You don’t need it, Ronan suggested. It is necessary only for emergencies. This is not an emergency.
Chads froze, staring at the bulkhead. Then she shook her head and blinked one of her eyes in a gesture humans used to indicate shared secrets.
“Well,” she said, “I hope it works out between you and the captain. I’d better get back to work.” Leaving the passcard on the bunk, she strolled out of the cabin. Ronan quickly closed the door and dropped the passcard in his pocket. He did not entirely leave Chads’s mind until she had reached engineering, spoken to the marine on duty, and returned to her console. It was, for her, as if nothing had happened.
Sickness overwhelmed him. He fell to his knees on the deck and clutched his stomach, which threatened to spill its meager contents. A pounding darkness crouched behind his eyelids.
He had succeeded. Charis wouldn’t notice the absence of the card until she needed it again—unlikely, since retinal scans were usually sufficient for access to every restricted portion of the ship. She would simply assume she’d misplaced it.
But it was Ronan’s way in, once he got past the marine at the door. He must act quickly to gather information before the ship arrived at Persephone.
Without a few hours of rest, he would be useless for such an operation. He crawled to his bunk and fell across it, summoning the Way to hold his unruly gut in check. He slept, and when he awoke again, it was to the wail of sirens.
The clock by Ronan’s bunk showed that several hours had passed. He remained where he was, fighting the blackness in his skull, and listened. The ship shuddered.
“Repeat, all crew to stations, ” the intercom spat from the overhead. “We are under attack by shaauri vessels. Brace for return fire and drive activation.”
Adumbe’s voice. The ship shuddered again, hit by enemy fire.
There would be no better opportunity than this. The crew must be aware of the circumstances of Ronan’s rescue and the fact that he was confined to quarters. But few crewmen or women would be in the corridors during an attack, and Ronan counted on the probability that the current crisis would prevent any crew he met from pausing to question him.
He was far from certain that his strength would sustain him long enough to complete his job and return to his cabin undetected. Should the shaauri succeed in catching or destroying the Pegasus, that would hardly matter.
He got up, tested his balance, and opened the door left unlocked by Charis’s passcard. He paused there for several minutes, waiting for his vision to clear. Voices echoed at the far end of the corridor. The siren continued to wail.
The way to engineering was still imprinted in memory from his first boarding of the Pegasus, though he had noted it without knowledge of what he would do with the information later. He crouched and ran near the wall to the lift that served crew quarters. No one saw him. The lift was empty.
He took it down two decks and pressed to the bulkhead as the door opened. A technician waited outside. Ronan touched the man’s mind, envisioning emptiness, and the crewman stepped into the lift without noticing him. Ronan slipped past him into the corridor.
Immediately he relinquished control and staggered the next few meters, gathering strength. He evaded the next woman he encountered by dodging into an empty storeroom. Most of the corridors on this level were deserted, because the crew who maintained the Pegasus were all at their posts.
That meant he would have many minds to cloud once he penetrated engineering. But first he had to pass the guard. The marine stood alert, rifle held across his chest as if he expected imminent attack.
Ronan flattened to the bulkhead just out of the guard’s view and probed the man’s mind with a touch light as morning mist. The man had been trained to expect mental intrusion, and his shield held firm. Ronan could not compel the marine to perform even the simplest task, but he might create an image the man would believe for a few essential moments.