"It’s not sabotage yet."
"Yet," Odris repeated. "I do appreciate a man who chooses his words with precision."
Outside the door, the cutting tool’s whine intensified, sparks visible now at the seam where Rohan’s molten weld had fused the frame.
Rohan reached out — not toward the door this time, his Origin Energy too depleted for another feat of that scale, but toward the nearest exposed section of the drive core’s outer housing, close enough that he could feel the raw heat radiating off it even through his palm held inches away.
"Tell your people to stop cutting," he said, "or I start finding out how much of this engine I can unmake before your engineer finishes cutting through that door."
A long silence stretched across the comm line. When Odris spoke again, some of the warmth had drained out of his voice, replaced by something flatter and considerably more dangerous.
"You understand what you are threatening, I hope. This is not a storage crate. This is a drive core rated for interstellar transit, worth more than every credit Veyrhold has earned across a decade of Tradefalls combined. It also happens to be the only thing keeping this vessel, its crew, and its cargo from drifting derelict in the void until someone eventually stumbles across the wreckage."
"I know exactly what I’m threatening."
"Do you." It wasn’t quite a question. "Then perhaps you’ll also understand that damaging it does not simply strand my crew. It strands you as well. There is no version of this scenario where you destroy my engine and walk away to enjoy whatever it was you thought you were escaping toward."
Rohan let the silence sit for a moment before answering, partly for effect, and partly because his hands had started shaking and he needed the pause to steady them.
"I’m not planning on destroying it," he said finally. "I’m planning on living, which is more than Cael Athis was ever going to let me do. So here’s what happens next, Captain. You stop trying to cut through that door. You call off whatever else you’ve got converging on this room. And you plot a course to the nearest active system — not some backwater rock like the one you just left, an actual system, with actual traffic, ships coming and going the way they’re supposed to. And when we get there, you let me off. Quietly. No records. No debt. No petition."
Odris was silent long enough that Rohan wondered if the connection had dropped.
"And if I refuse?"
Rohan closed his eyes, drew on the last thin thread of Molten Assimilation he could safely spend, and let a visible pulse of heat ripple across the drive core’s housing — not enough to damage anything critical, he hoped desperately, but more than enough to make his intent unmistakable on whatever readouts Odris’s engineers were currently staring at with growing horror.
A new voice cut in over the comm, sharper, edged with panic. "Captain, thermal variance spiking in cell four, he’s — he’s actually doing something to the housing, I don’t know how, there’s no equipment reading that could —"
"Enough." Odris’s voice snapped, all warmth gone entirely now. Then, quieter, directed back toward Rohan: "You have made your point."
"I have more where that came from," Rohan lied, hoping desperately that his voice carried more confidence than his body currently possessed. "I’ve got nothing left to lose, Captain. You do the math on how that usually ends for people trying to reason with someone in my position."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"Stand down the cutting team," Odris said finally, though not to Rohan — to someone else in the room with him, voice pulled slightly away from the comm pickup. "All of them. Now."
The whine of the cutting tool died outside the door.
"There is another option available to me, of course," Odris continued, and something in his tone had shifted, testing a new angle now that the first had been closed off. "This ship has emergency venting protocols for precisely this class of internal breach. I could simply order the atmosphere in that section evacuated and wait for you to lose consciousness. Considerably tidier than what you’re currently threatening, and considerably safer for my engine."
Rohan’s stomach dropped, but he kept his voice level with an effort that cost him more than he wanted to admit.
"Then do it. See how fast your engineer can get that door back open before I finish what I’ve already started while I’ve still got air in my lungs to finish it with. You’d be trading a stowaway problem for a hull-breach-and-catastrophic-engine-loss problem, and I don’t think that’s the trade you actually want to make, Captain."
The silence that followed had a different quality to it than the ones before — longer, heavier, the sound of a man doing arithmetic he didn’t enjoy the results of.
"You are gambling that I value my engine more than I value making an example of you," Odris said at last.
"I’m gambling that you’re a merchant before you’re anything else," Rohan said. "And merchants don’t burn profitable ships to punish people who can’t pay them back for it. You’ve got a hold full of cargo from that Tradefall. You’ve got a crew who wants to get paid at the end of this run. None of that happens if this ship doesn’t reach port with its engine intact. I’m not your biggest problem right now, Captain. I’m just the most inconvenient one."
He heard, faintly, another voice murmuring something urgent in the background — the engineer again, he suspected, arguing a position Rohan couldn’t make out but could easily guess the shape of.
"You make a compelling case for a man hiding in an engine room with a spear," Odris said eventually, and the flatness in his voice had thinned into something almost, though not quite, resigned. "Very well. No venting. No further attempts on the door. Let us discuss what you actually want, since it appears we will be doing this the slow way."
Rohan let out a breath so long and so shaking it left him briefly light-headed.
"Thank you," he said.