"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.
