Alien Exile: An Alien Warrior Romance (The Tourin Legacy Book 5) by Immortal Angel

1
Ande’ie
     
    I watch as Juordin presses the button again, obviously in disbelief.
    How much time do we have to get away from the explosion before it’s too late?
    For a second I want to ask him, but then I decide I probably wouldn’t like the answer.
    My body is shaking, whether from the aftermath of the fight, or from the realization we might be minutes away from death. I’m not sure which. “What can I do?”
    Casin and Corin enter the command room behind us.
    “Why aren’t we moving?” Casin asks.
    “Casin, take the controls. Corin, Ande, with me!” Juordin commands, jumping up and sprinting for the door. We follow him down the hall to the cargo bay, and he opens a door in the floor I’ve never seen before. He jumps onto a ladder there, descending from sight. I follow suit, Corin right behind me.
    I jump off the ladder into a long, well-lit space, and I realize this is where the humming comes from. Juordin is running down a metal walkway in the center of the tunnel, next to a long, round tube. As I sprint behind him, I realize the tube is broken into sections, each section having a glass panel with blinking lights. When I reach the far end, I see Juordin inspecting a huge crack in the round metal tube.
    Corin curses when he sees it. “Shit. We’re fucked.”
    “You think?” Juordin asks him, running to the end of the space and opening a door. Corin and I are close behind. There are boxes, buckets, and cases of unknown materials filling the shelves and the floor.
    “Look for the resining agent,” Juordin orders, and Corin steps into the cramped space beside him.
    Juordin hands me a large, smooth container. “Be careful, it’s heavy.”
    He’s not wrong. He grabs an even larger container and an empty bucket. “Take these back to where the case is cracked.”
    I walk back slowly, taking care not to drop the container.
    “You can set it down,” Juordin says, placing his own container on the metal walkway. He hurries back to the small closet of materials and comes back with a strange device. There are three long tubes going up into it.
    Juordin opens the two containers and puts a hose into each of them, then Corin places a third, smaller container next to the others. Juordin makes an adjustment on the device, then puts the third tube into the smaller container. He hands me the device and takes off his shirt, rolling it and stuffing it into the crack.
    “I need you to point this at the crack while Corin and I hold up part of the case. When you squeeze this trigger, liquid will spray out, but it will harden into metal in seconds.” He gives me the lever, and he and Corin walk around to the other side. I hear Juordin count—three, two, one—and the case visibly moves upward, the crack getting smaller.
    “Spray now,” he orders loudly. “Start inside the crack, then give a good coating over the crack and the outside edges. Don’t stop until the crack is completely gone.”
    I’m not sure what I expected when I start spraying, but the smooth, silvery liquid that hardens into a metal shell was not it. The liquid comes out much more slowly than I had imagined, the layer very thin. This is going to take forever.
    After several minutes, I can hear Juordin and Corin groaning with effort. By the time I’m done, several more minutes have passed. I can’t believe the bomb on the cat ship hasn’t exploded yet.
    “Come here.” Juordin hits a button on a small panel of buttons on the wall. “Punch it.”
    The engine starts, the humming much louder from here. Juordin and Corin come around the engine, and we all watch to see if it will hold as Casin pilots us away from the Ardak mother ship. After a few minutes, Juordin nods at Casin and motions toward the ladder at the far end of the engine room.
    We run back down the long walkway, but before we can reach it, we’re hit with something and the entire ship starts to shake.
    The two men exchange a glance. “Shock wave?” Juordin asks above the