6. Dux
DUX
By the time I return to Shot in the Dark, the bar smells like spilled liquor, burnt wiring, antiseptic spray, and bad decisions that have begun to dry on the floor.
The front sign flickers above the door in weak violet pulses, throwing broken light across the corridor like a dying emergency beacon.
Inside, the music has stopped, which makes the room feel larger and uglier than usual.
Without bass rattling through the tables and laughter covering the stains, the place looks exactly like what it is: a refuge for people who have run out of better rooms to ruin themselves in.
Chairs sit crooked. Glass glitters beneath the counter.
A smear of blood leads toward the side exit, where Loklo has apparently dragged our earlier guests with his usual respect for presentation.
He is behind the bar with a mop in one hand and murder in his eyes.
“Oh, good,” Loklo says, voice dry enough to qualify as a desert hazard. “The conquering idiot returns.”
I duck under the broken ceiling panel and step over the cracked remains of a glass that had probably deserved better. “You always greet management that way?”
Loklo plants the mop against the floor and leans on it, his half-Vakutan features arranged into theatrical exhaustion.
“Management usually stays long enough to manage. You vanished after recruiting yourself into a suicide expedition with a woman who carries conductive dust in her sleeve and looks at people like she’s deciding where to install bolts. ”
“That dust trick was good.”
“It was terrifying, which I admit is adjacent.”
I move behind the bar and begin shutting down the taps. The handles are sticky beneath my fingers, and the scent of cheap spirits rises sharp and sweet from the drains. “Where are Pell and his charming associates?”
“In the alley, rethinking their vocational paths. Pell cried. The Fratvoyan bit one of his own knives by accident. The Kiphian said he would sue, then remembered he was conscious only because we allowed it.” Loklo drags the mop through the largest puddle with unnecessary violence. “I gave them your warmest regards.”
“My regards rarely survive translation.”
“I translated them as ‘do not come back unless you have made peace with your ancestors.’”
“Accurate enough.”
Loklo watches me kill the first bank of lights.
The bar dims in sections, neon bleeding away from the walls until the scars show clearer: old plasma burns near the corner booth, knife marks in the counter, patched dents where heads have met architecture and lost. The air cools as the crowd heat fades, though the room still holds the sour warmth of bodies, liquor, and spent adrenaline.
“You’re really going,” Loklo says.
I keep my hand on the next switch. “Yes.”
“With Roma Larson.”
“Yes.”
“Into the galactic core.”
“That is the advertised destination.”
Loklo lets the mop fall against the counter with a hollow clack. “Do you hear yourself when you say these things, or does your brain politely step out for a smoke?”
“I hear fine.”
“Then explain it to me slowly, because I must have suffered a head injury while disposing of your consequences.” He points toward the side exit with the mop handle.
“A red-haired human engineer walks into the bar, insults half the customers, gets attacked twice, admits she’s chasing a ghost through the deadliest region in known space, and your conclusion is, ‘Finally, a sensible travel plan.’”
I flip the second switch. “She hired me.”
Loklo stares at me. “She rejected you repeatedly.”
“She came around.”
“You mean you loomed near her until the paperwork surrendered.”
“That is one interpretation.”
“That is the interpretation with witnesses.”
I turn to him, wiping my hands on a bar rag that probably makes them dirtier. “You want me to say I’m not going?”
“I want you to say something that makes me believe you have not mistaken self-destruction for romance with better lighting.”
“Romance?”
Loklo’s mouth curls, but the expression has no real humor in it. “Please. You looked at her like she had walked in carrying a bomb and a hymnbook, and you wanted to know which one would go off first.”
“She is interesting.”
“Explosive decompression is also interesting from a distance.”
“She needs help.”
“She needs therapy, funding, and possibly a priest with engineering credentials.” Loklo steps closer, lowering his voice as if the empty bar might gossip. “What she does not need is a Vakutan who keeps flirting with death because he’s bored of breathing.”
I pull the last public tap offline, and the system answers with a tired hiss. “I’m not bored.”
“No, you’re worse. You’re awake.”
That lands harder than I like.
Loklo sees it. He always sees too much, which is why I have considered firing him twice a month for years and never done it.
He sets the mop aside. “Is this a death wish?”
I look down the length of the bar. In the quiet, the place seems to listen with every crack in the walls.
The refrigeration unit clicks behind me.
Somewhere overhead, station pipes knock as the night cycle shifts temperature.
Shot in the Dark smells like old fights, stale smoke, and the thousand small failures people pour into glasses because they do not know where else to put them.
“No,” I say.
Loklo’s eyes narrow. “That answer was too quick.”
“It’s the answer.”
“Then give me the longer one.”
I reach beneath the counter and pull the access token from its hidden slot. The little black rectangle rests in my palm, scuffed at the edges from years of being ignored until emergencies. “I don’t care if I die out there.”
Loklo’s face changes before he can hide it. The anger stays, but worry moves under it, old and familiar.
“That is not helping your case,” he says.
“I didn’t say I want to die.”
“You understand how thin that distinction sounds from here?”
“I said I don’t care if it happens.” I close my hand around the token and feel its hard edges press into my palm. “There’s a difference.”
Loklo steps closer, his voice dropping to something rougher. “Not to the people left cleaning up after you.”
I look at him then.
For once, he does not dress it in a joke.
His expressive face is bare of the usual clever nonsense, and that makes him harder to answer.
Loklo has been with me long enough to know the shape of my silence.
He has seen me come back from fights with blood in my teeth and nothing behind my eyes.
He has heard me laugh too loudly when someone mentions the war.
He knows the bar is not peace. It is merely a place where I have managed to stop moving.
“This mission feels real,” I say.
Loklo’s shoulders ease down a fraction, not from relief but from recognition. “Dux.”
I hate the way he says my name there. Like he has found the wound and would rather not press, but will if he must.
I continue before he can. “Not safe. Not smart. Not noble. Real. She is walking into hell because someone she loves may still be breathing in it. That is stupid, maybe, but it is not empty.”
“And you want to be near that?”
“I want to be useful to it.”
Loklo studies me for a long moment, then laughs once under his breath. “That is the worst thing you have ever said to me, and I once heard you tell a customs officer that his mother looked like contraband.”
“She did.”
“She had a thyroid condition.”
“Then the contraband had nuance.”
Loklo points at me, but his hand shakes faintly. “Do not make me laugh while I am trying to be angry. It is manipulative.”
“I’m not manipulating you.”
“You exist loudly. That counts.”
I toss him the token.
He catches it against his chest and looks down. His fingers close around it slowly.
“Full authority,” I say. “Accounts, supplier codes, locks, payroll, and the safe under the south floor panel.”
Loklo looks up sharply. “The one labeled plumbing?”
“Yes.”
“That is not plumbing?”
“It was plumbing-adjacent money.”
“You told me it was dangerous to open.”
“It is. It contains responsibility.”
Loklo rubs his thumb over the token. “You are giving me the bar.”
“I am leaving you in charge.”
“That is a prettier way of saying the same ugly thing.”
“Keep Venn’s people out. Pay Gressa on time or she waters down the station-quality whiskey with something that glows.
Do not extend credit to anyone who says they are good for it.
Anyone good for it never needs to say so.
The left coolant line in the cellar sticks when the station changes thermal cycle; kick it twice, not three times. ”
“Three times makes it worse,” Loklo says quietly.
“Good. You listen.”
“I listen when people I care about start making last requests.”
The silence that follows is thick enough to lean on.
I put one hand on the bar. The metal beneath my palm is dented, familiar, faintly sticky no matter how often Loklo threatens sanitation reforms. I should feel more. Maybe I do, but my feelings are old soldiers; they know how to crawl beneath smoke and keep quiet.
“I may come back,” I say.
Loklo’s mouth twists. “That may is doing heroic work.”
“It is the honest word.”
“I hate honest words. They stand around naked and make everyone uncomfortable.”
I grin despite myself. “Run the bar, Loklo.”
He looks around the room as if seeing it for the first time as something that might belong to him. “If you die, I am redecorating.”
“That is your grief plan?”
“It will be ugly and spiteful. You would hate it.”
“Then I have an incentive.”
Loklo breathes out slowly, and some of his anger leaves with it. “Good. Hate the curtains from a living body.”
I head for the stairs to my room. He follows, because of course he does.
The upper hall smells like dust, overheated wiring, and the fried starch cakes the kitchen unit burns every fourth cycle no matter how it is programmed.
My door sticks when I open it. It has always stuck.
I never fixed it because some things are more comforting when they complain.