7. Roma #2
Dux leans forward, bracing his forearms on his knees as much as the harness allows.
His tone remains conversational, but the levity sharpens into something more practical.
“When a fight breaks out inside a ship, the person who wins is often the one who knows three seconds earlier which wall is about to stop being a wall.”
“This is not a battlefield.”
“Not yet.”
My fingers pause above the propulsion confirmation, then continue. “Do not romanticize paranoia.”
“I’m a veteran. We call it experience when it works.”
“And when it doesn’t?”
“We call it Tuesday.”
I dislike him.
I dislike that he is sometimes right.
I open a restricted overlay and route him a limited structural threat map: pressure doors, sealed crawlspaces, emergency bulkheads, primary hazard zones, and basic shield status with no access authority. His station accepts it. His brows lift slightly.
“There,” I say. “Visibility. No control.”
He studies the new display. “That hurt you.”
“Deeply.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“I can revoke it.”
“I retract all emotional growth commentary.”
The first warning chime rings again.
I do not look over. “What did you touch?”
“Nothing important.”
“That is a confession in costume.”
“I tried to zoom the structural map.”
“You can zoom by pinching the display.”
“I did.”
“You used claw pressure.”
“Is that different?”
“For the display, yes.”
A tiny crack appears in the upper corner of his secondary screen.
He looks at it.
I look at it.
The cockpit becomes very quiet except for engine hum and the soft tick of my patience developing structural fatigue.
“I can fix that,” he says.
“No.”
“I have fixed screens before.”
“Was the screen functional afterward?”
“In several philosophical senses, yes.”
I inhale slowly through my nose. The air is sterile, filtered, and suddenly inadequate. “Hands off active surfaces unless instructed.”
“Commander, respectfully, if your displays cannot survive me learning, how will they survive combat turbulence?”
“They survived stress testing.”
“Against claws?”
“Against impact.”
“Claws are impact with opinions.”
I route his map to a backup pane and lock the damaged screen. “New command protocol. You ask before interacting with any display not explicitly labeled for your use.”
Dux glances down. Labels appear across his station: ENVIRONMENT, HULL STATUS, MEDICAL, EMERGENCY FOAM, LIMITED COMMS, STRUCTURAL VIEW—OBSERVE ONLY.
He reads them aloud. “Observe only.”
“Yes.”
“You labeled me.”
“I labeled the interface.”
“With prejudice.”
“With hope.”
His grin widens. “That was almost sweet.”
“It was not.”
“It had an aftertaste.”
“It was professional.”
He settles back and, for a short, blessed span of time, behaves.
I guide the Lamplight across the Lydian Spur.
The route skirts the outer edge of sanctioned traffic before dipping beneath the commercial gate queue, where large freighters gather in luminous clusters around subspace buoys.
Their drive fields shimmer against the dark in blue, gold, and violet halos, each vessel dragging its own distortions through space like invisible weather.
The sight is beautiful in the way dangerous systems often are when viewed at correct distance.
I smell nothing beyond the cockpit’s filtered air, but memory supplies the scents of dock fuel, heated plating, and my father’s workshop in summer.
My father used to say machines were honest if you listened before forcing them to answer.
The Lamplight answers me now with stable harmonics, clean heat exchange, and a minor vibration in the starboard ballast pump I will recalibrate before first rest cycle. She is ready. I am ready. Dux is a statistical insult with a harness.
A soft ping announces the outer gate accepting our flight plan.
Dux speaks before I can transmit final confirmation. “That gate queue is ugly.”
I scan it. “Define ugly.”
“Too many ships clustered near buoy three.”
“Freight delays are common.”
“Not like that. The back two haulers are holding position instead of adjusting for queue drift.”
I zoom the external feed. Two blocky cargo haulers sit near buoy three, drives warm but not advancing, transponders blandly identifying them as mineral carriers. Their hulls are dirty, patched, and unremarkable. Too unremarkable, perhaps. One vessel’s running lights blink out of sequence.
My stomach cools.
“They are not in our route,” I say.
“Not yet.”
“We are not carrying listed cargo.”
“You are Roma Larson, flying an expensive custom ship after a public bar fight with creditor muscle.”
I adjust our vector manually, increasing distance from buoy three. “That information should not have propagated this quickly.”
“You were famous before tonight.”
“In engineering circles.”
“And now in creditor circles, bar circles, and whatever circles Pell screams in when frightened.”
I initiate a passive scan. One hauler’s heat signature spikes beneath its declared output. A concealed system is warming.
Dux says nothing.
For once.
That silence is worse than a joke.
“Unidentified energy buildup on mineral carrier two,” I say.
“Recommend lateral drop.”
“I am aware.”
“Recommend now.”
“I said I am aware.”
The concealed system flares.
I drop the Lamplight hard beneath the traffic plane.
The inertial dampers catch most of it, but not all.
Weight presses my body into the harness.
The starfield tilts. A burst of accelerated particles tears through the space we occupied and splashes harmlessly against a distant cargo shield. The hauler immediately goes dark.
Dux’s hand grips the armrest, but he does not shout, does not grab controls, does not interfere.
Good.
I angle us into the shadow of a legitimate freight carrier and cut our active signature by forty percent. “That was not a creditor collection weapon.”
“No,” Dux says, voice calm now in a way his humor never is. “That was military surplus.”
“Pell did not have military surplus.”
“Pell had friends or owners.”
I reroute shield harmonics and bring our engine output down to background traffic levels.
My pulse is fast, but my hands remain steady.
The route to the gate is compromised. The safest maneuver is to delay, slide behind freight traffic, and recalculate from below the corridor.
The launch window to the core remains distant enough to absorb the delay if I do not lose more than sixteen minutes.
Dux watches the external feed. “Second hauler is turning.”
“I see it.”
“It thinks you’ll run for the gate.”
“I won’t.”
“What will you do?”
“Use its assumption.”
I cut beneath the carrier shadow, rotate the Lamplight on a shallow axial roll, and feed false drift telemetry toward the gate.
The second hauler angles after the ghost signal.
I hold still, engines quiet, every system pared down to the smallest survivable profile.
The cockpit lights dim automatically as power reroutes.
In the half-dark, Dux’s golden eyes reflect the displays.
The hauler passes above us.
Too close.
Its underbelly fills the canopy, scarred plating and illegal weapon mounts visible for four long seconds. A low vibration passes through the Lamplight as its mass wake rolls over us. I taste metal at the back of my throat, though that is nerves, not atmosphere.
Dux whispers, “Nicely done.”
I should ignore that.
“Thank you,” I say, and the words come out clipped, but real.
He hears that too. Of course he does.
The hauler continues toward our false trail.
I wait until its aft sensors angle away, then bring the Lamplight up through a gap between two freight wakes and burn hard toward the alternate gate approach.
The engines answer with clean force. The ship surges forward, alive and obedient beneath my hands.
Dux exhales softly. “You can handle ugly.”
“I told you I could adapt.”
“You told me your plan would work.”
“It is working.”
“Because you changed it.”
I do not answer immediately.
He does not press.
That may be the most surprising thing he has done all flight.
I transmit a revised gate request under low-profile clearance, piggybacking behind a medical supply convoy whose authorization code is old but still honored. The gate accepts us. Space ahead folds into pale geometry, subspace light gathering in the buoy ring like frost on invisible glass.
I release the breath I have been holding.
Dux says, “For the record, I did not touch anything during the shooting.”
“I noticed.”
“Heroic restraint.”
“Basic competence.”
“Feels like you’re underselling my growth.”
“Your growth cracked a display.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“Do not quote Loklo at me.”
He grins, but it fades as the gate opens ahead. The cockpit fills with cold blue-white light, washing over his scarred scales and turning my gloved hands spectral on the controls.
I should still classify him as a liability.
I do.
But the category is changing shape.
The Lamplight enters subspace cleanly. The stars vanish into structured brilliance, and the ship hums around us like a lamp carried carefully into a storm.
Dux sits beside me, too large, too irritating, too observant by half.
And useful.
Unfortunately, undeniably useful.