9. Roma #2
Before I can answer, the forward sensors spike.
Not amber.
Red.
The central display fractures into competing warnings: gravitational deviation, inertial shear, localized distortion, shield asymmetry, drive alignment error.
The Lamplight jerks hard enough that my harness bites into my collarbone.
The cockpit tilts, or my body thinks it does, which is worse because instruments disagree for half a second.
A violent tremor tears through the hull from bow to stern.
Somewhere aft, a panel bangs open and equipment clatters free.
Dux’s hand shoots toward his console, then stops just short of touching anything.
“Roma,” he says.
“I see it.”
I do not see it.
Not really.
The anomaly blooms ahead on sensors like a wound in space, a gravitational knot forming where my models show only low turbulence.
It is not large by astronomical standards, but it is near, sudden, and moving against the local flow.
The route thread collapses on the display, replaced by impossible vectors that bend across each other too quickly to reconcile.
The ship lurches again.
An alarm shrieks. I silence it. Two more replace it.
Dux grips the armrests. “What is that?”
“Unknown localized distortion.”
“That is engineer for bad.”
“That is engineer for unknown localized distortion.”
The Lamplight drops three hundred meters relative to projected course, then snaps upward as the ballast system overcorrects against a force that was not there a second earlier. My stomach lurches. The copper taste in my mouth becomes sharp, nearly bloody. Shield harmonics scream across the display.
I feed new data into the navigation model.
The model rejects it.
That cannot happen.
I force manual override and input a reduced variable set. The display stutters, accepts, then produces a trajectory that would drive us through a shear wall and tear the port vane assembly clean off.
“No,” I say.
Dux’s voice cuts through the alarms. “Talk to me.”
“I’m recalculating.”
“We do not have that kind of time.”
“I am aware.”
“What do you need?”
The question is so practical it almost surprises me into looking at him. Not control. Not mockery. Not I told you so. Need.
The Lamplight rolls without command. I slam my palm against manual stabilization and drag us back before the starboard shield collapses. A tremor runs through the ship like pain through muscle. The lights flicker, then shift into emergency blue.
“I need the anomaly’s edge,” I say. “The sensors are reading the center mass wrong because of lensing.”
Dux looks at his structural map. “I don’t have full nav.”
“You have external visual on camera three.”
“Camera three is aft.”
“Exactly. The wake is more honest behind us than ahead.”
He moves, not touching random controls now, but finding the correct panel with brutal focus. “What am I looking for?”
“Dark displacement against the particle field. It will look like absence moving wrong.”
“That is a terrible description.”
“It is an accurate description.”
He switches the feed. His screen glows across his face. “I see three wrong absences.”
“The smallest.”
“They are all small compared to space.”
“Dux.”
“Lower left,” he says. “Trailing behind us, curling upward.”
I pull his feed to my display and overlay the aft visual with inertial data. There. A curve in the wake, a negative shimmer where charged dust bends around something unseen. The anomaly is not ahead of us.
It is sliding under us.
My prior route is useless.
The next decision arrives without the dignity of a plan.
I cut forward thrust by sixty percent, dump power from nonessential lighting, and reroute shield strength to ventral and port arrays. The cockpit plunges into deeper blue. The engines drop from a growl to a strained, dangerous hum.
Dux’s voice remains steady. “That sounds bad.”
“It is controlled.”
“That was not a denial.”
“I need ballast response.”
“Starboard ballast is lagging,” he says, reading the limited map faster than expected. “Point-four seconds behind port.”
“I know.”
“You did not know.”
“I knew as you said it.”
“Generous.”
The ship bucks again, and this time the motion yanks a gasp from my throat before I can strangle it. The anomaly catches our lower field and twists. Metal groans somewhere beneath the deck. Not failure. Stress. The difference is everything and not enough.
I flatten the Lamplight into the distortion instead of fighting out of it.
Dux turns his head. “Are we diving into the thing?”
“We are matching its outer rotation.”
“Because escaping would be too fashionable?”
“Because direct escape shears us in half.”
“Matching rotation sounds prettier.”
“It is marginally less fatal.”
He gives a short laugh, but his hand has gone white-knuckled around the armrest. “I enjoy your optimism.”
The ship slides along the anomaly’s edge. Shields flare. The display becomes a storm of warnings, each one demanding priority, each one convinced it is the most important problem in existence. I ignore all but four. Vane angle. Ballast lag. Ventral shield decay. Drive alignment.
The Lamplight is no longer singing.
She is grinding her teeth.
“Port vane stress is climbing,” Dux says.
“I see it.”
“At current rate, it goes red in twelve seconds.”
“I see it.”
“Roma.”
“I need nine.”
He shuts up.
That, more than anything, tells me he understands.
I count without speaking. The anomaly’s rotation pulls us sideways.
I let it, then feed a corrective burst through the port micro-thrusters at the exact moment its force changes direction.
The ship whips around the edge of the gravitational knot, not free yet, but pointed toward a narrow spill corridor opening beyond the distortion.
The corridor did not exist in my model.
It exists now.
I take it.
Full thrust would break us. Half thrust would strand us. I choose seventy-three percent and accept the risk.
The Lamplight surges.
Every warning on the board becomes red for one terrible second.
Then the force releases.
The cockpit snaps back into relative stability.
My harness bites again, then loosens as dampers catch up.
The alarms continue, but they are status alarms now, not immediate death.
Shield harmonics damaged but recovering.
Port vane overheated. Starboard ballast lagging. Drive alignment strained but intact.
We are through.
I realize I am breathing too fast and correct it.
Dux does not speak immediately. He looks at the displays, then at the canopy, then at me. His face is stripped of its usual careless humor, and in its place is something more dangerous than mockery.
Respect.
I do not know what to do with it.
So I work.
“Running diagnostics,” I say.
My voice is steady enough.
Mostly.
Dux exhales slowly. “That was not in your models.”
“No.”
The word costs more than it should.
He does not gloat. Somehow, that makes it worse.
I bring up the full integrity scan. “Hull spine intact. Shield lattice recovering. Port vane heat damage within repairable range. Ballast regulation compromised but functional. Drive coil alignment stable. No atmosphere loss. No critical breach.”
“Your ship held,” he says.
“Yes.”
“She held through something you didn’t predict.”
I look at the trembling diagnostic lines, the stressed but living systems, the stubborn green returning one by one after the red. My hands ache from gripping the controls. My cheek throbs again. My throat tastes of copper and fear I will not name.
“Yes,” I say again.
Dux leans back carefully, as though sudden movement might offend the ship. “Good design.”
The praise enters quietly.
I cannot dismiss it with sarcasm fast enough.
“Good pilot too,” he adds.
My fingers resume moving across the console. “You identified the wake.”
“You asked.”
“You answered correctly.”
“Careful, Commander. That almost sounded like approval.”
“It was a performance note.”
“Positive?”
“Do not ruin it.”
His smile appears faintly, but it does not mock. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I update the model with the anomaly data. The route ahead shifts, no longer the clean thread I built from years of work, but something messier, more provisional, alive with fresh danger. I should be angry. I am angry. But beneath that anger is a hard, uncomfortable fact.
I did not plan for that.
I survived it anyway.
Not alone.
The thought is intolerable enough that I immediately archive it for later examination under emotional quarantine.
Dux watches me from the secondary station, too large for the chair, too sharp for my comfort, too quiet for a man who has spent hours making noise out of every available silence.
“You all right?” he asks.
I do not look at him. “I am functional.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It is the answer available.”
He lets out a soft sound, half amusement and half something gentler. “Of course it is.”
Ahead, dangerous space opens wider, darker, and less obedient than my screens had promised.
I place both hands on the controls and continue forward.