11. Roma
ROMA
The asteroid’s air tastes like old coins and cold stone.
It should not have air at all, which irritates me more than its hostility.
A breathable atmosphere on an irregular asteroid inside a distortion pocket is not merely improbable; it is rude.
The moment the Lamplight’s outer hatch opens, thin wind slides into the vestibule with a dry hiss, carrying mineral dust, metallic particulate, and the faint bitter scent of ionized rock.
My thermal collar warms automatically against the cold, but the chill still finds its way through the seams of my suit and settles at the base of my spine like a hand I did not invite.
Outside, the world is jagged, dim, and wrong.
Black-gray stone stretches in uneven plates around the crash path, scarred by the long gouge my ship carved across the surface.
Pale mineral veins run through the rock in branching lines, glowing faintly blue where charged particles drift overhead like dirty starlight.
The sky is not a sky in any planetary sense.
It is a thin, bruised haze barely thick enough to hold wind, with torn bands of cosmic light shifting beyond it and the gravitational anomaly curling in the distance like darkness learning to breathe.
The Lamplight lies tilted against a ridge, one landing strut collapsed, her port side scored badly enough that I feel the damage as if it has been done to my own body.
I step down from the ramp with the scanner in one hand and a repair kit over my shoulder.
Dux follows, carrying enough emergency equipment to make a lesser creature list sideways.
He has a thermal harness strapped across his chest, but the suit panels look offended by the job of covering him.
His red scales seem darker under the asteroid light, his scars pale where dust clings to them.
He looks around and smiles.
Of course he does.
“Lovely place,” Dux says. “Very welcoming. I can see why the brochures were vague.”
I kneel beside the first hull scrape and set the scanner against the plating. “Do not touch anything unless I specifically instruct you.”
“You gave me a repair kit.”
“For carrying.”
“That feels like an underuse of my talents.”
“Your talents recently involved forcing manual attitude control without authorization.”
“Worked, though.”
I look up at him. “Survival does not retroactively make insubordination adorable.”
Dux shifts the gear on his shoulder, his golden eyes moving over the ship rather than me. “No, but it does make it relevant.”
I do not answer because the scanner begins populating hard numbers, and numbers are calmer company.
Port vane assembly: warped at primary hinge.
Starboard ballast: overheated, cooling unevenly.
Ventral shielding: drained to eleven percent.
Aft power routing: damage in junction three.
External plating: microfractures along lower port quadrant.
Landing strut: mechanically collapsed but not severed. The ship is injured, not dying.
I breathe once.
Then again.
“Damage is repairable,” I say.
Dux comes closer but stops before his shadow crosses the scanner. “How repairable?”
“Port vane needs hinge realignment and actuator replacement. Ballast requires cooling cycle and recalibration. Aft routing needs a manual patch. The strut can be locked for launch if we lift unevenly and compensate on ascent.”
“In normal language?”
“We can leave.”
“In honest language?”
I stand and turn toward him. “That was honest.”
“No, that was engineer honest. It tells the truth while hiding the knives.”
Wind drags loose dust around his boots. It whispers over the hull, catching in the scored metal with a dry rasping sound that makes my shoulders pull tighter.
“We can leave,” I say again. “It will take approximately six hours if nothing else degrades.”
Dux glances toward the horizon.
Not dramatically. Not fearfully. Practically.
“What?” I ask.
“This place feels watched.”
“That is not data.”
“It is veteran data.”
“It is superstition wearing boots.”
“It kept me alive.”
“Your redundant organs kept you alive.”
“They contributed.”
I return to the scanner and pull up my repair sequence. “We repair in priority order. Ventral shields first so the hull can tolerate ascent vibration. Then actuator replacement. Then routing. Then ballast recalibration.”
“And if whatever lives here comes to see who rang the dinner bell?”
“There is no evidence of indigenous macrofauna.”
He looks at the enormous gouge the Lamplight tore through the surface. “There is evidence of noise.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“It is to predators.”
I stop and look at him.
Dux’s expression is lighter than his tone.
That is becoming familiar. His mouth jokes while the rest of him measures distance, cover, wind direction, shadow movement, and the places an attack could come from.
His hand rests near the ship-safe sidearm I still regret authorizing under strictly limited emergency conditions.
“We are exposed here,” he says. “The ship is damaged, the terrain is bad, and that ridge gives anything on the far side a clean approach.”
“We cannot move the ship until I repair enough systems to make movement possible.”
“I am not talking about moving the ship.”
“No.”
“You don’t know what I am suggesting.”
“You are suggesting we leave the ship and relocate to more defensible terrain while assessing environmental threats.”
He flashes teeth. “Look at that. You do listen.”
“And the answer is no.”
“Roma.”
“No. The ship is life support, transportation, communications, shelter, and the only reason this mission remains viable. I do not abandon the center of operational necessity because you feel watched.”
He turns toward the ridge again, and this time the humor leaves his face entirely. “I am not asking you to abandon it. I am asking you to stop standing in the open beside a wounded machine that announced our arrival with a crash trail visible from orbit.”
“Orbit is not relevant on an asteroid of this mass.”
“Do not flirt with technicalities when I am making sense.”
“I am not flirting with anything.”
“That is a shame, but not our main problem.”
The wind gusts harder, carrying a stream of dust that pings softly against my face shield.
I taste metal again, this time through the filter, a faint mineral ghost on my tongue.
The environment is unstable. Radiation pockets.
Low pressure. Unknown atmosphere retention mechanism.
Probable magnetized mineral lattice beneath the crust. Possible electrical interference in weapon systems and ship sensors.
Unknowns multiply.
I hate multiplication without clean variables.
“We repair,” I say.
“We scout.”
“We repair first.”
“We survive first.”
“This is surviving.”
“No, this is you trying to drag the plan back onto rails that are currently bent into jewelry.”
The words strike too close to the damage display still glowing on my wrist. I pull up the next diagnostic rather than answer too fast.
“The mission window remains intact,” I say. “The anomaly cost us time but not failure. If we complete repairs efficiently, we can recover part of the loss through a higher-burn transfer after ascent.”
“Higher burn on damaged systems?”
“Calculated higher burn.”
“That sounds like a bad idea with math perfume.”
“It sounds like physics.”
“It sounds like control panic.”
I stand so quickly the repair kit strap slides off my shoulder and hits the rock with a dull metallic thud. “You do not get to rename disciplined response because you dislike structure.”
“And you do not get to call standing still a strategy because moving scares you.”
“I am not scared of moving.”
“No,” Dux says, stepping closer, his voice dropping. “You are scared of moving without knowing exactly where your foot lands.”
The cold wind presses between us, snapping a loose strand of hair against my cheek inside the helmet seal. His eyes are too direct. Too warm for a place this cold. Too perceptive for a man who claims so much of himself is reckless appetite and bad manners.
“I know where my foot lands,” I say.
“Not here.”
I hate that he is right.
I hate more that being right does not grant him authority.
“My command remains in effect,” I say. “We repair. You will secure the perimeter within visual range while I begin shield restoration.”
Dux’s nostrils flare faintly as he draws in the thin air through his filter. “Visual range is not enough.”
“It is what you are getting.”
“I could be more useful on that ridge.”
“You could also be dead on that ridge, taking our only combat specialist with you.”
He pauses, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Our only combat specialist?”
“Do not make me regret word choice.”
“You called me ours.”
“I referred to crew allocation.”
“Still warm.”
“It was administrative.”
His smile lingers only a moment before his attention snaps past me.
Not toward the ridge.
Toward the ship’s crash gouge.
I turn instantly, scanner raised though it is not a weapon. At first I see only dust drifting through the long scar in the stone, the pale glow of mineral veins, the broken fragments of rock thrown up by our landing. Then a darker shape shifts behind a stone spire.
Low.
Fast.
Too deliberate for debris.
“Dux,” I say.
“I see it.”
The shape vanishes.
The scanner flickers, catches movement, loses it, catches three more points behind it. Small by mass readings, but the interference is bad. No, not small. Compressed signatures. Dense bodies. Multiple limbs distorting the return.
“Possible local fauna,” I say.
Dux draws his sidearm. “That is a polite way to say company.”
A clicking sound travels over the rocks.
It is not mechanical. It is not stone settling. It is wet and dry at once, like bone tapped against glass through a mouthful of gravel. The sound repeats from the left. Then the right. Then somewhere behind the ridge.
My throat narrows.
The first drone rises onto the top of a black stone spire.