24. Dux
DUX
Pally’s ship sounds like it is arguing with itself in five different languages.
Every panel rattles with its own private complaint, every conduit hums at a pitch that belongs in a mechanic’s nightmare, and somewhere behind the bulkhead a pump knocks in uneven rhythm like a drunk trying to find the beat in a song he hates.
The air is warm from overworked systems and sharp with metal shavings, coolant, old grease, and whatever ration brick he has been living on long enough to stop noticing that it smells like punishment.
The whole vessel feels stitched together from wreckage, spite, and one man’s refusal to die where the core told him to.
I sit hunched in a chair too small for me while a medical patch knits heat into the wound along my ribs.
It burns like a bastard, but breathing no longer feels like dragging a knife through my side, so I count that as progress.
Across from me, Palindrome Larson stands at a cramped command console, one hand braced against the edge as he studies a projection of Throgg’s ship moving through debris fields and gravitational distortion.
He has Roma’s focus.
That is the first thing that keeps irritating me.
The second is that he has her stubbornness, only his has rust on it.
“You’ve been here nine years,” I say.
Pally does not look up. “That is the official count, yes.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Then choose better sentence structure.”
I huff out a laugh despite the pain. “Yeah, she definitely came by it honest.”
His fingers pause over the controls. “Do not make my daughter into a personality trait you understand because you spent two days with her.”
“Two days with Roma is like six months with quieter people.”
“She is not a puzzle box for your entertainment.”
“No,” I say, leaning forward carefully as the patch tightens against my side. “She’s a woman trapped on a Reaper ship while you and I trade charming family resemblance.”
That gets him to look at me.
Good.
His eyes are tired in a way Roma’s are not, though I understand now where hers are headed if nobody grabs her by the collar and drags her into a future before grief finishes carving her hollow.
Pally’s exhaustion has sediment. It has layers.
The man has survived so long in impossible space that survival has stopped looking like victory and started looking like a room he cannot leave.
“I am tracking Throgg’s projected route,” he says.
“Tracking is not rescuing.”
“Running blind at a military-grade Reaper vessel will get her killed faster than patience.”
“Patience is what people call fear when they want it to sound wise.”
His face hardens. “You have no idea what this place does to people.”
“Then educate me while your map thinks.”
His mouth tightens, but he turns back to the console and flicks his fingers through the projection.
The map expands, showing a cluster of marked zones around us: debris graveyards, shear bands, radiation pockets, Zenos territory, and routes drawn in thin, nervous lines that look like the kind of paths a desperate man makes when every road has teeth.
“My ship, the Heraclitus, suffered primary drive failure near the inner drift shelf,” he says.
“Official reports probably called it catastrophic systems collapse, which sounds cleaner than being peeled open by forces the models did not predict. We lost navigation first, then long-range comms, then two habitat rings and most of the aft section.”
He shifts the map with two fingers, and a faded point of wreckage lights up.
“I got twelve people into escape modules before the spine tore. Three modules launched clean. Two were crushed in shear before they cleared the hull. One made it into the debris field with me aboard because the emergency beacon jammed and I had to manually override the release.”
I watch his face while he says it. He keeps his voice flat, but his thumb rubs once against the side of his index finger, smearing grease across a scar.
“You were the only survivor.”
“As far as I know.”
“You looked?”
His eyes flick toward mine. “Until looking became a good way to join them.”
The ship creaks around us as if agreeing with him.
Pally taps the map again, bringing up a patchwork image of his current vessel.
“This thing started as that escape module, a research cutter’s reactor core, two Reaper cooling assemblies, Zenos carapace plating, and a religious amount of stolen wiring.
I learned which wrecks drifted through safe pockets, which predators nested in which fields, which signals were bait, and which moments of silence meant something worse was listening. ”
“Sounds cozy.”
“It was survival.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m starting to hate that word.”
He ignores that and continues. “For the first year, I tried to leave every time I had enough power. The core threshold shredded every configuration I built. Field collapse, heat cascade, compensator lag, shield inversion, drive spinout. Pick a failure and I have scars from it. The third attempt cost me most of my left lung function. The fifth burned out the cutter’s original navigation brain.
The seventh brought Throgg close enough to take an interest.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the chair. “He’s been hunting you that long?”
“Off and on. He knew I had adaptive systems knowledge. I knew he had a ship with enough power to try an escape if somebody solved his timing instability. Neither of us could complete the work alone.”
“So you hid.”
“I survived.”
“You hid,” I say, letting the word sit there.
Pally turns from the console, slow and sharp.
“I stayed alive in a region where ships with full crews die in minutes. I scavenged in vacuum, rationed atmosphere, slept in pressure suits when seals failed, and rebuilt half my own blood filter out of med waste and pump tubing. If you are looking for shame, look somewhere else.”
“I’m looking for your daughter.”
His anger falters at that, and I see the hit land exactly where I mean it to.
“She came here because your signal was still calling,” I continue. “She crossed the core in a ship she built from your ideas, half genius and half heartbreak. She fought like hell to reach you, and now Throgg has her because the signal she trusted put her inside his hunting ground.”
His jaw flexes. “I did not know she would come.”
“Bullshit.”
The word cracks through the little cabin.
Pally’s eyes go cold. “Careful.”
“No,” I say, pushing myself up from the chair despite the med patch pulling at my skin. “You don’t get careful from me right now. You kept broadcasting with your signature in it.”
“It was a general distress pattern.”
“It had enough of you in it that she recognized it through core static.”
“I needed any possible friendly vessel to identify the signal as human engineering.”
“You needed hope,” I say. “You needed somebody, somewhere, to know you were still breathing.”
He looks away first.
That tells me plenty.
The ship hums under our feet, and the map projection throws pale light across his worn face. For a second, he looks less like the legend Roma built her life around and more like a man who made one desperate choice after another until the choices started calling themselves principles.
“I sent that signal for years,” he says quietly. “After a while, I stopped believing anyone would hear it.”
“But you kept sending it.”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t act surprised someone loved you enough to answer.”
The silence that follows is ugly, full of engine ticks and distant coolant hiss. Pally’s hand grips the console until his knuckles pale under the grime.
“I had a daughter who painted stars on scrap metal,” he says.
“She cried when I left for long missions and pretended she had dust in her eyes because she hated being treated like a child. I had a wife who told me not to make promises in doorways because promises made there had a way of turning into ghosts. I have spent nine years imagining what my absence did to them, so do not stand in my ship and lecture me about love as if you invented it during your two-day heroic inconvenience.”
His voice breaks at the edge, and he clamps down on it immediately.
I let him have that much.
Then I step closer.
“Then act like her father,” I say. “Because right now, you’re acting like a man who’s already grieving her.”
His head snaps toward me.
“She is alive,” he says.
“Then why are you planning like she’s already gone?”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out quickly enough.
I point toward the projection of Throgg’s vessel. “You know his ship. You know his habits. You know this graveyard better than anybody living, and you’re standing here calculating risk while Roma is probably making herself useful to a monster because that’s the only knife she has left.”
His eyes sharpen. “That is exactly what she will do.”
“Yeah. And the longer we leave her there, the more useful she becomes.”
“You think I do not know that?”
“I think you know it so well it scares you stiff.”
He steps toward me, and for a smaller man he has a good amount of fight in him. “You want immediate action because you are angry and wounded and attached to my daughter in a way I have not yet decided whether to hate.”
“Save the fatherly disapproval for when she can roll her eyes at it.”
“I am trying to keep her alive.”
“So am I.”
“You are trying to charge a fortress with a broken body and a bad attitude.”
I grin without humor. “Don’t forget charm.”
“I am serious.”
“So am I,” I say, and the smile drops away.
“Throgg tossed me out an airlock because he thought I was unnecessary. That means he has decided Roma is necessary. If she’s necessary, he’ll keep her close to the systems he needs.
If he keeps her close to systems, she’ll start finding ways to turn them against him.
That buys us time, but it also puts a target on her the second he realizes she’s sharper than his leash. ”
Pally’s face shifts as he follows the thought.
Good.