26. Dux #2
The ship accelerates, engines rough but determined.
The vibration rises through the deck, and the whole vessel angles into a narrow current along the outer edge of the debris field.
Hull fragments drift past close enough to show scorch marks and old impact scars.
A dead cruiser rotates above us, its shattered windows dark, its broken spine glowing faintly where radiation still clings.
Pally’s hands stay steady on the controls.
“You built all this alone?” I ask.
“Most of it.”
“That answer doing work?”
“Some parts were acquired under pressure.”
“You stole them.”
“I survived creatively.”
“Roma gets that from you too.”
“She gets better manners from her mother.”
I laugh. “Does she?”
“No,” he admits. “But her mother would appreciate the lie.”
The little ship slips beneath a slab of wreckage, so close that I can hear tiny impacts ping across the upper hull as dust and frozen particles scrape along the plating.
Pally adjusts course by fingertip pressure, easing us between two drifting masses that look ready to crush anything foolish enough to pass between them.
“You ever think about what you’ll do if we get out?” I ask.
His shoulders stiffen.
“Bad question?” I add.
“Unfamiliar one.”
“That makes two of us.”
He keeps his eyes forward. “For years, all future thinking became engineering. Survive the next failure. Find the next power cell. Avoid the next sweep. Repair the next seal. The idea of afterward became indulgent.”
“Yeah.”
“You?”
I look toward the broken light ahead. “After the war, I didn’t plan past the next drink or the next fight. Then Roma walked into my bar wearing the ugliest coat in known space and asked for volunteers to do something suicidally meaningful.”
“Her coat was ugly?”
“Criminally.”
A faint smile touches his mouth. “She dressed like that on purpose.”
“I know. That was the worst part.”
The smile fades, but warmth lingers at the edge of his face. “She used to wear paint on everything. Hands, sleeves, hair. Her mother said she looked like a small explosion in an art supply shop.”
I try to picture it: Roma before grief sharpened her, red hair loose, hands stained with color instead of grease, building stars because she wanted to, not because she needed to reach a dead man.
The image hurts.
“I want that back for her,” I say.
Pally glances at me.
“Maybe not exactly that,” I continue. “Time doesn’t work that way. But something. Something that belongs to her because she wants it, not because the past is holding a blade to her throat.”
Pally returns his gaze to the viewport. “You really do love her.”
The word hits like decompression.
I stare at him.
He does not take it back.
The old instinct rises first, reaching for sarcasm, for denial, for anything that keeps the truth from standing naked in the cabin.
Then I let it die.
“Yeah,” I say.
My voice sounds rough even to me.
Pally breathes out slowly. “Does she know?”
“Probably not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Roma could discover gravity and accuse it of emotional manipulation.”
That gets a real laugh out of him, brief and cracked and gone almost as soon as it appears.
“She could,” he says.
The ship’s alarm chirps once, and the mood changes instantly. Pally leans forward, hands moving fast as the projection updates. A large signal mass appears ahead, moving through the debris field with controlled force.
Throgg.
His ship glides across the map, dark and deliberate, heading for the recalibration corridor exactly as Pally predicted.
“There he is,” I say.
Pally’s face closes around focus. “We are three minutes from the intercept point.”
I unclip the harness and stand. Pain tugs along my side, but it feels smaller now, demoted by purpose.
Pally glances back. “Mask on before we enter the lock.”
I secure the breathing mask around my neck, check the grappler, then flex my hands inside the pressure rig’s gloves. “Once we’re aboard, you follow my lead if things get ugly.”
“Once we’re aboard, you follow my lead until things get ugly.”
“Look at us. Compromise.”
“Try not to enjoy the ugly part too early.”
“No promises.”
He stands long enough to hand me a small transmitter. “If Roma accessed her ship, she may have embedded a signal under her standard diagnostics. This can detect Larson-pattern recursion if we get close enough.”
I turn the device over in my hand. “Larson-pattern recursion?”
“A family habit.”
“Sounds irritating.”
“It is extremely irritating.”
“Then she definitely used it.”
Pally’s eyes soften for half a second. “Yes.”
The ship rocks as we enter the outer turbulence from Throgg’s wake.
The metal around us groans. Lights flicker.
Pally drops back into the pilot’s seat and guides us lower, slipping under a rotating hull fragment as the massive Reaper vessel passes in the distance.
Even from here, Throgg’s ship looks less like machinery and more like intent given armor.
Pally’s voice lowers. “Forty-three seconds.”
The cabin tightens around the countdown.
I brace one hand against the bulkhead and look through the viewport at the dark ship carrying Roma. For the first time in years, fear arrives with a future attached. I fear losing her tomorrow. I fear never hearing her argue again. I fear surviving without the life I only just realized I want.
Good.
Fear means I have something to protect.
Pally angles us toward the maintenance blind spot, engines dropping to a low, shivering burn. “Thirty seconds.”
I draw one slow breath through the mask and taste filtered air, stale and rubber-edged.
“Hey, Pally.”
“What?”
“When we get her back, you can threaten me properly.”
“I already intend to.”
“Good. Means you’re planning past today.”
His hands tighten on the controls.
Ahead of us, Throgg’s sensor field flickers through recalibration.
Pally drives us into the gap.
“I am,” he says. “So are you.”
I bare my teeth at the looming hull.
“Damn right.”