29. Roma
ROMA
The first sabotage trigger opens quietly.
It enters Throgg’s internal network disguised as a coolant correction, riding the same pathway I built into the stabilizer update while his engineers were too pleased with improved performance to ask why the architecture looked more elegant than necessary.
The command moves through the secondary shield emitter, crosses into the habitation security layer, and blooms across the Reaper vessel like poison dissolving in clear water.
On the engineering deck, the lights remain amber, the drive continues its deep mechanical pulse, and the guards at my back keep their weapons angled toward my spine.
Nothing explodes. Nothing announces itself with melodrama.
The first sign of success is a soft chime from the console, so small it would mean nothing to anyone who did not write the lie that produced it.
Fourteen Reaper quarters seal at once.
I keep my fingers moving.
The guard to my left shifts. “Explain that alert.”
“Pressure equalization irregularity in nonessential compartments,” I say, opening three diagnostic windows to bury the real command beneath unrelated system chatter.
“Your ship overreacts to minor variance because your safety hierarchy was designed by someone with a spiritual attachment to confinement.”
The guard steps closer. “Is it dangerous?”
“Only to morale.”
He hesitates long enough for the second trigger to arm.
I route the next command through my ship’s damaged telemetry, then into Throgg’s borrowed sensor feed.
The security network receives a request to recalibrate visual capture timing across engineering, command-adjacent corridors, and the lower maintenance arteries.
The request appears to originate from Throgg’s own navigation buffer because I built it from the permissions he gave me while believing he was being cautious.
The first camera goes dark.
Then the second.
Then twelve more.
A Reaper engineer at the far console snaps his head toward his display. “Visual feed interruption in lower spine corridor.”
My pulse strikes hard.
Lower spine corridor.
Dux.
Maybe Pally.
Maybe death wearing their shape because hope has become reckless inside me.
I do not look up too quickly. I turn as if irritated by incompetence, which remains the safest expression aboard this ship.
“Your visual feed was already unstable,” I say. “I told you live pursuit data would overload the shared buffer if you insisted on routing it through three outdated verification gates.”
The engineer’s hands move over his panel. “That explanation is incomplete.”
“So is your understanding.”
He stiffens.
Deep in the deck, the engines stumble, losing the smooth predatory rhythm they have maintained since Throgg took the bait.
My third trigger slips into place through the hidden latency variation in the heat vent cycle, delaying power redistribution by fractions of a second.
The effect is small at first, a hesitation between drive pulse and stabilizer response, but inside the Thorn Shelf’s turbulence, hesitation becomes teeth.
A warning tone rolls across engineering.
The guards turn toward the central drive.
I enter the next command.
The engine does not fail. Failure would be obvious, and obvious things get corrected.
Instead, the drive begins to argue with itself, producing inconsistent pressure loads that force automatic systems to compensate in competing directions.
Throgg’s ship slows by necessity, bleeding speed to preserve structural integrity.
The Reaper engineer lunges toward my station. “Step away.”
I lift one hand from the controls and leave the other resting near the hidden trigger chain. “If I step away, your drive lag becomes a cascade.”
“You created this.”
“I warned you about over-centralized response architecture.”
“You created this.”
“Then arrest me after you survive it.”
The deck tilts as the ship banks through a gravitational ripple with less grace than before.
A tool tray slides from one workbench and crashes across the floor, scattering metal instruments that ring against the grating.
The sound cuts through the rising alarms, sharp and bright, and I use the distraction to finish disabling the last cluster of cameras along the maintenance route.
A feed flickers across my lower display before dying.
I see him.
Only for a fraction of a second.
Dux fills the corridor like violence given purpose, pressure rig scorched across the chest, one arm swinging hard enough to drive a Reaper guard backward into a wall.
His face is partly obscured by the mask, but I know the line of his shoulders, the brutal economy of his movement, the impossible refusal in him that made death seem like something he would argue with until it grew bored.
My hand slips.
The console flashes an error.
I correct it before anyone sees.
My breath hurts.
He is alive.
The thought goes through me with such force that the engineering deck blurs, the lights streaking amber across my vision. I grip the console edge and force my body to remain upright, force my face into irritation, force the scream trying to become joy into the clean narrow shape of action.
Dux is alive.
Dux is aboard.
Dux is coming.
The shipwide intercom activates with a low tone that silences every voice in engineering.
Throgg’s voice fills the deck, calm and terrible. “Roma Larson.”
The guards raise their weapons.
I keep my hand on the console.
Throgg continues, each word controlled enough to be intimate.
“You have locked down my personnel, corrupted my security feeds, and introduced deliberate instability into my engine systems while under supervision. I admit disappointment only because I hoped your intelligence would incline you toward longer survival.”
I glance at the nearest guard. “He sounds upset.”
The guard’s weapon lifts toward my head.
Throgg’s voice deepens. “Your death will be painful and slow.”
My fingers move.
The engine lag deepens by another fraction.
The deck shivers.
I lean closer to the console, letting the intercom pick up my reply. “You should prioritize propulsion before monologuing.”
A silence follows, filled by alarms and the strained hum of a ship fighting sabotage inside hostile space.
Then Throgg says, “Bring her to me alive.”
The guards move.
I hit the fourth command, the one I built after realizing escape alone was no longer acceptable.
The engineering deck doors slam shut on the far side, locking two of the guards outside and trapping three inside with me, the Reaper engineer, and a drive system that now believes it is experiencing a coolant emergency.
Steam vents from a pressure relief column, rolling across the grating in pale sheets that hide the floor and sting my eyes with chemical heat.
The nearest guard grabs for me.
I duck under his arm and drive the edge of my handheld interface into the exposed seam beneath his wrist armor.
The strike would not incapacitate him under ordinary conditions, but I am not aiming for pain.
I am aiming for the actuator line. His gauntlet locks open, fingers spasming as the suit misreads the electrical disruption.
He snarls and swings with his other hand.
I catch the blow badly.
Pain flashes across my shoulder as I hit the side of the console, hard enough to drive air from my lungs. The second guard closes from the left. I throw the interface at his faceplate, not because I expect damage but because reflex matters. His head turns by two degrees.
Two degrees is enough.
I slam my palm onto the emergency purge control.
A coolant vent opens beside him with a violent hiss, blasting supercooled vapor across his visor and upper armor. Frost webs over the faceplate, and he staggers back, weapon arm rising blind. The first guard recovers and lunges again.
The Reaper engineer yells, “Stop her!”
“I would love to see you try,” I snap.
I dive for the lower maintenance panel beneath the console, ripping it open with both hands as the third guard fires.
The shot burns through the upper display where my head had been, showering sparks across my hair and neck.
Heat kisses my skin, sharp and immediate, and the scent of scorched polymer floods the air.
I reach into the panel and yank the manual relay.
The lights go out.
Emergency red replaces amber, turning the steam into blood-colored fog.
Somewhere beyond engineering, another alarm begins.
The hidden summons pulses again through the system.
I crawl behind the console bank, dragging myself over the grating as weapons fire tears through the panel above me.
Metal fragments sting my cheek. My shoulder throbs with each movement.
My burned skin prickles under sweat. The world narrows to heat, noise, and the console access point three meters ahead.
I reach it.
My fingers shake when I open the feed.
Another camera flickers before shutdown, this one near engineering access.
Dux is closer.
Pally is with him.
For one impossible second I see my father alive, older and thinner, hair gray-streaked, face carved down by years I was not there to witness.
He is bent over a door panel with tools in both hands, arguing with the lock while Dux fights two Reapers behind him like the entire concept of injury has offended him personally.
The image fractures.
The feed dies.
My chest caves inward around a sound I refuse to make.
They are both alive.
Both.
The realization rearranges the entire universe inside me.
A Reaper guard rounds the console bank and spots me.
I throw a loose coupling into the exposed relay before he can fire.
The coupling bridges two contacts with a flash of white light, and the console discharges into the floor grid.
The shock catches the guard through his boots, locking his body in a violent tremor before he collapses hard against the side panel.
The engineer screams something in Reaper command syntax.
I push to my feet, one hand braced against the ruined console, and pull up the final sabotage menu.
The engine stall is holding. The quarters are locked.
Cameras along Dux and Pally’s route are dead or looping false images.
Throgg’s security teams are being redirected toward a fabricated breach near the aft weapons deck.
I have bought minutes.
Maybe less.
Minutes are enough for miracles when the right people are angry.
The engineering deck shakes as Throgg’s ship fires maneuvering thrusters to compensate for the stall. The force knocks me sideways, and my hip slams into the edge of the projection table. Pain blooms hot and deep, but I stay upright by hooking one hand around the table frame.
The intercom opens again.
“Roma,” Throgg says, his calm now sharpened by something close to satisfaction. “You cannot reach them from where you are.”
I freeze.
He knows.
Of course he knows. Not everything, perhaps, but enough. Throgg does not need certainty to apply pressure. He only needs a wound and a finger to press into it.
He continues, “The Vakutan survived. Your father survives. You have placed both within my ship and mistaken that for victory.”
I pull up the corridor map with my remaining access and find multiple security teams rerouting, faster now, correcting for my false breach. Throgg is collapsing the perimeter inward.
My window shrinks.
“You will stop,” he says, “or I will kill the father first and let the Vakutan watch.”
My throat tightens until breathing becomes a deliberate act.
A reply wants to form: a bargain, a threat, a calculation, some controlled arrangement of words to preserve leverage.
Then I see Dux again in memory.
Not at the airlock this time.
At my console, hand over mine, telling me wider path first. Bleeding, infuriating, alive with a future I had not known how to want until someone tried to take it from me.
Survival alone is suddenly obscene.
I look at the route between engineering and the access doors where they are fighting toward me.
I look at the armed Reaper still moving through the fog.
I look at the override that would let me vent a service corridor and slip through a maintenance conduit toward my ship, alone, fast, likely enough to escape before Throgg can fully lock down my path.
The old choice appears again.
My father.
My mission.
My survival.
The path I built myself to take.
I close it.
My fingers move over the console and route every remaining scrap of access toward the engineering doors.
“Roma,” Throgg says over the intercom. “Answer.”
I speak while I work. “You keep assuming survival is my highest priority.”
A guard rushes me through the fog.
I trigger a pressure surge in the floor vent beneath him, knocking him off balance long enough for me to grab the fallen weapon from the first guard.
It is too heavy, Reaper-designed, awkward in my human hands.
I brace it against the console edge and fire into the ceiling conduit above the main door.
The blast tears through the access shielding.
The door lock sparks.
Somewhere on the other side, something heavy hits metal.
Dux.
I know it before I hear him.
“Roma!” His voice comes through the damaged door, muffled and furious and real.
My knees nearly fail.
I grip the weapon harder.
Pally’s voice follows, strained and incredulous. “Move back from the door!”
I laugh once, and it comes out dangerously close to a sob. “Absolutely not.”
Dux snarls from the other side. “That sounds like her.”
The door shudders under another impact.
The remaining Reaper guard lifts his weapon toward the sound.
I fire first.
The recoil nearly tears my shoulder out of its socket, but the shot catches his armor at the side and drives him into the console bank. He does not fall, but he staggers, and that is enough.
Throgg’s voice returns, colder now. “You have chosen poorly.”
I look toward the door as the lock begins to fail under Pally’s tools and Dux’s violence. My heart beats so hard it feels like the ship has moved inside my chest.
Rescue, or death. Which will come first?
The door gives with a shriek of tearing metal.