2. Dux
DUX
The woman in the ugly hooded coat has a talent for making a room want to bite her.
I notice that first, before I notice the ship.
That says something, because the ship is not nothing.
The projection spilling pale light across my bar is too clean to be back-alley nonsense, too elegant to be dockrat fantasy, and too mean in its bones to have come from some comfortable design committee full of soft-handed geniuses who think danger is a simulation setting.
The hull geometry has intent. The shielding lattice has arrogance.
The drive housing looks like somebody locked a mathematician, a priest, and a criminal in the same room and told them only one could leave.
Still, the ship is not what keeps my eyes on her.
She stands under a half-broken ceiling light, shoulders set beneath that ridiculous coat, small hands braced near the projection like she can hold the whole damn room in place by force of will.
She is short, even for a human, which makes her decision to insult half my customers either brave, stupid, or a symptom of some interesting brain injury.
Her voice does not rise much, but it carries, clipped and precise enough to cut through whiskey laughter and engine-room music.
She does not plead. She does not charm. She does not soften one syllable to make these vultures comfortable.
That is new.
Most people who come into Shot in the Dark looking to hire trouble have the same stink on them: desperation wearing perfume.
They slap credits on the counter, flash guns they should not own, and pretend they are the sort of people who can command predators.
This one is desperate, sure. I can smell it under the grease and old fabric, sharp as scorched copper.
But she has packed it down so tight it looks like discipline.
Loklo leans against the back counter beside me, arms folded over his lean chest, his mouth curled in the shape he gets right before he says something that makes me consider firing him again.
“She’s going to get herself killed,” he murmurs.
“Probably.”
“You going to stop it?”
“Not yet.”
“That is the sort of answer that explains why our insurance premiums have a religious following.”
I glance at him. “We have insurance?”
“No, but if we did, several underwriters would be in prayer.”
The drunk at table seven shoves his chair back.
Ah. There it is.
Varkun. Yellow-scaled, half-blind, mean as a cracked tooth, and full of whatever fermented sewer runoff he has been paying for with coin I suspect he stole from someone smaller.
He has been quiet too long, which in his case means violence has been marinating.
A quiet drunk is either asleep, dead, or planning to make noise.
Varkun is too stubborn for the first two.
The hooded woman hears the chair. I see the tiny shift in her posture, the fraction of weight moving from heel to forefoot, the angle of her left shoulder changing just enough to free the arm nearest her sleeve.
She does not turn fast. Good. Fast turns make prey look like prey.
She looks into the mirror behind my bar, catches his shape coming up behind her, and keeps her face calm.
Loklo’s brows lift. “Oh, I like that.”
“You like trouble.”
“I like competent trouble. It has better posture.”
Varkun comes up beside her and slaps a hand onto the bar hard enough to make three glasses jump. The human with the mining harness flinches. The Alzhon with the silver hair quietly moves his drink away from the splash zone. Smart man. I make a note to overcharge him less next time.
“The core,” Varkun says, dragging the words out. His breath is bad enough from here to qualify as chemical warfare. “Did I hear that right, little hood?”
“You heard correctly,” she says.
No tremor. No flutter. No little human heartbeat I can hear over the room, though I know it has to be beating fast. She is afraid. Of course she is afraid. Fear is not the issue. Everybody with a working brain gets afraid. The question is what a person does with it.
She turns it into a blade.
Varkun leans down over her. “Then you’re either stupid, suicidal, or too rich to understand numbers.”
“Those categories are not mutually exclusive.”
A few patrons laugh. Not loudly, because Varkun is still Varkun, but enough to bruise his pride. That is when I know the night has chosen teeth.
His good eye narrows. “Careful.”
“I am being careful,” she says. “That is why I’m still talking instead of estimating how long it would take you to bleed out from a severed femoral.”
Loklo makes a strained little sound beside me. “I want that embroidered on something.”
“Shut up,” I mutter.
Varkun bares his teeth. “You’ve got a mouth on you.”
“Yes,” she says. “And unlike yours, it appears connected to a brain.”
The room tightens around that. Bodies shift. Drinks lower. Bets begin without words. I have owned this miserable place long enough to recognize the flavor of anticipation when it rolls across a crowd. It tastes like salt, old sweat, and the copper ghost of blood not yet spilled.
Varkun pushes away from the bar and squares up. “You some kind of engineer?”
“Yes.”
“That ship real?”
“Yes.”
“You really think it’ll survive the core?”
“Yes.”
He bends until his face is near hers. “Then you’re crazier than a Reaper choir in a maternity ward.”
Her eyes flick to his throat, his right knee, his left hand, and back to his face. I see it because I am looking for it. Most people will think she is frozen. She is not frozen. She is calculating angles.
“That joke requires knowledge of Reaper reproductive acoustics,” she says. “I’m surprised you have such a delicate academic range.”
Loklo whispers, “I am in love.”
“You fall in love with anyone who insults customers.”
“Only when they do it with footnotes.”
Varkun does not understand the half of what she said, but he understands insult. That is enough for him. His hand shoots out toward her hood, probably to yank it back, maybe to drag her off the stool, maybe just to prove he can touch what has refused to bend.
She moves before he reaches her.
Not far. Not dramatic. She slips half a step inside the arc of his arm and drives the heel of her gloved hand into the inside of his wrist. It is not strong enough to injure him badly, but it changes the line of his grab.
His fingers close on air and the edge of her hood instead of her throat.
Fabric tears. Her head jerks, and a coil of red hair flashes out from beneath the disguise like fire catching in a vent draft.
For the first time since she walked in, her composure cracks. Not fear. Fury.
Varkun laughs. “Well, now. Look at that.”
I am already moving.
He catches a fistful of the torn hood and hauls. She twists with it, trying to keep her feet under her, but he has too much mass and she has too little room. Her shoulder clips the bar. The compad projection wavers, the ghost-ship shuddering in the air as if the core has already found it.
I come over the bar because going around would take too long.
Wood and metal complain under my boots. Bottles rattle behind me. Somebody curses and scrambles back as I land on the customer side, close enough that Varkun finally remembers where he is and whose floor he is bleeding on if this keeps up.
“Let go,” I say.
He turns his head toward me, still gripping the torn cloth. “Dux, this ain’t your?—”
I hit him once.
Not hard by my standards. Hard enough by his.
My fist drives into the hinge of his jaw with a crack I feel up my arm.
His good eye loses its focus. His knees fold, but I catch him by the front of his shirt before he drops and slam him face-first onto the bar.
The impact knocks over the human’s drink and sends amber liquor spreading under the hovering schematic.
Varkun groans.
I twist his arm up behind his back until the joint starts making promises it cannot keep. “I said let go.”
His fingers open. The scrap of hood falls.
The woman snatches it from the bar and steps back, breathing hard through her nose. Her red hair is loose now on one side, bright against the dingy collar of her coat. Green eyes. Sharp face. Young. Too young for the kind of death she is selling.
And familiar.
Not because I know her. I would remember knowing her. I remember most bad decisions with red hair.
But I have seen that face in old holonet captures, in memorial articles, in IHC engineering forums Loklo reads when he is pretending not to be sentimental.
Palindrome Larson’s daughter. The one who kept insisting the official report was wrong.
The one everyone called brilliant until she became inconvenient, and then they called her unstable because it was easier.
My mouth moves before my caution catches up.
“Well, hell,” I say. “Roma Larson.”
Her eyes cut to mine.
There is the mistake.
The whole room hears me.
A murmur rolls outward, gathering names, guesses, old gossip.
Larson means something in certain circles.
Not enough to protect her here, but enough to make her more valuable than she was ten seconds ago.
Her jaw tightens, and for a moment I get a clear, clean look at the woman under all that control.
She is not embarrassed. She is not frightened of being known.
She is furious that I have altered the variables.
“Thank you,” she says, voice cold enough to frost glass. “That was discreet.”
“My apologies,” I say. “Usually when someone tries to recruit lunatics for a core run in my bar, I assume they’ve already abandoned subtlety.”
Varkun groans beneath my hand. I press his wrist higher until the groan becomes a whine.
“Loklo,” I call without looking away from Roma. “Take our ambitious philosopher here to the alley and explain the house policy.”
Loklo comes around the bar with a sigh that has years of practice in it. “Is the house policy still ‘don’t start fights unless Dux looks bored,’ or did we revise it after the chair incident?”