2. Dux #2
“We revised it to ‘don’t put hands on paying possibilities.’”
“Possibilities,” Roma repeats.
Her voice makes the word sound like a diagnostic error.
Loklo grabs Varkun by the collar with both hands and gives me a look. “You know, one day you’re going to call someone a possibility and they’re going to take it personally.”
“I am already taking it personally,” Roma says.
Loklo beams at her. “See? Fast work.”
I shove Varkun toward him. The drunk staggers, catches himself badly, and makes the mistake of looking as if he might object. I show him my teeth. He reconsiders his options with admirable speed for a man whose brain is currently floating in cheap liquor.
Loklo herds him toward the side exit. “Come along, sunshine. We’re going to discuss consent, property damage, and why your face keeps making appointments with hard surfaces.”
As they pass, Varkun mutters, “She’s insane.”
Roma says, “And yet I remain upright.”
I laugh despite myself.
She notices. Of course she does. Her attention snaps back to me, sharp and assessing, and I feel the oddest sensation under my ribs. Not softness. Not yet. Interest, maybe. Irritation with a pulse.
I turn toward the room and raise my voice. “Anyone else planning to debate engineering theory with their hands?”
No one answers. Several people find urgent business inside their cups.
“Good,” I say. “Then let’s discuss the part where this is a suicide run.”
Roma’s shoulders stiffen. “It is not.”
The ghostly schematic still hovers above the bar, flickering where spilled liquor interferes with the compad’s stabilization field. I reach through the projection and point at the drive housing.
“That is a pretty piece of madness,” I say. “I’ll give you that. Shield pattern is clever. Hull stress distribution is better than clever. But you’re going to the galactic core, not threading a needle at a university demonstration.”
Her chin lifts. “I did not design it for a university demonstration.”
“No, you designed it for grief.”
The room quiets harder than before.
Roma’s face goes still in a way I do not like. A human face should not be able to shut down that completely. It is like watching blast shutters seal over a window.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she says.
“I know who your father was.”
“Is,” she says.
The word comes fast. Too fast. It has lived behind her teeth for years, waiting to bite.
I tilt my head. “Is, then.”
A few patrons exchange looks. Someone whispers Larson again. Someone else whispers core mission and laughs under their breath until the scarred woman elbows them quiet.
Roma steps closer to the projection, putting herself between me and the ship like she is defending a living creature.
“The official report stated that the IHC research vessel experienced catastrophic systems failure near the outer core boundary. The wreckage pattern was incomplete. The distress burst contained data fragments inconsistent with total reactor collapse. The recovery fleet spent less than six hours inside the search perimeter before withdrawing.”
“Because six hours near the core is how commanders say they tried without losing another ship,” I say.
“Because they were cowards.”
That word lands. Not because it is fair. Because she means it with the kind of conviction that has burned everything else out of her.
I lean one hip against the bar and fold my arms. “Careful, Roma Larson. Some of the cowards who came home from bad space did so carrying pieces of the people who didn’t.”
Her eyes flash. “And some of them came home because they decided the dead were cheaper than the living.”
The scarred woman mutters, “Damn.”
Roma hears but does not look away from me.
Her cheeks are flushed now, not with embarrassment, but with heat dragged up from somewhere buried.
The disguise is ruined. The room has her name.
The drunk is gone. Any sane person would pack the projection away and leave before the night figures out how to become worse.
She does not.
She taps her compad, and the schematic shifts. Layers peel back to expose mathematical overlays, route projections, stress models, and bursts of dense notation that make half the room lose interest and the other half lean in despite themselves.
“This is not a fantasy,” she says. “I have spent nine years modeling the gravitational shear patterns around the core’s habitable debris fields.
I have mapped drift corridors from archived military wreck data, salvage beacons, research telemetry, and radiation ghosts nobody bothered to correlate because they assumed nothing living could remain inside.
My ship is not built to conquer the core.
It is built to survive long enough to enter, locate a signal, and get out. ”
“Long enough is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” I say.
“So is suicide in yours.”
A pleased sound moves through the crowd. They like blood. They do not care if it comes from fists or words.
I should shut this down. I should tell her nobody in this room worth hiring will take her job for any sum she can pay, because those with sense will refuse and those without sense will get her killed before the core has a chance.
I should send her away before her name brings worse trouble through my door.
Instead, I ask, “What signal?”
She hesitates. It is small, but I catch it.
Not because she lacks an answer. Because the answer matters.
“My father’s engineering signature,” she says.
The words are almost swallowed by the room.
I stare at her.
That is the hook in her, then. Not money. Not fame. Not the kind of arrogant scientific lunacy that gets a crew vaporized while someone shouts about discovery. Her father is buried in the dark, and she has spent nine years building a knife sharp enough to cut him out.
Hell.
That is worse.
Loklo returns through the side door, brushing his hands together. “Varkun is communing with the alley pavement and reconsidering his choices. I give that revelation four minutes before it wears off.” He slows when he sees the room. “What did I miss?”
“Grief with equations,” I say.
Roma turns on me. “Do not trivialize this.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“No,” I say, and the word comes out rougher than I intend. “I’m calling it what it is because nobody else in this room has the spine to do it. You built a beautiful coffin, and you want to hire someone to climb inside with you.”
Her lips part slightly. For the first time, I think I have actually hit something.
Then she recovers.
“No,” she says. “A coffin is passive. My vessel has three redundant escape architectures, independent thermal regulation, modular shielding, and a manual override system that does not rely on shackled artificial intelligence or prayer. If you want to critique my work, do it accurately.”
Loklo leans toward the scarred woman. “I think she just flirted with him.”
“She threatened him with documentation,” the woman says.
“With Dux, that counts.”
Roma’s gaze slices toward Loklo. “I can hear you.”
“I was counting on that.”
I grin, and she looks back at me as if my amusement is an instrument she intends to disassemble.
The grin fades slowly.
Because she is still standing there. After the laughter. After Varkun. After losing the hood, the anonymity, and the clean shape of her plan. She is angry, exposed, outnumbered, and surrounded by people who would sell each other’s bones if the price came with a drink voucher.
Yet she stands.
Not wild. Not fragile. Not merely stubborn. Controlled under pressure, yes, but not cold. That is the lie everyone probably believes about her because she speaks in numbers and wears discipline like armor. Underneath it, something is burning hot enough to light a route through hell.
I know reckless when I see it. I shave with it.
But this is not recklessness.
This is devotion sharpened until it has forgotten how to be anything else.
I tap the edge of the projection, letting my claw pass through a pale blue line of hull plating. “You understand that even if this ship does everything you claim, the core will still invent new ways to kill you.”
“Yes.”
“You understand charts rot out there. Gravity lies. Signals bend. Wreckage moves. Predators nest in places sane navigation systems flag as empty.”
“Yes.”
“You understand the first thing to go wrong will make all your perfect models look like children’s drawings on a tavern wall.”
Her eyes harden. “Then I will adapt.”
I laugh once, low in my chest. “You?”
“Yes,” she says. “Me.”
“You look like you schedule your breathing.”
“I do. It keeps me from wasting oxygen on people who confuse volume with insight.”
Loklo murmurs, “She has you there.”
I point at him without looking. “You are very close to becoming assistant manager of the alley.”
“I already manage the alley. Poorly, but with flair.”
Roma’s mouth twitches. It is so fast I almost miss it. Almost. The expression is not warmth, exactly, but it proves she has one buried somewhere beneath the knives.
I feel the room watching us, hungry for the next turn. Let them. I am past caring.
“What are you paying?” the human in the harness asks, voice thinner now that Varkun is outside becoming philosophical.
Roma gives a figure.
The room inhales.
Even I blink.
Loklo says, “I rescind my earlier jokes and would like to announce my lifelong passion for certain death.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I say.
“I said passion, not competence.”
The scarred woman eyes Roma. “That is real money.”
“It is,” Roma says.
“Why come here?”
Roma sweeps her gaze over the room. “Because official channels refused. Because reputable contractors declined. Because the people qualified enough to understand the risk are too comfortable to take it, and the people desperate enough to take it are usually too incompetent to survive launch.”
The human snorts. “That your sales pitch?”
“No,” she says. “That is my filtering process.”
Gods help me, I like that.
I should not. It is inconvenient. It is the kind of liking that leads to doors opening where they ought to stay welded shut.
I have spent years keeping my life simple: drink, fight, sleep when my body gives up arguing, wake, repeat.
Purpose is a dangerous infection. It starts with one impossible woman in a bad coat and ends with a man caring whether tomorrow comes.
Roma begins shutting down the projection, perhaps deciding she has said enough or revealed too much. The ghost-ship collapses inward layer by layer, vanishing back into the compad until only spilled liquor and scratches remain on the bar.
I catch myself wanting to see it again.
Not the ship.
Her.
That is a worse sign than any schematic.
“You’re going to die out there,” I say.
She tucks the torn edge of her hood back with a controlled, almost contemptuous motion. “Everyone dies somewhere.”
“Pretty line. Doesn’t make it a plan.”
“No,” she says, stepping close enough that I can see tiny flecks of gold around the green of her eyes. “The plan is in the data. The line is for men who mistake cynicism for wisdom.”
Loklo whispers, “I am definitely in love.”
This time I ignore him.
Roma holds my gaze like she has never learned to look away from danger and has paid dearly for the education.
I expect to see pleading there, some crack where the daughter shows through the engineer.
Instead, I see challenge. Worse, I see loneliness so disciplined it refuses to ask for comfort even while standing in the middle of a room full of knives.
The mission is madness.
The ship is probably a coffin.
The woman is trouble with red hair and a mouth sharp enough to open arteries.
And for the first time in longer than I care to admit, I am interested in something that is not already breaking in my hands.
“Roma Larson,” I say, tasting the name properly now.
Her brows draw together. “What?”
I smile, slow enough to annoy her.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just deciding whether your death wish is better built than mine.”
She stares at me as if I have answered a question in a language she does not respect.
“Mine is not a death wish,” she says.
I look at the place where her impossible ship had burned in the air.
“No,” I say. “I suppose yours has blueprints.”
The room laughs, but she does not. She studies me with fresh caution, as though I have changed shape in front of her and she does not yet know whether that makes me useful or lethal.
Fair enough.
I am wondering the same thing about her.