4. Dux
DUX
Roma Larson leaves the alcove like she intends to walk straight through the room, the station, and any inconvenient celestial body foolish enough to drift into her path.
I let her get three steps.
Not because I am polite. Politeness and I parted ways years ago over a misunderstanding involving a fleet commander, three broken ribs, and a chair I maintain was asking for it.
I let her get three steps because I want to watch how the room reacts to her now that it knows her name, her money, and just enough of her grief to start sharpening knives around it.
The bar has changed flavors. Before, it smelled like cheap liquor, hot metal, wet scales, old frying oil, and the everyday desperation of travelers who come to places like mine because respectable doors have locks.
Now there is something else underneath it.
Calculation. Not a smell, exactly, but I have lived long enough around predators to know when appetites change direction.
Voices stay loose, but eyes track her coat.
Hands linger near belts. A few patrons pretend not to look at the compad hidden inside her jacket and do such a bad job of it they ought to charge themselves embarrassment tax.
Loklo notices too. His mouth stays crooked, but his shoulders lose some of their lazy slant.
“She lit the room on fire,” he murmurs beside me. “And not in the fun way where we can bill people for damages.”
“You think there’s a fun way?”
“Yes. The version where no one bleeds on the upholstery.”
“We do not have upholstery.”
“That is because people keep bleeding on it.”
Roma reaches the edge of the bar and pauses to adjust the torn collar of her hood. She does not look back at me. That should be satisfying. A woman like that refusing to look back is usually an invitation to go be irritating where she can see me.
I accept.
I cross the floor after her, slow enough not to spook the room and fast enough that anyone considering a sudden grab remembers I am still in a working relationship with violence.
The music overhead grinds through another verse, bass thudding in the floor under my boots.
Somewhere near the card table, the Pi’Rell with the painted eyelids whispers something to his companion and folds a hand he could probably have won.
Smart. The immortal types know when the air has teeth.
Roma reaches for the compad inside her coat.
“Not leaving already, are you?” I ask.
Her hand stills. Then she turns, and the look she gives me could sterilize medical equipment.
“I have extracted all available usefulness from this establishment.”
Loklo drifts closer behind me. “That is the nicest review we’ve had in months.”
Roma’s gaze flicks to him. “You are included in the establishment.”
“I feel seen.”
I step into her path, not close enough to touch, but close enough that she has to acknowledge mass, heat, and inconvenience.
She is much smaller than I am, which makes the fact that she does not move back more impressive than sensible.
Her red hair has escaped the damaged hood in a loose spill along one side of her face.
The bar light catches in it, turning strands copper, blood, and flame.
Her eyes are green and furious and too awake.
“You still have not answered the important question,” I say.
“I answered several.”
“No, you answered the ones you liked.”
She folds her arms. “Ask quickly. My tolerance for theatrics is rationed.”
“What happens when your plan fails?”
Her expression shuts down. I do not mean she looks offended. Offense has movement. Offense breathes. Roma becomes very still, the way a pressure door becomes still right before it seals a compartment from fire.
“It will not fail,” she says.
“There we are.”
“That is not arrogance. It is preparation.”
“That is exactly what arrogant people call arrogance when they file the paperwork.”
Her mouth tightens. “You’ve mistaken cynicism for wisdom again.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I have been inside enough bad missions to know plans do not fail all at once. They fail politely at first. A sensor misreads. A corridor isn’t where the chart says it should be.
Someone lies because they’re scared. Someone else hesitates because they’re in love with the version of the mission that exists in their head.
Then the walls start screaming, and suddenly all that preparation becomes a very tidy list of things that used to matter. ”
A few nearby patrons quiet down to listen. Roma notices, of course. Her chin lifts as if attention is a weight she can balance perfectly.
“My redundancies have redundancies.”
“Cute.”
“My ship can survive systems degradation across multiple critical networks.”
“And if it cannot?”
“It can.”
“And if it cannot?”
“It can.”
I lean closer. “And if it cannot?”
The words hang between us, ugly and useful. Her eyes flash, but something behind them flickers too fast for most to catch. Not doubt. Never that. Roma does not allow herself doubt. What I see is the violence she does to herself whenever doubt tries to live.
“If the ship suffers catastrophic loss,” she says, each word precise enough to have serial numbers, “I will execute the best available contingency based on the specific nature of the failure.”
“That is not an answer. That is a prayer dressed as a procedure.”
“I do not pray.”
“No. You model outcomes until they start sounding obedient.”
Loklo makes a small sympathetic sound. “That was either deeply insightful or obnoxious as hell. Possibly both.”
Roma ignores him. Her attention is fixed on me with such intensity that I can feel it against my scales. “You are arguing from experience in chaos. I am arguing from expertise in prevention. These are not the same discipline.”
“Prevention ends when the universe gets a vote.”
“The universe does not vote.”
“Sure it does. Usually with a large rock at high speed.”
That pulls a laugh from the harness-wearing human, who kills it quickly when Roma looks at him.
I should stop. I know that. There is a point where pressing a wound stops being investigation and becomes cruelty.
I have crossed that line plenty of times and waved cheerfully from the other side.
But with her, the line feels different. Not softer.
More dangerous. I want to see what happens when she stops reciting survival and starts admitting what survival costs her.
“What happens,” I ask, quieter now, “if your father is not where that signal says he is?”
Her face loses color under the heat of the bar.
Loklo mutters, “Dux.”
I do not look away.
Roma’s hand closes around the edge of her compad inside her coat. “He is.”
“What if he isn’t?”
“The checksum is his.”
“Could be copied.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Could be a trap.”
“I considered that.”
“But you’re going anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Because if you don’t, you have to live with not knowing.”
Her lips part, and for the first time since she came through my door, she looks twenty-one. Not young in the soft sense. Not innocent. Just briefly stripped of all the armor she built from grief and math and sleepless nights over schematics no sane person should have to understand.
Then the armor slams back into place.
“I am going because my father is alive,” she says. “I am going because no one else looked long enough. I am going because nine years of institutional cowardice, budgetary convenience, and sentimental surrender do not constitute evidence of death.”
“Fine,” I say. “Then what happens if you find him and he dies on the way out?”
The words land hard enough that Loklo stops breathing for a second beside me.
Around us, the bar seems to recede. The music keeps playing.
Glasses keep clinking. Someone coughs near the kitchen door.
But the space between Roma and me narrows until it holds only that question and whatever it cuts open.
Her eyes shine. Not tears. She would probably rather stab me than cry in front of this room.
“I will get him out,” she says.
“That is not what I asked.”
“That is the only answer that matters.”
“No, it is the only answer you can survive saying.”
Her hand comes out of her coat empty, fingers curled as if she has decided not to reach for the compad because striking me with it would be inefficient. “You know nothing about survival.”
I smile, but it does not feel good on my face. “I know too much about it. That is the problem.”
“Then perhaps you should stop mistaking endurance for insight.”
“Maybe you should stop mistaking obsession for loyalty.”
The room goes quiet in earnest.
Loklo says, very softly, “Oh, hell.”
Roma steps toward me. It is a small movement by distance and a large one by consequence.
Her head tips back so she can keep looking into my face, and the scent of her reaches me under grease and bar smoke: metal, clean soap nearly buried by engine oil, and something warm beneath all the controlled layers that her disguise cannot smother.
“You do not get to name what I feel,” she says.
“No,” I say. “But I can recognize a fellow idiot when one walks into my bar with blueprints and a funeral march.”
Her laugh is short and cold. “You think we are alike?”
“I think we are both pointing ourselves at death and calling it something prettier.”
“I am trying to bring someone home.”
“I am trying to find something worth the trip.”
She stares at me.
I did not mean to say that.
There are truths a man keeps behind his teeth because once they are out, they become furniture in the room.
Everyone has to walk around them. Loklo turns his head toward me, all the humor gone from his face.
He knows enough pieces of me to recognize the shape.
Not all of it. Nobody gets all of it. But enough.
Roma’s voice lowers. “You don’t care whether you survive.”
“No.”
The answer comes easy. Too easy. Like tossing a spent cartridge onto the floor.