10. Dux #2
A ridge appears directly in our path, too high, too close.
Roma rolls us, skimming along its side instead of over it.
The port shields scrape mineral outcrop, blue sparks sheeting across the canopy.
The impact slams me against the harness and drives all the air from my lungs.
Roma’s shoulder hits the side of her chair, but her hands stay on the controls.
We clear the ridge by less than a meter.
“You meant to do that?” I ask, breathless.
“Obviously.”
“Liar.”
“Later.”
A flat stretch opens beyond the ridge, broken by shallow craters and a jagged field of black stone spires. It is not a landing zone. It is a place where geology has left fewer obvious ways to die.
Roma chooses it.
“Brace,” she says.
I resecure the harness with one hand and grab the attitude bar with the other. “You first.”
“I am braced.”
“You are emotionally clenched. Different thing.”
“I hate you.”
“Later.”
The Lamplight hits the first bounce like a fist.
The impact blasts through the ship, metal shrieking against stone.
My body surges forward into the harness.
A side panel bursts open and throws a cascade of tools across the cockpit.
The second bounce comes faster, lower, worse.
The starboard strut collapses or complains in a language very close to collapse.
Roma fires emergency thrusters in broken pulses, each burst stealing just enough speed to keep us from cartwheeling.
The third impact becomes a slide.
Rock screams beneath the hull. Sparks tear past the canopy in long golden sheets.
The cockpit fills with alarms, smoke, and the bitter stink of scorched shielding.
Roma wrestles the nose up, then down, then locks it straight while the Lamplight grinds across the asteroid surface with the grace of a drunken avalanche.
Finally, mercifully, violently, we stop.
For several seconds, nothing moves except smoke curling from a cracked panel and a loose cable swinging gently above Roma’s shoulder.
Then a final piece of equipment drops somewhere aft with a distant metallic crash.
I start laughing.
I cannot help it. It comes out rough, low, and half-strangled, pulled from somewhere between relief and old battle madness. The sound fills the cockpit, absurd against the alarms and smoke and Roma’s white-knuckled grip on the controls.
She turns her head slowly.
If looks could kill, I would be reduced to an administrative inconvenience.
“You’re laughing,” she says.
“Yes.”
“We crash-landed.”
“Technically, yes.”
“Technically?”
“We are alive. That makes it a landing with criticism.”
Her eyes blaze. “My ship is damaged.”
“And still in one piece.”
“Because I kept her in one piece.”
“Yes.”
The word is simple, and it stops her more effectively than argument would have.
I unclip the harness and wince as my ribs object. “You did.”
Roma looks back at her displays, face shuttering hard.
Damage reports cascade across the main screen: port vane offline, starboard ballast overheated, ventral shields drained, landing strut failure, aft routing damage, microfractures in external plating, atmospheric seal intact.
She reads every line too fast, absorbing injury like insult.
Her hands move to restart diagnostics.
They tremble once.
Then stop.
She thinks I do not see.
I see.
“You all right?” I ask.
“I am functional.”
“That answer is getting old.”
“It remains accurate.”
Smoke drifts between us, carrying the chemical tang of burned insulation. The emergency lights paint her face in alternating blue and red. For the first time since I met her, the ship around her does not look like an extension of perfect will. It looks wounded, and so does she.
I keep my voice easier than my thoughts. “You got us down.”
“I should not have needed to.”
“There it is.”
She glares at me. “What?”
“The part where survival disappoints you because it was not tidy.”
“That anomaly should not have been there.”
“No argument.”
“It did not match mapped conditions.”
“Obviously.”
“My model accounted for gravitational variance.”
“Not that one.”
Her lips press into a thin, furious line. She looks away before I can read too much, but not quickly enough. I catch the flash of something under the anger: shock, maybe, or the first hairline fracture in the belief that enough preparation can make fear unnecessary.
I do not mock it.
I am an ass, not a monster.
Instead, I look through the canopy.
The asteroid surface sprawls around us beneath a dim field of strange light.
Dust hangs in the low atmosphere, glimmering faintly where charged particles from the anomaly drift overhead.
The horizon curves close, jagged and lonely, with distant crystal veins shining like buried lightning under black stone.
The place looks dead, but the sensors claim air. Thin, cold, breathable air.
“Pretty little disaster,” I say.
Roma follows my gaze. Her expression does not soften, but the fight in her eyes shifts direction. From me to the landscape. From humiliation to problem.
Good.
Problems keep people moving.
She opens the exterior scan. “Atmosphere breathable but low pressure. Trace metallic particulates. Gravity point-three-one standard. Temperature below comfort range but survivable with thermal gear. Radiation elevated, shielded by local magnetic distortion in pockets.”
“Any predators?”
She gives me a flat look. “I have been scanning for four seconds.”
“So no pets yet.”
“No confirmed pets.”
I grin. She almost reacts, then decides against giving me the victory.
The damage report pings again. A propulsion warning appears, then expands.
Roma’s voice cools to professional ice. “Primary thrust cannot safely reengage without repair.”
“There it is.”
“Do not say that like you are pleased.”
“I’m not pleased. I am unsurprised.”
“I hate unsurprised.”
“I noticed.”
She unclips her harness and stands too fast. The motion costs her. She hides it by grabbing the console as if she meant to. “We assess external damage, patch critical systems, recalibrate ballast, repair the port vane, and depart.”
I rise more slowly, because my ribs are composing a complaint. “And if the anomaly is still chewing up our route?”
“We recalculate.”
“And if repairs take longer than your window allows?”
“They won’t.”
“Roma.”
She turns on me, all red hair, bruised cheek, and command voice held together by sheer refusal. “What?”
“This is already not the mission you planned.”
The words settle into the cockpit heavier than the crash.
Her eyes flick once to the damage display, then to the canopy, then back to me.
She hates all of it. The wrecked certainty.
The asteroid. The time loss. The fact that I saw the port vane issue.
The fact that she needed my read on the anomaly wake.
The fact that alive is not the same thing as in control.
“I know,” she says.
It is barely more than a whisper.
Then her spine straightens, and the whisper becomes steel trying to remember its shape. “That does not change the objective.”
“No,” I say. “But it changes how we survive long enough to reach it.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Not with trust. Not with gratitude. Something harder. Something unwilling.
Then she grabs the emergency kit from beside her chair and shoves it against my chest.
“Suit up,” Roma says. “If you are going to keep being right at inconvenient times, you can help fix what reality broke.”
I take the kit and smile despite the smoke in my lungs and the ache in my ribs.
“Yes, Commander.”
This time, she does not correct me.