14. Dux
DUX
The drones keep scraping at the hull like creditors with claws, but for a while, the cockpit feels quieter than it has any right to.
Noise still fills the Lamplight. The exterior plating shivers under impact.
The ventral shields hum unevenly as Roma coaxes them back toward usefulness.
A warning tone pulses from the aft routing panel every eleven seconds, too polite to be urgent and too persistent to ignore.
The air smells of hot metal, antiseptic sealant, scorched insulation, and my own blood drying under the compression patch.
Underneath all that, softer and more dangerous, is the scent of Roma’s soap and machine oil as she leans over the console with her father’s signal locked faintly on the display.
I should be thinking about drones.
I should be thinking about hull stress, the damaged vane, my side wound, our bad odds, and the fact that this miserable little asteroid has teeth and an atmosphere it has no business owning.
Instead, I am watching Roma Larson hold herself together by force of will, and I am realizing I do not like how close she came to falling apart when that signal answered.
That is inconvenient.
I know obsession. I have seen it on battlefields, in officers who kept feeding soldiers into bad ground because admitting failure would mean the dead had died for nothing.
I have seen it in wounded men crawling toward flags, commanders, lovers, and gods who were no longer listening.
I have carried my own version around for years, though mine is uglier in its simplicity.
Roma filled her life with one impossible purpose until there was no room left for anything else.
I let mine empty out and called the echo freedom.
Neither condition looks healthy from this cockpit.
Roma’s fingers dance across the controls, steadier now. Too steady. The kind of steady that means the tremor has been shoved somewhere internal where it can do damage later.
“Stop staring at me,” she says.
I lean back in the secondary chair, which groans under me like a dramatic old veteran. “I’m monitoring mission-critical assets.”
Her eyes remain on the display. “If you are referring to me, stop before I revise your access permissions to include only oxygen and regret.”
“I like that oxygen made the cut.”
“It is provisional.”
“Generous woman.”
“Bleeding man.”
I glance down at the patch along my ribs. “Still less than before.”
“That is not a medical category.”
“It is a battlefield category.”
“This is not a battlefield.”
A drone slams into the upper hull hard enough to make the cockpit lights flicker.
Dust shivers loose from a seam above the canopy and drifts down in the emergency-blue glow.
Roma’s fingers dart across the console, diverting shield strength toward the impact point without looking away from the signal trace.
I lift both brows. “You were saying?”
Roma gives me a look over her shoulder. “This is a repair environment experiencing hostile interference.”
“That is the most Roma Larson way to say battlefield I have ever heard.”
“I prefer accuracy.”
“You prefer control.”
“I prefer both.”
I watch her for another second too long. The signal marker glows on her display, faint and stubborn, tagged with her father’s checksum. Every time it flickers, her shoulders shift by a fraction. No one else would notice. I wish I didn’t.
“You locked the vector,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And the drones are back.”
“Yes.”
“And your ship still needs repair.”
“Yes.”
“And after all that, your biggest problem is still that you don’t know what to do if you actually win.”
She turns in the chair slowly, her expression going cold around the edges. “You are returning to that conversation now?”
“It wandered off when something tried to eat us. I’m herding it back.”
“How considerate.”
“I’m known for my delicacy.”
“You are known for damaging infrastructure.”
“That too.”
Roma stands, pulling up a repair overlay on the side display with a quick, angry motion. “I do not have time to indulge your need to poke at psychological wounds because silence makes you uncomfortable.”
“Silence doesn’t make me uncomfortable.”
“No?” She steps around the pilot’s chair, her red hair loosening from its braid again, copper strands catching against the collar of her suit. “You fill every quiet space with jokes, provocation, or tactical observations delivered like insults.”
I smile. “Good. You’re paying attention.”
“I observe threats.”
“That’s almost affectionate.”
“That was a diagnosis.”
I rise too, partly because sitting while she stands feels wrong, and partly because I know it will irritate her.
The cockpit becomes smaller as soon as I am on my feet.
It is not built for arguments between a human with too much pride and a Vakutan with too little sense.
The emergency lights cast her face in hard planes, sharpening the bruise along her cheek and the defiance in her eyes.
“You observe everything except yourself,” I say.
Her chin lifts. “I am not a system requiring external audit.”
“Maybe not, but you are running hot and pretending the gauges are decorative.”
She turns back to the console. “I have work.”
“Of course you do. Work is safe. Work does not ask what happens when your father looks at you and realizes you buried yourself to dig him out.”
Her hand stops above the controls.
Good.
No, not good.
Effective.
There is a difference, and I am beginning to dislike how easily I reach for the sharpest thing.
Roma lowers her hand slowly, then faces me again. “Do not bring him into this as leverage.”
“He is already in this. He is the whole damn engine.”
“My father is not a rhetorical device.”
“No,” I say, voice roughening despite my attempt to keep it light. “He is a man you love so much you have turned yourself into a rescue mechanism.”
Her eyes flare. “Better that than turning myself into a bar fight with a pulse.”
There she is.
The words hit, and I grin because pain is familiar ground. “Careful, Commander. That sounded personal.”
“It was meant to.”
“Good. I was worried you had replaced all emotional function with navigation software.”
She steps closer. “You do not want emotional function from me. You want a reaction. You want proof that I can still be provoked because then you can congratulate yourself for finding the woman under the mission.”
I move closer too, because I am exactly the kind of fool who advances toward artillery. “And there she is again, pretending being seen is an attack.”
“It often is.”
That stops me more than I expect.
Roma seems to hear what she has admitted a second after saying it. Her mouth closes, and her eyes cut briefly toward the signal display as if it might offer an emergency exit from her own honesty.
The ship creaks under another impact. Somewhere aft, a drone shrieks as shield charge repels it from the hull. The sound travels through metal, thin and furious. Neither of us moves.
I keep my voice lower. “Who taught you that?”
“No one taught me anything.”
“Liar.”
Her gaze snaps back. “Do not call me that.”
“You lie beautifully when the truth is about yourself. Less well when it is about engines.”
“I am going to ignore you now.”
“Try harder. You’re bad at it.”
She closes the distance between us so fast I almost laugh. Almost. The cockpit lights paint green fire in her eyes. She has to look up to meet my face, but she does it with such intensity that height feels irrelevant.
“You are not here to fix me,” Roma says, each word precise and heated. “You are not here to interpret me. You are not here to drag me into some crude emotional revelation because you mistake discomfort for progress.”
I lean down slightly. “Then why am I here?”
“Because you are useful.”
“That all?”
“Yes.”
Her answer comes too fast.
I feel my smile fade. “Try again.”
She inhales through her nose, and the breath catches at the end. Not much. Enough. Her hands are at her sides, fingers flexing once against the gloves as though she wants a tool, a weapon, or a control surface between us.
“You are useful,” she repeats, quieter but harder.
“That all?” I ask again.
Roma’s eyes search mine, angry and unsettled, and for one strange second I think she might answer honestly.
The air between us holds heat despite the cold filtration.
I can smell the metal dust on her suit, the faint antiseptic from the medkit, the warm human scent of her beneath fear and focus.
My side aches. Her ship groans. Outside, monsters crawl over the hull, and still the most dangerous thing in the room is the way she refuses to step back.
“You are disruptive,” she says.
“That’s closer.”
“You are insubordinate.”
“True.”
“You are arrogant, reckless, intrusive, and pathologically incapable of respecting boundaries.”
“I respect some.”
“No, you study them for weaknesses.”
“Sometimes that’s how you find the door.”
“I did not invite you through mine.”
The words land close, too close to something neither of us has named.
I should make a joke.
I do not.
Instead, I look down at her, at the bruise I did not prevent, the exhaustion she refuses to claim, the mouth that can cut a man open with grammar, and the eyes that nearly broke when her father’s signal touched the ship.
I wanted to get a reaction out of her. I did.
Now that it is here, bright and breathing and too near, the idea of pushing harder feels suddenly wrong.
I have broken enough things.
I do not want to break her.
That realization moves through me slowly, with the unpleasant weight of truth arriving late to a fight it should have prevented.
Roma’s voice drops. “What?”
I blink. “What?”
“You changed.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes,” she says, studying me with irritating accuracy. “You did.”
I look away first.
That surprises both of us.
My gaze lands on the canopy, where dust drifts across the glass and drone shadows crawl like thoughts best left outside. “You’re right,” I say.