18. Dux
DUX
The deeper we fly, the less the ship feels like metal around us and the more it feels like a held breath.
The cockpit trembles under a pressure no sane machine should have to bear, and the forward display bends the core into a fevered smear of light and darkness.
Gravity drags at the edges of the hull in uneven pulses, making the deck shift beneath my boots by fractions I feel more than see.
The console glow paints Roma’s face in hard lines and cold color, and every time the signal spikes across her instruments, something bright and reckless moves behind her eyes.
She is beautiful like that, and it scares the hell out of me.
“Roma,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Ease up on the thrust vector.”
Her fingers move across the console without slowing. “The margin is acceptable.”
“Acceptable to who?”
“To the person flying the ship.”
“That person is about three seconds away from making a bad call because she can see the finish line.”
Her mouth tightens, and she adjusts the lateral stabilizers with a sharp flick of her wrist. “Do not psychoanalyze me while you are actively bleeding on my floor.”
I glance down at the dark smear along my side where the Zenos drone opened me up. The cut has clotted enough to stop being interesting, though my shirt sticks to my skin every time I move.
“Floor’ll live,” I say. “Question is whether we do.”
“We will survive if you stop distracting me.”
“That’s cute, but you know I’m right.”
She exhales through her nose, clipped and irritated, and the ship rolls gently as she angles us through a narrowing fold of warped space.
Outside the viewport, a field of wreckage drifts in slow rotation—broken hulls, snapped spines, frozen debris glittering in bent starlight.
Dead ships turn like bones in deep water, and Roma’s eyes barely touch them before returning to the signal.
That bothers me.
It bothers me more than the monsters did.
“Left side,” I say. “That cruiser hull’s drifting into our path.”
“I see it.”
“You looked at it for half a second.”
“I processed its trajectory.”
“Roma.”
“I processed its trajectory,” she snaps, and the ship slips under the broken cruiser with less room than I’d use to scratch my own damn back.
A jagged antenna array skims overhead close enough that the proximity alarms flare orange. I brace one hand against the console and bite back the first three things I want to say.
She doesn’t even flinch.
The signal comes again, louder through the cockpit speakers now, a repeating sequence that sounds like a heartbeat translated through static. Roma leans closer, her whole body drawn toward it.
“It’s stronger,” she says. “The checksum is resolving cleanly.”
“I heard.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Her voice changes, and the sharp engineer’s edge gives way to something younger, rawer, dangerously close to wonder.
“That isn’t drift noise. That isn’t a corrupted echo.
That is active system communication. He maintained it.
Somehow, after all this time, he maintained it. ”
I watch her hands tighten over the controls.
“Then we need you steady,” I say. “We find him by staying alive.”
“We find him by reaching the source before the corridor collapses.”
“We don’t reach anything if you fly us straight into a graveyard because hope’s got its hands on the stick.”
She turns on me then, eyes bright enough to cut.
“Hope is not flying this ship.”
“No?” I ask. “Because it’s sure as hell sitting in the pilot’s chair.”
The silence after that does not empty the room. It fills it. The engines hum under us, the hull ticks faintly as temperature stress crawls over the plating, and the signal keeps pulsing between us like a third person listening.
Roma’s expression closes.
“I have spent nine years preparing for this,” she says. “You have spent less than two days deciding you have the authority to tell me how to feel about it.”
“I’m telling you how you’re acting.”
“You do not know me well enough to make that distinction.”
“I know you enough to see when you’re about to trade everything for one more meter.”
Her laugh is small and humorless. “Everything was already traded.”
The words land in my chest harder than they should.
I straighten slowly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She looks back to the display, and that is worse than if she’d shouted. “It means the costs were paid long before you came aboard.”
“Costs like what?”
“My career. My reputation. My mother’s trust. My childhood. Any version of my life that did not orbit this.” She adjusts the signal lock, voice flattening into something practiced and cold. “You are concerned about the bill because you arrived at the end of the transaction.”
My jaw tightens.
“That include me?”
Her hands still.
The cockpit narrows around the question.
“Dux,” she says carefully.
I hate the way she says my name right then. Like she’s choosing from a list of safe responses and finding none of them useful.
“That include me?” I ask again.
She looks at me, and for a second I see the answer before she can dress it up. She would not call it sacrifice. She would call it acceptable loss, necessary risk, mission priority, every clean little phrase people use when the truth is too ugly to touch.
Her voice drops. “I will do what is required to retrieve my father.”
There it is.
Plain as blood on a white floor.
Something cold moves through me, slow and mean.
I have faced weapons fire, vacuum, claws, and commanders with less mercy than a malfunctioning airlock.
None of it has ever unsettled me like the look in her eyes when she says that.
Danger is simple. Danger comes at you with teeth, and you either kill it or it kills you.
Roma is staring at salvation and turning herself into the knife she thinks she needs to cut it free.
I look at her hands on the console, small and steady and ruthless with purpose.
“You’d burn yourself down,” I say.
Her mouth trembles once before she locks it still. “That is melodramatic.”
“You’d burn me down too.”
She says nothing.
That does me in worse than a yes.
I turn away for half a second, staring out at the dead ships drifting across the viewport. My own reflection hangs faintly in the glass—blood on my side, torn fabric, scales marked from the fight, golden eyes staring back at me like some fool who only now noticed he walked willingly into a furnace.
I came on this mission thinking death might be useful if it finally had a point. I figured her father was the story, and I was just the muscle dumb enough to help her reach the last page of it. That was clean. Easy. Almost funny.
Now I know better.
The old man matters because he matters to her. The signal matters because it has her by the throat. The mission matters because it is the shape of the cage she built around her own heart and called it love.
But her?
Gods help me, she matters more than the damned signal.
“Listen to me,” I say, turning back.
Her chin lifts. “I am listening.”
“No, you’re waiting for me to stop talking so you can keep running.”
Her eyes flash. “We are not having this conversation while navigating an unstable drift corridor.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Dux.”
“You can be mad about it after you don’t get us killed.”
She stares at me with enough heat to cook the air between us. “Move away from the console.”
“No.”
“This is my ship.”
“Then act like you want it to still exist tomorrow.”
Her hand moves toward the manual input, fast and sharp, but I put my palm over the control before she can execute the tighter course correction she’s been angling toward. She freezes, not because I’m hurting her, but because I’ve crossed a line she keeps electrified.
“Take your hand off my console,” she says, each word precise.
“Tell me that course doesn’t shave the margin too thin.”
Her eyes cut to the display.
“That course reduces travel time.”
“Tell me it doesn’t shave the margin too thin.”
Her throat works.
“Roma.”
She closes her eyes for one second, and when she opens them, the fury is still there, but something scared lives under it.
“It may reduce maneuverability in the event of debris interference,” she says.
“That your way of saying yes?”
“It is my way of saying the risk is mathematically defensible.”
“Everything’s defensible when you’re desperate enough.”
She looks at me then, really looks, and her voice comes quieter. “I am so close.”
“I know.”
“No,” she says, and the force of it cracks through the restraint.
“You do not. He is not a theory to me. He is not a ghost in a signal model. He taught me how to solder before I could reach the workbench without standing on a crate. He used to let me paint constellations on scrap panels and pretend they were navigation maps. He called every bad drawing a prototype because he said invention needed room to be ugly first.”
Her breath catches, and she turns back to the display like she can hide inside the data.
“I remember his hands,” she says. “That is the part that never leaves. I remember grease under his nails and burn scars across his knuckles, and I remember thinking nothing bad could happen if those hands were building the thing that carried us home. Then everyone told me those hands were gone, and now his signal is right there.”
The cockpit hums around us. The dead ships drift outside. My hand stays over the control, but the fight in me changes shape.
“Roma,” I say softly.
“If I slow down, I might lose him.”
“You won’t.”
“You cannot promise that.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t.”
Her eyes shine, and she hates it. I can see that plain enough. She hates that her body is betraying the clean architecture of her mind, hates that grief still knows where every door is.
“I can promise something else,” I say.
She swallows. “What?”
“I’m not letting you turn yourself into wreckage to prove he’s alive.”
Her expression twists. “That is not your choice.”
“Yeah,” I say, my voice roughening. “Maybe I’m bad at choices.”