19. Roma
ROMA
The signal sharpens until it feels less like a transmission and more like a hand reaching through the dark.
Its waveform steadies across the central display, no longer collapsing beneath gravitational distortion or drowning under the static that has contaminated every scan since we entered the core.
I run the checksum again, then again, each pass confirming the same impossible result with brutal consistency.
The sequence carries my father’s old engineering signature, the strange and elegant logic he used when he built systems that other engineers called inefficient until they discovered they worked better than theirs.
My throat tightens as the pattern holds, because the data no longer allows me the mercy of doubt.
Dux stands to my right with one hand braced against the console, his broad body angled against the ship’s vibration as if he can bully physics into behaving.
The cockpit glows with layered projections: the route ahead, the debris field, the gravitational shear lines, the signal cone narrowing into a point somewhere beyond the next distorted corridor.
Red and amber indicators flicker across the edges of the displays, warning me that the stabilizers are heating too quickly and that the patched airlock section is still bleeding structural tolerance under pressure.
I increase thrust.
The ship surges forward, and the harness bites into my chest as acceleration presses me back against the pilot’s chair.
The deck vibrates harder beneath us, a fast, uneven tremor that travels through my bones and makes the instrument lights quiver in their housings.
Outside the viewport, wreckage turns in slow, lethal arcs through the warped dark, every broken hull plate and severed engine spine bending along gravitational currents that shift faster than old models can predict.
“Roma,” Dux says, his voice low and tight, “you’re pushing the engines too hard.”
“I have the signal locked.”
“You had it locked before you started treating the throttle like it insulted your mother.”
“The signal quality improves with proximity.”
“So does the chance of us becoming a decorative smear on one of those dead cruisers.”
I ignore the edge in his voice and refine the approach vector, shaving travel time by angling us through a tighter gap between two rotating masses of debris.
One is the shattered midsection of an IHC survey vessel, its identification markings stripped nearly smooth by radiation and time.
The other is a slab of blackened plating from something I cannot identify, tumbling end over end with enough momentum to crush us if my timing is off by even a fraction.
Dux leans closer to the display. “That gap is closing.”
“I see it.”
“You’re still taking it.”
“Yes.”
“Because your father’s signal is sitting on the other side of it.”
“Because the path remains viable.”
The ship banks hard to starboard as I commit to the maneuver.
The artificial gravity lags for a fraction of a second, turning my stomach as the cockpit tilts around us.
The proximity alarm rises in pitch, and the shield boundary flares white along the viewport as the edge of the ruined survey vessel scrapes close enough to overload the sensors.
Dux grips the console. “That was too damn tight.”
“That was accurate.”
“That was luck wearing a nice coat.”
I cut him a look while adjusting the stabilizer trim. “Do not anthropomorphize my calculations.”
“Then stop making them act drunk.”
The coordinates tighten. The source shifts, faintly but deliberately, as if whatever is generating it still has power, still has intention, still has someone maintaining it.
My hand moves before I fully think through the next adjustment.
Dux catches the motion.
“Do not increase thrust again,” he says.
“I need to close the distance before the corridor changes.”
“You need to breathe before you start flying like the alarms are cheering you on.”
“I am managing the ship.”
“You’re chasing him.”
The words hit too cleanly, and my fingers tense against the control column.
“I am following confirmed data,” I say.
“You’re following hope at full burn.”
I turn toward him sharply. “Do not make hope sound foolish.”
“I’m making reckless sound reckless.”
The ship crosses into a pocket of gravitational shear, and the deck drops beneath us with a sickening lurch.
My stomach pulls upward as the inertial dampeners strain to compensate.
I correct pitch, feed power to the lateral thrusters, and thread us beneath a tumbling engine assembly whose broken vanes sweep past the viewport like giant teeth.
Dux reaches for the secondary controls and diverts auxiliary power into the port stabilizer before I ask for it.
The ship steadies.
I hate the tiny relief that moves through me.
“You touched my controls,” I say.
“You were busy saving us dramatically.”
“I had the correction.”
“You had most of it.”
“I do not require commentary.”
“You require somebody willing to tell you when you’re about to do something stupid.”
My mouth tightens as another cluster of warnings flashes across the display. “If you intend to help, monitor the debris vector on the left and reroute power into maneuvering only when I call for it.”
He looks at me, and there is something in his expression that makes my pulse misbehave: frustration, yes, but also fear sharpened into usefulness. “Say the word and I’ll do it.”
I return my focus to the corridor ahead. “Left drift increasing.”
“Already on it.”
He adjusts the lateral compensation, and I alter the nose angle at the same moment.
The ship slides between two rotating debris masses with a smoothness that neither of us could have managed alone.
For one strange, suspended instant, our motions fit together cleanly: my hands driving the line forward, his hands strengthening the margins I am too impatient to preserve.
The signal blooms brighter across the display.
I lean toward it despite myself.
“There,” I whisper. “The source is close.”
“How close?”
“Less than a sector.”
Dux’s voice softens. “Roma.”
I know that tone now. It is the voice he uses when he thinks I am standing too near an edge.
“I cannot lose this chance,” I say before he can tell me to slow down again.
He shifts beside me. “Nobody’s asking you to lose it.”
“You are asking me to risk delay.”
“I am asking you to avoid turning rescue into suicide.”
The words strike old scar tissue. My grip tightens until the edge of the control column presses through my glove and into my palm.
“You do not understand what delay means,” I say.
“For nine years, every person with authority told me this signal could never exist. Every committee, every instructor, every friend of my mother who spoke gently while calling me unstable said the same thing in different language. Move on. Accept reality. Stop building your life around a corpse. Now the proof is sitting in front of me, alive enough to answer, and you want me to treat it like any other navigation problem.”
Dux’s jaw tightens, but his voice remains careful. “I want you alive when you find him.”
The gentleness unsettles me more than his anger would have.
I force my attention back to the display. “Then help me get there.”
“I am helping.”
“Then stop trying to slow me down.”
“Let me give you wider margins.”
“Wider margins cost time.”
“Dead women don’t rescue fathers.”
My chest constricts. “Do not.”
“Roma.”
“I said do not.”
The cockpit’s warning tones layer over the hum of the engine, each sound sharpened by the pressure between us. I adjust the route again, cutting closer to the signal cone, and Dux reaches toward the secondary panel.
I catch his wrist.
His skin is warm beneath my glove, solid and alive and inconvenient.
“Do not countermand me,” I say.
He looks down at my hand around his wrist, then back at my face. “Then don’t make me choose between obeying you and saving you.”
“That is not your choice.”
“You keep saying that like it’ll make me believe it.”
For a moment, the ship, the signal, the warped stars, and the ruin outside the viewport all seem to compress around us.
His wrist shifts beneath my hand, but he does not pull away.
The contact holds, and with it comes the terrible awareness that he is no longer merely a variable I accepted for tactical necessity.
He is pressure against my decisions. He is friction against my certainty.
He is the voice in the cockpit demanding that I survive the very thing I built myself to accomplish.
“I cannot lose him again,” I say, and the confession leaves me raw enough that anger rushes in to cover it. “I cannot get this close and behave as if caution has any moral authority over a life.”
Dux’s expression changes, the hard lines easing around something that looks dangerously close to pain. “Then let caution serve the life. Let it get you to him instead of dragging you past the point where your ship can still bring anybody home.”
I look at the signal, and my vision blurs for half a breath before I blink it clear.
The sensor array interrupts before I can answer.
A new contact appears at the edge of the forward display, cutting through the interference with controlled, predatory steadiness. I release Dux’s wrist and magnify the image, pulling the vessel out of distortion layer by layer until its shape becomes unmistakable.
It is large, angular, and dark, with armored plates fitted over its hull like overlapping scales.
Weapon housings sit along its flanks in recessed lines, their geometry sleek and purposeful.
The vessel glides through the wreckage field with a discipline that makes the surrounding chaos seem theatrical, its engines burning low and steady as it angles toward our path.
Dux leans over the console. “That’s a Reaper ship.”
“Likely.”
“Likely?”
“The profile matches archived Reaper military configurations, though the modifications are extensive.”
“That sounds like yes with homework.”
“It is holding position.”
“Can you hail it?”
“I can try.”
I open a narrow-band channel and transmit a standard identification request. The message leaves the ship and vanishes into the interference.
The Reaper vessel gives no immediate reply.
Its hull remains angled toward us, silent and deliberate, as if it has been waiting in the dark long before we arrived.
Dux watches the display with narrowed eyes. “Maybe it’s peaceful.”
The first shot hits our port shield before I can answer.
White-blue energy floods the viewport as the impact slams into us, throwing the ship hard to starboard.
My harness snaps tight across my chest, and the console flashes red as shield integrity plunges.
A panel above the navigation display spits sparks across the cockpit, bright arcs scattering over the floor before dying against the plating.
I seize the control column and roll us with the force instead of fighting it. “When will you learn to keep your mouth shut?”