20. Dux
DUX
The ship takes the next hit like a body taking a blade between the ribs.
The blast rolls through the hull with a precision that makes my teeth grind harder than the impact itself.
It doesn’t scatter force across the shields like the Zenos did, and it doesn’t hammer us in blind rage.
It finds the weakened places, the patched airlock, the stressed stabilizers, the sections already holding together by Roma’s temper and stubborn engineering, and it strikes them in sequence like someone reading our damage report from the inside.
The cockpit lights flicker from emergency red to a deeper, meaner shade as warnings spill across every display.
A console panel near Roma’s left hand bursts open, throwing sparks across her sleeve and the side of the pilot’s chair.
She jerks back just enough to avoid the worst of it, then drives both hands back to the controls before the smoke even clears.
“Forward shield grid down to twenty-six percent,” she says, voice sharp as broken glass. “Aft maneuvering compromised.”
“Can we return fire?”
“We do not have weapons capable of meaningfully damaging that vessel.”
“Meaningfully is doing a lot of work in that sentence.”
“It means no.”
Another shot hits us.
The ship snaps sideways, and I catch the edge of the console with one hand before my shoulder slams into the bulkhead.
Something tears deeper in my side where the drone cut me, hot blood sliding under my shirt, but I keep my eyes on the display.
The Reaper ship hangs behind us with ugly patience, moving through the debris field as if the core bends around it out of professional courtesy.
Roma throws us into a hard starboard roll, her fingers flying over the controls as she cuts thrust, diverts power, and skims us beneath a tumbling section of wrecked carrier hull. The Reaper’s next shot passes over us and melts a glowing scar across the debris instead.
“Good,” I say. “Do that again.”
“I am attempting to do several things at once.”
“Great. Put not getting shot at the top.”
“I already did.”
The Reaper fires again, and this time the shot doesn’t chase our center mass.
It clips the edge of our projected turn, exactly where Roma is about to put us.
She sees it at the same second I do and yanks us out of the maneuver, hard enough that the gravity compensation stutters.
My boots leave the deck for a breath before the field catches and slams me down again.
Roma’s face goes pale under the red light.
“They anticipated the correction,” she says.
“Then stop correcting that way.”
“I am changing the pattern.”
“You’re thinking like a pilot.”
“And you suggest what, exactly?”
“Think like a bastard.”
Her eyes flick to mine.
Despite everything, I grin. “Finally, a subject where I’m qualified.”
She doesn’t smile, but her next motion changes.
Instead of smoothing the turn, she makes it ugly.
She cuts power to one stabilizer, throws the nose downward, then fires lateral thrusters late, forcing the ship into a crooked, uneven slide through a cluster of broken plating.
The maneuver feels wrong from the inside, too jagged and unbalanced, but the next Reaper shot misses by a wider margin.
“There,” I say. “Ugly works.”
“Ugly damages my ship.”
“Pretty is getting us killed.”
“They are targeting systems rather than hull mass,” she says, eyes locked on the cascading diagnostics. “That was an engine dampener. The previous strike was shield relay routing. They are disabling us.”
“So they want us alive.”
“That is not comforting.”
“No, but it means we’ve got something they want.”
Her hands pause for the smallest fraction before she forces them back into motion.
The signal pulses ahead of us, still bright, still close, still sitting there like a cruel little promise while death wears armor behind us. Roma sees it too. I know she does because her gaze keeps snapping toward it between damage reports.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I did not say anything.”
“You looked at the signal.”
“I am aware of its position.”
“You’re thinking we can still make it.”
Her jaw tightens. “If I can draw them through the debris field and break their lock, we may reach the outer edge of the convergence zone.”
“And if they clip us again?”
“I am working on preventing that.”
The Reaper vessel fires a narrow burst that slices past our starboard side and detonates against a drifting hull fragment ahead. The explosion blooms across the viewport in a violent sheet of light, and debris scatters into our path like shrapnel from a giant’s fist.
Roma reacts instantly. She cuts thrust, angles our nose down, and drags us through a gap that barely exists. Fragments hammer across the shields, each impact kicking flashes of light across the cockpit. The deck bucks under us, and the damaged airlock warning screams again from somewhere aft.
“Roma,” I say, gripping the console as smoke curls from a ruptured panel near my knee. “They’re not herding us away from the signal.”
She looks at the tactical display, and the realization moves across her face like cold water.
“They are herding us into a capture vector.”
The next blast confirms it.
It hits beneath us, not to destroy, but to lift. The ship jolts upward into a distorted pocket where maneuvering thrusters fight against gravitational drag and lose. Roma slams three commands in sequence, rerouting power from life-support redundancy into stabilizers.
The ship steadies for half a breath.
Then the Reaper vessel launches something.
Not a missile. Not a shot.
A cluster of black, angular devices streaks toward us, each one burning with a tight blue corona. They fan out, curve around a field of debris, and attach to our hull with a series of heavy impacts that echo through the ship like fists on a coffin lid.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
“Magnetic grapples,” Roma says. “No, something more advanced. They are interfacing with the hull.”
“Can you cut them loose?”
“I am trying.”
Her fingers blur across the console. Systems lock and unlock under her hands, the displays shifting so fast I can barely follow them. She isolates the contact points, reverses polarity, vents charge through the outer plating, and for a second the attached devices flicker.
Then the Reaper ship sends a pulse through them.
Every screen in the cockpit flashes white.
Roma cries out as the control column shocks under her hands. She jerks back, and I move before thinking, catching her shoulders as the ship drops hard beneath us. The main display fractures into static, then rebuilds itself in ragged chunks.
“Roma.”
“I’m fine,” she snaps, though her fingers tremble when she reaches for the controls again.
“You’re not touching that until?—”
“I said I am fine.”
The next pulse hits.
The engines die.
The silence afterward is worse than noise. The constant vibration under the deck vanishes, leaving only alarms, our breathing, and the distant metallic groan of a ship being dragged against its will.
The forward momentum bleeds away.
The Reaper vessel grows larger on the display.
Roma’s voice goes thin with fury. “They severed drive control.”
“Can you get it back?”
“I can bypass.”
She unfastens her harness and drops to the lower access panel beneath the console, yanking it open with enough force to bend the edge. Smoke rolls out around her hands as she reaches inside.
I turn toward the cockpit door.
“Where are you going?” she demands.
“To make sure when they board us, they regret the career choice.”
“Dux, no firearms near the central systems.”
“I remember.”
“Blades only if you must.”
“Sweetheart, at this point I’m down to hands, teeth, and personality.”
“That last one has limited tactical value.”
“Wounded me worse than the drone.”
Her eyes lift to mine, and for one impossible second in that ruined red cockpit, something almost soft passes between us. It disappears when the ship jolts again.
A docking clamp slams onto our hull.
Then another.
The sound reverberates through the deck, huge and final.
“They are attaching,” Roma says.
“I know.”
“I need time.”
I head for the corridor. “Then I’ll buy some.”
The passage outside the cockpit is half-lit and full of smoke, the emergency strips flickering along the floor.
The ship groans around me as the Reaper vessel locks us in place.
Somewhere aft, metal screams under forced entry.
I roll my shoulders, flex my hands, and taste blood at the back of my throat from biting my cheek during the last hit.
The first breach comes at the forward access corridor.
The door doesn’t explode. It peels open with surgical force, cut along the seams by a tool that burns through Roma’s locks in a clean white line.
Three figures step through the smoke in armored suits that look grown around them rather than worn.
Reapers. Tall, gaunt, built with a hard economy of motion.
Their weapons come up in disciplined formation.
“Evening,” I say.
They fire.
The first stun round hits the wall as I move.
The second clips my shoulder and sends a brutal numbness down my arm, but I keep coming.
I slam into the lead Reaper before it can adjust, driving it back into the two behind it.
Armor cracks under my fist when I bring it down across the side of its helm.
One of them drives a shock baton into my ribs.
Pain detonates through my body, white and electric, but I trap the weapon against me and yank the bastard closer. My forehead slams into its faceplate hard enough to spiderweb the visor. I rip the baton free and swing it into the next Reaper’s knee, dropping it with a sharp, satisfying crunch.
“Dux!” Roma calls from the cockpit.
“Busy!”
A fourth Reaper enters behind the others. Then a fifth.
That is when the odds start getting rude.