20. Dux #2
They move with military patience, spacing themselves so I cannot take them all at once.
One fires low. Another feints high. A third circles toward the cockpit door.
I throw the baton at that one and catch it in the throat, then drive my shoulder into the nearest Reaper hard enough to send both of us into the wall.
A stun round hits my back.
My legs buckle for half a second.
I force them straight again.
“Come on,” I growl. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
They do.
Two rounds hit me together, one in the chest and one in the thigh. My muscles seize so hard my jaw clamps shut. I hit the deck on one knee, vision flashing white at the edges, and one of them slams the butt of a weapon across my face.
The corridor tilts.
I taste blood.
Hands grab me.
I break one wrist. I feel it snap in my grip, and the Reaper makes a clipped sound that might be pain if these things allow themselves that indulgence. Another shock baton drives into my spine, and this time my body refuses the command to rise.
Roma appears in the cockpit doorway.
Her hair has come loose around her face, and there is blood on her temple from somewhere, a thin line dark against her skin. She holds a compact cutting tool in one hand and a plasma torch in the other, looking like a furious little engineer ready to take apart an army one screw at a time.
“Get away from him,” she says.
The Reaper nearest me turns its weapon toward her.
I move on instinct.
My body is half-numb, my muscles firing wrong, but I throw myself sideways and catch the Reaper’s leg, dragging its aim off line as it fires. The shot burns into the wall beside Roma instead of her chest.
“Run!” I snarl.
She does the exact opposite.
Of course she does.
She lunges for the exposed control panel beside the corridor junction and slams the plasma torch into the interface.
Sparks explode outward as she shorts the local systems, forcing the door between us and the boarders to start closing.
For one glorious second, it works. The damaged door grinds downward, cutting the corridor in half.
Then a Reaper wedge device punches into the seam and stops it cold.
Roma’s face hardens.
“Damn it.”
A voice enters the shipwide comm.
Deep. Calm. Patient.
“Roma Larson.”
Everything in me goes still.
The Reapers stop advancing, not because they hesitate, but because they have been ordered to hold. The voice fills the corridor with quiet ownership.
“You have caused considerable inconvenience,” it continues. “Your skill makes that forgivable.”
Roma lifts her chin toward the nearest comm panel. “Identify yourself.”
“In time.”
“I do not negotiate with unidentified hostiles.”
“You are not negotiating.”
The words carry no anger. That makes them worse.
Roma’s hand shifts behind her back toward the manual emergency control. I see it. The Reapers see it too. One of them fires.
The stun round catches her in the side.
Her body jerks, and she hits the wall, sliding halfway down before forcing herself upright with a sound that goes through me like a hook.
I surge against the hands holding me.
“Touch her again and I’ll wear your spine as jewelry!”
A Reaper drives another shock baton into my side.
Pain blanks the corridor for a moment.
When my vision clears, Roma is still standing. Barely. Her hand is pressed against the wall, her breathing ragged, her eyes locked on me.
“Dux,” she says, voice strained. “Stop fighting.”
I laugh, though it comes out wet. “Terrible advice.”
“They want me alive.”
“Yeah, I noticed. I’m less impressed with what they want for me.”
The voice returns through the comm. “Correct.”
The Reapers drag me backward toward the breached access point.
Roma pushes off the wall.
“No,” she says.
One of them catches her before she can reach me.
She twists hard, driving her elbow into its armor with enough force to make it shift, then tries to duck under its arm.
Another catches her wrist. She fights like fury, all sharp angles and vicious precision, but the stun round has slowed her body, and there are too many of them.
“Roma!” I shout.
She looks at me.
The Reapers haul me through the breached corridor into the docking throat between ships. The temperature drops at once, cold biting through my torn shirt as pressure seals cycle around us. Harsh blue light lines the passage, reflecting off black armor and the blood on my hands.
I slam my heel into one Reaper’s knee and twist, nearly breaking free.
Nearly.
Another stun round hits the base of my neck.
My body locks.
The door ahead opens, revealing a small chamber with an outer hatch and warning symbols I understand even through the blur.
Airlock.
“Oh, hell no,” I rasp.
The comm voice speaks again, closer now, as if the bastard is watching. “The Vakutan is unnecessary cargo.”
Roma’s voice cuts through from behind, raw and furious. “Do not open that hatch!”
I fight harder than my body can sustain. The Reapers shove me into the chamber, and I hit the far wall shoulder-first. My fingers scrape against the frame, claws digging into metal as I try to hold myself there.
Roma appears beyond the inner seal, restrained between two Reapers, her face white with rage and terror.
The inner door begins to close.
“No!” she screams, throwing herself against their grip.
I lock eyes with her through the narrowing gap.
For the first time since I met her, every layer of control is gone. No calculations. No command voice. No cold little walls. Just Roma, terrified and furious and mine in a way I have no right to claim, staring at me like the universe has opened its hands to take something else from her.
I try to grin for her.
It hurts.
“Don’t you dare make that face,” I say, forcing the words through numb lips. “I’m hard to kill.”
Her mouth forms my name.
The inner door seals.
Sound cuts down to the thud of my own pulse and the harsh rasp of my breathing. Through the small reinforced window, I see her slam both hands against the glass. Her lips move, and even without hearing her, I know she is saying no.
The outer hatch warning lights flare.
My body still won’t answer right.
I press one bloodied hand to the glass.
Roma presses hers to the other side.
Then the hatch opens.
Space takes me with a violence no battlefield has ever managed.
The air rips out of the chamber, and I am torn backward into the core’s black, tumbling end over end as the ship and Roma and the red glow of the cockpit vanish into distance.
Cold clamps down around me so hard it feels like teeth in my bones.
The pressure disappears from my lungs. Light bends around me in long, terrible ribbons.
Through the blur, through the spinning dark, I see the ship receding.
I see Roma at the window.
I see the moment she believes I am dead.