22. Dux
DUX
Space does not take me gently.
It tears the last breath out of my lungs and replaces it with nothing, and that nothing has weight.
It crushes inward from every direction at once, cold enough to bite beneath my scales and deep enough to make my bones ache as if the core itself has reached into me with both hands.
The Reaper ship falls away behind me in a smear of black armor and bent light, and Roma’s face vanishes with it, pale behind the airlock glass, her mouth open around a scream I cannot hear.
I tumble through darkness, end over end, arms useless for the first few seconds while my body tries to understand that there is no floor, no air, no sound, and no good reason to keep fighting.
My chest locks.
Every instinct demands breath.
Vakutan bodies are stubborn things, built by ugly evolution and uglier wars to survive where softer species turn into memorial plaques.
I can hold pressure longer than a human.
My blood does not boil the second vacuum kisses it.
My lungs can clamp down and keep the last scraps of oxygen in play for a few miserable minutes before the universe finishes the job.
A few minutes.
That is not a lot of time to be alive.
It is a damn eternity to be dying.
I spin past a shard of wreckage, close enough that its jagged edge flashes across my vision like a knife.
I reach for it and miss, my fingers closing on empty dark.
The motion sends pain ripping through my side where the drone cut me, and the numbness from the Reaper shock rounds still crawls through my limbs in broken currents.
My body wants to fold in on itself. My thoughts start to smear at the edges.
Roma.
The name burns through the fog.
I see her hand on the airlock glass. I see her eyes when the hatch opened. I see the exact moment she decided I was dead, and that pisses me off more than the vacuum, more than the cold, more than the Reaper bastard who threw me out like trash.
“No,” I try to say.
Nothing comes out.
My jaw moves around silence.
Fine. Silence can listen too.
I am not dying where she can’t yell at me about it.
The core turns around me in impossible ribbons of light, every star bent into a curve, every shadow stretched too long.
Debris drifts everywhere, fragments of old ships caught in slow rotation, pieces of engines and ribs of hull and frozen sheets of metal glittering with frost. One chunk passes beneath me, big enough to matter, moving along a lazy path through the gravitational distortion.
I angle my body toward it.
The movement costs more than it should. My arms are heavy, my vision pulsing at the edges, black pressing in and withdrawing with each slowing heartbeat. I stretch one hand out, claws extended, and scrape across the surface of the debris as it passes.
Metal tears under my grip.
I nearly lose it.
Then my claws catch.
The impact wrenches my shoulder hard enough that something gives with a hot, bright flash of pain. My body slams against the wreckage, and I cling to the frozen metal with both hands while my legs drift uselessly behind me.
Good.
That is something.
The wreckage is a curved piece of outer hull, maybe from some old Alliance transport, maybe from something that never had the decency to label itself before it died.
It rotates slowly, carrying me with it, and for a few seconds I have the strange, terrible illusion of stability.
My chest convulses, trying again to breathe.
My throat closes against nothing. Spots bloom across my vision.
Roma is alive.
That thought holds.
They wanted her alive. They stunned her. They called her useful. They took her because her brain is worth more to them than the ship they gutted. That means she has time. Maybe not much. Maybe time measured in threats and chains and whatever sick games Reapers play with people they think they own.
But time.
I press my forehead against the frozen hull fragment and force my thoughts into order.
Find air.
Find weapon.
Find Roma.
Simple plan.
Terrible plan.
I have worked with worse.
A shadow moves across the wreckage.
At first I think it is another piece of debris passing between me and some distorted light source, but then the shape shifts against the field around it with controlled motion.
Small vessel. Ugly as sin. Built from pieces that have no business cooperating.
Its hull is patched in different metals, its profile uneven, its engines burning low and dirty blue through a web of improvised shielding.
It should not fly.
It does.
A beam of light sweeps across the debris field, thin and searching. It passes over me once, keeps moving, then snaps back.
I bare my teeth, because waving seems optimistic and I have no air to waste.
The vessel angles closer.
A hatch opens along its underside, and a tethered retrieval arm unfolds with a jerky, mechanical grace that makes me distrust it immediately. The clamp reaches toward me, misses on the first pass because the wreckage rotates, then adjusts and comes in again.
“Yeah,” I mouth silently. “Take your time.”
The clamp locks around my torso.
Pain explodes through every injury I own as it tightens and yanks me off the hull fragment. My claws rip free of the metal, and for a second I swing loose between nothing and nowhere, hauled toward the little ship like an especially angry piece of salvage.
The airlock swallows me.
The hatch seals.
Pressure returns like a beating.
Air slams into the chamber in a rough, blessed rush, and my body betrays all dignity.
I hit the deck on my hands and knees, dragging in a breath that feels like swallowing broken glass.
My lungs seize, release, seize again. Heat rushes back under my scales in painful waves, and sensation returns to my fingers as sharp needles under the claws.
The inner door opens before I am ready.
Boots step into view.
Human boots.
Worn, patched, practical, with scorch marks along one side and grease embedded in the seams.
A voice follows them, rough and wary. “Well, that is not what I was trying to catch.”
I lift my head.
The man standing over me is broad-shouldered under layers of patched survival gear, his curly blond hair streaked with gray and flattened on one side like he has been sleeping under machinery for a decade.
His beard is uneven, his face thinner than old holos made it look, and his eyes are bright in a way that belongs to people who have survived too long by refusing to be surprised.
Palindrome Larson looks down at me with a plasma cutter in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Hell.
Of course.
I cough hard enough to taste blood. “You Pally?”
The pistol lifts a fraction. “Who the hell are you?”
“Dux.”
“That answers less than you think it does.”
I push myself up to one knee, and the room tilts in a slow, ugly roll.
The airlock smells of hot metal, recycled air, machine oil, and human sweat.
I could kiss the floor for having an atmosphere, but the man with Roma’s eyes and none of her patience is pointing a gun at me, so I keep my romantic impulses to myself.
“Roma came for you,” I say.
His face changes.
Not much.
Enough.
“My daughter is here?”
“Yeah.”
His pistol steadies. “Where?”
I drag another breath in, rough and uneven. “Reaper ship took her.”
The words hit him hard. His shoulders lock, and for half a second the years fall off his face, leaving only a father hearing the worst possible sentence in a voice he does not trust.
“Explain,” he says.
“Your signal drew us in. She followed it through hell, because apparently that’s a family habit. Reaper vessel intercepted us near the convergence zone. Military-grade bastard. Disabled her ship clean, boarded us, stunned her, and threw me out an airlock.”
His eyes narrow. “You were with her.”
“Yes.”
“Protecting her?”
“I was trying.”
The pistol doesn’t lower.
“Trying,” he repeats, and the word comes out flat enough to cut. “My daughter crosses the core, finds me after nine years, and the man standing in front of me says he was trying.”
My temper comes back faster than my strength.
I push to my feet despite the way my legs threaten to quit. The ceiling is low for me, forcing my shoulders to hunch, and pain crawls through my side with every breath. I still manage to look down at him.
“You want to shoot me because I didn’t stop a Reaper boarding squad while half-paralyzed and bleeding, get on with it,” I say. “But don’t stand there acting like blame is a rescue plan.”
His eyes flash. “You lost her.”
“They took her.”
“You were there.”
“Yeah,” I snarl. “I was there when she nearly burned herself alive chasing your signal. I was there when she kept flying a damaged ship because she thought getting to you mattered more than breathing. I was there when they shocked her, dragged her back, and she still tried to fight through them to get to me.”
His jaw works.
I step closer, and the pistol presses level with my chest.
“Careful,” he says.
“Careful got thrown out the hatch.”
“You think you can come aboard my ship, tell me my daughter has been captured, and then growl at me like I am the problem?”
“I think your daughter is alive on a Reaper vessel, and every second we spend measuring guilt with our pants down gives them more time to put a leash on her.”
That lands.
His eyes change again, anger still there but forced into the shape of usefulness.
“What Reaper?” he asks.
“Big ship. Black armor. Modified military configuration. Voice over comm sounded like he’d never raised it in his life and never needed to. Called her skill forgivable.”
Pally goes very still.
“You heard him speak?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he call himself?”
“He didn’t. Roma asked. He gave her nothing.”
Pally lowers the pistol by a fraction, his gaze drifting toward the wall as if some old memory is crawling out from behind it. “Throgg.”
“You know him.”
“I know of him.”
“That sounds like the polite version.”