22. Dux #2
“He has been hunting signals near this region for years,” Pally says, turning sharply toward the inner corridor. “He raids disabled vessels, strips systems, takes skilled survivors when he can use them, and kills the rest when he can’t.”
I follow him because standing still is intolerable.
The ship beyond the airlock is cramped, cluttered, and aggressively alive with improvised systems. Cables run overhead in bundled lines.
Mismatched panels have been bolted into the walls.
A workbench along one side is covered in tools, circuit boards, dried ration wrappers, and half-assembled components.
It looks like a machine shop married a lifeboat and raised the child under siege.
Pally moves through it fast, grabbing a medical kit from one hook and throwing it at my chest without looking back.
“Patch yourself enough to stay upright,” he says.
I catch it against my ribs and hiss through my teeth. “That your bedside manner?”
“My bedside manner was lost with my original ship.”
“Shame. Roma got the warmth from your side, I guess.”
He spins on me so quickly that the loose tools hanging near him sway.
“Do not talk about my daughter like you know her.”
“I know she hates default security protocols. I know she thinks insults count as efficient communication. I know she schedules terror into little boxes and calls it discipline. I know she touched your signal like it was the first honest thing the universe had given her in nine years.”
His face hardens, then cracks in one small place he clearly hates.
I keep going because someone has to.
“I know she was ready to spend herself down to nothing to reach you, and if you think I’m going to stand here and let you waste time blaming me while she’s on that ship with him, you’re out of your damn mind.”
Pally turns away, breathing hard through his nose.
The little vessel creaks around us as it adjusts course. Through a narrow side viewport, the core twists in broad arcs of distorted light, and somewhere beyond that darkness is Roma, alive and captured and probably already insulting the most dangerous bastard on that Reaper ship.
Good girl.
The thought hurts.
Pally opens a wall display, and a rough tactical map flickers into being.
It is ugly, old, and patched together from more sources than I can count.
Signal ghosts, debris drifts, predator zones, gravitational shears, and marked routes overlap in a chaotic web.
He taps two fingers against one region, and a dark shape appears on the edge of the projection.
“Throgg’s vessel,” he says.
“You can track it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Track it now.”
He cuts me a look. “You do not give orders on my ship.”
“I do when your daughter is on his.”
His hand curls into a fist against the console.
For a second, I think he might swing.
I almost hope he does.
Then he unclenches his hand and begins working the controls.
“What did she look like?” he asks, voice lower now.
I know what he is really asking.
I see her again in that airlock window, control stripped away, fear naked in her eyes because she thought I was gone. I see her at the console, hair loose, face lit by the signal, grief turning into ferocious hope.
“She looked alive,” I say. “Angry as hell. Smarter than everybody in the room. Terrified when they spaced me.”
His shoulders tighten.
“That sounds like her mother,” he says.
“Pretty sure the terrifying part is all Roma.”
A rough breath leaves him, almost a laugh and almost not.
Then his face closes again.
“You should have kept her away from the signal,” he says.
“No one keeps Roma away from anything she’s decided belongs to her.”
“I would have.”
I step up beside him, close enough that he has to look at me.
“No,” I say. “You wouldn’t.”
His eyes sharpen. “You do not know what I would do for my daughter.”
“I know you left a signal on in the worst graveyard in the galaxy, and she heard it. You put a hook in the dark. She followed it. Don’t pretend you didn’t know she might.”
That hits harder than I mean it to.
Maybe exactly as hard as it needs to.
Pally’s face goes pale under the grime and age.
“I did not know she was alive,” he says.
“You hoped.”
His mouth tightens.
I nod once, grim. “Yeah. That’s the ugly part, isn’t it?”
He stares at the tactical map.
The anger between us does not vanish, but it changes shape. It becomes something we can stand on.
Pally taps the display again, refining the dark vessel’s projected route. “Throgg will not kill her quickly if he understands what she can do.”
“He understands enough.”
“Then he will use her.”
“Then we get her before he does.”
He looks at me. “You are injured, oxygen-starved, half-stunned, and barely standing.”
“Had worse mornings.”
“You are also arrogant.”
“Probably.”
“And emotionally compromised.”
“Definitely.”
Pally studies me for a long moment, and I let him. Let him see the blood, the shaking hands, the fury, the fear I am not bothering to hide. Let him figure out that whatever I was when Roma dragged me into this nightmare, I am something else now.
Finally, he turns back to the controls.
“Fine,” he says. “You want to help get my daughter back?”
I bare my teeth. “More than I want my next breath.”
“Then sit down before you collapse on something important.”
I drop into the nearest seat because my legs choose that moment to make a compelling argument. The med kit slides across my lap, and I tear it open with clumsy fingers while Pally drives his impossible little ship deeper into the core.
He does not trust me.
Good.
I do not trust him either.
But Roma is alive somewhere ahead of us, trapped on a Reaper vessel with a man who thinks people are tools, and I have already decided how this ends.
I am getting her back.