26. Dux
DUX
Pally’s ship turns toward the Thorn Shelf, and for the first time since Roma dragged me into her impossible little mission, I care what happens after we survive.
The realization comes without ceremony while I am tightening the straps on a pressure rig that smells of old rubber, machine oil, and somebody else’s fear.
The suit is too narrow through the shoulders, too short through the arms, and old enough that every seal makes me question its relationship with reality.
A cracked visor hangs against my chest, the inside scuffed from years of use, and the breathing line clicks into place with a sound too small for the amount of faith Pally apparently expects me to place in it.
Across the cabin, he works over the tactical table with quick, practiced movements.
The projection paints his face in blue-white light, deepening the lines around his mouth and hollowing the exhaustion under his eyes.
He has not stopped moving for nearly an hour.
Neither have I. Between us, Throgg’s projected route crawls across the map like a poisonous vein.
“You’re quiet,” Pally says.
I tug the left strap tighter until the buckle bites into the pressure rig. “You complaining?”
“I am observing.”
“That mean fatherly judgment is coming, or are we saving that for later?”
His fingers pause above the projection. “I have no idea what to do with you.”
“That makes two of us.”
He glances up then, and his eyes narrow in that familiar Larson way, like he is taking me apart by intention alone. “Earlier, you wanted to charge Throgg’s ship and tear your way to Roma with your hands.”
“I still like parts of that plan.”
“Now you are checking seal integrity.”
I look down at the rig, then at him. “Turns out dying before I reach her would be inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient,” he repeats.
“Deeply annoying, even.”
Pally studies me a moment longer, and something shifts in his expression. Suspicion stays, because he is not stupid, but it has company now. Maybe curiosity. Maybe reluctant approval. Maybe he is trying to decide whether Roma attracts lunatics or manufactures them through proximity.
“You want to live,” he says.
The words sit between us heavier than they ought to.
I flex my hands, feeling the lingering ache from vacuum exposure in my joints. “Yeah.”
His gaze sharpens.
I laugh under my breath, rough and low. “Don’t look so impressed. It’s new for me too.”
He steps away from the table and crosses to a side locker, pulling out a compact magnetic grappler and a coil of tether line. “Why?”
I know what he is asking.
I could dodge it. I have been dodging hard truths most of my life with jokes, fists, or both. The old me would grin, say something ugly enough to make the question go away, and call that strength.
I think of Roma’s hand against the airlock glass.
“I want to see what she does when this is over,” I say.
Pally stills with the grappler in his hand.
I keep going because stopping now would be cowardice wearing perfume.
“I want to see her after the mission quits eating her alive. I want to see what she builds when she isn’t building a way into hell.
I want to hear her insult a sunrise because it’s inefficient or argue with a coffee machine until it loses dignity.
I want her to have a tomorrow she didn’t schedule around grief. ”
Pally looks away first.
Good. Let him sit with that.
“And you?” he asks, voice lower.
I pull the pressure rig’s chest seal into place. “I’d like to be there when she finds out tomorrow exists.”
His mouth tightens, but the edge in him changes shape. “That is a dangerous hope.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Most good things are.”
He hands me the grappler. “Then we plan like men who intend to survive.”
I take it and feel the weight settle into my palm. “That your official blessing?”
“My official blessing would involve a background check, several threats, and time I do not have.”
“I’ll take the abbreviated version.”
“You have it.”
The map flickers as Pally expands the route into the Thorn Shelf.
The region ahead is ugly even by core standards, a dense knot of wreckage and gravitational turbulence where old ships have gathered over decades, maybe centuries.
Broken hulls rotate through shear pockets.
Dead engines drift hot with residual radiation.
Sensor ghosts ripple through the field, false returns blooming and vanishing like bad omens.
Pally points toward a narrow approach corridor. “Throgg will pass along this outer spine to avoid the worst of the Zenos territory. His ship is too large to cut straight through the debris field while towing or clamping damaged vessels. That gives us a window.”
“How generous of him.”
“It is forty-three seconds if his shield recalibration cycle remains consistent.”
“Less generous.”
“We attach here.” He marks a point along Throgg’s lower maintenance spine. “The hull plating shifts during recalibration to vent heat from the secondary shield emitters. For that interval, his external sensors lose fine resolution along this strip.”
I lean over the projection. “And if his cycle changed?”
“Then we are detected before contact.”
“And?”
“And his point-defense systems turn this vessel into vapor.”
I nod slowly. “Love a plan with clear stakes.”
Pally gives me a dry look. “You asked for immediate action.”
“I did. I’m enjoying the educational consequences.”
He adjusts the route again. “Once attached, we cannot cut directly into inhabited decks. Too many internal sensors. We enter through a maintenance intake and move through service crawlspace until we reach a junction near engineering.”
“Roma will be near engineering.”
“If she convinced Throgg of her value, yes.”
“She did.”
“You are very certain.”
“She had five minutes with him and a ship full of broken systems. She convinced him.”
Pally’s mouth pulls tight, and pride flickers through the fear before he suppresses it. “Yes. She would.”
“She’ll leave us something.”
“If she can.”
“She can.”
He looks at me. “Faith is not a method.”
“No, but knowing Roma is close.”
That almost earns a smile.
Pally opens a second panel and brings up a schematic of Throgg’s likely internal layout, patched together from stolen scans, old sensor data, and guesses labeled with the kind of blunt honesty Roma would have appreciated.
Unknown. Probable weapons routing. Avoid unless suicidal. Possible coolant access. Likely trap.
I point to a narrow conduit marked along the outer spine. “That our way in?”
“Yes. It will be tight.”
“For you, maybe.”
“For you, humiliating.”
“Charming.”
“You will complain.”
“Loudly.”
“You will keep moving anyway.”
“Obviously.”
Pally turns from the table and studies me, not the wounds or the rig or the size of me in his cramped ship, but something underneath. “You are not treating this as a glorious last stand anymore.”
“No.”
“What changed?”
I rest one hand on the edge of the tactical table. The metal is warm under my palm, humming faintly with the ship’s engines. “She did.”
His eyes hold mine.
I shrug, but there is nothing casual in it. “I came aboard her ship thinking maybe dying for something useful would be enough. That was easy. Lazy, honestly. Real neat little ending for a man who couldn’t figure out what to do with himself after the war.”
“And now?”
“Now dying sounds like leaving her with another ghost.” My jaw tightens around the words. “She’s got enough of those.”
Pally’s face goes still.
I do not apologize.
He turns toward the painted scrap panel near the console, the child’s crooked stars sealed behind cloudy plastic. For a moment, he looks like a man listening to years he cannot get back.
“You are right,” he says.
That surprises me enough that I blink. “Careful. You’ll strain something.”
“I dislike you less when you are correct.”
“That’s practically affection.”
“Do not get comfortable.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
He picks up a small tool case and shoves it into my chest. I catch it with a grunt as the wound in my side complains.
“Inside are seal cutters, bypass pins, two charge clamps, and a field injector,” he says. “Do not improvise with the injector unless you want to lose fingers.”
“How many fingers?”
“Enough to affect your swagger.”
“Tragic.”
“And Dux?”
I look up.
Pally’s voice loses the dry edge. “If we find her, and she tells you to leave without her, you do not obey.”
The air in the cabin seems to tighten around that.
“She’ll say it,” he continues. “If she thinks it keeps someone else alive, she will make herself sound calm and reasonable while carving her own name off the list.”
“I know.”
“You drag her out.”
“I know.”
“If she hates you for it?—”
“She can hate me breathing.”
Pally nods once. “Good.”
The word carries more trust than anything he has said to me so far.
The ship dips into a gravitational current, and the cabin shifts around us.
Tools rattle in their brackets. The projection wavers, then stabilizes as Pally corrects course.
Through the forward viewport, the Thorn Shelf spreads ahead in a vast, jagged mass of ruined metal and bent light, a graveyard piled so dense that the stars beyond it appear broken into shards.
Somewhere beyond that, Roma is alive.
I feel it with a certainty that has no manners and no proof.
Pally takes the pilot’s seat, fingers moving across controls worn smooth by years of lonely use. “Strap in.”
I wedge myself into the only seat that can pretend to hold me. The harness protests as I pull it across my chest.
“This thing rated for Vakutan mass?” I ask.
“It is rated for optimism.”
“That’s becoming a theme.”