30. Dux
DUX
The engineering door tears open with a scream of metal, and Roma stands on the other side with a Reaper rifle braced against a ruined console, smoke in her hair, blood on her cheek, and murder in her eyes.
For half a second, the whole damn warship narrows to her face.
She is alive. She is upright. She is furious enough to frighten the dead, and I have never seen anything prettier in my life.
Then she fires past my shoulder.
The shot punches into the Reaper coming up behind me and drives him backward into the corridor wall.
Pally curses somewhere at my side and ducks as sparks rain from the damaged doorframe.
I lunge through the opening before the next guard can recover, catch Roma around the waist, and haul her behind the nearest console bank as incoming fire burns bright lines through the steam and smoke filling the deck.
“You are alive,” she says, and the words sound like accusation, prayer, and insult all dressed in the same torn clothes.
“Yeah,” I say, grinning like an idiot behind a cracked mask. “Turns out I’m hard to kill.”
Her palm slams into my chest plate.
Pain bursts across the bruise where a turret shot hit me earlier, and I grunt, more surprised than hurt. “Ow.”
She hits me again, lower this time, right over the pressure rig seal. “You absolute ass.”
“Little busy here.”
“You made me watch you die.”
“I almost died,” I correct, grabbing her wrist before she can land another emotionally justified attack. “There’s a meaningful distinction.”
Her eyes flash bright, wet, and furious. “I watched you go out an airlock.”
“I remember. Terrible hospitality.”
“You were smiling.”
“I was trying to be comforting.”
“You were being a jerk.”
“Those overlap more than people admit.”
A Reaper round slams into the console above us, showering us with fragments of hot casing.
Roma flinches against me, and my body moves around hers before thought gets a vote, one arm braced across her shoulders as I pull her lower.
Her breath catches, and for one sharp, impossible moment, her forehead presses against my chest.
Then she shoves me back with both hands.
“Do not smother me while rescuing me.”
“Good to see you too, sweetheart.”
“Do not sweetheart me after faking your death.”
“I did not fake anything. I was forcibly spaced by hostile professionals.”
“Excuses.”
Pally slides into cover beside us, face pale beneath grease and battle smoke, eyes locked on Roma like he is trying to relearn the shape of her before the ship kills us all. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out quickly enough.
Roma sees him.
The rifle lowers by a fraction.
“Dad,” she says, and the word breaks in a way nothing else has.
Pally reaches for her, then stops short because fire rips across the console edge again and because years of absence do not fit neatly into a warship ambush. His hand hangs there between them, shaking once before he turns the motion into a grip on his tool kit.
“Hi, starling,” he says roughly. “Bad time?”
Her face twists. “Spectacularly.”
“Good. I would hate to ease into things.”
She laughs, once, broken and breathless, and then she is Roma again, wiping at her cheek with the back of her wrist while her eyes snap toward the tactical mess around us.
“How many?” she asks.
“Half dozen closing from the main corridor,” Pally says. “More coming from aft security if your lockdowns don’t hold.”
“They will hold for minutes.”
“Minutes is generous,” I say, drawing the spare plasma pistol from my belt and pressing it into Roma’s hand. “Here.”
She looks down at it. “You brought me a gun?”
“I’m romantic now.”
“This is not a gun. This is an overpowered hand cannon with a trigger tolerance designed by criminals.”
“Perfect. Thought of you immediately.”
Her mouth trembles at the corner, almost smiling despite the alarms, the blood, and the Reapers trying to kill us. Then her fingers close around the grip, adjusting with quick precision as she checks the charge cell and output setting.
“You set this too high.”
“I like commitment.”
“You like property damage.”
“Also true.”
The first Reaper pushes through the steam at the far end of engineering, weapon raised.
I move before he finishes stepping into view, launching over the console and driving into him shoulder-first. His armor cracks against mine, and we slam into a regulator housing hard enough to shake the entire bank.
He tries to bring his rifle up between us.
I pin it with my forearm and drive my fist into the side of his helmet until the visor fractures.
Roma fires twice from cover.
The first shot burns across the deck plating near a second Reaper’s feet, forcing him to break stride.
The second hits the ceiling conduit above him, dumping a burst of sparks and insulation across his shoulders.
He staggers exactly long enough for Pally to slap a charge clamp onto the wall panel beside him.
“Down,” Pally says.
Roma ducks without asking. I grab the Reaper I’m fighting and use him as a shield as the clamp detonates in a tight pulse that blows the panel outward and overloads the corridor lights. The second Reaper drops, twitching under suit feedback.
I toss my damaged Reaper aside and turn toward Roma. “Nice shooting.”
“I was not aiming at him.”
“Still worked.”
“I was aiming at the conduit.”
“Also nice.”
A third and fourth come in together, disciplined and fast, weapons sweeping in overlapping arcs. The closer one targets me because I am large, bloody, and offensively available. The other angles toward Roma because he has a survival instinct in need of correction.
I meet mine head-on.
Roma meets hers with the sort of elegance that makes a man briefly forget he is being shot at.
She does not try to outmuscle him. She gives ground around the console, drawing his aim with her body while her free hand skims across the environmental controls half-buried in the damaged workstation.
The Reaper tracks her chest. She watches his feet, his weapon angle, the valve pressure indicator flashing behind him.
“Dux,” she calls.
“I’m busy appreciating your murder face.”
“Left.”
I trust her and move.
The panel to my left bursts as she fires into it.
Steam explodes from the ruptured environmental line, a hot white wall that engulfs the center of the engineering deck.
The air fills with a shrieking hiss, wet heat washing over my faceplate and turning every light into a blurred smear.
The Reapers’ targeting beams scatter across the vapor, cutting useless red lines through fog thick enough to swallow movement.
Roma appears through the steam low and fast, grabbing my arm as she passes. “Move, you beautiful idiot.”
Beautiful.
I will be impossible about that later.
I pivot with her, catching Pally by the back of his jacket before he gets clipped by blind fire. He objects with a noise I ignore, and we plunge through the fog toward the side access route. Shots burn past us in the steam, close enough that the air snaps hot against my neck.
“Beautiful idiot?” I say.
“I was under pressure.”
“You said it.”
“I rescind it.”
“Too late. It lives in me now.”
Pally coughs through the vapor. “Could the flirting wait until after the extraction?”
“No,” Roma and I say together.
That nearly gets me killed because I laugh, and laughing while sprinting through hostile steam in a wounded pressure rig is bad battlefield etiquette.
A Reaper lunges out of the fog on Roma’s right.
She pivots and fires the pistol point-blank into the joint of his knee armor. The blast punches him sideways, and I finish the fall by driving my elbow into the back of his helmet as he drops. Another appears ahead of Pally, and the old man throws something small and flashing underhand.
The device sticks to the Reaper’s chest plate.
The Reaper looks down.
Pally grabs Roma’s sleeve and yanks her behind cover. “Brace.”
The device pops with a compact electrical burst. The Reaper locks rigid, armor sparking from the seams, and tips over like a felled statue.
I stare at Pally. “You made grenades?”
“I made diagnostic interrupters.”
“They explode.”
“Only diagnostically.”
“Your whole family needs supervision.”
Roma grabs my wrist and pulls me toward the access passage.
Her hand is small around mine, fierce and warm through the glove, and the contact nearly guts me because she keeps holding on even after the immediate danger passes.
She does not seem to notice. Maybe she does and refuses to acknowledge it, which feels more like her.
We reach the side hatch, but it is half-sealed by Throgg’s lockdown response.
Roma drops to one knee in front of the panel. “Cover me.”
I step behind her and turn toward the fog with the stolen shock blade in one hand and my bruised knuckles ready in the other. Pally works beside her, tools already out.
“This lock has Reaper command architecture,” he says.
“I can see that.”
“You are bypassing the wrong layer.”
“I am bypassing the layer they expect me to bypass.”
Pally’s fingers pause. “Oh.”
Roma shoots him a quick look. “Do not sound surprised.”
“I am not surprised. I am proud and annoyed, which is worse.”
Fire cuts through the steam. I catch sight of two more Reapers advancing through the haze, weapons up, silhouettes distorted by vapor and emergency light.
“Family bonding later,” I say. “Company now.”
Roma keeps working. “How many?”
“Two I can see. More being rude somewhere behind them.”
“Delay them.”
“Gladly.”
I charge into the steam.
The first Reaper fires, but the vapor ruins his precision.
The shot clips my shoulder instead of my head, burning a shallow groove across the pressure rig.
I slam into him with enough force to lift him off his feet and drive him into the deck.
The second tries to angle around us toward Roma.
I catch his ankle as he passes and yank.
He crashes down hard, weapon skittering away into the fog.
He kicks me in the face.
My head snaps back, pain blooming across my jaw. I spit blood into the mask and grin down at him.
“Fair.”
Then I bring my fist down.
By the time I stagger back to the hatch, Roma has the panel open and Pally is feeding a bypass pin into a lower junction.
“Door in five seconds,” Roma says.
“Make it three,” I answer, looking over my shoulder as more shadows move in the fog.
“Do not rush art.”
“Your art is armed.”
The hatch jerks upward halfway and sticks.
“Damn it,” Pally says.
I shove between them, plant both hands under the door, and lift. The mechanism fights me, grinding against damaged tracks. My ribs scream, my shoulders burn, and the pressure rig creaks ominously across my chest.
Roma’s hand lands on my back. “Dux, your side?—”
“Later.”
“You are bleeding again.”
“Still later.”
The door rises another foot.
“Enough,” Pally says. “Go.”
Roma ducks through first, then Pally. I hold the hatch until they clear, then slide under as the mechanism fails and crashes down behind me with a metallic boom that shakes the passage.
We spill into a maintenance corridor lit in pulsing red. The air here is cooler, cleaner, and loud with distant alarms. Behind the sealed hatch, Reaper weapons fire strikes the metal in furious bursts.
Roma turns on me the instant we have ten feet of breathing room.
“You absolute, impossible, reckless?—”
I catch her face in both hands and kiss her.
She freezes for half a second, and then she hits my chest again because apparently that is part of the conversation now.
Her fingers curl into the front of my rig immediately after, dragging me closer.
The kiss tastes of smoke, salt, fear, and survival.
It is too brief and too desperate and exactly enough to remind me why dying has become unacceptable.
She pulls back first, breathing hard. “Do not ever do that again.”
“Kiss you?”
“Die where I can see it.”
“I’ll make a note.”
“I am serious.”
“I know.”
Her eyes search mine, furious and bright. “I thought you were gone.”
“I know,” I say again, softer.
The anger in her face cracks just enough for the terror beneath it to show. I brush my thumb over the blood on her cheek and feel my whole damn life rearrange around keeping that terror from winning.
Pally clears his throat loudly. “As touching as this is in the most uncomfortable possible way, Throgg’s people are cutting through the hatch.”
Roma steps back, though her hand stays caught in one of my straps for another second before she releases it. “We need to reach junction seven. I routed most security away, but Throgg will correct soon.”
“Can we get to your ship?” Pally asks.
“Not directly. He will expect that.”
“Command buffer?” I ask.
Roma glances at me. “You know what that is?”
“No. Sounded important.”
“It is important,” she says, already moving down the corridor. “If I can reach a live buffer, I can widen the sabotage and force Throgg to choose between pursuit, internal containment, and Zenos engagement.”
Pally follows, face tight with calculation. “You set up a three-way convergence.”
“Yes.”
“Risky.”
“I had poor supervision.”
I fall in behind them, watching the corridor ahead while listening to fire chew through metal behind us. “You did good.”
Roma does not look back. “That is the lowest possible analysis.”
“Still true.”
Her shoulders shift, just slightly, and I know she heard what I meant.
We turn the next corner, and the ship bucks under a heavy external impact. The lights flicker. A deep alarm rolls through the passage, different from the others, lower and more urgent.
Pally grabs the wall. “Zenos contact?”
Roma checks her sleeve comp. “Possibly. Or Throgg’s maneuvering correction failed under my engine stall.”
“Could be both,” I say.
She looks at me.
I shrug. “I’m optimistic again.”
“Stop that immediately.”
Reaper voices echo from the corridor behind us.
Closer.
I tighten my grip on the stolen blade and the pistol at my belt, my body aching, bleeding, half-burned, and absolutely unwilling to quit.
Roma moves ahead of me, alive and brilliant and no longer running alone.
Pally is beside her, old ghost turned flesh, hands already working the next panel before we reach it.
We are still trapped inside Throgg’s ship. We are still outnumbered. The Reapers are coming, the Zenos may be closing, and every plan we have is hanging by a wire Roma probably rigged while insulting someone’s competence.
Fine by me.
If death wants another try, it can come find me standing up.
It can find me fighting.
It can find me beside the woman I love.