Page 119 of Red Scale Daddy
CHAPTER 18
DUX
The deeper we fly, the less the ship feels like metal around us and the more it feels like a held breath.
The cockpit trembles under a pressure no sane machine should have to bear, and the forward display bends the core into a fevered smear of light and darkness. Gravity drags at the edges of the hull in uneven pulses, making the deck shift beneath my boots by fractions I feel more than see. The console glow paints Roma’s face in hard lines and cold color, and every time the signal spikes across her instruments, something bright and reckless moves behind her eyes.
She is beautiful like that, and it scares the hell out of me.
“Roma,” I say, keeping my voice level. “Ease up on the thrust vector.”
Her fingers move across the console without slowing. “The margin is acceptable.”
“Acceptable to who?”
“To the person flying the ship.”
“That person is about three seconds away from making a bad call because she can see the finish line.”
Her mouth tightens, and she adjusts the lateral stabilizers with a sharp flick of her wrist. “Do not psychoanalyze me while you are actively bleeding on my floor.”
I glance down at the dark smear along my side where the Zenos drone opened me up. The cut has clotted enough to stop being interesting, though my shirt sticks to my skin every time I move.
“Floor’ll live,” I say. “Question is whether we do.”
“We will survive if you stop distracting me.”
“That’s cute, but you know I’m right.”
She exhales through her nose, clipped and irritated, and the ship rolls gently as she angles us through a narrowing fold of warped space. Outside the viewport, a field of wreckage drifts in slow rotation—broken hulls, snapped spines, frozen debris glittering in bent starlight. Dead ships turn like bones in deep water, and Roma’s eyes barely touch them before returning to the signal.
That bothers me.
It bothers me more than the monsters did.
“Left side,” I say. “That cruiser hull’s drifting into our path.”
“I see it.”
“You looked at it for half a second.”
“I processed its trajectory.”
“Roma.”
“I processed its trajectory,” she snaps, and the ship slips under the broken cruiser with less room than I’d use to scratch my own damn back.
A jagged antenna array skims overhead close enough that the proximity alarms flare orange. I brace one hand against the console and bite back the first three things I want to say.
She doesn’t even flinch.
The signal comes again, louder through the cockpit speakers now, a repeating sequence that sounds like a heartbeattranslated through static. Roma leans closer, her whole body drawn toward it.
“It’s stronger,” she says. “The checksum is resolving cleanly.”
“I heard.”
“No, you don’t understand.” Her voice changes, and the sharp engineer’s edge gives way to something younger, rawer, dangerously close to wonder. “That isn’t drift noise. That isn’t a corrupted echo. That is active system communication. He maintained it. Somehow, after all this time, he maintained it.”
