Page 125 of Red Scale Daddy
Her voice holds irritation, but her course adjustment already matches what I would have told her.
I look forward, feeling the ship tremble around us.
“Good girl,” I murmur.
Her head snaps toward me. “Excuse me?”
I grin despite everything. “Keeping you grounded.”
“I will vent you.”
“Wider path first.”
She mutters something vicious under her breath and turns back to the controls.
The signal is ahead of us, strong enough now to feel like a promise.
I don’t trust promises.
I trust her hands, her mind, her stubborn little heart, and the fact that I’m standing close enough to catch her if the promise breaks.
CHAPTER 19
ROMA
The signal sharpens until it feels less like a transmission and more like a hand reaching through the dark.
Its waveform steadies across the central display, no longer collapsing beneath gravitational distortion or drowning under the static that has contaminated every scan since we entered the core. I run the checksum again, then again, each pass confirming the same impossible result with brutal consistency. The sequence carries my father’s old engineering signature, the strange and elegant logic he used when he built systems that other engineers called inefficient until they discovered they worked better than theirs. My throat tightens as the pattern holds, because the data no longer allows me the mercy of doubt.
Dux stands to my right with one hand braced against the console, his broad body angled against the ship’s vibration as if he can bully physics into behaving. The cockpit glows with layered projections: the route ahead, the debris field, the gravitational shear lines, the signal cone narrowing into a point somewhere beyond the next distorted corridor. Red and amber indicators flicker across the edges of the displays, warning me that the stabilizers are heating too quickly and that the patchedairlock section is still bleeding structural tolerance under pressure.
I increase thrust.
The ship surges forward, and the harness bites into my chest as acceleration presses me back against the pilot’s chair. The deck vibrates harder beneath us, a fast, uneven tremor that travels through my bones and makes the instrument lights quiver in their housings. Outside the viewport, wreckage turns in slow, lethal arcs through the warped dark, every broken hull plate and severed engine spine bending along gravitational currents that shift faster than old models can predict.
“Roma,” Dux says, his voice low and tight, “you’re pushing the engines too hard.”
“I have the signal locked.”
“You had it locked before you started treating the throttle like it insulted your mother.”
“The signal quality improves with proximity.”
“So does the chance of us becoming a decorative smear on one of those dead cruisers.”
I ignore the edge in his voice and refine the approach vector, shaving travel time by angling us through a tighter gap between two rotating masses of debris. One is the shattered midsection of an IHC survey vessel, its identification markings stripped nearly smooth by radiation and time. The other is a slab of blackened plating from something I cannot identify, tumbling end over end with enough momentum to crush us if my timing is off by even a fraction.
Dux leans closer to the display. “That gap is closing.”
“I see it.”
“You’re still taking it.”
“Yes.”
“Because your father’s signal is sitting on the other side of it.”
“Because the path remains viable.”
