Page 128 of Red Scale Daddy
His skin is warm beneath my glove, solid and alive and inconvenient.
“Do not countermand me,” I say.
He looks down at my hand around his wrist, then back at my face. “Then don’t make me choose between obeying you and saving you.”
“That is not your choice.”
“You keep saying that like it’ll make me believe it.”
For a moment, the ship, the signal, the warped stars, and the ruin outside the viewport all seem to compress around us. His wrist shifts beneath my hand, but he does not pull away. The contact holds, and with it comes the terrible awareness that he is no longer merely a variable I accepted for tactical necessity. He is pressure against my decisions. He is friction against my certainty. He is the voice in the cockpit demanding that I survive the very thing I built myself to accomplish.
“I cannot lose him again,” I say, and the confession leaves me raw enough that anger rushes in to cover it. “I cannot get this close and behave as if caution has any moral authority over a life.”
Dux’s expression changes, the hard lines easing around something that looks dangerously close to pain. “Then let caution serve the life. Let it get you to him instead of dragging you past the point where your ship can still bring anybody home.”
I look at the signal, and my vision blurs for half a breath before I blink it clear.
The sensor array interrupts before I can answer.
A new contact appears at the edge of the forward display, cutting through the interference with controlled, predatory steadiness. I release Dux’s wrist and magnify the image, pulling the vessel out of distortion layer by layer until its shape becomes unmistakable.
It is large, angular, and dark, with armored plates fitted over its hull like overlapping scales. Weapon housings sit along its flanks in recessed lines, their geometry sleek and purposeful. The vessel glides through the wreckage field with a discipline that makes the surrounding chaos seem theatrical, its engines burning low and steady as it angles toward our path.
Dux leans over the console. “That’s a Reaper ship.”
“Likely.”
“Likely?”
“The profile matches archived Reaper military configurations, though the modifications are extensive.”
“That sounds like yes with homework.”
“It is holding position.”
“Can you hail it?”
“I can try.”
I open a narrow-band channel and transmit a standard identification request. The message leaves the ship and vanishes into the interference. The Reaper vessel gives no immediate reply. Its hull remains angled toward us, silent and deliberate, as if it has been waiting in the dark long before we arrived.
Dux watches the display with narrowed eyes. “Maybe it’s peaceful.”
The first shot hits our port shield before I can answer.
White-blue energy floods the viewport as the impact slams into us, throwing the ship hard to starboard. My harness snapstight across my chest, and the console flashes red as shield integrity plunges. A panel above the navigation display spits sparks across the cockpit, bright arcs scattering over the floor before dying against the plating.
I seize the control column and roll us with the force instead of fighting it. “When will you learn to keep your mouth shut?”
CHAPTER 20
DUX
The ship takes the next hit like a body taking a blade between the ribs.
The blast rolls through the hull with a precision that makes my teeth grind harder than the impact itself. It doesn’t scatter force across the shields like the Zenos did, and it doesn’t hammer us in blind rage. It finds the weakened places, the patched airlock, the stressed stabilizers, the sections already holding together by Roma’s temper and stubborn engineering, and it strikes them in sequence like someone reading our damage report from the inside.
The cockpit lights flicker from emergency red to a deeper, meaner shade as warnings spill across every display. A console panel near Roma’s left hand bursts open, throwing sparks across her sleeve and the side of the pilot’s chair. She jerks back just enough to avoid the worst of it, then drives both hands back to the controls before the smoke even clears.
