Page 145 of Red Scale Daddy
“I know of him.”
“That sounds like the polite version.”
“He has been hunting signals near this region for years,” Pally says, turning sharply toward the inner corridor. “He raids disabled vessels, strips systems, takes skilled survivors when he can use them, and kills the rest when he can’t.”
I follow him because standing still is intolerable. The ship beyond the airlock is cramped, cluttered, and aggressively alive with improvised systems. Cables run overhead in bundled lines. Mismatched panels have been bolted into the walls. A workbench along one side is covered in tools, circuit boards, dried ration wrappers, and half-assembled components. It looks like a machine shop married a lifeboat and raised the child under siege.
Pally moves through it fast, grabbing a medical kit from one hook and throwing it at my chest without looking back.
“Patch yourself enough to stay upright,” he says.
I catch it against my ribs and hiss through my teeth. “That your bedside manner?”
“My bedside manner was lost with my original ship.”
“Shame. Roma got the warmth from your side, I guess.”
He spins on me so quickly that the loose tools hanging near him sway.
“Do not talk about my daughter like you know her.”
“I know she hates default security protocols. I know she thinks insults count as efficient communication. I know she schedules terror into little boxes and calls it discipline. I knowshe touched your signal like it was the first honest thing the universe had given her in nine years.”
His face hardens, then cracks in one small place he clearly hates.
I keep going because someone has to.
“I know she was ready to spend herself down to nothing to reach you, and if you think I’m going to stand here and let you waste time blaming me while she’s on that ship with him, you’re out of your damn mind.”
Pally turns away, breathing hard through his nose.
The little vessel creaks around us as it adjusts course. Through a narrow side viewport, the core twists in broad arcs of distorted light, and somewhere beyond that darkness is Roma, alive and captured and probably already insulting the most dangerous bastard on that Reaper ship.
Good girl.
The thought hurts.
Pally opens a wall display, and a rough tactical map flickers into being. It is ugly, old, and patched together from more sources than I can count. Signal ghosts, debris drifts, predator zones, gravitational shears, and marked routes overlap in a chaotic web. He taps two fingers against one region, and a dark shape appears on the edge of the projection.
“Throgg’s vessel,” he says.
“You can track it?”
“Sometimes.”
“Track it now.”
He cuts me a look. “You do not give orders on my ship.”
“I do when your daughter is on his.”
His hand curls into a fist against the console.
For a second, I think he might swing.
I almost hope he does.
Then he unclenches his hand and begins working the controls.
