Page 156 of Red Scale Daddy
“You may sleep when the next correction is complete.”
“Then expect reduced elegance.”
“I will tolerate function.”
“How generous.”
He turns to leave, then pauses at the platform stairs. “You believe the Vakutan lives.”
I keep my face turned toward the display.
“Yes.”
“Against evidence.”
“Against incomplete evidence.”
“And if you are wrong?”
The deck hums under my boots. The modified drive settles into its new rhythm, carrying my hidden flaw inside its improved performance. Somewhere beyond this ship, my father’s signal continues calling through the dark. Somewhere in that same dark, Dux is either dead or refusing to be.
I know which one I choose.
“If I am wrong,” I say, “then I will become extremely unpleasant.”
CHAPTER 24
DUX
Pally’s ship sounds like it is arguing with itself in five different languages.
Every panel rattles with its own private complaint, every conduit hums at a pitch that belongs in a mechanic’s nightmare, and somewhere behind the bulkhead a pump knocks in uneven rhythm like a drunk trying to find the beat in a song he hates. The air is warm from overworked systems and sharp with metal shavings, coolant, old grease, and whatever ration brick he has been living on long enough to stop noticing that it smells like punishment. The whole vessel feels stitched together from wreckage, spite, and one man’s refusal to die where the core told him to.
I sit hunched in a chair too small for me while a medical patch knits heat into the wound along my ribs. It burns like a bastard, but breathing no longer feels like dragging a knife through my side, so I count that as progress. Across from me, Palindrome Larson stands at a cramped command console, one hand braced against the edge as he studies a projection of Throgg’s ship moving through debris fields and gravitational distortion.
He has Roma’s focus.
That is the first thing that keeps irritating me.
The second is that he has her stubbornness, only his has rust on it.
“You’ve been here nine years,” I say.
Pally does not look up. “That is the official count, yes.”
“That wasn’t a question.”
“Then choose better sentence structure.”
I huff out a laugh despite the pain. “Yeah, she definitely came by it honest.”
His fingers pause over the controls. “Do not make my daughter into a personality trait you understand because you spent two days with her.”
“Two days with Roma is like six months with quieter people.”
“She is not a puzzle box for your entertainment.”
“No,” I say, leaning forward carefully as the patch tightens against my side. “She’s a woman trapped on a Reaper ship while you and I trade charming family resemblance.”
