Page 157 of Red Scale Daddy
That gets him to look at me.
Good.
His eyes are tired in a way Roma’s are not, though I understand now where hers are headed if nobody grabs her by the collar and drags her into a future before grief finishes carving her hollow. Pally’s exhaustion has sediment. It has layers. The man has survived so long in impossible space that survival has stopped looking like victory and started looking like a room he cannot leave.
“I am tracking Throgg’s projected route,” he says.
“Tracking is not rescuing.”
“Running blind at a military-grade Reaper vessel will get her killed faster than patience.”
“Patience is what people call fear when they want it to sound wise.”
His face hardens. “You have no idea what this place does to people.”
“Then educate me while your map thinks.”
His mouth tightens, but he turns back to the console and flicks his fingers through the projection. The map expands, showing a cluster of marked zones around us: debris graveyards, shear bands, radiation pockets, Zenos territory, and routes drawn in thin, nervous lines that look like the kind of paths a desperate man makes when every road has teeth.
“My ship, the Heraclitus, suffered primary drive failure near the inner drift shelf,” he says. “Official reports probably called it catastrophic systems collapse, which sounds cleaner than being peeled open by forces the models did not predict. We lost navigation first, then long-range comms, then two habitat rings and most of the aft section.”
He shifts the map with two fingers, and a faded point of wreckage lights up.
“I got twelve people into escape modules before the spine tore. Three modules launched clean. Two were crushed in shear before they cleared the hull. One made it into the debris field with me aboard because the emergency beacon jammed and I had to manually override the release.”
I watch his face while he says it. He keeps his voice flat, but his thumb rubs once against the side of his index finger, smearing grease across a scar.
“You were the only survivor.”
“As far as I know.”
“You looked?”
His eyes flick toward mine. “Until looking became a good way to join them.”
The ship creaks around us as if agreeing with him.
Pally taps the map again, bringing up a patchwork image of his current vessel. “This thing started as that escape module, aresearch cutter’s reactor core, two Reaper cooling assemblies, Zenos carapace plating, and a religious amount of stolen wiring. I learned which wrecks drifted through safe pockets, which predators nested in which fields, which signals were bait, and which moments of silence meant something worse was listening.”
“Sounds cozy.”
“It was survival.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m starting to hate that word.”
He ignores that and continues. “For the first year, I tried to leave every time I had enough power. The core threshold shredded every configuration I built. Field collapse, heat cascade, compensator lag, shield inversion, drive spinout. Pick a failure and I have scars from it. The third attempt cost me most of my left lung function. The fifth burned out the cutter’s original navigation brain. The seventh brought Throgg close enough to take an interest.”
My fingers curl around the edge of the chair. “He’s been hunting you that long?”
“Off and on. He knew I had adaptive systems knowledge. I knew he had a ship with enough power to try an escape if somebody solved his timing instability. Neither of us could complete the work alone.”
“So you hid.”
“I survived.”
“You hid,” I say, letting the word sit there.
Pally turns from the console, slow and sharp. “I stayed alive in a region where ships with full crews die in minutes. I scavenged in vacuum, rationed atmosphere, slept in pressure suits when seals failed, and rebuilt half my own blood filter out of med waste and pump tubing. If you are looking for shame, look somewhere else.”
