Page 159 of Red Scale Daddy
His eyes sharpen. “That is exactly what she will do.”
“Yeah. And the longer we leave her there, the more useful she becomes.”
“You think I do not know that?”
“I think you know it so well it scares you stiff.”
He steps toward me, and for a smaller man he has a good amount of fight in him. “You want immediate action because you are angry and wounded and attached to my daughter in a way I have not yet decided whether to hate.”
“Save the fatherly disapproval for when she can roll her eyes at it.”
“I am trying to keep her alive.”
“So am I.”
“You are trying to charge a fortress with a broken body and a bad attitude.”
I grin without humor. “Don’t forget charm.”
“I am serious.”
“So am I,” I say, and the smile drops away. “Throgg tossed me out an airlock because he thought I was unnecessary. That means he has decided Roma is necessary. If she’s necessary, he’ll keep her close to the systems he needs. If he keeps her close to systems, she’ll start finding ways to turn them against him. That buys us time, but it also puts a target on her the second he realizes she’s sharper than his leash.”
Pally’s face shifts as he follows the thought.
Good.
He can think fast when he stops drowning in old failure.
“She will not give him full solutions,” he says.
“No.”
“She will give him enough to earn access.”
“Yes.”
“She will plant dependencies.”
“Sounds like her.”
“She will look for my signal again if she can reach a console.”
“Then make damn sure there’s something for her to find.”
He turns back to the map, his hands moving now with new urgency. Layers slide across the projection: Throgg’s likely route, old Reaper patrol pockets, signal shadows, gravitationalbottlenecks. He expands one section near a dense debris field marked with hazard symbols and a name half-erased by years of edits.
“The Thorn Shelf,” he says. “Throgg uses this region when towing disabled ships. The debris density interferes with external scans, and the shear patterns make pursuit difficult for anyone without mapped corridors.”
“You have mapped corridors.”
“I have partial routes.”
“Good enough.”
“No,” he says sharply. “That phrase kills people here.”
“Fine. Bad enough to make him work for it.”
