Page 164 of Red Scale Daddy
“I choose accurate words.”
He studies me in silence, and the engineering deck seems to hold its breath around us. I can feel every eye on my back, every weapon angle, every sensor watching for the twitch that would turn negotiation into punishment.
Throgg finally says, “Show me what you require.”
I walk to the main projection table and pull up the distorted map of the core they have compiled. Their version is better than I expected and worse than it needs to be. It contains predator zones, wreckage corridors, Zenos clusters, Reaper patrol paths, and several marked anomalies where ships disappeared or instruments died.
It does not contain my father.
At least, it does not label him.
I trace one finger near a region of overlapping debris and shear. “Your escape failure begins here. Your vessel cannot predict the transition load quickly enough because your map treats shear like weather instead of anatomy.”
“Anatomy,” Throgg repeats.
“Structure with behavior. Patterned, adaptive, responsive to mass. My father understood that better than anyone alive.”
The sentence almost breaks me.
I keep going.
“If he is in the region, he has already solved pieces of the problem you keep failing to brute-force. You need him.”
Throgg’s gaze sharpens. “And you can locate him.”
“I can increase probability.”
“That sounds modest.”
“It sounds honest.”
He steps closer. “And what do you want in exchange?”
“Access to my ship’s navigation core. Limited communication privileges for signal triangulation. Fabrication authority for adaptive sensor probes.”
“And freedom?”
I look at him. “Freedom is not a realistic opening demand.”
“Practical.”
“I prefer effective.”
He leans over the projection, his shadow falling across the map. “If this is an attempt to lead me into a trap, the consequences will reach beyond you.”
There it is.
I meet his gaze. “You have made that clear.”
“No,” he says softly. “I have implied it. Clarity would be allowing you to watch your ship cut apart while my crew tests how many useful answers pain can extract from a human engineer.”
My stomach turns, but my hands remain steady on the table.
“You would lose the answers that require precision,” I say.
“Perhaps.”
“You would gain fear and reduce accuracy. Bad trade.”
