Page 173 of Red Scale Daddy
Pally’s voice loses the dry edge. “If we find her, and she tells you to leave without her, you do not obey.”
The air in the cabin seems to tighten around that.
“She’ll say it,” he continues. “If she thinks it keeps someone else alive, she will make herself sound calm and reasonable while carving her own name off the list.”
“I know.”
“You drag her out.”
“I know.”
“If she hates you for it?—”
“She can hate me breathing.”
Pally nods once. “Good.”
The word carries more trust than anything he has said to me so far.
The ship dips into a gravitational current, and the cabin shifts around us. Tools rattle in their brackets. The projection wavers, then stabilizes as Pally corrects course. Through the forward viewport, the Thorn Shelf spreads ahead in a vast, jagged mass of ruined metal and bent light, a graveyard piled so dense that the stars beyond it appear broken into shards.
Somewhere beyond that, Roma is alive.
I feel it with a certainty that has no manners and no proof.
Pally takes the pilot’s seat, fingers moving across controls worn smooth by years of lonely use. “Strap in.”
I wedge myself into the only seat that can pretend to hold me. The harness protests as I pull it across my chest.
“This thing rated for Vakutan mass?” I ask.
“It is rated for optimism.”
“That’s becoming a theme.”
The ship accelerates, engines rough but determined. The vibration rises through the deck, and the whole vessel anglesinto a narrow current along the outer edge of the debris field. Hull fragments drift past close enough to show scorch marks and old impact scars. A dead cruiser rotates above us, its shattered windows dark, its broken spine glowing faintly where radiation still clings.
Pally’s hands stay steady on the controls.
“You built all this alone?” I ask.
“Most of it.”
“That answer doing work?”
“Some parts were acquired under pressure.”
“You stole them.”
“I survived creatively.”
“Roma gets that from you too.”
“She gets better manners from her mother.”
I laugh. “Does she?”
“No,” he admits. “But her mother would appreciate the lie.”
