Page 194 of Red Scale Daddy
He says, “I need ten seconds.”
I bare my teeth. “Take nine.”
Then I move toward the guards, toward the sealed doors, toward the woman who thinks I am dead and the future I have decided to survive long enough to claim.
CHAPTER 29
ROMA
The first sabotage trigger opens quietly.
It enters Throgg’s internal network disguised as a coolant correction, riding the same pathway I built into the stabilizer update while his engineers were too pleased with improved performance to ask why the architecture looked more elegant than necessary. The command moves through the secondary shield emitter, crosses into the habitation security layer, and blooms across the Reaper vessel like poison dissolving in clear water.
On the engineering deck, the lights remain amber, the drive continues its deep mechanical pulse, and the guards at my back keep their weapons angled toward my spine. Nothing explodes. Nothing announces itself with melodrama. The first sign of success is a soft chime from the console, so small it would mean nothing to anyone who did not write the lie that produced it.
Fourteen Reaper quarters seal at once.
I keep my fingers moving.
The guard to my left shifts. “Explain that alert.”
“Pressure equalization irregularity in nonessential compartments,” I say, opening three diagnostic windows to bury the real command beneath unrelated system chatter. “Yourship overreacts to minor variance because your safety hierarchy was designed by someone with a spiritual attachment to confinement.”
The guard steps closer. “Is it dangerous?”
“Only to morale.”
He hesitates long enough for the second trigger to arm.
I route the next command through my ship’s damaged telemetry, then into Throgg’s borrowed sensor feed. The security network receives a request to recalibrate visual capture timing across engineering, command-adjacent corridors, and the lower maintenance arteries. The request appears to originate from Throgg’s own navigation buffer because I built it from the permissions he gave me while believing he was being cautious.
The first camera goes dark.
Then the second.
Then twelve more.
A Reaper engineer at the far console snaps his head toward his display. “Visual feed interruption in lower spine corridor.”
My pulse strikes hard.
Lower spine corridor.
Dux.
Maybe Pally.
Maybe death wearing their shape because hope has become reckless inside me.
I do not look up too quickly. I turn as if irritated by incompetence, which remains the safest expression aboard this ship.
“Your visual feed was already unstable,” I say. “I told you live pursuit data would overload the shared buffer if you insisted on routing it through three outdated verification gates.”
The engineer’s hands move over his panel. “That explanation is incomplete.”
“So is your understanding.”
He stiffens.
