Page 197 of Red Scale Daddy
Another camera flickers before shutdown, this one near engineering access.
Dux is closer.
Pally is with him.
For one impossible second I see my father alive, older and thinner, hair gray-streaked, face carved down by years I was not there to witness. He is bent over a door panel with tools in both hands, arguing with the lock while Dux fights two Reapers behind him like the entire concept of injury has offended him personally.
The image fractures.
The feed dies.
My chest caves inward around a sound I refuse to make.
They are both alive.
Both.
The realization rearranges the entire universe inside me.
A Reaper guard rounds the console bank and spots me.
I throw a loose coupling into the exposed relay before he can fire. The coupling bridges two contacts with a flash of white light, and the console discharges into the floor grid. The shock catches the guard through his boots, locking his body in a violent tremor before he collapses hard against the side panel.
The engineer screams something in Reaper command syntax.
I push to my feet, one hand braced against the ruined console, and pull up the final sabotage menu. The engine stall is holding. The quarters are locked. Cameras along Dux and Pally’s route are dead or looping false images. Throgg’s security teams are being redirected toward a fabricated breach near the aft weapons deck.
I have bought minutes.
Maybe less.
Minutes are enough for miracles when the right people are angry.
The engineering deck shakes as Throgg’s ship fires maneuvering thrusters to compensate for the stall. The force knocks me sideways, and my hip slams into the edge of the projection table. Pain blooms hot and deep, but I stay upright by hooking one hand around the table frame.
The intercom opens again.
“Roma,” Throgg says, his calm now sharpened by something close to satisfaction. “You cannot reach them from where you are.”
I freeze.
He knows.
Of course he knows. Not everything, perhaps, but enough. Throgg does not need certainty to apply pressure. He only needs a wound and a finger to press into it.
He continues, “The Vakutan survived. Your father survives. You have placed both within my ship and mistaken that for victory.”
I pull up the corridor map with my remaining access and find multiple security teams rerouting, faster now, correcting for my false breach. Throgg is collapsing the perimeter inward.
My window shrinks.
“You will stop,” he says, “or I will kill the father first and let the Vakutan watch.”
My throat tightens until breathing becomes a deliberate act.
A reply wants to form: a bargain, a threat, a calculation, some controlled arrangement of words to preserve leverage.
Then I see Dux again in memory.
