Page 201 of Red Scale Daddy
“I was not aiming at him.”
“Still worked.”
“I was aiming at the conduit.”
“Also nice.”
A third and fourth come in together, disciplined and fast, weapons sweeping in overlapping arcs. The closer one targets me because I am large, bloody, and offensively available. The other angles toward Roma because he has a survival instinct in need of correction.
I meet mine head-on.
Roma meets hers with the sort of elegance that makes a man briefly forget he is being shot at. She does not try to outmuscle him. She gives ground around the console, drawing his aim with her body while her free hand skims across the environmental controls half-buried in the damaged workstation. The Reaper tracks her chest. She watches his feet, his weapon angle, the valve pressure indicator flashing behind him.
“Dux,” she calls.
“I’m busy appreciating your murder face.”
“Left.”
I trust her and move.
The panel to my left bursts as she fires into it.
Steam explodes from the ruptured environmental line, a hot white wall that engulfs the center of the engineering deck. The air fills with a shrieking hiss, wet heat washing over my faceplate and turning every light into a blurred smear. The Reapers’ targeting beams scatter across the vapor, cutting useless red lines through fog thick enough to swallow movement.
Roma appears through the steam low and fast, grabbing my arm as she passes. “Move, you beautiful idiot.”
Beautiful.
I will be impossible about that later.
I pivot with her, catching Pally by the back of his jacket before he gets clipped by blind fire. He objects with a noise I ignore, and we plunge through the fog toward the side access route. Shots burn past us in the steam, close enough that the air snaps hot against my neck.
“Beautiful idiot?” I say.
“I was under pressure.”
“You said it.”
“I rescind it.”
“Too late. It lives in me now.”
Pally coughs through the vapor. “Could the flirting wait until after the extraction?”
“No,” Roma and I say together.
That nearly gets me killed because I laugh, and laughing while sprinting through hostile steam in a wounded pressure rig is bad battlefield etiquette.
A Reaper lunges out of the fog on Roma’s right.
She pivots and fires the pistol point-blank into the joint of his knee armor. The blast punches him sideways, and I finish the fall by driving my elbow into the back of his helmet as he drops. Another appears ahead of Pally, and the old man throws something small and flashing underhand.
The device sticks to the Reaper’s chest plate.
The Reaper looks down.
Pally grabs Roma’s sleeve and yanks her behind cover. “Brace.”
