Page 4 of Red Scale Daddy
“Yes.”
“Why?”
There it is. The real question. Notcan it work.Why would anyone try.
I knew this part would come. I also know truth is only useful when portioned properly.
“I’m retrieving someone,” I say.
“From the core?” the human says, incredulous. “Nobody’s in the core.”
“Someone is.”
A murmur moves through the nearest crowd. Skepticism, interest, opportunism. I can hear the categories splitting apart.
The bartender finally speaks.
“And you expect to hire muscle for a rescue run into the deadliest stretch of known space,” he says, voice level, “by walking into my bar dressed like a smuggler’s laundry pile and insulting my customers.”
I meet his gaze. Up close, his eyes are a hard, predatory gold, and there is intelligence there that makes me wary. Not the loud, sloppy kind. The patient kind.
“Yes,” I say.
The half-Vakutan lets out a delighted huff. “Gods, I like her.”
“I did not ask,” the bartender says.
“You never do.”
“Because your answers lower the tone of the room.”
“That ship sailed years ago.”
The exchange happens with such practiced ease that for a moment I forget to breathe properly. It tells me more than words should. Familiarity. Hierarchy. Irritation with no actual threat behind it. The smaller man is not the bartender’s equal in force, but he is secure enough to needle him in public. That means the giant either values him or hasn’t found a way to kill him legally.
Useful again.
Dangerous again.
A chair scrapes somewhere behind me.
The sound is slow. Deliberate. Heavy enough that my body registers mass before thought assigns it shape. Several nearby faces angle past me toward the source. Expressions shift. Some brighten with ugly expectation. Others flatten with the detached interest of people who know a scene when they smell one.
I do not turn immediately. I let the sound come closer and use the mirror behind the bar instead.
Vakutan. Male. Massive even for the species, with yellow scales and a chest like a bulkhead. One eye filmed over white from an old injury. His shirt is unlaced halfway down, exposing scar tissue and the dark wet stain of a recent spill. His gait has the rolling instability of a man who has been drinking for hours and intends to make it everybody else’s problem.
Wonderful.
CHAPTER 2
DUX
The woman in the ugly hooded coat has a talent for making a room want to bite her.
I notice that first, before I notice the ship.
That says something, because the ship is not nothing. The projection spilling pale light across my bar is too clean to be back-alley nonsense, too elegant to be dockrat fantasy, and too mean in its bones to have come from some comfortable design committee full of soft-handed geniuses who think danger is a simulation setting. The hull geometry has intent. The shielding lattice has arrogance. The drive housing looks like somebody locked a mathematician, a priest, and a criminal in the same room and told them only one could leave.
