Page 41 of Red Scale Daddy
Her palm remains on the console beside my hand. She is close enough that I can see flecks of gold caught in the green of her eyes, close enough to smell soap beneath machine oil and the faint iron trace where her lip split earlier. She looks tired in the way soldiers look tired after they have survived too much and still have to write the report.
“You will not test my systems for entertainment,” she says.
“I am testing the boundaries.”
“They are not theoretical.”
“Good. Theoretical boundaries are boring.”
Her mouth firms with displeasure, but she does not give me the satisfaction of anger spilling loose. “Every system on this ship has been placed, locked, and limited according to mission necessity. Your curiosity does not outrank my design.”
“No, but my survival might.”
“Your survival is included in mission parameters.”
“That is generous.”
“It is practical. Corpses are inefficient in confined spaces.”
I laugh. “You say the sweetest things.”
Roma withdraws her hand and steps back, but her attention stays fixed on me. “You think rules are cages.”
“Some are.”
“Mine are not.”
“We’ll see.”
“No,” she says. “We will not see. You will follow them.”
I hold her stare. The cockpit hums around us, alive with low power and waking systems. Beyond the viewport, the fueling tech hurries back with the correct lines, moving like a man determined to survive her customer feedback.
“You hired me because I do well when plans stop behaving,” I say. “If you wanted a button-pusher, you would have hired someone cheaper and prettier.”
“I hired you because my options were limited.”
“Same thing, less flattering.”
“I am not here to flatter you.”
“You noticed my charm earlier.”
“I noticed your utility.”
“Liar.”
Her eyes sharpen. “Careful.”
“There it is,” I say, smiling. “That word gets passed around when people run out of arguments.”
She leans closer, and her voice drops into something smooth enough to cut cleanly. “I have arguments. I also have an airlock.”
“That is more of a punctuation mark.”
“For you, perhaps.”
I grin despite the warning, because she means it enough to be interesting and not enough to be stupid. She turns away before I can enjoy that too much and straps into the pilot’s chair. Her hands move over the controls with ritual precision, waking the Lamplight piece by piece. Screens bloom. Coolant flow steadies. Docking feeds align. The deck begins to vibrate beneath my boots, a deep, restrained tremor that travels up through bone and scale.
