Page 55 of Red Scale Daddy
For a fraction of a second, the ship does not.
The debris is caught in a local eddy, its motion wobbling between prediction bands. The safe path splits into three bad ideas. Up takes us into residual fragments. Down grazes a shear pocket. Starboard risks the mass’s spin.
“Choose,” I say.
“I am calculating.”
“You are out of calculating time.”
“I know.”
“Then choose ugly.”
Her breath catches once, so faintly the engine almost hides it. Then she angles us starboard and does something I do not expect: she kills forward thrust for two seconds and lets the debris’ own distorted wake pull us sideways. It is insane, elegant, and exactly timed. The curved hull section rotates past close enough that its torn edge fills the canopy like a black cliff. Frosted markings flash by, old IHC block letters half-burned away.
The Lamplight shudders as the wake releases us.
Roma reignites thrust and snaps us out of the eddy.
The ship clears the debris field.
The cockpit’s alarms fade from red to amber, then amber to watchful green. The engine hum steadies. My own heart is beating harder than necessary, which I only know because her cursed system still thinks my internal organs are everyone’s business.
Roma exhales slowly and begins logging the event as if she did not just dance us through a knife storm.
I look at her hands. They are steady now, but not before. I saw the hesitation. I saw the correction. I saw the part where she nearly trusted the plan too long and then, to her credit, betrayed it beautifully.
“You’re good,” I say.
“I know.”
“No, you know you’re prepared. Different thing.”
Her fingers pause over the log. “Explain.”
“You were late on the first call.”
She turns fully this time. “I was not late.”
“You wanted your route to be right.”
“My route was based on available data.”
“And when the data changed, you argued with it for a breath.”
“It was less than a breath.”
“It was almost enough.”
The cockpit seems colder for a moment, though the environmental readout remains unchanged. Roma’s eyes hold mine with all the warmth of a docking clamp.
“If you are attempting to undermine my confidence after I successfully navigated an unregistered debris field,” she says, “your timing is poor.”
“I’m not undermining your confidence. I’m pointing at the crack before the core sticks a claw in it.”
“My confidence is not cracked.”
“Your confidence is a bulkhead with stress fractures painted over.”
