Page 64 of Red Scale Daddy
“Roma,” he says.
“I see it.”
I do not see it.
Not really.
The anomaly blooms ahead on sensors like a wound in space, a gravitational knot forming where my models show only low turbulence. It is not large by astronomical standards, but it is near, sudden, and moving against the local flow. The route thread collapses on the display, replaced by impossible vectors that bend across each other too quickly to reconcile.
The ship lurches again.
An alarm shrieks. I silence it. Two more replace it.
Dux grips the armrests. “What is that?”
“Unknown localized distortion.”
“That is engineer for bad.”
“That is engineer for unknown localized distortion.”
The Lamplight drops three hundred meters relative to projected course, then snaps upward as the ballast system overcorrects against a force that was not there a second earlier. My stomach lurches. The copper taste in my mouth becomes sharp, nearly bloody. Shield harmonics scream across the display.
I feed new data into the navigation model.
The model rejects it.
That cannot happen.
I force manual override and input a reduced variable set. The display stutters, accepts, then produces a trajectory that woulddrive us through a shear wall and tear the port vane assembly clean off.
“No,” I say.
Dux’s voice cuts through the alarms. “Talk to me.”
“I’m recalculating.”
“We do not have that kind of time.”
“I am aware.”
“What do you need?”
The question is so practical it almost surprises me into looking at him. Not control. Not mockery. Not I told you so. Need.
The Lamplight rolls without command. I slam my palm against manual stabilization and drag us back before the starboard shield collapses. A tremor runs through the ship like pain through muscle. The lights flicker, then shift into emergency blue.
“I need the anomaly’s edge,” I say. “The sensors are reading the center mass wrong because of lensing.”
Dux looks at his structural map. “I don’t have full nav.”
“You have external visual on camera three.”
“Camera three is aft.”
“Exactly. The wake is more honest behind us than ahead.”
He moves, not touching random controls now, but finding the correct panel with brutal focus. “What am I looking for?”
