Page 69 of Red Scale Daddy
“I know what my ship should do.”
“Your ship knows what it’s doing right now.”
She cuts a look at me sharp enough to draw blood. “Do not start.”
“We are already started.”
The Lamplight rolls hard to port. Roma fights it, both hands on the controls, shoulders rigid under the harness. The ship answers, but sluggishly, as if something enormous has a hand around her belly. The anomaly we escaped is not behind us anymore. It is unfolding, stretching along our route like a wound torn open under pressure. The aft cameras show darkness bending wrong through a field of charged dust, and ahead, the mapped corridor buckles into useless geometry.
Roma tries to correct with thrust.
The Lamplight bucks.
“Stop fighting the roll,” I say.
“I am stabilizing.”
“You’re feeding it.”
“I am not.”
“Roma, listen to me.”
“I am listening to the ship.”
“The ship is telling you to let go.”
Her mouth opens, and whatever answer she has prepared dies when the port vane warning leaps from amber to red. The left side of the hull screams through the structural map, a web of stress lines racing toward the central spine. The Lamplight’s nose dips, then slews right as a gravity wave catches the damaged vane and twists us half off-axis.
I do not think.
Thinking wastes time.
I unclip the upper portion of my harness, lunge across the narrow space, and catch the emergency manual attitude bar beneath her console before she can slap my hand away. The bar is not meant for me. It is meant for her hands, her reach, herprecise little body in a crisis designed by engineers who never expected a Vakutan to decide permission was decorative. The mechanism resists. I force it down.
Roma’s voice turns lethal. “Dux!”
“Cut port vane authority.”
“No.”
“Cut it.”
“That leaves us without lateral compensation.”
“That vane is no longer compensation. It is a hook.”
She reaches toward my hand. I put my shoulder between her and the control because I am apparently committed to dying in the most irritating way possible.
“Dux, release that control.”
“Say please.”
“I will eject you.”
“Later.”
The ship jerks, and the attitude bar kicks against my palm hard enough to numb two fingers. I bare my teeth and hold it. Roma sees the structural map leap again. Sees the port side trying to tear the rest of the ship into obedience. Sees, damn her brilliant eyes, exactly what I saw.
