Page 8 of Red Scale Daddy
I turn toward the room and raise my voice. “Anyone else planning to debate engineering theory with their hands?”
No one answers. Several people find urgent business inside their cups.
“Good,” I say. “Then let’s discuss the part where this is a suicide run.”
Roma’s shoulders stiffen. “It is not.”
The ghostly schematic still hovers above the bar, flickering where spilled liquor interferes with the compad’s stabilization field. I reach through the projection and point at the drive housing.
“That is a pretty piece of madness,” I say. “I’ll give you that. Shield pattern is clever. Hull stress distribution is better than clever. But you’re going to the galactic core, not threading a needle at a university demonstration.”
Her chin lifts. “I did not design it for a university demonstration.”
“No, you designed it for grief.”
The room quiets harder than before.
Roma’s face goes still in a way I do not like. A human face should not be able to shut down that completely. It is like watching blast shutters seal over a window.
“You don’t know anything about me,” she says.
“I know who your father was.”
“Is,” she says.
The word comes fast. Too fast. It has lived behind her teeth for years, waiting to bite.
I tilt my head. “Is, then.”
A few patrons exchange looks. Someone whispers Larson again. Someone else whispers core mission and laughs under their breath until the scarred woman elbows them quiet.
Roma steps closer to the projection, putting herself between me and the ship like she is defending a living creature. “The official report stated that the IHC research vessel experienced catastrophic systems failure near the outer core boundary. The wreckage pattern was incomplete. The distress burst contained data fragments inconsistent with total reactor collapse. The recovery fleet spent less than six hours inside the search perimeter before withdrawing.”
“Because six hours near the core is how commanders say they tried without losing another ship,” I say.
“Because they were cowards.”
That word lands. Not because it is fair. Because she means it with the kind of conviction that has burned everything else out of her.
I lean one hip against the bar and fold my arms. “Careful, Roma Larson. Some of the cowards who came home from bad space did so carrying pieces of the people who didn’t.”
Her eyes flash. “And some of them came home because they decided the dead were cheaper than the living.”
The scarred woman mutters, “Damn.”
Roma hears but does not look away from me. Her cheeks are flushed now, not with embarrassment, but with heat dragged up from somewhere buried. The disguise is ruined. The room has her name. The drunk is gone. Any sane person would pack the projection away and leave before the night figures out how to become worse.
She does not.
She taps her compad, and the schematic shifts. Layers peel back to expose mathematical overlays, route projections, stressmodels, and bursts of dense notation that make half the room lose interest and the other half lean in despite themselves.
“This is not a fantasy,” she says. “I have spent nine years modeling the gravitational shear patterns around the core’s habitable debris fields. I have mapped drift corridors from archived military wreck data, salvage beacons, research telemetry, and radiation ghosts nobody bothered to correlate because they assumed nothing living could remain inside. My ship is not built to conquer the core. It is built to survive long enough to enter, locate a signal, and get out.”
“Long enough is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” I say.
“So is suicide in yours.”
A pleased sound moves through the crowd. They like blood. They do not care if it comes from fists or words.
