Page 96 of Red Scale Daddy
“Yes,” he fires back. “Because you gave everything to one outcome.”
“My father?—”
“Would want you to be more than this,” he interrupts, his voice rough. “Not just a mission wearing a person.”
I lock the vector, my father’s mark steady on the display, faint but undeniable.
“We finish this later,” Dux says, turning toward the hatch.
“Yes,” I say, forcing my voice steady again.
Outside, the drones return.
Inside, everything has changed.
CHAPTER 14
DUX
The drones keep scraping at the hull like creditors with claws, but for a while, the cockpit feels quieter than it has any right to.
Noise still fills the Lamplight. The exterior plating shivers under impact. The ventral shields hum unevenly as Roma coaxes them back toward usefulness. A warning tone pulses from the aft routing panel every eleven seconds, too polite to be urgent and too persistent to ignore. The air smells of hot metal, antiseptic sealant, scorched insulation, and my own blood drying under the compression patch. Underneath all that, softer and more dangerous, is the scent of Roma’s soap and machine oil as she leans over the console with her father’s signal locked faintly on the display.
I should be thinking about drones.
I should be thinking about hull stress, the damaged vane, my side wound, our bad odds, and the fact that this miserable little asteroid has teeth and an atmosphere it has no business owning. Instead, I am watching Roma Larson hold herself together by force of will, and I am realizing I do not like how close she came to falling apart when that signal answered.
That is inconvenient.
I know obsession. I have seen it on battlefields, in officers who kept feeding soldiers into bad ground because admitting failure would mean the dead had died for nothing. I have seen it in wounded men crawling toward flags, commanders, lovers, and gods who were no longer listening. I have carried my own version around for years, though mine is uglier in its simplicity. Roma filled her life with one impossible purpose until there was no room left for anything else. I let mine empty out and called the echo freedom.
Neither condition looks healthy from this cockpit.
Roma’s fingers dance across the controls, steadier now. Too steady. The kind of steady that means the tremor has been shoved somewhere internal where it can do damage later.
“Stop staring at me,” she says.
I lean back in the secondary chair, which groans under me like a dramatic old veteran. “I’m monitoring mission-critical assets.”
Her eyes remain on the display. “If you are referring to me, stop before I revise your access permissions to include only oxygen and regret.”
“I like that oxygen made the cut.”
“It is provisional.”
“Generous woman.”
“Bleeding man.”
I glance down at the patch along my ribs. “Still less than before.”
“That is not a medical category.”
“It is a battlefield category.”
“This is not a battlefield.”
A drone slams into the upper hull hard enough to make the cockpit lights flicker. Dust shivers loose from a seam above the canopy and drifts down in the emergency-blue glow. Roma’sfingers dart across the console, diverting shield strength toward the impact point without looking away from the signal trace.
