Page 129 of Red Scale Daddy
“Forward shield grid down to twenty-six percent,” she says, voice sharp as broken glass. “Aft maneuvering compromised.”
“Can we return fire?”
“We do not have weapons capable of meaningfully damaging that vessel.”
“Meaningfully is doing a lot of work in that sentence.”
“It means no.”
Another shot hits us.
The ship snaps sideways, and I catch the edge of the console with one hand before my shoulder slams into the bulkhead. Something tears deeper in my side where the drone cut me, hot blood sliding under my shirt, but I keep my eyes on the display. The Reaper ship hangs behind us with ugly patience, moving through the debris field as if the core bends around it out of professional courtesy.
Roma throws us into a hard starboard roll, her fingers flying over the controls as she cuts thrust, diverts power, and skims us beneath a tumbling section of wrecked carrier hull. The Reaper’s next shot passes over us and melts a glowing scar across the debris instead.
“Good,” I say. “Do that again.”
“I am attempting to do several things at once.”
“Great. Put not getting shot at the top.”
“I already did.”
The Reaper fires again, and this time the shot doesn’t chase our center mass. It clips the edge of our projected turn, exactly where Roma is about to put us. She sees it at the same second I do and yanks us out of the maneuver, hard enough that the gravity compensation stutters. My boots leave the deck for a breath before the field catches and slams me down again.
Roma’s face goes pale under the red light.
“They anticipated the correction,” she says.
“Then stop correcting that way.”
“I am changing the pattern.”
“You’re thinking like a pilot.”
“And you suggest what, exactly?”
“Think like a bastard.”
Her eyes flick to mine.
Despite everything, I grin. “Finally, a subject where I’m qualified.”
She doesn’t smile, but her next motion changes. Instead of smoothing the turn, she makes it ugly. She cuts power to one stabilizer, throws the nose downward, then fires lateral thrusters late, forcing the ship into a crooked, uneven slide through a cluster of broken plating. The maneuver feels wrong from the inside, too jagged and unbalanced, but the next Reaper shot misses by a wider margin.
“There,” I say. “Ugly works.”
“Ugly damages my ship.”
“Pretty is getting us killed.”
“They are targeting systems rather than hull mass,” she says, eyes locked on the cascading diagnostics. “That was an engine dampener. The previous strike was shield relay routing. They are disabling us.”
“So they want us alive.”
“That is not comforting.”
“No, but it means we’ve got something they want.”
