Page 148 of Red Scale Daddy
“Then I should be grateful for restraint.”
“You should be grateful I am too busy to catalog every design sin in this room.”
That earns silence from the engineers.
Throgg descends the platform stairs with deliberate patience, his long coat shifting around him. “You were placed here to evaluate my propulsion instability.”
“I am evaluating it.”
“You are walking in circles.”
“I am thinking.”
“You require motion to think?”
“I require perspective,” I reply, stopping near a secondary regulator bank. “Your engineers keep analyzing the failure at the drive core, which is understandable and incorrect. The instability begins upstream, here, where the power feed narrows before entering the adaptive distributor.”
The nearest engineer turns toward the regulator.
Throgg’s gaze sharpens. “Explain.”
I crouch beside the casing and point to the recessed line along the edge. “Your system is compensating for gravitational variance after the distributor detects stress. That delay is small under ordinary conditions, but inside the core, a small delay becomes cumulative damage. Each correction arrives late enough to create another imbalance, and the system begins chasing itself.”
The engineer leans closer to the display. “We have compensated with increased feed tolerance.”
“Yes,” I say. “Which is why it has not killed you yet.”
The Reaper looks at me.
I look back.
“It remains a stupid solution.”
“You speak freely for a prisoner.”
“I speak accurately for someone you need.”
His expression remains controlled, but his eyes brighten with interest. He likes defiance when it has utility attached. That matters. Pride, properly handled, becomes an access point.
I rise and tap the regulator casing. “Your drive can escape the outer layers of the core under limited conditions, but it cannot sustain the transition through the gravitational threshold. You can enter dangerous space, hunt in it, and retreat within a bounded region. You cannot leave.”
The engineering deck quiets.
Throgg steps closer. “You are confident.”
“I am observant.”
“And can you correct it?”
There it is.
The hook.
I keep my face still, though my pulse climbs.
“Partially,” I say.
His eyes narrow. “Partially.”
