Page 158 of Red Scale Daddy
“I’m looking for your daughter.”
His anger falters at that, and I see the hit land exactly where I mean it to.
“She came here because your signal was still calling,” I continue. “She crossed the core in a ship she built from your ideas, half genius and half heartbreak. She fought like hell to reach you, and now Throgg has her because the signal she trusted put her inside his hunting ground.”
His jaw flexes. “I did not know she would come.”
“Bullshit.”
The word cracks through the little cabin.
Pally’s eyes go cold. “Careful.”
“No,” I say, pushing myself up from the chair despite the med patch pulling at my skin. “You don’t get careful from me right now. You kept broadcasting with your signature in it.”
“It was a general distress pattern.”
“It had enough of you in it that she recognized it through core static.”
“I needed any possible friendly vessel to identify the signal as human engineering.”
“You needed hope,” I say. “You needed somebody, somewhere, to know you were still breathing.”
He looks away first.
That tells me plenty.
The ship hums under our feet, and the map projection throws pale light across his worn face. For a second, he looks less like the legend Roma built her life around and more like a man who made one desperate choice after another until the choices started calling themselves principles.
“I sent that signal for years,” he says quietly. “After a while, I stopped believing anyone would hear it.”
“But you kept sending it.”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t act surprised someone loved you enough to answer.”
The silence that follows is ugly, full of engine ticks and distant coolant hiss. Pally’s hand grips the console until his knuckles pale under the grime.
“I had a daughter who painted stars on scrap metal,” he says. “She cried when I left for long missions and pretended she had dust in her eyes because she hated being treated like a child. I had a wife who told me not to make promises in doorways because promises made there had a way of turning into ghosts. I have spent nine years imagining what my absence did to them, so do not stand in my ship and lecture me about love as if you invented it during your two-day heroic inconvenience.”
His voice breaks at the edge, and he clamps down on it immediately.
I let him have that much.
Then I step closer.
“Then act like her father,” I say. “Because right now, you’re acting like a man who’s already grieving her.”
His head snaps toward me.
“She is alive,” he says.
“Then why are you planning like she’s already gone?”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out quickly enough.
I point toward the projection of Throgg’s vessel. “You know his ship. You know his habits. You know this graveyard better than anybody living, and you’re standing here calculating risk while Roma is probably making herself useful to a monster because that’s the only knife she has left.”
