Page 166 of Red Scale Daddy
“I used opportunity.”
“Those are not different enough for comfort.”
“I do not value your comfort.”
I lean closer over the projection, and for once I allow him to see the edge of what I feel. “Then value this. If my father knows you are coming, he will run. If he knows I am with you, he may answer. If he thinks I am under duress, he will still answer, because he is sentimental and reckless in ways I am furious to have inherited.”
Throgg watches me with unnerving stillness.
I press harder. “You need me to bring him into the equation. You need him to complete the escape architecture. You need my ship to test it. That means threatening any one of us reduces your odds.”
“Us,” he says.
The word catches.
I recover too late.
His eyes narrow with satisfaction. “Your father. Your ship. The Vakutan.”
I straighten slowly. “You are reading significance into grammar.”
“I read priorities.”
“Then read the practical one. A living Dux would be useful.”
“Would he?”
“He is combat-capable, physically resilient, tactically adaptive, and extremely irritating to kill.”
“How touching.”
“How practical.”
Throgg’s expression remains controlled, but his attention has sharpened into a blade. “You believe he lives because you need him to live.”
“I believe he may live because his physiology allows a nonzero survival window in vacuum and because this regioncontains salvage fields dense enough to permit recovery or impact shielding.”
“And if he is dead?”
I hold his gaze. “Then you wasted a potentially valuable asset by ejecting him.”
A faint laugh moves through him. “You grieve like an engineer.”
“I grieve privately.”
“You grieve productively.”
“I am standing on your engineering deck under armed supervision, discussing how to improve your odds of survival. I would call that restrained.”
His smile fades, leaving something colder behind. “Then restrain yourself further. You will prepare a signal architecture designed to draw Palindrome Larson into communication range. You will provide stabilizer improvements sufficient to follow when he moves. You will not warn him.”
“I will need authentic signature fragments to make the signal credible.”
“You have them.”
“I have partials.”
“You have enough.”
