Page 176 of Red Scale Daddy
I draw one slow breath through the mask and taste filtered air, stale and rubber-edged.
“Hey, Pally.”
“What?”
“When we get her back, you can threaten me properly.”
“I already intend to.”
“Good. Means you’re planning past today.”
His hands tighten on the controls.
Ahead of us, Throgg’s sensor field flickers through recalibration.
Pally drives us into the gap.
“I am,” he says. “So are you.”
I bare my teeth at the looming hull.
“Damn right.”
CHAPTER 27
ROMA
My ship knows my hand.
The moment my palm settles against the recessed diagnostic plate beneath the navigation console, the dormant interface wakes in layers, its response hidden beneath the harmless surface chatter of routine damage assessment. The Reaper engineer standing over my shoulder sees coolant pressure, hull stress, and corrupted drive telemetry. I see the narrow pulse buried three menus deep inside the adaptive navigation loop, the private handshake I designed years ago because I trust people less than I trust systems that can lie on my behalf.
The cockpit is dim under Reaper power restrictions, lit by a skeletal amber glow from Throgg’s override clamps and the softer blue of my own emergency systems running below authorized thresholds. Burn marks scar the console where their weapons overloaded my shield relay. One overhead panel hangs loose, exposing braided wiring that sways faintly whenever the docking spine transfers vibration through the hull. The air smells stale and heated, full of melted insulation, cleaning solvents, and the faint mineral tang of Reaper atmospheric exchange bleeding through the open hatch behind me.
I breathe slowly.
I do not look at the airlock.
I do not look at the place where Dux was taken from me.
The Reaper engineer clicks through his external monitor. “Your system continues unauthorized background activity.”
“My system continues being alive,” I say, sliding two fingers across the console. “The distinction is important.”
“You were instructed to retrieve navigation architecture, not activate independent processes.”
“I was instructed to retrieve what Throgg needs. If you would like to tell him you interrupted the only person aboard capable of extracting it correctly, I will stand here quietly and enjoy that conversation.”
The engineer’s mandibles flex beneath the lower edge of his helmet.
I input a visible diagnostic command with my left hand and a hidden recursion string with my right.
The visible system opens a degraded map of the local core region.
The hidden system asks a question.
Is anyone listening?
Static answers first, a thin wash of radiation and gravitational noise. Beneath it, my father’s signal flickers like a candle glimpsed through a storm.
