Page 238 of Red Scale Daddy
He lifts both hands. “Fine. You professionally acknowledged uncertainty.”
Dad groans from engineering. “I am begging both of you to flirt after we are outside murder range.”
I push the throttle harder, aligning with the escape trajectory as the damaged ship shudders around us but holds. Stars stretch ahead, cold and clean, and for the first time since Throgg’s vessel swallowed us, the path forward opens instead of closing.
Behind us, Throgg’s voice tears through the comm one last time, distorted by distance and rage. “Roma!”
I cut the channel.
The silence that follows is not empty.
It is ours.
CHAPTER 36
ROMA
Alliance space arrives not as a place, but as a signal.
It cuts through the static first, thin and blue across my console, one clean identification ping threading itself through the battered silence of my ship. Then another follows. Then six more. Friendly transponders. Patrol beacons. Defense lattice signatures. The data blooms across the forward display in increments, cautious at first, as if the universe itself does not trust us to have survived, then fuller and brighter until the nav screen fills with the impossible proof of it.
We are out.
Behind us, the galactic core burns in violent golds and bruised reds, gravity tearing light into ancient ribbons, the whole region snarling with radiation and debris. Throgg’s vessel is no longer visible to the naked eye, swallowed by distance, interference, and the collapsing chaos of everything he thought he controlled. The last telemetry ghost shows his ship caught inside the core-side interference well, boxed in by Zenos swarms, failing engines, and his own sealed command grid. No pursuit vector follows us. No interception drone claws at our stern. No Reaper fire stitches itself across my shields.
We are out, and Throgg is not.
Dad makes a sound from engineering that begins as a laugh and breaks into something rougher halfway through. “Well,” he says over the comm, voice hoarse, “I would like to formally submit my resignation from whatever the hell that was.”
Dux slumps back in the copilot seat, one hand still wrapped around the manual thruster control as if he expects the ship to change its mind and dive back into trouble for sport. His face is grey beneath the soot and blood, his hair damp at the temples, his jaw shadowed with exhaustion. When he looks at the Alliance transponder grid, his mouth opens slightly, but no words come out immediately.
That unsettles me more than the silence of space.
“Dux,” I say, checking his vitals from the seat readout because asking directly feels too large and too small at once. “Status.”
He turns his head toward me, and the corner of his mouth lifts. “Alive.”
“That is not a comprehensive status.”
“It’s the big one.”
Dad snorts through the comm. “He’s got a point, kid.”
I glance toward the engineering feed. Dad appears on the secondary screen upside down, wedged half beneath an open panel, his skinsuit collar undone and one cheek smeared black with grease. His hands are still moving even though there is no immediate crisis left for them to solve.
“Stop modifying things,” I say.
“I am stabilizing your stabilizers.”
“You destabilized them.”
“And now I am completing the emotional journey.”
“Dad.”
He looks into the camera with theatrical innocence. “What? You want to drift into Alliance space looking like we escaped by accident?”
Dux laughs softly, a low, cracked sound that seems to surprise him as much as it does me. It fills the cockpit with warmth I do not know how to categorize. The laugh turns into a wince as he presses a hand against his side, and my harness is off before I make a conscious decision to remove it.
