Page 42 of Red Scale Daddy
The ship answers her touch like it knows her.
I do not say that aloud.
Roma opens the comm. “Fueling control, confirm deuterium mix three and seal all external lines.”
The tech’s voice crackles back. “Confirmed, Lamplight. Mix three loaded. External lines clearing now.”
“Run contamination scan.”
“Already ran it.”
“Run it again.”
A sigh begins on the other end, then dies a coward’s death. “Running again.”
I fasten the harness across my chest and tug it into place. It fits poorly, but not disastrously. “You always make people this nervous?”
Roma keeps her eyes on the display. “Only when they are incompetent.”
“That must be exhausting in public.”
“It is.”
The contamination scan clears. She confirms it, logs the result, and sends three more commands before the fueling tech can escape the conversation. I watch the sequence, noting what she checks twice and what she trusts once. Her caution is not random. It has architecture.
That makes testing it more useful.
I reach toward the external camera selector.
Roma speaks without looking. “Do not.”
“I want to see the clamps.”
“Ask.”
“May I view the clamps?”
“No.”
I press the selector.
The display shifts to an exterior view of the docking clamps locked around the landing struts. Massive, scarred, and very much worth seeing. Roma closes her eyes for one long inhale, the kind of controlled breath a person takes before deciding whether murder would be inefficient.
When she opens them, her voice is calm. “Why?”
“To see how you react.”
“That is not an acceptable reason.”
“It is an honest one.”
She turns her chair toward me. The cockpit light catches the bruise on her cheek and the loose red strands that have escapedher braid. “I am not one of your bar fights, Dux. I am not an officer you can provoke for sport. I am not some fragile little genius who needs chaos taught to her by a man with more scars than sense.”
“No,” I say, keeping my voice quieter than hers. “You’re a woman flying into the core with all control routed through her hands because trusting anyone else feels too much like losing.”
Her face goes very still, but her eyes do not empty. They burn.
“Do not confuse insight with permission,” Roma says.
