Page 49 of Red Scale Daddy
“For the display, yes.”
A tiny crack appears in the upper corner of his secondary screen.
He looks at it.
I look at it.
The cockpit becomes very quiet except for engine hum and the soft tick of my patience developing structural fatigue.
“I can fix that,” he says.
“No.”
“I have fixed screens before.”
“Was the screen functional afterward?”
“In several philosophical senses, yes.”
I inhale slowly through my nose. The air is sterile, filtered, and suddenly inadequate. “Hands off active surfaces unless instructed.”
“Commander, respectfully, if your displays cannot survive me learning, how will they survive combat turbulence?”
“They survived stress testing.”
“Against claws?”
“Against impact.”
“Claws are impact with opinions.”
I route his map to a backup pane and lock the damaged screen. “New command protocol. You ask before interacting with any display not explicitly labeled for your use.”
Dux glances down. Labels appear across his station: ENVIRONMENT, HULL STATUS, MEDICAL, EMERGENCY FOAM, LIMITED COMMS, STRUCTURAL VIEW—OBSERVE ONLY.
He reads them aloud. “Observe only.”
“Yes.”
“You labeled me.”
“I labeled the interface.”
“With prejudice.”
“With hope.”
His grin widens. “That was almost sweet.”
“It was not.”
“It had an aftertaste.”
“It was professional.”
He settles back and, for a short, blessed span of time, behaves.
I guide the Lamplight across the Lydian Spur. The route skirts the outer edge of sanctioned traffic before dipping beneath the commercial gate queue, where large freighters gather in luminous clusters around subspace buoys. Their drive fields shimmer against the dark in blue, gold, and violet halos, each vessel dragging its own distortions through space like invisible weather. The sight is beautiful in the way dangerous systems often are when viewed at correct distance. I smell nothing beyond the cockpit’s filtered air, but memory supplies the scents of dock fuel, heated plating, and my father’s workshop in summer.
