Page 53 of Red Scale Daddy
“That was the high point of their conduct.”
I smile and shift in the secondary chair, which creaks under me in a tone I am beginning to take personally. “You always this charming in subspace?”
“I become more charming when no one touches restricted panels.”
“Then you’ll have to describe the sensation someday.”
Her fingers pause over a control for half a second, then continue. “If you are bored, review the emergency procedures I sent to your station.”
“I did.”
“You opened the file for fourteen seconds.”
“I read fast.”
“You scrolled to the diagram of decompression foam deployment and laughed.”
“It looked like an angry pastry bag.”
She turns her head just enough to give me one green eye over her shoulder. “That system can seal a hull breach large enough to keep you from being flung into space.”
“Then I respect the angry pastry bag.”
“You do not respect anything.”
“That’s unfair. I respect good knives, honest bartenders, bad ideas with courage behind them, and women who can drop a ship under a particle burst without screaming.”
Roma faces forward again. “Your standards are eclectic.”
“My standards are earned.”
She says nothing to that, but her shoulders move in the smallest possible way. Not softening. Never softening. Adjusting, maybe. Filing. She files everything. Words, risks, angles, emotional damage. Somewhere in that clever head of hers, I am probably listed under Useful Problems, alphabetized between radiation leaks and unpaid debts.
A proximity warning flashes amber across my structural overlay.
I lean forward.
Roma has it too. Her hand crosses the central console, dismissing the first layer of routine alert and opening the scan. The ship hum deepens as sensors reach farther through subspace interference. Lines of data appear, thin and obedient, then begin to jitter.
“Debris field,” she says.
“Declared?”
“No.”
The word comes out clipped, annoyed, as if unregistered wreckage has committed a personal discourtesy.
The forward display resolves into a scatter of ghost returns ahead of us: fragments moving across the lane at ugly angles, too dispersed for a single clean origin and too dense to ignore. In normal space, debris has the decency to behave like matter.In subspace, everything gets clever and mean. Pieces skip, drag, and bend along field currents, appearing closer or farther than they are depending on what reality feels like admitting.
I study the pattern. “That is not passive drift.”
Roma’s fingers move faster. “It is likely spillover from a freighter breakup near the adjacent freight shadow. The pieces were pulled into subspace wake and stretched along the corridor.”
“Those three on the left are accelerating.”
“I see them.”
“They are accelerating toward our crossing vector.”
