Page 65 of Red Scale Daddy
“Dark displacement against the particle field. It will look like absence moving wrong.”
“That is a terrible description.”
“It is an accurate description.”
He switches the feed. His screen glows across his face. “I see three wrong absences.”
“The smallest.”
“They are all small compared to space.”
“Dux.”
“Lower left,” he says. “Trailing behind us, curling upward.”
I pull his feed to my display and overlay the aft visual with inertial data. There. A curve in the wake, a negative shimmer where charged dust bends around something unseen. The anomaly is not ahead of us.
It is sliding under us.
My prior route is useless.
The next decision arrives without the dignity of a plan.
I cut forward thrust by sixty percent, dump power from nonessential lighting, and reroute shield strength to ventral and port arrays. The cockpit plunges into deeper blue. The engines drop from a growl to a strained, dangerous hum.
Dux’s voice remains steady. “That sounds bad.”
“It is controlled.”
“That was not a denial.”
“I need ballast response.”
“Starboard ballast is lagging,” he says, reading the limited map faster than expected. “Point-four seconds behind port.”
“I know.”
“You did not know.”
“I knew as you said it.”
“Generous.”
The ship bucks again, and this time the motion yanks a gasp from my throat before I can strangle it. The anomaly catches our lower field and twists. Metal groans somewhere beneath the deck. Not failure. Stress. The difference is everything and not enough.
I flatten the Lamplight into the distortion instead of fighting out of it.
Dux turns his head. “Are we diving into the thing?”
“We are matching its outer rotation.”
“Because escaping would be too fashionable?”
“Because direct escape shears us in half.”
“Matching rotation sounds prettier.”
“It is marginally less fatal.”
