Page 72 of Red Scale Daddy
“Obviously.”
“Liar.”
“Later.”
A flat stretch opens beyond the ridge, broken by shallow craters and a jagged field of black stone spires. It is not a landing zone. It is a place where geology has left fewer obvious ways to die.
Roma chooses it.
“Brace,” she says.
I resecure the harness with one hand and grab the attitude bar with the other. “You first.”
“I am braced.”
“You are emotionally clenched. Different thing.”
“I hate you.”
“Later.”
The Lamplight hits the first bounce like a fist.
The impact blasts through the ship, metal shrieking against stone. My body surges forward into the harness. A side panel bursts open and throws a cascade of tools across the cockpit. The second bounce comes faster, lower, worse. The starboard strut collapses or complains in a language very close to collapse. Roma fires emergency thrusters in broken pulses, each burst stealing just enough speed to keep us from cartwheeling.
The third impact becomes a slide.
Rock screams beneath the hull. Sparks tear past the canopy in long golden sheets. The cockpit fills with alarms, smoke, and the bitter stink of scorched shielding. Roma wrestles the nose up, then down, then locks it straight while the Lamplight grinds across the asteroid surface with the grace of a drunken avalanche.
Finally, mercifully, violently, we stop.
For several seconds, nothing moves except smoke curling from a cracked panel and a loose cable swinging gently above Roma’s shoulder.
Then a final piece of equipment drops somewhere aft with a distant metallic crash.
I start laughing.
I cannot help it. It comes out rough, low, and half-strangled, pulled from somewhere between relief and old battle madness. The sound fills the cockpit, absurd against the alarms and smoke and Roma’s white-knuckled grip on the controls.
She turns her head slowly.
If looks could kill, I would be reduced to an administrative inconvenience.
“You’re laughing,” she says.
“Yes.”
“We crash-landed.”
“Technically, yes.”
“Technically?”
“We are alive. That makes it a landing with criticism.”
Her eyes blaze. “My ship is damaged.”
“And still in one piece.”
