Page 75 of Red Scale Daddy
Then her spine straightens, and the whisper becomes steel trying to remember its shape. “That does not change the objective.”
“No,” I say. “But it changes how we survive long enough to reach it.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Not with trust. Not with gratitude. Something harder. Something unwilling.
Then she grabs the emergency kit from beside her chair and shoves it against my chest.
“Suit up,” Roma says. “If you are going to keep being right at inconvenient times, you can help fix what reality broke.”
I take the kit and smile despite the smoke in my lungs and the ache in my ribs.
“Yes, Commander.”
This time, she does not correct me.
CHAPTER 11
ROMA
The asteroid’s air tastes like old coins and cold stone.
It should not have air at all, which irritates me more than its hostility. A breathable atmosphere on an irregular asteroid inside a distortion pocket is not merely improbable; it is rude. The moment the Lamplight’s outer hatch opens, thin wind slides into the vestibule with a dry hiss, carrying mineral dust, metallic particulate, and the faint bitter scent of ionized rock. My thermal collar warms automatically against the cold, but the chill still finds its way through the seams of my suit and settles at the base of my spine like a hand I did not invite.
Outside, the world is jagged, dim, and wrong.
Black-gray stone stretches in uneven plates around the crash path, scarred by the long gouge my ship carved across the surface. Pale mineral veins run through the rock in branching lines, glowing faintly blue where charged particles drift overhead like dirty starlight. The sky is not a sky in any planetary sense. It is a thin, bruised haze barely thick enough to hold wind, with torn bands of cosmic light shifting beyond it and the gravitational anomaly curling in the distance like darkness learning to breathe.
The Lamplight lies tilted against a ridge, one landing strut collapsed, her port side scored badly enough that I feel the damage as if it has been done to my own body.
I step down from the ramp with the scanner in one hand and a repair kit over my shoulder. Dux follows, carrying enough emergency equipment to make a lesser creature list sideways. He has a thermal harness strapped across his chest, but the suit panels look offended by the job of covering him. His red scales seem darker under the asteroid light, his scars pale where dust clings to them.
He looks around and smiles.
Of course he does.
“Lovely place,” Dux says. “Very welcoming. I can see why the brochures were vague.”
I kneel beside the first hull scrape and set the scanner against the plating. “Do not touch anything unless I specifically instruct you.”
“You gave me a repair kit.”
“For carrying.”
“That feels like an underuse of my talents.”
“Your talents recently involved forcing manual attitude control without authorization.”
“Worked, though.”
I look up at him. “Survival does not retroactively make insubordination adorable.”
Dux shifts the gear on his shoulder, his golden eyes moving over the ship rather than me. “No, but it does make it relevant.”
I do not answer because the scanner begins populating hard numbers, and numbers are calmer company. Port vane assembly: warped at primary hinge. Starboard ballast: overheated, cooling unevenly. Ventral shielding: drained to eleven percent. Aft power routing: damage in junction three. External plating: microfractures along lower port quadrant.Landing strut: mechanically collapsed but not severed. The ship is injured, not dying.
I breathe once.
Then again.
