Page 85 of Red Scale Daddy
“A little.”
“How little?”
“Emotionally modest.”
“Dux.”
“It won’t slow me.”
“That was not the question.”
“It was the answer you need.”
Her gloved hands move inside the actuator housing, quick despite the cold. The wind slides over the asteroid plain, carrying dust against my armor in a soft hiss. Above us, the strange haze shifts, and the light beyond it bends in slow ribbons. The whole world feels like a held breath before a larger predator arrives.
The drones regroup.
They do not rush this time. That is worse. They spread between the spires, keeping distance from the charged patches, clicking to one another in layered rhythms that crawl along my nerves.
“They’re adapting,” I say.
“I am aware.”
“How long?”
“Four minutes.”
“No.”
“Three.”
“Try one.”
Roma looks up at me, eyes bright with offense. “Would you like to realign a warped actuator hinge under hostile pressure with inadequate tools and mineral interference?”
“I would like to avoid becoming a fond memory.”
“Then give me two minutes and stop negotiating with physics.”
A drone starts toward the ramp.
I fire twice, driving it back, but the others move when I do. One crawls along the underside of a stone shelf toward Roma’s blind side. She does not see it. Her focus is inside the housing, where the damaged control link refuses to seat.
“Left and low,” I say.
“I cannot disengage.”
“I know.”
I move.
The drone drops as I reach it. I catch it midair, more by stubbornness than grace, and its weight drives us both down beside the port hull. A claw punches through the outer layer of my shoulder armor and scrapes scale. I snarl, hook one hand under its jaw plates, and slam it into the Lamplight’s hull.
Roma’s head snaps up. “Do not dent my ship.”
“I am being killed next to it.”
“Be killed farther away.”
