Chapter 10 - Dinner Time

"The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."

—Neil deGrasse Tyson

The smell reached him before he even made it to the mess hall door. Bacon fat and real eggs and something toasting. His stomach clenched hard enough that he actually stopped walking, because coffee and adrenaline were not, it turned out, actually food groups.

"Holy shit," Luca said, his voice barely audible. "Is that actual food?"

Emily bumped into his back, her hand catching his shoulder to steady herself. "It smells like..." She paused, inhaling deeply. "Like home."

They stepped into the mess hall, and Luca had to blink twice to make sure he wasn't hallucinating from exhaustion. The crates were gone, all of them, and someone had turned the shipping warehouse into an actual room, with chairs that matched and lights that didn't make everything look like a crime scene. He stood there like an idiot, swaying slightly, trying to remember what normal lighting felt like on his eyes.

Joey stood at the galley with a spatula in one hand and a dish towel slung over his shoulder, his red ponytail swinging while he worked a griddle that smelled like everything Luca had ever wanted. His mouth watered so fast it was embarrassing.

"You actually cooked?" Luca asked, moving closer. "I thought you were still setting up the food prep area."

Joey grinned over his shoulder, his freckled face flushed from the heat. "Figured the fresh stuff should go first before it turned. And after the day we had, cold rations felt like a war crime."

Chris came around a storage cabinet with an armful of plates, looking like he'd stepped out of a catalog shoot. Forty-four hours of near-death experiences and somehow not a hair out of place. Luca looked down at his own uniform, which had fused to his skin with sweat about twelve hours ago. "Figured we deserved a real meal after nearly dying six different ways today."

"Six?" Ryan was slumped in one of the chairs, his hair soot-black and sticking up at angles that defied physics. "I count at least seven. Electrical fire, oxygen failure, plasma thruster malfunction, mystery shuttles, tracker hunt, maintenance tunnel claustrophobia, and whatever the hell that noise was that turned out to be Chris dropping a bolt."

Danny looked up from tracing patterns on the table, his dark eyes half-focused. "Don't forget the reactor startup that almost turned us into a small sun."

"That was artistic license," Ryan protested, but he was grinning. "Controlled fusion is a beautiful thing when it works properly."

"And terrifying as hell when it doesn't," Zoe muttered from her chair, where she sat slouched with her chin propped on her hand.

"How did you guys manage to clear all this out?" Luca asked, gesturing at the transformed space.

"Teamwork makes the dream work," Chris replied, sliding the plates around the table. "While you and Emily were playing house in the cabins, the rest of us turned this place into something resembling civilization. Took about two hours to move everything to proper storage."

"Playing house?" Emily's tone sharpened just enough to make Chris's grin falter slightly.

"Figure of speech," he said quickly, holding up his hands in mock surrender. "No offense intended."

Emily's neck went pink. Her eyes flicked to Luca, then away, and his brain did that thing where it forgot what words were for about half a second.

Joey slid bacon and eggs onto serving platters, still sizzling, and the smell hit Luca so hard his knees almost buckled. Toast stacked on a plate. A bowl of fruit that must have cost a fortune to ship up from Earth. His stomach made a noise that could probably be heard from the bridge.

"Come on, everyone, sit," Joey said, pointing his spatula at the table. "Food's getting cold, and after the day we've had, we deserve this."

They gathered around the table, and for a moment, it felt almost normal. The seven of them, just sitting down to eat, like they hadn't spent the last two days trying not to die. Luca's hands shook when he picked up his fork, and he pretended that it was from exhaustion and not from the stupid lump in his throat.

"Seriously, though," Ryan said around a mouthful of toast, "This is exactly what we needed. Breakfast at midnight, after a 22-hour day."

Twenty-two hours. More like forty-four. Luca had been up since six the morning before. The sabotage hit at two AM, and everything after that had been one long blur of fires and broken systems and people trying to kill them.

Danny raised an eyebrow. "Don't let it go to his head. Joey's still the same guy who used to practice his 'cooking face' in the mirror."

"I did NOT—" Joey started.

"You absolutely did," Danny continued, putting on an exaggerated serious expression. "'The secret ingredient is love,'" he said in a mock-deep voice.

Zoe threw a piece of toast at Danny. "You're terrible. This is amazing, Joey. Don't listen to your bratty little brother."

"I'm only two years younger!" Danny protested.

Emily dropped into the chair beside him. Her shoulder bumped his, and she left it there while she reached for the butter. Luca's brain cataloged that contact with embarrassing precision. "This is good," she said, taking her first bite of eggs. "Joey, where did you learn to cook like this?"

Its just eggs and bacon. He bit his tongue. Morale was important.

Joey's face went slightly red, and he ducked his head in a way that made him look younger than his twenty-two years. "My dad taught me before... well, before. He always said that knowing how to feed people was the most important skill anyone could have."

The table went quiet for a moment, everyone understanding what he meant by "before." Before the system. Before he had turned into a tyrant. Before he was hanged from a noose. Before some of them lost people they couldn't afford to lose.

"He was right," Luca said. He cleared his throat. "Despite, you know."

They ate. Nobody talked for a while, and the quiet felt earned. Luca's shoulders dropped about three inches and stayed there. The food sat warm and heavy in his stomach, and somewhere between the second plate of eggs and his third cup of coffee, he stopped feeling like a corpse pretending to be a captain.

"Alright," Luca said finally, pushing back from the table. "I think it's time we all got some sleep. Real sleep, in actual beds, without the sound of alarms going off every five minutes."

Everyone agreed with the enthusiasm of people who could barely keep their eyes open. Chris and Joey grabbed the plates without being asked, moving around each other like they'd done this a thousand times. Ryan stretched, yawned wide enough to show his molars, and shuffled toward the door.

"Eight hundred hours tomorrow," Luca announced. "We'll meet on the bridge and start getting this ship properly organized."

"Eight hundred?" Ryan groaned. "That's only like six hours of sleep."

"Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep," Emily corrected. "No electrical fires, no oxygen alarms, no tracker hunts. Just sleep."

"I'll take it," Zoe mumbled, already heading for the door.

One by one, the crew drifted toward their cabins until it was Emily and Luca and a table full of dirty plates. She wrapped both hands around her coffee mug and watched the stars through the viewport, and Luca watched her watching them. The light caught the side of her face. He noticed the way her fingers overlapped on the mug, the way her breathing had slowed down for the first time all day.

"You okay?" he asked. His voice came out rougher than he meant it to.

"Yeah." Her eyes stayed on the stars. "Thinking about everything that happened today. This morning feels like a lifetime ago."

"I know what you mean." He looked at the empty plates, the grease cooling on them. Forty-four hours ago he'd been asleep in a normal bed and none of this had been real yet.

She smiled at him, and his chest did something complicated. "It's good, though."

He nodded. His whole body wanted to stay in this chair, in this exact moment, where nothing was on fire and Emily was close enough that he could smell her shampoo over the bacon grease.

"Come on," she said eventually, standing and holding out her hand. "We both need sleep before we fall over."

He took it. Let her pull him up. Her hand was warm, and he didn't let go.

---

Luca's cabin door hissed shut. The quiet felt different now. Alpha Centauri wasn't just a destination anymore; it was a tightrope, and he was about to step onto it, blindfolded.

[!captains-log] Captain’s Log - August 28th, Day 1

>

First entry. Emily said I should keep a record. She’s probably right.

So. We’re actually doing this.

This whole thing started on Venus. Level 60 portal, worst conditions I’ve ever run, months of competing for queue slots against every high-level IFC crew on the planet. We got lucky. Found an FTL drive, honest-to-god warp-speed engine, shoved it under Karen and Michael’s noses and told them we wanted the Alpha Centauri charter. They looked at us like we were insane.

We probably were.

Before we found ours, the UER had already bought the first one ever found for a pile of credits that would make your eyes water. Last I heard, the eggheads in Geneva were still trying to figure out how it worked. That was enough to kick off a gold rush. Venus went nuts. Every crew with a portal key was tripping over each other to find the next one. The IFC had an outpost down faster than anyone, and soon enough running Venus portals was routine, if not easy. The level of difficulty? Astronomical.

We ran those portals for months. Hundreds of crews all scrambling for the same thing. When we finally scored ours, it was out of a portal that was a straight-up hellscape. No exaggeration. We basically sprinted straight from that to the IFC offices with the drive still in our hands.

Convincing Karen wasn’t a walk in the park. But we had the drive, and she’s too smart to let an advantage sit idle. The bidding war that followed was something else. Karen and Michael against Orion Horizons, Titan Dynamics, and a whole pile of corporations who all wanted the same charter. There must have been thirty to forty outposts on Venus by the time we scored. IFC pulled out every resource they had, and somehow, we won.

First order of business after that: the Triumph Initiative. Our own company, technically a subsidiary of the IFC, but with all the freedoms that come with being system-sanctioned before the UER was even founded. We’re not under their thumb, which matters more than it sounds. We love Earth. We just know the UER has its own agenda, and ours doesn’t always line up.

Chris and Ryan are still cataloging the sabotage evidence. The tracker is in Danny's lab. We'll have answers eventually. Right now I don't have the bandwidth to care.

The charter win felt like a victory. It was also a ticking time bomb.

Karen bet the solar system on us. Hyperion profits, Kuiper Belt rights, the Venus outpost leased at cost. All of it gone, traded away to secure this charter. And the Genesis Platform, Dad’s shipyard, that’s not IFC money. Dad poured everything he had into upgrading his drydocks to build the Triumph. This ship is his flagship. His legacy. If we pull this off and bring back what the UER is demanding, the Genesis Platform is set for a generation. Dad gets to breathe again. The corporate sharks circling his yard back off.

If we don’t...

We’ll figure it out.

End log.