Chapter 21 - The Observation Deck

Emily found him in the corridor outside engineering, where Luca had been pretending to read a maintenance log for the last fifteen minutes. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled.

"Observation lounge," she said. "Come on."

"After you."

She was already climbing the stairs ahead of him, looking back every few rungs to make sure he followed. Twenty days of repairs and recalibrations, and Luca had barely gotten ten minutes alone with her. Now they were in FTL, hurtling toward Alpha Centauri, and Emily wanted the observation lounge. Just the two of them. His pulse picked up and he told it to knock it off.

Voices carried down from the top of the stairs.

"...but that's just it, the micro-jumps aren't actually jumps at all," Ryan was saying, with that specific pitch he hit when he got excited about something technical. "It's more like we're surfing the quantum foam, riding these little ripples in spacetime..."

"That makes absolutely no sense," Danny said. He sounded more amused than frustrated. "You can't surf quantum foam. It's not even..."

Emily stopped climbing. Her shoulders dropped about half an inch, and she took a breath before fixing the smile back in place. Luca caught it. He always caught it with her.

"Room for two more?" Emily called out, stepping into the lounge.

The observation deck had curved transparent aluminum windows that wrapped the entire space, floor to ceiling. Beyond them, something that was definitely not normal space was happening. Light pulsed past in waves, brilliant blues and whites bending in directions that made Luca's eyes water when he stared too long. It looked like being inside a lightning storm made of starlight, and it was giving him a headache already.

Ryan was sprawled across one of the curved benches, gesturing at the view like a tour guide who'd lost his group. "Em! Luca! You've got to see this. We're not just in subspace, we're in some kind of quantum tunnel. Danny thinks I'm making it up, but look at those wave patterns."

Danny sat cross-legged on the floor near the windows, data pad balanced on his knees. "I don't think you're making it up. I think you're anthropomorphizing complex physics into surf metaphors."

"Everything's a surf metaphor if you're brave enough," Ryan said.

Luca hauled himself up into the lounge and felt the vibration immediately, the FTL drive thrumming through the hull and into his boots. The weird relief hit him again, that full-body gratitude that they were all here, alive, not scattered across the void between stars. He was still riding that high. Probably would be for a while.

Emily settled onto the bench beside Ryan, leaving space. Luca dropped down next to her, close enough that their shoulders brushed. She didn't move away. His brain noted this fact about six times in a row.

"So what are we actually looking at?" Luca asked, nodding at the light show. "Besides Danny's physics homework."

"According to the nav computer, we're making about three thousand microjumps over the next three weeks," Danny said, not looking up from his pad. "The drive doesn't move us through space so much as it folds space around us. Each jump is tiny, but they're happening so fast it creates this continuous effect."

"Like skipping stones," Emily said. She had that tone, the quiet one she used when she was working something out in her head. "Each skip takes you a little further until you've crossed the whole pond."

"Exactly!" Ryan pointed at her. "See? She gets it. Quantum stone skipping."

Luca watched Emily study the streaming lights. Her eyes tracked the patterns with that focus she brought to everything that mattered. He was staring at her instead of the impossible alien light show happening three feet from his face, and he couldn't make himself care.

Three weeks to Alpha Centauri. Three weeks in this ship with Emily, with all of them, racing toward something no human had ever seen. He should have been terrified. Sitting here next to her, listening to Ryan gesture wildly while Danny muttered calculations, he wasn't.

"You know what's crazy?" Emily leaned back against the bench. "We're the first humans to see this. Whatever this is, subspace, quantum foam, Ryan's cosmic surf breaks, we're the first."

"The first of hopefully many," Danny said, finally looking up. "If we don't, you know, explode or get lost in an interdimensional rift or something."

"Always the optimist," Luca said. Danny's nervous energy was sort of endearing when it was pointed at keeping them alive instead of reciting statistics at breakfast.

Ryan stretched out, hands behind his head. "I don't know about you guys, but I'm planning to enjoy every minute of this. How many people get to take the scenic route to another star system?"

Emily laughed. "The scenic route through dimensions we can't pronounce, at speeds that shouldn't be possible, in a ship we commissioned from an alien shipyard." She shook her head. "When you put it like that, it sounds completely insane."

"The best kind of insane," Luca said, and Emily's eyes were already on his. Steady. Meant for him. His face got warm and he looked back at the windows before she noticed.

The patterns shifted and changed outside, sometimes flowing in parallel lines, sometimes spiraling in helixes that made his stomach do something unpleasant. It was hypnotic in the worst way. The kind of thing you couldn't stop watching even though it hurt.

"Hell of a view," he said.

Emily leaned her head onto his shoulder. "Yeah," she said, and when he looked down at her, she was already looking up. "It really is."

Luca forgot what words were for about three seconds. The streaking light caught the edge of her face and he noticed the specific way her eyelashes caught the blue glow and how her hair smelled like whatever cheap shampoo the ship stocked, and none of that should have mattered at all, except apparently it did.

Ryan was still talking. "We're folding space to get from point A to point B, right? What if the portals work the same way? A more advanced version. Instead of folding space to move us through it, they fold space to bring other places to us. Same basic principle, bigger fold."

"That's a massive leap," Danny said. "The energy requirements alone would be..."

"Would be what? Impossible?" Ryan grinned. "We're currently traveling faster than light using technology we barely understand. I'm pretty sure 'impossible' went out the window somewhere around the Genesis Platform."

Danny shook his head. "But the scenarios recycle, Ryan. It's been documented. Same basic environments, same challenge structures. They might have minor variations, but the core templates repeat. That's not how real locations would work."

"Maybe they're real places that the system has catalogued. Like it found these worlds and now it can recreate access to them." Ryan's voice picked up speed the way it always did when he was convinced he was right. "Think about it. We're using alien tech to travel between stars. What if the portals are using the same kind of technology, on a smaller scale?"

Luca was barely following. Emily had settled more comfortably against his side, and his arm had found its way around her waist. She leaned into him. Her weight against his ribs was warm and specific and real, and his whole brain had narrowed to the square foot of space they shared on this bench. Ryan could have been explaining the heat death of the universe and Luca would have nodded along.

Emily's laugh vibrated against his shoulder, and he decided that whatever they found at Alpha Centauri, this was already worth it.

"But even if you're right," Danny was saying, "the recycling issue remains. I've run statistical analyses on portal scenarios..."

"Statistics don't account for the variables we can't measure," Ryan said. "What if each recycled scenario is actually the same real location, accessed at different times? Or from different dimensional angles?"

Emily stirred. "You guys could debate this for hours," she said against his shoulder. "And knowing you two, you probably will."

"We've got three weeks," Ryan said. "Plenty of time to solve the mysteries of interdimensional travel."

Emily sighed. Then she was pulling away, sitting up, stretching. Luca's side went cold immediately.

"I should probably check on Zoe," she said, running a hand through her hair. "Make sure she doesn't need anything. The jump sequence puts a lot of strain on her."

"Zoe's fine," Ryan said. "She could probably pilot this thing in her sleep."

"Still." Emily stood and smoothed down her suit. "Someone has to check on the crew, right?" She looked at Luca with a small smile. "I'll be back in a bit."

He watched her head for the stairs. He was absolutely staring and making zero effort to hide it, which was probably a problem, but she was already gone.

Danny stretched and yawned. "I should probably run those subspace calculations while the readings are fresh," he said, gathering up his data pad. "The quantum resonance patterns might tell us something about jump efficiency."

"Always working," Ryan said.

Danny paused at the stairs. "You know, Luca, the statistical models for interpersonal dynamics during long-duration space travel are actually fascinating. Proximity effects, shared experiences, the way extraordinary circumstances can amplify existing..."

"Danny," Ryan said. "The calculations?"

"Right. Yes. Numbers. Less complicated than people." Danny disappeared down the stairs.

The quiet settled around them. Without the others, the streaming light outside the windows seemed louder, the FTL hum more pronounced through the deck plating. Luca tried to focus on the impossible view. His brain kept pulling back to Emily's weight against his side, the way she'd leaned into him, the warmth that was gone now.

"Hell of a view," Ryan said, echoing his earlier words.

"Yeah." Luca's voice sounded distant even to himself.

Ryan was quiet for a minute. Then: "She picked a good exit line. 'Someone has to check on the crew.'" He said it almost in her voice. "Classic."

"That's... she's not wrong."

"No." Ryan pulled at a loose thread on his sleeve. "She never is, though. Have you noticed that? Emily's always got the line that gets her out of the room before things get heavy."

Luca looked at him. "That's not what that was."

"Okay." Ryan shrugged. "What was it?"

"She went to check on Zoe."

"After leaning on your shoulder for an hour." Ryan tilted his head. "Sure."

"It wasn't an hour."

The FTL hum filled the gap. Luca turned back to the lights.

"You know what your problem is?" Ryan said. "You keep waiting for a version of this where nobody has to risk anything."

"I'm not waiting for anything."

"You're sitting in the dark staring at stairs."

Luca didn't have a response to that because it was true.

"Back in Sandworth," Ryan said, his voice dropping, "you were the one who moved first. On anything. You were annoying about it, honestly."

Luca still didn't say anything.

"Now you've got a ship, a mission, six months of good reasons." Ryan stood and brushed off his jacket. "Turns out that's worse."

"Worse than what?"

Ryan looked at him for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes that he didn't let land. "Nothing." He picked up his jacket. "Get some sleep, man. Big day of traveling faster than light tomorrow."

He was halfway down the stairs before his voice came back up.

"For what it's worth, she didn't look at Pierre like that. Not once that I saw."

Luca sat alone with the lights.

Three weeks to Alpha Centauri. Six months before they'd be back at the Genesis Platform, if they made it back at all. He needed to figure out if there was ever going to be a right time for this, or if he was going to spend the rest of the mission waiting for a moment that would never come.

Three weeks, and he was already running out of excuses.