Chapter 23 - Survey Protocols and Scotch

"The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination."

—John Schaar

Ryan was the first one through the door, already talking. Something about power distribution curves, because Ryan couldn't walk into a room without announcing whatever his brain had been chewing on for the last hour. He dropped into his usual seat with all the grace of a bag of tools and kept going. Luca wasn't sure the guy had stopped to breathe.

Danny came in next, hair still wet from the shower, and Chris gave him a nod from across the table like they'd been mid-conversation somewhere else. They probably had been. Those two could pick up a thread from three days ago without missing a beat, which was either impressive or deeply annoying depending on Luca's mood.

Emily slid into the seat to his right and powered up her tablet. Back in XO mode. Straight posture, eyes already scanning data. She gave him a small smile as she settled in, and Luca's brain did the thing where it tried to think about deployment schedules and her face at the same time and failed at both.

Zoe showed up last. She walked in like she owned the ship, claimed the seat beside Danny, and their shoulders almost touched when she sat down. Danny's back straightened about half an inch. Luca filed that away for later mockery.

Joey appeared from the galley wiping his hands on a towel, flour on his sleeve and something warm and yeasty trailing behind him. Luca's stomach growled before his brain could catch up. It had to be donuts, and probably space donuts at that, which tracked.

Luca stood up and put his palms flat on the table. The metal was warm under his hands, and his pulse was doing something unhelpful in his throat. He'd rehearsed this in his head twice already and it had sounded fine both times.

"We all know what we're here for," Luca said. "The System caps Earth at level 60, and this is our shot to break that ceiling." He paused and let that land. "But none of that happens if we screw up the charter. The IFC is waiting, Karen is waiting. We're paying for this ship with data, survey results, and deliverables. So if we want to go back into those portals and level up, we need to get this survey done."

He tapped his laptop and the main screen flickered to life with a PowerPoint slide he'd thrown together at two in the morning. The font was too small. The list was too long. Probes, satellites, telescopes, sensor packages, dozens of things that needed to work perfectly in a star system none of them had ever seen. He should have made two slides. He did not make two slides.

"Primary objective is a complete inventory of all survey equipment. Every probe, every deployable satellite, every sensor package." He pulled up the deployment schedules, which looked slightly more professional than the inventory slide because Emily had helped with those. "The window for data collection is just over three months, but Alpha Centauri is enormous. If we find any planets with an atmosphere or in the habitable zone, we'll need to land, and that eats into survey time."

Danny's brow furrowed, and Luca braced himself because that was Danny's "I have concerns" face. "The calibration windows are razor-thin, Luca. The optical arrays alone are going to need three or four days of fine-tuning, and that's assuming we don't run into any hardware issues."

Three or four days just to point the telescopes in the right direction. Fantastic. "Better to know what we're dealing with now than to find out we're flying blind when we arrive," Luca said, and that came out sounding almost like a real captain, which was suspicious. "I'm dividing us into teams. Joey, Chris, and Zoe, you're handling the hangar and storage bays. Satellites, the Peregrine, the Percival, and long-range probes. Danny and Ryan, you're on the science labs. All the precision instruments, the sensitive equipment that needs kid gloves."

He wanted everything catalogued. Model numbers, serial numbers, condition assessments. If a screw was loose somewhere on this ship, he wanted to know about it before they hit the system, not after. The IFC was going to scrutinize every data point they sent back, and Luca was not about to give Karen a reason to pull their funding.

"Define 'kid gloves' when you're talking about quantum resonance scanners," Ryan said.

"The kind that don't involve taking things apart to see how they work," Emily said without missing a beat.

"I haven't broken anything important in at least a day."

That was probably true. The "important" was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

"Questions?" Luca asked.

Nobody said anything. Either the plan made sense or they were all too polite to tell him it didn't. He chose to believe the first one.

He powered down the display. "Inventory work starts tomorrow. We've got three weeks to make sure everything actually functions when we need it to."

Chairs scraped against the deck plating as everyone stood and grabbed their stuff. The mess hall filled with the shuffle of tablets being tucked under arms and conversations already shifting to work mode. Luca stayed where he was and watched them file out, their voices fading down the corridor until the only sound left was the steady thrum of the FTL drive through the hull.

His hands were still on the table. He realized he'd been gripping the edge and made himself let go.

Emily hadn't moved. She sat in the seat to his right, green eyes on her tablet, scrolling through inventory lists like the room hadn't just emptied around her. The quiet settled between them and Luca became very aware of the fact that they were alone.

"Deployment schedules," she said without looking up. "We need to prioritize the automated sequences."

Luca lowered himself back into his chair. She turned the tablet toward him and leaned in to point at different sections of the timeline, and her shoulder pressed against his. He could smell whatever she used in her hair, something clean, and his brain helpfully decided to stop processing the deployment data.

"The gravitational wave detectors are the most sensitive to initial conditions," she said. "If we can get them deployed and calibrated early, they can run autonomous surveys while we focus on the visual spectrum work."

"Gravitational wave detectors first," he said. "Because apparently the hardest thing to set up is the thing we need running first."

Her finger traced across the screen and Luca watched her hand instead of the data. He knew he was watching her hand instead of the data. He kept doing it anyway. "The optical arrays are going to need constant babysitting," she continued. "Danny's going to be pulling long shifts just to keep them aligned."

"He can handle it." His voice came out rougher than he meant it to. Danny had more patience for technical details than the rest of them combined, which was good, because Luca's patience for calibration windows could be measured in minutes.

Emily looked up from the tablet, and their faces were a lot closer than he'd accounted for. Her eyes did that thing where they made deployment timelines seem like a waste of time. "What about you? Think you can handle three months of being cooped up in this tin can with all of us?"

She wasn't talking about the crew in general and they both knew it.

"I think I can manage," he said, quieter now. "The company's not terrible."

Her lips curved. She shifted in her chair, angling toward him. "I'll take that. For now."

"I aim to please," he said, and then immediately wanted to throw himself out an airlock because what kind of line was that. Emily laughed, and the sound did something to his chest that he refused to examine.

"Do you now?" There was mischief in her voice. Actual, deliberate mischief. Then her foot moved under the table and her bare toes pressed against his calf, and every thought he'd ever had about deployment schedules evaporated.

His face got hot. Emily's smile said she'd noticed. Her foot stayed where it was.

"I'm just reviewing deployment schedules," she said. "Important XO business."

"You're going to be the death of me," he said, quiet enough that it didn't carry past the two of them.

"That's the plan."

The mess hall door hissed open and Luca flinched hard enough to knock his knee against the table. Emily's foot vanished from his leg so fast he almost believed he'd imagined it, but the warmth still sat on his skin like proof. Zoe burst through the doorway with a bottle of amber liquid held above her head like she'd just pulled Excalibur from a stone.

"Found our alcohol stash!" She was grinning like the bottle had personally wronged her and she'd won.

Emily leaned back in her chair. There was color in her cheeks that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago. Luca grabbed his tablet and stared at it like it contained something interesting.

The rest of the crew filtered back in behind Zoe, drawn by the announcement and the basic human instinct to appear anywhere free booze might be involved. Ryan appeared in the doorway, his eyes locked onto the bottle immediately. "Please tell me that's not cooking sherry."

"Single malt Scotch," Zoe said, setting the bottle on the table hard enough that it thunked against the metal. "Eighteen years old. And apparently Joey's personal stash, based on where I found it."

Joey went red from his neck to his hairline. "That was supposed to be for special occasions," he said, though he didn't sound as upset as the words suggested.

"What's more special than humanity's first interstellar voyage?" Chris asked, completely deadpan, which meant he was enjoying this.

Luca cleared his throat and stood up again. Apparently, it was captain mode again. He could do captain mode. He'd literally just done captain mode five minutes ago. "This is exactly why we need rules." He looked around the table and tried to project authority, which was hard when his calf still felt warm. "Alcohol is only permitted in the lounge. No exceptions. And only if someone sponsors the night with their personal stash."

He was making this up as he went. It sounded reasonable. He committed to it. "Supply is limited to what each of us brought. But if you choose to sponsor a party or celebration, your drinks get shared out. And absolutely no drinking during work hours or outside the lounge. Inventory starts first thing tomorrow, and I need everyone sharp."

Zoe nodded. "Fair enough. We're not exactly in a position to call for backup if someone gets stupid."

"The lounge does need a proper christening," Joey said, perking up. "Once we get the inventory work sorted, maybe we could have a proper crew night. Toast to making it this far."

Emily looked up from her tablet. "We've earned it," she said. She was looking at the table when she said it, not at Joey or anyone in particular.

Luca caught her eye. She hadn't forgotten any more than he had. He looked back at the crew before that went somewhere it shouldn't in front of six other people.

"Once inventory is complete," he agreed. "We earn our celebration first."

The crew scattered again, lighter this time. Zoe tucked the bottle under her arm and headed for the lounge while Joey trailed behind her, already talking about what he called "appropriate celebration donuts," which Luca's stomach endorsed wholeheartedly.