Chapter 7 - Regret

Luca straightened from the console, Emily's hand on his arm. He pushed the thought away. His crew needed him focused on what came next, not dwelling on dead soldiers who'd made a stupid tactical call.

"You good?" Emily kept her voice low.

"I'm alright," he replied.

He rolled his shoulders slowly, his back aching from where he'd hit the deck. The bridge looked like hell. Every panel flashed warnings he didn't know how to read, the emergency lighting turned everything the color of a nosebleed, and the air still tasted like something electrical had died.

"Status report," Luca said, like he knew what to do with one.

Ryan looked like he'd crawled out of an engine compartment and forgotten to come back to life. Grease streaked his face and the circles under his eyes had circles. "Thrusters are stable," he reported. "We're maintaining full burn, but the power distribution is still sketchy as hell. Could lose it at any moment."

Great, so they were flying on a prayer.

Danny was slumped against the wall, pale under the freckles, his red hair practically glowing in the emergency lighting. He looked like he should be unconscious, but his eyes tracked everything. "Life support is holding. Air recycling is at eighty percent and climbing. We're good for now."

The Mission Charter notification chose that moment to pulse in his interface, a gentle blue glow that felt almost mocking. He blinked it open, the familiar text scrolling past before he'd fully processed what he was looking at.

[Mission: Alpha Centauri Survey Expedition]
Checkpoint 1: Depart Sol System with a qualified crew - [Pending]

The checkpoint was still pending. They were still in the asteroid belt, still in Sol, still running from people who wanted to take everything they'd built. The mission's first checkpoint required actually leaving the system, and they hadn't even managed that yet, which was just fantastic.

He forced himself to focus. Zoe was still glued to the navigation console, reading something on the sensor display that the rest of them were too tired or too stupid to see. She hadn't slept in at least two days. Luca was pretty sure she was running on spite alone.

"How far out are we?" he asked her.

"Still in the belt," she replied without looking up. "But we're making good time. Another six hours at this burn rate and we'll clear the outer markers. After that, it's open space to the Kuiper Belt, then we align to the Oort Cloud Passage."

He could do six hours, probably, maybe, if his body and brain agreed to keep pretending they worked.

His thoughts snapped back to Genesis Platform, to Dad and his brothers. Were they safe? The last transmission had cut off mid-sentence, static swallowing whatever came next. He had no idea.

---

Luca wandered the ship's corridors without meaning to, following familiar routes he'd traveled hundreds of times while moving cargo and equipment during construction. But the Triumph felt different now, scarred by the electrical fire, marked by the violence that had come after. This wasn't the same ship he'd helped build. Eventually his feet carried him to the mess hall.

It had been almost twelve hours since they left the Genesis Platform, and the mess hall was a disaster. Every surface was buried under sealed crates and boxes they'd thrown in during the last few days before the UER showed up. The place looked like a storage unit, not somewhere people were supposed to eat and pretend things were normal.

Luca stared at it for too long, then looked away.

"This is depressing," Joey said, kicking at a box labeled 'Atmospheric Sample Containers' that had somehow ended up next to a large box that read 'Pasta'. "We've got a five-hundred-million-credit starship, and we're living like refugees."

Luca rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand and said nothing. Refugees was about right, and he hated how right it was.

"Come on, come on," muttered Ryan, tossing aside a box of water recycling filters. "I know I saw it somewhere..."

Luca leaned against the bulkhead and let his legs breathe. Every muscle in his body had stopped cooperating.

"What are you looking for?" Joey asked, settling onto the floor with his back against a crate marked 'Emergency Medical Supplies.'

"The most important piece of equipment on this entire ship," he replied, diving deeper into a storage locker. "More important than the reactor. More important than life support itself."

Luca cracked a tired smile.

Then Ryan emerged triumphant, holding a coffee percolator in one hand and a case of Folgers in the other, his grin wide enough to split his face.

Luca laughed. He hadn't expected it. Maybe he really was that tired.

"Coffee." Emily stopped moving. "Oh my God, actual coffee."

Zoe smiled, a real one, her whole face doing something Luca hadn't expected. Chris laughed out loud and the sound bounced off the metal walls. Even Danny, who usually preferred tea, looked like Ryan had just offered him salvation in a red tin.

"Ryan, I could kiss you right now," Joey said, and he sounded like he meant it.

"Let's save the romance for later." Ryan grinned. "First, we need water. Danny, can you get the dispensers working?"

Luca lifted his head from where he was slumped against a crate, eyes bloodshot, face pale. “No,” he rasped, barely audible at first. Then, with a little more force, he added, “As your captain, officially, I'm begging you, please, someone... anyone else make the coffee.”

Ryan blinked. "What? Why?"

"Because you make tar, man," Zoe said. "You know this. We know this. You know that we know this. You’ve gotta have a transmutation skill somewhere in your stat screen."

“It was...chewy,” Emily added diplomatically, then looked at Chris.

Chris strode forward and snatched the percolator away with a smirk. "Don’t worry, Captain. Some of us actually know how to brew coffee." He poured the grounds with careful, deliberate hands. "I got this."

Luca sagged in relief, eyes fluttering shut for a moment. He vaguely registered Ryan rolling his eyes, but his headache was a dull throb behind his temples, and he didn't have the energy to care. "Thank God. My body... can’t handle... mud."

The coffee grounds were dark and rich, and the moment Chris cracked the seal, Luca was back in New Hampshire, Mom at the kitchen counter in the morning, the biggest problem in his life being whether to have another cup or switch to hot chocolate.

"How long?" Emily asked, settling down beside him on the floor.

"A few more minutes," Chris said, leaning on the galley counter.

Luca's muscles had stopped shaking, which was something.

Nobody called a meeting. Everyone just ended up on the floor, leaning against crates and wedging themselves between boxes. It looked more like a campout than anything a captain should be running. Zoe sat cross-legged and somehow still looked alert, running on spite and whatever dark magic kept her functional. Chris sprawled out like he was at a beach.

"So," Ryan said, settling down with a satisfied grunt. If he was bitter about losing coffee duty, he didn’t show it. "What's the plan once we get clear of the asteroid belt?"

“First thing is to get the ship properly operational,” Luca said, accepting a steaming mug from Emily. The coffee hit his bloodstream like a rescue team. His whole body unclenched. “We’ve got maybe half our systems running.”

He sounded like he had a plan. He did not have a plan.

“The food preparation area needs to be set up,” Joey added. “We have fresh supplies, can’t let them rot.”

“Living quarters, too,” Emily said. “Our cabins aren’t set up yet, and we need to establish some kind of routine.”

Right, they needed food, beds, and systems that actually worked, all things a captain should have thought of before his crew did. The coffee was helping, at least.

"We've got time," Luca said, taking another sip. "Once we hit the Oort Cloud, it's three weeks to Alpha Centauri. Plenty of time to get organized and..."

The communications alert cut through the room, a sharp electronic scream that made everyone freeze. Emergency priority.

"Shit." Luca set down his coffee and scrambled to his feet. So much for the plan he didn't have.

The run back to the bridge took forever, or his legs made it feel that way. At least the caffeine was kicking in. His brain started cooperating somewhere around the second corridor.

Emily reached the communications console first, working the controls as she tried to clean up the incoming signal. Static filled the bridge, scratchy and thick, then slowly started to clear.

"This is Genesis Platform calling Triumph of Darron. Priority transmission for Captain Rossi. Please respond."

Luca's chest locked up. Even filtered through layers of interference and distance, he knew that voice. Dad was alive and calling them.

"Dad!" Luca said into the communicator, probably too loud and too eager, but he didn't care. "We're here. We're all here."

The response took several seconds, long enough for light to travel from their position to the Genesis Platform and back. When Dad's voice came through again, it was cleaner, the static mostly gone.

"Luca, listen carefully. Genesis Platform is secure. Repeat, Genesis Platform is secure. The attackers were not UER forces. We’re not sure who they were yet, but the situation is now under control."

They weren't UER. The relief hit him so hard his knees almost buckled and he grabbed the console to stay upright. They weren’t fugitives. They hadn’t gone rogue. They’d stumbled into somebody else’s war like idiots.

"The mission charter remains valid," Dad continued. "Proceed to Alpha Centauri as planned. You have full authorization and support. Do not return. I repeat, do not come back to the Genesis Platform. It’s not safe for you here at this time."

Luca slumped against the communications console. The mission was still on. That was everything.

"Your brothers are safe," Dad added, pausing before the next part. "Matteo... he’s alright."

He blinked. "Why wouldn’t he be?" he asked.

His kid brother had been in a firefight. That thought sat wrong no matter how he turned it. Matteo was seventeen. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near combat, and the fact that he’d apparently held his own while Luca was running away made something ugly twist in his gut.

“There’s something else,” Dad said. “Those two shuttles... the ones that were after you? They were on autopilot.”

“What do you mean?” Luca asked. “There were people on those shuttles.”

“No,” Dad replied. “They were set to disable your main engines. The raiders used our communications equipment to transmit your exact position and vector to the shuttles. Once you powered up, they would have locked onto your thermal signature. Collision course.”

“So when we fired the thrusters...” Luca stopped. He didn’t kill anyone. There was nobody to kill.

“They were shuttles,” Dad confirmed. “Weaponized decoys. It was a trap from the start. They were meant to disable the ship.”

Luca stared at the console. He kept seeing the plasma, the explosion, the debris field where two ships used to be, empty ships with no one inside. His hands shook anyway, and he shoved them under the edge of the console so nobody would notice.

“You need to keep moving, Luca,” Dad said. “I think you’re still being tracked.”

Tracked how was the question, and Luca suddenly wasn't sure he wanted the answer.

“Think,” his father pressed, voice dropping. “Think real hard. Which systems on the Triumph weren’t affected by the sabotage?”

“I don’t...” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Dad, I can’t, my head’s not working.”

“No,” Dad said. “You know what broke. I’m asking you what didn’t. The Triumph was fully geared and cleared, I told you that. The reactor, the engines, they were clean when you left. But the logs don’t lie. Someone compromised the ship, and they were surgical about it.”

A chill crawled across his skin. All those systems that went haywire, the fire, the shutdowns, none of it was random. Someone had picked the Triumph apart with precision while Luca's crew nearly burned alive.

“Think, Luca,” Dad repeated. “Which of your systems has been online this entire time? Running uninterrupted. Drawing auxiliary power.”

The answer was right there. He could almost touch it, but not quite.