Chapter 261 - Epilogue to Book 4

The restaurant on Habitation Module I of the Genesis Platform had a waitlist now.

Karen had gotten a table because Athan owned the platform, which was the only reason anyone got a table on short notice anymore. The place was full, with standing room at the bar. The noise of conversations layered over each other, silverware and glasses, the low hum of people who had somewhere to be and were taking a moment not to be there.

A month ago, she could have walked in at any hour and had her pick of seats.

She looked at the room the way she looked at a production report, because it was the same thing. The new faces wore new uniforms, the IFC recruitment she'd pushed through in the spring. A woman at the corner table had the bright stripe of the Resource Guild on her shoulder. The two men at the bar were wearing Solvang's field grey, which meant advance scouts, which meant Henrik had gotten the expansion teams moving ahead of schedule. A table of eight near the window were all wearing the same thing, and she spent two seconds on it before she registered the crest: one of the new engineering subsidiaries, the ones she'd been onboarding since recruitment opened. Three weeks ago they hadn't been here. Now they were eating dinner on the platform they'd just signed on to work on.

"The food's better," Michael said.

Karen looked up from the corner table long enough to try it. The food was better.

"Izumi's company," Athan said. "Hyeon started running logistics for us a week ago. Platform provisioning, inbound logistics, all of it." He cut some bread and didn't eat it. "They're efficient."

"It shows," Karen said. She looked back at the room.

Athan turned the bread in his hands without eating it. He'd been doing that since they sat down.

The three of them had been neighbors once, back in New Hampshire, in the years before the System arrived and nobody knew what anything meant yet. A cul-de-sac of people trying to figure out what the same rules did to different lives. Karen had known Maddie Rossi before she knew most of the rest of it. Before the IFC and the Genesis Platform, before any of this. She'd known her when Luca was born and Maddie was alive and the biggest thing Athan was building was a deck extension on the back of the house.

That was a long time ago.

"How's production?" Michael asked.

Athan set the bread down. "Ahead," he said. "Second consecutive quarter. I moved two more bays to ship frame last week." He paused. "We have more to work with than the original build schedule assumed."

"How far ahead?"

"Six weeks, maybe eight." He picked up the bread again. "I keep telling myself I'm going to ease off the schedule. Then I look at the order queue and it keeps getting longer."

Karen understood that precisely. She had the belt orbitals and the Kuiper platforms on her desk, three more in active development, the Moon academy already over-enrolled, and the campus hadn't even broken ground yet. There was always more.

She'd spent today in back-to-back calls with her engineering directors, walking the Kuiper siting data against deployment windows. She'd had fourteen separate conversations about belt station architecture, two of which had devolved into actual arguments she'd had to resolve by declaring a position and ending the call.

Michael's hand found hers under the table. She let it stay.

"Luca's at Saturn," she said. "Refueling before the recruitment offers go out."

Athan nodded. He had been tracking his kids.

"The tour's done," she said. "Earth's unified. Planetary tower is up. Recruitment's open." She looked at her glass. "We got what we came for."

The table was quiet for a moment.

"Your kid did it," she said, quieter. "Your kid went out there at twenty years old and he held that whole tour together and he gave us this." She looked at Athan. "Maddie would have been so proud of him."

She hadn't meant to say it quite like that. She'd meant to say something more controlled.

Athan didn't answer right away. He looked at the table. He turned the bread in his hands one more time and set it down for good.

"Yeah," he said. He cleared his throat. "She would have been."

He looked at the restaurant around them. All of it, the new uniforms and the full tables and the noise that hadn't been here a year ago.

"She would have wanted to see this," he said. He wasn't talking to Karen or Michael. He said it to whatever he looked at when the loss was right in front of him. "All of this."

Karen said nothing. Some things you let sit.

Michael refilled Athan's glass without asking.

They sat with it for a moment, the three of them, while the room moved around them.

The officer's deck pool had a view of Saturn that Luca still couldn't understand.

The rings caught the light at this angle in a way that made them look lit from the inside, a wide pale arc above the curve of the planet, and every twenty minutes or so he'd surface from whatever was happening with Emily just long enough to register it through the viewport and think: yeah, that's still there. Then she’d shift her hips, or drag her nails down the back of his neck, and the entire universe narrowed back down to the warm press of her body.

Her arms were locked around his neck, legs tight around his waist, ankles crossed at the small of his back. The water was deliciously warm, almost body temperature, lapping gently against their skin. The ship’s low hum vibrated somewhere beneath them, but nothing and no one needed anything from him right now.

He was still figuring out what to do with that.

Pixel was stretched along the poolside, her tail drifting in the water, watching the deep end.

In the deep end, Alessio's team was being sixteen years old at considerable volume.

Luca knew their names now. He'd made a point of it in the first ten minutes. Jordan was the one explaining the physics of a perfect cannonball to anyone within range, which was nobody, but Jordan didn't need an audience to have strong opinions. Bob had said about twelve words since they got in and appeared to find this sufficient. Priya, in her own world, swimming laps. Phil was the one responsible for the wave that had soaked the pool deck twenty minutes ago and was clearly scouting her second attempt.

And Alessio was in the middle of all of it, which was where Alessio always was.

He was sixteen, Level 32, with his next portals on the Moon. Right now he was in a pool orbiting Saturn having the time of his life.

Good for him. He should be.

Danny was floating on his back in the shallow end with a drink balanced on his chest, watching the ceiling.

Joey was in one of the chairs with wings and a beer.

Emily kissed Luca.

He forgot about Saturn entirely.

Five months across twenty-two countries, every panel and recruitment interview. Every morning Chris had knocked at six and somebody's coffee wasn't ready. The tour had been real. The recruits were real. And now the tour was done and Earth was unified and the Planetary Control Tower was up over Nairobi and Titan was finished and he was in a pool orbiting Saturn with his fiancée holding on to him.

"We're short on toothpaste," Emily said, at some point between them.

He didn't say anything.

"Not critically, but we're going to run out."

"How much are we missing?" he asked her.

"About thirty percent of what we need for a hundred people on a two-year mission."

"Okay."

"And we're going to need more deodorant."

"Alright."

"We should order it before Ryan comes, or he's going to demand we get that spray stuff again."

Luca kissed her instead of answering. She kissed him back.

Ryan, Chris, and Zoe had headed down to Europa on a very important quest, and moments later, the door opened, and they all came in at once.

Ryan came through first, still in his jacket from the shuttle, already pulling it off, and then stopped at the table by the entrance to make himself a margarita.

Zoe and Chris came through behind him, and then Matteo, who walked through the door and stopped, because through the viewport was Saturn, and Saturn was doing what it did.

Matteo's team filed in behind him. Evan and Sarah Chen and Jules and Samira, all of them registering the pool and the rings beyond the viewport in various stages of the same delayed reaction.

In the deep end, Alessio's team immediately started yelling.

Zoe walked past everyone, removed her shirt, and once she was in her swimsuit, dropped into a crouch beside Pixel and lay down across her side. Pixel adjusted approximately two inches and settled back into her original position.

Pixel's tail moved once.

Ryan sat down with his margarita, looking at the rings.

Matteo still hadn't moved.

"Hey Matteo," Luca said. "Welcome."

"That's," Matteo started. He looked out the viewport for another second. "Okay. Yeah."

He looked at the pool, at Emily holding onto Luca, at Zoe sprawled across Pixel by the viewport.

"What?" he asked. "Pool? Why?"

"Pool," Luca confirmed. Emily hadn't adjusted her grip. Neither had he. "Come on in. Water's great."

Matteo's team had already spread toward the deep end to get absorbed into whatever Alessio's crew had going. Matteo looked at Luca for a moment.

"Anastasia's not here?" Luca asked.

"Yeah." He set his bag down. "We found out. At Europa." The way he said it, he had already processed it. "She was never—there was nothing there. I was an idiot."

"Matt—"

"No, it's fine." He shrugged. "Total idiot."

Evan reached back and punched him in the shoulder. "It was her eyes," he said. "She had gorgeous eyes."

Matteo went pink.

"Incredible eyes," Evan continued. "He never stood a chance."

"I'm fine, everyone's fine." Matteo's voice had gotten slightly more formal. "There was nothing between us anyway. So." He lifted both hands. "Whatever."

Luca looked at him for a second. He was eighteen and processing it the only way he could, which was forward.

"I'm sorry, Matt."

"Don't be." Matteo picked his bag back up. "Swimsuits?"

"Changing room off the corridor."

He went, and his team followed, one by one. He was soon back through the door, holding a folded towel very close to him.

"Who chose these?" he asked.

Luca looked at him. "What?"

Matteo raised the towel. "Where did these come from?"

It was a speedo. He was actually wearing it.

From the pool stairs, without opening her eyes: "Rio." Zoe lifted her sunglasses. "Don't you love them?"

Matteo stared at her, then at Luca. Behind him, his team appeared in the doorway, less abashed by the tiny outfits than he was making it out to be. Sarah Chen was wearing whatever tiny purple thing Zoe had left for her. Jules appeared wearing his blue speedo and shrugged.

Matteo opened his mouth.

Ryan set the margarita down, stood up, walked over to Matteo, put him in a headlock, and walked him off the pool's edge.

"Ryan—"

Matteo went in sideways, still holding the towel. He came up with his hair plastered flat and found Luca across the pool. The speedos had been a known quantity since Rio.

Behind him, Sarah Chen looked at the pool, then at Jules, and jumped in. Jules followed immediately. Evan came through the door already moving. Samira dropped her towel to no one and launched off the pool's edge.

In the deep end, Alessio's team lost their minds.

"We have to order the uniforms," Emily said.

Ryan, treading water in the shallow end, looked up.

She still hadn't moved from her position, and Luca did not mind, not one bit. She had also not, until this moment, needed to. "The color coding is finalized. Captain, my captain," she said, kissing him again. "Wears silver accents. My team, red. Danny's science division, orange. Zoe's bridge and navigation crew, bright green. Joey's medical, blue."

Zoe spoke from the pool stairs without opening her eyes. "Love it."

"Those all make sense," Ryan said carefully.

"Chris's team," Emily said, in the same tone, "Fitness and Security."

Ryan's expression went to Chris, not Emily. "Fitness is under Chris?" he asked with a note of incredulity.

"Security, communications, and physical readiness."

"He's going to destroy us," Ryan said, pointing at Chris. "You know that. He's going to call it unit cohesion, and it's going to be 0500 burpees until somebody dies from exertion."

"Physical readiness falls under field operations," Emily stated. It wasn't up for discussion. "His team will wear pink."

Chris, who had been enjoying the momentary power granted to him by Emily, coughed up his drink from the pool's edge and sat up. "Pink?" he asked.

"It's distinct, feels non-threatening," Emily said.

"So does black."

"Black is threat. Pink is identification."

"Red is threat. I can be threatening and identified."

"You can have your team visible across a hundred-person crowd," Emily said, explaining what was already obvious; this wasn't up for discussion, and Luca still wasn't sure if anyone would fight her about the choices.

"Engineering," Emily continued, "is yellow."

Ryan's expression said the rest.

"Can I—"

"No," Emily and Zoe said, in exact unison, neither of them looking at the other.

Ryan looked at Luca.

"I'm silver," Luca said. "I don't have a vote."

"You're the captain."

"Apparently, that comes with silver and no input on anything else."

Ryan looked at the water for a moment. Chris had gotten in now, all the way, and was doing a slow lap, already at peace and likely convinced that pink was going to be great on him.

Ryan absorbed that. "Fine," he said. "Yellow."

"Thank you," Emily said, and pulled Luca back in. Alessio shouted CANNONBALL at the volume of someone who had been timing this.

Luca had one second.

Alessio launched off the edge, curled tight, hit the water three feet away. The wave rolled across the shallow end. Emily gasped against his mouth. They both went under and came up to the tail end of the impact still coming down around them.

From the shallow end, Matteo surfaced from where he'd been talking to Ryan. He looked at Luca, then at the door ten feet behind him.

"Don't," Luca said.

Matteo got out of the pool.

"Matteo—"

He ran three steps, tucked, and hit the water. The wave was significantly larger than Alessio's. The pool deck got soaked. So did Zoe and Pixel. Zoe lifted her sunglasses, looked at the water dripping from her hand, and lay back down.

Matteo surfaced, grinning, the Rossi version, the one that didn't make it all the way and didn't need to. He looked at Luca across the pool.

Luca looked back at him. Eighteen years old and Level 56. He'd handled it. Izumi was still going to want to debrief him. That was going to be a different conversation entirely.

"Nice form," Luca said.

"Thank you," Matteo said.

The afternoon settled and drinks kept coming. Wings and pizza arrived shortly after, two enormous trays that Joey had produced without announcement and which were gone within the hour without anyone formally acknowledging they'd happened.

Joey had barely moved. Danny was at the shallow end stairs, deep in something with Sarah Chen. Chris was in the deep end with Matteo and the kids. Zoe was on Pixel. Ryan had his drink.

Luca had Emily.

He also had, in the corner of his vision, Alessio in the deep end with a piña colada.

He looked at it, then at Alessio, who was already watching him over the rim of the glass with the specific expression of a sixteen-year-old who had made a calculated decision and was committing to it.

Luca reached out and took the glass out of his hand.

"Hey!"

"I'm not getting you drunk on my ship."

"It's barely even a drink! It's basically juice!"

"It has rum in it."

"There's like a tablespoon of rum."

"One tablespoon," Luca said, "is a tablespoon too many. You're sixteen."

"But we're in space!"

"You're on my ship."

Alessio looked around for support. Jordan was not going to help him, and neither was Bob. Priya had already turned away and was doing her drill again. Phil was grinning.

"You don't even have soda," Alessio said.

"I know." Luca looked at Emily.

"I know," she said. She had already adjusted her grip to reach for her tablet, which was on the pool's edge, because Emily always had her tablet within reach. "I'm adding it to the list."

"Soda," he said.

"Soda," she confirmed, then kissed him.

He had Matteo across the pool, laughing like he hadn't five minutes ago.

He had all of them, here, where nothing was asking anything from him for once.

He let it stay that way.

Saturn turned in the window.