Chapter 263 - Home Cooking

Athan's apartment on Genesis Platform in the asteroid belt still felt like home. The rug was new. Luca noticed it on the way in because his dad did not buy rugs on impulse. The smell of garlic and olive oil wafted through the kitchen, mingling with the faint aroma of recently boiled pasta.

Luca sat at the table with Emily on his left and Matteo across from him, working through a bowl of pasta that was, by a wide margin, the best thing he had eaten in six months. Alessio was next to Matteo and had already finished two servings. He was now doing the thing where he tried not to look at the pot on the stove, which was exactly the same as looking at it.

Athan placed the salad on the table and sat back down.

"So," Luca said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. "How's business going?"

His dad's face tightened at the edges. Luca had been reading that expression his whole life. Athan had good news and was deciding how much of it to hand over. A lot, apparently. Athan set his fork down.

"Better than ever," Athan said. "Two weeks to close a miner now, start to finish. We couldn't do that eight months ago."

"That's fast," Alessio said.

"The material intake is finally keeping up." Athan picked his fork back up. "We have more gas harvesters running, mining ops around the belt are feeding the furnaces around the clock. We scaled fabrication capacity ahead of everything else, which made sense at the time." He paused. "Now the constraint is personnel. We have to run background checks, skills assessments, and onboarding. Fabrication is sitting at eighteen percent utilization, waiting for qualified operators."

"So you're building ships faster than you can crew them," Luca said.

"For now. The pipeline catches up eventually. But right now, yes."

"Seems like a good problem to have."

Emily was watching Athan with the same attention she gave anything worth taking seriously. She already knew his dad. She knew the apartment, knew what Athan cooking meant, knew how the whole place changed when there was food on the table and too many people in the room. That part wasn't new. Luca kept looking at her and landed on the same thought.

He had told her in the shuttle on the way over that he was going to tell his dad tonight. She had taken his hand, squeezed once, and gone back to her tablet. That was all the conversation either of them had needed.

Luca reached over and put his hand on Emily's arm. She turned her hand under his and caught his fingers for a second before letting go.

His dad noticed.

There it was. No cleaner approach was coming. Might as well take the shot.

"I asked Emily to marry me," Luca said. "Before we left, back at Sandworth."

Matteo stopped with his fork halfway up. Alessio looked up with bread still in his hand. Athan looked at Luca, then at Emily, and went still for half a second. Luca knew that look. His dad was already working through it before anybody else had finished hearing it. Yeah. There it was.

Emily met Athan's eyes without flinching. She was better than Luca at this part, and that was fine. It was one of the reasons he was marrying her.

"She said yes," Luca added.

"About time," Matteo said.

Alessio went red all at once. He looked at his bread, then at Emily, then back at the bread. Then he started clapping.

It startled everyone, and it must have surprised Alessio as well, but he kept going because he'd already committed and there was no graceful way out. Emily laughed. Athan reached across the table and took Luca's hand and held it for a moment.

"Congratulations," he said, then he looked at Emily. "Welcome to the family. Properly, this time."

"Thank you, Athan," she said.

He sat back and thought about it. That was normal. Athan never rushed a decision and never treated surprise as an objection. He wanted to look at it from every side first. What was Luca supposed to do with that, hurry him? Fine. Luca could live with it.

"You're twenty," his dad said.

"I know, Dad."

"The System changed things," Athan said. "You two are young. I was going to say too young. Then I remembered what the world is now." He looked at Emily. "I trust you both."

"But?" Luca said.

"I'd have said the same thing at thirty." Athan picked up his wine and raised it. "When are you thinking?"

Luca looked at Emily.

"We don't know exactly," she said. "We haven't had a chance to think about logistics. We're about to leave for two years."

"Not before we leave," Luca said quickly. "And once we're out there, we'll be a little busy."

Matteo had gone back to his pasta with a small grin on his face. Good enough.

"There's no ring," Matteo said.

"Yeah, I know," Luca said. "We'll figure that out."

"When we come back," Emily said. "That's when. When we come back, we'll get married then."

Athan nodded once. Good. That worked for him. It worked for Luca, too. Two years was a long time, but Luca already knew what came after it.

"You know," Alessio said, "Luca's the captain. You can technically just marry each other on the ship. Right now. Or whenever."

Everyone looked at him.

"What? He can. It's a thing." Alessio gestured at Luca with his bread. "Captain's authority and all that. You don't even need a priest."

"We're not doing that," Emily said.

"I'm just saying it's an option."

"It's not an option," Luca said.

"It's technically an option. Dad could do it, he's the commander."

Athan set his wine glass down. "Take it slowly," he said.

Luca had heard that tone his whole life. His dad said the thing once and left it there. Good enough.

Nobody mentioned the Vault or the Varnathi. Nobody said Proxima b, or the planet that ate metal for breakfast, or the sleeping aliens waiting inside that buried structure. Matteo knew Luca was leaving again. Alessio knew the ship was going out. But neither had been told what the real mission was.

Tonight, the focus was on the pasta, garlic, his dad's new rug, Emily at his side, and a few hours where they didn't have to focus on the roster, the teams, or which department each potential recruit would report to.

When the plates were empty, Luca moved to the couch and Emily came with him. She sat against his side, and he took her hand and laced their fingers together on her knee.

Alessio got the third serving he had been planning the whole time.

Five kilometers from the Genesis Platform, the Triumph of Darron was taking on cargo.

Izumi was running the hangar bay herself. She stood at the edge of the deck, calling corrections to the dropship pilots as they maneuvered into the interior. Pallets of MREs came down on the loading lifts in batches, the gourmet stock they had spec'd out in Washington, dense and varied and good enough that the crew might actually look forward to eating them, which was a real engineering problem that Karen had solved by throwing money at it. Frozen goods followed, protein and preserved stocks going straight to the lower decks in climate-sealed containers.

Luca sat at the head of the table in the tactical room in jeans and a gray hoodie, which was a pity because Emily had never returned his red one, though he had caught her wearing it from time to time. Emily had her legs tucked under her in the chair to his left, a binder open and scattered across the large table. Ryan was reclining and about to put his boots up on the table until Zoe kicked them off without breaking eye contact with her tablet. Danny had his computer on a pile of notebooks by his side. Chris had a coffee and said very little that morning. Joey looked bored.

Ellie sat near the wall beside Danny with a fresh pad of her own in her lap. She had accepted the role yesterday. Today she was already working.

"Los Soñadores are in," Emily said, spinning her chair toward Luca.

"Agreed." Luca pulled up their file. The Arecibo crew was rebuilding the observatory with their own credits, while everyone else wrote Puerto Rico off as a portal zone. They'd spent about ten seconds being excited to meet the Triumph crew before they started asking operational questions. Good. That was how you knew they were real. "There are seven of them. Isabel for geology, Alejandro for data science, and Sofia for life support. That's your science team, Danny. Camila, Diego, Miguel, and Rosa go to engineering."

Sofia. Luca looked at Chris, who was staring down at his notebook, which he hadn't written anything in. Then he looked at Ellie, who had her pad balanced on her knee and was still writing.

"Camila's cross-trained in fabrication," Ryan said without looking up. "She'll be useful."

"Done. What about Sabrina?"

Ryan looked up. He did his best to make it casual. He mostly succeeded. Amateur.

"Yes," Luca said. "Let's make sure she gets the invite."

Ryan grinned.

"Don't get any ideas," Emily said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You have many ideas."

"None of which I'm acting on," Ryan said. "Right?"

Zoe turned to the next file. "Toronto. The first team of four had potential. The Aurora Rangers, no."

"The Rangers are settled," Luca said. "They've already put roots down. They didn't want to come anyway."

"They really didn't," Danny said. "The interview notes were one long polite no."

"First team stays on the maybe list," Emily said. "If we're short."

"Iron Timber Crew," Emily said quickly. The Marquette kids, five of them, all of them would now be eighteen, standing up straight and paying attention before anybody told them to. She looked up and grinned at Zoe across the table.

"Yes," Zoe said.

"Alex, Jason, Mark, and Sarah," Emily said, tapping through the file. "Alex is on facilities, Jason on communications, Mark on logistics. Sarah, I want for recreation."

Danny looked up from his tablets. "Recreation?"

"Yes," Emily said. "Crew morale, programming, events. On a ship with a hundred people in deep space for two years, recreation is a job. A real one."

"Okay."

"I'm putting them under my department," Emily said. "It's operations work."

Luca watched her make the call without looking at him for permission, because she did not need it.

"What about Jake?" Zoe asked, pulling up the Desert Sparks file.

"Desert Sparks," Luca said. "Yes." He had been with Gabriela at the defense in the Agua Dulce canyons against the overflow on the terrain she'd grown up in. He did not need to read her assessment. "Gabriela for structural engineering, Natalia for energy systems, Valeria for manufacturing. All three under Ryan."

"Great," Ryan said.

"Jake... we'll find a job for him," Luca said.

"I'll put him in recreation."

A brief silence.

"Really?" Ryan asked.

"Really."

Ryan picked up his coffee and said nothing else about it.

Amari's team went into the maybe column. Caleb's team stayed there too. The Windward Collective came up. Six of them, Lars and his team, the ecologists and exobiologists they'd met on the predawn run by Lac Léman.

"In," Ellie said.

Everyone looked at her.

She kept her eyes on the assessment. "The biology coverage is exactly what we need. Anika for exobiology, Freya for the greenhouses, Karin for exoplanetary ecology, Lars for medical ecology, Samuel for systems ecology." She looked up at Danny. "This is the biology team. These are the people who run the long-term research."

Danny was nodding before she finished. "Jonas goes under Ryan for propulsion?"

"His specs say yes," Ryan said.

"Windward Collective is in," Luca said.

Emily made the note.

Luca set down his tablet and looked around the table. "Before we keep going. Danny, Ellie." He waited until they both looked at him. "The science programs."

Danny straightened.

"Everyone on that ship is going to be in portal rotations when we land," Luca said. "That's still the fastest way to level, and nobody's pretending otherwise. We've already done the initial survey and we still have that data." He looked at the two of them. "But this is different. We're going back to establish a permanent outpost, and I want all of it. What can hurt us, what can kill us, what can feed us. Every species, every sample, every reading, done properly. Good science XP is real XP, and the people who come after us shouldn't have to relearn what we already found out the hard way."

Ellie had her pen out. She was already writing.

"Once we hit our destination," Luca continued, "your first priorities are ecological analysis and self-sustainability. Plant life, water sources, mineral survey, and edible resources. I want to know what the planet can feed us with before we're two months in and still eating MREs."

"That's the Windward Collective's first brief," Ellie said.

"Exactly. And before anyone gets excited about bringing Earth crops to an alien planet." He looked at Danny, who already knew this, and then at Ellie, who was nodding slowly. "We're not doing that. No Earth crops in an alien biosphere. We eat what the planet can give us, or we eat what we brought." He looked around the table. "We are not introducing Earth biology to that planet."

"That is," Danny said, "the scientifically correct call."

"I know. Danny, make sure Ellie sees the science deck, the hydroponics, and all the lab setups."

Ellie was still writing. Her pen barely stopped moving.

They were still working through the list when Luca set down his tablet.

"Infrastructure," he said.

Zoe looked up.

"Hyeon is delivering the tent systems," Luca said. "Military-grade, semipermanent, rated for hostile environments. That's phase one. We land, we clear the overflows in the area, we secure a perimeter, and we plant the Territory Control Tower." He set his hand on the folder Angelo had given him in Detroit. "That's when the bootstrap happens."

Nobody asked what he meant by that. They all knew.

"Once the TCT is up and the System store is on-site, Ryan starts fabricating from local materials. We're not buying a colony out of the System catalog. We're building the capacity to build." He looked at Ryan. "That was always the plan."

Ryan nodded once.

"The tents are temporary infrastructure," Luca continued. "But our goal from day one is to secure the site and establish the tower. Everything else grows from that."

He looked at Danny and Zoe. "Pull up the Proxima b site assessments. Atmospheric maps, resource distribution, geological stability, water. The full package." He glanced at Ellie, who had stopped writing. "I want Ellie's eyes on it. We've done the analysis, but she hasn't seen it yet and I want a fresh read before we commit to a landing zone."

Danny was already reaching for his tablet. Zoe pulled up a holographic panel, and the star system replaced the cargo manifest in the center of the table. Proxima b rotated slowly, surface bands of rust and shadow, the survey overlays Danny had built over months of telemetry layered on top: temperature gradients, wind patterns, mineral surveys, and tectonic fault lines.

Ellie set down her pad. She looked at Luca. "What exactly is the mission?"

The table went quiet.

Luca looked at her for a beat. She'd been in the room for two hours, taking notes on a deployment she didn't fully understand.

"I thought you'd have guessed by now," he said, grinning.

She waited.

He leaned back in his chair. "You know that blip. The anomaly. The signal you pulled from our telemetry that everyone said was instrument drift." He watched her face. "You were right. It's a signal, a communication signal. From a structure on Proxima b." He kept his voice easy. "We're going back to defrost a bunch of aliens we found there."

Ellie stared at him.

"Aliens," she said.

"Aliens," he said.

"How many?"

"About a thousand."