Chapter 273 - Eighty Eight

Emily was already circulating through the arriving crew, tablet out, tracking names against her boarding manifest. She caught his eye across the hangar floor, and he crossed to her.

"Gear," he said, loud enough to carry across the nearest cluster of crew. The chatter settled. "Your personal equipment should be labeled. Find your bags, and grab them. Weapons and armor cases, follow Chris and Ryan to the armory at the aft of this deck and check them in. Everything gets logged in."

Chris was already at the armory access, tablet in hand.

The crew spread out across the hangar floor. The hangar filled with the sound of latches, rolling cases, and a few arguments over which bag was whose. It had the energy of a school trip with better weapons. That was bad operationally, hilarious personally, and also understandable, since seventy-nine crew had just boarded a system-upgraded starship for the first time. He could cut them some slack.

Pixel padded along beside him as he walked the floor.

Once all the weapons and armor had been catalogued and put away under lock and key, Luca led them up the internal stairwell rather than the lifts. The lifts would come later. He wanted them to understand the ship by moving through it.

One level up, at Deck 4, he stopped and gestured at the bulkhead door with the room label beside it:

04-110-2-Q
LAB-05

"Science deck," he said. "Danny and Eleanor will run the orientation down here. We'll do department tours in a few hours." He looked at the assembled faces. Most of them were curious, and a few were trying to see through the viewport beside the door. "One more deck."

He kept them moving.

At Deck 3, he stopped beside the first room label and let the group stack up behind him. The placard read:

03-110-6-L
SUP-01

Deck 3 was the habitation deck, and the first thing he noticed when the stairwell hatch opened was the smell. The herb garden beds flanking the mess hall entrance sent something sharp and green into the corridor, and for a second it cut through the recycled-air quality that came standard with every space installation he had ever been on. He watched people's faces change as they noticed it too.

The corridor itself was carpeted, a deep charcoal weave that swallowed footsteps, and the ceiling panels had warm circadian lighting that shifted by the hour. Acoustic paneling lined the upper walls at intervals. Small alcoves held desks and charging points. Conference room doors broke up the corridor at the middle and far end. Living walls ran in strips between the acoustic panels, dense enough to make the corridor feel planned.

Emily had been the one who pushed for this with Diana Hartwell.

Luca had sat beside her during that meeting, half convinced they were about to pay a terrifying amount of money for someone to say wood grain with a straight face. Then Emily had started asking questions about crew fatigue, privacy, noise, and where people would go when they were tired of other people, which was a hell of a thing to plan for before the crew had even boarded.

Now the deck smelled fresh, the voices were not bouncing off bare metal, and his ship looked like someone had cared about the people inside it.

His Emily had done that. Luca was absolutely going to be unbearable about it later.

"Habitation deck," he said. "Emily."

Emily stepped forward as they scrambled into the corridor, tablet in hand.

She read out names in groups of two, women first, then men, alphabetically, each one landing with a cabin number and a printed card she had already prepared. People peeled off the moment they heard their name to search for their room.

Each cabin had boxes inside it, with uniforms and equipment already labeled. They had two hours to settle in before everyone reported to the crew lounge.

Luca watched as the crew spread out from there, pairs and small groups peeling off at each junction, following the corridor signs.

He had a thought, briefly, about the uniforms.

He did not go far. He made it to the junction at the end of the corridor before the first reaction came through the wall.

"No," said a voice he recognized as Diego's. "No. This is not a uniform. This is a skin graft."

Laughter came from the adjacent cabin. Then Joao said, "It fits fine. Stop being dramatic."

"It fits like a blood pressure cuff."

The laughter came back louder. Down the hall, a door opened and Rosa from the Soñadores stepped out already in hers, looked down at herself, looked back up, and said nothing for a full second. Then: "Okay. Okay, I see it."

Luca stood at the junction for another moment. The corridor was filling with voices now, doors opening, the sound of his new crew discovering simultaneously that the briefing notes had not fully prepared them.

He smiled to himself as he took the lift up to the officers' deck.

His biomonitor pinged the reader at the access panel, and the hatch opened.

The officer's deck sounded pretentious and technically was, but the separation mattered. The crew needed places where Luca was not always standing pretending he was not listening. His officers needed the same thing.

He knew the deck the way he knew his own hands by now. The officer mess with its one long table, something closer to a kitchen table, comfortable and warm. The gym, which Chris and Joey had spec'd out with terrifying specificity during the refit, down to equipment weight limits and cable rig configurations. The pool at the aft end, which Ryan and Emily had chosen to add when they upgraded the ship and Luca had privately assumed was a joke until it wasn't.

The officer lounge looked out from the prow. He had been in it at 0200 more than once over the past week, working through crew assignments, looking at the belt. Wide viewports, low couches, the specific quiet that made people drop their voices without being asked.

He had fought for the lounge on the first Triumph. Athan's engineers had come to the table with a conference room proposal, a secondary workspace, optimized for use. Luca had said no, they could work in the mess hall, you could always find somewhere to work. You could not undo a month of mission fatigue in a conference room. Emily had taken some convincing. Now, in the rebuilt version, the room had plush couches and heavy curtains, a full bar stocked properly, a poker table long enough that all of them fit without anyone's elbow being in someone else's business. His electric fireplace, which he had refused to cut from the budget through two rounds of value engineering. A library with actual books. Board games, a proper selection this time, not just Risk. His favorite room on the ship, before and again now.

Then the twelve cabins. His was at the far end. Emily's was across from his, which was technically her cabin and practically a storage room. They both understood what that room was for.

He pushed into his study. Emily was already there, sitting on the edge of the bed working on her boots.

The first version of the Triumph had officer quarters that were a bed, a shelf, and a closet-sized shower. This had a desk, a lamp on it, shelving, a viewport running floor to ceiling on the exterior wall. The bedroom through the connecting door, same viewport continuing along the hull. A full bathroom one could turn around in, which still felt faintly absurd and also completely correct.

He pulled his uniform from the case and shook it out.

"It's going to be tight," Emily said, without looking up.

"It's always tight. It's like they measured wrong on purpose."

"They didn't measure wrong." She finished with the boots and stood, smoothing her own uniform. Red accents on silver, the patch already straight. She looked him over. "Arms out."

He extended his arms. She adjusted the collar, pressed once at the shoulder seam, checked the chest panel.

"It'll break in," she said.

"You always say that."

"And I'm always right." She stepped back and assessed him, and gave a small nod. "Okay."

The viewport showed Genesis Platform, visible at this distance, its new modules still offline. In a few hours, it wouldn't be visible. In a few days, nothing out that window would be familiar at all.

Eighty-eight people were now his responsibility. Four light-years away.

"Ready?" Emily asked.

"Yeah."

They went down together.

The crew lounge was double-decked and ran the width of the ship at Deck 3's forward section. The upper floor held the stage at the far end and the bar along the opposite wall, with the heavy curtains drawn back from the wide viewports to show open space and the belt. In the middle, broad stairs dropped toward the lower lounge on Deck 4. Poker tables sat near reading nooks, deep sofas, and hardwood floors. Emily had designed it for people who would spend months trapped together in a metal tube and might prefer not to hate every surface by week two.

His crew was already there.

All of them were in uniform, color-coded by department. Red for operations staff, orange for science, green for navigation, blue for medical, bright neon pink for security, and yellow for engineering. Eighty-eight people stood in the upper crew lounge, built for two hundred, and the noise level was substantial.

Luca climbed the stage steps with his officers behind him. The chatter settled down without him asking.

He stood there for a second, looking at them.

"Welcome to the Triumph of Darron," he said.

He waited for the noise to finish, and then he kept going.

"Tonight, we begin the voyage to Alpha Centauri." He did not rush it. "Department heads will run briefings this evening. Schedules get posted tonight: meal times, daily exercise rotations, shift assignments. Every department has its own orientation." He looked at the room. "This is your ship, your home. These are your people."

He had written something longer and scrunched it up that morning. These people had been through twelve days of hell, had signed a system-backed NDA over an alien civilization, and had boarded a starship in a single afternoon. They did not need a speech. They needed to know that he knew what he was doing.

He hoped they could see that.

"Emily," he said.

Emily stepped forward.

She called departments one at a time.

Ryan stood up with Sabrina beside him, and twenty-nine engineers filed out of the lounge and headed for Deck 7, all wearing their navy blue bodysuits and yellow accents, moving with the slightly excitable energy of people who had been waiting for something to build.

Danny helped Eleanor up from her chair; she was steady on the crutches, but still took a second to get the angle right. The science group, twenty strong in orange accents, followed them toward Deck 4. Luca watched Eleanor walk toward the lift with both crutches and a posture that communicated she was fine and did not require assistance.

Zoe led her bridge crew out next: Aiko, Shirin, Reza, Larissa, Tamar, and Gabriel, all in green, heading up towards the command deck.

Chris took his security and readiness staff toward the crew gym. Joey and his three medical staff disappeared toward the infirmary. Emily's twelve operations people gathered and followed her toward the lift.

The lounge emptied out in groups.

It took maybe four minutes.

The door closed behind her.

Luca stood on the stage of the crew lounge and listened to the ship.

The Triumph of Darron ran at a low, even hum. Ventilation moved through the walls. Lighting panels ticked faintly. Somewhere deep below, something creaked against the ship. The viewports showed open space, entirely undifferentiated, the same in every direction.

Eighty-seven people were somewhere inside this ship doing exactly what he had needed them to do.

He sat down on the edge of the stage.

The lounge was still warm from the people who had just been in it. Armchairs sat pushed back at odd angles. Someone had already left a jacket across a sofa armrest. The bar lights were low on the upper floor, and the poker tables on the lower deck. Cards still in their plastic wrap, the bookcases with new books, and the media library still untouched.

Luca heard the low rumble of the main engines coming to life.

The machine was running.

It didn't need him to push it anymore.