Chapter 274 - Third Shift

"Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted."

— Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

It was eleven o'clock at night, and the bridge of the Triumph of Darron had never looked quite like this to Luca.

The sixteen stations and two tier amphitheater, which had always struck him as far too big for their crew, somehow seemed the right size tonight, every chair filled and every screen glowing. Third shift had started lean, Zoe's people on duty, and from the command chair Luca could see that every one of them was locked and loaded. Aiko was at jump nav with both hands on the console, scrolling through the interface fast, her shoulders forward, eyes flicking from screen to screen. Shirin had pulled opened a diagnostic on her Triumph Initiative tablet onto her lap and was thumbing pages while she watched her board, doing two things at once because she had clearly decided to work the system out on her own. Reza had pulled up the long-range sensors for the shift and was leaning into the screen, mouth a little open, reading.

This was the part of the evening that he had not expected.

He had assumed that the first night out, would be the night he learned how out of his depth he actually was. Instead he found himself sitting in the command chair watching six people he barely knew run their stations with the sort of focus he usually only saw on his own crew. They were good. They were better than good.

Zoe had stayed with her people for the last twenty minutes without once turning around. Her head was down, and her shoulders set, and she was talking quietly to Aiko about something on the second screen. Pixel was sprawled across the deck behind her, her chin flat on the ground, one eye half open, her tail twitching.

The bridge comms caught a low exchange off engineering comms. It was Diego, five decks down, reading a propulsion delta off to whoever had asked for it. He was talking fast, the way everyone was tonight. Luca could feel the energy of it through the deck plating beneath his boots. Eleven at night after a full day, the first day out, and nobody on this ship was going to sleep for a very long while.

Four days to the Oort Cloud at this speed. Four days of exactly this. People finding their seats, the ship finding its rhythm, nobody breaking anything they couldn't fix in the same shift. He had asked Karen and she had given him two years and the first item on the list was four quiet days. He would take it.

There were four open objectives waiting on the other side of the Oort Cloud. The outpost. Pulling the Varnathi out. The missing stars, which was somehow now his problem. The ring structure. Each one of them worth more CP than his current balance had ever pretended to be. His job tonight was to sit, watch how the bridge ran, and skip being the captain who had to prove he was the captain on day one.

A roster sat on the armrest screen, departments by division. Emily had pushed it up from somewhere two decks down before he had even sat down.

Eighteen minutes later Ryan came through the hatch with a coffee. He was talking before he cleared the frame.

He saw Luca already turning toward him and stopped mid-sentence. "Nothing to report?"

"Course is locked. Zoe knows what she's doing. Roster's on the armrest."

Ryan looked at the roster. He looked at the coffee.

"You have the bridge," Luca said. "I'm going to walk the ship."

"Don't get lost," Ryan said, settling in.

Luca almost said something back, something stupid and good. Then he remembered Karen's face across the table in that conference room and he kept it to himself.

Ryan dropped into the command chair, found the cupholder, set the coffee in it, and let out a breath. Don't fuck up my ship, Luca thought, with all the affection that sentence was capable of carrying.

He took the stairs down.

He took the stairs instead of the lift. Three weeks at the platform had made him sluggish in ways he preferred to ignore, and the stairs were a small correction.

He walked down from the command deck deck without stopping.

He came out of the stairwell into Deck 3 with three doors slid open and voices behind two of them, and a music track running from a fourth with a low beat he could feel in the floor before he heard it. Two of the Soñadores were in the alcove near the junction, tablets out, heads bent over the same screen. Carmen and Carlos. They were halfway into an argument when he came around the corner, and they straightened when they saw him.

"Sit down," he said, before either of them stood all the way up.

They sat. Carlos grinned at him, said "Captain," and went straight back to whatever they had been arguing about. He would take that.

The mess hall was nearly empty when he glanced through the viewport panel in its door. A coffee setup ran on the far counter for whoever wandered through. Two crew sat at a corner table he could only half see from this angle.

He kept walking. The crew lounge door was twenty feet down and wide open. The music came out of it in a wash, three or four conversations going at once underneath, somebody laughing, somebody telling a story with both hands. Alvaro was at the center of a knot of people near the couch, mid-sentence, both hands up. Jake was sprawled on the far end of the couch with his boots on the table. Luca's foot was already moving toward the door before he caught it.

That's not for me tonight, he reminded himself, and pulled the step back before it finished. Boots on the table, though. They needed lounge rules out before somebody put a hole in the upholstery, and he was fairly sure that was not on Emily's list yet.

He kept moving past it and took the stairwell at the far end and went down.

Deck 4 was the science deck and it was wide awake.

While it was quieter than Deck 3, the corridor was lit on full and every door he passed was open. Equipment fans were running everywhere. Somebody was calibrating something in the materials lab and he kept walking. He could hear the high-pitched startup whine of instruments that had been crated three days ago and powered up tonight for the first time.

He stopped at the physics lab. The door was open. Danny was at the secondary station with the spectral array up on the main display, working through calibration flags one at a time. He stood at the doorframe for half a second, kept his mouth shut, and kept walking.

The hydroponics bay was midway down the corridor and the door was open across the infirmary. The grow lights were on full and the corridor outside the hatch had a green warmth coming through it that no other deck on the ship had.

Half the science team was in there on day one. He had known they would be. Hydroponics had been the one job that absolutely had to happen in the first twenty-four hours, and the team had been treating it accordingly.

Eleanor was in a chair just inside the door, her crutches folded against the wall and a tablet resting in her lap. That had been Joey's compromise: if Eleanor was going to be in the bay, she was going to be seated for it.

Paco and Lars were knee-deep in the planting trays at the far left, talking across the beds in low voices about soil composition. Freya and Lucia were on the upper tier passing seedling trays back and forth without much needing to say. Carla and Sofia were at the far end calibrating the grow-light rigs, one of them on a stool, the other one pointing at angles. Serena and Dolores were somewhere in the middle of all of it, doing whatever needed doing.

Nobody looked up as he came in, and Luca much preferred it that way.

Eleanor saw him. She gave him the small, dry smile that he had come to recognise as her default greeting whenever she was trying not to let anyone see how tired she was.

"Captain."

"How are we?"

"Everything is working." She paused. "Which is, frankly, a small miracle on day one. I had imagined something to go wrong."

"It still might."

"Don't say that out loud."

He almost laughed. There it was. Eleanor was in working order.

"Danny says everything is perfect."

"Danny is in the next room running calibration on a spectral array that has four flags on it. He will tell you it is perfect right up until he tells you it is not." She said it without looking up from her tablet.

Luca looked once more around the room. Eleven o'clock at night, day one, and half her team were still on their feet. He knew exactly how long Eleanor had been sitting in that chair tonight, because Joey had told him.

"Eleanor."

She looked up.

"Go to bed."

She raised an eyebrow at him, the British version of the eyebrow. "I am supervising."

"You have supervised. They are planting. Carla can run the rest of the night, and you can read her notes in the morning. Joey will be furious with both of us if I let you sit in that chair until two."

She considered him for a moment, and then she accepted it, and closed the tablet.

"Help me up, then, Captain."

He did.

He walked her to the door, handed her the crutches, watched her get her balance, and let her go down the corridor all the way to the lift.

He gave the hydroponics bay one more look. The team kept working and the plants were going in.

The aft stairwell put him out onto Deck 5, and the hangar opened around him.

The hangar was quieter than it had been at boarding. The cargo was lashed and the cases were locked, the Specter was under its cover, and the Centurion sat on its struts. The TL9 Scout Mech was where they had left it against the back wall, six meters of chassis and a neural-bonded cockpit and a set of schematics that was still hypothetical. Proxima b was the window for that. They had agreed, and Ryan had stopped bringing it up, which was the closest thing to peace Luca was going to get on the subject.

Down the ramp, he could hear the mustangs, a low, steady percussion that came up through the soles of his boots from the Deck 6 enclosure below. They had settled, which was a good deal better than the alternative.

There was a terminal panel set into the hangar wall near the armory access. The lines of it were clean, the material was System-quality. He had walked past it twice today during loading. He stopped now.

[Triumph Initiative - Mobile HQ Tower]

Integrated: Triumph of Darron (Deck 5)

Status: Inactive while in Motion

Authority Node: House Rossi - Luca Rossi (Master of Venture)

Functions: Command Relay / Initiative Registry / Company Store / Field Deployment

Company Store: LOCKED

Restriction: Store access unavailable while vessel is under active transit.

Required State: Stationary / Anchored / Deployed

Initiative Balance: 2,661,025 CP

Credits: 2,626,105,000

House Rossi was a real thing now, Luca thought, with a panel and a balance and his name on it. He took a second to think about that. His dad had not actually said a word about any of it, not when the title had come down, and not at any point since, and that had been on Luca to notice. Tomorrow he would call him from the FTL comms room and say the thing out loud, the way he should have done weeks ago.

He couldn't open the store now, but it was the same catalog he had been looking at for months, personal weapons and armor sets and ground vehicles and consumables, all of it anchored to the ship's HQ tower. An order placed at this panel came out somewhere within the hangar deck, and with enough warning, they'd be able to prepare for it.

He had 2.6 million CP to his name after spending 790,000 of it on NDAs.

They needed real objectives, on the ground, as fast as they could get them. He made a mental note to ask Emily to get these set up.

House Rossi was operational and flat broke. Plenty of credits but barely enough CP for the TL9 equipment they would need.

He pushed off the wall and walked toward the armory.

The armory was toward the bow of the ship, at the end of the hangar. Kenta and Sato had claimed the central workbench. Their cleaning kits were out, weapons broken down in neat rows across a cloth, the setup of two people who had been at it a while and planned to keep being at it for another hour or three. Kenta was running a contact brush down the emitter rail of an energy rifle, taking his time with it. He had the same set of shoulders Nonno Giuseppe used to get at the kitchen table back in Meredith, taking something apart slowly. Sato had a sidearm in pieces across his section, an energy pistol broken down into capacitor, emitter, frame, and grip.

Luca made another note to himself. His sniper rifle was still sitting in his cabin in the same condition it had come back from Leticia in. He had meant to break it down days ago. The week had eaten every hour he had set aside for it.

He looked at the rack behind Kenta and ran a quick mental check on what was on it. He saw energy rifles, standard sidearms, all TL8. He needed to confirm Chris had held the new security team to that tier for now. Kenta and Sato were good, and they would earn the TL9 rack, but that was a conversation for later in the voyage.

Chris was at the far end with his tablet, cross-referencing physical inventory against the manifest. He looked up when Luca came in.

Luca leaned against the bulkhead and let them work. Kenta and Sato kept their hands moving.

"Armory's solid," Chris said, still reading. "Personal weapons and armor are catalogued, security rotation is set." He scrolled something on the tablet. "Mech is tabled. Ryan needs materials and we'll have to find them when we hit Proxima b and he can source on the ground."

"He accepted that?"

"He accepted it, but that's a different thing. He still wants his own."

Luca looked over at the Scout Mech against the back wall. "Why can't he have that one?"

"Because that one's mine," Chris said.

"Is it?" Luca said, and smiled.

Chris kept his eyes on the tablet. "It is."

Kenta set down the contact brush and picked up the next one. Sato fitted a component back into the sidearm frame with a soft click.

"The ship's good," Chris said.

"Yeah."

Chris went back to the inventory.

Emily was in his cabin when he got there.

She stood at the viewport with her arms loose at her sides; the asteroid belt sat mostly behind them by now and Sol had already shrunk to something smaller than it had any right to be this soon.

She heard the door and looked over her shoulder. Her eyes were lit. Tired but lit. The two things she did better than anyone he had ever met.

"Hey."

"Schedules are done," she said. "Galley's set. I walked Leila through the inventory and we moved breakfast back forty minutes for tomorrow. After that, we'll keep breakfast at 0600 sharp so Chris can get his exercise regimen going. Laundry rotation goes up in the morning."

"Em."

She stopped.

"Lounge rules," he said.

She closed her eyes. "Oh, for fuck's sake."

"Jake had his boots on the table."

"Of course." She rubbed the bridge of her nose with two fingers. "I had it on the list. I had it on the list, Luca."

"It's fine."

"It is not fine. I'll have it out before first shift." She was already thumbing the tablet, not looking at it. "No boots, no glassware out of the lounge, loungewear only. I'll send it tonight."

"Tomorrow," he said. "Let me help you."

She looked up at him.

"Tomorrow, Em."

She let out a breath and set the tablet on the desk, screen-down. The screen-down was the part that mattered. He counted that as a win.

He sat on the edge of the bed.

She turned back to the viewport and started talking with her back to him.

"I saw Joey today. And Karen. And Dr Mehta. For the medical screening."

He waited.

"I should have done it six months ago."

That landed in his chest before he was ready for it.

"I just kept… there was always something. Or somebody. A week, and then a month, and then it was six."

She told the viewport. He listened from the bed.

She kept her eyes on Sol. "The damage from the radiation is still there. The eggs and... my body is clearing them. Slowly, but it's clearing them. I've lost a percentage in the last six months. I'm going to keep losing unless I do something about it."

He did not have the words for any of this. He understood the problem, he had picked up from her in pieces over the last six months. He was not going to interrupt her to ask.

"What's the percentage."

"It's not the number that matters. It's the curve."

"Em."

She finally turned from the viewport. "It's enough that I'm done waiting. I want to be in the suite the first time we're stationary long enough to run it."

He took that in.

That was the smaller problem. The bigger problem was the part she was not saying, the part he could see in the back of her shoulders.

The bio-recovery suite had been sitting behind a System lock waiting on their HQ, and the second both had landed, she could have walked herself down there and put herself in the pod. She had not. She had run the logistics, signed his paperwork, walked the galley, organized the breakouts, planned the recruitment stops, and put herself last on her own list every single time, because being useful was how she had learned to be safe, and he had been letting her be useful for six months without once asking her to stop.

Something low in his chest tightened up. The eggs were certainly a problem. The rest of it was his. He had been the weight she had been carrying.

He watched the back of her shoulders. They were set the way they had been set the first time he saw her cry, in eighth grade, in the parking lot outside the Sandworth gym, in the rain, refusing to call her stepfather for a ride. Twelve years he had known her. He had watched her stay last on her own list, because that was the move that kept her safe in a house where being useful was what kept her out of trouble. She did it on automatic now. She had stopped seeing herself doing it.

He wanted to put his fist through something, but kept his hands flat on the edge of the bed.

He stood up. He crossed the cabin and stopped a step short of her.

"Em."

She turned half-around.

"There is nobody on this ship more important than you." said Luca. "You take care of yourself first. That is how this works now."

She held his eyes long enough that he could see her register it. Then she looked back at the viewport.

He walked her through the practical constraint, which she knew as well as he did. The Bio-Recovery suite pulled directly off the reactor bus. While the drives were running it would brown out half the ship, environmental systems and secondary power and anything else they were willing to take down for a few hours. The window was Proxima b orbit when the drives would spool down and all non-essentials came offline.

"That's fine," she said and turned from the viewport.

She was facing him now. She was close enough to touch. She was still working through whatever had moved in her since she had said six months out loud.

He closed the last step.

He put his arms around her and pulled her into his chest, her cheek against his collarbone, his chin finding the top of her head. She let her weight rest against him for the first time tonight. She let out a long, slow breath she had been holding.

They stood there for a while.

Then she tipped her face up.

He kissed her first, which surprised her enough that she made a small sound against his mouth, because it was usually her who moved first. Her hands found his collar and she caught up fast.

Her bodysuit had a zipper that ran down the front. His hand found the pull. Her arms came up around his neck and she pulled herself closer.

His other hand went to her waist. She tilted her head back and let him at her neck, and his mouth found the place just under her jaw that always undid her. Her fingers slid into his hair. The breath she let out then was for him.

The ship kept moving forward.