Chapter 275 - First Watch

The alarm dragged Luca up and out. He groaned, rubbing his eyes as he pulled himself out of bed. Emily was entangled with him, her hair an absolute disaster across his collarbone. The Triumph was running quietly under them, the deck plates carrying the low hum of drives at cruise. They were a day out from the Asteroid Belt, and it was the first morning of their mission.

By the time he came out of the shower with his fresh uniform, Emily had reclaimed the warm side of the bed. He kissed the top of her head. She made a sound that was not quite a word and burrowed deeper, which he took as an acknowledgment, and let himself out, the silver accent at his cuff and arms catching the corridor light.

The officers' mess had been finished out at Sandworth weeks before they had ever pushed off, and Luca had still not stopped being suspicious of how nice it was. Warm paneling lined the bulkheads. The long central table, which could seat twenty and was laid this morning for nine, two settings down at the foot of it, left open in case anyone Emily had pulled in ended up coming up for breakfast. A glasswall along the inboard wall looked sternward at Sol, which was already a small, bright point against the dark. The HQ refit had replaced the old viewports with shielded projection panels, no more weak points in the hull.

Entering the mess hall, the smell hit him before he saw them: eggs and butter and sausages, warm bread, and the steady, reassuring smell of Folgers from the carafe at the sideboard. He had insisted on Folgers for the officers' mess and the crew mess hall as well, on the grounds that he was not going to spend four years drinking random varieties of coffee from around the world, much to Ryan's chagrin, though he had conceded to an industrial espresso machine for the crew lounge. Zayaan had laid the whole thing on the sideboard in covered dishes with a small basket of pastries off to the side, and then had apparently left.

Emily came in two minutes after Luca, in her suit, her hair up and her tablet under her arm. Her eyes went to the buffet, then to Luca's expression, and the corner of her mouth went up.

"Zayaan," she said, by way of explanation.

"He cooked all this and left?"

"He laid it out and left. He said the officer mess was not a place where the chef hovered. His exact words were, 'I am not waiting on the captain.'"

"That is... this is... why?"

"I told him so." She picked up a plate and started loading it. "Breakfast is going to be simple most mornings. Lunch will be on the schedule and Dinner will be running staggered, by shift. Zayaan, Leila, and Aya are going to figure out who does what without me hovering over them."

"This is fancy for breakfast, Em."

"Zayaan wanted to make a first impression."

Zayaan had cooked for Luca exactly never up to this morning, the recruitment pass having moved at the speed of recruitment passes, and if this breakfast was a promise of what future lunches were going to look like Luca was already in favor of the future. He took a plate.

Ryan came in next with Sabrina tucked under his arm. The two of them had been navigating the ship's corridors that way since she had joined them, and Luca had given up on expecting it to stop. Sabrina kissed Ryan on the corner of the jaw and said "buenos días, amor" into his ear at a volume that carried halfway down the table, and then she saw the spread and her face went radiant.

"Capitán. Emily." She made directly for the coffee. "Mi amor, there is bacon, you have to come look."

"I see the bacon, Sabrina."

"There is so much bacon."

She pulled a plate down for Ryan, loaded it with bacon and eggs and a wedge of toast, and slid it onto the table at his elbow. Ryan accepted the plate without comment and kissed the top of her head as she sat. Luca had been watching this exact transaction happen at every meal for the last week, and he was, against his own predictions, no longer finding it funny. He was finding it, if he was honest, kind of nice.

Zoe came in a step behind, dragging Danny by the sleeve of a uniform, her dreads tied back, face bright. Danny looked like he had been awake all night.

"He was working all night," Zoe said, dropping him into a chair.

"The plantings are done, everything's been transfered into the hydroponics. Now we have to hope they take."

"They will Danny. You can have toast now. With us. Like a person."

Joey came in alone behind them and Chris brought up the rear. He took one look at the spread and cracked his knuckles, one hand and then the other, already pricing out what this breakfast was going to cost the gym rotation.

"This," Chris said, "is going to ruin me."

Eleanor came in last, her cane tapping against the deck plates, her hair still damp. Chris was on his feet before she had cleared the hatch, pulling out the chair beside his own. Eleanor accepted the chair, leaned the cane against the table, and gave Luca a look that dared him to comment on the cane.

"Coffee," she said, to no one in particular, and Sabrina was already pouring.

"Eat fast," Luca said, settling into the chair at the head of the table. "We have a full schedule ahead."

"That's right," Emily piped in. "The schedule has been posted across the ship and everyone should have received their assignments. FTL comms go live in forty minutes, which should allow us to keep in touch with Genesis in real time. Chris, you're starting gym rotations this morning with your team? A group at a time."

"You want me kicking their asses first thing, or do they get a warm-up day?" Chris asked.

"Ease them in. We need them alive long enough to reach Alpha Centauri."

"That's boring, but fine." Chris grinned around a forkful of eggs.

"Danny and Ellie, once you're done setting up the labs, I'll need a list of projects by priority for lab time, research, and experiments. Karen's sent over her wish list..."

"Fine," said Eleanor, "Once it's all set up, though, we need to go through calibrations and adjustments... with our timeline and how fast we'll get there, I'm just not sure we'll get through it before we arrive."

"We're going to need everything online in 8 days," Emily replied. "Do what you can. Ryan?"

Ryan looked up from where he was chatting with Sabrina... "Engineering and Fabrication. Where are we?"

Ryan leaned back in his chair, rubbing at one eye before pointing his fork vaguely toward Sabrina.

"Engineering's split into three shifts right now. They are still learning the ship." He gestured toward the deck beneath them. "This thing's a lot bigger when everyone starts touching all my shit."

Sabrina snorted softly beside him.

"We've got fabrication online," she said. "Machine shops, additive manufacturing, materials processing, all operational. Inventory's still a mess, though. Half the team came aboard with different ideas on how to label systems."

"Which apparently matters way more than I thought it would," Ryan muttered.

"Life support?" Luca asked.

"Environmental is part of the shift work," Ryan said. "Air recyclers are nominal, water loop is closed and clean, thermal is steady. CO2 reclamation, we are still chasing the balance, the scrubbers are pulling, but the reclaim cycle is reading hot, so the team is walking it down through the day. Waste reclamation is..." He made a face. "Waste reclamation is being commissioned today, which is the only sentence I am willing to construct about it before breakfast is over. Ask me again at dinner."

"Noted."

"Reactor watch is steady, thermal's steady, no flags. Hull integrity sweeps are on the engineering rotation, twice a shift, all decks."

"Any major concerns?" Luca asked.

"Nothing critical," Ryan said. "Main issue right now is familiarization. Everyone knows their specialty, but not this ship specifically. We're figuring out maintenance rotations, emergency repair teams, fabrication priorities..." He shrugged. "Honestly, the next eight days is mostly about turning our team into an actual engineering department."

Emily tapped her tablet again.

"Navigation and flight operations are beginning simulator rotations today. Zoe, your team has access to the simulation room for the next 24 hours, please rotate them and make sure we're covering dropship insertion and evasion drills."

Zoe nodded once. "Already started. I'll be down with Tamar in 5 minutes."

"Medical is establishing long-duration readiness protocols," Emily continued. "Joey's team is running baseline scans on the entire crew over the next four days."

"We already started," Joey cut in, sounding mildly offended she even had to mention it. He pointed vaguely with a strip of bacon. "Karen shoved about four hundred pages of expeditionary medical courses down our throats before departure. Radiation response, exotic pathogen containment, prolonged cryo complications, portal exposure procedures, patient confidentiality..." He rubbed at his eyes. "We spent half the night going through emergency scenarios."

"That's why he looks dead," Zoe said cheerfully.

"I am dead."

Luca snorted.

"How's the team holding up?"

Joey shrugged. "Good, actually. Better now that we're figuring out what everyone does best." He nodded toward the doorway. "Dr. Mehta's protocols are solid. We're organizing around specialties instead of trying to make everybody do everything."

"Last item," Emily said, and the tone of her voice made Chris groan before she had even finished the sentence. "Duty roster. Laundry, heads, common spaces, mess hall scrub-down after dinner, recycling sorts. Everyone is on it. Officers included."

"Everyone," Ryan said, flatly.

"Everyone."

"What about Luca?" Chris asked.

Emily did not look up from her tablet. "The captain is exempt."

"And so is Emily," Luca said. "She's running the crew and will be supervising."

"Fine," Chris said. "But I want it on the record that I am cleaning this week and the captain is not."

"Noted. For the record," Emily said.

"Anything else on the schedule?" Luca asked.

"The launch party," Emily said. "I'm organizing it for tomorrow evening in the crew lounge. Let's get through today, establish our rotations, and tomorrow we celebrate."

"Excellent," Luca said. He looked down the table at the eight of them and the carafe of Folgers cooling at the sideboard. "You all know what we have to do and why we have to do it."

The FTL communications room sat near the stern of the command deck. Jason was waiting outside the hatch when Luca came up, eighteen years old and freshly showered, holding a tablet against his chest the way other people held shields. His cheeks went pink the second Luca turned the corner.

"C-captain."

"Walk with me, Jason."

Emily fell in on his other side, tablet under her arm, the look on her face that meant she had already noticed Jason's cheeks and was deciding how much trouble Luca was about to be in. Luca, who was twenty and remembered eighteen well enough, found this funny. He must have shown it, because Emily's elbow caught him in the ribs without her looking up from her screen.

"Be nice," she whispered.

Luca, aghast, replied. "I am being nice."

The room was bare, neutral white walls running into a deck plated in the same matte finish, with no fixtures along the bulkheads to break the line. A single console stood off to one side, low and unobtrusive, the only piece of hardware Luca could see. The speakers were hidden somewhere in the ceiling, the projection emitters were flush in the deck and the overhead, and the room had been built to disappear the moment the volume came up around them. Empty space, waiting to be filled with somewhere else.

The hardware had come with the Triumph upgrade, and Athan had spent a hundred million on the Genesis platform to install its TL9 equivalent, so that the two ends could speak to each other in real time across whatever distance the ship eventually put between them. Luca was grateful for it, in the abstract. He also had a nagging dread, in the considerably-less-abstract, that he was going to be looking at Karen in this room more often than he was strictly going to be comfortable with.

The way Ryan had explained it, the comms worked on the same trick as the FTL drive. Two points in known space, a folded length of subspace stitched between them, and a signal streamed across the seam as if the distance didn't exist. Luca did not pretend to follow the physics. What he had understood, and what mattered for the next two years, was the part about anchors. The Genesis platform was an anchor because it sat in a known orbit around Sol at a known speed, and the Triumph could find it from anywhere inside the system. Inside a star system you could drop buoys to do the same job at finer resolution. That was the part Luca actually cared about. Drop a buoy at Alpha Centauri, and the buoy could find the Triumph the same way the Triumph could find Genesis, which meant the line ran in both directions and his father could call him at home. Skip the buoy, or sit anywhere they had not anchored yet, and the line went one way only. The Triumph could reach back to Genesis whenever she wanted. Genesis could not reach out and find the Triumph unless she had told them where she was.

Which meant, Luca thought, that if his father wanted to call him in the middle of the night, his father was going to have to wait until Luca had given him a forwarding address. They had not manufactured any buoys yet, and that was sitting somewhere in the middle of a long list of fabrication priorities Ryan had been muttering about for a week.

Jason went straight to the console. Emily stood at his shoulder, close enough to read his screen, far enough not to crowd him. Luca stayed at the back of the room because this was Jason's job, not his.

"Bringing it up, Captain," Jason said. "Handshake protocol staged and the buffer is clean. All four nodes green."

"Open it, Jason."

"Yes, sir."

The console came up green. The deck and the overhead warmed at once, the air at the center of the room caught and folded into a column of light, and then the column resolved into a man.

It was Athan Rossi, standing in the comms room as if he had walked in through the bulkhead in his coveralls. Behind him in the same volume of light, Karen stood with her arms crossed, and Michael Stevens leaned over an Alpha Centauri system map that was not in this room. The resolution was for all intents and purposes, perfect.

It took Athan two seconds to register that the channel had locked. Then he turned, mouth tight, eyes brighter than he wanted them to be.

"Luca," Athan said. "Tell me FTL works."

"It's working. Hi, Dad. Hi, Karen. Hi Michael."

"Luca. This is genuinely something," Michael said.

Karen got down to it. "How clean is the link?"

Luca looked at Jason. Jason had already pulled up the readout. "Sub-second latency, Captain. No jitter. We are reading them as if they were on the next deck."

"You have a steady hand on that desk, son," Athan said to Jason. Jason went a deeper shade of pink under his uniform collar and did not look up. "Don't lose it."

"No, sir."

Karen cut in. "You are a day out. Drives clean?"

"Clean," Luca said. "Zoe has us threaded for the Oort Cloud passage. Ryan is happy with the engineering crew. The ship still has its gravity. We are good."

"Good. Your father has been here since five-thirty making me look at fighter timelines."

"It was six," Athan said.

"It was five-thirty."

Luca leaned a hip against the back rail. "Tell me."

Athan came around the table in the volume so the projection put him square. "I am moving the transport program up. The hulls are not the problem, the bottleneck is the FTL drives. The first drive should be ready in three months. If it all goes to schedule, we'll have a couple of transports with FTL engines and in service in six months."

"Six months?" Luca asked, taking that in.

"Six months, give or take. New Horizons is talking about a window in eleven months for the first colony ship."

Luca had known the colony ship would come. He had simply assumed he had two years to get ready for it. Maybe three. The number in his head had been the kind of number you build a plan around at the edges, not the center.

"Eleven months?" Luca asked.

"Eleven to the ship launch. Add the shakedown, the staging at Genesis, and you are looking at eighteen to twenty-four months before the first colonist sets foot on Proxima b. Which is still aggressive. Emma is not a person who pads her timelines."

"No, she is not."

"By the time her ship leaves the cradle, I want Hyeon Logistics owning the supply chain between Sol and Alpha Centauri end to end. Our transports with your fighters on the first delivery and whatever cargo we need."

"You and Karen are aligned on this?"

"Karen and I worked it out before I called you. Emma knows."

Karen stepped half a pace forward in the volume, not quite cutting Athan in half, just enough to make sure Luca was looking at her. "There's something else, Luca. Genesis is the only starship yard in human space right now. Titan is fundraising to buy a second one out of the System Store. Fifty-two billion credits, which is an insane number, and Halden is in front of every camera he can find arguing that one shipyard is a monopoly the species can't afford. They won't clear that on their own this year. They might clear it next year if Anderson's directorate decides starship capacity is a global-security question and not a Stevens family question. Your father isn't pushing this timeline because he wants to. He's pushing it because the moment a second yard exists, the lane stops being ours by default. Eleven months is the window we still own."

"Understood."

Luca caught Emily's eye across the volume. She gave him the smallest nod, eyes on her tablet, already two steps into the staging plan he had not yet gotten to out loud. He rubbed the back of his neck. Two years. That was the number, dressed up in eighteen-to-twenty-four-month language so it sounded like a window instead of a wall.

Two years to land at Alpha Centauri, clear ground, build the outpost. Two years to decant the Varnathi, settle them, integrate them, give them somewhere they could stand. Two years to make the place look like somewhere humanity could arrive into instead of somewhere humanity was going to have to fight its way into.

"Dad," he said. "We'll be ready."

"That is what I needed to hear." Athan's mouth went up at one corner. Karen did not smile, but she did uncross her arms, which was as close as she got. "Good first morning, Captain."

"Good first morning, Dad."

The volume folded back into light and then into nothing, and the comms room was just a room again. Jason exhaled all the way out for what looked like the first time since the hatch had opened. Emily put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed once.

Luca caught her eye across the room.

"Find Danny, Ryan and Zoe," he said. "I want them in the tactical room in ten."

Emily's eyebrow went up.

Jason looked between them, and to his credit did not ask. He started shutting down the console.