Chapter 277 - Ground Truth

Luca stepped off the lift onto Deck 6 at oh-eight-thirty with a long list of things he expected somebody to have fucked up already lined up in his head. Oil on the deck plates. A scuff on a lane marker. A directional guide worn through where somebody had stopped a recovery rig too hard.

He found none of them.

The deck was clean enough to eat off, which, in his opinion, should be the baseline. Ryan would have left a streak of grease the size of his hand, shrugged it off. Chris would have left two and walked past them. Klaus had left him nothing to find, and Luca was, on the inside, thrilled about it, forcing his face into a neutral expression. He had only meant to cut through Storage on the way to Manufacturing, and he stopped at the head of the lane anyway, because Klaus had laid the whole deck out for inspection and was clearly waiting for somebody to look at it.

Two rows of vehicles ran the length of Deck 6, parked clean between the stacks of everything else they were taking to Proxima. Pallets of dry rations under hard plastic shrink, water in containers, fuel canisters strapped to the bulkhead, crates of F-type batteries and tooling, the long line of cold storage units that ran the entire port wall. The ship could eat from this deck for two years or more, a lot more. Decals had been painted on the hulls. The Triumph Initiative emblem was now on every single one this morning, the golden T within a shield, split by the dark line that marked the chasm between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Luca had assumed somebody would get to it at some point in New Dawn. Klaus, evidently, had been up.

Bikes and buggies near the lift, carriers and fighting vehicles squared up across the middle of the deck between the supply stacks with utility trucks along the far wall. The tanks sat in the stern corner because there was nowhere else to put twenty tons of armored plate with a main gun that did not also block somebody's access to a freezer.

Klaus came over at a jog, a clipboard under one arm.

"Captain. Good morning."

"Klaus. How are we looking?"

"Deck is clean, Captain. Commander Athan's dropships up in the hangar have been through their flight checks twice, once by my team and once by Aiko's. Those are done. The ground fleet is ongoing. The bikes and buggies are signed off. The recon car and the first armored transport are signed off. The rest will be done today, and the specialty rigs toward the end. Every vehicle will be opened up, fluids checked, electronics reseated, and its weapons cleaned. We should finish with hours to spare before we drop into Proxima."

"Anything missing?"

"Nothing missing. Chris was down here at midnight to confirm the trucks himself, which I think was mostly for my benefit."

Luca took a long pull on his coffee and looked down the rows. He, Ryan, and Emily had chosen these from the Orion catalog over two long evenings, and at the time, on a screen, it had read like prudent planning for a colony outpost. Standing on the deck with twenty tons of tank in his stern corner, prudent was not the word that came to mind.

"Get some sleep before the party, Klaus."

"Understood, Captain."

Luca finished his coffee on the walk to Manufacturing.

The ramp from Deck 6 dropped Luca straight into the back of Manufacturing, and the Forge bay was open when he came through the hatch.

Ryan was standing in front of the open access panel on the Forge Core with both sleeves rolled past the elbow, and there was grease on the side of his neck where he had wiped sweat with the wrong hand. Yael was at the diagnostic console next to him, one hand on the readout. The thing the Forge had spent the night making stood in the open output bay, and it stood two meters tall.

It was matte black, octagonal in section, with a base that had four hull-anchor points. A band of glassy windows ran around the upper section, and the top tapered to a flat disc with a single emitter aperture at its center. Two weeks of weekly visits while the Core was being installed, and this was the first time the bay had anything in it, never mind a black spike two meters tall.

"Captain," Ryan said, without turning.

"Ryan, what is that?"

"Two minutes, then I will tell you."

Yael snorted. Ryan flipped a switch under the panel, and a green line traced the seam of the Core all the way around.

"That's the bond," Yael said quietly.

Ryan exhaled, closed the panel, and walked Luca over to the tower, knocked on it with two knuckles.

"Cloaking emitter, from CERN. Anchors on the hull, three of them give you a triangulated field, a few hundred of them give you a ship that does not exist on anybody's sensors."

Luca looked back at the tower. For one second he pictured it, the Triumph running cloaked through space, a ghost with engines.

"How long did it take?"

"Fourteen hours."

"Fourteen hours for one?"

"That is the part I want to walk you through."

Ryan crouched at the side of the Core, popped a small cover, and pointed at a slot no wider than a dinner plate.

"This is the disk port, for System schematics. You slot the disk, the Core reads it, you get a print in five to ten minutes depending on the size of the object. That emitter, on a System disk, would have been a six-minute print."

"And we don't have a disk?"

"Nobody has a disk, Captain. Not an empty one. Every disk anybody on this ship has ever seen came with a schematic already on it. I have never, in my life, seen a blank."

"Can't we make one?"

"We do not have a schematic for a disk. Yael's nano kit could probably build the carrier layer if we cracked one open and scanned the substrate, but that is months of work, and the only way to study one is to break one of the unique schematics."

"So how did you print this thing?"

"We wired the ship's computer straight into the Core through the diagnostic bus. The schematic comes off the ship, through a cable, the long way around. Takes fourteen hours, instead of the six minutes a disk would have taken."

"We need blanks," Yael said, without looking up.

"We need blanks," Ryan agreed.

Chris came through the hatch with his tablet.

"Captain. When Ryan has a minute. I have a list."

"Send it to me too."

The list landed on Luca's tablet a beat later, and on Ryan's console at the same time. It was longer than Luca had expected. The list opened with vehicle weapon mounts for the buggies and the recon car, then plate to fill the gaps in the carriers' factory armor, rack hardware for the armory, helmet rails, hardpoint brackets for the gunships, and spare barrels.

"Klaus has been adding to it all morning," Chris said. "Every item on it is in the TL9 Basic Tooling Bundle we picked up in Tokyo. Hand tools, fasteners, fittings, mechanical components, a hundred and forty-eight schematics, all on disks. Yael said she can run the bundle on the Nanoforge."

Luca looked at the emitter. Six feet of matte black metal, fourteen hours of Forge time. He ran the numbers in his head and did not like the result.

"Ryan, how many of these do we need for full hull coverage?"

"Around a thousand."

Fourteen thousand hours. A year and a half of Forge time, most of their mission timeline, for a hull nobody could see. They were not printing this thing on a cable.

"Fourteen hours each one? We need to reprioritize."

Ryan's eyebrows went up.

"Captain?"

"The emitter is the coolest thing we have ever printed, and I want it. But not first. Take the Nanoforge and run the schematics for Chris's list, in the order he and Klaus put it in."

Ryan was already nodding before Luca had finished, the queue visibly rebuilding behind his eyes.

"Fair. I had the emitter on the bypass because the Core needed a stress test and it was the most complex thing in our digital library. Tokyo disks would have run too clean for a real test. Now we know the Core handles anything we throw at it."

"Yael, if you have time, start sketching what a back-engineered disk would look like. So when we have time to spare, we are not starting from zero."

Yael was already writing without looking up.

Luca clapped Ryan on the shoulder, on the side that was not greasy, and walked back out into the corridor.

Emily was waiting for him at the lift on the officer deck at nineteen forty-five, already changed, and they walked down to the crew lounge together with her hand in his.

A heavy, disorganized bassline reverberated the deck plates, fighting with the overlapping shouts of eighty people trying to be heard over it. The air was already thick, smelling of rum, beer, and the sharp tang of sweat.

Emily had cleared the center of the lounge for a dance floor. Her lounge rules, having already been announced, held: loungewear only, no shoes. The sheer fabrics clung to damp skin under the dim lights, and the deck was a mass of bare feet sliding and stomping to the beat.

Luca took two steps inside, looked at his crew sweating and shouting in the middle of his ship, and decided the party was already a success. Aya appeared at his elbow with a small glass of amber punch, flashed a wicked grin, and pushed it into his hand. He drank it. It burned on the way down, sweet and entirely too strong, and he raised the empty glass at her in salute before she vanished back into the crowd.

"I thought we weren't spiking the punch," Luca yelled loudly towards Emily.

"I changed my mind," Emily said, grinning up at him.

Zoe found him next. She had Danny by the front of his shirt and was dragging him through the crowd like she was hauling a recovery sled. Danny's jaw was locked in silent, rigid endurance, his loungewear hanging on him like he was being punished by it. Zoe's anklet flashed as she moved. She pulled Luca in close enough that he could feel the heat radiating off her.

"You're late, Captain," she shouted over the music.

"We have been here for ten seconds," he shot back.

"Still late."

He laughed and waved her on. She hauled Danny into the crush of bodies. Danny shot Luca a look of pure misery over his shoulder, and Luca grinned at him and did not save him.

He passed Ryan a few meters in, caught between Sabrina and Lena, his face flushed, looking a little overwhelmed. Sabrina's bronze arm was hooked around his waist, her movements liquid and entirely without hesitation. Lena laughed at whatever Sabrina had just said. Luca clapped Ryan on the shoulder, got a desperate, wide-eyed grin in return, and left him to it. Ryan would survive.

Jason stood on the small stage, clearly out of his depth, tapping his fingers on his tablet furiously. He allowed for a full second of dead air before a reggaeton beat slammed into the speakers. Luca cupped his hands around his mouth and booed him, loud, and half the room within earshot booed with him. Jason flipped them off without looking up. The room cheered anyway. Luca was going to enjoy this party.

He found Eleanor sitting on the edge of a couch, her crutches on the floor and out of the way, smiling as she watched the chaos from the sidelines. That would not do. He set his empty glass on a nearby table, stepped up to her, and held out his hands.

Eleanor blinked up at him. "Luca, no, I cannot—"

She was smiling before she finished saying it.

"You are not sitting this out."

Before she could argue, he leaned down, slid his arms under her waist and knees, and lifted her. She let out a startled laugh, wrapping her arms loosely around his neck as he carried her onto the floor. The sheer loungewear made her lighter than he expected, the warmth of her skin pressing through the thin fabric. He swayed with her to the beat, a clumsy, shuffling rhythm that made her laugh harder.

His shoulders started to burn after a minute. He was about to set her down when Chris appeared, neon pink blatantly visible through the thin light fabric.

"I've got her," Chris said, and scooped Eleanor out of Luca's arms with insulting ease. Chris spun her in a wide, dramatic circle. Eleanor tipped her head back and laughed, the sound bright and uncontained for the first time since the pod.

Luca wiped sweat from his forehead, breathing hard, and went looking for Emily through the crush. The room was a sauna, and he had not danced with his woman yet.

He found her two strides in. Her hair stuck to her temples, and her loungewear plastered to the curve of her waist. He caught her by the hip and pulled her in, and she went up on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck, and the heat of her body annihilated whatever thought he had been about to form.

"This is going well," she said, pitching her voice over the music, moving her hips to the reggaeton.

"The playlist is a crime," he said, his hands settling on her waist.

"I know," she laughed.

They danced. A few meters away, Danny was staring at the ceiling and rigidly surviving the experience, but Luca actually had rhythm, and Emily knew it. The lounge dissolved into a grinding, heavy mass of damp hair and flushed faces, the air thick with the smell of alcohol and sweat. Luca stopped tracking the rest of his officers. He was soaked through his shirt, his legs aching from the gym earlier that morning and the relentless bass, and he kept Emily exactly where he wanted her, matching her pace, his hands on her hips.

By twenty-three hundred hours, his body was completely done. His ears were ringing, and the buzz in his head had sharpened into a heavy exhaustion. He had gotten what he came for.

He caught Emily's hand, gripping it tight, and pulled her close enough that his mouth brushed her ear.

"Em."

She turned her head, breathing hard, her eyes bright. "Yeah?"

"Let's go to bed."

She laughed, a low sound that vibrated against his chest, and followed him as he pushed through the sweaty bodies toward the hatch. Chris caught his eye from the dance floor, gave him a single nod, and went back to spinning Eleanor. Luca nodded back. The party belonged to the crew now.

The corridor outside the lounge was freezing by comparison, the air sharp and quiet. Luca kept Emily's hand in his, not looking back. The bassline rattled the bulkhead behind them and would rattle it for hours. The Triumph had been his on paper for a long time. Tonight, shaking under eighty people who were not going to stop until the lights came up, it was theirs too. In thirteen hours he was going to take every one of them into another star system, and every part of him believed he could bring them home. He would let them have the rest of the night.