Chapter 290 - First Light

The alarm went off at five minutes to six, and Luca cracked one eye at the glow of it and lay perfectly still, as if not moving might convince it to be wrong about the time.

He'd set it himself, a little over four hours ago, which took away anyone he could reasonably blame. Emily had a bare leg thrown across his, pinning him to the bed like she'd planned it. Her hair was in his mouth. One of her arms had vanished under the pillow and the other hung off the edge, and somewhere in the night she had stolen the entire blanket and most of the mattress, and he had let her, same as every other night.

He thumbed the alarm quiet before it could wake her.

For about ninety seconds he didn't move. The Centurion was quiet around him, its hull warming up, the small window showing the dim, red dawn of a planet whose small sun didn't know how to do mornings right. There was a ghost of last night's Folgers still in the air. It was a very good place to be at 5:55 in the morning, and if he were anybody else, he'd have stayed in it.

He wasn't anybody else, so he got up.

He lifted her leg off his and slid out from under it, and she made a small noise and burrowed down into the warm spot he'd left. He pulled the stolen blanket back up and tucked her back in, and stood there a second in the cold air to be sure she'd settled. She had, dead to the world, hair across her face. The captain didn't get to sleep in. The Chief of Staff, just this once, did, and he was fine with the trade.

He started the coffee.

He was two cups into the pot, and the light through the window had climbed from red to light pink by the time Emily surfaced.

She came out wearing the blanket like a robe, hair wrecked on one side, and made straight for the coffee maker. She got a mug down off the shelf. She reached for the pot. He let her get that far.

"Morning," he said, and crossed the galley, and slid his arms around her waist where the blanket had come loose, and kissed the warm skin under her ear. She leaned back into him and let him hold her up while the last of the pot finished dripping.

"Not now, Luca. We barely slept." But she said it into his forearm, and stayed right where she was, warm against his chest, the empty mug hanging from two fingers.

He held on a second longer, because he wanted to, and then let her go so she could get at the coffee.

She filled the mug, carried it to the dinette bench, and folded onto it with her knees drawn up and her eyes mostly shut.

"You were thinking so loud it woke me up," she muttered into the steam. "Come on. Out with it. If you're going to keep me up, you might as well use my brain."

"I keep thinking about the noble objectives. The Holding," he said, turning the mug in his hands. "Here's what's bugging me. The System never told me what it actually wants. It gave me the objectives back in New Hampshire, and nothing since. So I'm guessing at the whole thing." He tipped his chin at the window, where the tower stood. "But the tower upgrade's right there in the Store, and the Colony objective is as well. That thirty-day defense. My bet is the Holding wants the same thing, something about holding the ground for a month, since it's under House Rossi." He set the mug down. "And I think pulling the Level One upgrade is what trips it. The second we do, the System comes for us. So if those three objectives run separately, that's three different months of us getting shot at, and I'm not looking forward to that three times, or twice, I guess, if the Holding is tied to the Level 1 upgrade."

"We're not doing two months of defenses, Luca," she said, wrapping her hands around the warm mug. "No way."

"No, Em. We're doing two." He set his own mug down. "I'm not getting the Varnathi out of that vault until the tower's leveled up and there's somewhere to put them. And we can't hit the colony number without them. So it can't be one month. It's two."

"Two months of bleeding, when one might do it." She didn't soften it. "Convince me. Walk me through why we can't fold it into one."

"Because the colony objective wants four hundred registered residents, and we've got what? Ninety-six people and a bunch of horses." He leaned over the table. "The only four hundred bodies on this whole planet are asleep in that vault. We can't hit the number without the Varnathi. And I'm not waking them until the tower's at Level One, and there's a place for them to sleep and a bed and food for them. So the upgrade siege has to happen first, just us holding out for thirty days. Then we build the place out. Then we wake them. Then the colony clock starts. There's no way we can do all of that in one month."

“You wake them before the upgrade,” she said. “Not all of them. But enough. The defense is already manned by our teams and the perimeter’s covered, everyone’s already dug in. If we can register four hundred residents before the first one starts, the colony clock starts while we’re already holding the line.”

"No, Em. We can't rush it. We've got to talk to one of them first. Get one out, see if they're friendly. We don't need to wake four hundred. We wake the ones we have to, see if they can pull some levels, and it gives us a window between the first defense and the second. By then, who knows, maybe Izumi's done her first supply run."

"Six months?" She set the mug down. "Luca, you want to wait six months to get them out?"

"No. I don't. But we need to think it through." He held her eyes. "I'm not going to wake them up and then upgrade the tower and run a double defense."

Emily stared at him for a second, the mug forgotten between her hands.

"Then stop calling it thinking it through."

That was a low blow, low enough that he kept his face still and let her keep going.

She leaned forward, blanket slipping off one shoulder. "You’re not thinking it through. You’re trying to make it perfect. You want roofs first, beds and food on shelves. A nice expensive little town waiting for them, so nobody opens their eyes scared, hungry, and surrounded by guns."

"That’s not a bad thing." He heard how thin it sounded the second it left him.

"No. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s also not the situation we have."

He looked away from her, out the window, where the tower stood black against the pink dawn. Easier to face than she was. What he wasn’t saying, what he had no intention of saying at six in the morning, was that he kept imagining it go wrong in his eyes. The stasis pods cracking open. People sitting up into a fight they’d never agreed to, blinking at a sky that wasn’t theirs, dying in the dirt before they got a single word out, because Luca Rossi had been in a hurry. He’d already lost his mom to bad timing. He was not going to be the bad timing for the Varnathi.

"You’re right about one thing," she said. "We don’t wake four hundred people blind. We don’t drag them out of stasis and point them to defend our tower. But you’re talking like the only choices are perfect or stupid, and they’re not."

"I’m not walking them into a siege."

"You are. Every day you leave them in that vault is its own gamble. You’re just not the one who has to watch that one play out."

He wanted to tell her the vault was different, that a slow fade in stasis was at least a death they could still get out in front of. He didn’t, because he could already hear her gut it. They don’t know us, he almost tried, and swallowed it.

"Nothing about this is good enough, Luca," she said, like she’d heard the whole argument he hadn’t made out loud. "That’s the point."

Her voice came down a notch, not soft, just lower. "Wake the first one. Maybe two. Joey checks them, Danny talks to them. We find out what they know, what they need, what we can handle, what waking one actually costs. We don’t sit on our hands for six months because we’re scared of being bad hosts."

"I said I don’t want to wait six months."

"You said maybe Izumi does her first supply run." She didn’t look away from him. "That’s waiting six months."

He pushed a breath out through his nose.

Emily pressed two fingers against the back of his hand.

"You’re the one who told me this planet doesn’t give us clean options. So don’t sit here at dawn and try to build one because the alternative scares you."

His eyes came back to her fast.

There it was.

Something crossed her face the second after she said it, a small flinch, there and gone, like she’d felt the edge of it land where she’d aimed it. She didn’t take it back. She’d meant the truth underneath, even if she hadn’t meant the shape.

"I’m not saying wake all of them today," she said. "I’m saying we stop making plans around the fantasy that we can save them without ever letting them be in danger. They’re already in danger. They have been for however long they’ve been asleep."

The coffee maker clicked behind him.

Emily wrapped both hands around her mug again. "So here’s my vote. We wake the rest in controlled groups. With our medical teams ready, food, and guards. Blankets, water, whatever we can give them. But we do it now, before the upgrade. Before the colony objective."

"You want to pull them out of stasis and kick off the tower defense."

"I want to pull them out of stasis and let them decide whether they want to stand with us." Her eyes flashed. "They are not cargo, Luca. They are not an objective marker. They’re people. If this is their world, their vault, their dead civilization, then they get a vote before you spend a month bleeding for them and another month bleeding because of them."

She was right, and he knew it the second she said it, because he'd spent the whole morning doing the exact thing she was naming. He'd thought of them as registered residents and the colony number, a figure he had to hit, right next to the tower upgrade and the thirty-day clock. It had made sense until she said the word people and made him hear himself, and it shamed him now that it sat out in the open between them.

Emily drew in a breath and softened by a fraction.

"I know what you’re trying to do," she said. "You want them to open their eyes to a nice breakfast and a town that already works. I love that about you. I do. But we don’t have that. We have a tower, a hundred exhausted people, a planet trying to kill us, and who knows how many of them in the Vault."

Luca’s hand had gone still around his mug.

"Your plan guarantees two months of people dying," she said. "Mine might only cost us one."

"Might," he said quietly.

"Yes," she said. "Might. That’s the best word we have right now."

He finally looked back at her.

Emily didn’t look away.

"So don’t tell me you’re not gambling with them. You are. We both are. I’m just saying we stop pretending the safest choice is the one where they stay asleep until we’ve already lost people."

"I need to scout the vault," he said. "If they’re viable, we wake one. Maybe two. Before I make the call for them."

Emily studied him for a long second.

"Good," she said. "That’s the plan."

"What if they don’t want to be woken?"

Her expression shifted.

"Then we deal with that when one of them is awake enough to say it." She looked down at her mug, thumb moving once along the rim. "But Luca, I don’t think leaving them asleep is mercy anymore. You saw how many pods had already gone dark."

"I know."

"Most of them are gone."

"I know," he said again, but quieter this time.

Emily reached across the table and covered his hand.

"The vault is failing, you saw that. But if we wait for perfect, we may be waiting while the rest of them die in their sleep."

He closed his eyes for half a second. That was the part he hated. Not the siege, or the System. Not even the risk. Time. There was always a clock.

"We wake one," he said. "We ask. If they tell us to leave the rest asleep, we listen."

"And if they ask us to get them out?"

He opened his eyes.

"Then we get them all out."

For a few seconds, neither of them said anything. The Centurion hummed around them, while the tower stood black against the pink morning outside.

One impossible thing had become a plan.

Luca took a swallow of coffee and made himself put the next problem on the table before the first one could swallow him whole.

"What about the base in the asteroid belt?"

"The maintenance bay." She sighed, her eyes drifting shut for a second. "What about it?"

"It has housing."

Her eyes opened.

Luca sat a little straighter.

"It has housing," he said again, slower this time, because the thought had not been fully formed until he said it out loud. "And medical bays, storage, power, huge fabricators. It’s not a town, but it’s a shelter. Everything I kept saying we didn’t have."

Emily’s blanket slipped lower as she leaned forward.

"For how many?"

"Thousands."

"Luca."

"I know." He was already searching for the base design on his laptop, which they had explored and mapped. "We still haven't officially claimed it," he said. "We already ran those portals. We could claim and provision it, enough supplies for 30 days..."

"Alright. So if we trigger the attack on the tower—" she said, and let it hang there.

"—we then move the Varnathi up to the base," he said, picking it up where she had dropped off. "Keep them safe up there, out of the firefight, while we hold the outpost down here."

"Right." She had it now, fitting the last pieces in out loud. "We get the foundation ready, we hold the tower through the thirty days, and when it's over, we bring them back down and stand up the colony."

For the first time since she’d sat down, Emily looked like she could breathe.

"Good." She stretched her bare legs out under the table, her feet warm against his.

"So." He pulled the mug in close. "I will scout the vault first. Make sure they're even still in there. The sensors can't see through the overflow anyway, and I want to see the pods with my own eyes before we bet the farm on them."

She studied his face over the rim of her cup, pulling his thoughts out of him without needing a screen.

"You don't think they're... gone, do you?" she asked.

"No," he said, quick and sure. "The objective is still there, Decant the Varnathi. If they were gone, the System would've canceled the objective by now. They're in there. I just want to see it, Em. I want to know what we're getting into before we go in too deep. That's all."

"That's fair," she said, her finger pointing at him, sleepy but bossy in that way he loved. "It's just smart. Scout it, make sure they're safe, and get right back. Don't do anything stupid down there. I had to listen to you almost get killed on the feed last time, Luca, and my heart can't take it. Just check it and come home."

"Check it and come home," he promised.

"Good." She finally opened her eyes all the way, the sleepy warmth shifting as her business brain kicked in. "Because I have to head over to the Strategos in like an hour, and I can't be chasing you around while I'm trying to get things set up. Danny and Eleanor are taking the science teams out to grab samples. Flora and fauna, hitting every spot they can land a dropship on."

He nodded. That part was his, and he'd been stubborn about it and meant to stay stubborn. He wasn't hauling Earth seed four light years to plant a dead little monoculture in alien dirt and call it farming. He wanted to eat off this planet, wanted Eleanor and Danny to bring him back something native they could grow and graft and cultivate, something that belonged here, so that in six months, the colony fed itself off the ground it stood on and not off whatever supplies they had.

"What about Ryan and Zoe?" he asked.

"They're taking teams to prospect out the minerals nodes we found," she said, draining her cup. "Ryan wants to know where the good spots are before we buy the gear to dig them."

Standing up a whole civilization was a genuinely absurd plan, but they were going to do it anyway.

He pulled his interface up while Emily was tying up her hair and looked at the command layer.

Four noble command nodes lit, steady. Emily, Ryan, Danny, and Zoe. He had three slots left at his current tier. He wanted Chris and Joey in them before the hard part started, both of them, all of them wired into the same nervous system before the System came knocking.

He closed the interface. He'd ask Chris and Joey in person. It wasn't the kind of thing you sent as a System prompt.