Chapter 291 - Built Right

Luca went out the back ramp of the Centurion with Emily, holding her hand as they stepped into a cold morning that caught him by surprise.

Last night, they had been too exhausted from the descent and the portal chaos to do anything but collapse into bed. Waking beside her had left a warm hum in his chest that the cold New Dawn air couldn’t touch. Early winter, Danny had claimed, based on New Dawn’s orbit around Proxima Centauri, and the first thing Luca saw made him stop dead at the bottom of the ramp.

The whole crew, or close enough, was assembled in the field between the Centurion and the Triumph of Darron. Fifty, sixty of them, out in their gym shorts at dawn, arranged in loose ranks, with Chris up front leading them through stretches at the relentless pace of a man who loved exercise too much. He was counting something off, loudly, with both Dmitri and Rina keeping everyone moving. The crew followed, half of them still visibly half-asleep, rolling their necks and reaching for their toes in the dawn of an alien world.

Emily leaned her shoulder against his, grinning up at him in the pink light.

It was only their second morning on Proxima, but Chris had already lined up the crew in the grass. Stretches came first, because in Chris's book, a morning wasn't a morning without them. He loved the guy for it, but he also couldn't believe him. Only Chris would look at a brand-new planet and decide, first thing, that what it needed was a nice morning run.

Part of him wanted to peel off and join the ranks, and his weight had shifted half a step toward the field before he caught it. Fall in at the back, jog with the team, sweat the night out of his system, be one of the bodies out there. He hadn't had a good run in weeks. He missed it more than he'd say out loud.

“Come on, Captain,” Emily said, her voice quiet as her fingers laced through his. “Joey’s waiting, and you have a city to build.”

He had an infirmary to get to and a grid to lay out, and the captain's job had a way of interrupting the exact thing he'd have rather been doing. He turned with Emily and walked toward the Triumph of Darron.

Joey was moving between the cots with that quiet, heavy-eyed focus that meant he’d been up since yesterday. He and his team, Maria, Giulia, and Lucy, had spent the night between the overflow cots in the hangar and the infirmary med pods on Deck 4, and it showed in the dark smudges under his eyes. Elena Vargas was there too, asleep, sitting up in a chair by the door with a trauma kit still on her lap, and nobody had been stupid enough to wake her.

Shai was in the far med pod, sealed under the pale blue light. The display showed his vitals climbing in green spikes, the nano-scaffold already weaving new bone across his shattered ribs. It was terrifyingly fast. Back on Earth, a crushed ribcage meant weeks of intensive care and a ventilator; here, the TL9 cartridges were rebuilding him before Luca’s eyes. The pod’s readout estimated he’d be conscious by the afternoon, even if he’d need physical therapy to get his muscle tone back.

Luca stood over the curved glass, staring at its raw speed. Emily leaned against his side, her arm slipping around his waist, her face reflecting in the glass next to his. He looked down at her, catching the clean scent of her hair, and pulled her a little closer.

“He's going to be okay,” Joey said quietly, coming up beside him, wiping his hands. “The pod's got him. Lungs reinflated overnight. He'll hate the rehab, but he'll be fine.”

“How are Avi and Noa doing?” Luca asked.

“Avi's bone is already fused,” Joey said, nodding toward the cots. “I'll have him walking by tomorrow night, though I told him if he tries to run on it before Friday, I’ll lock him in a medical pod. Noa’s arm is set. She's already complaining, so I know she's fine.” Avi was propped up, scowling at a reheated MRE while Noa had her cast slung and was, indeed, complaining about something to Leila. Leila sat on the edge of the next cot with her own arm strapped tight in its stabilization wrap, gesturing with the other and clearly winning the argument.

“Did you get any sleep at all?” Luca asked.

“Enough to keep my eyes open,” Joey shrugged. “I'll sleep when the rotation starts, and there's nobody new in my infirmary.”

Luca looked at him, at Joey, who had spent the last five years stitching up shrapnel wounds and setting bones without ever losing his cool. He almost asked him then, about the command node, about the telemetry mesh. It wasn't the moment. Joey had dried antiseptic on his knuckles and a kid’s lungs reinflating ten feet away. It could wait.

“Thank you,” Luca said instead. “For all of it. You held the whole thing together.”

Joey looked faintly embarrassed, waved it off, and went back to work.

Emily stepped away to talk to Lucy about the shift rotation for the medical team, ticking off inventory items on her tablet. He watched her, noting the pale fatigue in her face. The lines around her mouth were still there from the time she’d spent in the Bio-Recovery Pod just before they landed. Luca’s eyes slid past her to the massive, silent shape of the machinery itself, dark and cold at the back wall. It pulled off the main reactor bus when it was active, a heavy, expensive piece of genetic reconstruction they’d only used twice. He felt a sort of relief that they hadn't needed it yesterday, that Shai and the rest could be mended with standard cartridges and a little time.

He crossed the deck to Emily, sliding his arm around her waist. She looked up from the tablet, her face softening as she leaned into him. Luca caught the happy grin she saved only for him and kissed the top of her head. Her hand squeezed his. “The shifts are set,” she said, her voice low. “Let’s go.”

The large dining tent was going up by the tower.

Zayaan had the frame half-raised already, a massive sweep of thick canvas that would seat the whole crew once the poles were secured. He and Aya were wrestling a line into a metal stake while Leila, who had apparently bolted from the infirmary the second Joey turned his back, stood off to one side with her wrapped arm held against her ribs, directing the entire crew one-handed. She couldn't lift a pebble, but she’d clearly made that everyone else’s problem. A folding table stood out front, stacked with breakfast wraps rolled in foil.

Luca grabbed one of the packages and peeled back the foil. It was a thin, griddled flatbread stuffed with scrambled eggs, some kind of spiced black bean, and a sharp cheese he didn't remember ordering. The heat of it warmed his hands, and the first bite was good enough to make him stop chewing for a second. When they’d been putting the crew together, he’d figured a professional cook was a luxury they could skip. Every time Zayaan stood over a stove, Luca was glad he’d been wrong.

He held the wrap out to Emily. She took a bite and chewed happily while they walked. She had a speck of griddled egg on the corner of her lip, and Luca brushed it away with his thumb, his finger lingering on her chin until she swiped at his hand with a laugh.

“You know,” Luca said, nodding toward the distant, red-tinged shoreline visible past the landing field, “the beach is right there. We could go check out the surf. See if there are any alien sandcastles to build.”

Emily rolled her eyes, though her grin spread wide and happy. “Come on, Captain. We have work to do.”

They walked toward the tower to find Gabriel.

He was at the tower where he'd been when Luca went to sleep, his laptop balanced on a crate next to the glowing store panel. The holographic overlay of the valley layout they’d settled the night before hummed in the pale light.

Gabriel looked up from his screen, his face breaking into a wide, white-toothed grin the second he saw them. “Capitão! Tell me you're here to give me the green light. I've got the main lines mapped out on the overlay, but the system won't let me lay the physical anchors until you authorize it.”

“I'm here to make you official,” Luca said, pulling his interface up. He found the Adventuring Company officer panel and added Gabriel to the vacant Quartermaster slot, pushing the permissions through for store access and infrastructure procurement. The interface flashed gold as the System registered the rank.

[Triumph Initiative: Procurement Authority Granted]

Gabriel, Quartermaster, authorized for System Store transactions against Company funds.

Gabriel stared at the notification, his chest rising as he took it in. Luca watched him, knowing exactly what this meant to the guy. Gabriel had grown up in the favelas of Rio, watching houses stacked on top of houses with no sewers or power lines, where tapped wires hung like black cobwebs across the alleyways. Now, he was holding the blueprint for a whole city, finally getting the chance to lay the infraestructure deep and right from the start.

“You're sure about this?” Gabriel asked, looking between them.

Luca looked at the projected cost, and the number was big enough that he leaned in toward Emily and dropped his voice. “That's a heck of a lot of credits, Em. Are we sure?”

“I'm sure.” She didn't even look at the figure. She looked at him. “This was your whole argument at dawn, Luca. Don't go soft on the bill the second it's real.”

That was fair, and it landed where she'd aimed it, the same place it had landed over coffee. Four hundred people were going to open their eyes here. He wasn't waking them up into a tent.

“Build it right,” he told Gabriel, nodding at the overlay and the clean lines the guy had spent the night laying out. “The way you mapped it. I don't want anything on this ground that falls apart on us in a year.”

Gabriel's grin went wide and relieved. “See? The Chief of Staff keeps him honest.”

Luca left them to it, walking back toward the Centurion while Gabriel and Emily argued over the delivery zones. It was hours of work and none of it needed him, which was, somehow, what a good day was supposed to look like.

His suit was in the Centurion, and he put it on. The light armor slipped on piece by piece. When the seals clicked and the internal pressure equalized, the familiar comfort of the suit settled over him. He slung the plasma sniper across his back and clipped the tomahawk to his hip. The orbital scans had mapped all twenty-two local portals yesterday, and the dropships had run patrol flights overnight, but Luca needed to look at them himself. He needed his boots on the ground, a physical read on the threat layout, before they committed to scouting the Vault or sending teams up to the asteroid base. Chris Valtz was going to map out the defense rotations, but Luca wanted to know exactly what kind of ground his people would be holding.

The two Roadrunner hoverbikes were leaning against the side of the LCV Strategos, their sleek sand-and-cream chassis dusted with Proxima dirt. He could have taken a dropship, but fuel wasn't free, and besides, the bike was more fun. He swung a leg over, settled into the saddle, and thumbed the ignition. The bike hummed silently to life, lifting six inches on a soft cushion of magnetic force, the glow of its repulsor nodes lighting the grass beneath him.

He'd barely brought the repulsors up to power when the mustangs noticed. The Sonoran horses were grazing the field edge, their powerful muscles moving as they cropped the violet grass. The lead bay stallion lifted his scarred head the second the repulsor pitch changed, and the black lead mare moved with him. They came to the hoverbike at a trot.

Luca watched the stallion pause to drop a fresh pile of dung into the red field. The horses were crapping everywhere, and if they weren't careful, they’d end up seeding half the valley with Earth weeds from the hay they’d eaten on the ship. Luca made a mental note to have someone scoop it. Probably Ryan and Chris. It was their fault the herd was here anyway, so they could spend their afternoons shoveling mustangs' business. But for now, he didn't mind the escort.

The cats had already slipped away. Pixel, who actually belonged on this planet, was somewhere in the red undergrowth showing Pepe and Pepa how to hunt. The two jaguars had taken to sticking with her, and the three of them were probably terrorizing the local things that lived in the brush. He didn’t worry about them.

He had barely rolled past the ramp when Emily walked down from the Strategos. She looked happy in the morning light, her hair finally loose and catching the light. She rested both hands on the Roadrunner’s handlebars, leaning in to kiss him through the open front of his helmet. It was a long, slow kiss that tasted faintly of Zayaan’s spices and the cold morning air, and Luca reached up to cup the back of her neck, his fingers drawing her in.

“Don’t get cute out there,” she told him, pulling back, though her eyes were soft and grinning. “Just get the visual layout. Let Chris handle mapping the rotations when he’s done stretching the crew. Ryan’s hands are full, and Chris is already complaining he doesn't have enough to do.”

“I’m just looking, Em,” Luca said, his thumb brushing the side of her jaw. “I'll come right back.”

She held his eyes for a second, and he wasn't sure if he had convinced her. “See you for lunch.”

She squeezed his hand one last time and stepped back.

Right as he brought the engine up, a shadow crossed the sun. The cool sweep of it slid over the field, over the mustangs, and Luca tipped his head back to squint into the gold.

High above, Plumitas was carving a slow, wide circle against the brightness. The giant condor must have found a thermal current. Down on the field, Rodrigo Castillo was probably sweating under Chris’s morning fitness dictatorship, running after the group and looking up every few minutes to check where his bird was.

“Show-off,” Luca muttered to the sky. He brought the Roadrunner around to the west.

He opened the throttle, the Roadrunner lunging forward. The mustangs surged into motion alongside him, their powerful muscles bunching, their hooves drumming a wild beat into the dirt. Overhead, the condor kept her slow, high circle, matching his heading. Luca Rossi rode west into the first morning of the world he was about to spend everything to keep.