The counter hit ninety-six.
Luca didn't move. Ghost Protocol held him invisible, the camo field burning power alongside a scan that had no business still running. The red warning on his visor pulsed like a heartbeat, and his actual heartbeat was doing its best to match it.
Ninety-seven.
The density shadow at the top of the shaft shifted on his overlay. It had moved from the monitoring station toward the shaft entrance, paused there for maybe three seconds that lasted about a year, and now it was drifting back. Routine check or automated response, Luca couldn't tell. He wasn't going to stay long enough to find out.
Ninety-eight.
The power cell read two percent. The multitool's scan beam flickered once, a micro-stutter that sent his stomach into his boots, and then stabilized. The schematic on his visor filled in the last structural gaps of the Vanguard drive's spatial fold assembly.
Ninety-nine.
[Schematic Scan Complete — Vanguard Faster-Than-Light Displacent Drive]
Object: FTL Propulsion System
Designation: Vanguard Faster-Than-Light Displacent Drive
Tech Level: TL8 - Full Fabrication Schematic Available
Core Component: Spatial Fold Initiator (Carbon-Glass Containnt Sphere)
Primary Dinsions: 3.8m x 2.1m x 1.9m / ~4,200 kg
Schematic Status: COMPLETE
Coordinates: Logged
[Field Catalog Integration Complete — New Schematic: "Vanguard FTL Displacent Drive" cataloged.]
One hundred.
Luca holstered the multitool and yanked the hacking pad off the terminal. The containnt field snapped back into place, the blue glow flooding the chamber and washing everything in cold light. On his overlay, the shadow at the top of the shaft had turned and was drifting back the way it ca, following the surface corridor toward wherever it had started.
The power cell read one percent.
"Done." Luca pulled the spare power cell from his belt and swapped it. Fresh power flooded the suit. The red warning disappeared. Ghost Protocol's tir still read eight minutes and change, which was plenty.
"Copy, Ghost One." Erik's voice had steadied. "Recomnd imdiate extraction via planned route."
"Already moving." Luca crossed the chamber to where Zoe waited at the corridor entrance. She'd watched the whole thing without a word, one hand on her dagger and the other on the plasma blaster she hadn't needed to draw. Her camo rippled as she turned.
"We should do Switzerland more often," Zoe said.
"That was nuts."
"You got it?"
"Yeah."
They climbed the service shaft in silence. Luca went first this ti. At the top, his HUD showed an empty corridor in every direction. Whatever had moved up here, an automated system or a bored technician checking an alert, it wasn't looking for them anymore.
The acoustic sensor flag on the security net would stay in the logs. Soone would review it later and find nothing out of place. The containnt field was back up. The FTL drive sat on its platform, unchanged.
Luca almost laughed.
They moved back through EHN1's warehouse. The Blue Giant shielding blocks lood at the eastern end, and Luca's visor still tagged the faint signatures bleeding through the iron. He counted at least two more unseen bays beyond the shielding, maybe three, holding whatever else the UER had collected from portal drops across the Solar System.
"Control, Ghost One. Primary objective complete. Moving to extraction point."
"Copy, Ghost One." Erik's voice.
Then Ryan ca on. "North Area caras are looped. You've got..." He paused, and Luca heard keys clicking. "Twenty-eight minutes before the tistamp cycle. Plenty of ti."
"How long on the loop?"
"Four minutes before the system cycles and resets everything. Get to the fence before that or every cara on the North Area goes live."
EHN1's bay doors opened onto the service road, a strip of asphalt between squat concrete buildings under a gray Swiss sky.
Two hundred ters of open ground stretched between him and the periter fence. On the other side of that fence, Erik should have the van waiting.
His visor swept the tarmac. No heat signatures, no movent in any of the buildings between them and the fence. The North Area sat in its mid-afternoon lull, and every physicist who might have been working out here was likely out to lunch.
"Ryan, we're moving to the fence."
"Fifteen seconds before the system resets. Gate 880's still in the loop." Ryan's voice went tight. "On my mark."
Luca tapped the haptic strip on his left gauntlet. Parkour Assist. His visor confird it, a dim icon going active in the corner of his HUD, and the suit's flex stabilizers locked around his shins. He swiped once and tapped again. Reflex Circuitry. Second icon. The micro-actuators synced to his movent prediction feed, and the world felt half a step slower than it should have.
He triggered [Silent Step] and [Heightened Awareness] back to back through his interface. The noise floor dropped to nothing. Every footfall, every rustle of nano-weave, gone. And in its place, the awareness blood outward, every movent within range sharpening into focus. He could feel the wind shifting between the buildings, hear the faint electrical hum of the periter fence two hundred ters out.
Zoe had always moved like the ground was optional. The Phantom suits just gave her permission to prove it. And Emily during Midnight Veil, mid-backflip, both blasters firing, laughing the whole way down. The suits turned what they already were into sothing unreasonable.
Luca had never been that. He was the guy who tripped on flat terrain and shot things from behind cover. But sothing in his chest was pulling forward, and he wasn't sure if it was nerves or the fact that he really, really wanted to know what the Phantom could do at a full sprint.
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His boots gripped the asphalt. The flex stabilizers humd against his shins. He just needed to not fuck this up.
"Mark."
Luca ran.
The first three strides belonged to him. After that, the Reflex Circuitry took over and the world turned into a sar. The flex stabilizers drove his stride longer and faster than his legs had any right to go, and the Silent-Stride swallowed every impact into nothing. He was a passenger in his own legs.
Zoe tore across the tarmac beside him making for the fence.
The periter fence ca up fast. It stood three ters tall, chain-link topped with razor wire. His visor tagged it, asured it, and the Parkour Assist module had the trajectory mapped before he finished his last stride.
He hit the base at full speed and the suit did sothing his body had no business doing. Horizontal beca vertical in a single violent push, the servo sh firing from calves to thighs, and the chain-link vanished under his boots. He cleared the razor wire close enough to hear it and landed on asphalt on the far side with his knees bent and his brain about three seconds behind the rest of him.
That shouldn't have worked.
Zoe landed beside him a half-second later. She didn't stumble.
A gray van with Swiss plates pulled up the road and slowed without stopping. The side door slid open. His visor tagged Emily inside, Izumi and the Radiant Blades packed into the back rows.
They sprinted the last forty ters and dove in. Erik hit the gas before the door shut.
"Ghost One and Ghost Two, extracted," Erik said into the comms. His voice had gone back to professional, all the frayed edges packed away. "All units, stand down. Operation Ghost Shift is complete."
Luca pulled his helm off.
The grin hit before the fresh air did. He didn't try to stop it. They'd pulled it off. Every second from the countdown to the razor wire was behind him, and he sat on the floor of a moving van with stolen schematics in his multitool and the dumbest smile of his life on his face. He didn't care who saw it.
Emily turned in the passenger seat. Her eyes found his, read the grin, and sothing behind her composure cracked wide open. She leaned between the seats and kissed him, one hand catching the side of his jaw.
"Welco back," she said.
A giggle erupted from the back row. Then another. Luca looked over his shoulder to find Xinran hiding behind her phone, Yuna with both hands pressed over her mouth, and Izumi biting down on a smile with limited success. Kazuha just grinned, which, Luca was starting to learn, was the sa thing.
Zoe unsealed her suit beside him and pulled the chest piece apart without hurrying. She rolled her shoulders once, tossed the gauntlets into the pile, and glanced at the rear door like she was already calculating the next ti she'd get to do sothing like this.
"Suits off," Erik said. "Stow them under the seats. Civilian clothes in the duffel."
The Phantom ca off piece by piece, nano-weave peeling from his skin as the van's air conditioning hit every damp inch of him. He was soaked. The under-layer clung to his chest, and when he pulled it over his head, the giggling started again from the back rows.
Luca kept his eyes on the duffel and pretended he couldn't hear Xinran whispering sothing to Yuna in Japanese. He swapped the suit for jeans and a plain black T-shirt and shoved the components under the seat.
His hands were still shaking. He missed the jeans button twice, which got another round of muffled laughter. Erik caught his eye in the rearview mirror and looked away a little too quickly.
Izumi leaned forward from the middle row. "Next ti," she said, her voice pitched low enough that only he caught it, "tell the tiline. I'm better at distractions when I know how long I'm holding."
Luca looked at her. She'd built that CERN distraction from nothing, orchestrated an evacuation with two teenagers and a katana, read the entire mission from body language alone, and never once asked what he was actually after. She'd done all of it without a single briefing.
"Yeah," he said. "Next ti I will."
She leaned back. Her expression said she'd hold him to it.
She'd earned a bigger seat at the table. He just needed to figure out which one.
Emily stayed half-turned in the passenger seat as Erik took the back roads toward Geneva. Her eyes moved from his face to his hands and back. They always did.
Luca let his head rest against the window.
They had co to CERN for one thing and left with four. Athan could build a fleet with the FTL schematic. The cloaking emitters could make ships invisible. The ring fragnt was sothing so large the multitool couldn't categorize it. And the UER had been stockpiling portal drops in secret, which ant Karen had either been kept in the dark or had kept them in it.
Every one of those facts changed sothing. Luca just needed a shower and twelve hours of sleep before he figured out what.
Erik dropped Luca and Zoe two blocks from the hotel. The van took everyone else around to the side entrance. Standard operational security that Luca hadn't needed to ask for, because Erik did this for a living.
The cover story would hold together on its own. Luca had gotten a phone call from Karen during the CERN, stepped away to take it, and Zoe had gone with him because Zoe went where she wanted. The whole thing was too boring to invite follow-up questions.
Danny and Joey were on the lobby couches. Danny's head snapped up the second Luca walked in, and his mouth opened. Luca gave him a look that said "later." Joey was reading studying sothing on his tablet.
Luca took the elevator. He knocked twice on Ryan's door and let himself in.
Ryan and Chris were huddled around the comms rig on the desk, the portable unit still warm from the operation. Ryan had a laptop open beside it. Chris leaned back when Luca entered, arms crossed, and gave him a nod that said everything had gone clean on their end.
"Data," Luca said. He connected the multitool to Ryan's laptop and waited. The transfer bar crawled across the screen. Five files. Everything he'd scanned in the last hour compressed into data packets that fit on a single drive.
"This thing is painful," Ryan said, watching the progress bar inch forward. "I'm running mission-critical transfers on a laptop that would lose a race to a graphic calculator."
"Next control tower shop we find, we're buying TL9 computers."
[Objective: FTL Schematic Acquisition] (1/1) [Complete]
1,200,000 CP
Luca blinked at the number. Over a million contribution points for a single schematic. Breaking into a UER black site apparently paid well.
Ryan scrolled through the headers. His eyes went wide, his mouth opened, and then he closed it and kept scrolling.
"That's the FTL drive," he said. "Complete?"
"Complete."
"And these three are..."
"Cloaking emitters."
Ryan's hands stopped on the keyboard. He stared at the header, then at Luca, then back at the screen. Luca watched him fight the urge to dig into the schematics right there. But he kept scrolling. He stopped at the ring fragnt and stared at the extrapolation data. The wirefra projection of the full ring structure rotated slowly on his screen, and the estimated diater readout blinked in the corner.
"What the hell is that?"
"I don't know." Luca dropped onto the edge of the bed. "Karen's intel said the FTL drive was in ECN3. She didn't ntion what was behind the Blue Giants."
"Blue Giant shielding?" Chris pushed off the wall. "What was behind it?"
"A stockpile." Luca closed his eyes for a second and opened them. "Portal drops. The UER must have been buying them from delves across the Solar System and bringing them to CERN for study. The ring fragnt, the cloaking units, and at least two more bays we didn't have ti to reach."
Ryan's fingers hovered over the keyboard without touching it.
"Fragnt one of two fifty-six," Ryan said quietly. He looked at the wirefra, then at Luca. "Where's the rest?"
"Scattered across portal drops. Could be anywhere."
"Then we should go find them."
Luca didn't answer right away. Ryan had jumped straight past what it was to what they should do about it, which was the most Ryan thing he'd ever seen.
Danny was going to lose his mind. Luca had thought the sa thing standing in front of the fragnt, and the prediction hadn't gotten less accurate.
Soone knocked. Emily let herself in, changed into leggings and an oversized sweater, her hair down. She closed the door and sat on the bed beside him.
She leaned over Ryan's shoulder and looked at the screen. Ryan scrolled through the schematics for her. The FTL drive. The cloaking emitters. The ring fragnt.
Emily didn't say anything for a long ti. She stood there with one hand on the back of Ryan's chair, reading, and Luca watched her eyes move through the data the way they moved through everything that mattered to her. The wirefra of the ring structure rotated on the screen, and her lips parted once and closed.
"Ryan, scroll back to that last file."
Ryan did. The wirefra filled the screen again. Emily stared at the extrapolation data from across the room.
"Do you think she knew?"
Luca leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Karen always knows more than she tells us. She sent us for the FTL drive. Everything else was a bonus or a test." He turned the thought over. "I haven't figured out which."
Emily stared at the schematic with the focus she saved for things that mattered. The rest of the room might as well have stopped existing.
"Danny's going to lose his mind," she said.
"That's exactly what I thought."
Emily's mouth curved into the slightest smile, there and gone. She squeezed his knee once, and picked her tablet back up.
Chris cleared his throat from the window. "Opening ceremony's in two hours. We all need to be in UER dress uniforms."
Luca looked down at his jeans. "Right," he said.
Ryan frowned. "CERN's internal network just flagged a containnt variance at ECN3. No active breach. But soone's pulling logs."
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