Luca stood in front of the hotel bathroom mirror, tugging at his UER dress uniform collar that sat half an inch too high on his throat. The fabric was olive green, starched and pressed, with silver piping along the shoulders. The United Earth Republic's eagle-and-stars, stitched in gold thread, sat right over his heart. Karen had sent the uniforms ahead with Erik. Seven sets, tailored from asurents Sabine had taken during the Washington visit. The note attached to Luca's had been brief: Wear it. Don't argue. We discussed this.
Emily stepped out of the bathroom in hers. The won's cut was fitted through the torso with a long olive skirt that fell past her knees. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a low twist, and the uniform sharpened every line of her.
She looked at him. Then she smiled, stepped close, and kissed his cheek.
"You look handso," she said. Her fingers straightened the collar he'd been fighting with.
"You look like a recruitnt poster," he told her.
"Good." She turned to check the mirror. "That's the point."
---
Karen Stevens walked into the hotel lobby and Luca had the sa thought he always had: he was glad she was on his side.
She arrived with steel-gray hair pinned severe and a charcoal suit that probably cost more than the hotel room, Erik and Sabine at her flanks. She found the crew lined up near the elevators, seven officers in olive green dress uniforms standing in a row that was almost straight, and walked the line without saying hello.
She stopped at Danny first. Straightened his collar, smoothed a wrinkle from his shoulder, and looked him in the eye. "You're the keynote response today. Dr. Caldwell will set the stage, and you'll have the floor for questions afterward. Don't let them rattle you."
"They won't," Danny said.
Karen's mouth twitched. She finished the rest of the line in silence, every adjustnt small, every correction efficient. When she reached Luca at the end, she paused.
"Walk with ."
They stepped toward the lobby's floor-to-ceiling windows. Geneva's skyline stretched beyond the glass, the lake glittering in the afternoon light. Karen stood with her hands behind her back, watching the water.
"Erik briefed on the operation." Her voice stayed low. "The FTL drive is confird?"
"Complete schematic. Every layer."
"Good." She turned from the window. "Focus on the ceremony. Danny and your engineers are the priority today. You, Emily, and Zoe are there to be seen, smile, and let the scientists do the talking."
"I can do that."
"I know you can." For a second she sounded like herself, not the job. "You did well, Luca. All of you."
She walked back to the group. She looked them over, all seven of them, and sothing in her expression shifted into territory she didn't usually let show.
"Today is yours," she said. "I want you to enjoy it."
---
Izumi t them in the lobby with the Radiant Blades in tow, and the contrast was imdiate. The crew looked the part. Izumi and her team looked exactly like themselves. They'd shown up in platform boots and leather jackets, and Xinran was already filming the lobby on her phone. The only concession to formality was that Kazuha had left the katana behind. Probably.
"You all look very official," Izumi said.
Luca scratched the back of his neck. "Don't start."
---
The International Conference Centre sat on the Geneva lakeshore, all glass walls and modernist angles that clashed against the mountainous backdrop. The dia waited at the entrance. Cara crews behind barricades, reporters with microphones, photographers with telephoto lenses aid at whoever walked through the doors.
Danny stepped out of the SUV first. He adjusted his collar once, a nervous habit Luca had watched him do since they were kids. Then his shoulders settled. His chin ca up.
Zoe grabbed his arm.
"Don't let them intimidate you," she said.
"They won't." He covered her hand with his, briefly.
A UER liaison intercepted them at the door. "Dr. Donahue, Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Donahue, Mr. Valtz, you're in the speakers' section, front left." She turned to Luca. "Captain Rossi, your party is in the reserved guest section. Row twelve."
Zoe's head ca up. "I'm his—"
"Row twelve," Luca said, because Karen was watching from ten feet away.
Zoe shot him a look. Then she looked at Danny.
Ryan got there first, dropping a hand on Danny's shoulder and steering him toward the doors. "You've got this," he said. "We've handled worse than a room full of PhDs." He raised a fist.
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Danny bumped it. Sothing in his face settled. "Yeah."
He walked through the doors.
---
The conference hall was massive. Tiered seating rose on three sides around a central stage, screens flanking a polished podium. Two thousand people settling into their chairs. Row twelve sat near the back of the reserved section, which suited Luca fine.
He settled between Emily and Zoe and imdiately started shifting. The seats were not great. Hard backs, minimal cushion, the armrest at exactly the wrong angle so his elbow had nowhere to land. His left side was going numb before the lights even dimd, and no amount of adjusting helped. Luca thought about the lounge chairs for Emily's stage on the Triumph, the ones the Boston firm had selected and he'd approved from a catalog. He had never actually sat in them. Right now that felt like a significant oversight.
The age gap was sothing else. Most of the audience looked like they'd been doing science since before the System arrived. Gray hair dominated. The younger contingent, the ones who'd grown up with the System and actually engaged with it, clustered in pockets. They stood out the sa way the crew did, younger and sharper, moving like the work wasn't theoretical to them.
"I should be up there," Zoe said quietly.
"Danny's got it," Emily said.
"Danny's my boyfriend and I'm his navigator. Technically half that data is mine." She adjusted her skirt with more force than necessary, and sothing solid shifted under the fabric. Luca could have sworn she'd brought the plasma dagger. "Also I'm hoping soone argues with him."
---
The screens on either side of the stage lit up, and Luca recognized the photos imdiately. Ryan had taken most of them during the mission. Photos of New Dawn and Midnight Veil. Then, diagarms of the mapped out Alpha Centauri system and finally, the research data took over, cycling through mission findings, atmospheric readings, biology specins, and stellar observations. It was everything they'd found four and a half light-years from ho.
It was strange to watch. He'd been there for all of it.
Then the credentials rolled.
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Oxford, Chair of the International Astrotrics Collaboration, mber of the UER Science Advisory Council. The list kept going long enough that Luca gave up reading it.
Dr. Beatrice Caldwell.
She walked out and took the podium without any ceremony about it. Mid-fifties, Luca guessed, silver hair and wire-rimd glasses. She looked like she hadn't needed to impress anyone since before Luca was born.
"Thank you," she said, and the British accent caught Luca off guard. He didn't know why. He'd known the woman was British. Sohow it sounded different out loud.
"I want to begin by acknowledging the United Earth Republic, whose mandate and resources made the Alpha Centauri mission possible."
Luca looked toward the stage. Karen was sitting to the side of the podium, hands clasped in front of her, watching Caldwell. When Caldwell finished the acknowledgnt, Karen nodded once. Like she was confirming a fact.
"Now. Sothing that most of my esteed colleagues will find uncomfortable." She paused, looked across the audience, and smiled. "We don't know nearly as much as we think we do."
Quiet laughter rippled through the younger section. The older contingent shifted in their seats.
"Five years ago, the System arrived and rewrote every assumption we had about physics, biology, and the nature of reality itself. Many of us in this room spent careers building models that the System rendered incomplete in a single afternoon. And our response, for the most part, was to cling to those models and insist the new data was wrong." She let that land. "It wasn't wrong. We were."
She moved quickly into the science, explaining the data models, TL9 classifications, habitable zone surveys, and extrasolar observation baselines. The terminology ca in fast and smooth and over his head. Emily was taking notes for so reason while Luca tried to follow along before giving up.
He shifted in his seat. His left side was completely asleep.
He put his arm around Emily's shoulders. She leaned into him without looking up from her notes. The stiff uniform creaked.
He scanned the room the way he always did when he had nothing better to contribute. Exits first, then security, then faces. Near the back of the reserved section, maybe twenty rows from the stage, a girl sat in a wheelchair at the end of a row. Dark brown hair falling loose around her shoulders. She was leaning forward, completely imrsed in the presentation, totally focused on what Caldwell was drawing in the air. She looked to be about his age and pretty.
Sothing in Caldwell's voice shifted. Luca stopped watching the room.
"This symposium marks a turning point." The screens shifted back to Ryan's photos, slower this ti. The Triumph is floating in the asteroid belt, and the Genesis platform is visible at the edge of the fra. "For the first ti, we have primary data collected by human researchers from beyond our Solar System. Collected by a crew of seven who traveled four and a half light-years and returned to tell us about it."
Emily's hand found his knee and squeezed once.
"That data is now available to every accredited institution in this room," she said. "All of it."
The murmur that ran through the hall was different from anything before it, louder and more excited. Soone near the front started a question and got shushed by the people on either side.
"The science officer responsible for cataloguing and analyzing the primary research dataset is in this room today." The screen shifted to Danny's photo alongside his credentials. "Daniel Donahue holds a United Theorist professional class at a level that exceeds the academic proficiency of nearly everyone present, including myself." Her eyes found Danny in the speakers' section. "He will be available for questions following this address. The scientific community is expected to engage with that data on its rits. Not dismiss it because the researcher is younger than your graduate students."
The younger section started clapping, loud and imdiate. Luca clapped along. Not everyone did. A cluster near the center stayed seated, arms folded or hands in laps, watching Caldwell like a committee vote they'd already lost. One of them adjusted his glasses with two fingers, slow and deliberate.
From sowhere in the rows ahead, a voice that didn't bother to keep itself down: "Professional class. Absurd terminology."
Caldwell let the applause run three seconds, then raised a hand.
"And now," she said, ignoring the outbrust. "I want to discuss sothing else."
The screens above and behind her changed.
A star chart replaced the photos of Proxima b, the Milky Way spread across the screens in blue and white points. Luca had no idea what he was looking at. It was a lot of stars.
Zoe had gone still beside him.
"Those circles," she said quietly.
"What?" Luca said.
"The red ones. Those are stellar positions." She leaned forward, eyes fixed on the screen.
Red circles did indeed mark seven points across the chart, each labeled with a catalogue designation and a date. The dates were all within the last eighteen months.
"Seven confird stellar disappearances in the past year and a half." Caldwell let the word settle. "Stars that existed for billions of years simply stopped being there."
Sothing moved through the hall this ti. Luca looked at Emily, who had stopped taking notes and was watching the screen.
"The distribution is not uniform." The star chart zood out, showing positions relative to Sol. The red circles clustered toward the galactic center, sparser in the outer arms. "There is no clean pattern. What there is, is a correlation with stellar density. The core loses stars first. The outer arms, later. Our best estimate places the next candidate sowhere within five to a thousand light-years from Sol." She said it the way soone says two blocks over.
"The crew of the Triumph of Darron carries the only FTL-capable vessel on Earth with proven extrasolar range." Her eyes moved back to the speakers' section. "If we are going to understand what is happening to our stars, we will need them."
Two thousand people turned in their seats, every single one looking at Luca.
What the fuck?
Luca's jaw dropped about half an inch.
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