What the fuck?
Luca's jaw dropped about half an inch.
He wanted to say sothing, anything. But there was nothing to say. He was twelve rows back with two thousand people between him and the stage.
Emily's fingers found his and squeezed his hand painfully hard.
He breathed out.
These were tenured professors. Researchers who had spent thirty years publishing work he would never read, foundational science that made the world work. Whatever his title ant on the Triumph, in here he was just a twenty-year-old from New Hampshire who'd gotten very, very lucky.
The moderator stepped back to the microphone while the applause was still going.
"We'll now hear from the crew's science officer." She gestured toward the speakers' section. "Daniel Donahue."
Luca watched Danny stand, already thinking he should have been up there with him.
Danny put his glass down on the floor and bumped Ryan's fist, pushed up his glasses and walked to the podium like he'd been planning it the whole ti.
Luca's left leg had gone completely numb. He'd shifted wrong sowhere during Caldwell's address and now pins-and-needles were working their way up from his ankle with zero regard for the mont. He shifted again, quietly, and Emily pressed her knee against his without looking up.
From Row 12, Danny looked small behind the podium.
"Thank you, Dr. Caldwell." He adjusted the microphone half an inch lower. "I'll be brief."
He took them through the Alpha Centauri mission sequentially, without unnecessary flourish, giving the audience enough to be useful and not enough to be confused.
The charter, he said, had been a UER commission. The findings belonged to the scientific community. Every data set, every specin catalogue, every transit observation was in the open-access package released through the UER science office. If any institution in this room wanted to dig into the biology of Proxima b, the atmospheric chemistry of its moons, the astrotric data from the transit itself, it was there. Go find sothing.
He did not ntion the missing stars.
Luca noticed. He was pretty sure the whole room noticed.
A hand went up before Danny had finished the sentence. "Mr. Donahue. The stellar disappearance data Dr. Caldwell presented. Your transit took you through several of the candidate regions. Did your crew log anything anomalous?"
"Our route took us through the Oort Cloud Passage," Danny said. "We didn't transit any of the candidate stellar regions Dr. Caldwell indicated. Our charter was specific to the Alpha Centauri system: comprehensive mapping, habitable zone analysis, core sample collection, life detection. Stellar monitoring beyond Alpha Centauri wasn't part of it."
Another hand. "What's the Triumph's current operational status? Is the ship available for a follow-up charter?"
"Operational questions go through the IFC."
"And the UER's position on a follow-up mission?"
"That question goes through the IFC."
The older physicist in the center section leaned forward without raising his hand. "You're dancing around it, Mr. Donahue. Seven stars. Your ship is the only FTL-capable vessel with demonstrated extrasolar range. That is a fact and this room knows it. Are you or are you not in a position to investigate?"
Danny looked at him. He set his hands flat on the podium and let the pause run.
"Scientific charters are evaluated by the IFC. If your institution wants to submit a proposal, I'd encourage you to do that."
The older man's jaw set. Soone near the back started a second question and soone else cut across it. The moderator called for order. The room got loud in the specific way rooms get loud when everyone has the sa question and nobody's getting an answer.
Danny stood at the podium and waited.
Then a voice from the floor, clear and carrying over the rest. "The Triumph Initiative has active recruitnt listings in twelve cities. You've been purchasing specialized instruntation and supplies for weeks." A beat. "Where is the Triumph going? And is it a UER-sponsored mission?"
Luca didn't move. From Row 12 he had a clean sightline to the podium.
Danny's eyes swept the room once, taking in the audience, the moderator, and then found Luca on row 12.
Luca grinned at him and shrugged.
Danny's face stayed level. His hands rested on the podium edge. Then his right hand ca up and pushed his glasses up his nose.
On the far left side of the stage, Karen stood up. She was already walking.
Danny opened his mouth.
He didn't get to use it.
Karen reached the podium in three unhurried steps and put one hand on the edge of the mic stand.
"Additional inquiries regarding the Triumph Initiative's operational plans may be directed to the IFC." Her voice was conversational, which made it worse. "We appreciate Dr. Caldwell's comprehensive address and Mr. Donahue's ti today."
She stepped back.
The moderator said sothing about a short break before the reception. The applause started, spottier than before. Luca unclenched his hands and realized he'd been gripping the armrest hard enough to leave marks.
Danny's ears had stayed the color of a stop sign for about thirty seconds after Karen reached the podium. All things considered, he'd held it together.
The reception spilled into a glass-walled atrium overlooking the lake.
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White tablecloths, catered food, wine in quantities that suggested the UER believed scientific minds worked better with sothing in their blood. The atrium's far wall had been given over to a series of displays, and Luca stopped in front of them. Proxima b from forty kiloters out, the planet's rust-red surface curving away to a horizon with Proxima Centauri burning in the sky at a size that still looked wrong for sothing that far away.
The adjacent screen had Midnight Veil, its atmosphere a sickly wash of green and yellow from orbit, beautiful the way sothing corrosive can be beautiful from far enough away. The third cycled through satellite images, terrain maps, magnetic field overlays, the atmospheric composition scans in gradients of blue and green. Those had been the mont they understood what they'd actually found.
Luca grabbed a plate and worked his way through everything on it before he'd found a wall to lean against. He didn't know what half of it was. So kind of pastry thing that turned out to be excellent. Thinly-sliced at on tiny toasts that he imdiately wanted four more of. He went back for more of both.
A cluster of researchers had ford in front of those screens and they were not talking. That was the tell. These were people who talked for a living.
Caldwell had done two things in one afternoon: made Danny look brilliant and made him a target. Luca wasn't sure which pissed him off more.
Within five minutes, Danny had a semicircle of researchers around him, all at least three tis his age, and the questions were already pointed.
"The rotation data." A man in a Caltech blazer held up his tablet like evidence. "The planet rotates. Every tidal locking model we have for Proxima b's orbital radius says that's impossible. Sixty tis the XUV irradiance of Earth, Cs every other day, and you're telling the atmosphere is intact?"
"We're telling you what we found," Danny said. "The docuntation is with the UER."
"The poles," the man said. "You logged active poles."
"Northern and southern, yes."
The man's jaw worked. He was looking for a sentence that hadn't already been invalidated by the screen behind him. "The pre-main sequence alone should have desiccated the planet. We've run the models. Hydrogen loss of fifteen to twenty-five Earth oceans over the lifeti of that star."
"I know the models," Danny said. "What I can say is that the ice ring around the planet is interesting. It may have played a role in atmospheric stabilization over geological ti. It's in the data. It's worth looking at."
"Is this the System?" a younger woman asked. Her voice had the particular edge of soone who had been waiting to ask that question since the opening ceremony. "Did the System stabilize the planet? Because there is no physical chanism that explains—"
"We don't know," Danny said.
"Surely you have a hypothesis," an older man pressed. He had the posture of soone who'd spent forty years behind a lectern and expected deference from anyone under thirty.
"I have several," Danny said. "None of them are ready for this room yet. When they are, you'll be the first to know."
The older man's mouth thinned. A younger woman beside him barely hid a smile.
Luca drifted on. Danny had it.
Zoe stood near the windows, arms crossed, watching the crowd with an expression that hadn't changed since the ceremony.
"Nobody's going to ask anything useful tonight," she said.
"You navigated a starship to another star system."
"Yeah, but nobody's asking about that. They want atmospheric data and stellar readings." She picked up a canapé from a passing tray, examined it with suspicion, and ate it anyway. "This is Danny's show."
Emily found them a few minutes later. She slid her hand into Luca's and leaned against his shoulder, tablet tucked under her other arm. "You're doing great," she said. "Very diplomatic. Very 'please don't ask any follow-up questions.'"
"Captain Rossi?"
He turned to find Dr. Caldwell standing behind him, a glass of wine in one hand and an expression that was warr up close than it had been on stage. Her glasses sat slightly lower on her nose. Less professor, more human.
"Dr. Caldwell." Luca extended his hand. "That was sothing. The opening especially."
"It was necessary." She shook his hand with a firm grip. "Half the people in this room needed to hear it, and the other half will pretend they didn't." She glanced toward the cluster around Danny. "Your science officer is handling himself well. The old guard isn't used to being redirected by soone who looks like he should still be in university."
"He's always doing that. You'd think people would learn."
Sothing in Caldwell's expression shifted. Better than she'd expected. Her eyes moved to Zoe. "And you must be Zoe Woods. The navigator."
Zoe straightened. "That would be ."
"My daughter has been poring through the Triumph's navigation logs. She says your in-system jump from Proxima to Alpha Centauri A was, and I'm quoting here, 'absolutely ntal.'"
Zoe's face lit up. "I like your daughter."
Luca thought about the Proxima hop. He still hadn't entirely processed that they'd survived it.
Caldwell laughed. Then she looked over her shoulder and raised a hand.
Three people broke through the crowd. A young man in a gray blazer was pushing a wheelchair; beside him, a young woman with dark hair pulled back. The woman in the chair had blue-green eyes already fixed on their group. She was the sa one Luca had spotted during the address, the one who'd been leaning in like the speech was happening specifically for her.
"My daughter, Eleanor," Caldwell said. "She goes by Ellie. And this is Matt and Alina, mbers of her team."
"Hi," Ellie said.
That was the whole greeting. She'd said one syllable.
Sothing in Luca's brain reorganized without his permission. He'd known she was British. He'd known her mother was British. Sohow when it ca out of this particular person, at this particular volu, it rearranged his thoughts into a different order than they'd been in a second ago.
"Hello," he said.
Beside him, Emily's hand tightened once on his arm.
"It's really good to et you," Ellie said, and there it was again, the rounded vowels and the matter-of-fact delivery, like she'd been eting the crew of the Triumph all her life and found it perfectly unremarkable.
Danny had appeared at so point. Luca had no idea when.
"We've been in the data since January," Ellie said, looking at him with the calm recognition of soone who had known who he was before tonight. "There's a blip near the end of your Sol-to-Alpha Centauri transit. About two days out from your recorded arrival. A brief field distortion that doesn't match anything in your drive teletry. Two sensor readings from the sa window that contradict each other. The UER said instrunt drift. We flagged it six weeks ago."
Danny pushed his glasses up slowly.
Luca recognized the move. Danny used it when he already knew the answer and just needed a second to decide how to say it.
He knew exactly what blip she was talking about. They all did. They'd buried it under noise until it looked like nothing and filed it as instrunt drift.
Luca looked at him. Danny looked back for exactly one second.
"You flagged it to who?" Danny said.
"The UER science office." Ellie's mouth curved slightly. "They said it was probably instrunt drift."
"We thought so too," Danny said.
"Weird, right?" Ellie said.
Matt said sothing polite about the food spread, gesturing vaguely toward the far tables. Alina agreed with him. Both of them drifted away, toward a cluster of researchers on the other side of the atrium. Ellie watched them for a second, then looked back at Danny like the subject hadn't changed.
"I have the flagged section isolated," she said. "If you want to look at it."
"Sure," Danny said. He had probably forgotten there was a reception happening, and definitely forgotten there were other people in the room.
Emily leaned slightly toward Luca's ear. "I like her," she said quietly. "Also your face is doing sothing very obvious right now."
Luca had no response to that. His brain was still spinning.
The SUVs pulled away from the conference centre as the sun dropped toward the mountains. Geneva's lights were coming on along the lakeshore, their reflections doubling in the water. Luca sat in the back seat with Emily on one side and the window on the other. She took his hand, laced their fingers together, and rested her head against his shoulder. He pressed a kiss to the top of her hair without thinking about it.
"The accent," Emily said.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
She made a sound that was mostly a laugh.
Luca loosened his collar and let his head rest against the glass.
Seven stars had vanished from the Milky Way. Every scientist in that room had spent two hours making the case his ship was the only one that could answer it.
He was already signed up for a two-year mission nobody in that conference hall knew about, with a hundred crew mbers still to recruit and a Varnathi rescue waiting at the far end of it. Seven missing stars, no clean pattern, denser toward the galactic center, had materialized on top of all of that.
And Ellie Caldwell had already found the signal they'd buried, pulled it straight from the radiation logs and the background teletry they'd filed under charter and never thought twice about.
He thought about CERN's servers, about ECN3's containnt logs, and wondered how long before soone noticed the field had flickered.
That was one day down.
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