The Granite Hawk touched down at Geneva's airfield and Luca taxied toward the private terminal and cut the engines.
"So," Izumi said from the seat behind him. She'd been sitting on that one since the board eting. "Master of Venture."
He looked back at her and smiled.
"I have good ears." Her eyes moved to his wrist. "What did you get? Co on. The System doesn't na you sothing and give you nothing."
Emily looked at him, too.
He'd been planning to tell Emily. In private. Without Izumi, two feet away, absorbing every word with those good ears. He pulled his sleeve down slightly. "That's classified."
"It's on your wrist."
"Still classified."
Emily's mouth did a thing. She'd co back to it. He knew she'd co back to it. Izumi wasn't done either. Yuna, beside her, had stopped watching the tarmac and was watching Luca instead, which was sohow more unsettling.
His transponder buzzed.
He pressed it. "Yeah?"
"Luca." Ryan hesitated. "There's been a complication."
"What kind?"
"The resolved kind. That's the good news."
"Ryan."
"It's resolved. I want to lead with that."
"What's the complication?"
A pause. "So. Danny."
Luca's hand ca off the throttle. "Danny what?"
"He got... distracted. During the conference."
"Distracted how?"
"Well. He left. With soone. And then he was, uh." A beat. "He was unavailable. For a while."
"Ryan. Where is Danny right now?"
"He's in his room. He's fine. Joey's with him."
"Where was he before his room?"
"That's the part that's a little—" Ryan stopped. "Okay. Look. He's fine. We got him back. Everything's back."
"Got him back from where?"
Izumi was watching him. Emily too. Yuna hadn't moved.
"We'll brief you when you get here," Ryan said.
Erik was at the edge of the tarmac with his hands on his waist, waiting for them. The situation wasn't resolved. It just wasn't on fire anymore.
"What happened?" Luca asked.
Erik walked them through it.
During the final morning of the symposium, Danny had t a researcher at the conference center who had so smart questions about Alpha Centauri magnetic field data, the kind from soone who'd actually read the papers rather than the executive summaries. A lab visit ten minutes east, and a quantum spectroter worth seeing. He'd told Ryan he was going and left without giving anyone the address, and walked out of the conference with soone he'd known for fifteen minutes.
The lab was a rental space with a lease and no current tenant. The researcher's institute had closed its Geneva office two years ago. The coffee she made him had a sedative in it. They found him on the floor of a staged laboratory with his clothes folded neatly on a chair beside the bench. A second team walked into the hotel with his keycard and walked out with the phantom cloak and other things.
They had had two coordinated teams at a UER-sanctioned event, one for Danny and one for the hotel. The symposium was the cover.
"The cloak?" Luca asked.
"Recovered. Ryan and Chris tracked the hotel team."
"Do we know who sent them?"
"Titan Dynamics."
Luca's jaw tightened. He rembered them; their teams had taken shortcuts in Venus and caused enough problems to get them banned from IFC outposts. "How big is this?"
Erik shrugged. One shoulder.
"Ryan and Chris handled the hotel team," Erik said. "Zoe and Xinran handled the lab. There was nothing left to interrogate."
Joey was in the hallway outside Danny's room when they got there, holding a coffee and looking nearly cheerful, which either ant Danny was genuinely fine or Joey had decided to skip straight to acceptance. He raised the cup when he saw Luca. "Before you ask. Yes, Danny's fine. Sedative burned out clean. He's embarrassed, and Zoe's already told him he's an idiot."
"Zoe apologized to him?"
"Once, briefly, before the idiot part. Then again, after." Joey sipped his coffee. "He needed both."
Luca pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
Even Erik looked like this was normal.
"Karen?" Luca asked.
"She received a summary."
"And?"
"It's your team," Erik said.
Ryan and Chris had shot up an extraction team and blown up a van sowhere in Geneva. Zoe and Xinran had walked into that lab and done whatever they'd done, and the footage of it need not exist. The diplomatic fallout was going to land on soone's desk before morning.
Luca stood there.
Emily put a hand on his arm. "You're spiraling."
"I wonder why," he said.
The hotel room was quiet. Luca had his jacket on the chair, his back against the headboard, and his interface open in front of him. Twenty minutes of not doing anything with it.
Danny was what he kept coming back to.
Nobody had told him to go. Luca hadn't said anything. Danny had heard "quantum spectroter" and followed a pretty researcher out of a conference because that was exactly the kind of thing Danny did, and nobody had stopped him, and three hours later, he was on the floor of a staged lab while two guys cleared out his hotel room.
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Which wasn't on Luca. Except it kept feeling like it was.
He thought about Erik, hands on his waist, already at the tarmac. The situation was under control before Luca had even landed. Which ant either Erik had moved very fast or he'd been watching for it. And Karen hadn't called. Apparently, a summary was enough, which was either trust or sothing that looked like trust from the outside.
Maybe Luca was just spiraling. It had been a long day, Danny was fine, the cloak had been recovered, and his crew had blown up a van in central Geneva, so.
The other thing that kept coming back was Karen, standing at the center of that board eting, saying his na in front of twenty-four directors and reading his résumé out loud, which he could have done without. He thought about the Frontier Charter notification and the eight bundle tiles all greyed out behind a condition he hadn't cleared yet, and the Vassal Objective that had appeared with no description, and the fact that he was sitting in a hotel room in Geneva with a TL9 nobleman's cuff on his wrist and absolutely no plan for tomorrow.
He was twenty. Today had been a lot.
The bathroom door opened.
Emily ca out in a t-shirt and bare feet.
He watched her cross the room. Sothing in his chest did what it always did when he wasn't paying attention to it. She looked like herself. Emily in a hotel room after a long day.
He genuinely did not understand how he'd ended up here. She was smarter than him, and she'd been handling things he didn't notice until they were already handled, and every ti he looked up, she was in whatever room he was in and not looking like she wanted to be sowhere else. He did not deserve this. He was also not going to say that out loud because he would never hear the end of it.
She climbed onto the bed and settled against his side without asking what he was looking at, her shoulder against his arm, one leg folded under her. She waited.
"So," he said. "Izumi wanted to know what I got."
"I was wondering the sa thing," Emily said.
He pulled up the full summary and told he started reading out loud instead.
The title had reclassified the Triumph Initiative. She'd seen that much, the company designation changing from Adventuring Company to Frontier Charter. What she hadn't seen was the rest of it, because the rest of it lived in his interface.
[Frontier Charter chanic: XP Smoothing]
Experience gained by Company mbers contributes to a shared progression pool. mbers below the company dian receive accelerated XP gain until parity is restored.
"Company XP Smoothing," he said, still reading. "We already share XP inside the party. This is different. It bleeds across the entire company. If one team levels faster, the rest don't fall too far behind."
"That's actually a big deal," Emily said.
"Yeah." He kept scrolling. "Four percent discount on buildings and weapons purchases. Which, fine, I'll take it." He stopped. "And then the bundles."
"All eight," he continued. "Every configuration. They've been locked since Midnight Veil." He set the interface down slightly. "Karen's title waived the minimum. The whole catalog opened the mont I accepted."
Emily was quiet for a mont. "All eight?"
"All eight."
She looked at the ceiling briefly. "Okay. That's— okay."
"Yeah."
"What else?"
"There's one more thing." He pulled up that section specifically. "Noble Command Layer. Three officer nodes. Biotric monitoring." He stopped. He read the next line again. "Persistent low-latency connection." He set the interface to the side slightly. "So when I designate soone into the sh, I get their vitals. Shared overlay and indicator."
Emily looked at him. "Their heart rate."
"At all tis."
"When mine spikes," she said, "you feel it."
"I guess, though I can see how that could get annoying."
She thought about that for a second. "And you'd know where I am."
"That's what it says." He went back to reading. "I want to designate you first. I should have asked in the shuttle but Izumi was right there and I—" He stopped. "I'm asking now."
Emily held his eyes for a mont. "Sure."
He pulled up the designation prompt. Her na was already populated, the System had apparently made inferences, which was either efficient or unsettling, he hadn't decided.
[System Notification]
Noble Command Layer Designation - Mutual consent required.
[End of ssage]
He confird it.
Emily went still. Her eyes focused on sothing he couldn't see. Then she blinked. "Received."
[System Notification]
Emily Berrow [Level 74] has been added to your Noble Command Layer.
[End of ssage]
"Anything useful in there?"
"NCL Node One." She tilted her head, still reading. "My overlay links to yours. Shared positioning. Threat triangulation."
"In combat," he said. "I see where you are relative to incoming. You get the sa from . The sh calculates vectors from wherever all the linked nodes are." He paused, still reading. "So abilities extend the sa way. Whatever's anchored to , the node positions beco part of the coverage area."
Emily looked at him. "Which abilities?"
"Doesn't say."
She looked up from her interface. "And the biotrics."
"Yeah." He paused. "If sothing goes wrong and you can't tell , I'll know anyway."
"Okay," she said. "That's actually useful." A beat. "Don't we already get each other's biotrics in a fight, though?"
"In a fight, yeah. This is just-" He paused. "Persistent."
Emily looked at him. "So it's always on."
"Always on."
"That's kind of weird."
"I can dismiss the indicator. It doesn't have to be sitting in my overlay all the ti." He paused. "You can always cancel the connection. It's not permanent permanent."
"Good," she said. "Okay. Done."
She leaned back against his shoulder. "The other two slots?"
"Not yet. I want to think about it."
He pulled the interface back and stared at the eight bundle tiles, all still greyed out. He'd been staring at this nu since the ridian and it still felt too large to touch.
"The bundles are unlocked," he said. "All eight, from the Frontier Charter."
"I saw."
"HQ cos first. We have to place it before any of the selections open." He paused. "I want to put it on the Triumph."
Emily looked at the ceiling for a mont. "What if we get a different ship soday? Or upgrade?"
"I don't know. There's a reassignnt option once per cycle, so it's not permanent. We'd figure it out."
"How long is a cylce?"
"No idea."
She exhaled. "Fine. The Triumph then." A beat. "Which bundles?"
He scrolled through the tile list and stopped on bundle five without saying anything for a mont. The system was quite cheap in that regard, no details or specs. He'd been staring at them since the ridian and they still hadn't opened up.
"There's a dical one," he said. "Bio-Recovery Suite."
Emily shifted, drew her knee up, and rested her head on his shoulder.
"I don't know exactly what's in it. Everything's still locked until we place the HQ." He paused. "But if it does what the na suggests..."
She looked at him.
"I thought," he said. "If it's an option."
"Luca." Her voice was even. "I already talked to Karen."
He looked at her.
"I talked to her back at the Genesis platform." She t his eyes steadily. "There are options. More than Joey thought when we got back from Alpha Centauri. IVF. Donor eggs."
"IVF?"
Emily blinked and smiled. "In vitro fertilization. Radiation did what it did, but you can use a donor. Soone else's egg, fertilized externally. It's science. It works, apparently. Karen connected with soone, and I've had a conversation." She looked at him. "I just didn't want to bring it to you before I knew what I was actually dealing with."
"Okay," he said.
Emily brought her other knee up and wrapped her arms around both of them. She waited.
"We're still young," he said. "That's—" He stopped. "That's not what this is."
She watched him.
"I don't like that sothing was taken from you," he said. "Without asking. I don't like it."
Emily looked at him for a mont. The lamp on the nightstand was doing sothing to the green of her eyes.
"I hear you," she said quietly.
She tucked her hand under his arm, and he leaned into her, and they sat there.
He'd been sitting with the word Founder since it appeared in his notifications. He couldn't find an angle on it that felt manageable. A Founder built sothing that lasted longer than the people who started it. That was the point. He'd spent four years running portals with a very easy relationship with next, as in: what ca after, where they were going when this part was done. He'd never had to actually think about what happened after next.
The Varnathi rescue operation was three months out. The ring fragnt was missing 255 pieces. The missing stars had a pattern pointing sowhere past ahead. None of this was going to be done when he was twenty-five. Maybe not when he was thirty. He was going to be old before any of it finished and it was going to keep going without him soday, and that was apparently the point.
He hadn't figured out how he felt about that yet.
"What, tired of already?"
He looked at her. She was watching him from an inch away, chin on his shoulder, with the expression she used when she'd caught him three thoughts deep and didn't mind pointing it out.
"No," he said. "Not even close."
"You had your thinking face on."
"I was thinking."
"About?"
He looked at the bracer. The owl etched into the band. Then at her.
"I don't want the rest of it without you in it," he said. "That's all."
Emily held his eyes for a mont.
"I know," she said.
She kissed him. He pulled her in, arm around the back of her neck, and she hooked her leg over his and settled against him like she had nowhere else to be.
Soone knocked once and the door opened before he could answer.
Zoe ca in first wearing a gray lounge shirt, looking entirely too comfortable for soone who'd killed people earlier that day. Ryan followed. Danny ca in behind him, still slightly pale, wearing a hoodie Luca hadn't seen in years. Joey brought coffee.
Chris carried a bottle of wine and six glasses.
Luca blinked at it. "Where did you get that?"
"Room service," Chris said.
Emily was already making room on the bed. "Study session," she said. "Conflict resolution."
Luca groaned.
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