The Granite Hawk cleared the Spanish coast at sunrise and pointed east over the diterranean, and Ryan still hadn't slept.
He was strapped into the seat behind Luca with three hardlight panes stacked in the air, all projected from the device on his lap, and the look of soone who had been awake all night and was now stuck having to explain what he'd found.
"Before coffee or after coffee?" Luca asked.
"There is no amount of coffee that makes this better," Ryan said.
That was a good start.
Emily slid into the copilot seat and tucked one leg under herself, hair tied back. Zoe was in the back with her boots on the table and her dagger still at her hip. Danny was half-listening while reading a paper Carn had sent at two in the morning.
Chris had his eyes closed. Joey was handing out jamón bocadillos he'd clearly lifted from the hotel in Spain.
"How much did you guys spend?" Luca asked.
"Less than a bad gunship." Ryan lifted a shoulder. "Also, this is what credits are for."
"That's not an answer."
"Four million for the compute and comms."
Luca looked back at him. "What? Why?"
"Four slates. Essentially laptops," Ryan said. "But TL9. They pull straight from satellite. No carrier, no plan, just public backbone. Not really sure who's paying for the bandwidth." He gestured at the projections around him. "That's how all of this is running right now." He moved to the next item. "Comm upgrade. What we had were internal only. These have hardlight screen and can take external calls, using the sa satellite pull. If any of us can see the sky, all of us can call it creates a sh."
Ryan produced a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket and put them on. They were matte black with a faint tint and were clearly not a necessary purchase.
"Also TL9?" Emily asked.
"Everything I bought last night was TL9."
Luca looked back at him. "You paid for that with your own money. Right?"
Ryan scratched the back of his head.
"Ryan."
"The compute and comms were company funds," he said. "That's a legitimate operational expense."
"And the cloak."
"The cloak is also an operational expense."
"The sunglasses."
Ryan touched the fra of the sunglasses. "Morale."
Luca faced forward again.
Ryan had turned his slate around. The screen was full of clips, headlines, streams, subtitles, panel windows, and scrolling news blocks. Everyone had sothing to say, and most of them were saying it at the sa ti.
Luca pulled the new communicator from his jacket pocket and thumbed the activation point. The hardlight rectangle unfolded above his palm, edge-lit in pale blue. He was calling a governnt line. They had phones.
An audio waveform pulsed in the center of the projection.
"UER Investigative Bureau, Geneva liaison. Agent Leclerc."
"Luca Rossi. I'm sorry about the missed calls. We've been moving."
"We appreciate the callback, Captain. We have questions about the incidents at the symposium."
"I'd love to help with that," he said. "I do. But I'd rather not do it over an open line. I want to make sure you get the full picture, not just whatever I can compress into thirty seconds." He watched the waveform. "We're landing in Naples soon. Any chance you can make that work?"
There was a pause on the line. "Captain, if you could provide a preliminary—"
"If you could et us in Naples," he said. "You'll have everything."
He flicked off the hardlight pane, and the connection blinked out. Ryan's slate, a solid bar that protected screens on one side and a keyboard on the other, was still open behind him.
---
Naples ca into view in a haze of pale sun and salt and old stone, the bay curved wide, Mount Vesuvius in the background was quiet and enormous.
It had been a long ti since Luca had been there. The buildings were older than anything he'd grown up near. Older than the country he'd grown up in.
The landing pad was in a private airfield about a kiloter from the waterfront. By the ti they'd stepped off the shuttle and hit the streets, Ryan was still talking.
"Here's the pattern," he said. "A video clip of us over Tucson goes up, then two hours later the sa phrase starts trending in twelve languages." He flicked one pane forward and froze the graph. "TL9 is a human right. Sa sentence structure every ti. Different accounts. Different regions. Sa phrase."
"Bots," Zoe said.
"Partly. Also real people repeating what they're fed." Ryan walked backward so he could keep facing Luca. "And it works because it isn't totally wrong. Everyone watched us erase a double overflow in one pass. Public sees that and asks why their city gets tanks and kinetic weapons while we get god-tier hardware."
Luca had nothing to say to that.
"Who's pushing it?" Emily asked.
Ryan tossed the answer onto the projection.
The man was in his fifties, silver at the temples, suit a little too clean for soone claiming to care about overflow zones. He was smiling at the cara the whole ti.
Marek Halden
CEO, Titan Dynamics Group
In one clip he leaned forward and said, calm as you like, "No private company should control the only viable path to advanced defensive technology while civilians die in overflow zones."
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
In another clip, he stated, "Access inequality kills." And in yet another, he pointed at the cara about the June auction being too late for families under portal pressure. And finally in one more, with a smile: "A self-styled noble house should not decide who gets to survive."
"He sounds reasonable," Joey said.
"That's the key," Ryan said. "Reasonable guy asking reasonable questions while his legal team buys our bankrupt friends from Texas."
That made Luca's head co up.
"Orion Horizons?"
"Yup." Ryan flicked another layer open. "Orion Horizons insolvency filings hit forty-eight hours ago. Titan-linked consortium filed three acquisition bids this morning."
"What are they buying?" Chris asked.
"Everything useful. Portal service contracts, their system store arsenal, Oort passage survey datasets, whatever internal R&D didn't burn in the bankruptcy." Ryan paused. "Plus whatever they can pretend is humanitarian while they grab the rest."
"And Danny?" he asked.
Ryan's expression flattened.
"Still think Danny was phase zero," he said. "Not because he's Danny specifically. Because he's curious, polite, and if you dangle a quantum spectroter he will follow you into a volcano." He looked back at Danny. "No offense."
"None taken," Danny said. "That's accurate."
"They needed physical access to TL9 hardware in the wild," Ryan said. "Titan's a manufacturer. They want to reverse engineer it and build their own."
Zoe made a sound low in her throat.
"Yeah."
Emily's hand found Luca's wrist. "Breathe," she said, quiet enough that only he heard.
Nobody talked for half a block.
Scooters blew past going way too fast, and laundry hung between the buildings overhead. So guy on the fourth floor was having a full argunt with soone Luca couldn't see.
Luca caught the sll of food.
---
Gli Argonauti t them at a narrow place two streets back from the water. Six tables. A family-run trattoria with a chalkboard nu.
Marco got up first, grinned, shook Luca's hand, and introduced the rest of his team before Luca had ti to sit down. Marco was twenty-two and handled vessel maintenance, port work mostly, but his class had been running toward closed-loop propulsion for two years. He went through them fast. Serena and Giulia covered dical ecology and support, overflow zone monitoring up the coast. Franco had been cataloguing portal fauna specins out of a university lab in the city. Riccardo ran environntal systems for a coastal infrastructure project that had wrapped six months ago and hadn't been replaced with anything interesting. Five of them, all Napolitan, Level 60 and capped.
Luca let Ryan run in the background while he worked the room.
Giulia leaned forward on her elbows. "How many crew are you taking on?"
"We need to get to about a hundred. Right now it's seven of us." He flagged the server and asked for a coffee. "We're still deciding on everyone. No offers made yet."
"Where do they co from?"
"So far, the US and Europe. We've got more stops after this." He took a drink. "We're not filling seats. We want people who want to be there for the right reasons."
Serena looked at Giulia, then back at Luca. "What happens on the ship? Socially. When you're in transit for months."
"People are people," Luca said.
Zoe looked up from across the table. "Birth control," she said. "Non-negotiable. Before you board."
Serena blinked. Giulia pressed her lips together like she was deciding whether to laugh.
"That's the policy," Zoe said, and went back to her wine.
Franco, who had been quiet for most of the al, leaned in. He was the youngest one there and looked it. "What about duties? Once you're aboard."
"Everyone has a role, including cleaning rotation."
Franco looked at him. "Everyone."
"From the top down. Laundry to scrubbing the decks."
By the end Luca wanted them on the ship.
He didn't say that.
But on the way out, Marco stepped in close enough that the others couldn't hear him.
"One thing," he said. "We're not doing this for money."
Luca almost smiled. Nobody would be getting paid, not directly anyway. What they were getting was a chance to go delving and find out what was past sixty.
"Good," he said. "Because the money's not the point."
Marco nodded. "We want to see what's out there. Past Earth. Past the solar system." A pause. "We want to know what happens next."
---
On the walk back Ryan had his slate open, which on a Naples street looked insane, but Ryan had never once required an audience to care what he was doing.
"Shell company trail out of Munich," he said. "Sa four addresses across every filing jurisdiction. Sa compliance officer. Sa audit firm." He swiped a layer open. "One of the entities funding Titan's dia campaign is also underwriting a humanitarian overflow fund bidding ergency contracts in the Amazon and in Egypt. They profit if overflows stay scary."
Danny frowned. "That doesn't an they caused them."
"No. It ans they built a business model that likes them."
Nobody said anything for half a block.
"Direct tie to the Danny op?" Luca asked.
"Can't prove it yet. But the sa nas keep showing up. dia contractors, logistics contractors, two shell transport firms. Geneva to Munich. Sa trail."
"Good enough for now," Luca said.
"For you maybe." Ryan's jaw flexed. "Not for ."
Luca pulled out his communicator and thumbed it open. The hardlight rectangle unfolded. Karen was in her Moon office, large monitors spread behind her. When she saw it was him she put down what she was holding.
"How's Naples?" she asked.
"Good. We had a eting this morning and a few more this afternoon. t five locals, all capped at sixty, strong backgrounds."
"Anyone interesting?"
"Yeah. All of them." Luca said. "Ryan's been up all night. He tracked a shell company chain out of Munich. Titan Dynamics CEO is running a dia campaign while his legal team buys what's left of Orion Horizons."
"I know about Munich." She picked sothing back up. "What do you need from ?"
"UER Investigative Bureau has been calling since Geneva. I set a eting. Figured you should know."
"What are you telling them?"
"Haven't decided yet."
Emily almost walked into him and then didn't.
"You don't need to decide everything before you walk in," Karen said. "Listen first. You're good at that." She glanced at sothing off-screen. "Don't get on cara about Halden. And send Ryan's write-up tonight."
She hung up.
He glanced at Ryan. "She knows about Munich."
Ryan didn't look happy about that.
Luca put the communicator back in his pocket.
He hadn't been there. That was the part he kept not dealing with. Danny had been on the floor of a staged lab while Luca was up in orbit getting a title. The crew had handled it without him, which was the thing he was supposed to be glad about, and he was glad about it, and it still sat wrong.
Ryan had been up all night because of it. So soone had to make the call to the UER about what they knew and what they'd share. He had the cuff. That was apparently how this worked now.
He didn't love it, but he was doing it anyway.
---
The crew checked into a hotel in Naples while Luca flagged a taxi.
Sant'Elia was twenty minutes east, past the city's edge and into countryside that was just old and dry and hilly. Emily had her window down. Luca had her hand.
The village was quiet in the mid-afternoon. The streets were stone, too narrow for anything wider than a cart. Whitewashed walls lined them past windows strung with laundry, a church sitting at the top of a short hill. The sun bleached everything flat.
He'd been here twice as a kid. He rembered the heat and his brothers running ahead of him on these sa stones and his mother calling after them in Italian she'd mostly stopped speaking by then. His father had taken pictures of everything.
They walked without hurrying. There was a territory control tower at the edge of the piazza, new enough that it still looked slightly out of place against the old stone. He kept walking.
They found a small place for lunch, two tables inside, one out, and ate simple, yet absolutely delicious pasta, and didn't make anything of it.
On the walk back, he stopped in the piazza. Emily waited.
"Happy birthday," he said.
She looked at him for a mont. "You rembered."
"Of course I rembered."
She looked around at the piazza. The church up the hill. Then back at him.
"Is this why we're here?"
"Small thing," he said.
"Thank you," she said, reaching up to kiss him.
---
Agent Leclerc was waiting outside the UER field office in Naples, sowhere in her forties, good-looking. Dark jacket, no badge visible. She shook Luca's hand without making anything of it.
They walked.
"We've been watching Titan Dynamics for eighteen months. Geneva is the clearest direct action we've docunted against a nad entity." A pause. "I need your IFC team's investigation notes. The hotel op and the lab."
"What do I get for that?"
She looked at him sideways. "Information."
"Then go ahead."
"We're familiar with Titan Dynamics," she said. "More than you might expect. Geneva wasn't isolated. We've docunted other activity targeting other adventuring teams in the last two months."
Luca kept walking.
"They're not after you specifically," she said. "They're after what you represent. You're just the most visible example of it."
He thought about that for half a block.
"Give twenty-four hours," he said. "I'll get you what we have from Geneva."
She stopped at the corner and offered her hand. He shook it.
Emily was waiting at the end of the block.
The seawall ran above the bay, old stone and salt and Vesuvius going dark against the evening sky. Marco had written a gelato place on a napkin before they left the restaurant and he had been right about it.
Ryan had the new sunglasses on, watching the city like soone who had made excellent life choices. Luca had no strong feelings about this.
He walked the seawall with Emily, both of them working through their cones. Luca looked at his left wrist. The cuff caught the last of the light.
None of it required anything from him right now.
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