Luca drifted forward in zero-G, momentum carrying him into Chris's shoulder. They both activated their mag-boots, locking onto the metal grating with satisfying clanks. The transition was jarring, a shift from luxury to vacuum in the space of a heartbeat.
His helmet HUD flickered, reorienting to the facility's dark corridors. There was no gravity and no atmosphere, only the cold reality of metal corridors and the steady hum of his suit's life support.
"Welcome back," Danny's voice came through the comm, tinny but clear. "How was the party?"
"Eventful," Chris said, already pulling himself along the corridor. "Got the key fragment."
Luca's hand went to his suit's utility pack, feeling the weight of the key fragment and the two small jewelry boxes Nisede had given him.
[Item Acquired: Alpha Centauri Drydock Key 1/3]
"What's the status on the others?" Luca asked, pulling himself along the corridor toward the storage bay portal.
"Zoe and Ryan are already back at the ship," Danny replied. "Got in about thirty seconds ago."
"They beat us?" Chris sounded genuinely offended.
"Barely," Danny said.
Luca activated his mag-boots, the clank grounding him to the deck plating. Floating was a novelty, but walking was faster. Beside him, Chris did the same.
They made their way through the dark corridors, helmet lights cutting pale beams ahead. The facility felt different now: less ominous, more like potential. With three portals cleared and their challenges completed, all that remained was to claim their prize.
The airlock cycled, and they pushed through into the Triumph's cargo bay.
Zoe and Ryan were already there, stripping out of their armor. Zoe looked exhausted, her dark skin slick with sweat inside her helmet. Ryan was grinning despite the blood spattered across his armor.
"Second place," Ryan said, pulling his helmet off. "Not bad for a high-society infiltration."
"How'd yours go?" Luca asked.
"Piece of cake," Zoe said, though her expression suggested otherwise. "Retrieved the device. Bypassed their corvette control systems. Got out clean."
Ryan pulled a data chip from his utility pouch, grinning. "Also snagged a funky [Prototype Cloaking Device Schematic]."
"Mostly clean," Zoe corrected. "There was a firefight on the way out."
"There's always a firefight on the way out."
Luca moved to the equipment rack and started unsealing his helmet. The familiar hiss of equalizing pressure, then the recycled air of the Triumph hit his face. It smelled like home, with a flair of toxic spore thrown in for good measure.
"Where are Emily and Joey?" he asked.
"Still in their portal," Danny's voice came through the ship's speakers now instead of the comms. "Probably scales easier with only two people."
They're fine. They've handled worse.
But the waiting gnawed at him.
He made his way to the bridge, Chris and the others following. Danny had the main viewscreen showing a feed from one of the facility's cameras, focused on the third portal's location in the generator room.
Nothing but the dark interior of the facility and the faint shimmer of the portal's threshold.
"How long have they been in?" Luca asked.
"Eight hours, sixteen minutes," Danny said through the speakers. "Longest so far."
Luca paced the bridge until the hum of the ship's systems felt like a drill boring into his skull. He couldn't wait here. Without a word, he cycled through the airlock and headed back into the facility's darkness, Chris right behind him. They reached the generator room just as the portal began to stir.
"Portal's active!" Danny's voice cracked with relief through the comms. "They're coming through!"
The portal rippled like disturbed water.
A figure stumbled through.
Joey. His shield was scorched, his armor dented in a dozen places. Blood streaked his visor, but he was upright, moving under his own power.
Then Emily.
She emerged half a second later, her dual blasters still in her hands, plasma blade mag-locked to her thigh.
The portal collapsed behind them, the shimmer fading to nothing.
With no gravity, Luca had to kick off the wall to build momentum. He pushed forward and caught Emily as she stumbled. Her body collided with his, and he wrapped his arms around her, holding tight.
For a second, she pressed her helmet against his, forehead to forehead through the armored visors. He could feel the tremor in her breath through the suit's audio pickup, the slight shake of exhaustion and adrenaline.
"We got it!" Emily's voice was breathless, triumphant despite the exhaustion. "We got it!"
"The third key?" Luca asked, already knowing the answer but needing to hear it.
"The Advanced Ship Upgrade mod!" She pulled back just enough to look at him through her visor, her green eyes bright even through the tint. "Obviously we have the third key too, but Luca—this mod is incredible. It's—"
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Joey drifted past them, one hand braced on the wall for stability. "She's been talking about it since we found the damn thing. I'm about ready to shoot her myself."
"You love me, Joey."
"Debatable."
A laugh of pure relief escaped Luca. They'd actually done it. With the portals cleared and the keys acquired,
Emily's hand found his through their gloves, squeezing once. "Let's go claim this thing."
They made their way through the facility's corridors toward the command theater. Luca's helmet lights swept across darkened spaces: massive halls that could have been commercial districts, sealed sections that might have housed hydroponics or recreational areas, automated walkway systems waiting dormant. The scale was staggering. This was more than a drydock; it was a city designed to support thousands.
"How many people do you think worked here?" Emily asked, her voice echoing through the comms.
"A lot," Ryan said, reading data on his HUD. "Facility schematics show habitation modules, engineering districts, support infrastructure. This place could house close to four thousand people."
The control room took Luca's breath away.
It was enormous, dwarfing the Triumph's bridge. The walls were lined with dark screens, currently dormant but promising functionality once powered. At the center of the room, a raised platform held the command theater. Beyond it, floor-to-ceiling viewports revealed the facility's interior.
Massive drydocks stretched into darkness, skeletal frameworks designed to hold ships far larger than the Triumph. Gantries and repair platforms stretched into the darkness, alongside maintenance bays and upgrade stations capable of complete vessel overhauls.
"Holy shit," Ryan breathed.
It reminded him of the Genesis Platform's command theater, sharing its brutalist architecture and sense of purpose, but this was bigger and more focused on maintenance rather than administration.
All six of them stood in the command theater now, helmets still sealed, staring at the view through their visors.
"The keys," Luca said.
Zoe stepped forward first, pulling her key fragment from her suit's storage. It was a crystalline wedge, roughly the size of her palm, glowing faintly with blue-white light.
Ryan handed over his—identical in size, but the glow was more amber.
Luca retrieved the final fragment from his own pouch. Green light pulsed beneath the surface.
"There," Emily pointed toward the center of the command platform.
A cylindrical pedestal rose from the deck, its surface smooth except for three recessed slots arranged in a triangle pattern. Each slot pulsed with light matching the key fragments.
Luca moved to the pedestal. The others gathered around him.
They placed the fragments into their respective slots, each one sliding home with a satisfying click. The interfaces activated, blue light racing across the surface as the pedestal scanned each key fragment.
The fragments locked into place with a mechanical thunk.
A series of deep thunks echoed from the facility's superstructure as heavy mechanical systems came online, deck after deck. Bulkheads began to pressurize and emergency seals disengaged, the vibrations traveling up through Luca's mag-boots. Eighty or ninety decks below, generators were spinning up, one after another, each one feeding power into dormant systems.
Around them, the screens flickered to life, displaying diagnostics and status reports in a language that looked almost human but wasn't quite.
The viewport lit up as massive floodlights activated throughout the two drydocks visible from this theater. The skeletal frameworks were visible in sharp detail, revealing the true scale of the maintenance bays. Engineering workstations. Fabrication equipment. Modification platforms built to handle anything from fighter craft to capital ships.
"Look at that," Chris whispered, his voice filled with awe.
One of the central screens flashed bright red.
[LIFE SUPPORT ONLINE]
[ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSING INITIALIZED]
[SCANNING...]
A pause. Then new text scrolled across the display:
[FOREIGN CONTAMINANT DETECTED]
[NEUTRALIZING IN PROGRESS...]
Ryan's head snapped toward the screen. "Wait. Foreign contaminant?" He leaned closer to the screen, zooming the display as his breath caught. “Composition matches the airborne particles from the Triumph. The spores. This thing… it’s cleaning them.”
The command theater went dead silent.
"What?" Emily pushed forward, staring at the display. "You mean—"
"The facility's cleaning them!" Ryan's voice cracked with something between disbelief and hope. "Look—atmospheric processing, environmental systems. It's detecting the contamination and neutralizing it!"
A soft chime echoed through the room. New text appeared on the screens:
[ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSING COMPLETE - CONTROL THEATER ALPHA]
[OXYGEN: 21.3%]
[CONTAMINANTS: 0.00%]
[ENVIRONMENT: SAFE]
Luca stared at the readout. His hand went to his helmet seal, hesitating.
"It's safe," Ryan said, already unsealing his own helmet. "The air's clean."
One by one, they removed their helmets. Luca's came off last, and he took a cautious breath. The air was cold, sterile, but it didn't carry the acrid chemical smell of his suit's recyclers. It was clean.
Joey was already at another console. "He's right. The filtration system is actively destroying them at a molecular level. It's far beyond anything on the Triumph."
Luca felt his chest tighten. Hope, dangerous and fragile, bloomed in his ribs.
"If the facility can clean the air..." Emily's voice was quiet, tentative. "Could it clean the Triumph?"
Ryan spun to face her, his expression shifting from shock to excitement. "The drydocks. If we bring the ship into one of the maintenance bays, seal it, run the atmospheric processing through the Triumph's systems—"
"We could decontaminate the entire ship," Chris finished.
The weight that had been sitting on Luca's chest for days, the knowledge that they were cut off from Earth, from their families, from everything they'd left behind, suddenly felt lighter.
"We could go home," Zoe whispered.
Emily's hand found Luca's, squeezing hard enough to hurt. Her green eyes were bright, wet.
"We could see our families again," she said.
His HUD flickered. A notification overlaid his vision:
[System Message]
Alpha Centauri Drydock - Claimable
Claim Facility?
[Warning: Requires Adventure Company Headquarters to finalize claim]
The hope crashed into a wall.
Luca's breath caught, and Emily noticed immediately. "What? What's wrong?"
"The facility..." He gestured at the notification only he could see. "It's claimable. But there's a requirement."
"What kind of requirement?" Ryan asked.
"Headquarters." Luca's voice came out flat. "To finalize the claim, we need to establish an Adventure Company HQ first. Twenty members minimum."
"We should have recruited people more before we left Earth," Danny said.
But who would have joined? Luca thought. The Triumph only had eight cabins. Anyone they recruited would have just sat on Earth for six months, waiting for them to come back. What established adventurer would abandon their own company for that?
Not that Luca had wanted a big crew anyway. The plan was never to build some massive thing, just a small, independent operation under the IFC umbrella. Keep the team tight. People he trusted. Separate finances, separate liabilities, but still part of something bigger.
He still wasn't sure he wanted to recruit more people.
Except now they didn't have a choice.
"We're seven," Zoe said quietly.
"Same reason we still haven't been able to accept the Headquarters Enhancement Package," Luca said bitterly. "Or the System-Issue Vanguard Bundles. All locked behind the same goddamn threshold."
There must be a loophole.
"So we're stuck," Ryan said quietly. "We found the facility. We cleared the portals. We have everything we need to fix the contamination and go home. But we can't access it because we don't have enough people, and we can't get more people because we're contaminated."
Emily's hand was still in Luca's, but her grip had gone slack. The hope that had lit her eyes moments ago was fading, replaced by something harder that might have been resignation, or maybe determination.
"There has to be another way," she said.
"Like what?" Chris's voice had lost its usual levity. "We can't recruit. We can't go back. We're it."
Luca looked around at his crew. At Emily, fighting to hold onto hope. At Zoe and Ryan, exhausted from their portal run. At Joey and Chris, still bearing the marks of their battles.
The facility thrummed around them. Life support running. Atmospheric processing neutralizing contaminants. Generators powering systems that could maintain ships, fabricate equipment, sustain hundreds of people.
All of it just out of reach.
Luca dismissed the notification.
"We'll figure it out," he said, though he had no idea how. "We've made it this far. We'll find a way."
"How?" Zoe asked. The question wasn't hostile, just tired and honest.
"I don't know yet." Luca looked out at the drydocks, at the maintenance bays waiting in the darkness. "But we're not giving up. Not when we're this close."