Ryan stared at the screens, his engineer's brain already working the problem. "Wait. We can't claim it. But can we operate it?"

  "What do you mean?" Luca moved to his side.

  "Look." Ryan gestured at the control interfaces, holographic displays showing system status across the facility. "The portals are cleared. The power's on. Life support is running. The System gave us access when we merged the keys, but it just won't let us finalize ownership until we meet the member requirement."

  Danny's voice came through the comms from the Triumph. "So we can use the facility! We just can't claim it as ours."

  "Exactly." Ryan pulled up schematics, hands moving across the holographic interface. "The drydock bays. The fabricators. The atmospheric processing. All of it's online and responding to our inputs."

  Luca leaned over his shoulder, studying displays that showed sprawling construction bays and massive support structures, all designed to handle ships far larger than the Triumph.

  "If we can open the bay doors." Ryan zoomed in on one of the massive drydock bays, the skeletal framework visible through the command theater's viewport. "Which means finding the controls for—there." He highlighted a section of the interface. "Bay door controls. Primary airlock sequence."

  Luca felt hope flicker back to life. They couldn't claim the facility. But they could use it.

  "Can you open it?" he asked.

  Ryan's grin was eager and focused. "Watch me."

  Zoe sprinted through the facility's corridors, boots clanking against deck plating with each step. The familiar, solid weight of her scout suit felt reliable and real after the portal run.

  But god, she needed to get to the ship.

  The Triumph of Darron. Her brother would've loved this, bringing their ship into an alien drydock and opening up a facility that could actually fix them. She could almost hear him laughing at how insane this was.

  "Zoe, you don't need to run," Danny's voice came through her helmet comms, amused despite everything. "I've got the pre-flight handled."

  Even through the static, his voice made her pulse quicken; he was adorable, brilliant Danny, still the smartest person she knew despite being stuck in that damn wheelchair, and still the one whose curly red hair she wanted to mess up.

  She forced herself to focus.

  "Shut up, I'm coming," she shot back, breathing hard as she ran.

  The airlock cycled. She moved through quickly, already unsealing her helmet as she made her way to the ship's entry hatch. The facility's air was clean and safe.

  Inside, Danny sat at the science station, his wheelchair locked into position. Pixel was curled in his lap, her bioluminescent markings pulsing an anxious orange. Data streams flickered across the screens in front of him: pre-flight diagnostics.

  "Took you long enough," Danny said, but he was smiling. Those dimples.

  Zoe grinned, tossing her helmet aside and reaching out to ruffle his hair. "How's she looking?"

  "Good." Danny batted her hand away, but gently. "Pre-flight's complete. Waiting for the go-ahead from Luca."

  She slid into the pilot's seat, hands already moving to the controls. This was her place. This was where she belonged, at the helm of the Triumph, ready to fly.

  "You ready?" she asked.

  "Yeah, let's do it."

  Emily and Chris moved through Bay Seven, their helmet lights cutting beams through the darkness.

  "This place is massive," Chris said, his voice crackling through the comms. "Look at all this equipment."

  Emily walked toward a stack of fabrication machinery. Beyond it, she saw more stacks, assembly platforms, and construction equipment designed for building ships from the ground up.

  This place was incredible. State-of-the-art fabricators. Industrial-scale assembly lines. The Rossis had Genesis Platform. Luca's family had built an empire there. This could be the same thing.

  Except.

  Except she didn't want an empire. She wanted to keep moving. Keep exploring. The frontier, not the foundry.

  Don't be selfish, Berrow. The crew needs this.

  "There's tons of stuff here," she said. "Materials, components—Chris, look at this."

  She'd found the cargo containers. Stacks of them, organized by type, each one labeled with material markings.

  Chris moved to her side, scanning the nearest container with his multitool. "Hull plating. This is way better than what the Triumph was built with."

  Emily moved deeper into the bay. She found more containers filled with alloy ingots, polymers, and sheets of reinforced plating still wrapped in protective film.

  Then she saw the advanced materials.

  "Chris. These are all advanced composites." She read the labels aloud. "Atomic Dopant Gas. UltraCeram. Graphenide Matrix; we have the schematics for most of these. Alumina Sublimate, Terrafiber Weave, RheTung Composite." Her voice picked up speed as she moved through the stacks. "Aerosteel Compound. Lumicite. This is... this is everything."

  "There's enough material here to build three ships," she breathed.

  "The System doesn't do things halfway," Chris said. He was already cataloging contents, his engineer's brain lighting up. "Emily, this is everything we'd need to completely rebuild the Triumph. Better than before."

  A complete rebuild would take months of work. Ryan and Chris handling engineering, Danny running the science and fabrication protocols. All of them stuck here, grinding away in a drydock instead of exploring new worlds.

  She felt something loosen in her chest anyway. They couldn't claim the facility, but it had given them a chance.

  Even if it meant staying still for a while.

  "Luca needs to see this," she said.

  Joey stood in the observation room, twenty floors above the maintenance bay. The viewport stretched floor to ceiling, offering a clear view of the massive space below.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  And massive was an understatement.

  The maintenance bay was enormous. Easily five to eight hundred meters long, maybe two hundred wide. Gantries lined the walls in a skeletal pattern. Work platforms hung suspended at different levels. The support structures rising from the deck were large enough to cradle an orbital.

  This place wasn't built for a crew of seven.

  It would take hundreds of workers to run this facility properly. Engineers, technicians, fabricators, maintenance crews. Entire shifts rotating through the bays. Support staff. Medical teams. The scale was staggering.

  They were six people trying to operate a city.

  The Triumph of Darron drifted toward the bay entrance, small and alone in the vastness.

  "Luca, you seeing this?" Joey asked quietly.

  "Seeing what?" Luca's voice came through the comms from the command theater.

  "The Triumph looks so tiny down there. What kind of ships does the System expect us to build in this place?"

  Through the viewport, Joey watched the ship glide past the threshold. Zoe's piloting was smooth: minimal thruster burns, precise corrections, and a clean alignment with the support structures below. The ship was too far down and too small for him to make out details through the bridge windows, but he knew she'd be focused, hands steady on the controls.

  The Triumph crossed into the center of the bay, and Joey felt the scale hit him all over again. Their ship, which had felt so sturdy and capable crossing Alpha Centauri, looked fragile here. A toy in a hangar meant for titans.

  "Ship is in," Joey reported. "Zoe, you're clear."

  "Copy that," Zoe's voice came back, calm and professional.

  Joey watched the Triumph settle into position above the support structures. The cradles waited below, ready to catch the ship's structural spine.

  "Luca," Joey said. "Whenever you're ready."

  In the command theater, Luca's hand hovered over the controls.

  "Sealing the bay," he said.

  The interface pulsed beneath his palm, holographic buttons responding to his touch. He ticked off buttons in sequence: primary seal, atmospheric lock, bay door closure. The controls felt solid, responsive. Real.

  Through the viewport and on the wall-sized displays around him, Luca watched the massive doors begin to close. Slowly, ponderously, the metal plates swung shut behind the Triumph with the finality of a vault sealing.

  He sat in the commander's seat above the maintenance bay, his hands on the controls of an alien facility.

  On the displays, atmospheric readings started climbing as pressure and oxygen levels rose, filling the bay with air.

  "Pressurization at thirty percent," Ryan reported.

  Luca watched the numbers climb. Fifty percent. Seventy.

  Everything was working as it should.

  Inside the Triumph, Zoe's eyes flicked to the environmental display.

  A red warning icon flashed on the environmental display.

  "Danny," she said, her voice going sharp. "Life support's kicking in."

  Danny's head snapped toward his instruments. "What? No, that's—the bay's pressurizing, but gravity shouldn't engage until—"

  The ship lurched.

  A terrible weight pulled down on a structure that had never been designed to bear it. Zoe's stomach dropped as the Triumph fell, crashing into the support cradles below.

  Her teeth clacked together hard enough to make her jaw ache.

  A terrible scream of tearing metal filled the bay.

  The sound was everywhere: shrieking, groaning, snapping. The deck buckled beneath her feet. Pixel yowled in Danny's lap, her markings flashing orange-red in panic. Her back arched, fur spiking, and she launched off Danny's lap onto the deck.

  "FUCK!" Zoe grabbed the comms, her heart slamming against her ribs. "Luca, kill the gravity! Kill it now!"

  The hull was breaking; the Triumph of Darron, was tearing itself apart.

  She screamed for him to kill the gravity, but it was already too late.

  Joey saw it from the observation room.

  The ship dropped. The support cradles caught the Triumph's underside, but the ship itself compressed under its own mass.

  Loud, violent cracks of snapping metal echoed through the bay, sounds so loud Joey heard them even through the observation room's insulated viewport twenty floors up.

  The Triumph's hull buckled. The central support beams, the structural spine that everything hung from, fractured under the sudden weight. Fissures spider-webbed outward from the breaks. Hull plating near the cargo bay cracked, the metal warping inward.

  Then came the wind.

  When gravity engaged, the atmospheric pressure equalized fast. Air rushed into every corner of the bay, howling like a hurricane. Loose debris that had been floating scattered across the deck. Work platforms swayed on their cables.

  The destruction was over in seconds.

  The Triumph sat in the support cradles, broken and crumpled. The ship that had carried them across Alpha Centauri was now a crushed and broken wreck.

  "Oh shit," Joey breathed. "Oh shit, oh shit, oh—"

  "Joey!" Luca's voice cracked through the comms. "What happened? Report!"

  Joey couldn't speak. He could only stare at the wreckage below.

  In the command theater, Ryan pulled up damage reports, his face pale.

  "Hull integrity critical," he read, his voice hollow. "Multiple structural failures. The central support beams have snapped. Cargo bay's breached. Environmental systems are reading failures across the board."

  Luca stared at the displays, his mind refusing to process the fact that they'd broken their ship.

  In trying to save it, they'd destroyed it.

  "Can we shut down the gravity?" Chris asked, his voice desperate.

  "We could." Ryan's hands moved across the interface. "But it won't matter. The damage is done. The structural failures are permanent."

  "Zoe, Danny, are you okay?" Luca asked over the comms.

  A pause. Then Zoe's voice, raw and shaking. "We're—fuck, Luca, we're alive. The bridge held. But the ship—" Her voice cracked. "The ship's fucked. It's all fucked."

  Down in the construction bay, the facility's automated systems activated. Maintenance struts extended from the support cradles, reaching for the Triumph's hull, trying to stabilize the damaged structure.

  Then a jetbridge began extending from one of the upper gantries, mechanical arms unfolding toward the ship's main airlock.

  Except the airlock wasn't where it was supposed to be anymore.

  The Triumph had collapsed so much under gravity that the hull was crumpled, sections sitting lower than the facility's systems expected. The jetbridge extended and reached, only to bump against the upper hull plating, three meters short of its target.

  It retracted slightly. Extended again. Bumped. Retracted. Extended.

  Again and again, stuck in a loop, trying to dock with an airlock it couldn't reach.

  Joey watched from the observation room. He pressed a hand over his face, shaking, and despite the horror, despite everything, a hysterical laugh ripped out of him before he could stop it.

  The facility was trying to help. Extending bridges and support struts like a helpful attendant. But the ship was too broken. Too warped.

  The jetbridge kept bumping against the hull, reaching for an airlock it couldn't connect to, and somehow that made everything worse.

  "We're stuck," Chris's voice came through the comms, flat and defeated. "We can't claim the facility. We just broke our fucking ship. And we're alone in Alpha Centauri with no way to get anywhere."

  "We're fucked," Ryan said quietly. "We're completely fucked."

  "Everyone to the observation room," Luca said, his voice tight. "I need to see it."

  They gathered above the construction bay. The viewport stretched floor to ceiling, offering an unobstructed view of the carnage below.

  Luca arrived first, the door sliding silently before him. His breath came in short gasps, his heart hammering against his ribs.

  He'd been in combat. He'd fought monsters, cleared portals, led his crew through impossible situations. But this was different.

  This was watching his only way home break apart in real time.

  His chest felt tight, the familiar itch of stress hives starting across his ribs, but he forced himself to focus on the viewport.

  Through the glass, the Triumph sat broken in her cradles. Through the glass, the Triumph sat crumpled and warped, its hull plating fractured and split.

  They'd been stuck before. But now? Now they were truly fucked.

  The jetbridge kept bumping against the upper hull, reaching for an airlock it couldn't connect to.

  Ryan came in next, followed by Chris. Both of them went silent at the sight.

  "Jesus Christ," Chris whispered.

  Joey was already there, having watched the whole disaster unfold. His expression was hollow, haunted.

  Luca's chest tightened.

  We broke her. We had one chance and we broke her.

  I was supposed to keep them safe. I was supposed to bring them home. And I just destroyed the only thing standing between them and being stranded here forever.

  Ryan walked to the viewport, his hands pressed against the glass. "The structural spine is compromised. Look at those support beams sticking out the hull. Even with the materials and even with the fabricators, we're talking about a complete rebuild." His voice cracked. "Months."

  "Luca?" Chris's voice was concerned. "You okay?"

  "Fine," Luca managed, the word catching in his throat.

  The observation room door opened.

  Emily stepped in, breathless, her eyes shining with desperate hope.

  Luca's heart lurched. That look; he knew that look.

  Everyone turned to stare at her. Chris looked confused. Ryan looked like he might cry. Joey just looked exhausted.

  But Emily looked like she'd just found the answer to an impossible question.

  "Did anyone forget this?" she asked, her voice tight with adrenaline.

  In her hand was a small, metallic device with crystalline patterns etched into its surface, pulsing with a faint internal light.

  It was the [Advanced Ship Upgrade Mod].

  It was the reward from the Junkyard of Jitters portal, the one she and Joey had fought for while protecting Varnathi engineers and dodging hostile fire.

  Luca's brain caught up a second too late. "The upgrade mod."

  "Do you think it will work?" Luca asked. His voice came out rough, strained.

  Emily met his eyes. Her grin softened into something more genuine. More hopeful.

  "One way to find out," she said.