Luca woke to Emily’s bare body pressed tight against his, her thigh was slung high over his hip, the soft weight of her breast crushed against his ribs, one arm locked across his chest like she’d fallen asleep making sure he couldn’t leave the bed without her knowing.

  The thin ship blanket had ridden down to their waists sometime in the night; her stomach was flush to his side, skin hot and a little sticky where they’d been tangled together for hours. Every slow breath she took moved her hips against his thigh, and the faint ache low in his body told him exactly how thoroughly they’d celebrated still being alive.

  She stirred, made a small contented sound against his neck, and instinctively pulled herself closer. Even in sleep, she wasn’t willing to give up an inch of contact.

  He watched her for a moment, something settling in his chest. After everything: the infection, the terror, the near-death experience... she was here. Alive. Wrapped around him like she belonged there.

  Her eyes fluttered open, green and still heavy with sleep. She smiled, slow and warm, and it hit him somewhere deep.

  "Hey, beautiful."

  "Mmm." She stretched against him, warm and close. "What time is it?"

  "Early. Christmas Eve."

  "Already?" Emily propped herself up on one elbow, hair falling across her face. The sheet slipped, and Luca's brain short-circuited for a second before he pulled it back up. Mostly for his own sanity.

  "We should probably get up," he said, not moving.

  "Probably." She kissed him, soft and unhurried. "Or we could stay here."

  "The crew will come looking."

  "Let them." But she was already sitting up, reaching for her bodysuit on the floor. "Joey's making breakfast. Real food, apparently. I could smell it from here."

  Luca watched her dress, the familiarity of her movements, the way she pulled her hair back and checked her reflection in the viewport. Domestic. Normal. The kind of morning he'd imagined when they talked about going home.

  The thought twisted something in his chest.

  "You okay?" Emily turned to look at him.

  "Yeah." Luca stood, heading to the small bathroom. "Just thinking."

  "About?"

  "Everything. The mission. What comes next." He pulled on his bodysuit and zipped it up. "I want to talk to the crew about the Varnathi. What we're going to do about the stasis pods."

  Emily nodded slowly. "It's been on my mind too."

  "Good. Let's do it over breakfast."

  The galley was warm with the smell of actual food. Joey had taken over the kitchen and somehow produced something that looked like eggs and bacon, though Luca knew better than to ask how long it had been frozen for.

  Ryan and Chris were already at the table, mugs in hand. Zoe sat at the far end, tablet in front of her, fingers moving across the screen. The Christmas lights Emily had strung cast everything in different colors.

  "There he is." Ryan raised his mug in salute. "The captain emerges."

  "Morning." Luca dropped into a chair, and Emily took the seat beside him. Her hand found his automatically.

  "Danny's awake," Joey said from the stove. "He's eating in the infirmary. Says he'll join us via comm if we need him."

  "Good." Luca looked around the table at his crew. "Actually, yeah. Patch him in. I want to talk about something."

  Joey tapped his comm, and a moment later Danny's voice came through the galley speakers, slightly tinny but clear. "What's up, Luca?"

  "The Varnathi." Luca leaned back in his chair. "The stasis pods on New Dawn. We need to decide what we're doing about them."

  The table went quiet. Ryan set down his mug. Chris stopped mid-bite.

  "It's been bugging me since we left," Luca continued. "We found living Varnathi in stasis. That's more than a discovery; it's a responsibility. And I don't think we can just hand that off to the UER and hope they do the right thing."

  Emily leaned forward, her expression thoughtful. "That's what worries me. We surveyed part of the planet, the soil, water, vegetation, and fauna. It's all bio-compatible for humans. Great for colonization." She paused, her eyes meeting Luca's. "But what if we wake the Varnathi? Wouldn't this be their homeworld? How can we just claim it for humanity?"

  Joey set down plates of food, then pulled up a chair. "She's got a point. We can't just plant a flag and say 'this is ours.' There are lives at stake. If the Varnathi wake up, it complicates everything."

  "We need to tread carefully," Chris said, his brow furrowed. "We've seen what happens when the UER gets involved. They see an opportunity, and they take it, no matter the cost. If the Varnathi are anything like us, they'd want their home back."

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  Danny's voice came through the comm, sharp with frustration. "How is this even a question?"

  The table went still.

  "There's barely a thousand functioning pods left out of thousands," Danny continued. "Most of them are already gone. Dead. Whatever happened to them, someone went to a lot of trouble to preserve what was left. We can't just leave them there."

  Ryan nodded. "He's right. If we wake them up, we should help them. It was their home long before we got here."

  "That's assuming they want our help," Joey said. His fingers drummed against his plate. "We don't know if they'll be friendly or hostile. What if we're the invaders in their eyes?"

  "Or what if waking them puts them at risk?" Chris added. "The atmosphere could have shifted. They might not be able to survive in the world as it is now."

  "Here's what gets me," Danny said. "There's nothing else in this star system. No ruins, no decayed civilization anywhere except that vault and whatever's buried in Midnight Veil. They're not from here. Someone moved them."

  "The System," Emily said quietly.

  "Had to be. An entire species, transported across light-years and sealed away in stasis." Danny's voice was heavy. "Why? What were they protecting them from?"

  Zoe spoke up, her eyes still on her tablet. "We should talk to Karen about this. She's got connections, resources. Maybe she can help us figure out what to do without handing everything over to the UER."

  Luca nodded slowly. If anyone could help them navigate this, it was her.

  "I think it can wait," he said finally. "Right now, we need to finish the survey, get home, and resupply. Then we talk to Karen and my dad." He looked around the table. "We're the first humans in Alpha Centauri. I don't want to rush this decision."

  "Agreed," Ryan said.

  There was a moment of silence as Ryan and Chris exchanged a look.

  Something in Luca's chest tightened. He'd seen that look before.

  "What?" he said.

  Chris cleared his throat. "Uh, about getting back home..."

  "And the Varnathi decision," Ryan added. His voice had gone flat.

  Emily's hand tightened on Luca's under the table. "What about it?"

  Ryan set down his mug with deliberate care. "We're contaminated. Not our bodies... Joey's tests came back clean. But the ship. The environmental systems. Air filtration, water recyclers, probably every surface." He nodded at Chris.

  Chris pulled up a display on his datapad and slid it across the table. "The particles are growing back faster than we can clean them. Every surface, every system."

  Joey lowered his fork slowly. Set it down on his plate. Pushed the plate away.

  Luca stared at the data. Contamination readings, filter replacement logs, chemical analysis of the green particles still living in their environmental systems. "How long have you known?"

  "Took us some time to confirm it." Ryan's voice was quiet. "We've been pulling filters, cleaning them, replacing them. They're contaminated again within a day. It's not enough to hurt us, but if we docked back in Sol, at any major station..."

  "We'll quarantine the ship," Luca said. "Full decon on arrival. We'll—"

  "We tried that." Ryan shook his head. "It grows back."

  "Then we—"

  "Luca." Ryan's voice was gentle. Final. "We can't set foot on Earth again."

  The galley felt smaller. The Christmas lights seemed wrong now, cheerful and bright against the weight of what they'd just learned.

  "So we can't go home," Emily said quietly.

  Silence pressed down on all of them. Luca's mind raced through implications, possibilities, alternatives. They all led to the same conclusion. Cut off. Exiled by contamination they couldn't eliminate.

  He thought about last night. Emily curled against his chest, talking about the burger place in Sandworth. About seeing his dad and brothers. About going home.

  Emily's voice was barely above a whisper. "We'll never get that burger, will we?"

  Luca couldn't answer. That future was gone. Burned away by green particles that wouldn't stop growing.

  "Merry Christmas," Chris said quietly.

  Danny's voice came through the comm after a long pause. "Well. That changes things."

  "Yeah," Luca said. His voice came out rough. "It does."

  "We're alone," Emily said. Her hand squeezed Luca's hard enough to hurt. "Cut off from Earth. From our families."

  "We can still communicate," Chris said gently. "Video calls, messages. They don't need to know we can't come back. Not yet."

  "But we can't." The reality settled over him. They'd survived Midnight Veil, beaten the infection, saved everyone. And the price was everything they'd left behind. "We're out here permanently."

  "Yeah." Ryan met his eyes. "We are. I'm sorry, Luca. I wanted to tell you sooner, but..."

  "You wanted to give us Christmas first." Luca looked around at his crew, at the decorations Emily had made. "One normal day before everything changed."

  "Something like that."

  Luca's mind kept circling back to it. Even if they could somehow get back to Sol, what then? The moment another ship tried to board them, the moment a shuttle docked or a dropship entered their cargo bay, those spores would spread. One contaminated airlock. One infected surface on a resupply crate. That's all it would take to bring this thing to Earth.

  They weren't stranded because they couldn't go home.

  They were stranded because going home would be irresponsible.

  The Varnathi question suddenly felt different. Heavier. They couldn't defer to Earth anymore. They couldn't go home and consult with experts and let someone else make the hard calls. Whatever they decided about those stasis pods, about New Dawn, about everything, it was on them now.

  "We're explorers," Emily said, her voice stronger. "And we have a destination. Whatever's out there, the System wanted us to find it."

  The encrypted coordinates. The ones that had almost cost them everything.

  "Two days until we arrive," Zoe said. "Ship's sensors should start picking up details soon. I've been running long-range scans."

  Something shifted in Luca's chest. Not excitement, nor dread. Something heavier. They'd lost their way home, and now they had a destination.

  But a destination without supplies was a death sentence. Luca did the math in his head, the same calculation he'd been avoiding for days. Four months into a six-month mission. Six weeks to get back to Sol. They'd need to resupply within the next two months or start rationing hard. And now resupply wasn't an option.

  Luca exhaled slowly. “Ryan… that fabricator you scanned in the battleship... tell me we can build it.”

  Ryan gave him a grim look. “Luca, we barely have a 3D printer. We’d need an entirely different class of fabricator tech to make that work.”

  By evening, they'd scattered across the ship to process everything. Luca found himself in the cargo bay helping Ryan move the Synthcrafter machines up to the science labs. Busywork. Something to keep his hands moving while his brain tried to accept that the idea of returning to Earth was gone.

  Emily was in the lab, writing up environmental reports. Chris and Joey were running diagnostics on the contaminated filters, documenting everything for records that might never matter.

  They were all doing the same thing. Keeping busy so they didn't have to think.

  Luca was sealing his third sample container when his comm chimed. Zoe's voice came through, practically vibrating: "Captain. Bridge. Now. You're going to want to see this."

  He dropped the container and ran.

  The bridge doors opened to reveal Zoe at her station. The main display showed their long-range sensor data, and right there in the center was something that shouldn't exist.

  A contact. Massive. Sitting at exactly the coordinates they'd been heading toward.

  "Look at that," Zoe said, pointing at the screen. Her eyes were wide, excited despite everything. "It's a massive facility. It looks... mostly intact."

  Luca leaned forward, squinting at the fuzzy outline. The resolution wasn't sharp enough for details, but there was no denying it. Dead center on the coordinates sat something that had no business existing this far from anything: a station the size of an asteroid.