Chapter 31: Plans For The Future

Camila sniffled and peered up at him through her curly hair.

"We lost our entire world yesterday," Leo said softly, leaning forward over the counter. "We watched our families, our homes, our friends and everything we’ve known since the day we were born get ripped away into nothing and then we had to crawl through a pitch-black tomb and shoot fifteen-meter monsters in the dark just to earn the right to breathe."

He reached out and rested his hand over Jin-Ah’s trembling fingers on the counter, stilling them with his warmth.

She looked down at his hand but she didn’t pull hers away.

"If you can’t cry after that," Leo went on, looking straight into Elena’s wide blue eyes, "then you aren’t human... You don’t need to explain it. You don’t need to blame the dust or altitude sickness or pulmonary spasms. You’re allowed to hurt, you’re allowed to break down, you’re allowed to sit in your room and scream until your throat bleeds."

The tension started draining out of the room, leaving a deep heavy stillness behind it.

"There’s zero shame in it," he said, his eyes moving over all six of them. "Not a single drop. Every one of you stood your ground when it mattered, and we’re all breathing because of it. What you felt in your rooms last night... that just means you still have a heart and out here, that’s the only thing keeping us from turning into cold iron like this ship."

Camila let out a long shuddering breath and her shoulders sagged as the humiliation melted into quiet relief. Jin-Ah’s hand relaxed under his palm and she nodded once in silence with her ears still pink.

Elena’s jaw loosened.

She sat slowly back down on her stool and dropped her eyes to the counter without another word and Ms. Tachibana looked up.

Through her glasses, her dark eyes held his with a deep ringing gratitude...

Leo took his hand back and straightened.

The softness in his posture sharpened back into the edge of a captain at the helm.

"Now," he said. "We let it out... We mourned but we don’t have the luxury of sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves."

He nodded toward the forward bulkhead.

"We have an S-Rank turret on the roof, a Graventhal hull and a fusion core purring like a kitten but fourteen days of life support isn’t forever. It’s a running clock and the Novice Buffer is ticking down with every breath we take... In less than sixty hours that tutorial shield expires, and the real universe comes looking for this ship."

He pushed off the counter and turned for the door.

"Leave your trays. Five minutes. Everyone on the bridge... We need a plan."

...

The bridge of the Wanderer-7 felt bigger now, bathed in the cool steady blue of its upgraded systems.

Where there had once been exposed wiring, screaming seals and rusted bulkheads, there were seamless matte panels and smooth floating holograms humming with cold quiet efficiency.

Leo stood by the central dais with his hands on the edge of the flight console.

The twin crystal cradles behind him pulsed with a faint blue heartbeat that matched his own through the ghost of the neural link.

The crew filed in from the corridor.

Harper walked in with her hands shoved into her pockets and her freckled nose still a little pink, her eyes on the floor until they snapped up to meet his.

She gave him a quick lopsided smirk that didn’t quite reach her eyes and dropped into the tactical station with an exaggerated stretch.

Her shoulder brushed Chloe’s as the smaller girl squeezed past toward the back bench, and Harper’s jaw tightened for half a second.

’Just focus on the ship,’ she thought, chewing the inside of her cheek. ’So she slept on him... Big deal... He’s the Captain, she’s a vampire, and nobody has time for high school drama when the vacuum is waiting to chew our faces off.’

Chloe sat as far back on the bench as she could get and pulled her knees up to her chest.

Behind her bangs, her wide green eyes flicked to Leo every three seconds and darted away again.

’He didn’t hate me,’ she thought, her small hands clutching her ankles. ’He said it was my right but everyone heard... the AI told everyone... and Harper looked at me like I stole her favorite wrench. I just need to be useful... If I’m not useful, I’m just a monster.’

Her eyes slid back to the two faint pink dots on his neck.

They stayed there a little longer this time.

Jin-Ah took station three and tapped the logistics interface awake with her posture ramrod straight, her face wiped clean of the morning’s flush... though her ears were still a telltale shade of rose.

’Emotional parameters are secondary,’ she told herself, her fingers flying across the glass. ’We have measurable deficits that will end our biological functions within three hundred and thirty-six hours... Numbers do not care about embarrassment.’

Her eyes drifted to the back of Leo’s hand on the console.

She corrected her course and looked at the numbers.

Elena walked in last with Ms. Tachibana, her chin at a severe regal tilt and her hair pinned in a flawless twist, looking every bit the high-born orbital heiress who had definitely never threatened to murder an AI over an open speaker.

’A common mechanic,’ she repeated to herself like a mantra, smoothing the sleeves of her white-and-blue flight jacket. ’He is an uncivilized stray who happens to hold the command codes... The fact that he caught my wrist over the abyss is irrelevant. The fact that his scallion bread was passably edible is also irrelevant.’

Ms. Tachibana settled at the astrogation console on the starboard side, adjusted her glasses and gave Leo a small dignified nod that carried the quiet weight of last night’s grief, stripped clean of any shame.

Leo cleared his throat and leaned over the main holographic projector.

"Alright. We had breakfast and the ship told our secrets so we’re over it."

"Speak for yourself," Camila muttered from the bottom step of the dais, but a tiny fragile smile tugged at her lips.

Her eyes were still swollen, but the crushing despair from the galley had settled into something warmer and steadier.

"Moving on," Leo said, tapping the console.

SWOOSH!

A three-dimensional wireframe of the Wanderer-7 bloomed into the air between them, turning slowly, sleek and predatory in its seamless skin of Graventhal armor.

He swept his hand through it, and whole sections lit up in harsh warning amber.

"We survived Kestrel-9," he said. "We evolved the ship... We’ve got a fusion core that purrs instead of coughing black smoke, and we’re not living in a tin can held together by duct tape and prayers anymore but we are not safe, Not even close."

He tapped the atmospheric gauge floating over the hull.

"Problem one, life support... The new scrubbers bought us fourteen days. That’s a massive upgrade from two hours, but it’s still a clock. When day fourteen hits, if we haven’t found a renewable source of oxygen, we choke. It’s as simple as that."

"Three hundred and thirty-six hours," Jin-Ah confirmed crisply, pulling up metabolic rates on her display. "Assuming baseline exertion... If we engage in high-G evasive maneuvers or heavy manual labor, that number shrinks by roughly twenty-two percent."

"Exactly. Problem two, food. The chillers gave us some flour, salt, beans and pork. It’ll last a week if we ration like monks... After that, the AI says the Foundry can make nutrient paste out of rocks and sludge."

Harper grimaced.

"I’d rather chew on my boots."

"I am not eating pulverized asteroid gravel," Elena declared coldly, crossing her arms. "I have standards, stray."

"Then we need real food," Leo said. "Problem three... our teeth."

He highlighted the weapons array.

The twin barrels of the S-Rank Mag-Rail Turret glowed faintly on the dorsal spine, but the missile bays along the flanks and the belly mounts were stark hollow wireframes.

"That turret saved our lives. It turned fifty worms and a Brood-Mother into purple mist but it runs on solid tungsten slugs, and after clearing that crater, the Foundry’s reserves are down to almost nothing... Maybe thirty rounds. If we run into another swarm, we’re out of bullets in six seconds flat."

"And the missile pods are empty," Harper added, her armory instincts kicking in as she leaned over her console. "We’ve got launch tubes and zero ordnance. It’s like carrying an empty shotgun..."

"And the kinetic shielding," Ms. Tachibana said evenly. "The magnetic deflection grid is listed as offline in the master log."

"Because it needs raw hyperalloy and phase-coils to calibrate the emitter," Jin-Ah said. "Right now it’s dead weight bolted to the frame."

Leo let the list settle over the room.

Nobody panicked.

They had already looked into the mouth of an alien horror and walked away... A list of broken parts was just a puzzle.

"So," Leo said, straightening. "Three objectives before this ship does anything else... One, a closed-loop biosphere, so we can grow our own food and make our own oxygen without burning through filters. Two, mine raw metal from the belt and refill the ammo... Three, build a new weapon. Something with range and something that gives us an option between running away and burning our last tungsten."

"A closed-loop biosphere is viable," Jin-Ah said, tapping her screen. "The mid-deck has a cleared compartment beside the environmental manifold... If we introduce vegetation with rapid photosynthetic output, the plants will absorb our carbon dioxide, supplement the scrubbers and provide edible biomass."

Every eye on the bridge turned to the bottom step of the dais.

Camila sat with her hands clasped tight between her knees, and under the sudden weight of six stares her bronze cheeks flushed as her eyes darted between Leo and Ms. Tachibana.

"Me?" she whispered. "You... you want me to build a whole farm?"

"You’re the Biosphere Harmonizer, Camila," Leo said gently, stepping down off the dais until he was standing right in front of her. "Your class is Hydroponic Cultivator if I remember correctly, If anyone can make things grow in an iron box in the middle of deep space, it’s you."

"B-But I’ve only ever grown tomatoes in a community garden!" She flapped her hands nervously against her trousers. "My abuela taught me to prune basil and keep aphids off the squash! That was with black dirt and sunshine and a garden hose! Out here there’s no sun... There’s no soil. How am I supposed to feed seven people and make enough air to keep us alive?"

"Your talent doesn’t just plant seeds, Camila," Ms. Tachibana said warmly, like a professor walking a brilliant student through her thesis defense. "The system description says your resonance accelerates cell division in plants by several orders of magnitude... What takes four months on Earth might take four days under your hands, with the right nutrients and light."

Camila swallowed hard and looked down at her open palms.

"Four days...? Really?"

"Really," Leo smiled. "We’ll clear the room, route water from the recyclers and build whatever trays you need. That’s goal one."

He turned back to the consoles.

"Goal two is materials. Iron, titanium, copper and raw tungsten... We can’t buy it, so we dig it out of the rock."

Then his eyes locked straight onto Elena Sterling.

"Which brings us to goal three. A new weapon... Something heavy, built for void combat, that doesn’t just spray expensive ammunition into the dark."

Elena blinked, and her icy eyes narrowed with instant prickly suspicion as she sat back, crossed her long legs and tilted her nose up with an offended scoff.

"And why, pray tell, are you looking at me, stray? Did you forget that I am an orbital architect and a gentlewoman, not your personal blacksmith? If you require crude implements, task Bell... She is the one who enjoys swinging blunt objects at things."

"Harper tunes weapons and runs the armory," Leo said smoothly, crossing his arms and leaning his hip against the rail. "She knows how a gun shoots but you have Mechanical Attunement... You crawled through half a meter of grease and felt the micro-stress in a warped hyperalloy mounting ring without a single diagnostic tool. You can feel where machines bind, where the torque shears and how a frame takes recoil."

He let it hang for half a beat.

"You understand how machines feel, Elena. Better than any of us... If we’re going to design a weapon from scratch and build it into the Wanderer-7’s frame, I need an engineer who can make sure it doesn’t tear the ship’s ribs apart when it fires. That’s you."

Elena stared at him.

Her mouth opened, clearly loaded with another scathing defensive monologue about her family’s prestige and his peasant manners...

The words never came out.

Under the flawless porcelain of her cheeks, a sudden vivid rose-pink flush bloomed and spread all the way to the tips of her ears, and her fingers froze in midair over the armrest.