We need much less than we think we need.

  -- Maya Angelou

  The private hangar at Dulles looked like someone was expecting a war.

  Luca counted a dozen IFC guards before they even got out of the SUV, armored and armed, forming a defensive perimeter around the shuttle.

  Sabine stood near the shuttle's boarding ramp, tablet in hand, looking like she hadn't slept in days.

  Karen stopped at the SUV's door. Her expression was professional, but Luca caught something softer underneath. Pride, maybe. Or just exhaustion. It was hard to tell with her.

  "This is where I leave you," Karen said. "I have meetings in Brussels, then Munich, then back to DC before Geneva. I'll see you in three weeks."

  Emily stepped forward and hugged her. Karen stiffened for a moment, then relaxed into it. The gesture looked almost natural.

  "Thank you," Emily said quietly. "For everything."

  "Don't thank me yet." Karen's voice was dry. "Wait until you see Erik's training schedule."

  The crew said their goodbyes one by one. Karen accepted them all with that calm, measured expression she always wore. But her eyes lingered on each of them a moment longer than necessary.

  Luca went last.

  "Stay safe," Karen said. She pressed a hand to his shoulder. "And stay smart. The next few weeks matter."

  "We'll try," Luca said.

  Karen's smile was thin. "Try harder than that."

  Then she was back in the SUV, and the vehicle was pulling away, and Luca was left standing in a hangar surrounded by armed guards and wondering when exactly his life had become this complicated.

  Sabine approached with her tablet and a stack of papers. Actual paper. Luca stared at them.

  "Your itinerary," Sabine said. She handed the stack to Emily. "Hard copies only. Nothing digital that can be tracked or intercepted."

  Emily flipped through the pages. Her eyebrows climbed steadily higher.

  "This is two weeks of scheduled meetings," Emily said.

  Sabine nodded. "Potential crew interviews in Puerto Rico, the Midwest, Texas, and California. And time for the homework."

  Ryan groaned somewhere behind Luca. "The homework."

  Sabine ignored him. "Your presence in Puerto Rico hasn't been announced. We'd like to keep it that way as long as possible. If you need extraction, use the emergency protocol. Otherwise, enjoy yourselves."

  "Enjoy ourselves," Zoe repeated. "While doing homework."

  "One more thing." Sabine's gaze swept across all of them. "Be careful. The political situation is volatile. President Anderson's announcement has stirred up nationalist movements across the globe. Some of those movements have taken an interest in the Triumph Initiative. Not all of them are friendly."

  "Understood," he said.

  Sabine nodded once. "Safe travels, Captain."

  The crew boarded the shuttle. Luca took the pilot's seat with Zoe beside him as copilot. The familiar controls hummed under his fingers as he brought the systems online. Navigation, propulsion, life support. Everything green.

  The gray February sky stretched beyond, heavy with clouds. Washington spread out below them, monuments and memorials rising from the urban sprawl. The Capitol dome gleamed white against the gloom.

  Luca brought them up smoothly, the shuttle lifting with that quiet power he still wasn't entirely used to. They climbed through the cloud layer, and suddenly the sun was bright and the sky was blue and everything below was just a carpet of white.

  "Setting course north," Zoe said, her fingers moving across the navigation console.

  Ryan leaned forward from the passenger compartment. "Wait, north? Puerto Rico is south."

  "Misdirection," Luca replied. "We go north, then climb out of the atmosphere, then come back down over the Caribbean. Anyone tracking our departure won't know where we're actually heading."

  "Plus we need to swap transponder codes," Zoe added. "Can't have anyone following our signal."

  Ryan settled back. "Sneaky. I approve."

  They flew north for twenty minutes, climbing steadily. The curve of the Earth became visible below them, the Atlantic stretching dark and endless to the east.

  The shuttle climbed harder, the sky darkening from blue to purple to black until the artificial gravity kicked in. Stars appeared as Earth curved away beneath them, a massive sphere of blue and white and green.

  Luca stared at it for a moment. Six months ago, they had been watching it shrink to a pinprick of light. Now here he was, skimming across its upper atmosphere like it was nothing.

  Then Chris and Ryan worked their technical magic at the communications panel, and their transponder began broadcasting a different identifier.

  "Clean signal," Chris confirmed.

  "Adjusting course," Zoe said. "Coming about to heading one-eight-zero. Should put us over the Caribbean in about forty minutes."

  The shuttle banked smoothly. Below them, the eastern seaboard slid past, cities and highways visible as patterns of light and dark. The clouds had thinned out, revealing patches of ocean glittering in the sun.

  "So," Ryan said, breaking the comfortable silence. "How much is all this extra security going to cost us?"

  Luca glanced back. "What do you mean?"

  "The guards at the hangar. Twelve heavily armed soldiers protecting our shuttle." Ryan's expression was calculating. "That doesn't come cheap."

  "IFC is covering it," Luca said. He turned back to the controls. "Karen set this whole thing up."

  Ryan snorted. "Yeah, right."

  "What?"

  "Nothing comes free from Karen Stevens." Ryan crossed his arms. "She's not running a charity. Whatever this is costing, we're paying for it somehow."

  Luca didn't have a good response to that. The thought had occurred to him too. Karen had invested a lot in them. Coaching, training, security, and publicity. At some point, she'd expect a return.

  "Visibility," Zoe said from the copilot seat.

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  Everyone turned to look at her.

  "That's what she's getting. She's recruiting, remember? We're her poster children. Every interview we do, every appearance we make, it's all marketing for the IFC. We make her look good."

  "So we're advertisements," Danny said.

  "Basically." Zoe shrugged. "We go to Puerto Rico, we smile for photos. Meanwhile, Karen uses our faces to recruit the best talent on Earth. Scientists, engineers, adventurers. Everyone wants to work with the crew that went to Alpha Centauri."

  "Makes sense," Emily said quietly. She'd been listening from the passenger compartment. "The IFC is growing fast. New research stations, new mining operations. She mentioned a permanent Mars base. All of that requires people."

  Luca kept his eyes on the controls, but his mind was working. Karen hired people. She built stations and ships and infrastructure. She was expanding her reach across the solar system. But why?

  "What's driving her?" he said aloud.

  Zoe raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

  "Before the System arrived, I mean, she was our neighbor!" Luca exclaimed. "Always poking her nose around the neighborhood. Now she's running the IFC, which you founded, Joey. She's got politicians eating out of her hand. She just executed a man in Monaco." That last bit still bothered him more than he wanted to admit. "What's the endgame?"

  The shuttle hummed around them. Nobody answered immediately.

  "Maybe she just wants to be in charge," Ryan offered. "Some people are like that."

  "Maybe." Luca didn't believe it. Every move she made had purpose. There was something bigger underneath, some vision or plan that she wasn't sharing.

  "Or maybe she's exactly what she looks like." Emily's voice was quiet. "Someone who saw an opportunity to build something and took it. Not everyone has a secret agenda, Luca."

  He glanced back at her. There was something in her expression he couldn't quite read.

  "She shot a man in front of three hundred people," Luca said.

  "A man who was running a trafficking operation," Zoe cut in. "A man who tried to have us killed. I'm not losing sleep over Barkov."

  "I'm not saying he didn't deserve it. I'm saying—"

  "You're saying you don't trust her." Emily's hand found his shoulder. "And that's fine. But maybe give her a chance to earn it before you decide she's playing us."

  Luca exhaled slowly. "When has Karen ever given anyone a straight answer?"

  "When it matters," Emily said. Something flickered in her eyes. "She's more direct than you think."

  Joey snorted. "That's generous."

  "We'll see in Geneva." Emily squeezed his shoulder once, then let go. "Just keep an open mind."

  The minutes passed as Earth rotated slowly beneath them. And eventually the Caribbean appeared, islands surrounded by impossibly blue water.

  "Beginning descent," Zoe announced. "San Juan approach in fifteen minutes."

  They dropped back into the atmosphere as the sky lightened from black to blue. Clouds appeared, fat and white and tropical.

  Puerto Rico appeared below them, green and mountainous, ringed by beaches and resort towns. The Luis Mu?oz Marín International Airport stretched beside the water, but as they descended, Luca noticed something wrong. The main runway was crowded with military aircraft. C-17 cargo planes lined up nose to tail, helicopters clustered near the hangars.

  "San Juan approach is redirecting us," Zoe said, frowning at her console. "Portal activity to the East. They want us at Isla Grande instead."

  A formation of helicopters passed beneath them, heading east toward the smaller islands. Relief operations, probably.

  "Adjusting course," Zoe said. "Isla Grande is smaller, but it'll work."

  The shuttle banked toward the smaller airport near Old San Juan. Isla Grande's single runway looked almost quaint compared to what they were used to. Zoe coordinated with ground control, and the approach was smooth, the landing smoother. Luca felt the shuttle settle onto its landing gear with barely a bump.

  Then the rear hatch opened, and the hot and humid air smacked him in the face. After Washington's bitter February cold, the Caribbean heat felt like stepping into a sauna. Sweat immediately prickled across Luca's forehead.

  "Holy shit," Ryan said from behind him. "Did we land on a different planet?"

  "This is February in Puerto Rico," Danny said, pulling out his shirt. "It gets worse in summer."

  They filed out of the shuttle onto the hot tarmac. The sun blazed down on them as palm trees swayed at the edges of the airfield.

  Zoe stepped out last, took one breath of the humid air, and announced: "We need bathing suits."

  Luca looked down at himself. He was wearing the same cold-weather outfit he'd put on that morning in Washington. Heavy jacket, long pants, shoes for a February day. Completely wrong for this climate.

  "We have an entire wardrobe on that shuttle," Emily said, gesturing back at the ship. "Including the new clothes Karen got us."

  "Winter clothes," Joey pointed out. "Karen got us winter clothes. Coats and sweaters and formal wear."

  "Will she make us pay for those too?" Ryan asked.

  Nobody answered. The question hung in the humid air like a bad joke.

  A middle-aged woman in a polo shirt verified their documentation without asking too many questions. Karen had arranged for cell phones to supplement their personal communicators. The devices felt strange in Luca's pocket, old technology compared to what they'd gotten used to.

  "If we had the Triumph in orbit," Ryan said, fiddling with his phone, "we could just patch into the IFC network directly. Real-time comms, proper encryption. None of this local cellular nonsense."

  "We don't have the Triumph in orbit," Luca reminded him. "We have a shuttle and some prepaid phones."

  "I'm just saying."

  A van with tinted windows and questionable air conditioning picked them up. The driver was a young guy who seemed more interested in his music than his passengers, which suited Luca fine.

  The drive to the hotel took them through San Juan's outskirts. Everything looked slightly worn and tropical.

  Luca watched the city pass through the tinted windows. This was Earth. His Earth. But it felt foreign, somehow. Alien in a way that New Dawn hadn't been.

  Maybe that said something about him. Or maybe it said something about how much he'd changed.

  The hotel was a beachfront property, nothing fancy but it had a bar and a pool. The lobby had tile floors and large televisions mounted on every wall. Air conditioning blasted from hidden vents, finally providing relief from the heat.

  A tourist family passed through the lobby, gathering their things. A husband and wife with two kids, all wearing matching t-shirts. The father glanced at them, did a double-take, then looked away quickly.

  He must have recognized them, or maybe just curiosity. Hard to tell.

  They weren't walking on eggshells here. For the first time since landing on Earth, Luca felt like he could actually breathe. At least for the time being.

  One of the lobby televisions caught his attention. President Anderson's face filled the screen, his expression grave and authoritative. The chyron beneath him read: UER PARLIAMENT: Encountering Regional Opposition.

  The crowd on screen didn't look too happy.

  "That's still going on?" Danny asked, following his gaze.

  "Probably going to keep going on for a while," Emily said quietly. "Restructuring the entire global government isn't something people just accept."

  Luca turned away from the screen. "Let's get settled. We've got shopping to do."

  Plaza Las Americas was enormous.

  The crew spread out across the clothing stores like a tactical team sweeping a building. They needed warm-weather clothes, and they needed them fast. Shorts, t-shirts, sandals. Light dresses for Emily and Zoe. Swimsuits for everyone.

  An hour later, the crew reassembled near the mall's main entrance. Everyone carried bags and looked slightly overwhelmed but grinning. This was their first real vacation since... well, since before Alpha Centauri. Just shopping, sunshine, and the promise of a beach.

  They piled back into the van and headed for the hotel to change. The afternoon sun was already angling toward the west, casting long shadows across San Juan's streets. They had a meeting tonight, but that was hours away. Plenty of time.

  Down by the beach, the hot sun and gentle waves were the perfect break from the chaos of space stations and missions and recruitment schedules. They ordered drinks at a small bar near the water. Pi?a coladas and mojitos were the drink of choice.

  For the first time in what felt like forever, they were just relaxing.

  "I'm going to need SPF five thousand," Danny said, squinting up at the sun. His pale Irish skin was already turning pink at the edges. "Give me twenty minutes and I'll look like a lobster."

  Zoe rolled her eyes and produced a bottle of sunscreen from her bag. "Turn around."

  "What?"

  "Turn around. You missed your entire back." She squeezed a generous amount into her palm. "Honestly, Danny. Did you even try?"

  Danny turned obediently, and Zoe began working the sunscreen across his shoulders with efficient strokes. His ears went red in a way that had nothing to do with the sun.

  Ryan nodded, sipping his drink. "No kidding. Although I think they watered these down a bit too much."

  Emily was stretched out on the chair beside Luca, her blonde hair loose and catching the sunlight. The red bikini she'd picked out at the mall suited her, bright against her skin.

  Luca almost laughed. They'd all been pale as ghosts when they landed. Besides the brief stint at the beach in New Dawn, months of recycled air and artificial lighting left them looking like they'd never seen the sun. Vitamin D deficiency. Something to address for the next mission. UV lamps in the gym, maybe. Add it to the list.

  Emily looked relaxed in a way he hadn't seen since they'd landed on Earth. No tension in her shoulders. No calculation behind her eyes. Just Emily, enjoying the sun.

  Luca reached over and laced his fingers through hers. She squeezed back without opening her eyes.

  The hours drifted by in the blissful heat of the sun. Luca found himself stealing glances at the crew. Here they were lounging on the beach like they were any other group of young people. After so much danger, it was a relief to see them relaxed and happy.

  As the sun started to sink lower, casting a warm glow over the beach, Luca sat up and stretched. "Alright, let's not lose track of time. We should head back, clean up, and get ready for this meeting."

  "Agreed," Emily said, standing and brushing sand off herself. "I'm curious about this group. Wonder if they'll live up to the hype."

  "Tomorrow we've got the Arecibo team," Zoe added. "Rebuilding that telescope is no joke. Anyone who's been working on that project should know their stuff."

  "We'll see." Luca gathered his things. The sun was warm on his shoulders, the sand soft between his toes. For a moment, he let himself just exist in this place.

  "Coming?" Emily called from the boardwalk.

  Luca smiled and followed her up the beach.