Luca didn't breathe. The cryogenic transfer line pressed against his back through the Phantom's nano-weave. He held perfectly still, and the suit's passive camo did the rest, bending light around him until he wasn't there. Somewhere to his left, Zoe had vanished into the same nothing.
The monorail came into view. A service cab, painted safety orange with hazard striping along the base, hung from ceiling rails and swung gently as it rounded the curve. The thing sat right in the middle of the tunnel, filling the gap between the equipment racks and the concrete wall with barely enough clearance on either side.
What the fuck was that.
The muon map had shown a vehicle with a human-density blob on top of it. Luca had pictured something on the ground. Something with wheels. Something he could step around if he had to. Instead, this orange monstrosity dangled from the ceiling and occupied every available inch of tunnel space, and nobody in Karen's entire intelligence apparatus had thought to mention it.
A man in blue coveralls and a yellow hard hat sat inside the enclosed cab, one hand on the controls and the other propping a phone against the instrument panel.
The cab crawled overhead at maybe ten kilometers per hour. Close enough that Luca could have reached up and touched the hazard striping. Close enough to read the name badge on the man's coveralls through the glass. The driver looked straight ahead, his face lit by the phone screen, glazed with the boredom of someone who'd made this trip so many times he'd stopped seeing the tunnel years ago. He didn't look down or sideways.
Luca watched it go, the orange cab shrinking toward Meyrin.
Luca exhaled. "Clear."
Emily's voice broke the silence first. "Was that the monorail?"
"Nobody told me there was a monorail," Luca muttered.
"It was in the packet."
The packet... of course! He had skimmed it on the flight over and tossed it to Emily because reading briefing documents ranked somewhere between dental work and listening to Ryan explain junction boxes. Emily had probably memorized the thing cover to cover.
Zoe's shimmer reappeared fifteen meters ahead, already in motion. She hadn't waited for the call.
"Ghost One, report." Erik's voice didn't waver.
"Maintenance vehicle. Single occupant, heading toward Meyrin." Luca peeled himself off the wall and started walking. "Ryan, he should hit your cameras in about two minutes."
"Overwatch," Erik said.
Overwatch. Because they had call signs now. Luca had accepted Ghost One without a fight, which made him a hypocrite for thinking Overwatch sounded cringe.
"Ghost One, copy. Already tracking." Ryan's voice came through without missing a beat. "He just popped up at marker two-point-one."
"Great," replied Luca. "So we weren't noticed."
"Just be glad it wasn't TIM," Ryan added.
Luca kept walking. "What. Is. TIM."
"Train Inspection Monorail. It's unmanned and runs on the same ceiling rails at about six kilometers per hour. Visual cameras, infrared imaging, radioactive probe." Ryan sounded entirely too pleased about this. "It's basically a robot that patrols twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel looking for anomalies." He paused. "There are two of them."
"And you didn't mention this before we went in?"
"They mentioned it on the tour and it was also in the packet."
Emily's voice cut through. "Twelve hundred meters to the junction. Keep moving."
The tunnel curved northeast under fluorescent strips that turned the concrete walls flat white. They walked twelve hundred meters of cryo lines and equipment racks before the tunnel widened into a service alcove with a steel ladder climbing through a ceiling hatch.
"Junction," Zoe said.
She climbed up the ladder before he could respond. Luca followed. He counted fifteen rungs. The hatch at the top opened without resistance, which meant either CERN didn't anticipate intruders coming through their inter-site tunnel or the maintenance staff had gotten tired of carrying keys. Luca accepted both explanations.
They emerged into a corridor with more concrete walls and cable trays running along the ceiling.
His visor showed nothing. Nothing moved. The North Area sat empty.
"Overwatch," Luca mumbled. "Cameras."
"North Area feeds are looped. You're clean," said Ryan. "Forty minutes before the timestamps cycle and someone notices."
"Ghost One, you're topside." Erik again. "Next patrol pass at EHN1 in twenty-six minutes."
Twenty-six minutes. The opening ceremony was that afternoon, and they needed to be showered and playing VIP before that. That left maybe two hours total, minus everything they'd burned getting here.
"Copy. Moving to EHN1."
EHN1 was a warehouse. Three hundred meters of concrete shielding blocks and steel truss ceiling, with overhead cranes on rails and cables climbing from the floor in thick bundles. The hall stretched long enough to make the Triumph's hangar look modest. Every overhead light was on, and the hall sat empty for lunch break. The machinery in the bays along both walls hummed to itself, waiting for the physicists to come back.
The FTL drive waited below them in ECN3.
Luca's visor had other ideas. The muon overlay, still running from the tunnel, tagged iron at the eastern end of the hall. Massive blocks of it rose two stories tall.
The Blue Giants. He remembered that much from the briefing: CERN's radiation shielding, iron blocks the size of shipping containers, arranged in walls to absorb whatever the particle beams threw at them.
The blocks were dense enough that the muon flux barely penetrated, leaving smeared shadows on his visor where the tomographic display should have shown clean structure. But faint readings bled through the iron anyway.
Multiple objects registered on his display, each tagged with a question mark he had never seen the helm produce before. Whatever sat behind those walls was punching through two stories of iron shielding on his display.
Luca switched to private comms. "Zoe. You seeing this?"
"Yeah." She stopped near the eastern wall. "Karen didn't mention anything behind the Blue Giants."
"No. She didn't."
The FTL drive sat fifteen meters below their feet. Every rational impulse in Luca's body said to get down there and start the scan. But three distinct anomalous signatures, maybe four, appeared behind the iron wall in separate bays.
"Control, Ghost One. Minor detour, obstructions in the hall. Routing around."
Erik didn't question it. "Copy, Ghost One."
"Let's check it out," Luca said to Zoe on private comms.
The access gap between the Blue Giant stacks barely fit his shoulders. Luca turned sideways and squeezed through. The gap opened into a larger space the size of a conference room, sealed from the main hall by the shielding wall itself. Cameras at the ceiling corners tracked slow arcs across the space.
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"Overwatch, cameras behind the shielding wall."
"Standalone system," Ryan said. "Air-gapped. Can't loop them from here."
Luca tracked the nearest camera's arc. It panned left, sweeping toward the far wall. He moved. Three steps to the center of the bay, then froze as the second camera swung back toward him. The passive camo locked in. Perfectly still meant the camo had nothing to give away, and the lens tracked right past him without registering anything but empty floor.
The titanium stand in the center of the bay was harder to handle.
A chunk of metal sat on it, two meters long and jagged across the edges. The surface was a dark bronze with veins of deep violet running through it, and the alloy didn't match anything he'd seen before. It just sat there. Inert. A piece of something much bigger, cut or broken and placed on a stand like a museum exhibit.
Luca didn't recognize the alloy. He hadn't seen anything like it in almost five years of system tech.
"Scan it," Zoe said.
Luca drew the multitool from his hip holster and aimed it at the fragment. The scan engaged from two meters out, and data started filling his visor. Atomic structure first, then molecular bonds, then material properties, each layer feeding the next.
The schematic resolved in forty-five seconds. Then the multitool detected the slight curvature, extrapolated the full structure, and projected the result across his display.
[Schematic Scan Complete — Fragment 1 of 256]
Object: Structural Fragment (Megastructure Component)
Designation: Unknown — Insufficient Data
Tech Level: Full Classification Unavailable
Composition: Unknown Primary Alloy
Metal Content: Unrecognized Element (68%), Trace Iridium (4%), Unknown Secondary (28%)
Crystal Structure: Unknown
Formation Process: Anomalous
Fragment Dimensions: 2.0m x 0.4m x 0.3m / ~9,890 kg
Extrapolated Structure: Partial Arc — Estimated Diameter 620–810 km (Low Confidence)
Schematic Status: INCOMPLETE — Additional fragments required
Coordinates: Logged
[Field Catalogue Integration Complete — New Schematic: "Unknown Megastructure" catalogued. Completion: <1%]
An arc. The multitool had detected the curvature and done the math, and what it projected on Luca's visor was a wireframe ring wider than anything he had a reference for. Most of the schematic was empty space, hollow gaps where the scan had nothing to fill in. One fragment down, two hundred and fifty-five to go, scattered across who knew how many portals on who knew how many worlds.
Danny was going to lose his mind.
"Next bay," Zoe said, and the moment broke.
The adjacent bay held three briefcase-sized units on individual stands, each encased in transparent housing with UER monitoring equipment clustered at the base. The multitool tagged them on his visor before Luca finished squeezing through the access gap.
Luca scanned each one. Twenty seconds per unit, and the schematics filled in clean.
[Schematic Scan Complete]
Object: Cloaking Emitter
Designation: Light-Bending Metamaterial Projector Array
Tech Level: TL8 — Full Fabrication Schematic Available
Composition: Carbon-Nanotube Lattice, Doped Silicon Carbide, Argon Gas Suspension Layer
Primary Materials: Carbon, Silicon, Argon, Titanium, Copper
Unit Dimensions: 0.6m x 0.4m x 0.2m / ~12 kg per unit
Application: Ship-scale visual cloaking — visible-spectrum light refraction only
Fabrication Note: Nano-lattice assembly requires sub-angstrom tolerances.
Schematic Status: COMPLETE
Coordinates: Logged
[Field Catalogue Integration Complete — New Schematic: "Cloaking Generator Emitter Array" catalogued.]
The schematic came back complete. Every material on the list existed on Earth. Carbon, silicon, argon, titanium, copper. But the fabrication note sat there like a locked door: sub-angstrom tolerances and nano-lattice assembly. The schematic told you exactly how to build it. Earth just didn't have hands steady enough.
The suit's power cell read thirty-eight percent. The ring fragment had gutted it, the unknown alloy forcing the multitool to work harder than anything Luca had ever scanned. The emitters barely registered by comparison. He carried one spare cell, and the primary target still waited below.
"There's more." Zoe had pushed deeper, past the emitter bay. At least two additional signatures showed in bays farther along. "Another bay. Maybe two."
"How much time?"
"Not enough." Zoe went still. "Luca, we're running out of time."
The patrol counter on his visor read sixteen minutes. Their primary target still waited directly below.
"We take what we've got." He holstered the multitool. "Primary target. Now."
They moved back through the access gaps and crossed EHN1's dark expanse. Karen had given them Building 377, the tunnel route, the patrol schedules, and the exact location of the FTL drive in ECN3.
She had not mentioned the ring fragment. She had not mentioned the cloaking emitters. She had not mentioned that the UER had turned CERN into a stockpile for System portal drops nobody on Earth could reverse-engineer.
Either she didn't know, or she'd chosen not to tell them.
"Control, Ghost One. Approaching primary target, ECN3."
"Copy, Ghost One. Fifteen minutes to patrol."
The service shaft dropped fifteen meters through reinforced concrete. Luca descended the ladder in silence, Silent Step killing every vibration before it could ring off the metal rungs. The Hum faded as they went deeper, muted by rock and concrete, until the only sound inside his helmet was his own breathing.
ECN3 opened at the bottom of the shaft.
Concrete walls three meters thick surrounded a chamber built to contain something the UER didn't fully understand.
The FTL drive sat at the center on a reinforced platform, surrounded by sensor arrays and diagnostic terminals. The thing was roughly the size of a sedan, with a carbon-glass sphere at its core where energy branched and folded in patterns that never repeated.
Luca recognized it immediately. The same design. The same impossible geometry inside the sphere, the same faint blue containment glow surrounding the assembly. Danny had dragged one just like it from the wreckage of a magma golem in Pyroclasm, and it had powered the Triumph ever since.
This was the first one. The original drop that had started the race for Venus portals and changed everything. And here it sat, fifteen meters underground, behind three meters of concrete and a containment field the UER had built to keep it from doing whatever it did when nobody was watching.
"That's it." Zoe had taken position at the chamber entrance, covering the corridor behind them. "Do your thing."
Someone had left a coffee mug on one of the monitoring consoles. The handle said CERN in blue block letters. Luca wondered if the physicist who owned it had any idea that the thing they'd been studying for years was about to get copied by a kid with a multitool and a bad plan.
He crouched beside the diagnostic terminal. The terminal ran a standard UER interface, TL8 hardware and monitoring software that represented years of development and a budget in the hundreds of millions. He pulled his hacking pad and pressed it flat against the access port, triggering the interface bypass. Earth's best encryption against processing power from Alpha Centauri. It wasn't a contest.
The encryption folded in half a second. Administrative access in two. Containment protocols on screen in five. He found the field generator controls and dropped the containment.
The blue glow vanished.
"Running the scan," Luca said. He aimed the multitool at the drive and started a slow circuit around the platform, keeping the scanner within range as the full-spectrum analysis engaged.
Data flooded into his visor's overlay. The FTL drive's internal architecture appeared in layers, each more complex than the last. Systems he couldn't name fed into pathways he couldn't follow, and every new layer revealed relationships between components he had no business understanding and couldn't stop staring at.
The identification header appeared first, before the scan had reached ten percent.
[Schematic Scan In Progress — Vanguard Faster-Than-Light Displacement Drive]
Object: FTL Propulsion System
Designation: Vanguard Faster-Than-Light Displacement Drive
Tech Level: Pending
Core Component: Spatial Fold Initiator
Composition: Carbon-Glass Containment Sphere, Resonant Alloy Frame, Unknown Energy Medium
Primary Dimensions: 3.8m x 2.1m x 1.9m / ~4,200 kg
Schematic Status: IN PROGRESS
Coordinates: Logged
[Field Catalogue Integration Pending — Schematic completion required.]
Danny had explained it to them: the drive folded space, skipped the ship across the crease, and unfolded it on the other side. The Triumph had been doing exactly that on its way to and from Alpha Centauri. But the Triumph was one ship with one drive pulled from a portal delve, and Athan needed schematics to build more.
"Twenty percent," Luca said. The counter in the corner of his visor climbed fast. "Thirty. Forty."
The power cell dropped below twenty. The FTL drive pulled harder than the ring fragment and the emitters combined, and it wasn't even half done.
"Twelve minutes to patrol," Erik said.
"Copy."
The schematic kept building as energy conversion systems and propulsion systems appeared. The drive they were scanning, while functional, had already been made obsolete by the Triumph's upgrade. But this one could actually be manufactured at scale with current technology. The counter raced past fifty and kept climbing.
"Sixty. Seventy."
Zoe shifted at the entrance. Her camo pulled tight against her outline, her posture shifting in a way Luca knew too well. She'd heard something, or thought she had, and the difference didn't matter because her hand had already drifted to the dagger on her hip.
"Eighty."
The power cell hit six percent. A yellow warning pulsed at the edge of his visor, and Luca's hand went to the spare cell on his belt. He could swap it in three seconds. But three seconds meant pulling the cable from the multitool, and pulling the cable meant killing the scan at eighty percent.
"Someone from the CERN security team just accessed the North Area security log," Ryan said. His voice had gone tight. "Routine check. They're not coming down."
"Eighty-five."
The data stream on his visor intensified. Each percentage point took longer as the scan pushed deeper into the drive's structure.
"Ninety."
The floor plating near the drive was slightly magnetized, an unintended side effect of the folding engine. As Luca rounded the corner, the pull caught his metal-reinforced boot, dragging it half an inch into a cable tray. A dull metallic clang rang through the silent chamber.
"Acoustic alert, ECN3." Ryan's voice jumped half an octave. "Your location just got flagged on the security net."
Luca kept his eyes on the scan counter. It read ninety-two and climbing.
On his overlay, the muon map activated, showing the floor above them had changed. A density shadow shifted near the shaft entrance. Something moved from what looked like a monitoring station. Luca couldn't tell if it was a person or an automated system activating, and he stopped breathing either way.
"Ghost One." The steadiness in Erik's voice had frayed. "Recommend immediate extraction."
Luca triggered [Ghost Protocol]. The passive camo's shimmer hardened into full invisibility, and an eleven-minute countdown appeared on his visor. Not enough for everything they still needed to do. Not close.
The power cell dropped to three percent. Ghost Protocol and the scan ran at the same time, both pulling from a cell that had nothing left to give. The yellow warning turned red.
The scan counter climbed past ninety-four.
"Luca." Emily said.
The counter hit ninety-five, and on his overlay, the shadow reached the top of the shaft.