Austria had been four days, Germany five, and Sweden barely two.
The Bergjäger were out of Innsbruck, mountain rescue turned portal specialists, four years running the alpine corridors above the treeline in terrain that actively discouraged the people moving through it. Die Stürmer were out of Munich. Klaus had brought his whole team to dinner, all six of them punctual and technical, and the meal had been good in the way meals are good when nobody at the table wastes time. Die Ingenieure came after, same city, different specialties.
Titan Dynamics had offices in Munich too. Their ads were everywhere, custom TL8 armor and weapon configurations, the logo on the side of three separate buildings Luca had walked past in the same afternoon.
Ryan had left the club with Lena.
She was from Die Stürmer, Klaus's team. Auburn hair, short bob. She asked technical questions that were actually tests. She'd spent most of dinner taking Ryan apart on a point about ballistic system tolerances, and Ryan had looked approximately like he'd met his match.
By the time they left the club at four am, he had used his new communicator to text the crew: I'll be back in the morning. He'd shown up at breakfast with the expression of someone who had made excellent decisions and no interest in elaborating.
Luca had said nothing. Ryan had needed that. Badly. He ran at full output regardless of whatever was happening underneath, which worked until it didn't, and Luca had been watching the edges of it since Geneva. A night with someone from Die Stürmer who could go toe-to-toe with him on ballistics was probably the best possible outcome.
The Valkyries in Stockholm were four women, all Level 60, all pilots. Freja led them. She was tall and said exactly what needed saying and then stopped talking, which Luca found immediately trustworthy. Astrid and Saga handled the combat roles. Linnea ran infiltration and recon. They'd done coffee, covered the mission parameters, and gone skiing at Romme Alpin in the afternoon, which had been Freja's idea and had been the best idea of the week.
They'd sourced the life sciences equipment in Stockholm. Spectroscopy arrays, tissue culture systems, a high-resolution mass spectrometer Emily had pulled from a university surplus listing Karen's logistics team had flagged. All of it went directly to Sandworth. Luca had not yet totaled the spending across all the stops, but the day of reckonning was coming soon.
---
The shuttle dropped below the cloud layer over eastern England, and the countryside spread out below them in shades of gray-green. After two weeks of Mediterranean sun, it felt like the world had turned the contrast down.
Zoe had her feet tucked under her in the copilot seat. Danny was on his third notebook page in the last forty minutes and had not looked up once, which was how he looked when he was working through something and didn't want questions about it. Ryan was asleep with his jacket folded under his head, the first time Luca had seen him sleep on transit since Germany.
"There are three teams to meet," Emily said.
"Yes." Danny picked the pencil back up.
From the back of the cabin, Chris looked up from his tablet. "Are we stopping by to see Ellie while we're here?"
"Not on the schedule..." Luca said. "Plus it's Oxford, that's pretty far out."
Chris looked at him for a second, then shrugged and went back to his courses.
---
The first team was based in Sheffield, four of them, all had professional classes focused on construction and civil engineering branches. They'd started as a portal response unit three years ago and gradually shifted as the immediate threat diminished and the rebuild needs hadn't. Their captain, a woman named Aisha, had spent the last two years rebuilding housing units, one after another.
They met at a community hall next to a project site. Through the windows, the framing of new flats rose above the scaffolding.
Aisha listened to the mission brief with full attention. When Luca finished, she said, "We're not interested."
"I figured," he said. "I wanted to give you the full picture anyway."
Over tea, he learned that they'd hit sixty about a year in and more or less stopped pushing. The portals were thinning out, the rebuild wasn't, and somewhere along the way the decision had made itself.
"It's not glamorous," she said.
"It sounds better than glamorous," Luca said.
She looked at him. "Most people say that. Then they mean something else."
The other two teams weren't any better.
By mid-afternoon Luca had his jacket off and was sitting on a low wall outside a council building with Emily, who had her tablet in her lap.
"You're not disappointed," she said.
"They're exactly where they should be." He looked up the street. The city center here had been half-rebuilt, new construction sitting next to older stonework in a way that hadn't finished sorting itself out yet. "Aisha's crew has put up more housing in two years than the government managed in five."
"You've been reading about urban planning."
"I picked up the course." One of the modules on Karen's tablet. He was two modules into it. "We're going to need to plan out the settlement."
Emily looked up from her tablet.
"It keeps coming up," he said. "Infrastructure first. Water, power, utilities before anything else. Then density, mixed-use from day one, or you end up with residential blocks with nowhere to buy food and a commercial district no one can walk to." He was two lectures in and already annoyed at how obvious it sounded once someone said it out loud. "You get the bones wrong and everything else fights you forever."
She was watching him.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing." She looked back at her tablet. "You're going to build a city."
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"We're going to build a colony," he said.
She smiled at the screen.
---
The pub was three minutes from the hotel, dark wood and a fireplace doing actual work against the March cold. The waitress had a local accent that got friendlier as the round progressed. They ordered steak and ale pies, fish and chips, a ploughman's that nobody fully understood until it arrived as a wooden board loaded with bread, sharp cheddar, pickled onions, and something that might have been chutney, and turned out to be an excellent decision.
Joey was halfway through his pie when he stopped.
There was a screen above the bar, volume off, running a news segment. The caption scrolled underneath: Titan Dynamics CEO calls for "equitable access" framework in upcoming TL9 auction.
Marek Halden was in a television studio, leaning forward with his hands folded, the picture of someone being extremely reasonable. The caption cycled: "No single private entity should control the pathway to defensive technology while civilians continue dying in overflow zones."
Ryan set his fork down.
"He's been on three networks in the last two weeks, since Geneva." Ryan said. "I tracked the segment schedule this morning. Senate hearing in eight days. Three committee members received contributions from Titan in the last month."
On screen, Halden smiled at something off-camera. The lower third cut to: Titan Dynamics humanitarian overflow fund reports 200% increase in emergency contract bids.
"Every humanitarian contract they land is a reason for the next overflow to stay unresolved," Ryan said. "The business model needs the problem."
"Eat your pie," Emily said.
Ryan ate his pie. Luca watched the screen for another second, then looked away.
Not now. They didn't have the full picture yet. He was still angry about Danny. That part wasn't going away. But swinging at Halden before they understood how he operated would just hand him something to use back.
The fire was warm. The pie was good. Paris was a two-hour flight south.
---
Paris from altitude was what it was supposed to be. The grid spread below in the late afternoon light, the Seine splitting it down the middle, the Eiffel Tower smaller than it looked in pictures and exactly right. The hotel was on the Right Bank, a nineteenth-century building with wrought-iron balconies and stone facades and windows that opened inward the way they stopped making windows. The lobby smelled like floor wax and old wood.
Their suite was on the upper floor. Four bedrooms. A sitting area with tall windows facing the Louvre.
Emily dropped her bag in the doorway and walked straight to the window.
"Luca." She turned around. Her eyes were bright. "We're in Paris."
"Yeah, I--"
"We're in Paris." She grabbed his jacket lapel with both hands. "The Louvre is right there."
"I can see that."
"Do you understand what this is? This is Paris." She was smiling so wide it looked like it hurt. "We are in Paris and I am not spending tonight in this suite."
He laughed. "We have dinner with Pierre's team at eight."
---
"Casual in Paris," Zoe said, slipping on her short heels and smoothing the skirt of her dark dress. "There's no such thing. But trust me, you're knocking it out of the park."
Emily perched on the arm of the sofa and brushed a hand over Luca's shoulder. "Are you sure you're okay? You've been grumpy all day."
"I'm fine." He took her hand briefly. "Just Pierre and his team."
"Still hung up on that?" Zoe leaned in just enough to make him squirm. "Relax, Captain. You've got the two best-dressed women in Paris on your arm tonight."
"Don't remind me," he muttered.
Chris grinned as he adjusted his jacket. "Chloé from Pierre's team is supposed to be there, right?"
"Oh, please," Zoe said. "You don't even remember their names half the time."
"Doesn't matter," Chris replied. "She's gorgeous. That's all I need."
Emily shook her head with a soft laugh. "Well, at least someone's excited."
Chris tugged at the hem of his jacket, checking himself in the mirror. "Not bad," he said. "Very Euro-chic."
"Very not you," Zoe said.
Ryan muttered something under his breath, pulling at the collar of his shirt. "I feel like I'm suffocating. Who decided no ties but jackets? Jackets are just as bad."
The hotel TV was running a business segment. Ryan stopped adjusting his collar.
The lower third read: Titan Dynamics Group completes acquisition of Orion Horizons assets.
"That was fast," Emily said.
Zoe looked at the screen. "That wasn't us, was it?"
Ryan was quiet for a second. "Actually..."
Nobody said anything.
"We bankrupted them," Joey said.
"We didn't even know they would be in Arizona," Luca said.
"Still us," Zoe said.
"That was not our fault," Luca said. "They made a bet for the Sonoran Desert... and you landed the Triumph on top of it."
---
Pierre's team had suggested a restaurant near the Marais. Pierre had made the reservation himself, which meant he'd been here before, which meant he was Parisian and knew exactly where to eat in a city he grew up in. Luca wasn't sure why this was annoying, but it was.
Luca still wasn't sure who had scheduled Pierre and his team in Paris, but here they were, having dinner in the most romantic restaurant Luca had ever been to, with great food, beautiful decor, and surprisingly good company. Pierre had the kind of face that worked well in dim lighting. His black eye had already healed, apparently. Luca was completely fine with all of this.
He greeted Emily first.
His team followed him in: Chloé, who had already made eye contact with Chris before she sat down; Gabriel; Étienne, Sophie, and Isabelle, who had apparently agreed before arriving that they were going to like everyone and were proving themselves to be perfectly normal people.
The conversation moved, the food came, and the wine was good. Luca covered mission parameters, as was the case every dinner.
"Eighteen to twenty-four months," he said, when Isabelle asked. "We expect to reach whatever the level cap is before we return to Earth."
"All through combat?" Sophie asked.
"Combat and portals, sure. But we're a science and engineering mission first." He set his glass down. "Professional Classes advance through discovery work. Documented experiments, novel findings, things that generate actual XP. All mission objectives, we weren't able to dedicate ourselves to during our first tour. If you're doing real science on the Triumph, your professional class will level up. It's why we're recruiting from research and engineering backgrounds."
Pierre had been listening with the focused attention of someone constructing a model. "The mission itself is the XP," he said.
"The mission itself is the XP, and the credits that come from that," Luca confirmed.
Emily had leaned slightly toward Pierre when he said that, the table being narrow and Pierre being on her other side. She laughed at something he followed it with. Her French was better than Luca's, which was not a high bar but which she deployed without hesitating, and Pierre found this apparently delightful.
It was delightful. Luca had no argument with Pierre finding it delightful.
Pierre's gaze settled back on Luca. "And the leadership structure? How does that work?"
"The officers handle specific areas, but that's not really the structure." He set his glass down. "Everyone has a voice. We adapt. We've been making decisions together for years, and we're still all here."
Gabriel glanced at Pierre. "No mutinies yet, I take it?"
Luca took a moment to look at Zoe. She looked back at him, and they both grinned. "None so far."
His crew laughed at the joke as Pierre and his team looked on.
"It's nothing," Luca said, his eyes watering.
By the time the dessert appeared, Chloé and Chris had stopped discussing the northwestern portal circuits and had moved into territory that required neither of them to ask further questions.
They filed out into the Parisian night. The cold hit after the warmth of the restaurant. Erik and a few members of IFC security appeared at the door.
Luca counted heads out of habit. "Where's Chris?" he asked.
Ryan looked left. Joey looked right.
Emily was already looking at the narrow gap between the restaurant facade and the building beside it. "Luca."
He turned.
Chris and Chloé were in the alley. The shadow coverage was imperfect.
Luca stepped forward. "Chris," he said, at a volume that carried.
After a brief pause, Chris appeared at the edge of the building, adjusting his collar, entirely unconcerned if not smiling. Chloé came out behind him, smoothed her hair, and said goodnight.
"Worth it," Chris said quietly.
"Let's go," Luca said.
The Seine was three blocks west. The night air carried river water and whatever the bakery they were passing had been doing with its ovens until an hour ago. Zoe came up alongside Luca and matched his pace.
"Pierre's good," she said.
"His team is good," Luca said.
"Emily thinks so too."
"Yes," he said. "She does. And they are good, perfect for what we need."
Zoe said nothing and hummed to herself.
"She's allowed to think Pierre's team is good," he said.
"Relax, Captain," she smiled and placed a hand on his arm. "She still likes you."
Emily was two steps behind him, talking to Étienne about the mission's academic output potential. Her voice was easy, and she was not looking anywhere but at the conversation she was in.
He put his hands in his pockets and kept walking.