The tour had always had two things running at the same time. There was the actual work, the meetings, the equipment, the UER stops, and then there was everything else. Rio had been mostly everything else. Three days of beach and sun and Emily in that bikini, João's different restaurants... and so much more. They'd still done the work. Os Guerreiros were good and so were many others. But Rio had not felt like work.
The difference was Emily.
She was going back to the ship with Chris and Ryan. The Triumph needed her there: equipment deliveries, interior decoration, and the dozen other things that nobody else did the way she did. Luca understood all of that. He'd been fine with it when they discussed it. He was less fine with it now, standing on the tarmac watching her walk toward the Hyeon Logistics dropship with his coffee.
He had noticed it was his coffee. He had not said anything because by then she was already at the boarding ramp, carry bag over one shoulder, completely unaware. He was going to need that coffee.
Ryan and Chris were already aboard. Emily turned at the top of the ramp, found him, and held up the cup. She didn't say anything. She just looked at him for a second.
He nodded as she went inside.
"You going to be okay?" Zoe asked, from somewhere behind him.
"She's going to New Hampshire," Luca said. "She'll be fine."
"I meant you."
Luca shrugged and picked up his bag. "We're burning daylight."
---
Luca took the pilot's seat by default. Zoe settled into the copilot chair, pulled up the nav display, and started rearranging the nav display like it had personally offended her.
Behind them, Danny had a notebook open and was writing something that probably had a lot of numbers in it. Joey had his forehead against the window and was staring at nothing in particular. Luca had a pretty good idea what he was thinking about.
Luca pulled them up and northeast, left the coast behind, and watched the Atlantic scroll away beneath them.
Within minutes, the Amazon appeared below.
He'd grown up surrounded by trees. New Hampshire had trees. That was apparently not the same thing at all. The Amazon went from one edge of the horizon to the other and kept going, too much green, too much river. He had flown over the Atlantic twice. He had flown over the Sahara. This was different.
"You know what's interesting," Danny said, from the cabin.
"What's that?" Zoe said.
"Statistically, if we went down in the Amazon, the survival odds for the crash itself are actually pretty reasonable. Multi-canopy structure absorbs a lot of impact energy as well as the dense undergrowth. It's the recovery that's the problem."
Luca glanced at the altimeter. "By 'recovery' you mean—"
"Nobody would be able to find us." Danny sounded almost cheerful about this. "The canopy closes over. Radar gets confused by the organic mass. Heat signatures get absorbed and dissipated within about forty meters of the surface. There are parts of that basin that haven't been physically walked through since the portals opened. Possibly longer."
Zoe looked down at the unbroken green below them.
"That's very reassuring, Danny," Joey said.
"I thought so. I'm just saying the crash itself probably wouldn't kill us."
"The crash wouldn't kill us," Luca repeated.
Luca checked the engine readouts. He checked them again. He checked them a third time because they were flying over several hundred thousand square kilometers of territory that apparently swallowed radar and heat signatures whole, and he wanted to be sure.
"Danny," he said.
"Yeah."
"Why did you tell us that."
"It's interesting."
"Sure," Luca said. "Very interesting. Great."
Danny went back to his notebook. Zoe started quietly adjusting the nav display again, probably routing them over the fewest possible trees. Luca stared at the green below. Emily had probably made the right call.
---
Cartagena from the air was not Rio. The colonial walls along the waterfront, the old city packed tight inside them, the Caribbean stretching beyond. Old in a way that was hard to put a number on, walled and dense. It was certainly smaller and quieter than Rio.
The heat outside hit the same as Rio, which he'd thought meant he was prepared for it. Cartagena had the humidity stacked on top, the kind that hit you in the face and stayed there. He stepped off the shuttle and his shirt stuck to him in two seconds. A fly landed on his arm immediately. He waved it off and another one replaced it.
His communicator buzzed while they were pulling gear as he read a message from Emily.
Just landed. Ryan's already arguing with someone about how the cargo's being loaded. Hyeon has it completely handled but Ryan saw something done differently than he would do it and couldn't let it go. Izumi seems pretty annoyed. The ship is going to look incredible, by the way. Diana did something to the lighting in the crew lounge. Come home soon.
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He stood there a second, then typed back: Good. Tell Ryan not to create problems; we need Izumi.
The reply came back in thirty seconds: He knows that. That IS the point.
Luca smiled at his phone.
"Emily?" Joey asked.
"Yeah, Ryan's being annoying."
Joey nodded. He was barely there.
Luca put his phone away. "How's Maria?"
"Good," he replied. "We're talking."
"Good."
"I don't really know what I'm doing," Joey added.
"That's normal," Luca said. "That's exactly where you want to be."
Joey looked at him the way people look at advice they're not sure is useful or just something someone said to fill the silence. Luca picked up his bag and headed for the taxi stand.
---
The hotel was old in the architectural sense and tired in every other sense. The lobby had ceiling fans doing what they could, a front desk attended by a man who seemed genuinely surprised to have customers, and a fly situation that was connected to the open window situation. The rooms had beds, windows opened onto an interior courtyard, and enough street noise that Luca could hear every bus, every argument, and smell... everything. Most of it was the good type of smell, something fried... awakening his stomach.
He set his bag on the bed and decided that it wasn't that bad. He had slept in worse places. This was what they needed: a bed in a city on the Caribbean coast of South America. It just didn't have air conditioning, that's all. He waved away a fly.
On opening the window, he saw the courtyard below had a few plastic chairs, a scraggly tree, and someone's laundry on a line. Past the gate, a vendor walked the street with a cart and a bell, the bell on his cart going at the same pace it probably always had. The city didn't care that Luca was there; there were no reporters, no fans wearing Triumph gear, not even a TV in the lobby. Just a radio playing cumbia. Emily would have liked that about it.
His communicator buzzed.
Karen's face on the screen had the look that meant she was about to ask for something. He'd seen it maybe twice in all the time he'd known her. It made him sit down.
"How's the hotel?" she asked.
"Karen."
"Your meetings are canceled."
"All of them?"
"All of them."
He looked at the ceiling fan. It wobbled and moved at a speed that was more about the idea of air movement than actual air movement. "Why?"
"One of the teams you were scheduled to interview has gone missing. A team out of Bogotá. A level 60 team, six members. They left a week ago for a regional operation, and nobody has heard from them since."
That woke him up, as Level 60 teams didn't just disappear. "A week ago? And we're finding out now? Who has them?"
"A guerrilla faction operating out of the Colombian Amazon. They're armed, organized, and also confirmed at level 60." She let him sit with that. "The UER has sent three extraction attempts into the area. None of them made it back out."
Luca set the communicator on the windowsill and looked at the courtyard below. Three UER attempts. He knew what UER extraction teams looked like. They were not people who got eaten by jungles.
"How?" he said.
"The terrain first, it's all dense canopy and no clear approaches, high-level wildlife throughout the basin. The faction knows the ground, and they've built their position around it. But the main problem is the level gap. The UER teams went in at 50, maybe 55. They ran into people who'd been living in that jungle long enough to know every angle of approach before you're close enough to see the camp." She kept going, steady. "Someone has also been routing off-world portal access to this group for at least two years. We don't know who."
"That's not why you're calling," Luca said.
"One of the hostages is the daughter of the governor of Gran Colombia. Part of the team you were scheduled to meet."
"How do you know she's down there?" Luca said. "You said they went missing. How does missing turn into we know where she is?"
"They made contact. A ransom demand was delivered to the governor's office three days ago. Video confirmation, six hostages alive at time of recording." Karen pulled something up on her end. "Classic tactic for this region. They take someone with enough political weight to guarantee a conversation, they make the demand, and they wait. They know the terrain buys them time."
"Who are these people," Luca said. "You don't get to level 60 in the Amazon by accident."
"They're successors to an organization that operated in this region for decades before the System arrived. Different name now, but the same playbook. They've been doing this longer than you've been alive." Karen's voice stayed even. "The portals changed everything. Ten years ago these people were fighting with rifles and pipe bombs. Now they have energy weapons, armor, and four and a half years of portal runs. The jungle is still the jungle, that hasn't changed. They did."
"And the girl?"
"Twenty years old. Senior systems engineer. Has been level 60 for a couple of years now with her team. " Karen paused. "She was very much on the list."
Luca didn't say anything for a moment.
"Why us?" Luca said. "The UER has an army."
"The UER has already lost three teams trying to find this camp." Karen's voice stayed even. "These people are level 60. They know the terrain, they know UER equipment, and they've spent four years supplied by the system. If Anderson sends in a battalion, the forest burns, and the hostages die on video. And Gran Colombia is watching. The governor's daughter is one of those hostages. If she doesn't come home, or if she comes home because a UER operation went wrong, the whole region starts asking whether the UER is worth the cost."
"You're asking me to find them," he said.
"I'm asking you to locate the camp." Karen's voice was careful. "The UER can't launch another attempt without knowing where they are. What I need is eyes on the position: location, approach routes, what they're working with. You get me that, you get out, and the UER handles the rest."
"And the hostages."
"Are the UER's problem once we know where to send them." A pause. "I need a scout, Luca. Not a rescue. If the situation on the ground is worse than the intelligence suggests, you pull out. That's not optional."
Luca had known Karen for a while now. She gave orders. She set conditions. She showed up at board meetings, reclassified his company, handed him titles, and told him what the mission was. She did not ask. He couldn't remember her ever actually asking.
This wasn't quite asking either. But it was closer than usual.
"What about bringing the Triumph over and—"
"No."
She said that fast.
"It's a protected rainforest," she said. "Whatever you're imagining doing with the ship's weapons would cause ecological damage that people would be studying for thirty years. The political consequences alone would—"
"I get it."
"We cannot burn the rainforest, Luca."
"I said I get it." He rubbed the back of his neck. "We'd need the Specter. And our armor."
"Ryan can fly it down from Sandworth."
He thought about it. Quiet entry, no engagement, find the camp and get out. "So it's a scout mission. Specter goes in low, Zoe and I on the ground, we find the position, and we leave."
"That's the job. You find the camp, you mark it, and you come home."
Luca thought about the Amazon below them on the flight over. Green from one horizon to the other, rivers cutting through it in brown loops, no landmarks, no edges, the kind of place Danny had cheerfully explained would swallow a crash site inside of an hour.
He was considerably less cheerful about it now.
"Send whatever satellite imagery you have on the basin," he said. "I'll tell Ryan to bring our stuff."
"I'll find you a better hotel while you wait."
"The hotel is fine."
"I've seen the booking, Luca."
He ended the call. The vendor outside was still working the same corner, bell ringing every thirty seconds, same as when they'd arrived. The laundry on the line in the courtyard hadn't moved. A fly landed on his arm and he let it sit there for a second because he was busy thinking about a twenty-year-old girl four days into whatever was happening to her in a jungle he'd just flown over and paid no attention to.
He texted Zoe: Karen called. Come to my room. Bring Danny and Joey.
Then he waved off the fly, looked at the ceiling fan still turning its slow useless circles, and decided he barely had a few hours before the Specter arrived and he was going to spend at least some of them finding somewhere in this city that served decent food. He was in Colombia for the first time in his life, Emily wasn't here to share it with him, and Karen Stevens had just asked him for a favor.
The least the city could do was feed him well.