Destiny Among the Stars - Scifi - LitRPG - Adventure

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."

— Lao Tzu

The days aboard The Triumph settled into a routine, a blend of calibrations, chores, and movie nights. They were a self-contained capsule, hurtling through the solar system on the way to the Oort Cloud passage, the point of no return where they'd finally ignite the FTL drive. Each passing day brought them closer, and with it, an undercurrent of anticipation that was almost palpable. Luca could feel it in the air, a buzz of nervous energy, excitement, and just a hint of dread.

Calibration sequences with the Genesis Platform became a daily ritual. Hours spent on the bridge with Emily and Zoe, coordinating with Isabel Torin's team back home, fine-tuning sensor arrays, navigational systems, and the complex pre-flight diagnostics for the Vanguard drive. Tedious, but vital. Their survival depended on getting it right.

Engineering, under Ryan and Chris's often-noisy supervision, ensured the power systems could handle the projected load. Those two were always fighting, but they got the job done. Danny lived in his science lab, cross-referencing their sensor data with Genesis's long-range astronomical charts. The kid was brilliant, no question. Joey kept them fed and, remarkably, sane. How he managed it, Luca had no idea.

Today's session was wrapping up. They'd been working with Isabel on the FTL's primary energy conduits, and she was giving her final sign-off for the cycle.

"Alright, Triumph," Isabel was saying, her voice crisp despite the light-lag, "we're seeing stable energy fluctuations across the primary manifold. Your adjustments on the magnetic containment fields look good from here. That concludes the scheduled diagnostics for this window. We'll pick up with the pre-ignition sequence simulations tomorrow, same time."

On the main screen, Athan, who'd been observing, gave a brief nod. "Good work, everyone. Stay sharp, Luca. You're making good time." He offered a rare, small smile. It made Luca stand a little taller. He wanted Dad's approval.

"Copy that, Genesis Control. Thanks, Isabel. Thanks, Dad," Luca replied, a sense of minor accomplishment settling in. Another step closer.

Emily was already closing down the secure comms channel. "Alright, that's us for today with Genesis. Zoe, run a final sweep on the long-range array before you power it down to standby."

Just as the connection to Genesis blinked out, a new notification pinged on Emily's primary console: an incoming data transmission. It was tagged with Genesis Platform's encryption keys and handshake protocols, but it hadn't been announced. Isabel had clearly signed off. Athan hadn't mentioned any further uploads.

"Hold on," Emily said, her brow furrowing. "We've got another incoming packet." She looked at him, a question in her eyes. "They didn't say anything about a priority update, did they?"

"No," Luca said slowly, a prickle of unease running down his spine. "Isabel said simulations tomorrow." His eyes flicked to the data stream signature on a secondary display. It looked like standard Genesis encryption, but the timing… it was off. Something wasn't right.

"Ryan!" Luca yelled, picking up the intercomm microphone and shoving back from his chair so hard it scraped against the deck. "Kill the downlink to Engineering! Quarantine it! Now!"

On the bridge speakers, Ryan's voice came back, laced with confusion and the clatter of tools. "Uh, Captain? What packet? We just got the all-clear from Isabel. We were about to cycle down…"

"There's an unscheduled priority update coming through, Ryan! Don't open it!" Luca slammed his fist on the console. "Emily, Zoe, isolate that data stream! Full quarantine, highest level!"

Emily's face was pale, but she was already moving, rerouting the incoming data to a firewalled server block. Zoe was already running deep-level intrusion scans. Smart and quick, both of them. He'd picked the right team for this.

A heavy silence descended on the bridge, broken only by the soft hum of The Triumph's systems. The implications of what they'd just narrowly averted were staggering. If that packet had made it through...

"They're listening," Zoe said finally, her voice flat, echoing the thought that was now screaming in Luca's own head. "They have to be. To know about our calibration schedule, to time an injection like that, to spoof Genesis encryption keys… this isn't random. Our comms are compromised."

Emily nodded, her expression grim. "Which means every official transmission, every data burst we've sent or received, could have been intercepted. They know our progress…"

"And they'll know we caught this one," Luca finished, a cold knot forming in his stomach. "They'll adapt. Try something else." They were a lone ship, far from any support, with an enemy who was clearly sophisticated, well-informed, and relentless. He didn't like being outmaneuvered.

"We need to warn Dad," Luca said, already moving towards the comms station Emily had vacated. "He needs to know Genesis Platform's outbound channels might be compromised too, or that there's a serious internal leak." He trusted Dad, but someone at Genesis had to be playing them.

"Assuming we can even get a clean message through," Zoe muttered, already running diagnostics on their own transmission buffers, looking for any signs of prior tampering.

"We have to try," Emily said, her gaze steady on his. "Use the tight-beam."

It took a few agonizing minutes to re-establish a secure, albeit narrow, link back to Dad's private channel on Genesis Platform. His face appeared on the screen, etched with concern. He must have seen the emergency flag.

"Luca? What's happened?"

"Dad," Luca said, keeping his voice as level as he could, "we received an unscheduled data packet immediately after your last transmission. Genesis encryption, priority override. It wasn't from you."

He saw Emily in his peripheral vision quickly typing a summary of their findings, ready to transmit it if the verbal comm failed. They were on the same page, as always.

"The packet contained malware," Luca continued. "Advanced. Designed to hijack the ship's systems and trigger a shutdown. We quarantined and neutralized it." Barely, he thought. Too damn close.

Athan's expression hardened, his eyes going cold. The implications were clearly not lost on him. "Compromised," he breathed, more to himself than to them. He looked away from the camera for a moment, then back, his jaw tight. "Understood, Luca. We'll initiate a full security sweep on our end, assume all outbound channels are vulnerable. Good work."

There was a pause, the light-lag stretching the silence. "This changes things," Athan said finally, his voice heavy. "If they can inject data into your secure stream, they're almost certainly monitoring your telemetry, your standard comms. They'll be anticipating your next move, your FTL jump point."

"What are you saying?" Luca asked, though he already had a sinking feeling he knew the answer.

"Radio silence, Luca. Complete and total, starting now. Cut all non-essential outbound transmissions. Go dark. Your FTL drive is your only true advantage now. They won't be able to track you once you make that jump, not if they don't know your exit vector and timing beforehand." He sighed, the weariness evident. "This is what they wanted, I think. To isolate you. To force a mistake."

"What about critical updates? Mission progress?" Emily interjected, leaning into the frame.

"Negative, Emily. Not until you're out. The risk is too high. Any transmission could be a beacon." Athan looked directly at Luca. "Your mission parameters remain the same: reach Alpha Centauri, conduct your survey, return with the data. How you do that now, with this new constraint… that's on you, Captain."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The weight of that settled on Luca. No more guidance from Genesis. No more data exchanges. They were truly on their own.

"If there are any… personal messages," Athan continued, his voice softening almost imperceptibly, "anything you or the crew need to send before you go dark, record them. Package them. Send one final burst. Make it count. After that, nothing until you come back." He looked at his watch. "You have one hour. Then I want confirmation that The Triumph is silent. Understood?"

"Understood, Commander," Luca replied, his own voice serious.

"Be safe, Luca. All of you." His image flickered, and then the screen went dark, the connection severed from his end.

One hour. One last chance to reach out before they plunged into the true unknown, a ghost ship running silent through the void. It was time to get it done.

"Alright," Luca said, turning to Emily and Zoe, the words feeling inadequate. "You heard him. One hour. Pass the word to the crew. Anyone who wants to send a message, get it recorded. We'll beam it out in sixty minutes. After that…" He didn't need to finish the sentence.

Emily nodded, already moving to alert the others. The journey to Alpha Centauri had just become infinitely more dangerous. They were at war with a powerful corporation or adventuring company, or it seemed.

The final encrypted data burst, carrying their collective hopes, fears, and last words to Earth, arced away from The Triumph an hour later, a fleeting whisper into the vast, uncaring silence. Then, as per Athan's directive, they went dark. The primary comms array powered down, long-range sensors shifted to passive-only, and an almost unnerving quiet settled over the bridge.

Joey decided the best way to deal with impending doom or groundbreaking interstellar travel was with a full stomach. A few hours later, the mess hall was filled with the surprisingly comforting aroma of what he was calling "Emergency Morale Meatloaf." It smelled a damn sight better than any emergency ration.

Plates were filled, the initial silence of shared anxiety gradually giving way to the clatter of cutlery and tentative conversation. Ryan, predictably, was the first to dive into the topic on everyone's mind. Always a big mouth.

"So, that FTL drive, eh?" he said, mouth half-full of meatloaf. He gestured vaguely with his fork towards the engineering deck. "All those calibrations we did with Genesis… you think they were actually enough before we got cut off? That last 'diagnostic package' sure wasn't helping."

Chris looked up. He had been meticulously cutting his meatloaf into perfect squares. "The core jump mechanism itself is solid. Pre-System principles mostly, just… exponentially more powerful. That part'll work. The Vanguard's design is sound. The question, as always, is the new stuff." He had a point. New stuff always broke.

Danny, who'd been sketching something on a napkin, again, chimed in, his brow furrowed in thought. "It's the Reality Anchor Field I'm most concerned about. According to the schematics Athan managed to send before… well, before… it's not just about generating it. It's about the precision."

Luca leaned forward, his own appetite suddenly fading. Oh shit, here we go. "Explain, Danny. For those of us who didn't swallow the advanced theoretical physics textbook."

Danny actually looked a little flustered at being the center of attention, but pushed on. "Right. So, the FTL drive doesn't just… push us through space. First, it has to establish what the Vanguard schematics call a 'Reality Anchor Field.' It's essentially a localized containment bubble that stabilizes The Triumph's quantum state. Keeps us tethered to the known laws of physics while the actual FTL drive… well, it sort of skips us between the normal folds of spacetime." Skipping between folds of spacetime? Was this even a good idea?

"So, a glorified shield?" Zoe asked.

"More than that," Chris corrected, surprisingly knowledgeable. "It's what prevents us from turning into a shower of exotic particles the moment we exceed light speed. It maintains our structural integrity, our internal temporal consistency… basically, it stops the universe from saying 'nope, you can't do that' and erasing us."

"Exactly," Danny said, nodding eagerly. "The drive will generate the field, that's almost guaranteed. The raw power is there. But the calibration we were doing with Genesis, the stuff that got cut short by that… interference… that was all about shaping and maintaining the field's integrity and, crucially, its dimensions."

He picked up a breadstick, holding it up. "Imagine this is The Triumph. The field needs to encompass the entire ship, every nacelle, every antenna, with a stable buffer zone. If it's too small…" He snapped the breadstick. "...parts of the ship could be exposed to raw FTL-transition stresses. Bad."

"And if it's too big?" Emily asked, her fork paused halfway to her mouth. Her eyes found his across the table, wide and searching, reflecting the sudden tightness in his own chest. He could see the unspoken question there, the same one clawing at him: Are we going to be okay? She was scared, and he couldn't promise her anything.

"Too big, and it draws an exponentially larger amount of power from the primary FTL capacitors just to maintain itself," Ryan jumped in, a new layer of concern in his voice. "Leaving less juice for the actual… uh… 'skip-jump' as Danny put it. We might not have the range to make it to Alpha Centauri in one go. Or worse, the field could become unstable under the strain, flicker during the jump." Flicker? What the hell happens if reality flickers when you're going faster than light?

Zoe, who'd been silently demolishing her meatloaf, finally spoke. "So, what you're saying is, we're about to bet our lives on a system that's maybe seventy-five percent calibrated, hoping the bubble it makes is 'just right' like some kind of glove?"

A rather uncomfortable silence fell over the table. Joey's meatloaf suddenly didn't seem quite as comforting. Under the table, Luca felt a light pressure against his hand. Emily. Her fingers brushed his, then gently, firmly, took hold. Her hand was warm, steady, a small anchor in the sudden storm of his thoughts. He squeezed back, a silent acknowledgment of the fear, the uncertainty, the shared leap into the abyss they were contemplating. This was the real deal. No turning back now.

"The initial field generation simulations we did complete with Genesis looked promising," Danny offered, though his voice lacked its usual certainty. "The energy draw was, perhaps, within projected limits for a stable, correctly sized anchor. But those were simulations without the final fine-tuning from that last, corrupted, data package."

"So, we're flying a bit blind on the final parameters," Luca summarized, his voice a little hoarse. He kept his eyes on Emily for a moment longer, drawing strength from her quiet presence, her hand still in his. The weight of command rushing down on him. "We have to trust the work we've done so far, trust the Vanguard's core design, and trust that Ryan and Chris can manage the power flow during ignition if things get… unpredictable."

Ryan and Chris exchanged a look.

"We'll manage the power," Ryan said, his earlier joviality gone. "We always do."

"The question is," Chris added quietly, "what's an acceptable margin of error when you're talking about reality itself unraveling around the edges of the ship?"

No one had an answer for that. The clinking of forks against plates resumed, but the earlier laughter was gone, replaced by a more somber, focused mood. His hand was still holding Emily's beneath the table, a small, secret point of contact, a shared understanding that this next step was bigger, scarier, than anything they'd faced before. The Oort Cloud passage, and the first true test of The Triumph, felt very, very close.

Later that evening, Luca found Emily staring out of the observation lounge viewport, the star-dusted blackness reflecting in her eyes. His own brief, recorded messages to Matteo and Alessio, full of forced cheerfulness and reassurances he didn't entirely feel, had already been bundled for the next transmission. He'd told them to stay out of trouble. He'd told them he loved them. What else could he say?

"Heard from your brothers?" she asked, her voice quiet, not looking away from the void.

"Yeah," Luca said, moving to stand beside her. "Got a burst back from the last batch. Alessio's complaining about school, Matteo's bragging about some new weapons mod they found in a portal. The usual." He paused. "You... hear from anyone?"

Emily was silent for a long moment. The red hoodie he'd lent her back on Genesis, the one she still wore sometimes when off-duty, was folded neatly on a nearby seat. She hadn't returned it, and he hadn't asked. It was a small, unspoken thing between them now.

"No," she said finally, her voice barely a whisper, so low he almost didn't catch it. "Mom's... probably busy." There was a careful casualness to her tone that didn't quite mask what they all knew. "You know how she is with her kids, those little projects she takes on. And my stepdad…" She trailed off with a slight, almost imperceptible shrug, the gesture speaking volumes. He never reached out. He wouldn't. The silence stretched, filled only by the faint hum of the ship. "And Pierre…" Another pause, longer this time. "Nothing. Not since we left." She finally turned from the viewport, attempting a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Busy, I guess."

The forced casualness, the tremor she couldn't quite hide, it twisted something in Luca's chest. She knew the 2 a.m. departure left no time for goodbyes. She knew their communications were now a dangerous, restricted trickle. But logic was a cold comfort against the silence from family, from someone who was supposed to care. And she was all alone.

Especially when others were getting those precious, filtered echoes from home. He remembered her mentioning once, long ago, how her own father had just… left the house. And her mom, caught up in a new life, new kids, with a man who barely acknowledged Emily's existence. That kind of silence from family, it digs deep. It stays with you.

This time, not even Pierre's ghost could hold him back. Couldn't. The raw hurt in her voice, the vulnerability she rarely showed, cut through all of it. He stepped closer and, as naturally as breathing, put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her in.

She leaned into him without hesitation, her head resting against his shoulder, a soft sigh escaping her lips. It was a familiar comfort, this closeness, something they'd shared countless times over the years, after a tough delve, a bad dream, or just a long day. But tonight, it felt different. Heavier. Beneath the familiarity, there was a current of shared loneliness, of two people clinging to a small piece of home in the vast, indifferent dark.

"It's a long way," Luca said quietly. "Messages get lost. People get busy. Doesn't mean they're not thinking of you, Em." It sounded hollow even to his own ears, but what else could he say? He wished he could take the pain away.

She just nodded against his shoulder, her body relaxing a little more into the embrace. They stood there for a long time, sharing the silence, the star-dusted blackness outside mirroring the growing distance to everything, and everyone, they knew.

This new threat, this unseen enemy who could reach them even here, had just made their long journey feel infinitely longer, and lonelier.

And for Emily, it seemed, the silence from Earth was a particular kind of void.

He would be there for her.

Always.