Destiny Among the Stars - Scifi - LitRPG - Adventure

"Adventure is somebody else in deep shit, far, far away,"
– David Drake

The motorcade rolled through the palm-lined boulevard, headlights cutting through the humid night as it approached the Palacio Presidencial de Malabo, its white colonial façade glowing beneath floodlights. The heat was thick and clinging, even after sunset, and the scent of salt and diesel drifted in from the port beyond the trees.

President James Anderson adjusted the collar of his lightweight coat, sweat slicking his back as his interface pulsed in the corner of his vision.

Another two percent. Anderson thought grimly. Another two percent that stood between him and that Control Tower. With it, he could finally bring order to the chaos. Control the portals. Regulate spawns. Quarantine Overflows before they turned cities into hellscapes. No more firefighting or more praying that regional governors could hold the line. It would open up new governing structures.

Then, his phone rang, shattering the silence.

"Mr. President," Director Okonjo's voice, clipped but calm, cut through the static. "We have Bangladesh. Provisional elections are underway in Dhaka. The insurrection in the Chittagong corridor was contained with minimal casualties."

Anderson stepped from the armored car, the courtyard tiles still damp from a brief evening squall. Two Secret Service agents flanked him as he climbed the wide steps toward the palace's grand colonnade, where golden uplights flickered against fluted pillars.

"How minimal?" he asked, his voice low as a delegation of Equatoguinean officials bowed slightly in greeting.

"Forty-three dead, sir. Mostly militia." A pause, heavy with unspoken grief. "One child."

Anderson closed his eyes for half a breath, the image of a child's face flashing through his mind. "Have our security teams moved in?"

"They're en route. Coming in from India and Russia." Okonjo hesitated, the unspoken question hanging in the air. "It's progress."

"Thank you, Director. Keep me posted." Anderson replied, his shoulders sagging beneath the weight of the responsibility.

He ended the call. The night air buzzed with insects, the hum broken by the occasional wail of a distant siren in the port district. Across the courtyard, a group of protestors clustered behind police barricades, their chants faint beneath the rhythmic thrum of Malabo's nightlife. Placards read "Humanity First, Not Mars" and "Heal the Cradle, Not the Cosmos."

Humidity clung to Anderson's hair and shoulders as another notification slid into his vision.

Another base on Venus, Anderson mused bitterly. So much money wasted, resources poured into the void, while so much hunger remained here on Earth.

He passed through the security checkpoint, nodding to the local guards in crisp uniforms. Inside, the palace's polished stone floors gleamed under soft lighting. High ceilings and carved mahogany walls gave the space a cool elegance, though Anderson barely noticed.

Everyone was tired, worn down by the relentless pressure. The System had given them miracles: new technology, instant diagnostics, and unparalleled knowledge. But every miracle came paired with chaos. Riots and power struggles, millions dead in the first month. And now, expansion.

The orbital blueprint was a tempting reward, especially if the Genesis Platform met its end of the Shuttle contract. More industry in space meant less pollution on Earth, a small victory in a losing war.

Just as he thought the interface was done, a final notification appeared:

At the top of the stairs, a pair of aides bowed him toward the reception hall. He paused under a vaulted arch, water from the earlier storm dripping off the hem of his coat onto the marble floor.

They had taken one step. Just one tenuous step toward the stars. Now, the System expected a march, a relentless advance into the unknown. He looked skyward, through stone and steel and weather, to where the Triumph of Darron streaked through the cold interstellar dark, carrying the hopes and fears of a fractured world.

A Star System Control Tower. He didn't know what it meant. No one did. But if it was anything like the Regional Control Towers... if it could stabilize a star system the way a City Tower stabilized a region, then it would truly open the Solar System. It would make it manageable.

"So it begins," he murmured, the words barely audible above the distant hum of the city. "God help them out there."

Karen's office sat near the top floor of Dome One, its sweeping glass arc overlooking the grey, scarred surface of the Moon. Earth hung low on the horizon, blue, bright, and impossibly far away from the reality she managed every day.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The glow of the lunar sunrise filtered through the IFC headquarters, casting pale light over Karen Stevens' cluttered desk.

Before the System, she was just a housewife managing petty HOA politics. Now she oversaw thousands of lives, contracts worth millions, and the future of humanity's expansion into the stars. Sometimes she still woke up expecting to pack lunchboxes and chase neighborhood kids off the lawn.

She scrolled through line items on her monitor without even blinking.

Helium-3 exports, essential for fusion drive production, were down 2% from Luna, threatening delays across three propulsion contracts. Ore deliveries from Valles Marineris were already forty-eight hours late, Kuiper Belt shipments hadn't even departed their extraction hubs: bottlenecked by broken loaders, missing pilots, or simple miscoordination. The Genesis Platform's forge plants were running lean, and without a steady feed, they'd be forced to idle; a disaster, considering it was still the only functioning shipyard in the system.

Subcontracting could bridge the gap, but only if they had more mining ships, more gas scoopers, more long-range haulers. Yet right now, Genesis was the only shipyard capable of building them. Transport subsidies remained frozen under the UER budget review, leaving cargo capacity maxed and scheduling a daily war.

Karen scrolled past a dozen budget deviation alerts, red, red, and orange lit up her screen. The opportunities were staggering. But her own adventuring company, the Interstellar Frontier Company, massive as it was, stood bottlenecked. There just weren't enough hands, enough ships, or enough hours in the day to chase everything the System had made possible.

Karen rubbed her temples, the familiar pressure building behind her eyes. She leaned back in her chair, exhaling slowly, the synthetic leather squeaking beneath her. Her husband, Michael Stevens, stood across the office, sitting at his own desk and watching her with his usual quiet concern.

"You've been at this since 4 am," he said.

"I'm trying to stop three different subsidiaries from suing each other over launch window conflicts," Karen muttered. "Starlight's biomedical launch got bumped by Horizon's resupply drop. Now I've got a screaming match on LunaComm and a mediation team in orbit trying not to throw each other out of an airlock."

Michael raised an eyebrow. "So… a normal Tuesday."

Before she could answer, her interface dinged.

For a long moment, Karen just stared at it. Then, quietly said. "Goddamn kids really did it."

She closed her eyes. The tension she didn't realize she was holding drained from her chest like air from a pressurized lock. Her shoulders sagged in relief.

"The FTL drive worked. They're on their way," she said. Beyond reach, beyond sabotage.

Michael stepped forward, his voice low. "Are they safe?"

Karen opened her Adventuring Company interface with a flick and scrolled down the list of subsidiaries.

"They're all accounted for," she replied as she focused on the membership.

Company Leader: Luca Rossi – Level 60 – Starship Commander

Then Emily. Zoe. Danny. Joey. Chris. Ryan.

Her crew. Too young, too bold, and too much ambition. Just perfect.

Michael watched her, the lines around his eyes softening.

"You didn't hesitate when Athan pitched this mission. Not once."

"No," Karen said, standing now. "Because I knew what they were. Not just capable and ambitious, but good. Really, truly good. And we need that more than ever."

She paused as she focused back on the crew, her kids. "Earth's already losing itself again. The UER talks unity but governs like it's still playing Risk. Too many flags. Too many closed doors. We can do better than that, we should be better than that."

She closed the Triumph Initiative overlay, then one by one dismissed the rest: the funding requests, the raw material disputes, the orbital launch schedules. For the first time in weeks, she allowed herself to step back from the storm.

"We need to go to Genesis. Call Athan."

Michael smiled, already turning to make the call.

Karen picked up her coat and paused at the door. There were still no answers about the sabotage, no confirmation of who'd tampered with the launch of the ship. But whoever it was had failed.

And her kids were beyond their reach now.

The Command Center of the Genesis Platform resembled a forward-facing amphitheater, its descending rows of control stations arranged like an amphitheater. Massive windows arced across the far wall, revealing the vast, glimmering construction yards outside. Industrial cranes rotated with modular parts. Haulers offloaded cargo. Steel skeletons of new ships floated like bones against the void, scaffolded and steaming in the cold.

Below him, the drydocks hummed with ceaseless motion. Twenty-five sleek shuttles, wrapped in scaffolding and vapor, were queued for final delivery as part of the latest UER order. Workers in armored construction suits worked in space.

Athan sipped his espresso, lukewarm by now. Bitter.

And then, his interface pulsed.

Just as the update on his interface faded, a new one popped up.

Athan didn't speak. Just stared at the alert, heart slowed by a heavy mix of pride and grief.

Luca had done it.

They'd solved it. The oscillation harmonics, the Reality Anchor Field stabilization, and the energy backlash curve that they had wrestled with for months in simulators. The FTL drive had held, and The Triumph of Darron was gone. Beyond the solar system now.

He leaned back in his chair, resting his cup on the console. Through the window, a new mining ship frame began to rotate, its grapplers were shifting it into launch alignment.

He could almost hear Maddie's voice in his head. "Knew he could do it. Just wish I could've been there to see it."

A tightness in his chest gave way to something else, the kind of breath you didn't know you were holding until the stars finally moved.

Maddie would've been proud. She would've cried. Or cheered. Maybe both.

Matteo was back on the Moon, leading his team near Shackleton Crater. The fool boy had leveled up again and sent Athan a blurry selfie with a blood-splattered pickaxe, grinning like a lunatic beside a collapsed obsidian behemoth.

While Alessio had just touched down in New Hampshire, off to start school with Maddie's parents, he hadn't said much on the call. Sixteen now, quiet and sharp. There was a lot of Maddie in him, too much sometimes.

Athan had wanted to call Luca, but the new comms relay had gone up just as the Triumph initialized its Vanguard Drive. Too late to matter now anyway. He hadn't said goodbye. Hadn't said how proud he was.

The buzz of the Command Center roared back into focus. A junior engineer called out adjustments to fabrication queue 22. Someone else flagged a parts shortage from Deimos. One of the orbital tugs needed recalibration on its grav-hooks. He could hear it all, and none of it.

His sons were out there. One breaking the edge of space. One clawing through monster-infested tunnels looking for that next level-up. And one looking back at Earth with his mother's eyes.

And Athan? He was building the ships. Laying the roads while keeping the lights on.

Because Maddie had believed in something, and so did he. That Genesis wasn't just a space platform or a yard, it was a seed. That one day, when Earth was no longer burning, Athan would be ready with fuel, ships, and a way forward.

"Push the next four haulers to the priority queue," he said softly to his assistant. "And spin up the scout-class lines. I want prototypes ready before the end of the quarter." They'd learnt a lot from building the Triumph, and now they had to build 17 more like it. No, not the same, they wouldn't have Luca's touch.

He looked back out to the stars, faint motes beyond the glare of industrial floodlights.

"Be safe, Luca," he whispered. "And make something worth the cost."

And then, with a final sip of bitter coffee, Athan Rossi turned back to his station.

The next fleet wouldn't build itself.