The T-48 came down over the Yokohama waterfront without landing gear, primarily because there was no landing gear to lower. Rita Ashbury-Singh had already learned that explaining this to human aviation experts was a conversation that could easily consume twenty minutes if you let it. Instead, the massive shuttle settled toward the cleared ground on three thick nacelle runners. The counter-gravity system lived inside them, making the runners both the propulsion mechanism and the physical structure the craft rested on once grounded.
Sitting at the copilot controls, Rita watched the numbers settle.
“Three meters,” the V’ren pilot beside her announced.
“Two.”
The ground rushed up to meet them.
“One.”
The T-48 settled onto the runners with almost insulting gentleness for something of its immense size. Rita checked her board, called out the grounding confirmation, and looked through the forward glass.
The scale of the operation had been difficult to truly appreciate from the air. Their shuttle was nothing special here. Forty-eight V’ren shuttles had been assigned to the waterfront movement, a logistical flex that fit perfectly into the frantic schedule of the youth delegation’s ongoing World Tour. Some shuttles had already departed. Others sat scattered across the land Marmaduke Logistics had aggressively purchased beside the first proposed AGRIsolutions site. T-48s dominated the view, mingling with autonomous construction equipment moving through the old industrial property in meticulously coordinated patterns.
A two-hectare section had been marked out and was already being cleared for the first reactor and reclamation unit. There had been derelict buildings there just that morning. Now, the waterfront looked less like a construction site and more like someone had decided to carefully disassemble a piece of Yokohama, remembering exactly where every molecule belonged.
Rita unstrapped, her joints protesting after a long day of flying. Tokyo had somehow turned every supposed day off into another workday, though at least this one involved aviation. The aft compartment opened into a wall of noise, movement, and the sight of another T-48 sitting a few dozen meters away. More importantly, Rita recognized the two people standing beside it.
MJ Reyes had one hand casually shoved into a pocket, looking every bit the seasoned pilot who had already earned her stripes flying high-stakes missions under the #MJFlies banner. Beside her, Y’kem T’all was—predictably—eating something.
Rita headed toward them.
“You’re alive,” MJ noted as she approached.
“Debatable,” Rita countered, eyeing Y’kem as he lifted his food in a silent greeting. “Where have you two been?”
MJ and Y’kem exchanged a look. “Working,” MJ offered, suspiciously vague.
“It has been a suspiciously vague day,” Rita said, turning to Y’kem for backup. “Helpful.”
“I flew,” Y’kem stated.
“I assumed that.”
“He also ate,” MJ added.
Y’kem nodded solemnly. “A great deal.”
Rita looked across the sprawling waterfront, watching an autonomous excavator peel apart a concrete foundation while Japanese survey teams moved effortlessly among V’ren engineers. “How much of this was here this morning?”
“Less,” Y’kem observed.
Rita watched a cargo insert being hauled away. “So this is actually happening. The first reactor goes right there.” She stared at the cleared two-hectare plot for several seconds before a far more pressing mystery interrupted her thoughts. “Where’s Kevin?”
MJ immediately pivoted. “That is exactly what I was going to ask you.”
“You don’t know?” Rita blinked, turning to Y’kem, who continued chewing with absolute serenity. “You know.”
“I know what he told Matt late last night,” Y’kem said after swallowing. “He told Matt he was taking today off… to do charity work.”
Silence stretched between the three of them.
“Kevin took a day off,” Rita said, her brow furrowing. “For charity work.”
MJ looked profoundly suspicious. “What charity?”
Y’kem shrugged. “He did not tell me.”
Rita pulled out her phone, checking the group chat. Nothing. Not a single useful update. MJ did the same, finding the exact same void.
“And Matt said yes to this?” Rita asked, incredulous. “That seems irresponsible.”
MJ snorted. “Matt let us fly spaceships. Fair.”
Another massive T-48 descended behind them, sinking vertically until its runners met the earth. A Japanese ground supervisor walked past, checking his tablet. He barely glanced at the three teenagers, treating the cadets who had just flown alien spacecraft as completely ordinary logistics personnel, releasing their crews once cargo control signed them off.
“No one here cares who we are,” Rita noted, watching him go.
“It’s nice,” MJ smiled.
They started walking toward cargo control, the massive industrial theater operating flawlessly around them.
“I bet Kevin is asleep,” Rita mused.
“No,” MJ shook her head.
“Eating?”
“Possible.”
Y’kem considered the options. “He could be doing actual charity work.”
Rita stared at him. “For ten hours?”
“This is Kevin,” MJ pointed out.
Rita stopped walking entirely. “What if he joined a monastery? In Tokyo? It would explain the silence.”
Y’kem shook his head with absolute certainty. “No. He packed too many clothes.”
MJ laughed for the first time since they had landed. The three started walking again, completely oblivious to the reality unfolding less than an hour away. None of them knew that Kevin Wood had spent the entire day hiding in plain sight. They didn’t know about the six grueling costume changes, the dazzling Ziggy Stardust homage, or the professional ballroom dancer. They certainly didn’t know the Harajuku Creators Fund was having a historically profitable day.
And they absolutely did not know that a feral pack of schoolgirls was about to solve the mystery of their missing Boston cadet by running down the street, phones held high, screaming, “Husbando!”
