TCTS 3: Book 3 Finale: Part 1 (Patreon)

Welp, I didn't get the chance to fully edit this, so I'll just upload the first half of the ending here since I have work tomorrow, and then I'll continue working on the second half tomorrow.

When Mark first came to, the first thing he felt was an odd quiet. It was a quiet that not only adorned the room, but also his mind, as if he had stopped fighting himself. There was no pressure behind his thoughts or the bothersome distractions of having a hundred half-finished problems all demanding attention at the edge of his awareness. His mind was simply his, all of it, laid out in front of him like a perfectly organized workshop for the first time in his life.

Sounds started to reach him, noticing the slow and steady beeping of a heart monitor to his left, accompanied by the faint hum of an environmental regulator and the low buzz of the lights. His already enhanced senses had evolved, giving him a heightened spatial awareness of his surroundings without even moving his head.

It was as if he could feel his surroundings. The heart monitor's beep resolved itself in his mind as sixty-two beats per minute, four beats above his usual resting rate, consistent with a body recovering from significant metabolic strain. The temperature was seventy degrees Fahrenheit, and the air was seventy-eight percent nitrogen, twenty-one percent oxygen, with a slightly elevated CO2 reading.

This was all information he hadn't tried to know, but had simply arrived to him as if it was the most natural thing.

"Well," he said aloud, his voice sounding rough. "That's gonna take some getting used to."

"Welcome back, Father," Vita's voice said gently through the room's speakers. "Your consciousness has been rising toward wakefulness for the past nineteen minutes. However, I've held off notifying the others until you spoke, per your standing preference for the option of a private moment before company arrives."

"That is very thoughtful of you, Vita," Mark said before clearing his throat. "How long was I out?"

"Four days, six hours, and forty-two minutes since seal engagement," Vita responded. "The procedure completed on schedule and all four serum layers unfolded exactly as designed, though the stabilization ran ten hours faster than projected, marking your recovery as nothing short of remarkable."

"What do my enhancements look like?" Mark asked.

"Your cellular repair function is currently running at approximately sixteen times that of a baseline human," Vita said, sounding pleased with the number. "As for your neural conductivity, it has been measured at four times the projection while your bone density is one hundred forty-two percent of what it had been pre-procedure, with muscle fiber composition being fully restructured to a high-endurance configuration and your metabolic rate elevated, but sustainable, and self-regulating in a way the simulations did not predict. Your body appears to have found an equilibrium the model considered impossible."

"That'll be the merger," Mark said quietly.

There was a pause.

"Father, I don't have the context for that statement," Vita said.

"Don't worry about it. I need to talk to Dr. Corven," Mark said as he shifted his weight, testing the feeling of his own body. He had no soreness or any lingering weakness. He felt, for lack of a better word, ready. "How has Lyra been holding up?"

"She has been rather anxious, but well," Vita answered. "She has visited the observation window every day, for approximately six hours per day, holding her stuffed bear. Sister Elara has been managing her schedule to ensure she continues to eat, sleep, and attend her schooling. She is currently in the atrium of the hospital, waiting for permission to see you."

Mark closed his eyes as he tried to imagine Lyra coming to see him for four days straight, not sure if he would ever wake up again.

"Get her," he said. "Please."

"Right away, Father," Vita said, and five minutes later, Lyra came through the door running.

She didn't slow down for the medical equipment or the tubing or the delicate arrangement of monitors around his bed. She saw him upright, saw his eyes open, and she launched herself at him while throwing caution to the wind. Mark caught her, and for a moment, the world consisted of his daughter's arms around his neck and her face pressed hard against his shoulder and the wet sound of her trying not to cry and failing.

"Hey, Bug," he said quietly into her hair. "I'm awake. Everything's okay."

"You were sleeping for four days," she said, her voice muffled. "Four days, Papa."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry," Mark said placatingly.

"You said you'd be okay," Lyra sobbed.

"And I am. Look," he said while pulling her back just enough for her to see him properly. "Same face. Same everything. I promise I'm fine."

She stared at him, studying him with her red eyes. There was a smudge of something on her cheek, and Mark noticed that she was wearing the same green tunic she'd put on for their walk through the city three months ago, though it was starting to fit tight across the shoulders, which meant she'd grown a bit while he was under.

"You feel different," she said finally.

"Oh, yeah?" Mark asked with a soft smile.

"Not bad different," She said. "But your eyes feel a little different."

Mark almost laughed, because that was exactly right. Though his eyes hadn't changed, there was a renewed sharpness to them, as if he was more attentive. He pulled her back into a tight hug.

"I'm able to pay more attention now," he explained.

"You already were," Lyra said.

"Yeah, but I'm going to be better now," Mark said with a thin smile spreading across his lips.

She held on for a little while before gradually breaking away from him. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and looked up at him with an assessing gaze.

"Marcos said you might be different in your head," she said. "Like even smarter."

"It seems like the rascal wasn't wrong," Mark replied.

"How much smarter are you now?" Lyra asked

Mark considered how to answer that and looked at Lyra. For a fraction of a second, his mind ran through the shape of what he was, cataloged the changes, mapped the new configuration of his neural pathways against his memory of what they had been, and produced a feeling. The feeling of being able to hold multiple thoughts in his head at once without any of them fighting for space. The feeling of concepts being able to fully assemble themselves within his head.

"I think that now I'm smart enough," he said, "to keep up with you."

She narrowed her eyes at him and gave him an accusatory look with an adorable pout. "That's not an answer."

"Well, to me," Mark said as he lightly flicked her nose. "It's the only answer that matters."

She thought about that for a moment, then decided it was an acceptable response, and climbed onto the edge of the bed to sit. Mark sat beside her, and she leaned against his shoulder and let out a sigh.

"I missed you, Papa," Lyra said.

"I missed you too, honey," Mark replied.

About twenty minutes later, Dr. Corven arrived with Marcos following on the room's speakers and Kenjiro trailing a few steps behind her with a tablet under his arm. She stopped in the doorway, took one look at Mark sitting up in bed with Lyra tucked against his shoulder, and let out a breath.

"You look disgustingly good for a man who just woke up from a four-day coma," she said.

"You look disgustingly relieved for a woman who claims to be objective about her patients," Mark replied.

"That's Doctor Disgustingly Relieved to you," she said as she crossed to the bed and began to check the monitors with quick glances before dragging a chair over and sitting down. "How do you feel?"

"Clear," Mark said.

"Please, elaborate," Dr. Corven pleaded, and Mark did.

He talked through it carefully, explaining the eerie yet soothing quiet in his head, how he felt he could fundamentally understand things and even hold multiple lines of thought in parallel without any of them getting lost. He described it as being able to think without friction, and Dr. Corven listened without interrupting.

When he finished, she was quiet for a while.

"Hmm, that's not what the serum was supposed to do," she finally said.

"Yeah, it isn't," Mark agreed.

"Vita's projections had you at enhanced cognitive function, but nothing like what you're describing," Dr. Corven said.

"A step change," Kenjiro offered from his seat by the wall. "A different mode of operation that gives you a better way of thinking."

"Yeah," Mark said. "That sounds about right."

Dr. Corven looked at him carefully. "But why?"

"I think it's because of Anahrin," he said, and Dr. Corven waited for him to elaborate. "What I think happened in the pod is that the serum interacted with the changes Anahrin had already made in my body. Maybe his work laid a foundation, and the serum, which was more of a way to boost baseline humans, ended up meeting inside my body and pushed the result further than the model predicted."

"How much further?" Dr. Corven asked.

"Enough that no one else is going to have the same outcome I did," Mark said. "But there's no need to worry. I'm sure that the serum is going to work within the projections for the Peacekeepers and most likely the Elites as well, since, at the end of the day, they're still fully human."

Vita's voice came through the ceiling speaker. "Father, I would like to run a full genetic panel to confirm if the interaction you're describing is plausible on paper."

"You're welcome to run the panel," Mark said.

"I've already begun," Vita said.

Dr. Corven looked at Mark and held his gaze for a while, and Mark did not look away. She understood the implications of his secretive past and the bits he had been willing to share. She also understood that, although Mark was considered human in nature, and his DNA remained mostly human, he wasn't exactly the target for whom the serum had been created. She then nodded once and looked away from him.

Just then, Kenjiro, who had been sitting quietly through the entire exchange, pulled his tablet from under his arm and flipped it around. "I was hoping you'd let me try something?"

"That depends on what, Kenji," Mark said, turning to look Kenjiro in the eyes.

"This is something I've been working on for eleven days," Kenjiro said as he handed Mark the tablet. "There's a problem in it that I can't find. I mean, everything checks out, but something feels off, and I don't know what it could be."

"I think I'll need to take some time with it," Mark said. "Might be a while."

"Take however long you need," Kenjiro said. "I've got other work to do."

And Mark did just that. He settled back against the pillows and went through the schematic Kenjiro had handed him.

He was looking at the War-Frame's actuator cooling system, the capillary network Kenjiro had designed to keep the twelve high-torque joints from overheating during sustained combat. It had been Kenjiro's proudest contribution to the frame's design, and it had tested well in every static thermal model they'd run.

But if Kenjiro felt like there was something wrong with it, they couldn't just ignore it. After all, finding out what was wrong in the middle of a long battle was not ideal.

So he started where Kenjiro would have probably started, and that was the heat sources. He pulled up the actuator specifications and spent an hour mapping the thermal output of each of the twelve major joints under various load profiles while stroking the hair of a sleeping Lyra. Walking generated a specific heat signature, running generated more, and combat maneuvers such as sharp lateral cuts and sudden directional changes generated the most. As he went through the data, he built a mental model of each actuator's heat curve and held them all in his head simultaneously.

The capillary cooling system was designed to match those curves. Each actuator housing contained hundreds of micro-channels, and the synthetic coolant flowing through them absorbed heat from the housing walls and carried it away to the main thermal circuit, where Kenjiro's dual-purpose structural channels distributed it across the frame's skeleton for passive dissipation. At low load, the coolant circulated by convection alone, but at high load, micro-pumps embedded in each housing kicked in, increasing the flow rate to match the rising thermal demand.

Mark then checked the convection phase, which took another hour. The passive flow rates were well within the thermal budget at walking speed and at a slow run, so he moved to the active pumping phase.

While he was doing so, Dr. Corven ran a couple of routine tests on him and asked if he needed anything, which he declined, so she left him to it.

Kenjiro had taken one of the chairs and worked on another tablet in silence. Occasionally he'd get up and pace the room, or leave briefly, but he always came back, though neither of them spoke unless one of them needed something.

As Mark analyzed the active pumping phase, he realized how much more complex it was. When the micro-pumps engaged, they drew power from the frame's main reactor through a secondary bus, and pushed the coolant through the capillary network at a flow rate that scaled with the actuator's output. The harder the joint worked, the faster the coolant moved, running on a responsive system.

Mark spent two hours testing it, running the twelve actuators through Knox's combat profiles one at a time, checking the thermal response of each housing against its rated ceiling, and coming to the same result over and over again. Each one held. He ran pairs of actuators simultaneously, simulating the load of a frame that was pivoting and striking simultaneously. They held. He ran the full combat envelope with all twelve actuators at peak output, the frame sprinting, turning, and swinging its blades in a sustained engagement, and the numbers held there as well.

He finally concluded that the problem wasn't with the actuators individually. Nor was it in the capillary channels or the micro-pumps.

Mark sat with that for a while, staring at the schematic without really seeing it, letting his mind turn the problem over. If the system worked at every load profile he'd tested, why did Kenjiro feel like something was wrong?

While wondering about this, he had an epiphany and went back to the beginning and looked at it differently.

He started looking at the coolant itself rather than the flow rates or the pressures, at the thermal state of the coolant as it moved through the system. He decided, for some reason, to trace a single unit of coolant from the moment it entered an actuator housing to the moment it exited into the main thermal circuit. It entered cool, absorbed heat from the housing wall, and exited warm, flowing into the structural channels and shedding its heat into the frame's skeleton before returning to the actuator housing cool again.

But what happened when the coolant couldn't shed its heat fast enough?

Mark spent the next hour building that scenario in his head. In a temperate environment, the differential was large and the dissipation was fast. But in a hot environment, a desert, a fire zone, or hell, the interior of a volcanic region, the differential shrank, and the dissipation slowed.

And if the dissipation slowed enough, the coolant coming back from the structural channels would still be warm, and it would enter the actuator housings warm, and absorb less heat than it was supposed to, and exit even warmer, and the cycle would compound with each pass through the system shedding less heat than the last, causing the temperature to climb in a slow ratchet that wouldn't show up in any single-pass thermal model due to it only emerging over time.

When he realized this, Mark ran the numbers. In a temperate environment, the ratchet effect was negligible because the dissipation rate was fast enough to reset the coolant between passes, allowing the system to run indefinitely. But at an ambient temperature above one hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit (forty degrees Celsius), the ratchet began, and it only got worse from there, with the coolant temperature climbing past the actuator housings' rated thermal ceiling in approximately fourteen minutes of sustained combat.

After fourteen minutes, the micro-channels, which were woven into the structure of the housings with no seams or joints, which was their strength, would begin to deform as the housing material expanded beyond its design envelope. The channels would narrow, causing the flow rate to plummet and the heat to climb even faster. And within another six minutes, the actuator housing would reach a temperature where the synthetic coolant itself would begin to break down, losing its thermal conductivity and turning the capillary network from a cooling system into an insulator.

At that point, all twelve actuators would seize within seconds of each other, because they were all running on the same coolant circuit and the thermal ratchet would hit them all at once. That would cause the frame to lock up in the middle of whatever action it was performing, and the pilot would be sitting inside a twenty-minute time bomb that had just stopped moving.

Mark set the tablet down, looked at the still sleeping Lyra, and then at the clock on the wall. He had been working on it for a little over seven hours.

It took almost a minute for Kenjiro to remove his glasses and rub his eyes, and when he did so, he saw that Mark had stopped and set his work aside.

"You've got something?" Kenjiro asked.

"I've got something," Mark confirmed, "But it's not where you were looking."

Kenjiro leaned forward, and Mark walked him through it. Once he had finished, Kenjiro pulled the tablet back and started working through the numbers himself, checking Mark's scenario against the actuator housings' material properties and the synthetic coolant's thermal degradation curve. It took him a while, and when he finally looked up, his face had gone through several stages before settling on something between respect and a resigned kind of frustration.

"This took you seven hours," Kenjiro said slowly.

"To be fair, I had the benefit of coming to it fresh," Mark pointed out. "You've been living inside the design for weeks, so your eyes most likely just glazed over it."

"That's a generous way of framing it," Kenjiro sighed.

"It's an honest one. And I'll be honest with you the other way, too. I only found the ratchet because I ran out of things to check and started looking at the coolant's state over time instead of per pass. You would have found it if you'd had another week to sit with it."

"But you found it in seven hours," Kenjiro said.

"Yeah, quite the astute observation," Mark chuckled.

"That's the point I'm going to keep coming back to, Mark," Kenjiro spoke with a hint of frustration in his voice. "Fresh eyes or not, someone without a single degree in engineering, let alone such a specified field as thermal engineering, shouldn't have been able to identify this issue. Though I should be used to it by now."

Mark shrugged as he nodded.

Kenjiro sat back as a slow smile broke across his face. "And Mark, the fix is straightforward. We add a dedicated radiator array to the coolant circuit that can actively dump heat when passive dissipation falls behind. It'll add mass to the frame, but not much, and it means the system works in any environment."

"See?" Mark said. "You found the fix in thirty seconds. I just found the problem."

"Which is the hard part, and you know it," Kenjiro chuckled.

---

Dr. Corven had imposed a seventy-two-hour stay on Mark to keep him monitoring his new changes, a move Marcos backed as well, marking him as a traitor in Mark's books. After the seventy-two hours were over, Mark was able to walk out of the hospital wearing a comfortable plain white T-shirt, khaki cargo pants, and black boots, an outfit that was produced by the pendant.

He spent a few days with Lyra, enjoying fatherhood, before deciding it was time to put his mind to use and head to the labs.

Vita's medical research wing had grown since the serum's development, expanded by Mason into a well-lit complex adjacent to the hospital's main building. Mark had spent most of his hours, when he wasn't dedicating them to Lyra, thinking about what needed to happen next.

The answer to that was actually a question in of itself: Could the serum be made safe enough to give to someone who wasn't him?

His body had handled the original formula because of Anahrin's prior work. The "merger," which the System had described, had pushed the outcome far past Vita's projections. But the Peacekeepers didn't have that foundation, neither did the Elites, or anybody else for that matter. If they entered the pod with the same compound that had reshaped Mark's genome, the best-case outcome would be the 91% survival rate Vita had modeled. The worst case was worse than that, because nobody had tested the formula on a body that wasn't already carrying Strathari sequences.

Which, to Mark, meant that they needed a different serum. A serum built on what they'd learned from Mark's procedure, calibrated to a fully human baseline, and refined until the survival rate left no room for error.

Mark found Dr. Corven already reviewing tissue samples from the original trials when he entered the lab, and sat down across the table from her.

"I think we need to build a new formula," he said. "Based on my DNA."

Dr. Corven raised an eyebrow, took off her glasses, cleaned them, and put them back on.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because the original serum used synthesized Strathari sequences to trigger the evolutionary changes," Mark deadpanned. "It worked, sure, but the immune rejection risk was never fully eliminated. My DNA, right now, carries those same sequences, but integrated. For all intents and purposes, my body has already done the work of merging them with the human genome, and if we use my genetic material as the template instead of raw Strathari sequences, I believe that we could be giving the recipient's body something that's already been proven compatible with human biology."

"So, let me get this straight," Dr. Corven said. "You want to use yourself as the source."

"More like a bridge," Mark corrected. "In the same way that Anahrin used Strathari biology to change me, and we used Talos' biology to help develop the serum, I believe that we can use my biology to change everyone else's."

Dr. Corven churned over the idea for a while before finally breaking her silence. "Vita."

"Already modeling it, Doctor," Vita answered from the ceiling. "Father's proposal has theoretical merit. Using his genetic material as the catalyst base, rather than synthesized Strathari sequences, should significantly reduce the risk of immune rejection. However, I'll need time to confirm exactly how significant a reduction it'll be."

"How much time do you need?" Dr. Corven asked.

"Weeks for the initial modeling," Vita replied. "Months for the full simulation suite and tissue trials."

"Then I think we better get started," Mark said.

Over the course of five weeks, Mark had done something he had never bothered with before. Learning biology. He read every paper Dr. Corven had ever referenced, Vita's complete research archive on the Strathari genome, and texts on gene therapy, immunology, and pharmacokinetics that Marcos pulled from the database of information he had stolen- ahem, borrowed indefinitely.

Mark's new mind worked like a well-oiled machine, holding onto everything, connecting the dots between the facts. He was able to gain understanding on a lot of things, and though he couldn't perform surgery or synthesize a compound, he could now sit across from Dr. Corven and speak to her in her own language.

"The original four-layer structure is too aggressive for a baseline human," Dr. Corven said during one of their sessions. "A normal human body will be overwhelmed by the metabolic demand. We need to slow it down."

"Slower layers means a longer procedure," Vita noted. "Which means more time for complications to develop."

"So let's just reduce the amplitude," Mark suggested. "The original serum pushed each system to an evolutionary target. But what if we take my DNA as the source, extract the functional sequences that drove each enhancement, and dial them back?"

Vita ran the first simulation that afternoon, and, of course, it failed.

She ran ninety more over the next two weeks, and most of them also failed. The failures taught them lessons that narrowed the gap between what the formula was doing and what they needed it to do.

And almost three months since they began looking into this, they made a breakthrough. While Mark was reviewing a batch of failed simulations at two in the morning, he noticed a pattern in the metabolic cascade failures that Dr. Corven had been attributing to dosage issues.

The original serum used raw Strathari sequences that the human body treated as foreign, which is why the primer and the per-patient shell calibration were necessary in the first place. Mark's DNA-derived version eliminated the foreignness entirely because the sequences were already integrated into a human-compatible genome, allowing the body to recognize them and the immune system to let them through without resistance.

But that solved one problem and created another.

"The primer is now redundant," Vita reported during a review session six weeks in. "The immune rejection rate in simulation is effectively zero since the body now accepts the compound without resistance, which means the entire primer phase can be eliminated."

"That's good news," Dr. Corven said.

"Kind of," Vita agreed. "Removing the primer changes the procedure's internal timing. Since the original serum was designed around the assumption that the body would resist, the primer bought time for the first layer to establish itself before the immune response caught up. Now that there is no resistance, the neural layer initiates faster, substantially faster, and the downstream layers, which were timed to follow the neural layer at specific intervals, are now arriving into a body that's further along in its neural evolution than the original timing assumed."

"So the layers are out of sync," Mark said.

"Basically," Vita confirmed. "Just enough that the metabolic layer arrives and finds a neural system that's already seventy percent evolved instead of forty percent, and the metabolic response calibrates itself to that more advanced state, which pushes it harder than it needs to go. The structural layer arrives and finds a metabolism running hotter than expected, accelerating bone and muscle changes beyond the intended targets. Each layer compounds the overshoot of the one before it."

"So the changes are too aggressive," Dr. Corven said. "Without the body fighting the serum, the serum, having been designed for a body that fights it, overcorrects."

"Yes," Vita confirmed.

That reframing changed everything about how they approached the redesign since the solution now was a ground-up recalibration of every layer's intensity and timing, designed for a body that would accept the compound willingly rather than one that had to be coerced. Mark spent the next three weeks working through it with Vita and Dr. Corven, along with the other relevant medical staff, directing the AIs to run simulations testing different amplitude curves for each layer, different dissolution rates for the delivery shells, different interaction profiles between layers that were no longer buffered by the hours-long primer phase.

The per-patient calibration they'd established during the original serum's development still applied, because individual metabolic rates and blood chemistry varied from person to person and continued to affect shell dissolution timing. But now it operated according to a formula rebuilt from the ground up to match the reduced resistance profile. Many of the previous procedures would remain, but the compound inside the shells would be fundamentally gentler and more precisely calibrated, designed to guide the body toward evolution rather than force it through.

Two and a half months in, and the survival rate across Vita's simulation suite had climbed to ninety-nine point four percent, leaving the remaining failures traceable to a single variable: individual neuroinflammatory sensitivity. The same genetic markers that had excluded two of the original fourteen Peacekeeper volunteers.

There was also another part of the serum that hadn't changed, and that was the pain. The serum, even in its recalibrated form, was still guiding a human body through an accelerated evolutionary process, causing bones to become denser, muscles to restructure themselves, and neural pathways to rewrite themselves.

The body was being reshaped from the inside, and no amount of calibration could make that painless, which meant they had to do medically induced comas from the moment the serum entered the bloodstream until stabilization was complete. But even under anesthesia, the body's stress response would be significant, and anyone who underwent the procedure would feel the aftermath when they woke.

By the third month, the formula was locked, and tissue trials on samples from every cleared volunteer had confirmed the simulation's projections within acceptable margins. The pod's real-time monitoring system had been updated to handle the new compound's recalibrated timing. The per-patient blood panel protocol remained in place. The anesthesia protocol had been tested and approved.

Severus had been the first to volunteer, since Mark hadn't allowed him to be first before.

He was stripped down to medical shorts and lay on the pod's cradle where Dr. Corven administered the anesthesia personally. Severus counted backward from ten, made it to seven, and was gone.

The pod sealed, and the serum entered his bloodstream as the monitoring systems tracked every cellular change in real time, and Vita called out the milestones as they passed.

Twenty-eight hours later, the pod opened, and Severus was transported to a bed, where he slept for another ten hours before finally waking up. He blinked multiple times, flexed his hands, and sat up, and was immediately greeted by an enthusiastic Dr. Corven, who shone a penlight into his eyes to check his pupils, reflexes, and cognitive response.

"So, how do you feel?" Mark asked.

Severus looked at his own hands for a long time.

"Heavy, my lord," he said. "I feel like I've been wearing weights my whole life and now they're gone."

"That's the bone density," Dr. Corven said. "You're twenty percent denser than you were two days ago. Your body's recalibrated to handle the mass, but you'll notice it for a few days."

Severus nodded slowly, absorbing the explanation before looking at Mark.

"When can I move?" he asked.

"Two weeks of monitored recovery," Dr. Corven said. "Then we test."

"Two we- what?!" Severus asked, shocked and offended.

"You think I'll let anything happen to my best assistant?" Dr. Corven asked. "Not if I have a say in it.

The other Elites followed on a rotating schedule. Their bodies, already pushed past baseline by whatever process had created them, responded to the DNA-derived compound with an eagerness that the Peacekeepers' bodies hadn't shown. The changes went deeper, and the enhancements stacked up.

Both the Peacekeepers and the Elites all reported a sensation similar to Severus's.

Kenjiro also decided he would participate in what he had called "humanity's glorious evolution." He came out with a sharper mind than before, turning an already genius-level thermal dynamics engineer into a force to be reckoned with.

Following Kenjiro was Dr. Corven, who came out looking much younger, as if she were in her twenties, all wrinkles and signs of age gone with the wind. 

"How do you feel?" Mark asked when she was cleared to speak.

She took off her glasses, looked at them, and set them on the table beside the pod.

"I don't need these anymore," she said quietly and with a bit of shock at the sound of her own voice.

---

The proving grounds were a two-kilometer stretch on the Military base, built for testing heavy vehicles and now repurposed for something no vehicle had ever done.

A group of ten Peacekeepers stood at the starting line, all of them two weeks past their recovery clearance and looking at the open track with barely-contained energy.

The Elites stood in a separate group, off to the side, watching the trials of the Peacekeepers.

Mark stood at the observation platform with Dr. Corven, Kenjiro, Octavia, and Marcos' projected avatar. He was also accompanied by Lyra, who was sitting on the railing with her legs dangling after begging Mark to let her tag along. Mark had initially declined her request since she had school, but she gave him puppy-dog eyes, and he couldn't look away in time, so he ended up caving in.

"Peacekeepers first," Mark said. "Run at full sprint. Let's see what we've got."

A female Peacekeeper took her first few steps normally, but by the fourth stride, the difference announced itself as her legs pushed off, launching her forward at a speed that made the air crack around her shoulders. By the sixth stride, she had become a blur, her feet hitting the ground for a split second before lifting off again.

She crossed the two-kilometer course in one hundred and nineteen seconds and a top speed of sixty point four miles an hour.

She stopped at the far end, turned, and jogged back at a pace that would have been a dead sprint for Olympic athletes of Mark's first life. Mark noticed that they weren't breathing hard and their skin wasn't flushed, as if they had just taken a stroll on a nice sunny day.

"What are their vitals looking like?" the rejuvenated Dr. Corven asked.

"Heart rate elevated to one hundred and twelve beats per minute," Vita reported. "They're still returning to resting baseline. Muscle lactate levels are negligible, and I detect no micro-fractures in any bone, meaning their skeletal structure held without measurable strain."

"No strain," Dr. Corven repeated. "At sixty miles per hour."

The other nine Peacekeepers ran next, one at a time, and each one hitting the same range of fifty-eight to sixty-two miles per hour, sustained over two kilometers, with recovery times under ninety seconds and zero physiological distress.

Then the Elites stepped up.

"Let's see what you've got," Mark said.

Titus went first. The hunk of a man had a savage acceleration, and he crossed the two-kilometer course in seventy-four seconds with a speed of about ninety miles per hour.

When he came back, he was grinning, which was something Titus almost never did, and his eyes carried a startled delight. He wasn't breathing hard either, but there was a faint shimmer of heat coming off his skin as his elevated metabolism shed the thermal load of the sprint through his pores in a way that made him look like he was steaming in the cool morning air.

"Well," Marcos said from the observation platform's speakers, "I suppose we should update the speed limits."

Aurelia went next and matched Titus's time. Then the other Elites went, each one hitting a range of eighty-eight to ninety-one miles per hour, with the same negligible recovery and the same absence of physiological distress. Seven Elites, running at highway speeds across open ground, and none of them even winded.

Lyra, still sitting on the railing, turned to Mark.

"Papa," she said, "can I get the serum too?"

Mark looked at her and smiled. "When you're old enough, and when you want it."

"I want it now," Lyra demanded while giving him puppy-dog eyes.

Mark forced himself to look away as he scratched the back of his head. "I know you do, Bug, but like I said, when you're older."

Lyra begrudgingly accepted her father's unacceptable answer and went back to watching the Elites cool down.

"Vita, now that you have life data, what do you project for their lifespans?" Dr. Corven asked.

"For the Peacekeepers, I am projecting a minimum of three hundred years based on the cellular repair rates I'm observing," Vita said. "The actual ceiling may be considerably higher, but I won't have confidence in a tighter range until we've observed cellular aging patterns over the next several years. As for the Elites, the projection is higher still. Their prior enhancements created a biological foundation that the serum built upon, and the compounding effect has pushed their cellular repair function to a level I cannot currently model an upper bound for."

"So, you don't know how long they'll live," Dr. Corven said.

"The data suggests they will live for a very, very long time," Vita said. "And I am comfortable leaving it at that until the data says otherwise."

Dr. Corven watched the Elites on the proving ground. Seven men and women who had already given up their baseline humanity once and now given it up a second time, running at speeds that would have been absurd in a novel, happening in front of her on a Tuesday morning on an alien world.

"Mark," she said quietly.

"Yes, ma'am?" Mark asked.

"I believe you've just created the most formidable military ground troops in the known galaxy," Dr. Corven said. "You understand that, right?"

"Yes, ma'am," Mark nodded

"And you're comfortable with that?" Dr. Corven asked.

Mark watched his people on the field and nodded. "Yes, ma'am."

---

While the augmentation program ran its course, the colony kept building.

Projects that had been queued for months began moving. Mason's continued future residential expansion, which had been waiting on a finalized infrastructure plan, received it that afternoon and broke ground the next morning.

Sterling's trade protocols, which had been in draft for some time, were finalized and implemented within a week.

Ceres's agricultural expansion into the southern lowlands, which had been held up by an irrigation design that nobody could agree on, received a solution from Mark that incorporated elements from three competing proposals and satisfied everyone, allowing the expansion to begin within days.

And then, ten kilometers south, was the biggest project of the all. Six kilometers past the river was a flat grassland. It was open and far enough from the city that noise and heat wouldn't be a concern. And since things within the city were advancing just fine, it was about time they continued developing outside of it.

"A launch and landing pad," Mason said when Mark presented the plan to the council of AI's. "It'll be a reinforced S-Alloy platform, roughly six hundred meters across, rated for vertical takeoff and landing of vessels up to frigate tonnage. Fuel processing, ground control, crew staging, the works."

"What about defenses?" Knox asked immediately.

"There will be defenses," Mark stated. "I'm thinking automated laser turret emplacements around the perimeter with overlapping fields of fire. We can expand the defense grid as well as you guys' reach. Nothing would be able to land or take off from that pad without Knox seeing it first."

"How many turrets?" Knox asked.

"Twelve, maybe more," Mark said. "Three on each cardinal point, staggered for overlapping coverage and being independently powered and independently targeted, with manual override capability from the ground control center."

"That's a significant autonomous weapons deployment," Marcos observed.

"Well, you and I both know how much of a significant asset to protect that pad will be," Mark said. "That pad is going to be our door to orbit, and in the future, if someone comes through the atmosphere with hostile intent, I want the door to shoot back."

"Then we also need planetary defenses," Knox added.

"Eventually, yes," Mark agreed. "But let's get back to space first. We would have to build a station that would be in a geosynced orbit with the pad, and then from there on we will develop a system-wide defense system and planetary defenses."

"I find these terms acceptable, for the time being," Knox stated.

And four weeks after the augmentations ended, the pad's construction began. With more materials on hand and more nanoprinters, Mason had the foundation laid within ten days.  Massive S-Alloy platforms were printed in sections and welded together by crews of augmented Peacekeepers working twelve-hour shifts.

Kenjiro designed the thermal management system for the pad's surface to prevent a vessel landing on thrust from superheating the platform by creating an underground heat-sink network, a grid of coolant channels buried beneath the platform that absorbed the landing heat and dissipated it slowly into the bedrock over the following hours.

The turrets went a week after the foundations had been laid, a total of sixteen of them, because "there is no such thing as too many defenses," according to Knox. They were squat and angular, each on a compact S-Alloy housing containing a focused-energy emitter powered by what would be the platform's power reactor, though Mark wanted to eventually create some sort of long-lasting batteries for the lasers so they could truly be independent. 

And finally, there was a maglev line as the final piece.

It ran from the city's southern gate to the pad's main entrance, a ten-kilometer rail of magnetic track laid across the grassland in a straight line. The crews under Mason's management built it in six days once the rail segments were printed and foundations were laid. The cars were simple, capable of carrying forty passengers or an equivalent mass in cargo, and they covered the ten-kilometer distance in just over two minutes at cruising speed.

The first test run carried Mark, Lyra, and Kenjiro from the city to the pad and back on a bright morning five months after Mark's awakening. The car hummed on its magnetic cushion as the grassland blurred past the windows, and Lyra pressed her face against the glass and watched the landscape streak by.

"It's fast," she said.

"Fastest thing on the ground that isn't Aurelia or me," Mark said.

"Can Aunty Aurelia race the train?" Lyra asked.

"Probably," Mark said after a moment of false deliberation. "But don't tell her that, or she'll try."

When they arrived, the pad was a sight that stopped Mark in his tracks. The massive platform gleamed under the suns. Six hundred meters of polished S-Alloy stretching in every direction, with the twelve turret emplacements dotting its perimeter and the ground control center rising from the northern edge. The fuel processing facility behind the control center, and beyond it, the crew staging buildings stood ready.

It was all empty, since they had no functioning vessel to launch yet, but it was all ready, and that was the point of it. The colony now had built itself a door to the void.

Mark stood at the center of the pad with the wind coming across the grassland and the turrets tracking slowly overhead, and he looked up at the sky, at the pale blue dotted with the faint points of stars that were always visible during the day on this world.

"We'll soon return to travel amongst the stars," Mark stated with confidence.