My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 737: Meeting Friends

Liam vanished from the spot and reappeared inside the office, and before he had fully registered the room, two figures were already on him.

Lucy and Yanxia collided into him at once, their arms wrapping around him tight, their faces bright with a joy that had been waiting months to be spent.

"Master, welcome back," Lucy said, her smile warm against his shoulder.

"Welcome, Papa. I missed you a lot," Yanxia mumbled, burrowing her head into his chest as though she meant to fold herself into him entirely.

Liam laughed softly and drew them both in, one hand rising to smooth over Yanxia’s hair and the other resting at Lucy’s back.

"I’m happy to see you both too," he said gently. "I missed you a lot more."

The girls only nodded and held him tighter, unwilling to let go just yet, and for a moment Liam let them, standing in the quiet of the lunar office with the two people who mattered most pressed against him. There was a particular kind of relief in it, coming back home to warm embraces after spending gruelling months doing his best to temporarily save a dying universe.

When at last they loosened their hold enough to breathe, he asked how they had been faring.

Yanxia answered first, and she answered at length, launching into a stream of grievances that had clearly been accumulating for months. It had been boring, she declared. Achingly, unbearably boring.

There had been nothing fun for her to do the entire time he was gone, and worse — far worse — every single time she found something fun to do, Lucy swooped in and took the opportunity away from her before she could enjoy it. It was, in her considered opinion, a great injustice, and she wanted him to know exactly how much she had suffered in his absence.

Liam chuckled at the theatrical misery of it, then turned to Lucy, one eyebrow raised.

Lucy only smiled, unbothered by the accusation. "I’m fine," she said. "I’ve been waiting for you."

"And keeping this one out of trouble, it seems," Liam added, glancing down at Yanxia, who made a small indignant sound.

"Someone had to," Lucy replied evenly.

Liam’s expression settled into something more serious as he studied her. "Did anything come up while I was gone? Anything that needed handling?"

Lucy nodded, and her tone shifted, cooler and more precise "A slight incident, yes. It involved the youngest of the clinical trial volunteers. After she returned home, that organization — Meridian Continuum — abducted her, with the intent of extracting and replicating the medical nanites from her body." She let the words sit for only a moment before continuing. "I handled it. The child was recovered before any harm came to her, and those responsible were dealt with in full. Everything is back on track. There were no lasting complications."

Liam’s jaw tightened briefly at the mention of the abduction — a child, taken to be cut open for what was inside her — but the tension eased just as quickly, because Lucy had said I handled it, and he knew exactly what that meant. Whatever had happened to Meridian Continuum, it was finished.

"I can see the progress you’ve made," he said instead, and there was genuine warmth in it now, and pride. He looked, really looked, at all of it — not just the resolved crisis, but the sweep of everything Lucy had accomplished while he sat frozen above the Earth with his mind trillions of galaxies away. "You’ve done incredibly well, Lucy. All of it. I’m very proud of you."

Lucy’s composed expression softened, just slightly, the faintest flush of pleasure crossing her face. "Thank you, Master."

"And Daniel? Whitlock?"

"Both doing well," Lucy said. "Daniel has the finances running smoothly, and Whitlock remains our anchor at JP Morgan — though he’s fielding a great deal of pressure from parties who want a way into Nova. He’s holding the line. And your friends," she added, a knowing lilt entering her voice, "are all doing wonderfully. They’re currently taking a trip around the solar system."

"Good," Liam said, nodding slowly. "That’s good."

Then something drew his attention, and he turned his head toward the far distance, his gaze extending out past the moon, past the vast dark, all the way to the great banded giant that ruled the outer system.

There, against the cratered grey face of one of the Galilean moons — Callisto, the outermost of the four — a space shuttle was descending, settling toward the ancient surface.

His spiritual sense reached out across the impossible distance and slid effortlessly through the shuttle’s hull, and there they were. His friends, every one of them, grinning and laughing as they pulled on their high-protection vac suits, and then, over those, activated the sleek advanced exosuits he had given them. They looked like children on the morning of a long-awaited holiday, and the sight of it warmed something in his chest.

He turned back to Lucy, an easy smile forming.

"It looks like I’ll be taking a few weeks off before I get back to work," he said. "A vacation."

Lucy nodded without hesitation. "You need one," she said. "Genuinely. You’ve earned it more than anyone alive."

Liam turned to Yanxia and she immediately jerked her face away from him, her small chin lifting in exaggerated offense. "Papa is leaving me again," she declared to the room at large. "Gone for mmonths, and now he’s leaving immediately."

Liam chuckled and reached out to ruffle her hair. "You know you can come with me," he said. "You’ve always been able to come with me."

She hmphed and turned her head the other way, the very picture of wounded dignity — but even as she did, her arms tightened around him, refusing to let go, betraying the whole performance.

Liam smiled, ruffled her hair once more, then reached over and did the same to Lucy’s, earning a small amused huff from her too. Then, with Yanxia still clinging to him like a limpet who had no intention of being pried loose, he vanished from the office.

The next instant, he stood on the surface of Callisto.

He appeared directly beneath Matt’s shuttle, the ancient cratered ground stretching away beneath his feet, the immense bulk of Jupiter hanging in the black sky overhead like a painted god.

Above him, the shuttle’s boarding platform was descending, and on it stood his friends, still laughing, still chattering, entirely unaware of the figure that had just materialized below them.

His smile widened as their voices reached him.

"It’s really unfair," he called up, "that you’re all having fun without me."

The reaction was immediate. Every one of them froze mid-laugh, the chatter cutting off all at once. Heads turned, gazes dropped — and then their eyes went wide with shock as they found Liam standing calmly on the surface beneath them, Yanxia hanging off him and paying no attention whatsoever to anything happening around her.

Matt didn’t wait for the platform. He vaulted straight off the edge of it, though it was still a good distance from the ground, and dropped through Callisto’s low gravity to land lightly in front of Liam.

"Liam? How?" Matt stared at him, then looked from Liam’s face to the small girl fused to his side, who spared him not so much as a glance.

"I just finished what I was doing," Liam said, then let his expression crumple into exaggerated heartbreak. "And it broke my heart to come back and find you all went on a trip without me. Having fun. Living it up around the solar system while I saved the—" he caught himself, smoothly, "—while I was busy. I feel so betrayed." He sniffed, playfully wiping at a nonexistent tear.

Matt grinned and stepped forward to pull him into a hug — but a slow, deathly glare from Yanxia, who had finally deigned to notice the world around her, made him reconsider the entire endeavor. He wisely kept his distance from the clinging little tyrant.

"It’s really nice to see you, man," Matt said instead, his grin softening into something more sincere. "We missed you. You know we’d have dragged you along if we could have — kicking and screaming if that’s what it took. But you were doing something important. Something that mattered. We weren’t about to get in the way of that."

"It’s okay, buddy," Liam said, dropping the act, his voice warm. "I was only teasing." His eyes flicked over Matt, and then to the sleek vessel looming above them, and his smile turned knowing. "I see you finally got your gift. How do you like it?"

"Like it?" Matt laughed as though the question were the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. "I don’t like it. I love it. Liam, this thing is the greatest gift anyone has ever given anyone in the history of gifts."

"Wonderful, then," Liam said, thoroughly pleased. He turned toward the rest of the group, who had come down off the platform and were making their way over the cratered ground toward him. "So — what are you all doing out here?"

"Welcome back, brother," Kristopher called out, reaching him first with a broad grin. "It’s good to see you again."

The rest of the group closed in around him, and one after another they greeted him — Harper, Alex, Kristy, Stacy, all of them talking over each other, all of them glad — and Liam returned every greeting, standing there on the surface of a moon at the edge of the solar system, Jupiter turning overhead, his daughter clinging to his side and his oldest friends gathered around him, and thought, with certainty, that he had come home to exactly the right place.