Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  Separated Starlight

  Merry Ravenell

  9 Swords

  Contents

  All Alone, Together

  Bad Ideas Made Worse

  Scurvy

  Deck 4 Dealings

  Inconvenient Dead Bodies

  Underfoot

  Lights Falling

  Cages Are For Rattling

  Useful or Used

  Scraping By

  An Officer & A Lady-Wolf

  Omission

  Outsider On The Inside

  Expected Outcomes

  Play Proper

  Turnabout

  Beware Small Details

  1 * -1 = -1

  22 Gauge

  Cerebus

  Prey, Predator, Mirrors

  Upstream

  Memory Leak

  My Future, Torn Asunder

  Where Blame Lies

  No Victory

  A Different Kind of Rabbit

  Not Together, Never Apart

  Second Place Dies First

  Buckle Up, Strap Down, Hold On

  Invited Invasion

  Rusting Secrets

  Is Anyone Awake?

  Let Them Sleep

  Us vs Them

  Lead Your Dominoes

  The Fifth Law

  Fake Hero

  1.2 * 10^4

  -1 * -1 = 1

  Erosion

  A Quiet Death

  GTFO

  We Missed You (Sort Of)

  Turnabout

  Stripes Make Right

  Condition Black

  Twenty Percent

  Book 3: Between Dark Places

  About the Author

  Also By Merry Ravenell

  Separated Starlight

  Copyright ©2020 Merry Ravenell

  All rights reserved.

  Separated Starlight is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Covers By Juan

  All Alone, Together

  Operations manuals and scenarios were like painfully dry toast.

  Lachesis once again tried to read the proper protocols for evacuating a recreation area below Deck 50 due to a sanitization gas leak in the secondary ventilation system, which was a distinctly different protocol than the primary, or any other sort of leak, or what was used for other clusters of Decks.

  She knew how to evacuate and lockdown the parts of Crèche, from securing the various types of Biomes to the shielding of frozen genetic material by order of priority, shuffling expectant mothers and infants to special areas if necessary, and so forth. NightPiercer’s instructions on how to secure Crèche during various emergencies were different from Ark’s, but at least familiar and not so seemingly neurotic.

  Life Support system malfunctions? Move the people from that area to another area, seal bulkheads and corridors, let the appropriate teams do their thing. Why did it have to be so nitpicky? Just get the people out of the damn area of concern, sort it out later.

  There had to be a better way to go about this. She searched through the NightPiercer archives once again, trying to find some kind of training guides for the exam. She was exhausted, felt like shit, couldn’t stop shivering, and despite hours spent searching through manuals, documentation, and guides, she couldn’t find anything that looked like So You Want To Be In Operations.

  “Petey,” she said. Time to admit defeat.

  “Yeah?” her new bunkmate-that-was-in-Operations responded, looking up from his own work. He had the top bunk on the other side of the room, and they were at eye-level. He was a junior lieutenant, average height, average-everything human, and in his early thirties.

  Aside from the fact her new bunkmates preferred to pretend she wasn’t there, they weren’t flat-out rude or hateful.

  There was Marie, who was in Crèche: Biomes (mostly fruit trees and bushes), Jevon, who was in Medical as a lab tech and bio-cultivator, and Petey, who was in Operations. They were all mid-level staff with enough seniority and privilege to be in a four-bunk, although about ten years her senior overall. Too mature and decent to be outright rude, but not exactly thrilled to be warehousing her.

  “Is there some kind of Operations Entry Exam training guide?” She’d been avoiding pestering any of them about the exam because she didn’t want to draw attention to the fact she’d been invited to take it at all.

  She was née Ark, Rainer’s estranged spouse, and all kinds of socially radioactive.

  “Nope,” Petey said.

  She cocked her head to the side. “No textbook or distilled manual to springboard?”

  He shook his head.

  “So do you mind if I ask how you studied? Just chewing on all the documentation?”

  He shook his head again. “No, teams get formed and everyone divvies up the work and writes reports, and you study en masse.”

  “It’s to promote teamwork,” Marie said. She stuck out her tongue. “I took the exam. I flunked.”

  “Oh, so it’s a team exercise.” Lachesis tried to hide her dismay.

  “Then Tech tracks down all the files and deletes them, so there’s no historical record for future crops to fall back on,” Petey added.

  The annual Operations exam was in six weeks, but the invitations had been handed out six months earlier. There was no way for her to secure a list of all the invitees to the exam, much less introductions. First Officer Bennett would get a laugh out of it if she tried to creep up to one of the study-crews and beg for a place at the table.

  She’d accused Rainer of pulling strings to get her this opportunity, but it seemed impossible she’d do anything other than fail spectacularly. How did her flunking a test square in Bennett’s line-of-sight do Rainer any favors? It didn’t. It just made her look like a dumb feral cull, and Bennett was the one who got to brand her. Rainer’s game was either more terrifying than previously thought, or Rainer wasn’t the one playing games.

  Marie punched the underside of Petey’s bed. “Hey, ready to go? It’s getting late.”

  “Yep, yep.” Petey slid his tablets into a single stack and swung his legs over the side of his bed. “See you later, Lake.”

  “Bye.” She acknowledged them with a nod and wave. They were headed off to the mess to catch the end of the dinner shift.

  Ever since she’d moved out of her parents’ quarters, she’d eaten with her bunkmates. She hadn’t always gotten along with her bunkmates and traded bunks a few times until she’d fallen in with the right group, but she’d always had someone to eat with.

  Tsu had told her she wouldn’t be alone, but he must have forgotten that a four-bunk with people you liked was a privilege not everyone earned. She clearly had not earned it.

  And she was married and had been chosen from the Pool. Her bunkmates were in their thirties, with clocks ticking on marriage and parent prospects. She’d walked away from her marriage. Nobody did that.

  NightPiercer didn’t know the truth about her purchase price. As far as the rumor mill knew, she’d cost a hive of bees. She was insanely valuable. And she was a little princess, wasn’t she, rejecting her marriage.

  The Operations Entry study protocol was intended for a group of people pooling resources over multiple months. She didn’t have a crew, and she didn’t have mon
ths. She had one brain and six weeks.

  “It’s a puzzle, and you’re overthinking it.” She arrayed her tablets on her bed.

  It was a test intended for just-graduated kids. That meant broad strokes and basics. Emergency protocols for very specific decks and circumstances? There might be one question. It wouldn’t be a lot of technical knowledge of obscure procedures. It’d be day-to-day Operations, generalities, basic why is running important and who do you report suspected Exodus Syndrome to.

  A ship was, really, a big puzzle. Tons of moving parts all keeping everything in balance.

  She had no idea how anything worked on this ship. So who would she report suspected Exodus Syndrome to? What would she do if an enhanced gravity track wasn’t working? If she smelled sewage? Spotted a leak? A door didn’t open? How would she get a second towel? How did she earn recreation credits? How did she cash them in?

  It wasn’t the best plan she’d had. If Operations was that easy to get into, anyone who had ever lived on NightPiercer could pass the test.

  “But maybe I’ll get at least a few questions right.” She sighed. “And maybe I’ll find out where to get another towel…”

  Bad Ideas Made Worse

  Her scent clung to everything. She’d been here.

  Rainer checked each room and closet. Nothing was out of place.

  He walked into the bathroom and brushed his hand along the paneled glass door to the shower. Cold and bone-dry. Soap untouched.

  Access logs said she’d been in his sandbox, doing the Telemetry work she’d agreed to.

  No pings. No messages.

  She’d reported to the mess hall for breakfast the past two mornings, but no other meals.

  “What are you doing, Lachesis?” he said, pacing as he scrolled through access logs trying to figure out her path for the day. She’d come here, left, and there’d been a long gap—about two hours—between leaving here and arriving back in her bunk, with no other activity. Where had she been? What had she been doing?

  He undressed and shifted into wolf form, and prowled around the quarters again, tracing her steps and everything she’d touched, straining his senses to determine the pattern and how long she’d been in any given spot. Her scent came clear and cruel to him.

  Hunger. So much hunger.

  Sickness. Much sickness.

  The metallic, sour scent the medications gave her.

  He traced her scent into the kitchen. It led to the cabinets, and finally the container of algae flour.

  So she’d had something to eat. Then she’d sat in the chair. The intensity of her scent said she’d been there a while. She had not moved except to leave.

  He hopped onto the bed and curled up in the center of the blankets, tail curled around himself and snout on his forepaws while he glared at the door and his lupine brain sorted through the scents for every possible clue. But everything came back to the same thing: his mate was hungry and unwell. She had returned to the den to find food, but taken pains to hide evidence of her presence.

  He burrowed deeper into the blankets. Where had she been in those gaps? Who had she spoken to? What had she been doing? It was possible she had been with a group of people and had simply not opened any doors, but she definitely had not been at the mess hall eating, or in the wardroom, or anywhere there had been food.

  If she was unhappy outside her den, why not return to it? He would leave. It was her den.

  He slicked his ears down. The not-voice howled at him. This was not right, and his mate needed him.

  Except his mate had rejected him and left the safety of the den. Even if she returned to do work. Of course, if she had been here working during the day she would need food, and she had only taken a small portion of algae flour. So little that if he hadn’t smelled her hand on the container, he would not have noticed.

  I am not used to being so blind.

  He’d told his trusted crew in Engineering to avoid Lachesis. If she thought he was using his crew to monitor her, she’d be even angrier with him, and it’d drive her farther away.

  How do I fix this?

  He was not in the mood for bridge duty. He was never in the mood for bridge duty, but he was especially not in the mood now. Sitting on his ass in the big chair listening to everyone moving around him, dealing with the constant stream of reports from various sections, watching the flow of data on the massive screen at the far edge of the bridge was never how he liked to spend his time.

  Most of his job as Lead Engineer was, in fact, sitting in front of a screen dealing with reports, duty rosters, trouble tickets, complaints, and supervising everyone under him. Officer-In-Command was the scaled-up version of that, except he couldn’t make policy or do anything. Officer-In-Command made sure everything remained stable until the Captain returned to duty.

  But the good side of it was the excellent view of all sections. Even Bennett’s precious locked box of Operations.

  He tapped the controls on the arm of the chair, scrolling through Telemetry data from the past week while cursing the lack of a functional, up-to-date navigation system. Trusting fifty-year-old navigation protocols unnerved him, especially when combined with NightPiercer’s upgraded engines. The ship’s flight characteristics had changed dramatically, and while it wasn’t a problem for low-speed maneuvers, when it came time for the ship to go somewhere, the flight computer may kill them all.

  And all their cartography of the Jovian system was out of date. Jupiter had had a marked increase in magnetic and radioactive activity. It seemed to go in cycles of getting close to starting fusion before it gave up and relaxed into being more planet than failed dwarf. Even the gravity eddies and space around it shifted during those times. When NightPiercer’s systems had been programmed, these local phenomena had not been well understood or even discovered.

  Add into that the Sun had also been active lately—perhaps not a coincidence. NightPiercer and LightBearer were positioned worse than Ark for the solar abuse. Ark had decided it’d rather take more abuse from Jupiter.

  Those tiles on the starboard forward hull were baked by the Sun, with Jupiter tugging at the tiles on the other side. There had to be a better position for the ship. Fabrication couldn’t keep up with the demand for new tiles at the rate they’d been burning through them the past fourteen months, and if this solar cycle of flare activity continued, he’d have to evacuate some portions of the ship.

  But if he could officially have his wife on the job, she’d be able to calculate the best, most optimal position for NightPiercer and maybe even a position to let him carry out more extensive repairs on the exterior. But instead he had her chewing through Telemetry data, trying to clear up noise and distortion.

  If she is able to do that, though, it doesn’t matter. We’ll know if we can go home or go somewhere else.

  If she doesn’t starve to death first.

  “Commander,” a voice said.

  Rainer slid his eyes to the side. He’d been glaring at the screen and possibly growling under his breath. Time to be professional and as accommodating as he could manage, even if he hadn’t slept since Lachesis had left, and more than half his brain seemed determined to howl about how she was in danger and he had to find her now.

  He’d delved into the old documentation and archives on mates. The old records and chronicles of his species, back from when they knew what the hell they were doing. Every source agreed: a mate was a gift from Gaia. A male with a mate was one of Her favored sons. There had always been more males than females—a population imbalance that Crèche had tried and failed to forcibly correct. And because a mate was a gift not every male could receive, there was no greater disgrace than a male forcing his mate to abandon him.

  He’d assumed Gaia’s bond would overcome everything between them. Further research had proven this was the single most stupid assumption any mated wolf could make. Everything warned that the bond between souls was a burden, not a panacea, and that any chance of a healthy relationship required moving slowly in t
he beginning. Bonds easily turned toxic and dysfunctional, binding the pair in misery they couldn’t escape or heal. The bond was a power that the pair had to learn to control and manage.

  None of his ancestors had written down how to do things properly. The records warned of what not to do, and advised senior mated wolves to intervene. But the records didn’t contain any knowledge of what that intervention or advice looked like. That knowledge was lost.

  Even the humans, who had adapted an entirely different set of courtship skills, had lost those skills. They weren’t needed or wanted on the ships. Friendships were encouraged. Relationships were culled.

  He’d managed to court her back from her initial distrust and hatred, but Tsu’s poorly timed offer had undone almost all of it. He clung to her by the shreds of their bond and her desire to go back to Earth. She objected to his methods, but the prospect intrigued her enough she circled in the shadows around him, still ultimately undecided.

  He’d have to be patient. She needed to come to him, but somehow, he also needed to show her she’d never left his thoughts.

  “Commander.”

  He rolled his eyes towards the lieutenant.

  The lieutenant said, “Kitchen says the jerky for dinner has gone moldy. They want to know if they can pull more from reserves. They need to know within the hour.”