Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  Food went bad. Such was the nature of food. Jerky, however, should have been dry enough to not mold. He rested his chin on his fist as he read the ticket, complete with Kitchen’s replacement dinner plan with nutritional content. No accompanying tickets to investigate the cause of the bad jerky.

  Normally this would go to Bennett, but Bennett was offline, and Kitchen needed this now. Coordinating food between Crèche’s production of it and Kitchen’s dispersing of it was entirely Operations. Engineering only got involved when a freezer unit broke. Kitchen, however, had done him the favor of having a plan in place, so he just pressed his thumb to the screen to authorize the request. “Done. Now, find out why a hundred and twenty-five kilos of jerky turned moldy. Investigate the entire batch.”

  “Sir,” she said, nodding, but hiding a grimace.

  “Would you prefer me to pass it to Engineering?” he inquired, leaning towards her very, very slightly in the manner wolves had adopted so a human knew when they had picked up on their scent. Half the time he didn’t even bother reminding humans he could smell them, and half his species no longer had their sharp sense of smell anyway.

  She stiffened. “No, sir. I will take care of it.”

  He turned back to the data on the screen. “Excellent, thank you. Send samples to Science for testing before it ends up recycled. We should know what managed to grow down there. Rope in Engineering to investigate storage and processing.”

  “Sir,” she said, still smelling annoyed.

  Rainer resisted the urge to point out this is your job. Nobody liked getting ten urgent tasks dumped on them right before the end of their shift. Not even him.

  He returned to his contemplation of data, but his mind wandered off back to the memory of Lachesis in the Biome. How she’d smelled. How pleased she’d been with the fish. How pleased she’d been with him.

  How quickly it had all shattered.

  He couldn’t bring her small gifts in the old customary fashion of a male trying to make amends, although he instinctively quivered with the exciting thought of bringing her a warm rabbit and laying it at her feet while she gazed at him in that distant, imperious way she didn’t realize she had. In wolf form, her eyes were the same color as her human form, and her pelt was tipped with autumn-red and undercut with smoky, sky-blue-gray. She had large paws, with large claws, and very fine fangs that were easily larger than any of the puny space-bred males that could barely shift forms, much less dare to court such a she-wolf.

  He imagined her deigning to sniff the prey. Or maybe she refused, and turned her tail to him and walked away, perhaps smacking him with the fringe of her tail to express her disdain and taunt him with her scent. Perhaps she’d even try to bite him for his impunity.

  If he left small tokens outside her bunk, it’d make them both look like ferals. That, and one of the few things he and Bennett could agree on was don’t leave your shit in the corridors.

  So he’d try the only thing he had left: the 22nd century equivalent of a message in a bottle.

  [Rainer] >> Lachesis] Breakfast?

  This particular morning he’d ended up on fourth watch, which was usually given to the more junior bridge officers. What they’d called graveyard back on Earth. Morbid. No idea why they’d called it that. Something about gas station attendants being killed in the darkest hours or such back on Earth.

  He’d pull a triple that day, but he had nothing to go home to, so it didn’t matter.

  An hour later, his tablet vibrated softly. Lachesis had read his message.

  [Lachesis] No, thank you.

  His cheek raced with the rush of nerves like she’d really brushed her tail against his snout as she walked away, leaving him with his belly in the dirt and his offering dismissed. The intense reaction echoed throughout him like a vivid memory, carved in perfect, exquisite detail from her scent to the sensation of the tips of her long tail fringe, the warmth of the cobblestones under him. Except she’d never swatted him with her tail like that, and he’d never been belly-down on warm cobblestones. The not-memory sent a jolt of ferality through him so hot and intense his canines pricked his tongue as they twitched, and a corresponding jolt went through his balls.

  Only half his mind cared about the visceral reaction. The other half growled, deep and feral and victorious: she had deigned to reply.

  Scurvy

  Eating alone in a room full of people was going to kill her faster than the AGRS ever could. She’d just go steal more of Rainer’s food like a fucking feral scavenger too crippled to hunt her own meal.

  It was a half-decent system: try to study a bit for Operations while her bunkmates got ready, exchange the usual morning pleasantries and pretend they didn’t resent her and wish she’d just go die somewhere, then walk the slow, draining two hours up to the Officer’s deck, eat exactly two algae pancakes while she worked on Rainer’s Telemetry data, and be gone before Rainer got off shift. Two hours back down to the bunk, collapse from exhaustion and nagging hunger.

  Except by day seven she was so hungry from days of just two algae pancakes that the damn flour had started to look good, and she started licking her fingers and the pan itself.

  Crap, you know you’re starving when algae flour tastes good.

  “There is perfectly good food in the mess hall if you weren’t such a little cowardly baby,” she told herself as she smushed her palm into the door to Rainer’s quarters. “Instead, you’re up here making excuses about how you’re working.”

  She tore off her comm and threw it down on the low table by the door. A bruise had formed on the back of her wrist from something.

  Bad sign. Her skin had also taken on a paleness that had a gray tint. No wonder people avoided her. They probably thought she had some disease.

  Enduring the messhall offended every feral, deep-buried instinct in her brain. A lone wolf. Tolerated tagging along behind the main pack and stealing scraps after everyone else had fed. Without introductions to the rest of the pack, or protection from a pack member, she was no one to NightPiercer.

  She laughed bitterly. Crèche had done so much to try to crush pack instincts, and packs were even outlawed, but the entire ship was a pack. They just didn’t realize it because nobody ever tried to join it.

  Her pack had been taken from her. Her place had been taken from her. She’d been stripped of everything. She was officially the Third Officer’s wife, but bunking with three people who had nothing in common with her, and never would. Nobody had any reason to waste energy getting to know her, or risk further interaction beyond the bare necessity of being civil.

  She rubbed the tattoo on her neck. Crèche had done so damn much to breed the feral out of the wolves that they’d actually succeeded in destroying their ability to shift into war-form. Except for her, with her Omega sire, and now she was crippled by the instincts everyone feared.

  “Time for a pancake.” She swung around the corner into the little kitchen.

  There was a small collection of items on the counter. Usually Rainer kept things in canisters, but these were out on a plate. A small portion of cashews, dried oranges, dried strawberries, and a little bit of rhubarb and blackberry jelly, fresh bread, some jerky. It was too neatly arranged to be accidental or left-over.

  She slowly brought the mixing bowl down onto the counter, and reached for the canister of algae flour, but kept staring at the plate.

  Of course Rainer had figured out she came here and what she was doing.

  She could lie to herself about it just being so she could work on the Telemetry data, but deep down? She was hiding. Hiding from Rainer, hiding from the ship that didn’t want her. She stole algae pancakes because she was too weak-willed to endure the mess hall alone. Because she was lonely, but being alone in a room full of people who didn’t want her around was worse than being lonely.

  “Who wouldn’t want to be in officer quarters, sitting in a chair, admiring paintings, and eating algae cakes?” Hell, she could even take a proper shower with proper soap and dry
her hair.

  But as she took the first bite of a hot, thin, greenish cake, and left the plate of delicacies untouched, she couldn’t say for sure what lies she was actually telling herself.

  Rainer glared at the plate.

  He shifted into wolf form, sniffed it carefully, and deduced she hadn’t even touched it.

  Now if he didn’t eat it, it’d go to waste.

  Disgusted, he choked it down as quickly as possible.

  This was the third day he’d left her food.

  A hungry wolf was a dangerous wolf. A wolf that refused to eat was a dying wolf.

  He prowled through the quarters again, hoping to catch her scent in the shower, or the bed, or somewhere else that said she might have partaken of the comforts the den offered her.

  He crawled up into the nest of blankets at the center of the big bed, his stomach threatening to reject the meal that had been meant for his mate—what male eats his mate’s food? You are revolting—and tried to think what would tempt her to eat properly.

  He wracked his brain trying to figure out why she chose to scavenge food from him, yet refused to eat the proper meal he provided, and also refused to avail herself of her two other options.

  He shifted into human form to clear his snout of her scent. Wolf form clouded his mind. Made the not-voice intolerably loud, and he’d do something stupid where he’d lose her forever. He had to play by her rules.

  Unfortunately, her scent revealed she was doing something to herself that was unacceptable. His command training had honed into him a keen watchfulness for crew falling into dangerous patterns of behavior, and a werewolf refusing to eat was a sign of grave distress. She still had the will to eat, but something more painful than hunger prevented it.

  The not-voice and all his command sensibilities nagged him to fix it.

  The wolf form option of bringing her small bites of a fresh kill, pre-chewing them, and offering them to her morsel by morsel was not available.

  The human form option, given all the factors, would be to report the matter to Forrest. Which would involve Crèche. And Therapy. And probably Tsu. She might even be force-fed.

  He’d have to try one last time to solve this issue privately.

  Rainer had upped the stakes this time: fresh meat and fresh fruit. Not jerky. Not canned. Not salted. Not processed. Fresh. Half of a peeled orange and a side of meat still on the bone. Just singed a bit on the outside, but cold and raw on the inside.

  “Fuck,” she muttered. If she didn’t eat it, it’d go bad and be wasted. “I hate you, Rainer. I hate you so much.”

  She was talking with her mouth full.

  And it was delicious.

  She didn’t think as she tore through the hunk of meat, gnawed on the bone, and then devoured everything else on the plate before her willpower could exert itself again.

  By then she was sucking on her fingers and trying not to vomit around her suddenly full stomach.

  She waddled to the chair to get some work done while her body digested food.

  Except she fell asleep first.

  The door to the quarters opened.

  She jumped, nearly knocking her chimera tablets onto the ground, instantly expecting it to be Security storming in to demand why she was working in Rainer’s sandbox when—

  Rainer stepped over the threshold. The door slid closed behind him.

  She put a hand over her throbbing heart and tried to collect herself enough so she could get up to leave. “What are you doing here?”

  He paced into the quarters, posture guarded, his scent seeming to smother everything else. “I live here.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  He stopped moving. “I was on fourth shift bridge watch. Does it frighten you that I am, quite regularly, Officer-In-Command?”

  His tone dared her to comment. Her heart skipped a beat for an entirely different reason than usual, and a shiver of pleasure rattled her.

  He tilted his head very slightly. “Are you going to faint, Lachesis?”

  The way he said her name conveyed every bit of pleasure he took from finding her in his quarters. She recovered enough to say, “No, you startled me. I thought you’d be Security.”

  He came two steps closer, then stopped. “Why would Security storm in here?”

  His spell broke. She said, impatiently, “Because they have before.”

  “I’ve had Security biometrics removed from my door. You’re safe in here.”

  “Safe from Keenan? They’ve taken me from here too, all they had to do was knock,” she reminded him.

  “That also won’t ever happen again.” He went to the kitchen and inspected the plate of food he’d left behind. Finding that apparently to his satisfaction, he got himself some water. Then he studied her from the kitchen like she was some new piece of fabrication off the line.

  She glared at him, unwilling to say what she was thinking, and unwilling to move from her seat on the chair either. It was a comfortable chair.

  Rainer finally said, “The consequences of your refusal to eat are worse than expected.”

  “I haven’t refused to eat,” she snapped, trying not to drown in the shame and humiliation, and like hell she was going to admit it to him. “I wish you wouldn’t leave me meals. It’s bad enough coming here and eating your algae cakes.”

  “Food is simple math. You will not survive eating two algae cakes a day. That’s approximately two hundred calories, six carbs, eighteen grams of protein, and not nearly enough micronutrients. You will get scurvy at this rate. It’s 2168, and I know we’re on a rickety sky-boat, but really. Scurvy?”

  The math didn’t lie. Fucking math.

  “Even if you refuse to believe you are my mate, the ship is still my pack. That makes you my responsibility. The Alpha ensures the pack is fed. You apparently are unable to obtain your own food, so the pack will feed you.”

  Alpha wolf? Pack? Some deep part of her yearned towards his words, but that part of her was too stupid to realize Security would love to barge through those doors and introduce both of them to a large quantity of well-aimed silver bullets. “When you talk like that, you remind me why I left.”

  “Do I? Because your scent says you hear me very clearly.”

  “We aren’t supposed to be attached to each other,” she said.

  Rainer, unrepentant, said, “It’s not what I claim to be that’s why you left. You already figured that much out. It’s not even what I claimed you were that upset you. You left because you thought I was going to turn this ship into Sunderer. I’ve kept my promises, you’re a feral, you are my mate and I am yours, and Gaia has called us.”

  Holy shit. She blinked. “Don’t put all that on me. I can eat in the mess. I choose not to.”

  Rainer didn’t buy it for a second. “Of course. And if you were being precious about your food after eating in the wardroom, why aren’t you doing that? You are still my wife.”

  She scowled. “I don’t get to have it both ways. I’m your wife, but I’m not living with you.”

  “If you have so many options for a meal, why do you scavenge from my den?”

  She flinched.

  “I’m sure you have a good reason. I don’t need to know what it is to humor it.”

  “It’s a stupid, childish, weak reason,” she muttered. Is this what grasping at straws looked like? Because this felt like grasping at straws.

  Rainer walked over to the chair. His scent swirled, thick and masculine. “If that were true, you’d have given in to your hunger by now. I’ll humor you arguing with me if it amuses you, but I would prefer if you didn’t waste your energy on it.”

  Everything hurt, from the painful ache in her calves and quads to the beds of her fingernails to the bruises on her toes, to every aching internal organ.

  He caressed her cheek with the back of his hand.

  The silence was a gravity well, pulling her back into his orbit.

  She shuffled her tablets into a single stack.

  “Stay
,” he said as she stood. “It’s early in the day.”

  “I should be studying for Operations, not working on Telemetry data I’m not supposed to have.”

  “Nobody said you couldn’t have it,” he said, eyes gleaming, “Now you logged into my sandbox as me? I’m here, who is to say it’s not me?”

  She chewed on those small details. “We both know my being in your sandbox is a huge problem if we’re caught.”

  “I’ve always been transparent about that risk,” he said. “But if you’ve changed your mind, you can tell me.”

  “That’s a bullshit choice and you know it.”

  “How?”

  “Because you know if we don’t do it this way, it’s not getting done.”

  “It’s not your responsibility unless you want it to be. These are deep waters. You can go to shore if you want.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” she snapped. “I can’t just turn my back on the possibility. Not when I know LightBearer is already in trouble. It’s Year Seventy-Three. We’re not supposed to be here. We never were.”

  “It’s amazing we’ve lived this long. These ships were built for a seventy-five-year service life out by Mars.”

  She grabbed a handful of her hair and dug her fingers into her scalp. “Yes, yes, I know.”

  Rainer brushed his hand across his tablet, bringing up the clock on the screen, and said, “I’ve been on duty the last sixteen hours. I’ll finish my work later.”

  Without another word, he went into the bedroom.

  She peeked around the door.

  A wolf form Rainer, burrowed in a nest of all the sheets and blankets, cracked one eye open.

  “Do you always sleep like that?” She’d rarely been able to indulge sleeping in wolf form once she’d left her family’s quarters. Her parents hadn’t cared what forms she’d slept in, but bunkmates did.

  He flicked his ears. Sometimes.

  Then he extended his forepaws a little bit, and rested his snout on them, both eyes open, ears forward. Come rest.