Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  “Failed how?” Marcus demanded.

  Malcom shrugged. “No idea. Unknown failure, but it’s hot in there. And climbing.”

  That’s what she’d smelled when she’d come into the box: the faint, faint scent of algae. Only they’d been locked in the isolation deck with the scent of algae, so nobody had noticed it. Their noses were inured to it. Shit. This problem had been set up before they’d even gotten there and had been building this entire time.

  Environmental controls failing and letting the algae rooms get too hot usually just resulted in an algae bloom. That was a ruined vat, not an emergency. Was it a distraction, or could a bloom be an emergency? The closest she’d come to growing anything in a vat had been her initial assignment of oysters.

  “How hot is it in there?” Dietrich asked.

  “Fifty-one C and rising,” Clint said, tension in his voice.

  “Evacuate the rooms,” Marcus directed.

  “They’re already empty, sir, nobody on this shift,” Dietrich said.

  “Did someone leave the lights on?” Marcus said dryly.

  “Pressures in the tubes still rising.” Lil’s fingers moved faster. “It’s spreading to other tubes.”

  “Lake, the Biomes have their own gas exchanges, right?” Jeremy asked.

  “You want to shut off Biome life support?”

  “I’m thinking isolate the system.”

  She weighed it for a second. “Biomes need supplemental support from primary. They’re not sealed ecosystems.”

  Marcus glanced at her like she was an annoying bug. “They have some of their own O2 exchange. I’m calculating how much time we have before we have to think about a Biome emergency.”

  Lil broke out of her calculations to say, “She’s right, they’re not closed systems, but they can go a few hours.”

  “Fifty-three C,” Clint reported.

  Lachesis shifted back to her station to keep an eye on the ever-present scrolling Telemetry data. Someone needed to keep an eye on the ship and not lose focus. They taught this shit in flying shuttles: one pilot flew, one pilot monitored. She’d monitor, the computer could fly, and everyone else could sort out the problems.

  Marcus said, “Engineering, how long until your crew gets down there?”

  “Twenty-two minutes, sir.” Juan’s voice sounded calm and slightly annoyed with the pestering from on-high.

  Her crewmates continued to grapple with the increasing pressure and lack of flow in the systems in the forward hull for the next six minutes, while the temperature in the algae rooms seemed to stabilize at fifty-five C.

  She paused over her data.

  Hello.

  “Lil,” she said. “I need a few CPU cycles.”

  “Can’t give them to you, Lake. Working on saving some cows.”

  “Wasn’t asking, Lil.”

  “And I’m not arguing,” Lil snapped.

  Alarms started to ding on the Engineering terminal.

  “Shit,” Lil said at the same minute. “Shit, shit, shit. Mixture out of spec. What the hell is going on in there.”

  “What does that mean?” Marcus asked.

  “Means the air mixture isn’t within tolerances.” Sweat visibly beaded on Lil’s face. “So whatever is in those pipes is at a high pressure, isn’t flowing, and isn’t what it should be. I just can’t see what it is yet. It looks like… hydrogen?”

  Whatever was happening was getting ahead of them—fast. They were missing something. External crews, a life support glitch, algae vat rooms too hot but also empty. She’d smelled algae—there was an uncontrolled bloom, but was that dangerous or a distraction?

  Something jerked the box.

  Dietrich grabbed hold of a railing to stay upright.

  Alarms on Lil’s panel burst to life.

  Party’s about to start…

  Memory Leak

  “Report,” Marcus said, his voice cutting through the din of alert bells.

  Another jolt smashed the box. Then another.

  “Someone tell me who is shaking my ship!” Marcus shouted over the din.

  Lachesis shoved herself to the Engineering panel.

  >> FIRE VAT ROOM 22 <<

  >> FIRE VAT ROOM 23 <<

  >> FIRE VAT ROOM 24 <<

  >> FIRE VAT ROOM 25 <<

  A strange scent of combustion started to waft into the box.

  The sensors for Algae went dark, like lights switching off one after the other.

  Clint and Belle jumped into action to re-route everything.

  “Fire protocols,” Marcus said. “That’s you, Dietrich. Lock down and seal those algae rooms. Lil, report.”

  “We’ve had explosions blow out the tubes,” she said, her voice shaking. “Blew all the valves. Tube pressure is negative. We’re venting, and I don’t know what we’re venting. Looks like hydrogen, but I can’t figure out where we’re getting hydrogen from.”

  “Do we have a fire in the interior hull?” Marcus asked.

  More fire alarms lit up all along the Engineering console, like watching dominos fall.

  “Oh no,” Lachesis said softly. The fire was tracking all through the life support system, consuming O2 as it ripped through everything, and probably spewing fire into the interior hull from the ruptured pipe, and from the pressure readings, more valves had burst.

  She checked her time. Eighteen minutes.

  “Engineering,” she said, touching her comm without thought.

  “Busy down here, bridge,” Juan’s voice said. “What the hell is going on in the forward hull?”

  “Call off the team, have them standby. We’ve got a fire in the interior hull.” She distantly felt a bit silly about a bunch of crew that didn’t exist in a place that wasn’t really on fire but… the smell of smoke was only slightly less terrifying than the smell of ozone, and her heart rate was up, and the dribble of adrenaline had started in her system.

  But no point sending imaginary people to their imaginary fiery deaths.

  “Guess it’s better we didn’t get in there and start hammering on things,” Juan said grimly.

  “Oh, I don’t know, a few more sparks, all the more party, right?” she said just as grimly. “Keep them on… keep them two decks down on stand-by, but hell no, don’t go in there.”

  She kept an eye on Telemetry and one ear on the growing crisis as they struggled to contain the fire. It seemed like Lil and Belle had managed to contain the rogue air mixture, and things were under control.

  Until Algae Room 24 blew up.

  Lachesis assumed it blew up, because the box snapped them all around, slammed them into things, lights flickered, the noise left her ears ringing, and when she crawled back up to the Engineering station, the algae room… just wasn’t there anymore.

  Then Algae Room 25 blew up.

  “What the fuck is happening!” Marcus shouted as he picked himself up off the floor.

  Lil stared at the blood on her hand. She’d smashed her nose.

  “Shake it off,” Clint told her, literally shaking her. “It’ll be fine. Just bloody.”

  Jeremy limped back to his station, breathing hard.

  “Are you okay, Jeremy?” Lachesis asked. He had all his weight on one leg.

  “All good.” Jeremy flashed her a thumb’s up.

  Reports started to come in that 24 and 25 were just… gone, and there was massive damage to the lower decks. People shouting about fire, evacuating, heading out of the area. Life support was failing in the forward lower decks, various things leaking, but the fire in the interior hull had been contained, the main computer protocols had automatically started to reroute life support, error and status messages scrolled across every panel.

  It looked bad—really bad—but the primary hull was intact, they weren’t venting into space, no explosive decompressions, all systems were rerouting, secondary bulkheads sealed, radiation levels were holding. Everything seemed to be doing exactly what it was supposed to do, and nothing it wasn’t. The lower quadrant of the ship
wasn’t crew quarters: it was algae vats, long term storage, Biomes, waste processing. If there was going to be an explosion, the front of the ship was the best place to have it.

  Assuming the fire didn’t find anything that burned too hot to feed on, it’d burn itself out.

  She shifted attention to the Telemetry data while the rest of the crew managed the emergency. The blip she’d spotted earlier was no longer a blip. “Sir.”

  She hated calling Marcus sir. But she needed to prove she could play nice with others, so time to hit her protocol marks.

  “Not now, Lake,” Marcus said, scrolling through a tablet and giving orders.

  “Sir,” she said.

  “It can wait.”

  No, it fucking couldn’t. “The Sun doesn’t give a shit about waiting.”

  Marcus jerked his head up.

  “Incoming solar burst.” She didn’t have the skill to tell if it was just a regular flare or a CME, but she knew what a big flicker looked like. “Permission to get the external teams in. They’ve got thirty-six minutes before it hits.”

  “Tell them to anchor the last ceramic panel they’ve got on hand and get inside,” Marcus said.

  “They don’t have time for—”

  “Do it.”

  “I’ve flown those missions. There’s no time. They need to get inside now.”

  “And if they abandon a ceramic panel do you want to explain that to Fabrication?”

  “I’d want to explain eighteen dead people less,” she said.

  Marcus snarled, “Do you have difficulty with taking orders?”

  For a second, there was silence on the bridge.

  I have a problem with stupid orders. “No, sir. I don’t.”

  Marcus nodded as if there, see, and turned back to his tablets.

  “Tell them to finish and get inside?” she asked, since he hadn’t actually told her what she was allowed to do.

  “Monitor the situation.”

  She twitched her fingers, but bit down a snarky retort and turned back to monitoring Engineering and Telemetry. A bad feeling brewed within her as she watched the Telemetry data. Without CPU cycles she couldn’t analyze it—despite begging Lil for them, and Marcus shouting her down—but it didn’t look right. Something was happening in the Jovian system.

  Oh, and the wall of Sun-burp coming at them.

  “Wait,” she said suddenly. “Maybe…”

  She scooted back down to Engineering, yanking and pulling at panels on the screen, digging and digging.

  “Bingo.” Rainer had reserved CPU cycles for Engineering, and the simulation had them too. “Marcus, I need your biometrics to access the Engineering core.”

  Marcus, talking with Dietrich, walked over, smacked his hand against the panel, and unlocked the reserved pool of CPU cycles, barely paying attention. Good. Now he wouldn’t bother her. She allotted the handful of CPU cycles to Telemetry.

  “Oh fuck,” she breathed.

  She spun around in her chair. “Marcus.”

  “Not now—”

  “Yes, now!”

  “Shut up, Lake, you shouldn’t even be here,” Marcus snarled. “We have real problems.”

  “Yes, we do, and it’s not the fire,” she said trying to keep from shouting and strangling him. “There’s a moonlet coming right for us. We have to get that crew in and move the ship now.”

  “So you can feel like you’re useful?” Dietrich said scornfully.

  “No, so I can keep feeling alive.” Her heart rate rose and the stupid implant jabbed her. “This is going to kill us faster than those contained fires and low-population life support failures.”

  “Potentially.” Marcus seized on the word. “We have sealed bulkheads, valves, and blastdoors, and no sensors and H2 pumping into the—”

  “And the fire is not spreading, it’ll burn itself out, but this moonlet will miss us by five thousand meters, which is well inside my margin of error. Protocol requires the ship to move if it’s within one thousand kilometers. It’s eight feet in diameter with an iron composition. It’s going to leave a hell of a mark if it even grazes us.”

  “Negative,” Marcus said. “We’re not bringing the crews in with tiles off, and we’re not moving the ship while we’ve got failures, sealed bulkheads, unknown secondary hull damage, and unknown fire status.”

  “It’s a fucking moonlet!” she shouted. “We just have to adjust course—”

  “Stand down, wolf.”

  She composed herself with effort. “Sir, I formally protest this. You need to—”

  “Enough, Lake,” Clint said. “It’s going to miss us. We have other problems.”

  “Five thousand meters is nothing!” she exclaimed, horrified. “Sweet Gaia, are you—”

  “Leave the religion off the bridge,” Marcus snarled at her.

  “You’re going to need a divine intervention if that moonlet even grazes us. You think Fabrication is going to yell about one lost tile? Wait until they’ve got replace the whole damn starboard hull! If it even nicks the generator disc or nacelle, we can’t repair it. This is the biggest threat—”

  “And the biggest threat just happens to be the one calling on your skills,” Marcus said sarcastically. “Solar flares, moonlets. Sit down.”

  She took a breath, and tried again, even though it felt like she was bashing her head against a door. “It’s easy to avoid. I can manage the situation on my own. It doesn’t have to become an issue.”

  “Sit!” Marcus bellowed.

  Needles stung her arm. A rush of cold moved through her veins. Her mouth parched further. If the moonlet hit, it’d hit the generator disc, skim along the starboard hull, and that’s what made calculating it so challenging: it wasn’t coming at them, it was overtaking them.

  And all she had to do was use the thrusters to push the ship a few degrees one way or the other. All she had to do was get the crews inside and she could reposition NightPiercer to take the solar flare. It was standard, low-risk, commonplace maneuvering.

  She trembled so hard she could barely hit the right inputs on her screens, powerless to do anything except run and re-run the numbers.

  If she was right, and the moonlet hit the box, they might die. If they didn’t die, the simulated damage would be so extensive, they’d probably spend a horrific hour in a futile fight to survive.

  There were eighteen fake people outside the ship about to die. But there were real people in the box, and…

  She touched her comm and turned her head like she was looking at the Engineering panel. “Crew Chief, get inside. Drop everything and go.”

  “We’re not done out here, bridge.”

  “Don’t care. Drop the tile, I don’t care what happens to it. Pilot, burn that pancake.”

  That meant fly the shuttle into the bay at full burn, belly flop it, and let Engineering deal with the damage.

  Laughter from whoever was playing pilot. “One hot algae-fed cake incoming.”

  “Belay that,” Marcus barked. “Finish assignment, Crew Chief. That’s an order. Ignore the Telemetry officer.”

  Lachesis spun around. “You’ll get them killed! Focus on the real emergency! It’s not the contained fires and life support failures! Those are under control!”

  “You call this under control?” Lil shouted.

  “This is how we die,” Lachesis told Marcus coldly. “This. In eight minutes, that moonlet is going to hit us. Let me get the crews inside and move the ship. You manage the emergency, let me prevent one.”

  “Stop looking for this to salvage your sorry, miserable life,” Marcus said.

  “Hey,” Belle said sharply. “Don’t make it personal. Let her get the crews in and move the ship. I don’t really want to get my ass done by a moonlet and she’s not doing anything anyway.”

  “We are not moving a compromised ship,” Marcus said.

  “I am more qualified than you are to say how compromised this ship is or isn’t,” Lachesis snarled. “And it’s going to get more compromised
when a moon hits it.”

  “I am not interested in a damn thing you have to say. Stand. Down.” Marcus stood.

  She trembled, heart racing, vision dimming, sweat pouring down her spine. “Listen to me you arrogant, self-important, puffed—”

  He smashed her back with an open hand between the breasts.

  She stumbled backwards and fell on her ass.

  Ow.

  Pain rocked through her weakened body. She rolled over, coughing and gasping.

  “Next time I take off my shirt and use it to tie you to a chair!” Marcus threatened.

  Lachesis gasped, trying to breathe after he’d knocked the wind out of her. “You’re going to get us all killed! This is how we die, you arrogant self-important biped!”

  She crawled to her feet, unsteady. Marcus stared at her, and everyone else did too. She wanted to scream at them to get back to work.

  “Dietrich,” she pleaded, “please.”

  Dietrich returned to issuing orders to evacuate the lower decks as they turned off life support in certain zones and getting containment crews to the destroyed algae rooms.

  “Jeremy,” Lachesis said, “please.”

  “Not now, Lake,” Jeremy said, face gray and strained with pain. “Keep an eye on the exterior crew and that incoming flare.”

  “In under seven minutes,” she said, still breathing hard while the implant and band tried to stabilize her cardiac function, and she wasn’t sure if anyone heard her, “hold on to something, because this is going to suck.”

  Nobody listened.

  Six minutes later, everything disappeared.

  My Future, Torn Asunder

  Lachesis came to in complete darkness, ears ringing, plastered up against the main screen, ass up and staring at her ankles.

  Dark, hot, quiet.

  Am I dead?

  The ringing in her ears ebbed, and other sounds happened: coughing, groaning, moaning, strange metallic creaking. Emergency lighting flickered to life, casting the bridge in dim, faint light. The stations flickered. It stank of blood, fire, sulfur.

  She coughed, rolled over, and crawled to her feet.

  “Clint.” She stumbled towards the man, dropped to her knees next to him. Blood poured from somewhere and spread under him in a glossy, sticky pool. “Clint, Clint.”