Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  “Violet,” he said, intrigued. “A bold color. I am pleased you are embracing your ferocity.”

  “I was sort of tricked into it.” She’d been compelled to choose what she wanted based on samples before being told what was already in inventory. The standard crew choices for uniforms were a few different styles in shades of gray and brown. Senior officers got a wider range of styles and colors: several choices of blue, gray, and brown, as well as a deep green, burning maroon, russet, smoky purple, a deep violet, and a hideous marigold. The deep violet reminded her of the moon painting, so she’d chosen it for her dress uniform. For regular uniforms, she’d taken the smoky violet and maroon.

  Since she wasn’t a command officer, she hadn’t been measured for white gloves or the silk sash, but she’d been fitted for tallboots (choice of black, the deep brown Bennett favored, or the slightly reddish brown Tsu wore). There’d been a pair in storage close enough to her own measurements they’d be adjusted and re-issued to her. For her dress uniform long coat, she’d chosen a style that gathered at her hip and small of her back, producing pleats that caused the fabric to spill in folds down past her knees.

  It was an extravagant use of fabric and trimmings, but it was also the only dress uniform she’d ever have, and hopefully someone else would one day wear it. Unfortunately, all her uniforms were going to have to be custom made: she was the first of her measurements to want the particular combination of styles and colors.

  Rainer’s lips curled. “It’s so that the officer gets what they actually want, not what’s available.”

  “Who cares?” She sighed at him.

  “Everyone. Wearing colors is an honor.”

  “Says the wolf who chose gray.” Rainer’s uniforms were in the smoky and deep steel grays.

  “I almost chose the pale blue for my long coat.”

  “Almost doesn’t count.”

  “I’m glad you agree, because we won’t get any points for almost getting home from LightBearer safely.”

  Buckle Up, Strap Down, Hold On

  Rainer supervised the final loading of the crates.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said, recognizing that look.

  “I reserve the right to be displeased about this.”

  The only thing that had kept her from strangling Rainer the past three weeks had been they’d both been so damned busy getting ready for LightBearer they had barely seen each other. She’d been run ragged learning how to handle the bridge. She hated to admit it, but Bennett and Keenan were very good instructors, and of course, so was Tsu. At the very end she’d pulled a few shifts with Rainer so there’d be no shock if they found themselves in a professional dynamic.

  She was fairly sure they’d arrive on LightBearer merely shaken about. The problem was LightBearer’s continued decline. The return course she’d plotted would only be good for twenty-eight days, and only if nothing dramatic happened. After twenty-eight days, their return window would become more limited and hazardous. At fifty-six, they’d have to return to NightPiercer via Ark. After ninety-three days, they’d be trapped.

  Rainer said, “LightBearer has navigators that can calculate a flight path out for us.”

  She wanted to move alongside him, run her hands over his strong shoulders, feel his body against hers. “They aren’t me.”

  She also had been issued three of NightPiercer’s most powerful tablets, so her daisy chain gizmo could chew on her own shuttle sandbox. Rainer’s shuttle simulation program was much simpler than NightPiercer’s, and with one tablet getting customized by Tech, it could just barely fit onto the modified tablet.

  She moved up the ramp into the belly of the shuttle.

  Rainer grabbed one of the beams and leaned towards her. “Don’t try to mollify me with logical arguments.”

  She brushed her fingertips along his face. “And don’t think you aren’t still in serious shit for trying to leave without me. I’m still angry.”

  “Not that angry,” Rainer said as she passed, his voice low by her ear as she squished between him and the crates in the center of the shuttle.

  She spun around and hooked her thigh around his, her breasts against his arm. She could have given him a harsh nudge right where he’d probably not like her knee to be if she was feeling vicious, and very much where he liked it right then.

  She flexed her feet and pressed her lips to his. His tongue slipped past her lips, and she drew him deeper, slow, savoring him.

  Keenan would have lost her mind. Bridge officers didn’t marry each other.

  Heat rose off her skin in a blissful shimmer. His body stirred against her thigh. She leaned into him, knowing she shouldn’t, but only caring that the kiss deepened.

  He was the one who pulled away first. “We can’t do that.”

  “I know.” She shifted her thigh against him. “Is it safe for me to move?”

  “Not if you keep teasing me like that.”

  “You like it.” She leaned forward a bit more. He growled and pushed her away, ducking between the containers towards the front of the shuttle to hide his traitorous body.

  The shuttle was crammed with crates and boxes. It was hard to know what to bring, so after conversation, everyone had just agreed the best course of action was to bring things there might be resource allocation arguments about. That meant a lot of tools and widgets. There were also trunks of emergency food rations, spare tablets, blank data chips of all sizes. There was the small crate stocked with the medications she’d been prescribed, as well as another crate with painkillers, antibiotics, bandages, wound glue, weighted bands, even eight pints of universal human donor blood, saline, the pink electrolyte solution she’d been dosed with, needles, tubing.

  Forrest had suggested that even though nobody on the team had Medical training beyond the basic apply pressure, if there was an injury, they could provide their own supplies and LightBearer could provide the hands. No point getting into the uncharted area of a non-crew member with an injury and resource allocation arguments while someone bled to death.

  They’d had to piss off the QuarterMaster and dig into reserves, but hopefully they’d be able to return almost all of it to NightPiercer unused.

  They’d all been allocated a small amount of space for personal items. She’d brought plenty of soap, her combs and hairpins, and a few spare towels.

  Xav was already sitting on one of the fold-down bench seats and harnessed in, looking and smelling nervous. She asked, “Ready?”

  “Yep. Just… getting comfortable.” He tugged at the harness and tested the exact placement of his butt in the seat, and the one inch of clearance between his knees and the crates.

  “Never been on a shuttle before?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “Juan is a pilot,” Rainer said from the front. “But none of the others are, and half of them haven’t even done external maintenance.”

  So their first flight was going to be a twelve-hour crossing requiring skilled pilots right into the periphery of the No No Zone of the Jovian system.

  “It’ll be fun,” she told Xav.

  “For who?”

  “Someone, I imagine. Probably not us.” She squished between the crates and wall towards the nose of the shuttle, glancing at Rainer’s crotch as she deposited her bag in the crammed closet.

  “Oh, now you want attention,” Rainer whispered as he pressed around her back towards the ramp. His hand slid along her ass as he passed behind her.

  “Careful, wolf,” she whispered back.

  “Or what?”

  “Or you’ll make my panties so wet you’ll be smelling them the entire way to LightBearer.”

  He raked his teeth across her ear, then headed out of the shuttle once more.

  Captain Tsu walked across the shuttle bay. “Everything in order, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No big send off, as requested,” Tsu said. “Navigator.”

  “Sir.” She still had a hard time b
elieving that had become her official designation.

  “Still ninety-three days hard limit?”

  “As of this morning. The ship’s descent profile hasn’t changed.”

  Tsu glanced between the two of them. After a moment, he ventured, “Are you two ready for this?”

  Rainer glanced up from his tablet. “Meaning?”

  “A married couple on the same mission is unique.” Tsu’s tone conveyed he wasn’t even sure what he was saying.

  “And as you told me yourself, it is an arrangement with its own certain purpose,” Rainer said.

  “Keenan has concerns that you two are a… match of passion… more than calm compatibility,” Tsu said, again like he was reaching for old, dusty, little-used words he only half-knew.

  “Are we having that conversation you didn’t want to have?” Rainer asked.

  “Are we?”

  “No.”

  “Excellent. Just keep in mind, married officers almost never work together. Avoid drawing attention to it and keep it flawless. Lachesis, at the end of the day, your husband is your commanding officer. In front of your team or LightBearer’s crew, you will behave that way.”

  Tsu nodded to both of them, then went into the shuttle to speak to Xav.

  Rainer stepped behind her, reeking of lust and mischief. “Translation: do as you’re told.”

  She elbowed him in the gut.

  “I’m going to enjoy this,” he whispered.

  Her body began to dampen, and a flush moved over her skin. Rainer had taken his time that morning, and now he moved close, his breath and scent and presence teasing her nerves again.

  “You’re blushing,” he whispered. He inhaled the scent of her hair.

  “And I can feel you getting hard against my ass.”

  “Perhaps I do want to smell you all the way to LightBearer.”

  She flicked her hair and strode away from him. “We have civilization to save, keep your mind on the work.”

  Tsu stayed until everyone on the team arrived, shaking hands with each, until Rainer checked his antique watch and herded everyone into the shuttle.

  He pulled off his boots and socks and tucked them into the little closet.

  She sighed.

  “And you didn’t believe me,” he said.

  She flipped him the bird and buckled herself into her seat.

  “I can’t believe we’re taking this old crate,” Juan complained.

  “They’re all old crates.” Rainer started the launch procedures.

  “You want to do a test flight of those new powerplants anywhere near Jupiter’s plasma torus?” Lachesis turned around in her seat to ask him.

  “In theory, we could skip NightPiercer off it and slingshot ourselves—” Rainer said.

  “We are not slingshotting NightPiercer off anything.”

  “Says the she-wolf who likes to calculate exactly how many Jovian moons she can slingshot a ship around.”

  “Before it disintegrates.”

  “Exactly. Before. And you can do more than one moon before it disintegrates.”

  “Considering what happened last time you and I flew a shuttle together, this conversation is not filling me with good feelings.”

  “Can we not talk about disintegration?” Simone asked.

  “First flight?” Lachesis asked.

  “Yeah?”

  Juan gave her a toothy grin. Everyone else already looked green, clammy, and like they were about to bolt. Not that there was anywhere to go. The ramp had clicked into place, and everyone was pressed in with the cargo.

  Rainer keyed in the start sequence. The shuttle began to grumble, then rumble, then rattle on its little legs. The magnetic locks grabbed hold of the floor as the shudder through the hull increased.

  The shuttle bay doors ground open, and the vastness of space greeted them, massive, empty, and unforgiving.

  “Hull stresses normal,” she reported, checking for the pulling on the starboard spar she’d seen on the upgraded shuttle, even if the whoosh whoosh of the generator disc spiraling up was unfamiliar. It rattled in its housings while it got up to temperature.

  “You ready?” Rainer asked.

  She almost snarled at him, but it was a fair question: within ten seconds of launch her medical telemetry would be cut. The implant would revert to its own pre-programmed protocols to keep her heart in rhythm. If something happened outside the implant’s tolerances, there was no back-up.

  Her heart rate was up from anticipation, but she didn’t feel the implant punishing her, or the little needles pricking her. She took a slow, deep breath, and said, “Yes.”

  Rainer released the magnetic clamps.

  The shuttle shot forward and into nothing.

  She still hated the feeling of plunging into blackness.

  From the screams in the back, nobody else liked it either.

  Weightlessness grabbed them, making the disorientation of launch and lack of control worse.

  Then the weightlessness exceeded their acceleration, and the sense of falling and movement stopped.

  “Flying towards Jupiter. Not my favorite thing to do,” she said as NightPiercer retreated in the distance until it was just a blot of lights.

  The sounds and smells of the shuttle sorted themselves, but the oppressive silence beyond the hull always weighed on her. Or didn’t, it’d be more accurate to say.

  Rainer twisted in his seat. “Is everyone in one piece?”

  A chorus of yes, sir’s, a couple of them sounding pretty snotty and tearful.

  “Keep the tears on your sleeves,” Rainer said. “Otherwise everything turns to droplets.”

  “What do we do now?” Xav asked, his voice whispering through the comm at her ear.

  “Just hang out for eleven hours and thirty-seven minutes,” Lachesis said.

  She’d never shipped sentient living cargo that could talk to her about how bored they were.

  “Are we there yet?” Rainer said under his breath, chuckling to himself.

  “What’s so funny?” Of course they weren’t there yet. He could see they weren’t there yet.

  “Nevermind.”

  “You are an odd, odd wolf.” She kept an eye on the navigation readings and horizon.

  “And I am a puzzle you cannot resist,” he replied with a sly grin.

  Invited Invasion

  The LightBearer shuttle bay was colder than she remembered. Even with the heat dissipating off their shuttle, there was a damp, wet chill in the air.

  It also smelled slightly… hard to say, but there was a funk in the air, and it was humid. It also seemed dimmer. After a few months in NightPiercer’s .93G, she definitely felt whatever LightBearer’s was.

  “What’s the AG in here?” Simone whispered to Juan.

  “Supposed to be .90G,” Juan whispered back.

  “I grew up in .90G,” Lachesis whispered. “This is not .90G.”

  Rainer’s expression schooled to something just above the temperature of the room. “Stay close and quiet,” he ordered them in a hushed tone before leading them across the span of the shuttlebay towards the collected row of four officers waiting for them.

  They lined up behind Rainer in order of rank, with her in the highest position and Juan on her immediate right.

  Rainer presented himself to the man wearing four stripes. “Commander Rainer, Third Officer and Lead Engineer of NightPiercer.”

  “Captain Ersu,” the man replied. His bearing and movement said he was about Tsu’s age, but his face looked older. He was slender under his uniform. With an efficient gesture, he indicated the woman to his left. “My First Officer, Commander Sirtis, Operations Staff, and my Second Officer, Commander Landon, Science, and my Lead Engineer, Lieutenant Commander Ursus. Welcome to LightBearer.”

  Rainer tucked his hands behind his back at parade rest. He noted each of the other officers in turn, then nodded to her. “Warrant Officer Lachesis, NightPiercer’s Navigator, chief pilot, and my wife. This is Lieutenant Juan, my r
ight hand in Engineering.”

  Then he went down the line to introduce the rest of the NightPiercer crew.

  Ersu flicked his gaze at Rainer. “I did not realize you were bringing your wife, Commander.”

  “She’ll be serving as our bridge and Operations liaison. Is her being my wife relevant?” Rainer asked with a barely cocked eyebrow, his tone communicating it was a meaningless question.

  “You mentioned it like it should be taken as relevant,” Sirtis said.

  “It’s only relevant in the spirit of you knowing who is on your ship.”

  “We are short on space and were going to put all of you into a bunk. We’ve shuffled some bodies to get you an eight-man, but don’t have officer quarters to assign to you two.” Ersu seemed aggravated.

  “There won’t be any difficulty. We were all expecting to bunk together. The only special accommodation we need is this going to Medical.” Rainer produced a pink datachip from his breast pocket.

  Ersu accepted it but said, “What is it?”

  Now Rainer missed a beat. He glanced briefly between the gathered officers before saying, “This wasn’t communicated between our Chief Medical Officers?”

  “As far as I know, there was no communication,” Ersu said.

  Rainer became impatient and frustrated. “I suppose that got lost by our Ark intermediary. Lachesis is flying with Critical Officer Clearance.”

  She hated still being under that clearance.

  Ersu didn’t hide his annoyance as he passed the chip to Sirtis. “Our resources to care for that sort of situation are very limited, Commander. I’m sure NightPiercer rations similarly.”

  “All she requires is Medical telemetry and monitoring.”

  “The situation is complicated enough,” Sirtis said.

  “I assure you Lachesis is well worth the small amount of effort required to keep her alive,” Rainer replied, terse. “Your Medical crew has permission to descend on the Warrant Officer with the wrath of the stars if necessary. She tends to become overly focused on her work.”

  “Rainer. You’ve made your point,” Lachesis said dryly.

  “Good. I see you were listening.”