“Do you regret coming?” he whispered, pressing his hand into her breastbone, his scent urgent and tormented.
“Never,” she whispered without thinking. “Never.”
He inhaled again, breathing her scent, every curve and joint of his body curled around hers. He nipped her ear very lightly. She shivered, aware of his cock against her ass, but Rainer only buried his face in her neck and she sensed him close his eyes, and his strong body surrender to a bone-deep weariness.
She pressed her fingers against his, and waited in the dark.
Rainer moved from their bed to put on his battered shorts so he wouldn’t just be wandering around naked in front of everyone. Even though nudity was a thing that happened and nobody in the bunks gave a damn. Just was customary to have something on when delivering bad news.
Time for a shower, although hard to get motivated. She pulled at a strand of her hair. She needed to wash it. She was down to every four days. Not for lack of soap, or the lukewarm water, just how long it took for it to dry.
She rubbed her arm. It ached. Some mottled blue had appeared around the band. It’d been a while since she’d taken the band off—it was carefully aligned to her blood vessels, so only Medical handled it—but she probably looked like an abused pincushion under there.
Rainer told the room, “Hit the showers. I need to speak with Lachesis alone.”
Jess glanced at her, then back at Rainer, her body tensing as if to balk, and Jimmiez moved slowly. The scent of confusion and resistance permeated the bulk.
“Go,” Rainer said again, adding a bit more force to his tone: he expected to be obeyed.
Xav crept up behind Jess, and Kos balked, while Jimenez and Juan gathered up their things. Cheshire shifted back and forth on his feet. Reluctantly, they filed out.
“Something happened after I left?” Rainer asked her, his tone conveying he knew damn well something had happened.
“Juan and Jess tussled,” she said, feelings from the previous day brewing with the feelings from the previous night. Why did it always feel like such a tug-of-war with Rainer?
“How serious?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I didn’t get involved. Maybe I should have.”
“Probably best you didn’t. Juan sat in the proverbial big chair, and he didn’t do the best job with the opportunity.” Rainer sounded aggravated.
“Why didn’t you just explain it to him? He knows he got it wrong, and I’m not sure he doesn’t think you got it wrong. He said I’ve been pampered and spoiled.”
“That’s a start. I could explain it to him, but that’ll just pull the splinter out.” Her husband looked around, then sat down on the edge of Simone’s unmade bunk. He gripped the edge of the thin mattress and metal frame, shifting his grip, and the muscles of his forearms moved under his skin like cables. “Ersu is not letting you back onto the bridge.”
Ersu could keep his bridge to himself. She tried to find some guilt or bad feelings, but she kept tripping over Ersu is a terrifying asshole and I did the right thing. Even if Juan had a valid argument that now they didn’t have anyone on the bridge, and next time it might not be twelve thousand meters.
“We had a massive argument,” Rainer added, tone darkening along with this scent. “Bob appears to be living in two realities. In one, you got the data. And in this one, where you didn’t. Ersu was furious at me for pointing it out, of course, because shooting the messenger is how it works, as you saw last night.”
She shivered. “So what now?”
Rainer cricked his neck. A vertebra popped. “I gave Ersu the worthless apology he wanted, which I found easier to do than expected. I merely thought of how pleased you would be that I remembered there were thousands of people on this ship, and my dealings with these… peculiar individuals… will be very limited. But I swear to you, if I ever see him planet-side, things will be much different. So do not attempt to stop me.”
“Even if it starts a conflict between tribes?” The Repopulation Protocols strongly suspected that there would be inter-ship conflicts as crews became tribes. Having lived on three different ships, she firmly believed they’d all start fighting with each other because that was simply what would happen. Nobody would need a reason beyond them and us.
“I would be doing this tribe a favor.” He gave her a feral, wild grin. “But for now, and to please you, I will wag my tail like a good dog. Since it is forty percent of civilization, and you do remind me of everything that is actually at stake.”
She pushed off her bed and moved to him. His hands grabbed her and pulled her astride his lap, and she bent and kissed him. He buried his hands in her hair, raking it free as strands fell around them.
They broke apart, but stayed close, breathing hard. He pulled his hand through the clumps of hair, smoothed his fingertips over her face. She raked her fingernails along his shoulders, digging into the deformed skin and strong muscles. He hissed in pain and she dug deeper, and he tugged her hair, bending her neck to the side to expose the smooth curve of her throat. She sank deeper astride him, savoring the way his cock had swollen against her. He pulled harder.
She whimpered obediently.
The door to the bunk slid open. Kos and Simone stumbled through, filthy, panting. “Comman—”
Erosion
“Um,” Kos said as Simone clapped her hands over her mouth and turned scarlet. “This is… awkward.”
Rainer still had her hair in his grip, and her head still pinned at an awkward angle, and his cock still shoving through his shorts and brushing the crease of her thigh.
“It’s not what it looks like,” Lachesis said.
Rainer looked over his shoulder at them, not moving or releasing her. “It is exactly what it looks like.”
“Rainer…” she whispered.
“That’s not even your bed,” Simone said awkwardly. “But I mean… should we come back? Where is everyone else? And could you… not fuck on my bed?”
“No, showers, yes.” Lachesis answered each question in order as she slid off Rainer’s legs and stood. She tugged her shirt around her hips and raked a hand through her unbound hair.
Rainer didn’t move.
She grabbed him by the arm and hauled him to her bed to sit. Obvious hard-on be damned, his horny ass was still on Simone’s bed.
Rainer, unfazed, said, “You can get back to the emergency now.”
“Wait until the others get back from the showers,” Lachesis said. Oh, and until the blood returned to the brain that could do complex math. “You two. Hit the showers. It will wait ten minutes, right?”
Simone laughed, crazy-like. “Sure, I guess?”
“Is something on fire?” Rainer asked. “Aside from us.”
Lachesis covered her face with her hands, groaned, and folded over her knees. “Now is not the time for you to develop a terrible, terrible sense of humor.”
“We do have our tradition of inappropriately mixing emergencies with sex.”
Simone laughed, wild and terrified. “Hey, sure, let’s shower. You guys fuck like crazy. Do it on my bunk. Do it on Kos’ bunk! Do it in the damn showers. It’s all going to hell anyway and we’re riding Charon’s boat!”
An hour later, everyone was back, dressed, Lachesis with her soaking wet hair spread around her back (soaking through her uniform, but whatever) and they all stood around in a circle in the center of the little bunk.
Simone handed Rainer her tablet.
Rainer flipped through the images they’d brought back from the forward bulkheads and spars. “How bad is this in person?”
“Worse than the pictures.” Koss still seemed badly shaken.
The corrosion was deep, widespread, and had been building for years. The convergence of bulkheads and spars that wrapped around the large, open spaces of the Biomes was almost rotted through.
Rainer flipped through the images once more. Lachesis asked, “So this is what caused the strange shiver yesterday?”
Juan nodded,
pale. “The front bulkheads were probably crumbling. The spars were shuddering, and the vibrations were because the plates themselves were taking the stress. If you’d kept flying…”
“Shit, shit, shit.” Jimenez nervously bit his thumbnail.
She let out a breath of air and sank down onto the trunk. Years of asymmetrical engine thrust issues, combined with a progressively more corroded hull, had warped the ship’s entire shape. The ship no longer flew true to course, even if the flight computer thought it did. It staggered through space like a drunk stumbling and tottering back to a bunk. “Who would fly a ship in this condition and just ignore it?”
Rainer glanced meaningfully at Juan. Juan went from pale to ashen to downright green.
Lachesis shook her head. “Ersu didn’t want to quit the test. Remember how Ursus didn’t want to quit? The bridge crew didn’t react either.”
“What are you saying?” Kos asked.
She held up her hands, helpless, and just wanting to cry in the cold. “They’ve been flying this ship like this for years. This is their normal.”
“That’s impossible,” Juan said. “The engine sync safety was enabled.”
“Oh come on, Juan, that’s easy to turn off,” she said.
Simone shook her head violently. “They’ve been trying to keep us out of the forward decks. They knew.”
Cheshire asked. “Are you saying they hid it?”
“That’s exactly what she’s saying,” Lachesis said. “This is their normal, but they know it’s not normal.”
“That makes no sense,” Kos said. “Why do that?”
Simone shrugged. “I dunno, lure the Commander here and trap us?”
“You watch too many old movies,” Jimenez said uncertainly.
Juan, still pale, said, “This much wobble should have shown up on the engine performance data. The hull data should have shown it. Lake, you’ve been studying this ship for years. How did you not know about this?”
Good question. This hadn’t happened overnight. She shoved Rainer on the arm. “Move.”
She dug around inside her trunk. “When I left Ark, I brought all my LightBearer datachips. I thought I’d send them back in the mail. That hadn’t happened, so I brought them with me, planning on returning them. I haven’t gotten around to it. It’s not complete data, just what was sent to us to crunch. But I do know we had three more or less functional engines.”
Juan and Jimenez started to examine all the data, while Rainer sketched something against a blue grid.
Half an hour later, Jimenez shouted something profane and flung one of the chips against the wall. It shattered.
“No!” Rainer barked.
“It’s full of bullshit!” Jimenez shouted at Rainer. “They’re all full of bullshit! They lied to Ark for years! They lied to us!”
Rainer growled, “Clean that up.”
Jimenez stomped off towards the shattered bits of yellow silicon.
Juan shifted, seeming corked up with anger. “The engine data Ark was getting was pure lies.”
“Pure lies?” Lachesis said.
“Fine. Really optimistic. Engine Three hasn’t performed above forty-two percent for six years.” Juan’s voice shook with anger.
“Yeah, and our front bulkheads are corroded takes a lot of space on a datachip to say,” Jess said sarcastically.
“Why create such an elaborate lie?” Cheshire said.
Kos hugged himself. “Because they were afraid no one would help them if they knew the truth.”
The realization settled over them like a cold, thick blanket.
“Is this where we pack it up?” Jess asked quietly.
Rainer’s scent of nightmare intensified.
She brushed her fingertips along his hair, tracing the outline of the plasma scar that travelled behind his ear, down his neck. Her fingers touched the tattoo. “There has to be something left.”
“It’s time to go,” Kos said again. “There’s nothing we can do for this ship. There never was.”
Lachesis closed her eyes and grit her jaw. “It’s year Seventy-Three. We are so close to going home. It can’t end like this. It can’t.”
“We don’t know if we’re close to going home. But it’s a nice thought,” Simone said miserably.
“I know you don’t want to leave them to die.” She could feel the weight of it in her soul, she smelled his nightmare scent, she could feel the tearing: his obligation to the pack, his obligation to the greater good.
“I don’t.” He looked at the six crew, then back at her. “How long until our next window?”
“Io is in transit for another eight hours.”
“So we can’t leave right now anyway.” Rainer straightened, “Give me four hours to see if I can come up with an idea. Xav, you and Cheshire go grovel to someone in Tech or Telemetry for the most current data. Everyone else play cards or pray for inspiration.”
Rainer, five hours later, said, “I have a thought.”
Everyone crowded around him and peered down at the blueprint on his tablet.
Rainer pulled up a sketch of something that looked like a double-sided metal brace with rods and bolts and other pieces attached to it. “Reinforce the crumbling structures with these. They’re designed to fail. Like the frames on old cars. They used to crumple in, and it looked very dramatic, and you’d think the person inside was dead, but they walked away uninjured.”
Rainer needed a new hobby. Rooting about in the archives researching old Earth was best left to the historians. The askance looks of the crew told her half of them didn’t know what a “car” had been.
Juan was unmoved. “Let’s say you can complete the designs in record time without CPU cycles to run the simulations, and we can find enough materials to build whatever you design, and they get LightBearer back where it was three years ago, it doesn’t change they still don’t have a way to fabricate new bulkheads and spars. Those braces are one-use only.”
“There’s somewhere to get parts.”
Jess stood up straight. “You’re talking about Sunderer.”
Juan instantly said, “Do we even know where it is?”
Holy shit, her husband was a genius. “Telemetry keeps track of it just like any other large piece of space junk.”
Rainer gestured to his design. “This ship’s shuttles were originally built with astro-mining in mind. They’d be good candidates for salvage work.”
Lachesis added, “Or they just abandon LightBearer and evacuate to Sunderer. Although Sunderer isn’t big enough. Maybe we could find Haven.”
“They’ll die on Haven within fifteen years,” Kos said.
“More like five,” Cheshire muttered.
Rainer started to issue orders: get exact measurements and information about the forward hull and inventory anything they could use to build the patches to glue the ship together for one last major push.
“Do we have two days to put this together for a proof of concept?” Rainer asked her.
“This ship could tumble the next time someone farts,” Simone said.
Lachesis did some quick mental math. “We either leave within the next twelve hours, or we’re going to be here for another forty-seven.”
“Then it’s time to have a meeting with Ersu.”
“I’m not sure how he’s going to take the bad news.”
Rainer grinned, but it was grim. “And I’m certain he’ll be delighted to see you again.”
A Quiet Death
Ersu’s officer meeting room was very similar to NightPiercer’s. It was also cold as hell.
“Have you slept, Commander?” Ersu asked, his feathers still ruffled from the previous day. None of his officers seemed happy to have this impromptu emergency meeting.
They clearly preferred their emergencies politely scheduled.
Rainer managed to keep the contempt to a minimum. “We’ve isolated what we’re sure is the cause of the shuddering from yesterday. We haven’t done all the—”
“You ca
lled me here, Commander, and you haven’t finished the work?”
“I want to show you what you’re dealing with, so you can weigh your options and priorities.” He tapped one of his smaller tablets, summoning a montage of images from the forward interior of the hull.
Ersu stared at the pictures, unmoved. “It’s corrosion, Commander. Are you saying NightPiercer doesn’t have corrosion and is utterly pristine?”
Sirtis looked bored.
Rainer’s throat and jaw moved as if to speak, but it took a few false starts before he managed it. “We suspect two of the front bulkheads have cracked if not failed entirely. The front spars are failing. A number of secondary supports have already failed. The primary and secondary hulls are taking the stress.”
“You say that like you’ve never seen a beam fail,” Sirtis bit out.
“I never have outside of a simulation,” Rainer said, “because I don’t let my ship get into such a condition.”
Lachesis winced.
Ersu shuffled through the photos. “If we panicked every time there was some rust on this ship, we’d have turned into Sunderer years ago.”
“So if this rust doesn’t bother you, why did you deliberately conceal this ship’s condition to Ark and NightPiercer?” Rainer raised a brow, his tone a tightrope between accusation and inquiry.
Ersu stopped moving. “I suggest you provide proof of that, Commander.”
Lachesis deposited her bag of chips on the table. “Chips sent to Ark for the past three years containing incomplete and falsified data. I didn’t get a chance to send them back to you before I left for NightPiercer.”
“You can keep those,” Rainer said as Sirtis pulled the bag towards herself and opened it, grabbing a handful of chips. “Interesting historical data, except it doesn’t match the historical data we were provided on NightPiercer, or the data that you supplied when we got here. If you’re going to lie, keep them straight.”
Ursus bowed his head and clasped his hands behind his neck.
“The only thing we can figure,” Rainer said, tone caustic, “is you didn’t want to admit this to anyone, and you were hoping for a miracle where your ship could be saved without you ever having to admit how dire it was. If you were my Captain, I’d rip your head off and beat your other officers to death with it. But since you’re not, you just tell me if you’re going to face reality or if I should take my crew and leave you to die.”
Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2) Page 28