Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  Tsu nodded grimly. “Not what any of us were hoping to hear. I don’t like the idea of knowing they’re isolated, but I’m sure they like it even less. We’ll monitor as best we can, and when they get to Sunderer, we’ll re-establish contact and try to render more aid if practical.”

  As if they would ever be welcome again on that ship, or that any of them would ever consent to go back.

  Forrest murmured to her, “Report to Medical sooner than later.”

  “You’ve gotten thin, all of you,” Tsu said. “And you stink like algae vats. Forrest, examine all of them. Extra rations. Hell of a job, crew. Commander, Navigator, Lieutenant, I want reports from each of you as soon as possible.”

  “Extra shower time and soap?” Simone asked hopefully.

  “Fifteen minutes for all of you the next twelve months,” Tsu agreed. “Bennett, see to it. They stink.”

  Xav sniffed his cuff.

  “I’ll supervise getting your gear unloaded and put back into inventory,” Tsu said. “Everyone get out of here. You stink and look like shit.”

  We Missed You (Sort Of)

  Rainer had over ten thousand pings and tickets waiting for him.

  She had a dozen. Which was a dozen more than she’d been expecting. She tapped through the list, somewhat bewildered by being back on a network after over a month off. Generic notifications about her shifts being cancelled and her being removed from various rotations that had been sent after she left the ship, Doctor Forrest re-iterating she was supposed to report to Medical, a message from her Aptitude crewmate Belle, and two letters from her mother.

  The letters were dated the day after she’d left Ark, and from six weeks ago. Both had arrived while she’d been on LightBearer.

  Her tablet suddenly seemed too heavy, so she put it down, and rubbed her other arm. The band stung and itched. It’d been on almost twelve weeks. Far longer than it’d been designed for. “Forrest wants me to report to Medical,” she said, trying not to think about anything, “think I’m getting this implant out?”

  “I think you shouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  Belle’s letter would be the easiest thing to absorb. It was dated two days after she’d left for LightBearer.

  From: Belle [Technology :: Artificial Intelligence]

  To: Lachesis [Navigation :: Chief Pilot]

  Subject : LightBearer

  Not surprised you volunteered for LightBearer. Congratulations on being smarter than the systems I maintain.

  Lieutenant Belle

  Senior AI Specialist

  So was Belle salty, or was this a roundabout congratulations? She shifted her tablet to one hand and fingered the gold pin stuck on her collar.

  She owed it to her mother to at least read the letters, even if she didn’t feel like she had the strength to do it. She’d read them over, then go hit the shower. And she would write letters to each of her family and she would make sure they were on the next shuttle to Ark.

  Time to act like a damned adult. She was almost twenty-four. She could walk up to the bridge right now, key in a course, and move a ship full of thousands of people and animals. She could read some letters from her own mother.

  The first letter was two lines about how her mother missed her, and felt her loss on the ship, even if Lachesis hadn’t lived in their quarters for years. The second letter wasn’t more than a paragraph, just a stilted, awkward few sentences that barely seemed like her mother. Just a hope you are well, and I hope you are settling in, and for Lachesis to write when she knew the details of the biological father of her presumably conceived-yet-unborn pup.

  Lachesis put her tablet down and stared at the moon painting, trying to absorb the large lump in her gut.

  Rainer smoothed his hand along her braid.

  “My mother,” she said. “She sent two letters. They arrived while we were gone.”

  “And?”

  “She doesn’t know. Or she didn’t know when the letters were written.” The gold pin hung like a heavy collar on her neck. “Nothing from my father or sister.”

  Rainer looked at the moon painting. He frowned, as if struggling with a faint memory. “Perhaps neither knows what to say.”

  “My father never really was one for talking. He always said his music spoke for him. I’m worried what’s going to happen to my family if word gets out about the euthanasia.”

  Rainer removed the gold pin from her collar, scent skeptical, and then removed the pin from his own collar. He gave them both a contemplative look, then put them onto one of the shelves with the Earth stones. “You helped save LightBearer. I think that says enough.”

  She laughed wearily. “That’s not exactly a conversation stopper. That’s more of a conversation starter.”

  Rainer’s expression hardened. “Your family has no right to question you. They knew you were a feral and kept it from you, hoping to convince you you were ‘normal.’ My parents never kept it from me. I’m not ashamed or afraid of what I am, but you are constantly weighed down by guilt, shame, and fear.”

  She yanked her collar open and pulled out her braid. Maybe she should just cut it off. It seemed to be an issue for everyone not named Rainer. “You don’t just get over finding out you’re a feral just like you always feared, and you don’t just get over finding out you’re a cull.”

  “Why not?” Rainer asked.

  The limits of Rainer’s Emotional score had just been reached. “I need a shower.”

  The water seemed especially hot after a month of lukewarm LightBearer water. And it didn’t stink.

  Rainer came into the bathroom, naked.

  “There’s another shower,” she told him. They had the impossible luxury of two bathrooms. One for each bedroom. He didn’t need to be in her space getting impatient.

  Rainer’s gaze followed every rivulet and droplet that slid down her skin. “I know you wanted to see your family. I don’t like the idea of you avoiding them like you have something to be ashamed of.”

  “Why are you in here? How do you even have the energy to argue? And by the way, we can argue after I use some soap.” Hot water plastered her hair to her skin, and her body felt thin and frail under her hands. He studied her, counting each rib, the raw shape of her hips under her skin, the sharp angles from her joints, but there was a sensitivity to how he looked at her—like an artist studying his subject.

  He was thinner too, leaving his muscle defined under skin stripped of all its fat, making the melted texture of his grafted skin like putty bonded to his true form. His features seemed more raw, shallows in his cheeks casting shadows that gave him a haunted, grim expression.

  She did not want to talk about her family, or the giant crater of confusion the thought invoked. Her mother would laugh off rumors, but her father would be upset, and what about Clotho? Her father had always tried to temper her sharp disposition, warned her humans didn’t appreciate fangs like wolves, and he’d always been so careful to speak carefully so her mother wouldn’t be offended.

  Her mother had a tattoo, and loved her fangs, and she also loved her husband. In the way Tsu loved Arden. In the way Crèche approved of.

  Rainer didn’t move. “I didn’t like your scent when you said to carry on to NightPiercer. I don’t like your scent now. You just want to go crawl into a hole like a whipped dog. You’re the ship’s Chief Pilot. You aren’t what they said you were.”

  “Then what am I? You said they wouldn’t recognize me. I don’t even recognize myself. I don’t even know what I want.” That was a lie. She wanted him and she wanted off this ship. She wanted a planet. She wanted sky, clouds, rain, wind, dirt, dusk, dawn.

  Those were impossible things to want, and if she stopped believing they were impossible, they became dangerous.

  What was happening on LightBearer would happen to NightPiercer and Ark one day. The day was already here for LightBearer. It would come for Ark soon, and there wouldn’t be a Sunderer to salvage from when that happened.

  NightPiercer was the stron
gest ship. The best ship. It had Rainer. If one of the ships was going to do something, it would have to be them.

  “Why are you standing naked in here looking for an argument?” Even though his nudity was an excellent view. Perhaps she wasn’t too tired for a little fun. It’d been forever.

  Rainer focused on her face. “You aren’t used to hot water and I don’t want you to faint.”

  So much for the idea of a little fun. “I am not going to faint.”

  A wry smirk. “Really. Have I ever told you how I learned I needed an emergency heart transplant?”

  She looked at his chest. He only had a very, very faint scar bisecting his breastbone, although it was tangled with the edges of the melted skin. “No.”

  “I fainted and cracked my head in my shower,” Rainer said.

  “Fair enough. So why isn’t this heart transplant in the medical file Forrest let me see? Any other transplants I should know about?”

  “I have no idea. It’s common knowledge. My point is I went from normal AGRS recovery to total heart failure in three days. My case is the only one like it on all three ships, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. We simply don’t understand artificial gravity. Just another chapter in a book I do not intend us to keep writing.”

  The water didn’t seem nearly hot enough now. Her skin crawled with the bone-deep chill of LightBearer.

  Rainer’s attention felt heavy, inescapable, like he read her mind, perceived all her thoughts and fears, and spoke directly to them. “LightBearer is the first warning. And yes, I got what I wanted, and more than I could have ever dreamed when Tsu made you Navigator. Gaia is a cruel, angry mistress but She rewards those brave enough to pursue the prey She offers.”

  She shied away from the mention of Gaia like it was a light too bright to look at. “Are you also going to tell our Captain how Ersu tossed me off his bridge?”

  Rainer chuckled. “Of course I am, but it’s not going to merit conversation. Ersu doesn’t appreciate a talented officer questioning is judgement. Tsu isn’t going to appreciate that kind of Captain.”

  “Is it perhaps to our benefit Tsu isn’t that kind of Captain?” she asked warily.

  “Your point?”

  “Bennett might find it useful. He’s never been less than fair to me on the bridge, but we both know he’s a snake looking to get his jaws around something. And he’s going to be the next Captain. Tsu is going to retire in a few years.”

  The reality of Bennett as Captain and Keenan as XO was not some distant possibility. It was going to happen.

  “Have you ever considered that the reason Keenan hasn’t had a baby or married herself to anyone, and why Bennett is still single, is an alliance?” Lachesis asked. “And doesn’t it strike you as strange Bennett and Keenan both allowed my upgrade to Navigator while remaining married to you?”

  “Meaning what?” Rainer inquired.

  “We set the precedent for high-ranking officers to marry each other. Yes, Bennett tried to get me for himself, but he made it obvious why. Ambition. Politics. Bennett wants to make you not a threat. It’s not a new goal. Think about what Bennett and Keenan could do if they had spousal privilege and everything they said to each other was off the record because the ship’s firmware literally won’t let it be anything else?” Her voice rose a bit with anxiety. “They used you and I as lab rats. Bennett maybe even knew I’d refuse him, and he used it to trap you. Why else would we have gotten so many chances? Why haven’t he and Keenan put up more of a fight to anything Tsu wants? If we act like idiots, it will make a Bennett/Keenan marriage look charmed. If we prove it works, it still benefits them.”

  Rainer pushed the shower door open and squeezed into the small space with her. He gathered up a handful of the lightly cinnamon-and-apple soap he’d found for her in some obscure artisan’s bathtub, and worked it into her hair. She didn’t ask how much grime came up with it, and gave herself to the pleasure of his fingers working into her scalp. The head of his flaccid cock brushed her ass and thigh as he moved, and his scent mingled with the soap and steam.

  He worked her hair into a soapy mass, gripping all of it in one big hand, and his other touched the groove of her hip.

  “Please do not tell me now you want this taken out.” After all the fights they’d had, and the things he’d said, Rainer didn’t suddenly get to decide he wanted a pup.

  “You don’t?”

  “Not now. We aren’t even supposed to be… cuddling… like this. Keenan would lose her mind.” Having hot sex in the shower was one thing. They weren’t supposed to cuddle. “Where do you even get these ideas? I thought Simone was the one who watched old movies.”

  “It just seems natural,” he murmured. “Listen to your instincts.”

  He moved his hands, sliding them both over her hips, across her belly, up her ribs, across her breasts, to clasp them in a cross over her heart, and gathered her in his embrace.

  “It seems familiar,” he murmured. “Like I have held you a thousand times before. Felt your heart beat a thousand times before.”

  She opened her mouth to say something, then fell silent as he counted, in a whisper, by her ear.

  Turnabout

  Rainer tucked himself off to the side, judging the distance between himself and Lachesis to be just far enough that Forrest and Ang would be annoyed, but not pick a fight with him.

  Forrest unbuckled the medication band from her arm. The scent of skin that had been without air too long came with it. She sighed, grateful, and rubbed her skin, then winced.

  The skin was bruised, mottled, and prickly from the needle jabs.

  He bent and twisted her arm to get a good look at the skin. “Since LightBearer Medical didn’t bother to send your data back, I’m going to have to go based on what I see today. It is fair to say you did not have a good time on LightBearer.”

  She shrugged. “I’m sure some of this is from before.”

  “I’m sure I saw your arm before you left, and it did not look like this.”

  Lachesis watched the doctor with those autumn-and-sky eyes of hers, her scent observe. Pleasure slid through the back of his brain, through deep and buried places. He loved that scent when she shed her timidity and let herself become the feral she-wolf that would look Gaia Herself in the eye.

  Deep resentment simmered in his blood. Her scent the previous evening haunted him. He’d smelled it too often on her, although usually he had been the source of it. Not ideal, but within his power to address. He could not fix this matter with her parents. They’d meant well, and had probably hoped that by hiding the truth from her it’d just go away.

  He’d had to read her Crèche files for Aptitude. Her parents had not wanted her to pursue a career in Crèche. They were afraid she’d figure out what Lachesis had figured out as a pup: Clotho was her genetic replacement. Lachesis didn’t believe her parents had put two and two together.

  They’d always known.

  There were notes in Lachesis’ Crèche file praising her love for her sibling, but expressing deep concern that the two pups had to be parented differently. The parents had been referred to Counseling for help while Crèche monitored things, especially when Clotho revealed herself as a musical prodigy.

  It was so stupid Rainer almost gnashed his teeth thinking about it. Did people think pups were dumb? Pups learned by observing adults, even more than human children did. Her parents hadn’t needed to tell her. It’d have come out in everything they did.

  They needed to get off these damn ships.

  Time to reinforce to his mate that she was spectacularly not defective. “Tell me how her replacement heart is developing.”

  “It’s coming along,” Ang said.

  “That sounds like a lie, and smells like one as well,” Rainer said, bristling.

  Before Ang could retort something, Forrest intervened. “We couldn’t use your liver.”

  “Why not?” Rainer demanded harshly. “There’s no replacement for her? That was part of the deal.”
/>
  Forrest scraped off some of the wrinkly skin on her arm into a little dish. “We tried to repurpose your liver and it didn’t take, and we lost the liver as well.”

  “It went to goo?” Lachesis asked.

  Rainer counted to ten. Livers didn’t go to goo. They were tolerant of being re-sequenced and adapted into different organs.

  In the hierarchy of replacement organs, a re-sequenced converted liver was a solid middle ground. It wasn’t like when an officer died their organ reserves got thrown out: they got re-sequenced. Custom-sequenced for officers were the gold standard, offering no risk of rejection and quick recovery. Re-sequenced and converted organs were a solid middle choice.

  Harvested organs were considered a necessary evil and sub-ideal due to problems with needing anti-rejection drugs and, more concerning, cellular memory, especially with hearts. Changes in personality, preferences, and quirks were common side effects. People had fallen into deep depressions or even Exodus Syndrome after losing interest in or hating their profession or Dying Art. Marriages had fallen apart, and children traumatized. There had even been issues with gene-blending and microchimerism.

  But when the choice was death or it’s complicated, many people chose the complications.

  Forrest puffed his cheeks as he sighed. “It can happen. Usually when the tissue has been damaged by radiation or mishandled during cold storage.”

  Nothing the doctor was saying made him feel better. “When were my spare organs irradiated or mishandled? If you’re having issues with the vats, you know damn well where to find me.”

  Forrest’s eyes narrowed. “It’s always a risk to resequenced an organ.”

  “We’re Omega bred, Forrest, and war-form capable. We don’t have DNA micro-fracturing.”

  Forrest shoved his finger right into his neck where a tattoo would have been. “Sure. When you can get your Omega-bred organs to grow at all. War-form capable wolves have the highest biomass failure rates. Nobody has attempted to re-sequence a male-originating war-form liver into a female war-form liver. The fact it didn’t work isn’t the biggest surprise I’ve ever had. The technology was only a few decades old back on Earth and developed for humans. Don’t be surprised when something doesn’t work.”