Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)
Page 31
Lachesis eyed Forrest, her scent distrustful and wary. “So why wasn’t Rainer’s heart transplant in his medical records? Did he get a re-sequenced heart? A donor?”
Rainer cocked his head to the side. Why was she asking that, like that? He observed, secretly enjoying the way her brain turned this unknown puzzle around. “I have a vat-grown heart.”
Ang, aggravated, threw up her hands. “It probably just didn’t get retrieved with the regular bundle. Transplant histories are stored with the organ vat data.”
“Why are medical records so fractured?” Rainer asked, mildly perturbed.
“Ask Tech,” Forrest said.
They needed to get planetside. This was getting absurd.
Lachesis looked at him, and something in her eyes made his heart crunch. Some aching need in her own soul that echoed his own. The not-voice howled, and for a gut-wrenching second, his mind shoved a one of his nightmares at him: being in a forest while the Earth shook under him, and the sound of the land tearing like cheap fabric and the vibrations and fury of the planet coming up through his paws.
His mind cleared, but her grip on his soul did not. He shook his head, counted to five, and indulged the hot and metallic anger simmering in his veins. “A new heart was part of the deal.”
“And she’ll get one,” Ang said. “Crèche granted authorization to vat-grow her own heart. The biomass is viable and it should be ready in about seven months.”
Lachesis gasped, and even he had to admit the minor delay in delivery would be worth the result.
A nurse brought a fresh band. Lachesis sighed as Forrest placed it around her upper arm. She pleaded, “How about just a few days without it?”
“Nope,” Forrest said. “You’re still Critical Officer, and this time, you’re even an officer.”
“Hah. So funny. Is your Dying Art stand up comedy?”
“My wife asks me that. No appreciation from you she-wolves. Tough crowd.” Forrest gave her a real, genuine smile, and his scent conveyed he enjoyed she-wolves. “My Dying Art is I am a skilled tailor. As if I don’t get enough time sewing things when your husband is around.”
Rainer smiled, pleased by her change in demeanor. Now she would perhaps realize her great value, and she didn’t need to be ashamed of what she was. Being a feral was something to be managed on a ship, it wasn’t a disease.
Forrest waved them away. “I’ll sign both of you back onto the regular duty rosters effective tomorrow at first shift rotation. No doubles for either of you for the next four weeks.”
Rainer snorted. He had ten thousand pings waiting for him, and they were piling up by the hour. Engineering had been fine during his absence—mainly because he trusted his chain of redundancies, and Captain Tsu had been a previous Lead Engineer—but it was time to get caught up, and very much time to start planning how to convince Tsu it was time to act.
They couldn’t sit around and wait any longer.
Forrest smirked. “Oh, you’ll obey, Third Officer. Keenan wants Lake healthy enough to remove her implant. That means you also need to recover from the stress of LightBearer. Your sperm viability is probably zero. Keenan wants the pup she’s been promised.”
“She what?” Lachesis whispered.
Rainer growled. “We have more significant concerns than breeding. LightBearer is a look at our own fate. Generation Four is the last generation.”
Forrest tucked his tablet against his chest. “I’ve heard your arguments before, Commander, and like I’ve explained to you: I’m not getting involved. We can’t just stop having children. It takes twenty years to produce a productive member of society, and Civilization Management has their breeding schedules mapped out for the next twenty years. Maybe we won’t be here in twenty years, but if we start acting like that’s a sure thing, we definitely won’t be here in another forty.”
“We aren’t going to be here in forty years either way, Forrest,” Rainer said. “Not you, not me, and not your son.”
Forrest, unflinching, gestured to the door. “We’re done. You can go.”
“Have you finished your report for Tsu?” Rainer put his foot up on the coffee table.
“Sent off a this morning,” she said, dragging her hands through her unbound hair. “You?”
“Same. Juan omitted any mention of your run-in with Ersu, as expected.” Rainer buried his aggravation with his most trusted officer down deep. Juan had failed his first big test, but it didn’t mean he’d fail the second when it came along.
Lachesis stared at the rug and absently rubbed her medication band. Forrest had said it’d take time for her irritated skin to heal from all the needling. According to her, she hadn’t felt a needle in four days.
He opened his mouth to ask about the pup they’d been threatened with. She hadn’t talked about it, but it’d been on her mind. He saw it in how she kept looking at him with that far-away gaze, like she watched him from a safe distance, and kept deciding it wasn’t time to approach. She still didn’t want to accept what they were, not that he’d done much to earn her faith.
Her love would be hard-won, and only because he’d made it difficult for himself.
Instead, she said, a little bit of an edge to her voice and scent, “You got the Navigator and pilot you wanted. I don’t think I can clean up that Telemetry data. NightPiercer is the best and strongest ship. We need to decide what we’re going to do before LightBearer decides what to do.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because if we decide to set up shop on Pluto but they’ve launched for Earth, they’re never going to get to us. Earth is one-way.”
“Lachesis, there’s no way they could make Pluto,” he said quietly. ‘That’s going to be, what, forty AU, give or take a unit? Earth is going to be four. The ship might eventually drift to Pluto, but the crew won’t.”
None of the terrestrial objects in the solar system were good candidates for a new home for them. Mars was too close to a violent Earth and was a dead world. Titan had an atmosphere and gravity, but it was toxic. Pluto had a thin atmosphere and some gravity, but almost no light and was freezing cold. Pluto was the theoretical best of a large number of very bad choices.
She blinked against a sudden glimmer swimming in the bottom of her eyes. She flicked her gaze to him, jaw set. “How theoretical are these engines doing FTL?”
“Very,” he said. In his head, it all made sense, and he could see how all the metal and plasma and particles and spacetime would fold and flow around and under the ship. It didn’t mean he’d actually be able to bend one of the fundamental laws of physics.
“Not worth thinking about?”
What was she asking? “That depends on how many people want to have a serious conversation about it.”
She sighed. “I’d also need a hell of a simulator. And more CPU cycles than we can win playing poker. Not that I’m allowed down in your den of sin.”
He allowed himself a smile. “The biggest obstacle to anything short of Earth becoming a new Eden will be Bennett and Keenan. I’m afraid you may be right about their power couple status.”
She lifted her head. “Their what?”
He hesitated, then sighed. “Another old Earth term. It means a couple where both members are powerful.”
She wrinkled her nose. “That must have been a human term.”
He sorted through his vague recollections. Probably coined because a lot of human relationships had been extremely unequal, with one partner being powerful and the other being support staff or worse. It conjured an old, salty disgust and the surprising taste of bile in the back of his throat. Fucking offensive. Humans were so easily intimidated by each other.
“Are you sure your heart isn’t a human donor or made from some human-distilled biomass?” she asked, half joking, but half serious too.
“It took a werewolf DNA sequence, so that would be an interesting trick,” he said. “I liked to watch old Earth documentaries as a pup. I am a font of strange memories, I told you that.”
“Exactly, and she’ll work herself out of a job.” Bennett was scared of Earth. Every time Rainer said Gaia the human’s scent flinched. “If the Repopulation Protocols go as expected, Keenan and Bennett’s sections will be mothballed within ten years. A few will transition to help manage the settlements and livestock, but the rest will all become redundant. Their prestige and purpose will be gone. As long as NightPiercer exists, their futures are secure.”
Lachesis frowned, thoughtful. “Then perhaps it’s time for you to become what Bennett fears most.”
Rainer cocked his head to the side. “And that would be?”
She smiled at him and pushed her finger into his chest. “You already figured it out. Become a model officer.”
Stripes Make Right
She burst out of sleep. What the hell was that noise?
Rainer threw the blankets off both of them and shoved his comm behind his ear. She grabbed hers as the klaxon blared from their tablets and lights shone from the main room.
>> GENERAL QUARTERS. <<
>> GENERAL QUARTERS. <<
>> GENERAL QUARTERS. <<
“What the ever loving hell?” she asked.
“Juan, report,” Rainer was saying, hand behind his ear as he adjusted his comm. She flinched as hers lashed into her nerves and was met with a jumble of emergency cross-chatter.
Whatever was happening was not a fucking drill.
Their tablets flickered like bright red blots in the darkness. The screen washed red, split in two panes, one with scrolling text ordering various officers to stations, and above that, in larger text:
>> WARRANT OFFICER LACHESIS : BRIDGE <<
Her fingers clenched around the edge. Her heart thumped.
>> COMMANDER RAINER: EMERGENCY SPOOL PROCEDURE AUTHORIZED. <<
“Oh hell,” she breathed.
Rainer grabbed her as she pulled her uniform over her head.
“Rainer?” she asked his haunted expression, like all this was a horrible nightmare they’d been sharing.
“LightBearer,” he said.
“LightBearer?” There was too much chatter on the channels to understand exactly what was going on, or what LightBearer had to do with any of this.
“That Gaia-damned idiot has fired up the engines,” Rainer snarled, the flickering red lights of the screens in the room washing his face into something twisted and not human.
“What?! No! That can’t be right! That’s insane!”
“That’s what I’m getting told, and right or wrong, Tsu’s ordered an emergency spool. In twenty-two minutes you’re going to have a handful of ship that has to go somewhere.”
“No, no, we can’t go to full power like this.” She needed time to plan an acceleration curve, the deceleration curve, and figure out where to point the damn ship. Crew had to secure crates, Crèche needed to lock down everything, people needed to be in quarters.
He grabbed her by both arms and kissed her, hot and hard for a second. “I will be waiting for you.”
Waiting where? The bridge? Engineering?
Gaia’s fucking River?
“Rainer—” she said, but he was already running for the door, barefoot. “Don’t you dare die on me, you stupid wolf!”
The bridge was organized chaos. Tsu sat in the center of it, barefoot, and Bennett—if the boots were any suggestion—had been the one on duty.
“Sir.” She glanced at the view screen, which showed various overlays of ship systems, and in between it, absorbing the center pane, a magnified view of LightBearer. Against Jupiter’s bright bulk the silhouette of LightBearer had obviously rotated on its y-axis, pointing its engines at the planet, but the forward hull had developed a strange bulge. The overlays provided by real-time Telemetry suggested something was venting into space.
“Warrant Officer,” Captain Tsu barked.
“Sir.” She gathered herself and faced him.
“LightBearer, for whatever blasted reason, fired up its engines.” Tsu pointed at her station. They needed to get far, far away from this situation.
Oh Gaia, no. No, no, no. She had no idea what time it was, but she didn’t need to see the clocks or Telemetry to know Io was on their side of the planet. What was Ersu doing? “Are we sure? That wasn’t the plan we made with Ersu.”
Tsu nodded towards the helm. “We’re sure. Ersu has lost his mind. Telemetry has calculated an estimated blast and debris field. Get us the fuck away from it so we don’t eat the blastwave when their drive section explodes, and so we avoid debris concentration. I don’t want them turning my hull into cheese!”
Debris field?
Oh Gaia…
Ark is—where is Ark? Does Ark know?
Tsu stared at her from his chair, two tablets clutched in his left hand, expression cold iron. “Warrant Officer, this isn’t a drill, and it’s not a box. This is really happening. Your ass, your station.”
Don’t look.
They’re all going to die—
Telemetry’s data came through: a crude projection of the blast and debris chunks when LightBearer ripped itself into pieces. Huge chunks of debris would fling through the system. The Core’s detonation pulse, assisted by the transit of Io, would blast through the system and rip all of them apart.
“Are we sure LightBearer went through a start procedure?” she heard herself ask. It didn’t seem possible. There was a difference between LightBearer exploding due to Core meltdown, or the engines being at acceleration power.
Graves told her from his position, “They confirmed start procedure intentions to Ark over comms forty-two minutes ago.”
Ersu and his command staff had been in denial, but they hadn’t seemed delusional. “What was the message? Where do they think they’re headed?”
“They’re on course for Sunderer. It was a see you later, we’re under way type of message. Ark warned us to keep an eye out. They began to spool eight minutes before Commander Bennett issued general quarters.”
She went completely cold. “Ersu has lost his damned mind. They all have.”
“Years of reduced AG, cold, reduced nutritional variety, bare bones rations, and despair,” Bennett said. “Yes, it’s possible they’ve all lost touch with reality.”
“I don’t care what happened on that ship, I care that that drive section is overloading,” Tsu said, reading the heat maps. “And I can see the hull warping from here. The albedo signature is changing.”
Except what was happening on that ship seemed to keep happening to all of them…
Bennett broke out of his litany of orders to echo what had just passed through her mind. “I thought we were past this.”
Tsu snorted. “Space doesn’t want us here.”
NightPiercer began a slow, deep vibration that rattled through the soles of her feet. She brushed her fingers across a side panel, illuminating the status of the powerplants and discs.
Rainer’s face appeared in one of the panes on the main display, under some of the less important heat maps. He stood at the primary engineering station. Behind him people ran and scampered, and there was a din of noise like rocks smashing into metal.
“Commander,” Tsu said. “Status of the spooling.”
“Eighteen percent,” Rainer replied. “And I would be very grateful if someone could confirm what I’m being told about LightBearer.”
“Ersu has decided to leave for Sunderer early,” Lachesis said, fingers moving as she worked.
Rainer’s expression was unlike anything she’d ever seen. He actually stopped moving or even breathing for a moment.
Tsu checked one of his tablets. “Eighteen percent isn’t fast enough, Commander. Telemetry projects we’ve got about twelve minutes before LightBearer becomes a very dangerous bomb.”
“Understood,” Rainer said matter-of-factly, although what Tsu wanted was impossible. The generator discs would crack
if they were heated too quickly. They’d rattle in their housings, sending vibrations along the hull. The drives were efficient and powerful, and while they were capable of tremendous bursts of thrust and sustained flight, they had to be handled with care during spool.
Lachesis checked the engineering panel under her left palm. “Am I going to have any sort of main engines in ten minutes, Commander?”
“You’ll have at least fifty-six percent.”
Fifty-six percent wasn’t nearly enough. She’d need more thrust and momentum to ride out the wave Telemetry expected to smash into them, and outpace the projectiles sure to get flung their way.
“I need a plan, Lake,” Tsu ordered.
Yeah, so did she. She overlaid her calculations over the dying LightBearer, which suddenly illuminated as an explosion punched out of the midsection.
“Shit.” Tsu growled.
Her hands trembled. The vibrations under her feet increased. Cold needled her arm. “Captain, I need all the available CPU cycles.”
Tsu tapped on his tablet. “Done, but you’re sharing with Rainer.”
There were a few emergency scenarios in the nav system, but they didn’t take into account a threat coming from Jupiter. Everything assumed Jovian gravity would pull things towards it. This wasn’t exactly anything civilization had faced before.
Not spooling fast enough, and the vibrations on the hull showed stresses along the spars in the belly. Rainer was pushing it to spool as quickly as possible. Likely venting plasma to try to heat the metal externally, which meant it wasn’t heating evenly, so the deadly rattle in the bearings pushed the hull in ways it was never designed to take.
On the other hand, their choices were definite death and probably death. Made probably death obvious.