NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  “The best,” he said without arrogance as he pulled off his second sock. “Lead Engineer, actually.”

  She might have asked why he was taking off his boots, but compared to everything else, of course. Sure. A Commander who had solo-piloted a shuttle between ships outside of an optimal flight window to abduct her taking off his boots to fly home? Why not. Get comfortable.

  She tossed her bag into the little alcove before plunking herself in the co-pilot’s seat. She buckled her harness while scanning the control panels. A number of the usual suspects, but quite a few things she didn’t recognize.

  Rainer took the starboard seat, waited a few seconds for the power-up to finish, then deftly keyed through engine start. The shuttle began to wriggle on its spindly legs as the generator disc spun up.

  A display illuminated mid-board showing a diagram of the two nacelles and the disc, along with various values. Rainer focused on the disc’s spin-up, and the nacelles powering on. He checked his watch again.

  “Twenty-one minutes,” he said, mostly to himself. “Should work out.”

  The view through the three small windows along the port side of the shuttle revealed the cargo bay crew scrambling away from the ship. Nobody wanted to be turned into jerky by an engine. So at what point was Rainer going to start the proper launch sequence? It would kind of be required if he intended to leave. There were some cargo bay doors in front of them.

  Rainer’s attention remained on finalizing the start, and she’d known him for all of fifteen of those twenty-one minutes, but she knew the face of an engineer (or pilot) anticipating a problem. His fingers moved on his console, and the humming and wriggling changed in reaction to whatever adjustments he made.

  All shuttles shimmied, rattled, and wriggled while they stumbled through jobs they weren’t built for. This particular shuttle was likely stolen (although could a Commander steal a shuttle?) and had some new engines strapped to its aging tail assembly, with a senior-level engineer who had decided to solo fly it at the same time he clearly had to nursemaid it.

  Time for a more detailed inventory of the controls and console. Just in case she really did have to steer this bucket while Rainer talked sweet nothings to the engines.

  The wriggling intensified to throbbing.

  “Greaaaatttt.” She touched the hull stress panel, and spun the 3D diagram around to see where the hull was being torqued, and hot spots formed. The legs, obviously, were taking the brunt of it, and hot spots formed on the sides of the snub nose right under their compartment as the vibrations from the tail traveled forward. All normal, except for the bay doors still being closed, and the comms now chirping through the speakers about NightPiercer Shuttle What The Hell Are You Doing.

  Rainer’s fingers brushed the console. The cargo bay warning lights and horn started to spin.

  “The hell,” she blurted out.

  “Command staff override,” Rainer said. The massive doors ground into motion. “After Sunderer and LightStrike were lost and couldn’t be salvaged, it was decided that all ships develop executive command codes so that command staff from any other ship can override any door lock.”

  “What?”

  “One of those dirty little executive staff secrets.”

  The cargo doors opened like a beast’s metal jaws, and the void waited for them on the other side.

  She hated this part.

  Once the doors locked open, the gravity in the bay switched off. Magnetic grips on the bottom of the shuttle’s feet held it into place as the engines spiraled up further. Hull stress looked mighty hideous on the forward tiles and belly plates as the engines torqued the ancient frame.

  CLUNK

  Rainer released the magnets.

  G-forces shoved them both backwards as the ship plunged into the void.

  For thirty terrifying seconds she fell into nothing.

  Then the G decreased, and with it came the terrifying sensation of drifting and semi-weightlessness. Shuttles couldn’t compensate for acceleration forces, nor did they have artificial gravity. The acceleration forces were just to shoot the shuttle out of the bay before it drifted too high and couldn’t clear the doors. The pilots (and anything else on board) had to deal with the disorientation for several moments.

  “Lost a tile, port side,” she reported without thinking, “and you should consider the loads the tail’s port side is taking.” The port nacelle was not running even with its sibling, torquing the tail and skin panels. Rainer’s fingers moved across the console with practiced ease, and while the nacelle still ran out of sync, he adjusted the shuttle’s angle of attack to ease the strain on the tail structure.

  Just another shuttle trip. If it wasn’t the reactor core running hot, or the control rods getting broken, or tiles ripping off, it was this.

  The acceleration forces eased, and the engines throttled down to a gentle cruise, increasing the weightlessness to something like being in water. NightPiercer’s light-punctured hull lay far in the distance, and Ark quickly retreated behind them. A quick calculation said it’d be three hours at their current speed. The new engines had some kick to them, although the hull of the shuttle didn’t appreciate the additional stresses.

  Only when he seemed somewhat satisfied that the shuttle was not going to fall into pieces—although his vigilance suggested he expected something to go wrong, even if his bare feet said complete control—she asked a simple question. “Why?”

  The lights of the console reflected oddly in his green eyes. “Why what?”

  “Don’t play dumb.” She tried to keep her voice composed like during a Crèche interview. Show no weakness. Not in front of this wolf. Not in front of any of them.

  “Crèche ordered it so,” Rainer said dryly.

  “We both know this isn’t how Crèche does things. Or at least you should know, because you’re executive staff. Spit it out. Why am I married to you? Why am I going to NightPiercer?”

  “Would it make you feel better if you knew I was not pleased about this either?”

  “No, that doesn’t make me feel better. I like the idea of being locked in with you even less. None of this is how it works. So why did the rules get broken for you? I know damn well they weren’t broken for me.”

  Rainer gave her a long, sharp look that carved her up and weighed all the pieces of her. “I wish you were not so perfectly my type.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Although I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s what Crèche specializes in, isn’t it? Analyzing you and determining what your type is.”

  Was that a compliment, or a warning? So much bitterness dripped from his tone that it scalded her. So they were married, he didn’t want to be, and he resented being attracted to her?

  “When did you find out about this?” She changed the topic a bit. He’d known all this was negotiated some time ago, but he might have had the actual date sprung on him.

  A strange look from him. “I’ve known for eight months this was being negotiated.”

  “Eight months!”

  His strange look remained. Not quite a frown, not quite confusion. “When did Ark tell you?”

  “Yesterday,” she snarled.

  A flicker of something. “You were supposed to have been told two months ago. I specifically requested this not be a surprise. It seemed unfair, given it wasn’t a surprise to me.”

  Her gut sank into some nameless abyss, filled with an emotion she couldn’t name.

  Rainer turned his attention back to the starfield. “You should know I fought this, but was unsuccessful. It does not change that I have absolutely no interest in having children in this void.”

  Almost everyone had reproductive cells collected, but no one was forced to parent. Before she could prod him with another question, he looked directly at her. “Intractable cryo-survival. NightPiercer’s Crèche decided the solution was an arranged marriage in the style of Earth antiquity. You were chosen as the right she-wolf for the job. When all things were weighed, I was deemed more
important to NightPiercer than you were to Ark.”

  “I see,” she said, trying to parse the cruel truth that NightPiercer’s Lead Engineer was more essential than one of Ark’s Livestock Crèche staff, along with the obvious explanation for why all this was happening. Intractable cryo-survival. His sperm didn’t survive freezing. Either wholly dead upon thaw, or alive but unviable and would not result in a pregnancy, even using direct implantation techniques.

  Nobody had figured out what caused sub-optimal or poor cryo-survival, although it did appear to have a hereditary component, and was typically accompanied by lower fertility or even sub-fertility, or the maddening problem of lower potency. She’d dealt with a few buck rabbits like that. Their fertility appeared fine under a microscope, but didn’t result in as many pregnancies as it should have.

  It was a problem that had been documented back on Earth, so while being out in space might have worsened it, it wasn’t a uniquely extraterrestrial problem.

  How many compromises had been made, and where? Clearly his willingness to parent had been disregarded completely. His suitability to parent might also be out the window. And their being paired might have been based not on her and Rainer being a good partnership, but on her being Crèche (and having a clinical understanding of the situation), young (so they could try for multiple years if needed), the right sex and species, having excellent biopsy results, and having been from a mother who had another daughter.

  Great. Just…. Just great. All this might have been arranged for Rainer years ago, and everyone had been waiting for her to mature just enough to slap them together.

  “I am not going to condemn my children to a life in this void,” he added suddenly, fiercely, a growl edging his voice.

  She scrunched herself into her seat, or tried, given she was mostly weightless. Her contraceptive implant still sat under her hip, and if he was going to talk like that, it could stay there until things settled down. And since it was going to be… natural… she could expect to be… serviced… at least once or twice a cycle. For however long it took to get her pregnant.

  Oh, all this just sounded so wonderful. So wonderful. The news got better and better.

  His seething silence became unbearable. So she asked, “What was I traded for?”

  “What?” He startled out of his thoughts.

  “Ark didn’t just give me to NightPiercer. What did you have to pay for me? What am I worth?”

  Rainer surprised her with a dark chuckle. “I haven’t been officially told, but I have deduced based on cargo manifests over the past few months that you were traded for a hive of bees.”

  Managing the hives was one of the greatest Biome challenges. Every colonization plan of Earth had bees as a critical component. It was actually news when a new queen had set up shop and a hive was thriving.

  “I can’t confirm it, but I learned a hive of bees, complete with queen, was shipped to Ark six weeks ago, listed on the cargo manifest as several hundred fertilized duck eggs.” His attention returned to the nacelle.

  NightPiercer had become more visible, now a sleek shape against the starfield, dotted with lights. Halfway there. The sensor readings seemed odd, though. She frowned as readings spiked and data jumped across the screens.

  An explosion smashed the shuttle sideways.

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  If it was an alarm, horn, siren, or warning of any kind: it was going off.

  Lachesis shook off the disorientation, blocked out the spinning and whirling as the shuttle tumbled through space, sparks spewed from panels behind her, and things vented and smoked around her. Nothing was familiar, what the—

  This was a NightPiercer shuttle, and at the moment, they were tumbling away from the ship at a terrifying speed while the shuttle did its best impression of flaming space trash.

  “Take control!” Rainer shouted at her over the din of alarms and chaos. He unbuckled his harness and drifted towards the aft section where sparks spewed out from behind panels.

  “Where the hell are you going?” She didn’t know how to fly this thing. The shuttle lurched on its x-axis. She scanned the controls, trying to ignore how the nacelle and disc display had turned charming shades of fiery red and blinked values that couldn’t be good. Time to take inventory of what was working. It would be the shorter list.

  Life support didn’t appear to be trashed, and it seemed like they still had—sort of—main power, although they were clearly venting something into space, and from the readings she hazarded the port nacelle had exploded. There were still crazy readings from it, so maybe it was still attached, or maybe it wasn’t and debris just waved around in space sending back worthless data. The generator disc may have been damaged as well. In which case they were so very, very, very screwed.

  She brushed at her right eye, and her hand came back wet. Red. Blood. Her blood. Drops of blood drifted around her. Several panels around and above her had exploded, spewing shards and bits everywhere, and dangling wires. Some shrapnel had sliced through her clothing and dug into her shoulder.

  Her head seemed clear, and another quick prodding of her scalp revealed only debris in her hair, but nothing lodged into her skin. Time to fly the shuttle. She could bleed at the same time. If the generator disc was damaged, she had to conserve all their momentum to glide this bucket back to a ship. Any ship. There was no such thing as rescue.

  Metal tore behind her.

  She whipped around once more as bits of fabric started to drift in the air.

  Rainer, in war-form, dug his claws around one of the panels, ripped up the other side, flung it away, and plunged his claw right into the pile of wires and tubing. Sparks showered and burned him from the opened hatch above him leading to the tail’s access port.

  Tawny-silver timber-wolf pelt, except for the thick plasma scar that crawled down his neck and shoulder and half his right side. His hind claws ripped holes in the grate beneath him, anchoring him to the chaos, and he used his front claws to pry open another panel. Sparks rained onto him. Burning wires lashed into his fur. The scent of burning skin started to mix with everything else. Whatever was venting from the panels had to have been coolant—it iced, then scalded the fur and skin underneath.

  “Gaia,” she breathed in horrified realization. War-form regenerated, and he was counting on being able to out-regenerate being burned and frozen alive.

  He snarled at her and barred his huge fangs.

  “Right. Right. Not going to distract you. Steering, steering, thrusters, thrusters—” she chatted to herself while a possibly-raging-war-form tore the shuttle apart behind her.

  The shuttle clanked and rattled as he crawled up into the access panel of the tail structure. She closed that out too, and the burning, and the cold draft mixed with heat, and the disorientation and swerving looping G-forces and all the other nonsense. She needed to stabilize the shuttle and wrestle it onto a path back towards NightPiercer. Nothing else mattered.

  She figured out the controls for the maneuvering thrusters. They were on the belly of the shuttle, although two on the port side had been damaged. Whatever had blown out the engine nacelle—or the tail, perhaps—had taken some control lines with it. A few smacks on the panel brought the hull stress gauges back online, and from the diagram, they’d lost all their port side aft ceramic shielding. It had probably ripped off the hull, tearing all kinds of wiring and sensors when it went, and caused things in the panels on her side of the cabin to explode.

  More ripping and clunking and burning sounds from the back of the shuttle. Gauges and panels danced. Whatever Rainer was doing, it didn’t seem to be improving anything.

  “On the other hand, doesn’t seem to be making it worse,” she told herself as a wash of sparks spit out of the access tube all over the floor, and another wash of sparks spewed from the exposed wiring to her right. She ducked instinctively and mashed controls as she tried to calculate the best course back towards NightPiercer.

  Rainer appeared behind her, now i
n human form and naked, breathing hard, and sort of charred, burned, and bloody in various ways she didn’t have the available brainpower to process. He asked, “How are we looking?”

  “How do you think this looks?” she retorted as her fingers flashed across the controls. Things half-worked, didn’t work at all, didn’t work as intended. Looked like a shitshow to her, and Rainer just drifted behind her shoulder like he was checking her homework. “Are you naked? Of course you’re naked.”

  The tiny primitive stupid part of her brain liked what she saw. Nice final thing to see before they plunged into the cosmos to see which one ate the other first. All carved muscle and angular lines and burns and frostbite. He’d made the most of the glorious raw materials he’d started with.

  He leaned across her and tapped on the center console, bringing up various engine views, none of which said much of anything between flickering and jumping about. “Port nacelle blew out, we’re venting the magnetic plasma, and the generator disc has been cracked. The tail assembly is more or less intact.”

  He powered down the generator disc entirely. She paused in her tapping to say, “All the shielding on that side is ripped up.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  How the hell had he known? Because tiles ripping off the front of the nose was so typical when a nacelle exploded? Well, if he was such a brilliant mind, maybe he could figure out something else. “If I’m about to lose the right engine, what are the odds of you getting me back my port thrusters? And out of my way?”

  “We aren’t going to lose the engine entirely.” He pointed at a small gauge under the starboard nacelle’s display. “That’s the power remaining on that nacelle. I’ll see if I can re-wire one of the port thrusters for you.”

  “These nacelles can store power?” she asked. One of the big problems with a magnetic/ion drive was the generator disc: no functional disc, no go.

  “I told you I was the best.”

  “Your engine exploded,” she reminded the glorious talking statue as she tried to convince the shuttle to crab-glide its way back around towards NightPiercer, keeping the aft of the ship pointed more towards the Sun, and the still-intact starboard shielding towards Jupiter.