“I haven’t checked,” he said.
She sat down on the couch and curled her legs as demurely as she could manage. “Tell me how much Crèche strong-armed you into this.”
Rainer headed over to the very small kitchen-like area, which included a sink, two burners on a glass-top stove, and a small refrigeration unit, along with an array of cabinets. He opened one of them, which contained unmarked bottles of scratched-up, milky glass, and some battered-looking glasses. He brought down two glasses, and one of the bottles, this one sort of blue and containing an amber-ish liquid. He poured them both a drink and passed her one.
“Guess that’s my answer.” She accepted her glass and sipped. Proper whiskey. Bitter, vulgar, and probably brewed in a dirty bucket, but better than algae swill by several astronomical units.
She remembered who she was with and set her whiskey down rather than continue to drink it.
“I am not getting you drunk so I can smother you with a pillow,” he said, bristling with insult.
“Why did you take your boots off?”
“Excuse me?”
“In the shuttle. You took your boots off. You knew you’d need to go war-form.” She started to tremble with anger, and fear, and all the emotions of the day.
Rainer settled himself into his chair. “I always fly with my boots off because I always expect trouble.”
“I don’t believe you,” she rasped. She grabbed the whiskey and slammed it back, gut churning miserably. The tears tried to start again. “You kept checking your watch. You knew something was going to go wrong, and you knew when it was going to happen! Why are you persisting in this damn lie! We’re married, you can confess it to me and I can’t rat you out, so stop being a coward and admit it.”
Rainer set his whiskey down and shifted to the couch. She scrunched away from him until he pressed her into the corner, looming over her, but not quite touching her. His scent engulfed her, and she swallowed, confused, and pressed against his chest with her hands to try to stop him, brace herself, touch him, something.
“I am going to tell you this one time, Lachesis.” He lowered his face to hers. “I did not make Commander before thirty because I am good at making friends, or by murdering my competition. I made Commander because I am the best Engineer on this ship, and because I am equally devoted to the souls on this ship. I maintain NightPiercer’s heart, and without me, and what I do, this ship will die. I will not let that happen to my pack. You are my wife, and that makes you the single most important member of my pack. I will never trust her safety to anyone. I will not ask her to rely on anyone else, especially not thrill-happy pilots who do it for the laughs and danger-pay. She will know she is treasured, and valued, and the singular jewel in my crown. That is how I was raised, and perhaps your Crèche-trained mind will consider that inappropriate, dangerous, and toxic,” he barred his teeth in a sharp, feral grin, “but that is the wolf I am.”
She breathed hard, fingertips still resting against his chest. His scent overwhelmed her, she couldn’t think straight. Every single instinct wanted her to believe him, and it wanted him to kiss her, for his hands to run over her body, for his lips against her skin.
“Are we clear?” Rainer’s low growl caressed her.
“I still don’t trust you,” she whispered.
He moved away from her, taking with him the heat of his presence and body. “I’m not asking for trust. I want a truce.”
“Why am I really here? Crèche didn’t make you do anything. What is this really about?”
“I’m not asking for your trust, nor am I offering you mine. I was not prepared to react as strongly to you as I have. I know you were not expecting the same. I want a truce.”
She was in no position to negotiate with him, but from the silver burns around his neck, he didn’t have a strong position to negotiate from either. He knew she had nowhere to run. There was no going back to Ark, there was no fleeing to LightBearer trying to build a new life, there was only NightPiercer.
“Fine,” she said, throat dry. “But I’m sleeping alone.”
“I am content to keep sleeping on the floor in the other bedroom.” He gestured lazily towards the other doorway.
“I’m glad you’re so very easy to live with,” she said sarcastically.
“It’s your den,” he said, throwing the dangerous word out there like bait she wasn’t nearly stupid enough to take.
Without another word, he went to gather up more blankets.
Drifitng In
She didn’t want to cry. She tried not to cry. And up until the moment when she’d crawled under the covers of Rainer’s bed, she’d been okay.
But in the darkness, under blankets, with all the strange smells—especially his—it’d been too much. Her body hurt.
Rainer had taken a few blankets and pillows and curled up in the empty second bedroom without comment.
She couldn’t even message her mother or father. Ask for advice, sympathy, help, anything. Just to hear their voice. Or cry to her little sister. She and Clotho had always squabbled, but she’d always had a playmate and someone else in the room with her while she slept. She hadn’t slept alone since…she could barely remember.
Just when she dozed off from sheer exhaustion she’d wake crying again. She wanted to howl. Sing to the abyss and an absent Moon.
Rainer paced in sometime after midnight while she curled into a ball and wept.
“Go away,” she rasped to him. She flung one of the pillows at his lupine shadow.
A soft growl of concern.
“I said go away!” She flung another pillow at him. “Go away, go away, go away! I’ll cry all damn night if I want!”
The lupine shadow retreated to the doorway and watched from just outside the door, but kept his head across the threshold so the door wouldn’t close unless she wanted to squish his skull.
Exhausted, she finally fell asleep.
She dragged herself out of bed when what passed for morning came around, her body exhausted and battered from the day before, and her eyes dry and swollen from crying. Cold water didn’t do much for it.
Rainer was already awake, buttoning up his shirt, as she wandered into the front room, feeling sort of lost and unsure what the hell her life was now. Before she’d have gotten dressed, hit the gym, had breakfast, then gone to work.
“Quartermaster sent up your clothes.” Rainer nodded to the folded pile of clothing on the couch.
She stared blankly at the sooted greys, blacks, tans, creams. The bulk of everyone’s wardrobe was made up of ship-issued clothing due to rationing. Most owned a few of their own personal items for special occasions or personal enjoyment, but everyone wore more or less the same things going about their lives.
“Lachesis,” Rainer prompted.
“What?” She didn’t have the energy to do anything except stare at the unfamiliar clothing. Her mind couldn’t go any farther.
“Breakfast.”
Her heart was broken, and he thought she cared about breakfast.
She went back into the bedroom and crawled under the blankets.
“We’re expected.”
She didn’t care.
“Lachesis, I know that—”
“You don’t know anything!” She surged up and flung a pillow at him. “You don’t know anything. You told me this ship is your pack, well I just lost my pack. I lost all of them, and I will never see them again. They’re across that void and they might as well be dead!”
Impossibly, the tears started again. He didn’t understand, and he couldn’t understand, and she didn’t care if he did or didn’t, she didn’t want his sympathy. She wanted to be left alone.
“They aren’t dead. You can write to them. They will write back.”
“It’s not the same and you know it.” She hated how she couldn’t stop sobbing, but the howls in her heart wouldn’t give up. “You’re still here with your pack.”
“Pack? That’s a daring choice of words.”
“You know what I meant!”
“Let’s presume I do. Let’s also presume that if we don’t show up at breakfast Crèche and Medical are going to start sniffing around.”
Her heart cracked again against his iron tone. “Can’t have that, can we.”
“You’re already expected at Medical in two hours. My shift starts after breakfast. You’ll be rid of me and have the day to yourself, but you have to get through breakfast. And you need to eat. You haven’t had anything for—” he paused.
“Since Ark.”
“Since Ark.” He muttered a curse to himself about how he’d missed that the previous evening. Dinner hadn’t been the highest priority.
“Go away.” She burrowed back under the blankets.
“Your choice is breakfast, or the wrath of NightPiercer’s Crèche. Which would you like less?”
She knew how Crèche would go. They’d come in here, try to talk to her, then when she snarled at them, and refused to play along, they’d wrangle her to Medical and it’d become a scene. Crèche would win. Medical would win. She’d lose, and she’d get a reputation as either difficult or insane or a little of both.
She’d lose. Over and over and over again she’d lose.
Or she could get up, get dressed, go to breakfast with Rainer, and try to pick up the pieces and glue it all back together again.
Her ancestors had done it. Generation Zero had boarded a ship they hadn’t known wouldn’t explode, or fall apart, left behind billions to die, traveled into the abyss, and lost everything they’d ever known, and built something from what was left. And the something they built didn’t have sunlight, or real seasons, or anything else—it’d all just been scraps and remains and pale imitations.
She was Generation Three, so she didn’t have any right to curl up and die.
Rainer offered her her new comlink. “Required when you’re outside our quarters. Almost identical to Ark’s. I checked.”
She tucked it behind her ear and winced as the nanodes clicked into place on the nerves. Momentary discomfort. She flicked her finger across it, setting it so she wouldn’t hear the ship’s internal chatter. Some people liked to hear the buzz, and various channels, sort of like a cross between an antique police scanner, party line, and radio station. She preferred quiet. “Does it track where I am?”
“Yes, and it can eavesdrop on you and monitor basic vitals. Same as Ark. But not required in our quarters.”
She brushed the device. Rainer would be able to spy on her. “Does the off-switch actually turn it off?”
Rainer cracked a grim smile. “I have destroyed several to verify that yes, the off-switch actually does turn it off.”
She wandered to the bathroom mirror. She looked puffy and red-rimmed. She brushed and re-braided her hair, but putting on one of her new uniforms, devoid of any bars, stripes, or emblems almost broke her again. It hadn’t been the rank or the perks. She’d still gotten ordered around plenty, and had seven bunkmates, and had higher-ups telling her her hobbies were inappropriate.
She touched her left cuff, rubbing the plain, unadorned fabric where previously there had been a solid stripe and a dotted stripe.
A lifetime of work gone.
There was no chance she’d ever work on NightPiercer’s Crèche. Rainer could make all the salty comments about Crèche he wanted, but part of the reason Crèche seemed inscrutable was because Crèche wasn’t pure math. If Crèche had only been genetic diversity, that would have been easy, and a simple computer program could have done it. Crèche was about making sure that sheep didn’t get bred that produced wool, but little meat. Or a lot of meat, but poor quality wool. Or they produced a good mix of both, but grew slowly, were expensive to feed, unthrifty, mean-tempered, or not hardy.
The math guided and informed, but it couldn’t decide. Like the artist who had done the paintings on his walls had probably studied techniques and artists and technical things that made up all the basic raw parts, but the art couldn’t be manufactured. Crèche was an art. Years of familiarity and experience with families and ancestors, and an eye, instinct, and talent that science couldn’t replace.
It was like the soul, or the spark that shaped life, or what made werewolves not human.
She might still have her instincts, and her eye, and her training, but her years of familiarity were limited to Ark’s, populations. It simply could not be transferred to NightPiercer.
She joined Rainer in the front room. He had a couple of tablets clutched in one hand. The top of his shirt collar was still unbuttoned. His neck was red and angry from the silver burns, which had turned an ugly shade of green-black overnight.
“Does that hurt as bad as it looks?” she asked.
“Worse,” he said, voice steady.
“Is it your first time being silvered?” she asked again, softly.
“Yes. Security is very heavy handed with us when we’re not in our human form. Remember that.”
“I noticed not even the wolves liked us wearing our fur.”
“Is it different on Ark?”
“Not really, I suppose. There are centuries of distrust between our species. We were part of their nightmares for thousands of years, and we knew they’d have done terrible things to us if they’d known about us. When the world ended, they found out another species had been living in secret all this time, who claimed Earth loved them better, and they had the best of everything for it.”
“And my grandfather did exactly what an Earth-Alpha of his time did. Defended his pack, and made everyone else settle for scraps,” Rainer said. “Then there was Sunderer. We are different species, with different biological imperatives, customs, programming. They’re afraid of us because we can suddenly turn into a monster from their nightmares.”
“Sunderer gave them a reason to be afraid of some of those biological imperatives,” she said warily. “You can’t possibly be defending what happened there.”
“I’m not. I’m blaming our ancestors and the Alpha that set back interspecies relations a thousand years.”
On Ark the senior officers had usually eaten in the wardroom, or in their own quarters as a privilege of rank. Rainer, however, led her to the regular mess hall, which seemed similar to Ark’s, with rows of long tables and hungry people tucked up to meals, and a chow line, and even a table stacked with algae cakes and bowls of crickets.
“Not so different from Ark,” Rainer commented as they stood in line. They were late and were getting the crusty left overs from the serving trays.
“It’s interesting how all the ships were built by different teams, but ended up with similar attributes,” she commented, since staring blankly at the wall would get attention. She reminded herself once more about how the original refugees had probably not felt the will to eat or live. As long as Rainer didn’t beat the stuffing out of her and try to murder her again, she’d do fine. Rainer seemed like the type if she left him alone to work he probably wouldn’t bother her.
Except when he wanted sex.
Which sounded like it’d be much sooner than later.
“Back then it was easy for information to change hands,” Rainer was saying, “Hade wouldn’t let his team help other teams, but he shared his blueprints and design specifications openly.”
“He did?” Hade’s reputation hadn’t been one of generosity or benevolence.
“My grandfather’s reputation as a territorial, resource-hoarding asshole is somewhat exaggerated. With the technology infrastructure on Earth at the time it was easy to share vast amounts of data instantly. He maintained a central repository of all the designs, research, data, design tests, everything. Publically available to anyone who wanted to see it. Knowledge, CPU cycles, and bandwidth were three things that were not in short supply.”
Each of the trestle tables had three segments, and the inside segment of one particular table had only one other person sitting at it, even though everyone else was packed in tight. Rainer led her to this segment.
“Commander,” the hum
an male sitting at the table finishing his toast said.
“Lachesis, Lieutenant Jenks. Jenks, my wife, Lachesis,” Rainer said as he sat next to Jenks.
“Call me Lake,” Lachesis said. Something else not different: the awkward flash of panic that crossed a face when they realized they couldn’t pronounce Lachesis. Jenks had the Operations emblem on his shoulder: generic management staff, familiar with the important sub-systems of the ship, but not trained to directly manage any of them. They were people managers, go-betweens, and facilitators.
The hall had gotten a little quieter, with heads twitching as everyone tried to glance at her without being obvious about it.
Rainer surveyed the room with a baleful look that tucked everyone back into their food and returned the noise level to the typical din.
“Don’t take offense,” Jenks told her. “No one from another ship has come to NightPiercer in thirty years. A new face is exotic.”
“I’m sure,” she said around the feeling like he’d punched her in the gut.
She turned her attention to her food before he saw the tears start. Familiar food: peanuts, soybeans, toast instead of steamed buns, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, a sausage patty, crispy crickets, and so on. Rainer scrolled through his tablets as he ate. The toast was a novelty and served with ample amounts of rhubarb-raspberry and rhubarb-blackberry jam.
“Finish this.” She pushed the rest of her tray towards Rainer after she’d eaten the savory patty, some lettuce, the toast, and peanuts.
Rainer glanced at the tray, then looked back at his tablets.
“I can’t finish it. Eat it,” she said again. Sharing food between wolves was an ancient ritual of esteem and caring. She gulped down the nerves. It wasn’t like that, she told herself. She’d been given too much and didn’t have Sonja nearby to hoover the rest. Rainer might as well do it. That physique did not survive on standard portions.
“You are short a few meals,” Rainer said.
“So are you. Just eat it.” He had silver wounds on his neck. His body would need thousands of calories to repair that damage, and that was before the thousands of calories he’d burned being in war-form and regenerating the previous day. Shifting forms consumed several hundred calories on its own. He wasn’t showing it, and didn’t smell like it, but he was probably so hungry he’d eat every algae cake and cricket in the mess hall.
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