NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  He hesitated another moment, then slowly exchanged his tray for hers as the wolves in the hall watched, and a few of the humans who knew about those hard-ingrained instincts between wolves.

  She looked through her new tablet while he made quick work of her tray, then started in on the algae cakes and crickets from the all-you-can-eat table. Her tablet was similar to Ark’s, all the usual news feeds and chatter boards and maps. She gulped down a lump in her throat. Hers had had messages and emails and reports and things she’d needed for a profession she was no longer part of. This one had nothing waiting for her.

  Should she compose a letter to her parents? What would she tell them? My new husband tried to murder me, but this morning I gave him my food anyway?

  She tried to tell Rainer she could find her own way to Medical, but he refused, and escorted her anyway. Probably to make sure she actually went like she was supposed to.

  A different doctor than the one she’d seen the previous day poked and prodded her. The shrapnel wounds were examined, along with all her various other bumps and bruises, and then she was prodded some more to verify Ark hadn’t sent them a sickly female, even though she’d had an exhaustive exam about six weeks earlier.

  “Will you send me back if I’m not what you ordered?” she asked the human doctor poking her.

  “We’ll try to rehab you if it’s economical to do so,” the doctor replied.

  “And otherwise I become fertilizer?”

  No answer.

  Medical supplies of all types were always in short supply, and many things that had existed on Earth couldn’t be manufactured on ship. Her shrapnel gashes were minor and while on Earth they might have been bandaged, on ship they were flushed, and poultices of aloe and herbs applied for comfort. Doctors relied on natural remedies from Earth’s distant past as much as possible, since plants and tallow could be grown and composted, but needles and saline had to be manufactured and were difficult to recycle. It didn’t surprise Lachesis that NightPiercer wasn’t going to invest a lot into keeping her alive.

  She contributed nothing to the ship. Not even wisdom or experience. More useless than a decorative plant.

  “But,” the doctor said as she finalized tapping some info into her tablet, “aside from the expected signs of stress and these minor injuries, you’re in excellent condition. Nothing to be concerned over.”

  “Has Rainer seen my medical files?” she asked.

  The doctor paused, considered, then said, “Very likely. Spouses have access to that information.”

  “Can you see if he ever requested it?”

  “There’d be no formal record of it,” the doctor said, “You’d have to get Tech to check access logs. He’s the Third Officer. Low level requests like that aren’t logged for him.”

  “Since I’m his wife, can I see his?” Those plasma burns over his body were impressive. She also wanted to see what else came with his intractable cryo-survival. She wasn’t Medical, but she was Crèche. There was plenty of crossover between the two.

  The doctor nodded like this was a normal, uninteresting request. “Let me get it for you. Wait here.”

  Hey-O

  It wasn’t like he had had a plan, exactly. This wasn’t the sort of situation one could plan for. Not the way he’d done things, and not with all the variables in play.

  But he’d had a vague idea of how things would have played out: keep her at arm’s distance for both their sanity, return to NightPiercer, try to soothe her anger, have dinner in the wardroom, let her settle in, try to find a way around Supervision, slowly build trust and understanding.

  Even the shuttle exploding hadn’t exactly been not-part-of-a-plan. Expecting trouble on a shuttle was smart. Especially the two he’d kitted out with upgraded engines. The shuttle being as badly damaged as it was? Not part of the plan. Her being a far-more-competent-than-expected pilot? Also not part of the plan, luckily. Or they’d both be debris.

  He had not expected her to have no idea he was her husband. Ark had been instructed two months earlier to sit her down and tell her the news. He’d expected she’d be some sort of distraught and angry, but to have already had ample time to get over the initial shock so they’d focus on a mutual enemy: Crèche.

  Now she was mad at Crèche, and she hated him.

  Why hadn’t Ark told her? Probably some administrative choice about not wanting to distract her from her duties, disrupt Crèche timetables, and filed it firmly under kicking the can down the old-fashioned road and leaving him to deal with it.

  He’d wanted to hold her at arm’s length while he appraised her and the situation, but she was so, so much more than he’d expected. He’d been given her file—but not her complete file. Crèche liked to play coy with those—and thought he’d been prepared. But he had not been prepared.

  Crèche liked to believe that minds, personalities, and preferences could be quantified through careful analysis and study, putting it all into a complex matrix and mixing personalities and DNA like his mother mixed chemicals in a lab. Crèche admitted the system was not perfect.

  Crèche refused to admit how imperfect it all was.

  He’d played Crèche’s game, though, and now the game was playing him. What was that old Earth term for that? Karma? Karma.

  But for now: a mystery. The shuttle accident required an explanation. A solid one. Lachesis would require absolute evidence that he hadn’t tried to kill her.

  The doors to the shuttlebay slid open for him, and he strode into the massive bay, taking stock of where everything was, and where everything wasn’t. Scent told him who’d passed through recently. Crews crawled over two other shuttles, but the one he’d come in on the previous day still lay in its mangled heap. Someone had wheeled over various toolboxes and crates of supplies, and someone else had swept up bits and pieces of debris that had flaked off upon their belly-flop landing.

  The twisted wreck hadn’t been moved. He could salvage the shuttle, but did he want to? The tiles and metal shielding would eat into reserves intended for NightPiercer.

  But it was the nacelle’s canted position in its housing that pissed him off. The generator disc had been blasted apart, and those parts lost to space. He’d have to look at the fabrication schedules, but they were already at maximum capacity, and had been at maximum capacity for years. They’d been at capacity since before he’d been Lead Engineer. Space wanted to kill them.

  He counted to thirty-eight under his breath.

  Might be better to lose the shuttle and use it for parts. He’d have to run the math on that, but losing another shuttle, and this one one of the testbed upgraded ones? His temper smoldered.

  A few of the bay crew trotted over.

  His first instinct was to get the entire mess on chains and have it moved to his development bay, but that might jar something loose. There was a lot of fragmentation in the tail, and what was left of the disc cracked, and wrinkling along the right front spar’s skin. He’d have to do his tear-down and examination in the open bay.

  A shuttle “incident” was not unusual. NightPiercer’s shuttles had been built with the intent of close-ship repair and very short distance transport, like moving large cargo externally from a port side bay to a starboard side bay. The shuttles had also been intended for use in the area around Earth and Mars, not the churning hell closer to Jupiter. Only one ship, the now-lost Sunderer, had built shuttles with astromining and reclamation in mind. Every other ship had pressed their shuttles into service.

  There was a reason that pilots were hard to come by and paid very well. Every year there were a ton of applicants. After weeding them out on paper, the fastest way to whittle them down even further was to take them on a mail run. The ones who were left, who also didn’t crack during training, rarely lasted more than a few years. Every pilot had at least one bad story, and after a few years, left the willing to fly list.

  Lachesis being on that list had caught his eye. As a navigator, she’d learned to pilot a shuttle, but she’d been
scratched off the flight roster once she’d completed her two obligatory round trips. She’d regularly done short maintenance flights around Ark, usually one every ninety days. Given her biopsy scores, and the extremely compromised shielding on the shuttles, strange choice from Ark’s Crèche to allow her to continue to expose herself to the void that way.

  Some bodies were just a little more resistant than others, especially Omega-produced werewolves. The micro-damage being done to their DNA in artificial gravity and with all the radiation exposure of space meant the products of later Generations were more human. That’s what Medical wanted to believe. His personal, pet theory was more grim and less acceptable.

  He resisted the urge to touch the painful scald marks around his neck. His collar rubbed them raw. He had other problems: he’d kitted out two shuttles with the new engines. They’d been his testbeds for the upgrades that had recently been completed to NightPiercer itself.

  One of them blowing itself out of its housing and taking out the generator disc was… not good.

  He stroked his chin as he considered the entire hull, brain distracted by Lachesis, and the gnawing instinct to go make things right with her.

  There was no way to make things right with her. He dismissed the thought. He was master of many things, but the flow of time was not one of them.

  A defect in the design at low-heat, low-resonance spooling would be devastating. He had anticipated that and run months worth of simulations, made adjustments, but perhaps it had not been enough. Perhaps something had been missed in his simulations. Something he had not noticed in the prototype once practical test flights had started.

  Anything was possible. First, take apart the nacelle and tailplane and deduce the point of failure, then manner of failure. Work backwards, since he could not work forwards.

  “Commander,” Simone said, arriving with Xav. “Getting a look at it?”

  Rainer accepted the thick leather apron he always wore for tear-downs. “Do you have early thoughts?”

  Simone was one of his best metalworkers. She wasn’t a metallurgist by training, but when it came to hands-on fabrication, Simone understood metal and whatever shape it was bent, hammered, poured, or cast. “No, sir. I did get your flightpath from Telemetry. Best we can manage with Jupiter and the solar cycle. Downloaded from the core and Xav started to map the timeline.”

  She did not mention since you were occupied being court-martialed and all. His core team down in Engineering was more than a little familiar with the ongoing, long-running debacle that was his personal life. “Anything?”

  She shook her head. “First pass says no. Telemetry isn’t being much help.”

  “They say it’s an Engineering issue,” Xav said dryly.

  Rainer’s expression chilled further as he counted to fourteen. Insulting other sections was inappropriate. Even when well-deserved, and from their scents, Simone and Xav already shared his opinion of Telemetry. Territorial cluster of CPU-cycle hogging self-important humanoids.

  On Earth, competition had been for prey and territory. On ship? They’d managed to select for, suppress, modify, or redirect the drives for territory, wealth, prey, breeding rights, but biological imperatives were deeply wired from millions of years of evolution. And while Crèche probably would have loved to breed all those ‘primitive’ drives out of them to make them manageable, there was a significant obstacle: those drives were absolutely required for their survival.

  Humans and werewolves who had not had the fierce will to survive and endure had not survived Exodus. The crippling grief and knowledge everything they’d ever known was gone. The ship provided food, clothing, shelter, and purpose, but they’d still managed to identify a resource to squabble over.

  On Earth, ancient cultures had warred over gold and arable land. Later, it’d been fossil fuels. Then water, rare earth minerals, helium. On NightPiercer? CPU cycles were the new black-market currency. Squabbles between sections were fierce, and officers wagered them in poker games.

  Engineering—especially with the engine modifications Rainer had been designing since he was a teenager—had been getting the lion’s share for years. Medical howled about we can’t research artificial gravity-induced illnesses without cycles to crunch data. Science barked about their own research, while Biome & Resource snarled about fabrication and upgrade modeling, while Telemetry loved to piss on Engineering whenever they could, muttering about we can’t know if it’s time to go back to Earth if we don’t have the CPU cycles to do the math while Tech cried about needing CPU cycles to do the research to upgrade the main computer to add more cycles.

  Medical, Science, Biome, and Research all had good arguments. Telemetry had a problem a bit more severe than CPU cycles, and Tech knew damn well they’d maxed out the core.

  Rainer looped the apron’s strap over his neck, and tied it behind his back with quick, practiced motions. “Time to start the hands-on investigation. Hammers and crowbars.”

  “Do you think it’s the new engine design?” Simone asked while Xav looked on nervously. “Something we didn’t see?”

  “Something I did not see.”

  The upgrades had been his design. He’d championed it. He’d insisted. The sophisticated design was beyond the ability of anyone on the ship except him to truly comprehend. Captain Tsu—who had been Lead Engineer on his way to the big chair—had had enough knowledge to know Rainer’s designs were out of his league, and enough trust in the Commander’s skills to give his blessing.

  Others on the senior staff had countered him, but not because they argued his designs were flawed.

  But if the designs were flawed, and he’d missed something, or there had been a fabrication error or miscalculation, then it was on him to both find and resolve, and if he had to stand up in front of his peers and admit it, then he’d admit it. But not without evidence, and not without a solution. “Three bars on my cuffs means it’s my responsibility.”

  “You know we’re with you, Commander,” Xav said.

  Rainer grabbed a hunk of metal and vaulted up onto the top of the shuttle. “I’m not taking anyone with me on this. My designs, my numbers, my supervision, my responsibility. Tell Juan I’ll be here until this is resolved. He’ll have to deal with Engineering day-to-day in the interim. You two are going to give me a hand with this, and we’ll bring on a few more of the core crew once I have a handle on what we’re dealing with.”

  “Just tell us where to start, boss,” Simone said, dropping his title in favor of the more affectionate term his core crew used with him.

  Rainer nodded at the pile of minuscule debris bits that had been swept up previously. “Sort and catalog all that.”

  “You want me to take it to Fab for analysis?” Simone asked.

  “After you examine it all. Fab will give us a technical analysis, I want practical. That’s you. Xav, help her and learn something. Simone, make sure to teach him how to catalog it so we actually get it back from Fab. Otherwise it’s going to walk away to some other section.”

  Simone mock-saluted him, then elbowed Xav. The young wolf grinned and mimicked the salute. “Yes, sir.”

  Rainer flicked his crowbar around in his hand. The young wolf headed after Simone to dig through a pile of small bits. Overeager and underfoot, but he’d be fine. The Commander had plucked Xav out of his graduating class along with five others. Those other five had already begged for reassignment to some bowels of Engineering with at least five layers of reports between them and Rainer. The Commander had been all too happy to give them their wish.

  Xav had not run crying yet. He’d come through School studying electrical and power sub-systems, but he was turning a wrench and sweeping metal shavings.

  Rainer’s footfalls echoed hollowly over the mangled frame. “Once I look at this husk and all the parts are cataloged, and the wreckage mapped and modeled, we start the full tear-down. I can rebuild this, but not until we know what went wrong. We may have to rebuild NightPiercer first.”

  Unintentio
nally Dangerous Hobbies

  Rainer apparently didn’t believe in self-preservation, and it hadn’t been his first encounter with silver. Well, technically. His first had been when he’d been a kid. He’d burned himself with an antique silver spoon. Note in medical record: to experience it.

  “Sure,” Lachesis said to herself with a sigh as she shifted on the big chair, tablet against her knees. Sounded like something Rainer would do.

  Aside from his encounter with an antique silver spoon, he’d had a long, long, long list of injuries. Soft tissue and infections as a kid. More than most kids, but Medical had made notes about rowdy play and he’ll grow out of it. Which he had. He’d had stitches and bruises over the years from scuffles (which weren’t written into his record as such, because that would have required discipline), and another long list of injuries involving being burned, sliced, squished, crushed, and punctured, complete with correlating incident reports. Rainer had also pursued Security training along with being an Engineer.

  Apparently Rainer did not like knowing he couldn’t rip off panels and flesh off bones.

  The plasma scarring was about seven years old. The medical report had redacted the specifics of the incident, but the summary involved an explosion of vented magnetic drive plasma and radiation, and Rainer had crawled into and stayed in the plasma capsule to repair the venting. He’d used his war-form exactly like she’d already seen on the shuttle, but nobody could out-regenerate that kind of damage. He’d managed to survive long enough to stop the venting, and for his crewmates to drag what was left of him out of the capsule. He’d managed to hold his war-form and brain together for two days: long enough for the combined efforts of war-form’s regeneration and Medical to keep him stable enough he was able to revert to human form for skin grafts, muscle grafts, new eyes, and new lungs. After a year, his heart had been replaced as his original hadn’t been able to recover from the radiation and Artificial Gravity Recovery Syndrome.