She had to read that entry at least five times to fully wrap her head around it. If Medical hadn’t already determined Rainer was “Essential Personnel” and started growing replacement body parts for him, Rainer would have been jerky. The sheer amount of effort put into saving him seven years ago explained why NightPiercer was willing to put up with his shit.
The agony he must have been in was beyond comprehending. The raw mental capacity to keep the war-form mind focused enough to remain still through that pain. So many werewolves couldn’t even assume war-form, or hold it longer than ten minutes, and Rainer had held his for forty-nine hours.
She flipped through all the efforts that had been made to solve the riddle of Rainer’s cryo-survival, and it appeared NightPiercer’s Crèche could be very, very thorough when it wanted to be. His sperm was completely normal under the microscope, but viability tests revealed it was the low end of normal, and once frozen and thawed, completely dead. There had never even been any post-thaw viability tests as there’d never been a spermatozoon to use. That was pretty damn dead.
He’d endured all sorts of procedures, diets, protocols over the years to increase either his viability or cryo-survival. The only break had been when he’d been recovering from being plasma-charred. He’d endured literally everything up to and including asking him to do it all over again in wolf form. Numerous notes from Medical implored Crèche to abandon their efforts.
“Okay, I feel a shred of pity for you.” Rainer had endured being treated like livestock for years. Not even Ark was this stubborn. No matter how straight-forward or matter-of-course these things were, asking a male to endlessly masturbate into cups or mount a dummy used by livestock just to figure out why his balls didn’t work the way they needed… The instant Rainer had become combative was the instant Crèche should have backed off. Hate-sex and angry-sex might have been things, but stress did not improve fertility in any species.
She understood trying to preserve the genetics of a revered bloodline, especially when it was in a physical and mental specimen like Rainer. But there were limits. It must have come as a relief for Rainer when Crèche had given up.
Except they hadn’t.
NightPiercer Crèche had probably formed their plan as soon as they’d accepted Medical’s diagnosis. They had probably identified her then, but she’d been far too young. She was still a few years too young, but with Rainer almost thirty, close enough!
She stalked into the bedroom. She may as well put her things away and make the bed and tidy up. It wasn’t like she had anything else to do with her time.
“This is too much.” She ran her hands over her face. Her eyes were still raw from crying and all of her was sore. She rubbed the back of her neck. Going to the gym might help, but with the healing wounds on her shoulder, she’d probably bleed a bit, and risk getting someone else’s germy sweat in it. She’d have to wait until that was healed. Not great, because artificial G tended to eat bodies, even if NightPiercer’s was .93G.
Speaking of gravity…
She’d brought all her Navigation scenarios and calculations. The LightBearer situation was delicate, and NightPiercer had declined to get involved. She was on NightPiercer now, so waiting to work on LightBearer until she got an introduction to NightPiercer’s own navigators sounded smart.
“So let’s skip LightBearer and try Jovian Hopscotch,” she said to herself. No point in pissing off NightPiercer any further. She hadn’t had a chance to analyze her last few attempts at slingshotting a full-sized ship around the Jovian system. She’d need access to the main computer and a few CPU cycles to run the full simulation, but she could analyze the data from the already-compiled simulations, and update everything to NightPiercer’s parameters and starting position.
NightPiercer had issued her three tablets. A quick exam revealed all the usual ports, and she even had a little gizmo from Ark Tech that someone had cobbled together to let people daisy-chain tablets to pool computational cycles for things that needed more than a single tablet could do, but weren’t important enough to justify allocating main computer resources.
She’d won it in a game of strip poker. A fierce game that had left her with just her panties, but in a zero-sum game, that’s all one needed was panties. No guarantee it would work on NightPiercer tablets, but no harm in trying.
Hopefully, because if she needed the NightPiercer version she was a little too married to play strip poker.
She chose one of her datachips and slid it into the slot on her master tablet. The chip mounted, but threw an unreadable error. A few of the other chips all gave the same error. Filesystem incompatibility.
“Damit,” she swore, wiping the back of her hand across her face and hating the dampness of tears. “Wait a second. There are NightPiercer penpals.”
When people sent mail between the ships, they actually sent files to a giant mailbag database that loaded them onto large chips, then those chips got ferried between ships. There must have been a do-dad or program that bridged the file systems. Now she just had to go find the right person in Tech or Operations to ask.
She uncurled from the couch and grabbed her tablets.
“Um.” They’d all shut down. Tablets did not normally shut down, and more to the point: these didn’t want to start again. Some kind of NightPiercer peculiarity? She waved one, tapped it, peered at it looking for something other than the fingerprint scanner.
The door to the quarters burst open.
Round Two : FIGHT!
“Ie!” She yelped and scrambled backwards as various figures barged in. She grabbed something (a pillow) and flung it (good job), scrambled, heard shouting, and rough hands grabbed her and slammed her against the antique rug.
Dazed, her lungs tried to breathe. Couldn’t.
Her lungs inflated. Hands wrestled her wrists behind her back. Her shrapnel wounds tore open again.
Her cheek rubbed raw on the rug’s knots. “Not the rug,” she gasped, stupidly. The precious rug. She couldn’t bleed on it. Who were these guys? What was happening?
Rough hands hefted her to her feet. Security had just barged into the quarters, and they were gathering up the tablets and all her chips. “Wait—” she said as they grabbed the bags. “Those are mine—”
“Let’s go. Quietly,” the Security team member told her sternly.
“What’s going on? You can’t just barge in here!” At least on Ark they needed a warrant. Or to knock before they broke in a door. She struggled against the loops binding her wrists. Rainer was a Commander, for fuck’s sake! “You can’t do this!”
Rough hands grabbed her, wrestled her, and demonstrated they could, in fact, do that.
“Did Rainer hire some of you Security goons to do his dirty work for him?” she spat at one of them, trying to squirm away. “Should I resist more so you can just off me now? Hey, maybe I’ll go war-form and make it interesting!”
The butt-end of a baton slammed into her side.
She dropped to her knees. Her liver tried to trade places with her lung. Before her legs worked right and she could even breathe again, they hauled her upright and dragged her. Her legs slid and dangled. She coughed, tried to get out you have to tell me, but the shocks of pain still echoed through her body.
“What—” she choked out finally. “You can’t—”
Another punishing liver shot. This time she saw stars and blacked out for an unknown number of strides. Her brain came back online in one of the lifts, where two other people pressed themselves against the wall and out of the way.
“Yeah,” she wheezed at them. “I agree. Bad day.”
This time the baton cracked over her third vertebrae.
“Fuck off! What the hell did I do! You have to tell me what I’ve been charged with!” she howled as they dragged her into another corridor, this one busy.
CRACK.
They dragged her back to Security and tossed her into the same cell she’d shared with Rainer the first time. She impacted the floor hard enough to
rattle her ribs. She rolled onto her front and inch-wormed her knees under herself. The magnetic bars slammed into place.
“Yay, the brig again.” She crawled up onto the sole bunk. Her torn up shoulder seared with pain, and her side ached from the jabs to her liver, and her vertebrae—the one right where her neck met her shoulders—throbbed.
Fine. Whatever. They could do whatever they wanted. Rainer had won.
I want to go home. I want my mother. I want my family and my friends and even stupid Jebb and that stupid bowling alley.
Gribbons came to the magnetic bars.
“Don’t you have to tell me what I’ve been charged with?” she asked.
“Attempting to sabotage the main computer core,” Gribbons replied.
“What? Are you crazy?” Rainer really had a long arm and creative mind if he’d found a way to sell her as some sort of high-level secret Tech ninja.
Gribbons held up the small bags of datachips. He dangled them meaningfully. “What are these?”
She groaned. “You know what they are. They’re datachips.”
“That’s not what I was asking. What’s on them? The security net detected non-standard files on the chips. We’re sending it all to Tech for analysis, but things will go better for you if you confess now.”
She wrestled herself into a sitting position. What was this guy going on about? Non-standard files? What pathetic excuse for charges had Rainer cobbled together? “Fine, I’ll confess. They’re navigation simulations.”
“Exactly.” Gribbons jabbed his finger at her.
“Simulations are illegal?” she asked, nonplussed. Um… maybe they were? This was NightPiercer, and they liked to watch new couples have sex and believed in spousal privilege and their Commander was allowed to have an ancient hemp rug on his floor instead of a museum wall. “My Dying Art is Navigation. Theoretical scenarios are part of the job.”
Gribbons tossed the chips to one of the guards nearby. His balled fists rested on his hips and a vein bulged out of his forehead. “Scenarios where you try to take over this ship’s navigation system and fly us right into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.”
She stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s not what—”
“You threatened to kill Commander Rainer.” Gribbons barely seemed able to contain his fury while the rest of the Security staff glared at her with a level of violent hatred that made the liver punches seem tame. “So you’re going to take us all with you? Not on our watch!”
“Hey, no!” She scrambled to her feet, fell to her knees, and inch-wormed her way to the bars as Gribbons and his guys stormed out. She flung herself as she shouted, hit the bars, and they smashed her back. “They’re simulations! It’s just a project! Let me explain! Get back here!”
CLANK.
The magnetic bars brightened, and a thin yellow film slithered between them.
Complete silence.
“It’s a project!” she howled, but nobody could hear her.
Silence.
She sat on the floor.
Then she laughed.
Rainer had won.
Why She Is Called Luna
“Commander!”
Rainer straightened from the work of ripping apart shuttle pieces. One of his junior engineers trotted up to him, eyed the stack of metal parts, and offered, nervously, “Ping for you, sir.”
“I don’t care.” He’d deliberately taken his comm off, as usual. Otherwise he’d be pinged a dozen times an hour with things that didn’t matter. Right now, he had a shuttle to dismantle, examine, and rebuild. Whoever it was could take a number and get in line.
His crewman paled a notch, stiffened another notch, and held his ground. “Sir, it’s important.”
“They’re all important, and they’ll all wait. I’ll deal with it later.” There was no time in that day’s schedule, so unless something was venting toxic gases or on fire or about to explode, he didn’t have time for it. He had his days scheduled down to the minute. While he was very, very good at making things, he had not yet figured out how to coax more time out of the universe.
“Commander—”
“What short straw did you draw to be told to come bother me?”
“Ah… it was my turn, sir.”
So they were taking turns now. Must have been Juan’s idea. He ignored the messenger, then realized three minutes later he could still smell him. “Are you still here?”
“The ping is from Security, sir.”
Gribbons. One of his least favorite individuals at that moment. The blisters around his neck tingled. He shifted his shoulders to ease the tightness, but the scalded skin simply cracked. “I especially do not care what Gribbons wants.”
“Sir, it’s—it’s your wife, sir.”
Rainer’s aggravation hit pause. “What about Lachesis?”
“She’s… been arrested, sir.” The engineer’s voice and body trembled.
He’d left her unattended for less than six hours, and she’d managed to get herself arrested. He pulled his heavy leather apron over his head. “For what?”
“Attempting to sabotage the main computer core, sir. Or hijack the ship. I’m not sure which. Tech is working on it.”
“If this is a joke—”
“No! No, sir! Not a joke, sir! We’ve confirmed she’s in the brig.” He yanked his spine to attention out of terrified habit.
Rainer almost growled at him. This was a new, young fresh-out-of-School type that Rainer had agreed to take since he seemed less stupid than most, and he needed some warm bodies for basic work. But he hated when they were afraid of him. The stories about him shoving junior techs and engineers who had annoyed him into various tubes, ducts, and chambers, then expected them to get their own way out were mostly exaggerated.
“What is Tech working on?” Rainer shoved the apron at the quivering engineer. Lachesis might hate him, but she’d never harm a whole ship to get to him. There were still so many other creative ways to kill or maim him, like chopping off his cock or biting off his tongue or using her claws to give him some new orifices.
His engineer shifted nervously on his feet and glanced around, wishing to be anywhere but delivering this particular bad news. “I’m not sure. Gribbons said he found some datachips in your quarters—”
“He was in my—nevermind. I’d say if he’s right, this is an unexpected escalation in hostilities between my wife and I. Hell hath no wrath.”
The engineer went white as a sheet. “I’m hoping it’s a mistake, sir.”
Rainer breathed out, aggravated. “Of course it’s a mistake. Lachesis has a temper that will melt those heat tiles, but she’s Crèche. You might find me dead with my intestines stitched through my abdomen like embroidery, but she’s not a fan of collateral damage.”
“Ah…” The engineer somehow went white, then gray, and a little green. “She um… sounds… wonderful, sir.”
Rainer allowed himself a smile, which sent the new engineer into a shriveled shade resembling a corpse. “Do you know why the old werewolf packs on Earth used to call their female Alphas ‘Luna’?”
“Ah, no, sir.” Now he tried to find any single way to escape.
This was the best way to torment the fresh meat: have a dangerous conversation with them that bespoke the Commander might have some feral tendencies, some Alpha tendencies, and might believe in Gaia, not Earth.
“The Earth’s Moon is disproportionately large,” Rainer explained, enjoying the way the young human sort of squirmed in horrified fascination. “If Ganymede plunged into Jupiter, it’d barely leave a mark. But if the Moon plunged into Earth, it would destroy the planet. The Moon may be smaller, but She pulls on the pack, and Her mate, with an unavoidable force that stabilizes. Without Her, there is no motion of the tides to sustain the ocean, and without the ocean, there is no life.”
The engineer’s mouth moved, but he didn’t say anything and snapped it shut instead.
Rainer buttoned his collar and pulled on his jacket. “I’m sure most of thi
s ship will disagree, but I don’t think there’s a point to having a spouse that’s no threat to you, can’t rival you, and can’t challenge you. If you find me dead one morning, tell everyone I died happy at her claws. I would like that better than growing old and withering away in this empty hell.”
Now to find out what absolute madness this arrest was.
Rainer's Match
Lachesis amused herself trying to wriggle her wrists enough so she could twiddle her thumbs, but it proved too painful a challenge.
“Was beating the crap out of me really necessary?” she asked nobody in particular. They couldn’t hear her through the mute-screen. She started to count the threads in the cot’s fabric for something to do, then figure out what kind of sheep the fiber had come from, and what it’d been dyed with.
It might have been a few hours, it might have been fifteen minutes, until Gribbons re-appeared, this time with another officer in tow.
She recognized him from the previous day: he’d been the male Commander who hadn’t given his name. He had the three bars on his sleeves, the Operations emblem, and a star medallion she didn’t recognize. About Rainer’s height, fit under his uniform, reasonably good looking. Exactly what she’d have expected from a high-ranking human officer. Didn’t have Rainer’s presence, but Rainer’s presence was like an uninvited boulder that had just crashed downhill, or the oppressive humidity of a steam room.
He placed his palm on the scanner, and the mute-screen dissolved, and the magnetic bars parted.
A vent fan to her left started to blow gently. It pushed the Commander’s scent downwind.
“Lachesis,” he said as he stepped into the cell. “I’m Commander Bennett, NightPiercer’s First Officer. Let’s talk about your situation.”
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