NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

“Fine. But we both need to get washed up and head to dinner. The thing to piss Bennett off more than anything is if we both act like this didn’t leave a mark. Even if it did.”

  “That we can agree on,” she said as he herded her towards the shower. He looked somewhere else as she painfully peeled off her clothing around her bruises, and pulled out her disheveled braid, and stepped under the water.

  He kept his gaze averted. She ignored him. She’d showered in a group almost her entire life. He was just making sure she didn’t crack her skull or stumble over her bruises.

  “Damn,” she muttered, looking at the bruise on her ribs. Her arms hurt too much to raise over her head and wash her hair, and the strands stuck to everything.

  Rainer side-stepped over, eyeing her carefully. “May I?”

  “May you what?” she asked, more astonished than suspicious.

  He visibly hesitated, then stepped into the shower, still wearing his pants. He gathered up the strands of her hair, pulling the length through his hands, one over the other.

  The small shower was barely large enough for both of them, but somehow Rainer managed to keep his body just from touching hers. There was a bar of hard soap. He picked that up, and peeled several curls with his fingernails, carving deep trenches in the block. He rubbed them between his palms and then drew his hands through her hair.

  She closed her eyes.

  He pulled the rope of her hair through his hands, squeezing the excess water from it, then reached for the comb, drawing the comb’s teeth along her scalp and gently detangling each strand.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

  “You can’t.”

  His scent of stone and desire engulfed her. She kept her eyes closed. Was he hard? She was certainly damp in more than one way. His hands didn’t touch her.

  Her nipples stung painfully in the cold, begging for his touch.

  Pheromones were a hell of a drug.

  Maybe she should fuck him just to top it all off. Fuck a guy she didn’t like, who had tried to kill her, who didn’t want her, but their lizard brains had other ideas. It wasn’t like liking someone was a requirement to having a fun time with them.

  “Let’s see if I remember how to do this,” he murmured as he separated her hair into three smaller strands.

  “Where did you learn how to do it at all?” she asked softly as he started to twist the strands into a passable plait. He hadn’t snagged her hair once with the comb.

  “Learning to tie ropes and knots, but I’ve never touched hair like yours.”

  “I’d think a male of your prestige would be able to get his hands on whatever interests him,” she replied.

  “I can, I have, and I do,” he said, tugging her hair very gently.

  Arrogant sot. Charming, in his own sick way.

  The officer’s mess was several decks above them, almost at the top of the ship, and quiet. Tables meant to seat two, four, or six arranged on an open floor, one wall entirely windows, and affording a view of Jupiter’s dangerous northern auras. Green plants lined the walls and gave the air a fresher, moister scent similar to the biomes.

  They sat at one of the smaller tables towards the windows. Jupiter’s auras put on a brilliant, ice-blue show. The spikes reached high into the empty dark.

  “The solar wind has been especially strong lately,” Rainer commented.

  She didn’t reply.

  “It’s been strong for a while,” Rainer added. “A number of solar storms. Telemetry is not amused.”

  “Yes, I know.” The Sun’s activity came in cycles, although the models were only moderately reliable. The solar wind, and solar storms, were always a concern for the three ships. The charged particles blasted hulls, made shuttle flights especially dangerous, wrecked intership-coms, and made exterior repairs or maintenance almost impossible. The cycles lasted years, not months.

  “We’ve never seen the wind this strong out here, but it’s not unprecedented if you look at Earth history. Telemetry can’t count on the Sun as a standard candle. Makes for beautiful auras, though.” He watched her out of the corner of one eye as he offered this information.

  “Is there something I’m supposed to do with this information?” He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know, unless he thought she was an exceptionally stupid navigator. He was sniffing around for something.

  “Just making conversation. I thought you might find it interesting.”

  “Not especially, unless NightPiercer’s measurements vary dramatically from LightBearer or Ark, but no one would know that given this ship enjoys its silence.” She ignored the glances of the other officers eating at their own tables.

  “I know you didn’t try to plunge the ship into Jupiter,” Rainer said, leaning back in his chair. “I suppose that makes us equal.”

  “I don’t see how. There are legitimate concerns, and absurd ones, and the idea that I’d kill thousands of people out of pique is absurd.”

  “Are you curious as to why you triggered some alarms?”

  “I suppose I should ask,” she said grimly, “but I think whatever you tell me will make me wonder how this ship has survived this long given how insane you all seem to be.”

  A nervous member of the staff placed two small plates of salad in front of them.

  “There are no navigators on NightPiercer. The navigation sandbox was taken offline long ago to free up computer cycles. The computer could only interpret your scenarios as actual course directives,” Rainer explained.

  His words punched her right in her already-bruised gut. “Wh-what? You don’t have a single navigator on ship?”

  LightBearer and Ark maintained the art just in case the navigation computers failed, or the course options plotted decades earlier were no longer practical. Interplanetary navigation was somewhat predictable, and the solar system operated on timescales measured in thousands of years, not decades. But while predictable, it was also very complicated and precise, and even a tiny deviation could mean disaster. The distances were huge and all the pieces were moving in three dimensions and there were all sorts of considerations and invisible threats and variables. Earth was a tiny, tiny target. A small mistake on course could cause the ship to overshoot Earth and not have enough fuel or time to correct course for a second approach. A small mistake with re-entry might cause the ship to incinerate going through the atmosphere, or if the atmosphere was even slightly different from what the models had predicted.

  The Navigators were also trained cartographers, especially using antique instruments. They practiced mapping on the stars and moons of Jupiter. When they returned planet-side, the new civilization would need a way to create maps. She’d been extensively trained in ancient navigational instruments, techniques, and cartography. A Dying Art that had been Dying for hundreds of years before she’d been born. During Exodus, most survivors didn’t even know how to read a map. They just had had devices that fed information into their ears.

  “The Art was allowed to die a Generation ago,” Rainer answered. “Mothballed. Lack of need. We did have twenty years more than the other ships to perfect our navigation system.”

  “How is this supposed to make me feel better?” Her Dying Art wasn’t Dying. It was dead. So dead that the ship hadn’t even realized what she was doing and had taken her simulations as course corrections. “You mean the navigation sandbox protocols are so removed that you don’t even have a security protocol wrapped around the main nav system?”

  “Apparently not, although I imagine Tech is working on that tonight,” Rainer said. “I thought you’d feel better knowing it was a total misunderstanding.”

  She stared at him incredulously. Now she didn’t even have a sandbox to continue to work on full-scale simulations or LightBearer.

  And that explained why NightPiercer had refused to help with LightBearer. They didn’t have the ability. Literally. They were crazy enough to trust programming from a hundred years earlier.

  “
What’s bothering you?” Rainer asked.

  She laughed miserably. She should have just crawled under the covers and told Rainer to go eat alone. “You wash and braid my hair like some attentive spouse, then hit me with the Dying Art I no longer have?”

  “You still have it,” he stated.

  “No,” she said, “no, I don’t. I’ve lost everything. There’s nothing left.”

  Rainer set his own fork down and left his food untouched. A male never ate before his female peers or pups.

  Captain Tsu twisted around in his chair to watch.

  With the Captain’s gaze upon her, she picked up her fork and fiddled with it for a second. “Tell me more about the solar wind. I’m curious about how NightPiercer’s readings may vary from Ark.”

  A Grim Reality

  “Try to stay out of trouble,” Rainer told her after breakfast and the officer’s gym the next morning.

  “I’ll do my best,” she sighed, annoyed. Rainer hadn’t let her out of his sight even at the gym, staying obnoxiously close, and her body ached from the thumping she’d gotten. At least the officer’s gym hadn’t had a lot of people who hadn’t been informed of what had happened.

  “And stay out of sight,” Rainer admonished as he gathered up his tablets. “Word got around the ship about your arrest. Don’t draw further attention to yourself until your face heals.”

  “Why not? I was absolved, wasn’t I?” she demanded.

  “Because every time you’ve been seen in public it’s been chaos.”

  “Then let’s go for three.”

  Rainer shifted his tablets to one hand and drew his thumb along her face. “Let’s not. Everyone will start asking questions Command doesn’t want to answer.”

  His thumb left icy, tingling trails on her skin.

  “The public story is that this is a very regrettable and unfortunate series of events arising from us rarely needing to integrate new adults into the ship’s population. No specifics, nobody to blame, no section at fault.” Rainer stroked her face with the rough pad of his thumb.

  How nice for everyone but her. She yanked away from him. “And I’m the one who ends up bloody, bruised, and confined. Without so much as a sorry about that.”

  “The means to an end, Lachesis.”

  “What end?” He kept throwing that term around enough it was breadcrumbs, but if she remembered that story correctly, it’d only lead her to a candy hut in a forest inhabited by some old crone who ate babies.

  A bitter smile crossed his face, although it failed to match what could only be described as a sly warmth in his unusual eyes. Vibrant shades of green tangled in a network like Jupiter’s clouds, coalescing into an amber-green halo around each pupil. Rainer drew her face up to his, and said, amused, “The long term survival of the species, of course.”

  What a joke. “From the wolf who doesn’t want to contribute to it?”

  “Stay out of sight.”

  She watched him go and rolled her eyes. “Stay out of sight. Stay out of sight and do what all day, exactly?”

  She plunked herself down on the couch. That would have been easier if she could work on Jovian Hopscotch, but that was as dead as an asteroid. She could have disobeyed him, but getting worked over by Security twice in as many days sounded unappealing.

  Quite a few hours could be consumed by staring at paintings. Since now she had the hours to spend and the paintings to stare at. She crawled up on the bed to study the triptych of trees, then up onto the couch to get close to the winter night with the Moon, and then over to the spring forest with the lake.

  Paper and ink were difficult to manufacture and costly to acquire if you could find any to purchase. Paper, ink, pencils, chalks, pastels, paints. All those things went to practical or ceremonial uses, or the Dying Arts. Even a print was almost impossible to acquire. Real paintings—done on canvases or speciality paper, with paint—were almost always on display in galleries. At least on Ark. The people lucky enough to have Painting as their Dying Art planned and sketched for months, even years, on their tablets while they amassed the supplies to paint even a small canvas.

  But Rainer had family heirlooms. Because of course he did.

  “This is amazing,” she whispered as she studied each canvas in detail. Each delicate little leaf that had been daubed onto the tree, or the individual flecks that made the snow sparkle, or the transitions of light-on-lighter-light to create the golden glow shining through trees. It wasn’t just the transition of the paint and the use of color, but the application of the paint itself, and the texture of it, and even the texture of the canvas, all of which were a little different.

  These paintings captured something about what it must have been like to be on Earth. She’d seen plenty of similar scenes, but they’d felt like wistful daydreams of a place the artist had dreamed of, but never seen. Except for the ones that had been brought from Earth itself during Exodus. These must have been brought too, except there seemed to be a bittersweet vividness. They echoed her longing to go home. Home being Ark, but it might as well have been Earth, too. Either one was impossible.

  Rainer’s collection of heirlooms was impressive. He didn’t just have five priceless paintings, but shadowboxes of trinkets. One was a collection of smooth polished semi-precious stones from Earth. There were twenty-four in all, and she only knew the names of a few: jade, malachite, tiger’s eye, garnet, topaz, turquoise. There were also some metal chunks and rough stone pieces, and what looked like a polished iron meteorite.

  Ah, so one of Rainer’s ancestors had had a sense of humor. A morbid one. She could see the family resemblance.

  Each of the ships had only had a small amount of space dedicated to taking artwork, and only canvases had been brought due to weight and space. Many of Generation Zero had used their own small personal allowance to smuggle in things like rocks, feathers, priceless works of art, ancient manuscripts. The full catalog of what had been lost existed in vast, digital archives too depressing to bear. In many ways what was in those digital archives were a complete reading of each species’ sins.

  They were all Tantalus, and this was their Tartarus.

  On Being A Pet Guppy

  By the time Rainer returned, she’d found staring at the paintings too morose, so she’d put on her comm (since the probes had to train themselves to her nerves anyway) and found NightPiercer’s general chat channels. There were three, as random as Ark’s had ever been, and she was a hot topic of conversation. At first she’d ripped off her comm in sheer mortification, then had realized everyone talked about her like she couldn’t possibly be listening. She was a guest at her own funeral.

  Who could pass up that kind of opportunity? She sat on the table, stared at the moon painting, and listened.

  Nobody on NightPiercer knew what to make of her being “imported” for Rainer. Collective chatter agreed Rainer was an intolerable prick (they used more circumspect language) but he wasn’t a murderer, and the idea of him being a murderer was tragically hilarious. As if Rainer would kill someone, in their opinion.

  Instead the NightPiercer folk speculated Ark had gone to the crickets if her go-to-assumption was a command officer would murder her. What kind of cesspit swamp had she been raised in? Had she been rolled around in the algae vats then tossed in a cricket cage?

  They felt bad for her in the way someone felt bad for someone with the flu: that’s too bad, but keep your contagious disease to yourself.

  A few hours was all she could take. She threw her comm to the side and resumed staring at the paintings while trying to learn to juggle rolled up socks.

  Rainer returned Gaia-knew-how-many hours later. Maybe it was twelve, maybe it was eighteen. She didn’t know. But she had mastered juggling three balls of socks for about six rounds before the socks went everywhere.

  “You haven’t moved,” Rainer said critically as he put his tablets on the counter. He pulled off his comm and tossed it aside. His face was smeared and smudged with grease and slime, whatever that was gr
ound into the crevices of the chapped skin of his hands and up his forearms, his uniform smeared and streaked.

  “What vat did you fall into?” she asked instead.

  “Transferred the shuttle into the engineering bay and started to dismantle it piece by piece. Everything in the tail assembly is leaking and—nevermind.” He caught himself before he rattled on about what was on his mind and recomposed himself into the wolf she’d known for all of three days. “You stayed out of sight?”

  She sighed, irritated. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I was half-expecting to hear about you being somewhere you shouldn’t be. I’ll wash, then dinner. Ten minutes.”

  “I actually do have common sense,” she said dryly. She had scored quite well when it came to practical intellect. In fact, she was a genius in certain scenarios. Probably smarter than Rainer.

  Rainer ignored her and headed towards the shower. She let it go. She was hungry and fighting with him would delay her meal by five minutes.

  “Will NightPiercer let me change my Art?” she said as they sat down at one of the small tables on the window-side of the wardroom.

  “There’s no way to change an Art,” Rainer replied.

  “Yes, but here on this ship my Art isn’t Dying, it’s dead,” she said. “Can’t an exception get made?”

  “You are the exception.”

  “So what am I supposed to do with myself? What do you think I did all day?”

  “I’m not sure. What did you do?” he asked, clearly not caring.

  “I counted how many dried cranberries are in the jar, and studied the paintings, and sat on my ass and taught myself to juggle your socks.”

  Rainer sighed and asked, annoyed, “You have the entire ship’s digital world to consume—which I promise is more expansive than Ark’s could ever hope to be—and you stared at paintings and juggled my socks?”

  The criticism stung. “I’m not a Historian.”

  “Try to have a curious mind, Lachesis,” he said shortly.

  She twitched, insides stinging under the lash. “I didn’t want to accidentally search for the wrong thing and get beaten up again. Or do you like me having black eyes? Will it be a convenient excuse for when you snap and start hitting me?”