Rainer froze, his expression turning frigid. Captain Tsu, who was seated close by with his husband and daughter, actually turned to look at them. Lachesis ignored them and kept her gaze on Rainer.
“I will never hit you,” Rainer growled.
“You did try to kill me.” She pointed her fork at him.
“You wish I tried to kill you. If I’d tried to kill you, I’d have succeeded, because I am not some half-assed degenerate that doesn’t know how to kill something,” Rainer said coldly. “You want to be mad at something, so you’ve fixated on me having tried to kill you. And if you hadn’t noticed, even if I had tried to kill you, no one here cares.”
He’d bitten deep, and those fangs had sunk into her liver. Captain Tsu watched them, but the Captain also hadn’t moved to intervene, and the other officers that had overheard the conversation were ignoring them, eating their food in that please shut up so I can pretend this didn’t happen way.
“You were a very expensive purchase,” Rainer said. “But in the end, you are just a mean to an end, and as long as Crèche gets what they want from both of us, they really don’t care what happens to you.”
Captain Tsu made no move at all to correct or intervene. Tears wanted to flow, but she refused. The tattoo on his neck swore he knew how to kill things, or at least was capable of it. She had the same tattoo. The Ark version, but similar enough nobody would question what she was: a war-form capable werewolf.
“You wish I had tried to kill you,” Rainer repeated.
“Why? Share with me that Command training and tell me the deepest secrets of my heart,” she said recklessly.
“Because it would make me your enemy,” Rainer said. ‘The truth is much crueler, isn’t it.”
She gripped her fork in one palm. “So that’s it. I’m just your pet goldfish.”
“You are an officer’s wife. There are worse fates.”
She dropped the fork before she stabbed him with it. “Pray tell, Commander, what exactly am I supposed to do with the rest of my life considering you aren’t going to be able to get me pregnant?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Rainer said, with enough warning in his voice she decided to shut up. Even if it meant sitting and eating food she hadn’t earned, like she was some goddamn goldfish.
Dinner was miserable, and Rainer had brought one of his tablets, and was busy skimming through it most of the time. Two runners brought him datachips that he pocketed. Lachesis caught the Captain glaring at them both with disapproval, but what could she do about it?
There had to be a way to acquire a new Art. There had to be something unpopular that could use a spare brain and set of hands.
She shut up for the remainder of dinner, but when they got back to their quarters, she asked, “How can I search for what Arts have openings in this Generation?”
“There’s no way to change Arts. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask. The answer will not change.”
“There has to be an exception! This is how people die! Don’t stonewall me! Or is this how you plan on killing me? You’re going to isolate me until I go into lupine psychosis?”
“For the last damn time, I did not try to kill you.”
“Then what the fuck is your grand plan? Crèche isn’t taking these implants out, even if they do want to watch us fuck.” She shuddered in revulsion. “You don’t want pups, you’ve made that perfectly clear, which is probably good because you can’t sire them anyway and I don’t want to fuck you. They’re not going to use straws from another male on me. I’m like your pet fucking goldfish! I’m not even allowed out of these quarters.”
“I told you to stay here until the furor around you dies down,” Rainer said, aggravated. “That’s not the same thing.”
“And what then? It won’t matter. I don’t have an Art, I don’t have a profession, I don’t have a family, I don’t have a life. I’m going to be like the pet goldfish you forget to feed!”
“Except I don’t recall goldfish making this much noise. Conversation over, Lachesis. You can’t change arts, professions, or wander the ship. Make peace with it.”
She waited for him to say something else, but Rainer was done talking, and didn’t say another word to her the rest of the evening.
CPU Cycles
Rainer took her to the gym after breakfast the next day, then returned her to their quarters.
“Like taking your dog for a walk,” she muttered once he’d left. Werewolves weren’t inclined to keep pets, so the humans were the ones who hoped to get chosen for Domestication duty, and Rainer apparently was no different, even if his pet had two legs.
At least her body wouldn’t rot away since he took her to the gym for two hours a day. She’d had a nice run around a greenery-lined track, even if he’d insisted on running with her.
She practiced sitting on her hands and trying not to crawl the walls. When he finally sent a ping to say he’d be working late, her temper snapped. The one time she got out of the damned quarters was gym time or meal time, and now she’d lost one of those.
There was food in the quarters. She could have made herself algae pancakes, or eaten the dried fruit or dried nuts, or snacked on the crickets. She flicked a few cashews around with a fingernail. “The height of luxury, and the height of functionality.”
It wasn’t like she’d starve.
“I am not staying in here, Rainer.” She grabbed some of the precious fruit and nuts. “I’m your wife, not your damn pet.”
He wanted her to stay out of sight? Fine. She’d stay out of sight. There were some perks to her time crawling around in the vents. She consulted a detailed map of NightPiercer and deduced where she’d been when she’d smelled the poker den: down in the belly of the ship in what looked like a cargo hold. Probably not behind any doors she couldn’t unlock.
“And if Security beats me up again, I’m past caring,” she said, studying the shadows around her eyes while she re-braided and coiled her hair at the base of her skull. She’d rather not get worked over by Gribbons again, but no reward without risk. And all she’d be caught with in her pockets were some cashews and bits of dried orange and mulberry. So incriminating.
But she didn’t intend to get caught. She’d never gotten caught before.
She easily made her way down the decks towards the lifts that lead to the Biome and Cargo levels. Biome was closely guarded on every ship, she’d never get close, and a lot of Cargo was sensitive, but a lot of it was not. She followed the least-travelled scents on each hallway—overlaying it with her mental map of the decks and lifts—until she ended up in a quiet, dim corridor on one of the ship’s bottom levels. Just three strips of low-lumen low-power lighting ran along the ceiling, and the floor was open grating that echoed with each step.
“Looks about right,” she whispered to herself. It smelled of a little dust—a sure sign humanoids had been through here regularly—and a bit of water and algae and the faint scent of the brown line processing. Several dull rumbles reverberated through the hull. The air was humid and warm. Almost tropical.
She walked down the corridor, hung a right, and her ears picked up voices. Bingo. Two storage bays down the door was half-cracked, and a sentry wearing a Crew emblem on her uniform spotted her.
Lachesis brushed past her.
Two more guards—one wearing Crew, one Science—greeted her on the other side.
“Authorized personal only,” the one from Science told her. “You need to leave.”
She almost burst out laughing. “If you didn’t want people to find your party, don’t make it so easy to find. I can smell the cheap booze and bad luck from ten decks up.”
The cargo lining the walls obfuscated and confused all the scents, but the mingling of scents was unique: lots of different people, but also the smell of dust. So a lot of people through here for a lot of cargo that hadn’t been touched in decades.
The guard on the right smirked at her. “Okay, smarty, got a name?”
“Lachesis,” sh
e said.
“The Commander’s wife,” the guard on the left said.
Why couldn’t her mother have named her something more common, like Jessie or Raphael? But no, her mother had chosen a name that had never been given to anyone in any of the Generations previously. Lachesis shrugged. “I play a better hand of poker than he does. You can call me Lake.”
“We don’t get familiar with an officer’s spouse,” the guard on the right said.
She glared at him. “It’s my name, and if I don’t want to hear it get butchered because you’re more afraid of my husband than me, I’ll remind you Crèche chose me for him because I’m two things: fertile—because he isn’t—and mean—because he is. By my math, that makes me more dangerous than he is.”
The guards hesitated. The one on the right asked, “Do they have poker on Ark?”
“Of course there’s poker on Ark. What kind of backwards barnyard do you think Ark is?”
“The one who thinks a Commander will kill her,” he said, tone edged and sharp.
“Then be glad to know that Ark is in fact civilized enough to not just have poker, but snooker. Do you fine, upper-deck types know what snooker is, or does NightPiercer have to make do with pool?”
“Cricket is more our game,” the one on the left retorted.
“No wonder you lot are so bland. Next you’ll tell me you waste your farm Biomes on golf courses.” She shoved between them into the main part of the party-bay. They didn’t stop her.
Golf courses seemed like the ultimate in weird luxuries. Nothing but green rolling fields where the objective was to swat a little ball into a little hole in as few strokes as possible. Useless for hunting, groomed so close to be useless for pollination, O2 exchange, or livestock grazing.
The ultra-rich had thought nothing of carving out hunks of Gaia to build buildings, or smothering Her with concrete in the name of more money, they’d also created elaborate and beautiful golf courses with palatial mansions, but charged fees for the privilege of playing upon them. People had found a way to exploit even Gaia’s most basic, humble resource.
She turned her attention to the party-bay. A lot like Ark’s: a dusty bay lined with palettes of non-perishable supplies that only needed to be checked on once a year. With the cricket cages not far away, everything being stored was metal or some kind of composite. Nothing crickets would eat if they got loose.
There was a pool table she’d have believed had come from Earth itself. There were no other tables, just clusters of people sitting in circles on the floor playing cards or dominos or mahjong or tiddlywinks.
On Earth, card decks had been ubiquitous, and on Ark, a pallet of playing cards had been sent along in the hold, so that even three generations later, there’d been decks to be had. They were still very expensive to purchase, so highly prized when someone had one, but one of those attainable status symbols. And it seemed that NightPiercer may have had the same thing, as she saw three “tables” of players playing with actual cards.
The dominos also looked well-loved, but the tiddlywinks players were playing with bits and pieces of scrap metal and composite, and a stolen metal cup.
Nobody paid much attention as she walked in and hung around the edges. Pool had never been her game, and just as well, as the wagers seemed steep. Nothing her dried bits of fruit would get in on, but lots of people wanted to watch, so it gave her a chance to stand around and pretend to observe while actually paying attention to the players.
She headed to the lowest stakes poker table. A few people stood around drinking shitty algae booze and watching while ancient music played from the hold’s hacked speakers.
She observed half a dozen hands. The same version of poker she was used to. Fingering the dried fruit in her pocket, she approached the table.
“Show your neck,” the dealer said gruffly as she sorted her cards in her fingers.
“Why?” The dealer was human. Everyone at the table was human. There were some wolves in the bay, but her current victims were humans.
“If you’re gonna ask, you’re gonna leave.”
“Fine.” She jerked her chin up and to the side, exposing the side of her neck.
“Werewolf,” the dealer grunted, seeing the tattoo. “A war-form one.”
“I’m not a sore loser,” she said dryly. If she’d had that uncontrollable of a temper, she’d have been culled the first time she’d torn something to pieces.
“Werewolves have to up more than humans. ‘Cause you can smell us,” the dealer said matter-of-factly.
“I don’t need to smell you. You’re all shit actors,” she said sweetly. No surprise: Ark had had the same rule. A wolf’s snout was a sizable advantage. “And I’m a female. Our noses aren’t male noses.”
“Still better than a human. Those are the rules.”
Poker must have been much simpler back on Earth when they’d played with chips that had flat denominations. The pot on any ship was much more of a mix, unless you were playing with some kind of credit. Playing with dried fruit, nuts, and other stolen scraps was an inexact science at best.
She deliberately lost her first two hands. These guys were sitting at the cheap table for a reason. No point in making enemies right away. Didn’t want to startle the rabbit as it nibbled at grass under a fake sun.
Command didn’t approve of gambling dens because they bred problems. People would gamble away their rations, their clothing allowances, everything, and a bunch of scrawny naked people were a problem.
She kept one eye on the second table. They were playing with a mix of what she had, and things she didn’t: credits of various types, and higher-value items, and it wasn’t consistent where every hand had a food-item equivalent.
Her third hand was pure shit, so she folded early. The fourth, though. She laid her cards out. They grumbled as she scooped the pot towards herself. Time to move to the next table.
She was deep into an intense hand involving a pot with a third of a clothing voucher when Rainer walked in.
“Fuck,” she muttered under her breath. She’d taken off her comm, which was a no-no, but so was sitting in an illegitimate gambling den at the bottom of the ship when a senior officer had given her a direct order to stay in her (his) quarters.
Without a word, Rainer walked right to her table. He nudged two of the players with his foot. They scrunched over for him, reeking of nerves, and Rainer gracefully dropped to the ground, legs crossed. He stared straight at her, but told the dealer, “Deal me in.”
She stared at her cards, brain sparking and nerves rattled as Rainer’s scent clouded the entire table.
“Middle of a hand, Commander,” the dealer said, his voice not entirely steady.
Rainer did not break eye contact with her. He acknowledged he’d have to wait for the next hand with a single nod of his head.
“Nothing as good as your little daisy-chain device will be had at this table,” Rainer told her as she collected her winnings.
“Everyone starts somewhere, Rainer. Although I suppose you’ve forgotten that,” she said sweetly, scooping her prizes towards her. She picked up one cashew and popped it in her mouth.
“And what, pray tell, are you going to do with that clothing credit? All one-third of it?” Rainer asked as the dealer shuffled the cards and began to flick them out. He still hadn’t broken eye contact.
His directness didn’t bother her. Her skin seemed to enjoy it, and something deep and feral responded to the weight of the challenge. “Win the other two-thirds, of course.”
He tapped the floor. The dealer tossed a card his way. He snapped his finger down on it just as it landed. “As if you need the credit.”
“Well, I have told you what I need, husband, and you refuse to provide it. Pleasing your wife is not a set of boxes you can tick or benchmarks to achieve.”
Snorts and snickers from the table.
Rainer finally broke eye contact to survey his cards. “Of course not. I’ve been told compromise is the foundation of a good
marriage.”
“Your first wife needed therapy after divorcing you, and you threatened to stuff yourself into a plasma capsule if you had to remain married to the second. You are hardly an expert on what makes a good marriage. You have told me you don’t want to be married to me, so we know you have no interest in being a good husband. Don’t fault me for responding by being a bad wife.”
Rainer’s eyes narrowed. “You could try being a good member of the ship.”
“Except I have no place or purpose on this ship except as your wife, and everyone has made it clear they’d prefer if I wasn’t here at all. Can’t expect me to do much with such unpleasant examples. So what is a proper officer like yourself doing in this seedy den of sin?”
He curled his lips back in a not-smile. “Wondering what my wife is doing down here.”
She feigned a laugh. “Being a bad wife.”
Rainer chuckled so smugly she debated shoving her cards down his throat. “You think Command doesn’t know about this place? Or the ten others before it? It’s tradition the Lead Engineer look after it. Didn’t you notice those are all Engineering parts? Who do you think they’ll call if the crickets get loose?”
Her throat filled with a thousand expletives. She’d walked right into his territory. No wonder he’d shown up so quickly: someone had said oh, Commander? Your wife is down here. Come round her up before something happens.
“Command staff looks the other way as long as things don’t get out of hand,” Rainer continued. “Before I was Lead Engineer, things often got out of hand.”
“Someone actually beat you and take your oranges?”
“Pit fighting. I may or may not have been a participant. CPU cycles are precious and the wagers can be project changing,” Rainer said, his teeth flashing in the dim light.
She re-arranged her cards but her hand still sucked. And what he had just said was so stupid it hurt. “You risked serious injury and death on a wager that you’re the biggest asshole in the room. Why would anyone even fight you for that title?”
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