NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  Music and math came from the same intellectual root. Clotho was a musical genius, while Lachesis did better with puzzles.

  “Do you love your sister?” Rainer asked.

  “What kind of sick question is that? Of course I love my little sister,” Lachesis said angrily, the scent of anguish blooming off her. “Shouldn’t you be bathing?”

  The not-voice warned him he’d made things worse. He was using too much of her strength and none of his own. He would have to start bleeding to make this right or she’d keep accusing him of being a tube-bred degenerate.

  She sighed from her core and sank down in the big chair, attention on the painting over the back of the couch.

  “Do you like it?” he asked, unable to resist, but her expression was so far away and her scent smoothed from despair to sadness and wistfulness. He just wanted something to please her, and if she didn’t like that painting, there were some others in storage.

  She gave him a scathing look over her shoulder. “You just won’t quit until you win, will you? Yes, Rainer, it’s a beautiful painting. I am in awe of your priceless family treasures. I have a very beautiful guppy bowl.”

  Rainer managed a grin. “Never change. You wouldn’t be nearly so much fun laying in a puddle of Exodus Syndrome tears.”

  Start Game : Y/N?

  “And this is why they worried about astronauts going nuts on long space voyages,” she said, legs crossed and gripping her ankles as she rocked back and forth while she watched the large monitor.

  She’d found some old stash of space documentaries from the early 2000s that some Omega with a sick sense of humor had added to the archives. In fact, NightPiercer’s archives had large quantities of out-of-date documentaries. “Who curated this stuff?”

  According to history, there’d been some limitations on what had been uploaded since storage space hadn’t been infinite. Apparently NightPiercer’s curators had thought someone would enjoy old, out-of-date documentaries talking about what planets or space would be like.

  She’d started with the documentaries on Jupiter.

  “Not even close,” she said, staring at the “true color” image of Jupiter an early space probe had sent back. In the pictures it looked like a glass marble. From where she sat, it churned and seethed and consumed itself, a failed star trying over and over and over again to start fusion.

  She glanced at the door, itching with the desire to get the hell out of the quarters.

  “Documentaries aren’t that bad,” she muttered. The Science & Nature section also had many, many documentaries on ancient Earth history, landmarks, geology, animals… looking at the last accessed time and view counts, nobody watched those. She’d watched five minutes of a documentary on a massive canyon (aptly named “The Grand Canyon”) and another five minutes on massive land mammals called hippos before she’d gone back to science and space documentaries.

  The door to the quarters opened.

  “What are you doing?” Rainer inquired, taking in her sitting on a couch cushion, cross-legged, on the hemp rug, glued to the screen.

  “Watching old documentaries from the safety and security of my guppy bowl,” she said, annoyed.

  He was filthy and grimy, with some kind of black-green grease in his hair and smeared down the arm and leg of his uniform. He stank of burned wires and sweat. He disappeared for a shower.

  He better not have forgotten or lied to her.

  Rainer returned about half an hour later, this time dressed in not much. Just shorts and a light short-sleeved shirt. He was a sculpted specimen. She checked herself. Rainer’s nose was too sharp, and his ego already big enough.

  Rainer poured himself a drink.

  “Are you going to make me beg, or did you forget?” she asked tartly. “You made me a promise last night. I shouldn’t have to beg you to keep it.”

  “Since my smell offends you, I thought you would prefer me washed,” Rainer said. With his free hand he rummaged around in the bottom of his satchel. He produced her daisy-chain gizmo and datachips. “I retrieved these from Tech.”

  He’d promised her a purpose, not what already belonged to her! “You’re giving me my property back and think that’s how you keep your promise?”

  He fished out two more datachips. “No, this is how I keep my promise.”

  She eyed the chips. “Keep talking.”

  “This one,” he flicked his fingers skillfully, somehow shifting the reddish chip to the front of his grip, “is a raw data dump from the shuttle’s computer core. Has records of the last twenty-two flights on it.”

  “And you want me to do what with it? Does it explode every trip, and you want to prove to me you didn’t try to kill me?”

  “I’m looking for the reason why my shuttle exploded. Analyze the flight path, parameters, everything.”

  “That’s Engineering and Telemetry. I don’t know what you’d be looking for. I have no idea how those engines you strapped to the back of that shuttle function.”

  “I can provide you all that information and answer all the questions. I built those engines. You may as well become the next most foremost expert on their practical function.”

  “They were an upgrade, not a build-out.”

  “They are a clear generational improvement over the original design.”

  She eyed him. “NightPiercer’s been upgraded, hasn’t it?”

  Rainer nodded. “Now you know why I need to know exactly what happened. Telemetry is putting me off on analyzing it, telling me to do it as they don’t have the CPU cycles. I don’t have time or the CPU cycles. You, however, do.”

  She looked at her daisy-chain gizmo. “I see. Although it boggles my mind that Telemetry wouldn’t make examining this data a priority.”

  “Telemetry claims they have other priorities, and since there is no anticipated spool of the engines to drive power on the horizon, I have to go to the back of the line. Do you still think I’d blow up my own powerplants just to get out of marrying you and create a competency inquest for myself?”

  When he put it like that? No. Bennett would have loved to take Rainer down a few pegs, and what would be better than Rainer’s upgraded engines having a fault? And if Rainer had sabotaged himself just to get out of a marriage, he wouldn’t even have been thrown in the brig. He’d have been shot with silver bullets in front of the entire population of the ship.

  “It also doesn’t change you showed up two days early, rushed me out, and flew barefoot. You knew something was going to happen,” she said, aggravated.

  Rainer flicked the second chip between his other two fingers. “Ask anyone who has ever flown with me about my preference to be barefoot. This chip is a more long-term project. I expect you will chew through the shuttle data in a day or two.”

  “So why did you keep checking your watch?”

  “The generator disc,” he said. “Temperature is a major component of safety. It dissipates heat at a certain rate, and can’t be spooled at certain temperatures. If we’d stayed too long, the disc would have cooled too much to spool, and we’d have had to wait for several hours. The powerplants are extremely efficient and effective, but they require careful handling. Given the already sub-optimal Jovian system conditions were worsening, a prompt turnaround was absolutely required.”

  Okay, that made sense—maybe. But he’d expected a problem with the original flight plan. Well, perhaps she’d be able to tease out some clues from the shuttle data. On to the long-term project. “What is that chip?”

  “This is a raw dump of all Telemetry data from the past eight solar months.”

  She unfolded her legs and got to her feet so she stood across from him. The chip, a pale ice blue one, indicating the size and density of the data it held, gleamed in the light. “And?”

  Rainer fixed her with a piercing stare, his scent collecting into something that smoldered, and his expression became darker. “I want to eliminate the possibility that Jupiter and the solar wind are interfering with Telemetry’s imaging o
f Earth. I’ve been assured that they’ve corrected for all parameters, but I want a second opinion. You’ve been working on the LightBearer issue and are one of the most informed people when it comes to the Jovian system’s idiosyncrasies.”

  “NightPiercer can’t image Earth either,” she said.

  “No.”

  She held out her palm. Ark’s Telemetry had turned to the Navigators with just this problem a few years earlier, but nobody had spotted a solution. It was year Seventy-Three, and the models from the time of Exodus had predicted by Seventy-Five, Earth would be ready for them. Ark’s readings had been inconsistent and incoherent, like gibberish that had been scrambled. The gibberish had changed over the years, but remained gibberish.

  For the past sixty-something years the gibberish hadn’t concerned anyone. The entire reason the ships were out past Mars instead of being in Mars orbit like had been originally planned was because Earth’s dynamo had gone inexplicably crazy. The ships had had to take up a position farther out from the magnetail, since every time the altered Earth passed them, it would have bathed the ships in radiation and a crazed magnetic field, like the planet had suddenly decided it wanted to become a neutron star.

  Jupiter wasn’t much safer, but Jupiter had been understood. The ships hadn’t been built to be science or research vessels and were not equipped to study planets, only monitor one single planet. It was possible that the equipment they did have was not compatible with whatever Earth now was, or the instruments had been damaged, or that the instruments simply couldn’t function properly from Jovian orbit.

  Ark’s Telemetry and Navigators hadn’t found a filter or correction, but Ark was not NightPiercer. Ark had been built by a different team under different circumstances, on a compressed timeline, and drifted in a different position. While the two ships, in terms of cosmic distances, were very close, over the span of distance from the ships to Earth, it might make a significant difference. All the little differences between the two ships might have generated totally different data and circumstances.

  LightBearer had also consistently sent Telemetry data to Ark to assist with their problems. LightBearer’s instruments were similar to, but not the same as, Ark’s. NightPiercer was probably the same. Now she had Telemetry data from all three ships, with three different engines, and three different positions that formed a rough triangle. The three ships combined, working in concert, might be enough to create a picture of Earth.

  Rainer was still hiding something. But what sinister possibility could exist in Telemetry data? If the original models held, then they should be able to go back to Earth now, or soon, or even in her lifetime. Maybe it was just him holding back his own hope.

  It was too dangerous to put the ships through a flight back home, burning irreplaceable fuel and putting the hulls under immense stress, unless they were sure an iceball or flaming magma ball wouldn’t greet them. The models said Earth’s heaving should have settled by now.

  “Nobody can know I’m looking into this. Crèche forced both of us into this, so why not make the best of it? You want to know just as badly as I do. Telemetry thinks I requested it as part of my investigation into the shuttle incident, and for ongoing engine and exterior repair analysis. It’s not sensitive data. People are territorial and sensitive.”

  He was still not being completely honest. “You mean like Commander Bennett.”

  Rainer stretched his mouth into a bitter, unconvincing smile that didn’t match his scent. “We do not get along.”

  “Is there any truth to his accusation that you’re up to no good, and I’m here for some reason other than Crèche?”

  “Would you really want to know if that was true? Seems lose-lose to me. Your choices are cruel truth or dangerous secrets.”

  “I do not need you to protect me,” she spat.

  “That’s my duty,” Rainer retorted. “To protect you. I do not shirk my duties or obligations. No werewolf male takes any pride in being in circumstances so desperate that he has to ask his mate to fight at his side, which is exactly what I’m doing, and it sickens me.”

  Did he just say “mate”? They weren’t mates. Nobody said mates. There were no mates out here in the void. The so-called bond between souls had just been pheromones, if it had existed at all. Some byproduct of being part wolf and the impulse to mate for life to a single partner. Generation Zero werewolves had insisted that mates were real and if they still existed, had to be obeyed, which had pissed off Crèche and all the humans.

  But even the most faithful of Zero wolves had fallen silent when Generation One hadn’t produced a single pair willing to claim they were mates. Wolves began to agree that mates hadn’t been real. The ones who refused to give up their faith had had to face an even colder, grimmer prospect: Gaia had stopped pairing souls. Just like the non-believers that said something about artificial gravity robbed wolves of their ability to shift, the believers said it was another thing Gaia had taken from them.

  Lachesis looked at the chips in her hand, heart brewing cold but hot at the same time.

  Rainer sat down in his favorite chair. He tugged the collar of his shirt and felt along the silver scald marks again.

  A drink sounded like a good idea. She helped herself to one of the unmarked bottles containing a dangerous-looking green liquid. Engine coolant or swill, same difference. “This doesn’t sound like you’re protecting me.”

  Rainer watched as she tucked herself into the big chair, then said, “I’m avoiding red tape. Nobody said you can have the data, and nobody’s said you can’t. It comes down to Telemetry doesn’t want to do it, but they don’t want anyone else to do it either. If you find something, I’ll worry about how to present it then. If you don’t, nobody needs to know.”

  She sipped her drink, hissed as it scalded her mouth, and coughed. She eyed the liquid. It was magical. “You think Bennett will get in the way.”

  He shifted onto one elbow and kept watching her.

  “I was right there, Rainer. I heard the whole conversation about how you think he’s afraid to go back to Earth.” She tried to wrap her head around the idea that anyone would want to stay on these ships. If her choice was eeking out an existence on a half-dead planet or living on a ship, she’d take the planet every single time.

  Rainer touched the silver marks under his shirt again. “I think he doesn’t feel the urgency.”

  She glanced at him over her glass, paused, asked, “Is there a reason to feel some urgency?”

  “You know there is. You understand the situation with LightBearer better than I do. That ship is dying. This ship and Ark will die too. The ships were built for, at maximum, a hundred year mission in a Martian orbit. They are seventy-three years into dancing at the edge of Jupiter’s wrath. We’ve already been through this once before. How many more could have been saved if humanity had listened to the werewolves? They didn’t want to. It had to be staring them in the face and a few million already dead before they accepted it. As a civilization, we’ve learned nothing.”

  The burning liquid kept her warm even as her insides chilled. Rainer’s talk teetered on the brink of something exceedingly dangerous, a flinty threat that could throw a spark if struck correctly.

  “It is staring us in the face, and the name is LightBearer,” Rainer said, eyes narrowing to angry, stormy slits. “Or are these conversations I have only with myself? Did they lie to you and tell you LightBearer was just a practice exercise?”

  “I’ve seen the simulations. I’ve done the simulations. Believe me, I know what happens to that ship in twenty-eight years. I was also sworn to secrecy. Nobody wanted to start a panic. You can barely mention Sunderer without people getting nervous.”

  “Sunderer should make people nervous. All I will get from Tech or Telemetry is stonewalling about CPU cycles. Ask again in a year. But you offer a solution.”

  “It’s not that easy. I need a navigation sandbox, and you mothballed yours thirty years ago. Remember?” Her ribs still hurt from the boot she�
��d gotten for her trouble. “I may as well do the math on a sliderule with some chalk.”

  “Could you do it on a sliderule?”

  “Give me the sliderule and about fifteen years, sure.”

  “The navigation system was cloned into my Engineering sandbox years ago. I can bring it online and spare a few CPU cycles to run it. We can patch your chimera-tablet into the box so it can use the interface, but instead of sending the packets to the main core for processing, they’ll go to the chimera. Don’t pull more than a few CPU cycles and Tech won’t be any the wiser.”

  Dangerous secrets or cruel truth. Seemed like he was withholding the former, but sending her in pursuit of the latter.

  She clenched the chips in her palm.

  “Find out why my shuttle exploded, then examine the Telemetry data. LightBearer’s fate changes if it can be put on a course for Earth,” Rainer said. His posture remained relaxed, but his expression barren. “And all our fates change if we can go back to Earth.”

  NaN

  The next morning after breakfast and the gym, back in the privacy of his quarters, Rainer introduced her to what was left of the navigation sandbox.

  Except there was only one way to access it.

  “You want me to be logged into your workspace as you,” she said, horrified by what he’d presented to her.

  “My engineering sandbox, yes,” Rainer said. “Tech gave me a walled garden for my work. It also includes an almost complete copy of the navigation system from the moment before it was mothballed.”

  “Almost complete?” she asked warily. “Completion matters in this kind of thing. What’s been carved out of it?”

  “The drive interface. Tech let me have it, but only if I agreed to have the hooks that would make it actually functional removed. Save space and resources, while also accommodating Tech’s level of paranoia.”