She shook her head. “Not what we were hoping for, or what we were looking for.”
“Show me,” he commanded.
“Shower first. It’ll wait five minutes.”
Rainer paced closer. “You’re afraid.”
“I’m afraid I’m right,” she said, throat dry like someone had shoved a towel down it.
He brushed his fingertips along her hair as he passed. She bit her lip and fidgeted while he showered. He returned swiftly, water still dripping down his legs and arms, and his threadbare shorts and hole-riddled shirt clinging to his physique in damp patches. He sat down in his usual place on the couch and fixed her with an expectant stare.
She asked, “Can you get me the most recent data on LightBearer’s position? I only have a few parameters and it’s eight days old.”
“If I want to be an asshole to Telemetry more than I already am. Which I may or may not be inclined to be. Why?”
Since when had Rainer ever had any hesitation about being an asshole to anyone? “And Ark’s data? Can you get recent data from Ark?”
“I haven’t even agreed to piss off our Telemetry, and you’re asking for Ark?”
“Well, could you if you were so inclined, sir?”
“Not likely.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll have to request the data ahead of time. They’ll want to know why. We’re on good terms with them—”
“I would hope so.”
“And the data isn’t sacred, but it’s still asking for a favor between ships.”
“I’m not asking for a special trip, just bump up next week’s mission.”
Rainer smirked. “And here I thought I wouldn’t be able to help you study for Operations Entry.”
She glared at him.
Rainer plucked the stylus out of the top of his large tablet and moved it through the fingers of his left hand. “It’s the cogs in the machine called NightPiercer. For every hour shuttles fly, they require three hours of maintenance. All eight pilots are on duty rosters assigned to other areas or sections. Bumping up a flight by a week requires adjusting maintenance schedules, and I need to call in favors from other leads to get their rosters shuffled so I can get two pilots. Those two pilots may or may not be the pilots who had originally been assigned the mission, and pilots who were counting on hazard pay don’t get happy when they’re bumped.”
She’d only done four ferry flights (two to each ship), but she’d flown exterior close maintenance missions a number of times, and the credits had helped fund her hair. She had always gotten pissed when she’d been bumped off a mission and had to go fleece someone in a card game to buy soap.
Rainer continued, “Ark will also want to know why we need one of their techs to spend half a shift dumping data onto a valuable high-density chip they won’t get back because if we tried to import that much data into our core Tech will howl so loud you will hear them out by the orbit of Eris. Especially since I’d be asking for data for a ship that we’d refused to help years ago.” He stopped talking and smiled, humorless and sharp. “I’m not saying no. I am telling you it will cost me a fortune, so what am I buying?”
Since when had minor obstacles like decorum and protocol stopped Rainer? Time for him to weave some of his dark magic.
“Forest sprite, you are up to something,” he said, eyes brightening. “What prey does my mate want me to lay at her paws? What demonstration of my skills do you require?”
“Save forty percent of civilization.” She pulled up the simulation she’d created and set it into motion.
It was very crude, but the best her chimera tablet could manage on short notice. LightBearer’s position had remained relatively stable up until three weeks earlier, when it abruptly stumbled into a lower Jovian position. There was some Telemetry data indicating the ship had done a main engine burn lasting approximately eighteen seconds, although it wasn’t clear if the burn happened before or after the tumble, or what the goal of the burn had been, or what the ship’s intended course had been.
After the initial falter, the ship’s heading had stabilized: descending right down into Jupiter. So either the instruments were very faulty or something very bad had happened to LightBearer.
If LightBearer kept on its current course, it’d be trapped permanently in Jupiter’s grip, but before the planet ever consumed it, it’d get turned into a charred hunk of blasted metal thanks to the plasma torus wrapped around Jupiter.
Rainer’s smile evaporated. “Eighteen second burn, yes, but not full burn. LightBearer is more powerful than that, and this engine signature looks uneven. But you’re right: they weren’t using idle power.”
All three of the ships kept their engines at idle to generate power and gravity. Bringing the engines up to full idle could produce a very slow maneuvering speed, or if the engines were configured for it, ignite the main engine start for acceleration.
Ships avoided doing a burn. It cost fuel, caused hull stress, and slowing a ship was more difficult than accelerating one.
Rainer scrawled some calculations on his large tablet. “How much margin for error do you think there is in this simulation?”
She tucked her feet up against her rump. “Large, but based on its current position, I wouldn’t want to make a mail run to LightBearer. Not that its previous position was an easy flight.”
Rainer rubbed his jaw and nodded. “We haven’t done a mail run for about ten months due to lack of cargo to make it worth it. Not doing the runs isn’t popular, but LightBearer’s position relative to ours has always been difficult. Urgent items we’ve been passing through Ark.”
“No wonder Ark grumbles about you. Explains everything.” Also drove home how worthless she’d been to Ark.
“The current position isn’t unflyable.”
“That depends on how crazy and desperate the people flying are.”
“You and I could manage it.”
She laughed humorlessly. “You’re the Lead Engineer, I’m a formally trained navigator, and we’re both expert pilots. If the best we can do is ‘manage it’, then everyone else is going to barely survive.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Tapped out at the moment what with all these grand NightPiercer adventures I’ve been having.”
He grinned. “Touché, touché.”
“And my point is that in six months, we aren’t making that flight, and in ten, Ark won’t either.”
Rainer leaned back against the couch and contemplated the big screen. “Unless Ark cracked the problem and LightBearer is on the move.”
She and the other navigators on Ark had flirted with the idea that the way to get LightBearer out of its bad spot was to send it a bit further into the minefield of moonlets, moons, ring debris, radiation belts, magnetic belts, and ionized plasma that made for the swamp around Jupiter.
Old-Earth airplanes had stayed aloft by moving fast enough through air that the force of the air going over and under the wings lifted the whole plane. “Stalling” the plane wasn’t stalling the engine—it was stalling the wing by disrupting the airflow. Stall a wing, fall out of the sky. The way to recover a stall was to point the nose down and get air flowing over the wings, then pull out of the dive.
And never stall the plane again. And probably change your undies. And the seat cushion.
“So we confirm that,” she said. “That’s just a simple yes/no. Like one of the navigators can just walk down to the shuttle bay and tell a pilot.”
Rainer brushed his hand across his tablet, pushing her calculations onto one half of the large screen. He moved through a variety of documents and pulled up an old design from the archives. He skimmed through it, scribbling numbers and equations in the margins of his screen.
She moved over to the couch and sidled up alongside him. “You’re trying to calculate how fast LightBearer moved.”
He shifted as she pressed against his arm, and his stylus stopped moving. “Not enough data.”
She lea
ned closer against him, and said, softly, “Guess.”
He turned his head to look at her. “It’s not even clear from these timestamps if the burn was the cause or the reaction. I only know what’s in these Earth-era designs, which are eighteen months before Exodus.”
She pursed her lips. “You think it makes a big enough difference?”
“NightPiercer’s upgrades make even its fifty-year-old casual courses to adjust position chancy. Even at idle, the engines strain the hull differently. If we actually needed to accelerate, you’d have to do it, even if no one wants to admit it. LightBearer and Ark might be the same way, but I wouldn’t know. You probably know the current flight characteristics of LightBearer better than I do.”
“So let me send a letter to my old colleagues. They’ll tell me.”
He pushed his tablet off his lap and adjusted to face her, one of his hands sliding along her side to rest on her hip. “You know I can’t let you do that. We can’t even ask the question. It’ll expose this project.”
She shoved him. “Well, figure it out! Pull some strings or play your games! Forty percent of civilization is on that ship, and sure, this ship has the deepest reserves of genetic material, but only twenty percent of the warm bodies. We can recolonize Earth with it, but survivability, especially if we have to colonize somewhere like… Pluto… becomes a lot better with more warm bodies! You’re the Third Officer, you have to know about Minimal Sustainable Population and Re-population Protocols.”
A small, wry smile. “Oh, yes, my dear, I know all about Re-population protocols and how I’m not currently contributing. And neither…” he trailed his hand lower. His thumb pressed into the groove of her hip and felt the small, slender nodule embedded into it, “are you.”
She shivered at his touch. His thumb stayed there, halfway between her waist and the apex of her thighs, pressing deeper, while his fingers pressed into her ass. “Afraid to sit at the biggest table of them all? Afraid of what it might cost you?”
“It might cost me you.”
“It might be Gaia telling you don’t come home without half Her errant children,” she growled back. “Are you going to answer to Her, Alpha, and tell Her, why yes, I let half of civilization die because I didn’t want to anger my Captain because I’d broken the rules trying to save twenty percent of civilization?”
He grinned. Wide enough to show teeth, and accompanied by a scent of smug, masculine pride and pure ego, and something else that was like the sweet-salt of desire but laced with something deeper, more primal. “I will head out in pursuit of the prey.”
“Good,” she said, annoyed. “You bring me fish, but you won’t bring me what I really want!”
“And what do you really want?” he asked, tone low and rough.
She wanted to get off this ship. She wanted a planet. She wanted a family. A real family. Her family. And maybe she wanted a pack, and she wanted to hunt more than once a solar year when she’d scraped up enough credits and good will, and she wanted a lot of impossible things.
His hand still held her by the hip. He tugged, pulling her down against him, and captured her by her hair with his other hand. His expression smoldered. “I can only give you what you want if you tell me.”
She slid her arms around his neck, brushing her palms along his gnarled plasma scars. He lifted his chin to accept her touch, gaze never leaving hers. She laced her fingers behind his neck. “The last thing you need is to be goaded.”
“Then you will have to show me I am at least slightly acceptable to your tastes, or else I might go off in search of something to please you, and I wouldn’t want to bring back the wrong planet.”
She bent to kiss him just so he’d stop talking crazy.
He held still as she explored his lips with hers, giving her the chance to taste and sample, drown in his scent. His muscles and nerves twitched under her, waiting for her to come to him. Her tongue grazed his lips, and they parted, his own tongue waiting for hers, although his thumb pushed deep into the softness of her hip.
Heat built between her thighs, deep in her core. He released her hip and slid his palm over her ass, then up her side to cup her breast. She gasped as his thumb found her nipple, not expecting that light caress to send charges through her body. His fingers shifted, kneading her flesh lightly, rolling her hard nipple under his thumb.
She breathed out and moaned softly. He nipped her lower lip and released her breast, caressing her down her side and hip to her thigh. His other hand released its grip on her hair and trailed teasing fingertips down her cheek and across her lips as he kissed her slow, deep, then down her throat, across her breast to linger over that nipple.
She hated him sometimes. She growled as he teased the nipple through the fabric of her uniform, sending taunting shocks through her skin before he smoothed his palm across the flesh, cradling it and rewarding her with a caress that made her moan again. His other hand slipped along the inside of her thigh, but stopped midway, making her fight the urge to squirm and spread her legs for him to invite him further.
He shouldn’t turn her on like this.
He nipped her lower lip again, gaze meeting hers, eyes so close she saw the stormy clouds and flecks of color in the iris, and then moved to nip her ear. He drew his tongue lightly along the edge of the lobe, then whispered, “I can smell you.”
She clamped her thighs together, capturing his fingers between them and sending a jolt of pleasure through her core. Her body dampened more, pleading with his hand to push up between her thighs and touch her.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t had a hand between her legs before (his, hers, someone else’s), but she shouldn’t want his so damn badly it almost hurt. She threw her head back and grit her jaw, trying not to gasp or plead, unconsciously offering her throat to him.
He kissed her windpipe very gently, then raked his teeth across her skin, just as lightly, his breath hot.
She’d never offered her throat to anyone. No lover had ever been worth it. She’d never even thought of doing it. And here she was, flipping her throat around like she tossed her hair.
Quivering, she pulled herself back, and it felt like peeling melted plastic off a surface.
He captured her cheek in his hand. “Stay.”
Her heart caught. She knew exactly what would happen if she stayed. What had almost just happened. Hell, she might as well peel off her clothing and abandon herself to it. She licked her lips. Her hands were braced on his chest. She willed them to not move further south and explore his body. She ignored the stinging thirst to taste his skin. “Because I have to study.”
“What a convenient half-truth. Then permit me to feed you, then I will return you to your bunk.”
Her dry throat refused to form no. The skin still burned with the gentle rake of his teeth, paralyzing any attempt to refute anything he said. The thought of surrendering to him, if he proved to be enough, sent an unbidden, crushing shudder of anticipation through her. She’d scratch, claw, bite him, drive him, taunt him, demand he prove himself. Make him prove he was enough. That she was the greatest prey he would ever capture.
You’re just a trophy, and once he has you, he’ll set you on that shelf with the other rocks.
And maybe she was his trophy. All the old stories said a male with a mate was a favored son. That didn’t mean she was going to sit on a shelf with the rocks.
She lifted her hands off him, curling her fingers into her palms so she didn’t grasp at him. “Fine. But I’m picking the table.”
Cages Are For Rattling
They all looked so young.
She was twenty-three. The faces around her were barely-graduated kids who had just finished School. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe some late-blooming eighteen-year-olds. She’d been minding oyster vats by seventeen.
They all had hair cut very short, all faces clean-shaven. Hell, half of the males didn’t even look like they needed to shave yet. Four werewolves, eighteen humans. The werewolves pushed towards the front of the group to g
et a better look at her. Not a single tattoo among them.
No Omega-sired? A bunch of Generation Two products, perhaps?
Must be nice to have a pleasant disposition. Clotho probably would have had fifty friends by now and been the star of the show. She could win anyone over. There was something about her smile, and the instant she picked up an instrument? Pure love.
“You’re Lake, right?” one student asked her.
“That’s right,” she said, side-stepping her way to one of the desks.
“Commander Rainer’s… um… wife?”
“Yes,” she said. For now. Maybe. I don’t know. Yes? Probably?
“Why are you taking Operations Entry?” another one asked.
Had she been this rude when she was a teenager? Although it was a valid question. She was years older than them, married, and presumably pregnant. Hilarious. Nothing was further from the truth. “Captain Tsu insisted I make the attempt. I was Crèche : Livestock on Ark.”
“What kind of livestock?” someone else asked.
“I managed three genetic pools of multi-facet sheep,” she replied. Then I got shipped off here like the cull I am to marry your might-be-a-religious-zealot-commander. But we won’t talk about that, or the fact that the Commander you’re trying to impress is just as big an asshole. Maybe even bigger. Huge, even.
“Who did you study with?” another person asked.
“Nobody. I arrived too late to find a team.”
“You’re going to fail,” one said dryly, reeking of annoyance that she was even there in this precious hall of scholarly pursuits.
Lachesis dropped the farce of politeness and smiled bitterly. “Captain Tsu ordered me to take the test, so here I am. Go henpeck someone else. I’m not interested in your pup-pissing contests.”
The door to the room slid open, and Commander Bennett came in with several other Operations officers. He glanced at the room, summed up the dynamic in about two seconds, and asked in a very pleasant tone that reminded her of how Clotho could win over a room, “Making friends, Lachesis?”
“No.” She headed to a desk in the farthest corner as the other students snapped to various stages of attention. The other proctors had stacks of tablets and chips and ignored the Commander as Bennett took inventory of the room.
Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2) Page 5
