Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

  Juan held a tablet in front of himself. He didn’t say what he was thinking, but Rainer could smell it easily enough.

  “Manage the shift without me. I have a stack of tickets and Command Aptitude to work on,” Rainer said. “I’ll be in my office if something catches on fire.”

  “Nothing’s going to catch on fire.” Juan managed a grin. “Go sleep it off. You look like shit.”

  Rainer chuckled, even though it sent pain through his head. “I consider myself formally chastised.”

  “I’d be drunk and hungover as fuck too,” Simone said quietly.

  “She gave me a different version of events.” Rainer had zero desire to discuss it, but at the same time, this sort of thing never happened, so pretending like it wasn’t happening seemed like a stupid thing to do. This was his core crew. They had gone through a lot of risk and effort to help him find her and save her.

  “Do you believe her?” Simone asked.

  “Yes, but I can’t prove it,” he said.

  “Can we do anything?” Juan whispered.

  “No.”

  “She wouldn’t have done that,” Simone said. “I’ve known her for five minutes, but she wouldn’t have. She’s not stupid and she might hate your guts, Boss, but she likes you too.”

  “Thank you. I’m not sure how that works.”

  Simone grinned. “Come on, don’t you watch old movies? The enemies-to-lovers ones are the best.”

  Juan sighed at her. “That’s stupid.”

  “Says the guy that loves those sappy movies about old holidays involving some weird fat man in a red suit? With the flying team of moose?”

  “Reindeer. They’re reindeer.”

  “All I’m saying is it’s probably better some stuff didn’t leave Earth. Like genetically enhanced smallpox.”

  Juan sighed at her, then whispered to Rainer, “Say the word, Boss. Anything you need.”

  “I’m on my own. All I’m going to ask is if it really does end this way, after Command Aptitude, make sure she’s not alone. Make sure the right people down in Crew and a few levels removed in Engineering befriend her. I’ll never be able to get near her again, and you won’t be able to either, but… we’ve got to protect her somehow. It’s my fault all this has happened to her. But I’m not giving up yet. Tsu hasn’t ordered me off it. And if I start to drink myself into oblivion regularly, sell me out to Tsu. Do not cover for me.”

  This last request got some doubtful looks. Rainer headed off to his office to process and answer tickets, and work on designing the final details of Command Aptitude.

  It sickened him. He had to destroy her… and now he was incentivized to do it. The harsher, the crueler the test, the more it put Lachesis under pressure…

  Gaia, I am a monster. I have become a monster.

  He rested his cheek on one hand and frowned at the massive rows of input parameters and considerations. Lachesis had added a very interesting layer to the Aptitude test, opening up whole new possibilities and ways to challenge the team. But she’d also come with a number of extra challenges, not the least of which was Medical figuring out the best way to do medical support protocols and what might be considered ‘performance-enhancing’ versus ‘death-preventing’.

  He called up her Medical data and skimmed through it once again, now that he was (somewhat) sober if extremely hung over.

  He wrote a script to analyze the frequency of the two shapes and it came away that one type appeared a little more than seventy percent of the time. The rest appeared in chunks with no obvious pattern. A line here, a line there, a chunk of a few hours in one place, with the largest chunk, being the span of twelve hours she’d been in Bennett’s quarters.

  He flicked his stylus in his fingers, sketching swirling patterns like her hair.

  Time to go ask Medical what data they had actually been tracking.

  Forrest met him in his office, which was a mess of tablets and small storage devices, some supplies, and plants. Forrest lined the walls of his office with ivy and special medicinal herbs. It was almost like the officer had wanted to be in a Biome.

  “What?” Forrest asked, annoyed. “You put your claws through my iso-pod and now demand to see me? I have patients. You should know. You’ve been one often enough.”

  “And we both know you knew Lachesis was going to die of neglect. You signed her euth order by default,” Rainer growled back.

  “The way I hear it, Lachesis is Bennett’s concern now. The rumor mill is abuzz, and while the XO hasn’t offered comment, he does look more of the smug bastard than usual, and you have the look of a man who medicated himself with the entire contents of an algae swill vat.”

  “Don’t salt wounds.” Rainer sat himself down, too tired and frazzled and hungover to bullshit his way around Forrest. He was Medical: he could read people. His job as a doctor was to tease out lies, confessions, malingerers, and officers trying to avoid getting a medical clearance revoked. Forrest probably could spot a hungover werewolf as easily as he read a chart.

  Forrest took his chair and leaned back. “Just stating what I’ve heard. You’ve been nothing but a shitshow since she arrived, and I don’t appreciate getting splattered. I get hit enough with blood and other bodily fluids.”

  “You’re a veritable saint. All I want to talk about is Lachesis’ Medical Telemetry data.”

  “I’m not telling you her medical information. I’m taking bets you’re getting divorced after Aptitude, so I’m going to start acting with discretion now.”

  “I don’t want details. I want to understand how it works,” Rainer said. “We’re both creating that scenario.”

  “Hmm-mmm. Why do I smell bullshit?”

  “The data is encoded and means nothing to me.”

  “Yep.”

  “Just tell me the high-level on how it works, or do I have to go digging through documentation? Because one way or the other, I’m going to find out.”

  “Medical Telemetry is really no different from any other sort of telemetry or diagnostic information. Data goes in, programs crunch the data, spit out the compiled reports, and we analyze that. Same as you analyzing engine performance reports. You only go look at the data when you’re watching one very specific value, or trying to figure something out.”

  Rainer pulled up the data he’d been looking at and sent it to the screen on the wall. “There are two different string formats.”

  “And?” Forrest asked.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, I see. I thought you were bringing me something complicated. Gaps in Medical telemetry are common. The data transmits through the comm, but those bands get saturated with higher-priority communications, or if the connection is poor quality and the packets will get dropped, it either delays the packets or drops them.”

  The main comms operated on four different bands, but those bands could get bogged down with data.

  Forrest gestured with his hands. “Medical telemetry data is sensitive—I mean, private—and also very dangerous if it’s corrupted, incomplete, or duplicated. So if the comm detects poor band quality, it stores the data to send all at once. Medical Telemetry has a low-priority flag, so it’s a frequent occurrence. We don’t often use these devices.”

  “It’s Medical telemetry. How can it be low priority?” Rainer asked.

  “Right now we’re just gathering baseline data. Low priority. We’ll flag it higher, but you know Tech. They want justification.” Forrest shrugged.

  Yes, he knew all about Tech. Territorial resource-mongering despots. All the network fibers and bands also had priority settings. Not enough bandwidth availability? Get in line. Your job will execute in the order and priority it was received.

  Forrest gestured to the time stamps. “That column there has the timestamp of the polled data, but that other one is when the data was actually received. Sometimes we get data in batches. More than sometimes, actually.”

  Rainer caught the impatient snap before it escaped and tried to keep his tone mild. “I�
�m not interested in the timestamps. I’m interested in the secondary data type. It’s less data, but gets sent with a verification hash. Why? Bandwidth constraints? Too many packets, so it reduces the dataset to critical parameters only?”

  Forrest shook his head. He tapped his chest. “No, that’s from her implant.”

  “But the implant sends data via the comm,” Rainer said, annoyed. Forrest had just said that.

  “You really don’t know how these things work, do you?” Forrest sighed, groaned, and looked at the ceiling. Then he rubbed his face and said. “It’s simple. If the comm is out of range, fails, falls off, or doesn’t confirm transmission OK after a set number of failures, the implant falls back to its own low-powered antenna to transmit critical data. It uses reserved frequencies. The hash is a packet hash. It’s so if the comm comes back online and sends overlapping data, we don’t process any duplicates.”

  Rainer leaned forward. “Wait. You’re saying that if the implant can’t reach the comm, it falls back to transmitting on its own.”

  “That is exactly what I’m saying.”

  “Why not use that option all the time?”

  “Because it’s a low-power band with limited capacity, and we use those bands to send Medically-urgent commands to the implant to make her heart beat properly or inject medication. We don’t want to clutter the band with upstream telemetry data. It risks congestion, Tech bitching at us, and makes the implant run at a power deficit that drains the battery reserve in days.”

  Rainer pulled up the large gap when Lachesis had been in Bennett’s quarters. “So what would cause a gap this large and long?”

  Forrest glanced at the encoded strings. “Comm out of range or unavailable.”

  Rainer sat up straighter and slid to the edge of the chair. “How do you know?”

  “The hash and encoded string contain a flag telling us why it’s in fallback mode. We do like to know why something isn’t working.”

  His brain surged with the thrill of the hunt as the scent of his prey wafted through his mind. “How far away does the comm have to be to be out of range?”

  “You mean aside from the patient just turns it off despite us saying don’t turn it off? Three meters, give or take depending on things like walls, other comms, other bodies.”

  So she had to be close. In the same room. Bennett may have lived on the same deck as Rainer, but in the single bedroom quarters at the opposite end. Well out of range. “That seems uselessly limited”

  Forrest shrugged. “These implants are meant to be used in critical situations to keep an officer going for the sake of the ship. The implants are designed to not waste time, bandwidth, or power if something isn’t working exactly as expected. It presumes whatever is malfunctioning won’t come back, so stop waiting and move on. While it might seem aggressive, keep in mind these implants are designed to keep patients alive, and with the sort of heart difficulties Lachesis has right now, even a thirty second delay could incapacitate or kill her.

  “Her implant polls for data, then transmits the packet to the comm, every ten seconds. The comm attempts to send the packets as received, but often has to hold on to them due to the network. The implant only expects a confirm OK from the comm every five minutes. If that doesn’t happen, it enters standard fallback, and begins transmitting itself. Any duplicate data we might eventually get from the comm is dumped.”

  So that explained the hodgepodge of data shapes. Simple network congestion. The big window, though, had a different, delectable explanation. “And if I took this to Tech and asked for node data, they’d be able to corroborate that her implant was sending packets via network nodes not near Bennett’s quarters?”

  “Are you asking me if your wife’s comm was perhaps in Commander Bennett’s quarters, but this implant data would indicate her body wasn’t?”

  “Let’s say I am.”

  Forrest chuckled humorlessly. “I’d say Tech would be pissed you involved them in this shitshow.”

  “Bennett knows she has the heart implant.” They’d had meetings to discuss the medical fitness of everyone. “Does he know about this fallback mode?”

  “Did you?”

  “Why didn’t you mention this to Tsu? You knew Bennett was lying,” Rainer said.

  Forrest heaved a sigh. “We look at the compiled data. We don’t dig into the raw data unless we’re looking for something.”

  His mate could have fallen into such an easy crack.

  Forrest eyed him. “Don’t involve me in this, Rainer. If you drag me in between you and Bennett, you should consider yourself deeply in my debt. You two despise each other, and I’m not choosing sides. I already did you a favor not making an issue over the iso-pod.”

  Rainer snarled, “You knew you were killing her. You just didn’t want to get into the fray.”

  Forrest’s calm facade cracked and twisted into raw anger. “Every day I have to decide who we can afford to save, and who we can’t. Keenan ordered her culled. I gave Lachesis the most gentle end this ship could afford to give her—functional sedation, so she didn’t have to sit waiting to die like a condemned criminal, using rationed drugs that I don’t have in vast supply. Why? Because she didn’t deserve to spend her last hours or days waiting for you squabbling assholes to decide her fate. I have given her everything short of a new heart from reserves we do not have. So do not demonize how I do my job, or tell me I abdicated my responsibility.

  “I’m a doctor, and all sides have to feel like they can come to me without wondering if their care is going to get compromised because they’re in a certain section. I fight you for fabrication cycles. I fight with Bennett about excessive shifts and him wanting to reduce the standards for medical clearance. I fight with Keenan about biopsies and insemination protocols. I don’t give a fuck about your politics, or Bennett’s, or Keenan’s. I care about my patients, and my patients come from all your sections. Tsu can referee you three. I’m too busy stitching up the bodies.”

  Rainer picked up his tablets and straightened his sleeves. “We both have a mandate to keep everyone on this ship alive. If you like cancer and radiation sickness, let me know, I’ll simply tell Fabrication to stop prioritizing tiles for the hull.”

  “Needles, Commander.” Forrest narrowed his eyes. “I would very much appreciate some more goddamn needles. Twenty-two gauge, if you’re feeling grateful. But don’t worry if you aren’t. I’ll still stitch your nerves back together the next time you decide you can possibly win a battle against a radioactive fire.”

  Cerebus

  The door to Bennett’s quarters slid open. The first Officer, wearing just shorts and cradling a cup of tea, answered it. “What do you want, Rainer?”

  That neutral tone and expression might work on humans, but wolves smelled through it. Bennett’s scent was… condescending. The human thought he had the upper hand. Rainer schooled his own expression to ice instead of barring his teeth. “We need to talk.”

  “So come back when I’m on duty.”

  “About Lachesis.”

  “In that case, don’t come back. Nothing to discuss.”

  Rainer’s entire back clenched, and he fought to keep his fingers from reaching for Bennett. He reconsidered his plan to lure the First Officer down into the Core and perhaps… bump into him… and perhaps Bennett would fall over a railing…

  No. Lachesis would bite him if he threw everything away for Bennett, no matter how much he wanted to extract every loop of the First Officer’s intestines from his belly and examine them while Bennett watched.

  Rainer clamped his palm around the edge of the door. “I know you’re a lying sack of shit.”

  Bennett paused in mid-turn. “What you think you know doesn’t interest me.”

  Rainer shoved the door back. “I can prove it.”

  “You can’t prove anything. Stop mangling my door, you will only have to fix it.”

  “You should not be worried about your door. You should be worried about your career.”

&
nbsp; “You aren’t dismantling me, wolf.”

  “Then I’m going to cause you such a deep wound your uniform will be stained forever. Then I’m going to make good on my threat to set my mind to making sure you call me sir the rest of your life.”

  Bennett grinned. “Been a while since you and I have had a proper fight. Come inside and tell me your tale of woe. But don’t expect me to disclose anything that may or may not have happened between her and I.”

  Rainer suppressed a snarl and a surge of violence so intense his nails itched in their beds, and the pores along his spine stung. A hundred years ago this human piece of garbage would be on the ground trying to hold his intestines inside the cavity that passed for his body.

  Rainer counted to a hundred and sixty eight.

  Bennett watched the whole time. “Still counting? That’s anger management for children.”

  “It’s keeping you alive,” Rainer said, finally stepping over the threshold, skin twitching at being in the other man’s quarters.

  Bennett’s quarters were not nearly as spartan as one might think the First Officer’s would be, given the man’s disposition. No rugs, but a plush couch and chair, and a large blob-shaped chair with a body-shaped indent and three tablets strewn around beside it, and a plate of crackers and crumbs. No paintings, but instead framed works of art comprised of dried grasses and pressed flowers and leaves squished between panes of glass. The focal point of the room was a lattice made of wood adorned with a vibrant ivy plant, turning the wall into a garden where Bennett also grew small amounts of precious fragrant herbs.

  His bed, in the bedroom off the front room, was neatly made, and from the brief glimpse, piled with blankets and pillows in bright shades and more artwork and ivy cuttings. On the coffee table were four delicate double-pointed knitting needles, a ball of fine yarn, and the beginnings of what looked like a very beautiful and intricate glove cuff. Bennett’s knitting skills were some of the best on the ship, and even Rainer had to admit the gauzy, ephemeral knitted lace would have looked lovely around Lachesis’ shoulders.