Separated Starlight (NightPiercer Book 2)

by Merry Ravenell

She jumped, got zapped by her implant, and picked up a tablet. A ping waited for her, but there was a public statement front and center.

  Are you kidding.

  Bennett had issued a formal statement “clarifying” the matter of her lost comm. She read through it, then read through it again, and again, and again, and then another ten times before she really understood what she was reading. Bennett took full responsibility, spinning a beautifully convincing story of being the distracted and well-meaning officer who had sought to spare a similarly distracted and overwhelmed and “in ill health” member of crew the embarrassment of filling a Lost Comm report, and that this entire sad matter was just an example of why protocols existed, and them both failing to obey protocol had resulted in a very unpleasant public fiasco.

  You belly-crawling scavenging piece of shit…

  On the other hand: she’d been exonerated of the incomprehensible crime of betraying her spouse. Now she’d just mortified him (again) in public with her stupidity.

  And Bennett was right about one thing: if she’d done what protocol said, and filled out the stupid report, this wouldn’t have happened at all. She’d have been chastised and berated and finger-wagged at for losing track of her comm. Even if Bennett had done her the “favor” of revealing she was distracted, overwhelmed, and in poor health to try to mitigate it, which just made her sound all the more pitiful and helpless.

  I told you, Rainer. I told you I hadn’t fucked him.

  But no messages from Rainer.

  “You are such an idiot,” Marie said bluntly. “I don’t care what excuses Bennett makes for you.”

  “I can’t believe he’s taking the blame for this,” Petey said. “You’re smart enough to know the Commander is covering for you, right?”

  Oh, was that what he was doing? But they’d never believe the truth. Even Rainer had been all fire and storms thinking she’d fucked his rival. That still stung. She’d had to cry and bleat like a stupid fucking sheep.

  She checked her one ping.

  — THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE. DO NOT REPLY —

  FROM: TECH -> (MESSAGING SERVICE)

  RE: DIRECT MESSAGE PERMISSIONS

  YOUR ABILITY TO DIRECTLY MESSAGE RAINER [SHIP’S THIRD OFFICER, SECTION: ENGINEERING] HAS BEEN REVOKED. PLEASE USE THE PROPER TICKETING SYSTEM FOR ALL COMMUNICATIONS.

  — THIS IS AN AUTOMATED MESSAGE. DO NOT REPLY —

  It hit like a brick in the chest.

  Her marriage was over.

  In just a few weeks, she’d die on her own, and all the problems since her arrival would disappear.

  You’re nothing. You’re no one. No strings to pull.

  Tsu cleaning house in the most brilliant way possible.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said softly, eyes swimming with tears as it all made sense. Tsu had used his own Commanders to destroy her, and they’d never even known. He’d let Rainer and Bennett defeat each other, while delivering a crack to Keenan’s snout so hard she’d never get out of line again.

  Nimble, deft, and without even raising his voice or showing a glint of fang, the undisputed Alpha of NightPiercer had put all his ambitious Betas in their place.

  She laughed, oddly blissful. It was such an elegant use of her life.

  Tsu also knew she wasn’t going to just lay down and die.

  Perhaps the game was not yet over.

  And she sure as hell was not going to lay down and die for Bennett. Her bunkmates thought he was so noble? Her bunkmates were idiots, and so was everyone else who couldn’t see underneath that thin veneer of good looks and pleasant demeanor.

  Petey was still looking at her. She scowled at him. “Get away from me, you mid-rank degenerate. I might be trash, but Crèche didn’t forget I was alive.”

  Petey withdrew, eyes widening, and his scent turned to shock and a pang of something like grief. She’d hit a nerve.

  “If the three of you think,” she told them all, “that anything that happens on the officer’s deck is exactly what it looks like, you’re idiots. The Command staff show you just enough of how things work to make you think you know all there is worth knowing. Stop talking to me like I’m the one who doesn’t understand how things work.”

  She’d lost everything, and just when she’d thought there was nothing left to lose, one of them had found some last bit of gristle on her bones.

  There was only one way to get her life back, and that was going to be to rip it from NightPiercer’s jaws in as bloody, vicious, and nasty a fight as it had to be.

  I hope you made a hell of a test, Rainer. I either want a hell of a victory, or a glorious death.

  In the old-fashioned manner that you prize so much.

  Upstream

  She tugged her braid tight and pinned it securely against her skull with her two pins.

  Her face was gaunt, her wrists had wasted further, and her hair was dull and brittle.

  Eight days before Aptitude she had been rounded up (along with the rest of her crew, who had refused to speak with her and politely told her stay away from us, thanks) and moved to the Isolation Deck. It was a corner of a forward lower deck near the belly of the ship and probably right above the algae vats from the smells coming through the vent system.

  Her tiny box of a cabin was bare metal walls, grate-floored, and barely big enough for the bed. A small mirror hung on one wall. Everything else was at the end of the hallway, and they were let out, one by one, in turn, by automatic door locks that opened at regular intervals, to shower (briefly, in freezing cold water), toilet, and get water at the facilities at the end of the hallway. They were also allowed out once per day to head to the small, derelict gym on the same deck. The air was stifling hot and humid, alternately smelling of the algae vat rooms, the faint odor of brown line, and cricket fraas.

  The heart medications kept her mouth dry, and the warmth made her sweat, and she had a constant headache from low-level dehydration.

  Their meals came from the wardroom, delivered by people they never saw, and set outside their doors, which were opened one at a time. The food would have been good if not for the scent in the room corrupting one’s palette.

  Twice Doctor Forrest had come by to change the needles in her medication band and swap out the tiny vials. It was a fascinating little gizmo: a band of stretchy synthetic material that covered most of her upper arm, and was laced with a network of tiny needles so fine they could inject tiny doses of powerful medications into the blood vessels at the surface of her arm with unerring precision.

  They’d been shoved into isolation because major sections of the ship got involved in the scenario. While it did take place in “the box”—a simulator that didn’t deal in unsimulated death—actual people from the other sections got involved. Since they needed time to prepare, even if they weren’t given the full scenario, they might accidentally let something slip.

  Being alone in her little box didn’t bother her at all. Prior to that she’d spent her time eating in the mess hall glaring at all the NightPiercers who didn’t want her sitting near them, kicking feet out of the way, and growling while she ate and reminding herself over and over again they just wanted her to crawl away and die, so she could not do that.

  Her fight was with their Alpha. She couldn’t let the unranked members of the pack distract her.

  She’d been issued a single new tablet, wiped clean of anything she might have found useful, and blocked from all comms and chatter. She could access the archives, and that was it.

  So she spent her time reading manuals, studying designs, and trying to learn everything she could about Telemetry. Unfortunately, she did not have access to Rainer’s new engine designs.

  Aptitude tried to break everyone. That was the goal.

  She’d already been broken. There was nothing left to break.

  When the door to her room slid open the morning of Aptitude and Captain Tsu stood on the other side, she didn’t bother to salute him.

  “I escort everyone to Aptitude,” Tsu to
ld her.

  She fixed him with a stare. “Don’t trust anyone else to do it?”

  “No.”

  Getting to “the box” required going down through the market level and through the tree-dotted square. Crowds had already congregated. Large screens had been set up for anyone in the crowd to watch what was going to be happening in the box. Many more people would be watching from the privacy of their quarters, or other gathering areas throughout the ships. The officers oversaw it from an undisclosed location.

  The air smelled jubilant and hopeful, but went quiet as she entered, like she’d just crashed a party.

  She kept her spine straight, shoulders square, chin up.

  She was going to take her prestige out of their Alpha’s hide. Or she was going to die in the attempt.

  By the wall of command officer pictures, the marble had been slid aside to reveal a long tunnel.

  There was only this: this river of stone and metal.

  At the end of their lives, wolves crossed the River that separated the world of the living from the dead. Gaia waited on the other side to pass Judgement on the souls that went to Her. But many wolves dwelled on the banks, in limbo because they were too frightened to risk Judgement.

  The long hallway, bent in a crook, ended at large double doors. Tsu pressed his hand into the panel.

  She stepped across the threshold into…

  NightPiercer’s bridge?

  She’d never been to NightPiercer’s bridge, but this sure as hell looked like a bridge. And she was the only one on it.

  The doors slid closed. After a week of the smell of her single room, the air was clean, cool, fresh, but there was a faint scent to it she couldn’t identify. She paced cautiously into the large space, cataloguing everything, from the huge screen at the front of the bridge, to the Captain’s chair made of old, red leather with the distinctive patina of great age and some questionable stains, to the stations, panels.

  Everything looked similar to what she’d seen in the manuals and documentation, and the helm controls came up when she touched the panel. Somewhat similar to the shuttle she’d flown.

  Finally, she moved to Telemetry. Data was already flowing to the panel. It looked like the previous shift’s report. She’d been told that the scenario would use current data and should be handled exactly as if it was a genuine scenario, so anything she already knew was fair game.

  Although she’d have to be careful, because she’d been exposed to data and information she wasn’t supposed to have.

  She called up the Telemetry data. Yes, LightBearer’s position still looked recent. Hell, it looked like it had gotten worse.

  She cycled through Jovian system data, at first pulling up the past four weeks, then realizing that might look incriminating, so why not grab all of it? She had the entire system to herself, and from the looks of things, CPU cycles to burn. Well, relatively. The main core was probably burning a ton to run the simulation.

  She calculated where they were relative to where NightPiercer currently was. Much different. She wouldn’t be able to fall back on any preconceived ideas she might have had. Immaterial to everyone on the team not named Lachesis. Now they were in a slightly worse position in terms of gravity and radiation exposure. There were no notes as to why the “ship” was in that position.

  She went to the helm and pulled it up, bringing up the entire console.

  New engines.

  She pulled up the navigation and flight control system.

  >> COMMAND AUTHORIZATION: REQUIRED <<

  Someone in Tech had decided that security on the helm system was a good idea.

  She almost laughed, except it wasn’t funny, because the engines strapped to the box were new, but the computer flying said engines was not. Still, this scenario hadn’t been built around her or Engineering, so she couldn’t overthink this.

  Tsu returned sooner than expected with Lil.

  “You find something to do?” Lil asked, plunking herself down at a random Tech station and swinging back and forth.

  “Have CPU cycles, might as well burn them,” Lachesis said, processing the last twelve weeks of Jovian system behavior and solar activity just to get an idea of what had been happening. The Jovian system had cycles, some long, some short, and while the planet could be unpredictable, a lot of its “unpredictability” were just short cycles that became more obvious the more time you spent watching the crabby brown-red ball.

  “I’m just glad to be out of that tiny box.”

  Must be, because you’re being civil to me. Lachesis focused on her work.

  “Didn’t it drive you crazy?” Lil asked. “Us wolves can’t bear to be alone like that!”

  “I managed,” Lachesis said, trying to sound pleasant. Soon someone else would be along, and Lil would stop trying to talk to her, because Lil didn’t really want to talk to her. Lil had been one of the first to flat-out tell her don’t come around once the problem with Rainer and Bennett had occurred.

  “You’re so lucky. I was going crazy from boredom.” Lil groaned and looked at the ceiling. “What are you working on, anyway?”

  “Telemetry data from the past four weeks.”

  Actually, she was trying to figure out some strange readings that might have offered a clue as to why their box had moved positions. There was no documentation on why that had happened. Not realistic: there would always be a note about why a ship had moved positions.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Just preparing myself,” she lied.

  Clint arrived next, already sweating and bug-eyed. Lil shifted her social attentions to him. Clint confessed to being freaked out and out of sorts after his eight days on the Isolation Deck.

  One by one, the rest of the team arrived. Everyone wanted to socialize, grateful to see another living person. Lachesis tore herself away from her station to try to be social before she gave up and accepted the cold shoulders.

  Marcus was the last to arrive, and he sat in the big chair with obvious relish.

  So, five hours after she’d arrived, the CPU-glut party was over and the test was about to begin in earnest. These tests could go on for twelve, eighteen hours depending on how sadistic the proctors wanted to be.

  She had spotted some strange readings, but hadn’t had time to ferret out what they were. Marcus had the answer: apparently he’d gotten some “early data” to kick off the party. A moonlet had been ejected from the Jovian system thirty-six simulated hours earlier, and NightPiercer had been moved to a new position. Nothing remarkable there. There were a couple of moonlets that had been calculated to be ejected. Debris regularly got sucked in and chucked out of the system.

  “Why wasn’t the ship moved back into optimal position?” Lachesis asked.

  Dietrich said, “There are external crews scheduled to do some forward hull repairs. Tile replacements. We’ll move after they’re back in.”

  “So we have crews outside right now,” Lil said. “Just want to be sure I’ve got the lay of things.”

  “Yep. Two shuttles, eighteen warm bodies,” Dietrich, who was acting as Marcus’ XO, confirmed.

  There were other reports from various sections. Lachesis half-listened, but it sounded pretty banal and standard. No apparent emergencies, urgencies, or even a minor glitch.

  Everything ticked by for about ninety minutes, with reports from other “sections” trickling in. Mundane things like arrangements for meal shifts or disciplinary tickets, or whatever the hell else it was a bridge crew consisting mostly of Operations people did for amusement. The only thing of interest was a “tickle” (as Lil called it) down in a forward Biome, but according to her it was just some ongoing issue with an air exchange valve, and she and Clint were working on bringing some other systems online until Engineering could get down there to bang some hammers on it.

  She’d have been bored out of her mind, except she had free rein of Telemetry data and CPU cycles to gorge herself on, so she kept one eye on the stream of incoming fabricated data while wo
rking on the genuine historical data.

  “Marcus,” Clint said. Something in his voice made Lachesis look up.

  Marcus spun around in the big chair.

  “We can’t get this valve to open up,” Clint said. “Pressure’s been building in the lines and we can’t reduce it. Something’s going wrong at a main gas exchange junction.”

  “Going to have to be more specific, there’s a lot of pipe down there,” Marcus said, not sounding very concerned.

  “Hard to pinpoint from here,” Lil said. “I can give you an approximate section of pipe, but it’s still fifty meters of pipe to check. It’s probably a check valve, or maybe a bio-filter came loose and ended up jammed somewhere.”

  Marcus nodded. “Kick it down to Engineering. Have them send someone to get eyes on it.”

  Juan (acting as Lead Engineer) said he’d dispatch someone to check the pipe.

  Of course he wouldn’t. But this was part of the script.

  So far, the script was boring as hell.

  “Need CPU cycles, Lachesis,” Lil told her, tension in her voice.

  Lachesis cancelled her current calculations. “All yours.”

  “Thanks,” Lil said absently as her fingers moved faster.

  Dietrich was talking into his comm, and some of the others were moving around, listening and skimming reports. The scent in the air had become thick with nervousness. This Life Support issue was a little bit bigger than they were letting on.

  She made eye contact with Belle. Shit was rolling downhill.

  Lachesis slid two stations down to the unoccupied Engineering terminal and skimmed around to the problem section of the ship. She wasn’t an expert, but she knew what failing and jammed valves looked like: they were blocked in red and blinking, with pressure readings building in the main conduits, with other conduits not reporting anything. Either because the systems were off-line, faulty, or had failed.

  Malcom reported, “Temperature alarm Vat Rooms 22, 23, 24, 25. Looks like Environmental Controls have failed in there.”