NightPiercer
Merry Ravenell
9 Swords
Contents
Changing Lanes
Is It Too Late To Say No?
We'll Meet Again
Rainer
A Hive In Trade
Hypothermic Jokes About Male Anatomy
Nowhere To Run, But Somewhere To Hide
Act Like You Belong
Entangled
His Heartbeat
Judge Not...
Sexual Elephants
A Truce, Not Trust
Drifitng In
Hey-O
Unintentionally Dangerous Hobbies
Round Two : FIGHT!
Why She Is Called Luna
Rainer's Match
Are We Coming Or Going?
A Grim Reality
On Being A Pet Guppy
CPU Cycles
FIX THIS
Start Game : Y/N?
NaN
0/0 = Undefined
Flattery That Isn't
Goal Achieved...yaaaaayyy
Née
Potatoes
Small Talk
No.
Betrayal
Saved By A Girl
Forest Sprite
Another Betrayal
Go Away
Next Century Romance
Useless Honesty & Important Lies
It Is Small
Rainer's Final Game
Hull Rupture
Book 2: Separated Starlight
About the Author
Also By Merry Ravenell
NightPiercer
Copyright ©2019 Merry Ravenell
All rights reserved.
NightPiercer is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Covers By Juan
Changing Lanes
From: Forest Game [Crèche :: Biome Management]
To: Lachesis [Crew :: Crèche Division]
Subject : Hunt Request :: Recreation -> (Rabbit)
Your request for a recreational rabbit hunt has been denied. Please do not submit further requests unless accompanied by a Civilization Management endorsement.
Regards—
Lieutenant-Warden Emanuel
Forest Biome Mammal Management
Lachesis bit down a curse, just in case the comm nestled behind her ear overheard her cursing to herself and someone decided to compare timestamps of her reaction against her reading the denial.
She leaned her head back and stared at the ceiling.
There were plenty of rabbits down in the Forest Biomes to hunt. She’d been managing three of the largest colonies that supplied Food and Biome the past two years. That surplus hadn’t disappeared in the six months since she’d been promoted to Sheep.
Get a promotion, get more recreation credits, but get a smack across the snout by Civilization Management. Now she needed their blessing to go hunt a rabbit every six months.
Not good.
This Warden hadn’t even made up any polite lies about Medical fitness certifications, an insufficient supply, or the Biome not doing recreational hunts to control the spread of fungus, or a cricket got loose. No, just the blunt truth: Civilization Management had concerns.
She rubbed the tattoo on her neck. She loved the hunt, the stalking, that feeling of being on a planet, breathing air that smelled like tree and dirt, then that sweet moment just before the final bite.
She ignored the tingle through her jaw, the shiver under her skin, and the predator’s snarl in her throat.
One of her tablets pinged. Time to go.
The main corridor ran alongside the external hull and sported narrow windows that afforded a view of Jupiter. The planet’s bulk was a swirling, unchanging, giant shadowed by an assortment of moons. Jupiter’s bands of color didn’t change, the show just rotated and sparkled with flashes of lightening.
Jupiter was more of a failed dwarf star than a planet. The auroras at the north pole were more than a little evidence of just how dangerous it was.
The LightBearer dangled in the massive planet’s grip, thirty thousand kilometers away. Invisible to the naked eye, the other ark ship’s tiny cluster of thousands of lights didn’t match the rest of the starfield.
She cupped the bottom of her satchel, jostling the tablets inside. There wouldn’t be anyone up in astrometrics this time of day. She’d have free reign over the CPU cycles Captain Ertsu had allocated to the LightBearer project. A new moonlet had appeared in Jupiter’s orbit and needed more study. It threatened to throw their models and work straight into the trash.
No. Now she was making excuses. Navigation was her Dying Art. Crèche was her career, and Civilization Management had sent a pretty clear warning on their disapproval of how she spent her time.
So that meant… right now… she had to go… bowling.
New hobby. Social hobby. An I-can-play-nice-with-others sort of hobby.
Hunting could be that kind of hobby too, except werewolves were banned from hunting in packs. It had once been their birthright, the instincts cherished, the skills celebrated. Even when the werewolves had been driven into secrecy by the dominant human race, pups had still learned to hunt, even if many of them had become glorified ratters. Now hunts were organized and rationed, with a limited supply of culled livestock to teach youngsters the essential survival skills of hunting small prey and dressing a carcass.
And if you liked the hunt and the kill too much, and Civilization Management thought that all those primitive instincts burned too fiercely in your blood?
“Should have listened last time,” she told herself under her breath. She’d faithfully saved up her recreation credits to buy a rabbit hunt every twelve months. Hunting and her long hair were her only indulgences. They were also expensive hobbies. Five extra minutes of hot water and soap that didn’t turn her hair into a brittle mess weren’t easy to secure through normal means.
Forest Biome had pushed back the second to last time she’d applied for a hunt. You’re here like clockwork, isn’t there something else you’d like to do with your credits?
Her mother had pointed out if she was chosen out of Crèche Pool she’d be in the Forest Biome regularly teaching her pup to hunt. Take the hint.
She’d brushed it off and here she was: officially blocked until Civilization Management decided she was… civilized.
She rounded a corner and almost bumped into a line of bodies. “Blast.”
“Lifts out of order again,” the person in front of her told her.
She sighed, but didn’t complain further.
The ladder crawl gave her a chance to ponder LightBearer anyway. Nobody would accuse her of being feral for liking numbers and Telemetry data.
At the bowling lanes, the human working the counter handed her a ball, and she wandered over to where the rest of her team were on their second game of the evening.
There wasn’t any evening on the ship, or day, or night, or dawn, or dusk, but millions of years of evolution had stamped a twenty-four-hour clock into everyone’s biology and language. Everyone on Ark had been born in space, but the old solar concepts of time remained.
Bryan, a human nearing thirty and skinny as a rail, informed her, “You’re late.”
She set her ball into the tray, and herself onto one of the leather couches. Her hamstrings thanked her. “Maybe i
f Electrical happened to fix the lifts down by Livestock?”
“Waiting on Engineering to fabricate some parts,” he drawled and pointed at one female she only knew in passing.
The wolf from Engineering, who sported no stripes but the hammer-and-flame badge of the section, flashed a grin. “Not on my task list, but I’ll put in a word. Can’t have Livestock falling down tubes from exhaustion. Getting a little soft there, Shepherdess?”
“Leg day.” Lachesis stretched out her left leg as her calf tried to cramp. With Ark’s artificial gravity of .90G, running and weights were a daily routine for everyone. Her misfortune that particular day had started with a run on the augmented-gravity top deck track followed by leg day in the weight room.
“Don’t slip, none of us want to eat algae cakes for more than breakfast,” Sonja teased.
Everyone groaned. Algae and crickets were the two foods not rationed. The vast algae tanks in Ark’s belly helped power the O2 exchange for life support, as well as provided an endless stream of edible green goop. There were plenty of palatable ways to prepare algae, but the spartan grilled cakes served at every meal wasn’t one of them. You had to be more than a little hungry to choke them down. Most reached for a handful of grilled crickets instead.
Bryan snickered, having delivered a graceful strike that knocked down all his pins, and told the Engineering wolf, “Evie, this is Chess. Chess, Evie.”
Lachesis shot Bryan a dirty look.
“Chess. Is that short for Francesca?” Evie asked.
“No, Lachesis. Call me Lack, Lach, Lake, hey you, Shepherdess, anything but Chess.”
“Okay, Lake, since you’re Livestock and make the big credits, we’ll let you buy the next game,” Evie said with a sly grin.
“Loser buys next game, and it won’t be me,” Lachesis replied, and she managed a grin so everyone knew she wasn’t trying to be a bitch about it.
There was a mountain of work for her to do, and aside from her little secret side-assignment of figuring out how to save LightBearer, there was some kind of obnoxious genetic incompatibility in her flock of sheep. Almost all the ewes from a certain bloodline she’d bred to a certain ram had lost their pregnancies. Unexplained Early Embryonic Death, and with it, all her plans for the next five solar years.
Her predecessor had to have known the combination didn’t work. Why hadn’t it been in his documentation? Probably the same reason he’d been fired. She’d known when she’d applied for the upgrade that she wouldn’t get flocks that had been expertly tended for thirty years. Exactly why everyone with more seniority than her hadn’t applied. They’d known it was a dumpster fire.
Juggling balls of DNA to maintain a sustainable genetic base was her job, and it wasn’t always going to be pretty. It just got uglier and more complicated higher up the food chain.
“You look like you’re going to bite something.” One of her friends tapped her shoulder.
She twitched out of her thoughts. Someone shoved her on the shoulders and propelled her towards the lane. Her turn.
Gutter ball.
She refreshed her cup of swill and sighed. Her spot on the couch had been claimed by two human males. The one she knew by name, Jebb, patted the sliver of couch next to him. She told him, “There are plenty of free lanes. Go start your own game.”
“Heard a new game was just starting.” Jebb grinned at her. “And you’re buying, Lake.”
“I might be buying, but I don’t remember inviting you to the party.” She glanced at her teammates to say something, but got a bunch of blank looks begging her to drop it.
“Too good for the regular Crew?” Jebb asked with a drop of venom.
Regular Crew were the few hundred workers who did a myriad of things, from moving around cargo, stacking palettes, mopping, cleaning, simple construction and repairs, putting up jellies, making soap, stirring cheese vats. They supported all the official sections and divisions with whatever needed a spare pair of hands and warm body.
“Nope. Guess you may as well join us since we’re the ones inclined to put up with you,” she said. Nobody else was going to back her if she told these two parasites to shuffle along. Time to be her most sugary good-natured self so Civilization Management wouldn’t think she needed more than the normal amount of management.
“What’s got up your butt anyway? I know it’s not any of us,” Jebb said.
“Lake’s got that high-level Crèche work she’s doing,” Byran said. “She’s gunning for Civilization Management before thirty.”
“I am not,” she protested, cringing at the thought of that getting overheard by Tech and passed on to Crèche. Ambition wasn’t exactly a positive trait, especially in a werewolf. “I’ve just got a lot of work on my mind.”
“You’re allowed recreation. There’s a reason they give us allowances,” Bryan advised her. “Don’t be like one of those old-fashioned work-all-day types from back on Earth. You’ve been twitchy for the past year, even before you got this promotion.”
Because a year ago she and the other navigators on Ark—all four of them—had gotten assigned to help LightBearer’s navigators calculate a new position for the failing ship, and more importantly, a course out of Jupiter’s grip. Navigation and cartography were technically Dying Arts preserved for their return to Earth, but LightBearer’s navigation computer couldn’t figure out a way back to safe space.
Nobody outside of Command knew how serious LightBearer’s situation was. She’d been sworn to secrecy.
“Just working,” she told him with an overly dramatic sigh. “I must save you all from a terrible fate of algae cakes and nudity.”
Laughter.
After her next gutter ball, she turned around to accept the regular taunting, only to be faced with someone wearing the badge of an Ark messenger. In her gloved hands was an off-white envelope. And nobody—not even Jebb—was laughing. The entire alley around them slipped into silence like lights shutting off in sequence.
“Lachesis?” the messenger asked.
She nodded mutely.
The messenger offered her the envelope and a bright smile. “Crèche Pool. Congratulations.”
Is It Too Late To Say No?
Seventy years earlier Earth’s poles had shifted, setting off cataclysmic seismic activity and vulcanism. Earth became uninhabitable within fifteen years. Humanity had barely mastered putting a single human into Martian orbit and now had to evacuate a dying planet.
A group of werewolves had realized a generation before that the Earth changes could only end one way. They tried to warn the world, but no one had listened. One of the wolves had been fabulously wealthy, and brilliant, and had started NightPiercer twenty years before the rest of the world accepted the truth.
The world descended into utter chaos as governments and private interests scrambled to ensure the survival of both species. Most of the best and brightest were already on NightPiercer and had been promised a place on the ship. The remainder of the world did what it could. Civilization fractured. Society decayed.
An unknown number of ships were started. Most were ransacked by other builders for parts and talent. More were stormed by desperate, angry people who knew they’d be left behind. Only seven additional ships were completed, built by whoever was left, with whatever was left, stocked with whatever was left, and defended by people willing to do unspeakable things and make unspeakable choices.
Two ships exploded at launch. Three more were lost in the following years.
Now all that remained of what Earth had once been huddled together in the abyss, waiting until they could go home.
The models of Earth at the time of Exodus had said seventy-five years until Earth was habitable again.
It was now Year Seventy-Three, and Earth’s fate remained a mystery, obfuscated by senseless data from Telemetry.
And Generation Three carried on, prepared to breed Generation Four.
Lachesis clutched the envelope in both hands. Heavy, thick paper. Unfamiliar roughness tickle
d her fingertips.
The messenger gave her a friendly salute and marched out of the bowling alley.
Crèche Pool: where all humans and werewolves willing to become parents put their names, hoping to be chosen to raise Generation Four.
Her name and number were written across the smooth front in an ornate, archaic hand. A thick red wax seal embossed with the emblem of the Crèche Council sealed the back.
She’d applied to Crèche Pool as soon as she was old enough. She’d passed all the necessary physical tests and biopsies to indicate her body could sustain a pregnancy in artificial gravity, and that the latent radiation that oozed through the triple hulls hadn’t left her compromised.
She’d been chosen to be a mother.
This was why Civilization Management hadn’t wanted her in the Biome hunting?
“Open it!” Bryan broke the stunned silence.
Everyone clustered around her. Even Jebb. Someone ribbed her. “It’s all downhill from here. After this you’re gonna get married off to someone and you’ll have two bodies underfoot!”
Sonja slid her arm around Lachesis’ hips. “Hey, baby. Maybe you and me in a few years? My biopsies were kinda junk. I’m all yours, though.”
Lachesis looked up, dazed. “I’m pretty sure you and I aren’t spouse-compatible.”
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