NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  Sweat mingled with some of the blood, and there was a burning, throbbing pain starting in her shoulder. The scent of Rainer’s skin and pelt burning might have made her gag if she hadn’t been so focused on keeping the shuttle on its round-about arcing path that used their momentum to slide towards NightPiercer.

  “How are the controls?” Rainer shouted from up in the tail access assembly.

  “Erratic and dodgy,” she shouted back.

  “Have you figured out why the flight computer isn’t stabilizing the trim?”

  “Yeah, because it’s passed out cold in a corner.” She would have rolled her eyes if she could have afforded to take them off the controls for a second. “We’ve got standby instruments, and that’s about it. So tell me, Lead Engineer, what’s your ship’s attitude relative to Jupiter’s orbital plane. If you don’t mind.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m navigating this thing by the starfield and eyeballing our trajectory.” Literally. She was literally eyeballing it based on some primitive gyroscopes and the starfield beyond NightPiercer’s hull.

  Rainer drifted back to his seat, still naked, and his skin flushed red and shiny from still-healing burns. He harnessed himself back into his seat and started to work through the various alarms and panels. “You should have one port thruster now.”

  “So… pants?” she suggested just as her brain was about to explode from the constant struggle to keep the shuttle headed in the right direction. Teasing him seemed like a good/bad idea to blow off a little steam. That’s what they taught in crisis management: crack a joke to crack the tension. The other natural instincts were to fight (bad) or have sex (also bad). She was having all three instincts right then.

  “Am I distracting you?” he inquired, having realized the landing gear controls had been severed, and trying to patch the controls through another system.

  “No, just didn’t realize how cold it was in here.” Her breath had started to frost.

  Rainer paused, took note of the dropping temps, and began to move through the panels looking for the cause. “I find it ironic that we’ve lost most coolant containment, but we’ve also lost the life support ambient temperature sub-system.”

  “So we’re going to turn into radioactive popsicles.”

  He unbuckled himself and drifted towards the back again, and she flinched as he crawled back up into the tail assembly. Now that he’d gone through and silenced all the alarms, and the engines had been powered down, the silence pressed on her, and every clank and claw of his movements echoed across the old shuttle’s carcass. Claws smashed into metal, grabbed hunks of things, more sparks hissed behind her.

  She closed it all out and focused on the course to NightPiercer. The ship was still sixty-three minutes away, and that was a very long time for a lot of things to go very wrong.

  Clunk-clunk-crunch-clunch as his war-form crawled back out of the access tube. Claws twisted the metal grates. But it was Rainer’s human form that drifted back towards her, the last vestiges of his tawny pelt dissolving off his skin. He braced his hand on the back of the seat to anchor himself and used the other to spool up the right nacelle.

  “Don’t touch that!” she yelped and smacked his hand away. “Are you crazy! You’ll push us off course!”

  “I’m putting it into test-start mode,” he said with maddening calm. “It’ll just ignite the inner core.”

  “Why?”

  “So you’ll be coherent enough to keep making simpleton-level penis jokes instead of having hypothermic hallucinations.”

  “Who said I ever made a dick joke?”

  “Never think I’m stupid enough to not get a joke. I just don’t like wasting the carbon scrubbers on most of them.”

  “You’re such a prince.”

  Within a few moments, heat started to press out of the boards in the cargo area behind them. She risked a glance. A heat haze. “Tell me that’s not going to melt the floor.”

  “Won’t melt.”

  “Why does it smell like coolant?”

  “Because I routed life support’s heating system through the empty coolant system.”

  “That’s even possible?”

  “Is it possible for you to get us back to NightPiercer with just a few gyroscopes, one thruster, and a starfield to navigate by?” he asked as his fingers moved across screens.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “That depends, doesn’t it?”

  He didn’t have anything to say the rest of the trip, but as her adrenaline calmed (and a profound exhaustion started to creep in once it became apparent they were going to make it in one piece), she became aware of the scent of his deep anger. Not embarrassment, or frustration, but a different kind of anger that frightened her.

  When he took the controls back to land, she didn’t say a word.

  He did have a spare set of pants and a shirt that he donned before they left the shuttle. His coat and sash he draped over his left arm. She noticed as he pulled on his shirt that the plasma scars extended from his hairline down his arm, chest, back, and legs. What the hell had happened to him? Had he just gotten hot plasma poured over him?

  Being filthy and bloody and burned didn’t stop him from descending the still-warm ramp like he owned every molecule of air he breathed.

  She glanced down at her shoulder. Blood stained it, and her clothing was ripped. She also had a gash in her thigh.

  A bunch of the NightPiercer cargo crew clustered around staring at the battered shuttle. She circled around the hull to get a look at the damage. Half the tiles on the port side were gone. They’d been ripped away with such force that it’d peeled up hull panels, causing the massive shorts and pressure changes that had caused interior panels to explode. Wires and the fine honeycomb mesh layering the panels dangled against the wrinkled forward hull sections.

  The port nacelle was still in its mounting, and didn’t look that bad, except for being charred and deformed. But a meter below it something had punched a hole in the tail assembly. The generator disc was still mostly intact, but missing large chunks, and probably full of microfractures, possibly from being hit by flying tiles or other debris.

  Rainer’s scent of fury and frustration increased.

  He stared at his pet shuttle, vibrating like an angry lighting element. Every question she had crowded back into her brain, and the nagging warning that this was not-right gnawed on her bones.

  She’d been on the port side. All the damage was port side. Rainer had arrived two days early, unannounced, and dragged her away while making gallant statements and putting on a show for everyone in the mess hall. Flown solo, using new engines on an old shuttle. Kept checking his watch. Hurried her along, kept to a timetable, been exceptionally forthcoming about his extreme displeasure with being forced to get married, and absolutely no interest in children. Even bemoaned how she was his type.

  And he’d taken off his boots and socks… knowing he’d need to be war-form.

  He’d tried to kill her.

  She touched the cut on her scalp.

  Cold, still horror like the abyss closed around her mind. It couldn’t be true. If he hadn’t taken off his boots, maybe it could have been bad luck combined with a massive ego. No. Luck didn’t exist for Rainer. Rainer was the sort of wolf who made luck obey him.

  Her husband wanted her dead.

  NightPiercer’s cargo bay was smaller than Ark’s, and with her new crewmates clustered around uncertain at what they were seeing, everything was still for just another moment more.

  A crazy plan formed in her mind. Crazy, but she wasn’t going to wait around for Rainer to off her the next chance he got. Hair-brained, stupid, probably wouldn’t work, but if he was going to kill her, he’d have to do it with an audience.

  She spotted an access panel open across the bay. If it was like Ark, the panel would lead into the network of small tunnels that gave maintenance crews access to all the ship’s internal bits, including vent shafts and plumbing.

>   There was a mail shuttle leaving for Ark in less than forty-eight hours. All she had to do was evade Rainer (and everyone else) and smuggle herself onto the shuttle. Hard for a human, but for a wolf?

  She set her bag down on the ground and wandered around to the other side of the ship casual-like. She sensed Rainer’s attention, but he was distracted by his lovely shuttle and plans turned to scarred nothing.

  One breath, two breaths—go.

  Her paws skidded a bit on the polished metal floor. Strange scents clouded her snout, but the panel was in focus. Her legs devoured the distance. She lunged into the open panel. Her claws clattered on the metal grates. Excellent! A human would have had to crawl, but she ran.

  Rainer’s voice shouted after her.

  She wriggled past two crewmen in the tube. One right turn. The junctions all had numbers and letters and names, but she counted turns: one right. One right. One left.

  She needed to get to a vent shaft to disperse her scent. She remembered to not touch the sides of the tube and tried not to contemplate if this tube dead-ended or didn’t have vent access.

  “Lake!” Rainer’s deep, masculine bark echoed up the tube. The vibrations of his paws traveled up the metal grates.

  The tube ended in a vast, dark tunnel that plunged straight down. No illumination, no bridge she could see, but a tiny ladder going down into the darkness. Too far to jump, no ledge, no way across.

  “Lake!”

  Something rumbled in the darkness below.

  “Lake!”

  “Farewell, Rain!” she barked. Maybe he’d think she’d jumped to her death.

  One… two… three…

  She jumped.

  She fell—and fell—and

  OOF!

  Her paws impacted the metal top of whatever the thing was. She stumbled as pain shot up her shrapnel wounds, then fell flat onto her chest. Her lungs howled in pain. Reflexively, she gasped, air flooded her lungs. The lift whisked upwards, and below her—

  “Lake!” His desperate howl echoed up into the shaft and commanded she sing a song of her own.

  She closed her ears and clamped her jaw shut.

  Nowhere To Run, But Somewhere To Hide

  The lift had three lights on top of it, which supplied enough light to reveal a small access hatch. She shifted to human form and popped the hatch open, then slithered down inside.

  Two maintenance crew just about jumped off the lift in terror.

  Naked bloody women randomly dropping out of a lift’s access hatch probably were not part of their regular duties. She ignored them and examined the injury on her shoulder. She pulled out a piece of metal lodged in the muscle of her upper arm, but other than that, she seemed in one piece. She patted herself down just to be sure.

  “Do you um… need help?” one of them finally asked her.

  “Where’s a good place to hide from a man trying to kill you?” she asked, not expecting an actual answer, nor really caring if they knew what was going on. If this ship was like her home ship, word would get around very fast a werewolf had crawled into the walls.

  “Security?” one offered.

  “Considering the man in question is Commander Rainer, I don’t think command staff is going to be very helpful. In fact, I bet you guys aren’t going to be very helpful either now that I told you that,” she said. When she said Commander Rainer, they glazed over at the same time flickers of non-surprise crossed their faces. “So, where does this shaft go?”

  “Runs the entire y-axis of the ship,” one said uncertainly. “Ah, who are you?”

  “Lachesis of Ark. Or at least I was. Now I’m Rainer’s wife and neither of us is happy about it.” Entire ship, hmm? Good bet that NightPiercer’s algae vats were in the belly. The vats drove life support, so there’d be airflow and ventilation access. The stench was so thick it’d mask her scent. She could hang out down by the vats, sneak back into the cargo bay via the access panel (or ventilation shafts), and tuck herself in with the cargo back to Ark. When she got back to Ark she’d throw herself on the mercy of the Crèche Council.

  Sorry about stamping out your bloodline, Rainer, but you’re determined to do that on your own.

  “You’re from Ark?” the other guy said, eyes bugging out.

  “Nobody on NightPiercer could apparently be suckered into marrying your Commander, so I got the job. Not sure who I pissed off,” she said bitterly. “He doesn’t want to lose his confirmed bachelor status and tried to kill me with a faked shuttle accident. Now I have to kill him before he kills me.”

  When these two invariably reported this conversation, better Rainer think she was going to kill him than just holing up waiting to escape.

  The lift crunched to a stop and they all sort of swayed a bit at the jolt.

  “This is your floor,” she told them with forced cheerfulness, “time for me to double-back. Tell Rainer he got first blood, but being first isn’t important. It’s who’s last.”

  Lachesis had gotten away from him.

  When he’d skidded to a halt at the edge of the shaft, and thought for a horrible second she’d jumped, ice claws had sunk into each chamber of his heart. It’d ripped a song from his throat he’d never heard before.

  Lachesis hadn’t answered. The silence had pushed him onto the grate under a crush of something he couldn’t describe, and just as he’d been about to shift forms to scramble down the ladder to find her body, he’d realized her scent did not go down: it floated from above.

  The crazy bitch had jumped onto the oncoming lift.

  Now he had to find her before this got beyond his ability to contain. The crew were more afraid of him than gossiping, for now, and so far this had only gotten as far as Security pinging him about two maintenance crew with a strange story about a woman claiming to be his wife.

  He could keep a lid on Lachesis’ irrational behavior for another few hours, depending on who she bumped into along the way. Once shift change happened, it’d be mess-hall chatter, and any hope of damage control gone.

  The two crewmen cowered as he came into the Security office, where Gribbons gave him a doubtful side-eye.

  “Where was she seen?” was his immediate question, although he already knew the answer. He simply wanted to make sure these two crewmen were the only ones she’d bumped into.

  “In the B2 Access Shaft,” Gribbons supplied.

  Good and bad news. These men must have been the ones on the lift, meaning Lachesis wasn’t covering a lot of ground. The bad news was that shaft ran the entire vertical length of NightPiercer.

  “She dropped through the lift access port,” one of the crewmen said nervously. “Naked, bloody, sort of…”

  Rainer raised a brow at the crewman's scent. The usual mixture of admiration, intimidation, and desire that came with weak human men meeting an impressive she-wolf. If there was one thing Lachesis was, it was striking. A she-wolf brave enough to march up to a strange male and tell him he was in the wrong place while everyone else in the mess hall just stared slack-jawed was not someone he met every day. These two men hardly seemed a match for her.

  He’d been prepared to be impressed, even caught off guard, the first time he met her, but not prepared enough. She’d seemed soft at first glance, and she’d been soft when he’d touched her. So sad, so vulnerable, so… pliant. Although that couldn’t be accurate. Not for his wife, and nothing in the file he’d been given on her had included anything about her being docile or accommodating.

  Lachesis was not delicate or dainty. Refined, perhaps? But whatever fragility or daintiness she might have disappeared at the slightest hint of a challenge. She lit up with a strange wildness. Another thing her file had not included.

  “Spooky,” the other crewman offered.

  “You thought she was a ghost,” Rainer said dryly. These ongoing accusations NightPiercer was haunted with the spirits of the dead annoyed him.

  “She said she was going to double-back,” was the reply. They shifted on their feet. “She… she said
to tell you she’s going to kill you before you kill her.”

  Rainer’s other brow went up.

  “Leaving a good first impression, Commander,” Gribbons said.

  Rainer ignored the barb. “Did she say anything else?”

  “Um… nothing too flattering about you…”

  Gribbons grinned and sat down on the edge of his desk. “Spit it out. The Commander knows everyone on this ship thinks unflattering thoughts about him. Hasn’t changed his behavior yet.”

  “I get things done, Gribbons,” Rainer said, “and that frequently means removing obstacles. Forgive me if I place a higher premium on being effective than being popular. What did she say about me, crewman?”

  The crewman shifted on his feet. “Well… she just said that… she got suckered into marrying the Commander because nobody else on NightPiercer would do it, and how he tried to kill her in a faked shuttle explosion, so she’s… she said that the Commander got first blood, but that first isn’t important. It’s who’s last.”

  Gribbons’ grinning jaw went slack. “Commander, is this your wife? I thought that—”

  “She was going to be formally introduced in a few days,” Rainer said. The plan had been for her to arrive on a scheduled mail run, given a chance to catch her breath, and then be introduced around. “Her name is Lachesis, and she is from Ark.”

  Gribbons mouthed the name. “That’s a mouthful.”

  “It’s Ancient Greek from Earth. The Fate who measured the destiny of a man,” Rainer said.

  “So trying to outrun destiny and kill her?” Gribbons asked bluntly.

  “Why would I try to kill my own destiny?” Rainer retorted.

  “You’re stupid enough to try. You’ve already evaded that particular destiny at least twice by different names.”

  Rainer growled to himself. “Do you want to get into a philosophical argument on free will?”