NightPiercer

by Merry Ravenell

  “As Command staff, you shouldn’t. I’m disruptive.” And a werewolf with the war-form tattoo on her neck was especially on notice not to be disruptive.

  “We’ll talk about that over dinner.”

  “Tsu might talk to you before that.”

  His expression chilled. “When did you bump into the Captain?”

  “On the way down, and may not have been as demure as I should have been,” she said. “I’m just rattled, and tired of this. Anyway.”

  “Tell me what you found.”

  She offered him the stack of tablets. “I’m not completely sure yet. I got the simulation to stop crashing in those eighteen seconds, though.”

  “How?”

  She worked her lips, gnawing on them with her teeth.

  He waited expectantly, leaning close.

  “Two explosions,” she said. “The shuttle rotated on its belly. We slid through space like this.” She held up her right hand flat, then tilted it about thirty degrees, and swept it to the side. “I remember we slid through space, round about, but I thought we were wings level. We weren’t, we were gliding belly-canted. There were no flight control inputs to put us in that attitude.”

  His eyes seemed very bright, like a predator locked on his prey. “You’re certain.”

  “I’m certain. The sensors were all damaged and obviously unreliable, but the only way I can get your simulation to not crash to command prompt is no flight inputs and to let two small explosions occur during that time.”

  Rainer’s expression hardened.

  “The first one about here.” She walked over to the nose and pointed at the peeled up and damaged tiles. “Not big. It was that one,” she walked back around to the tail and pointed up, “that rolled us belly-over and nose tilted. With the resulting damage I couldn’t get the attitude corrected. So we skid on the side of our foot, if you will.”

  Rainer nodded, expression burning and his scent shifting to match. Not the scent of someone who had been caught. The scent of someone who had been screwed.

  She hugged herself. She needed to accept two things. The first: Rainer hadn’t tried to kill her. The second: something else had happened, and it probably was worse, and Rainer had expected it. He’d shown up early and rushed her out of Ark. He’d even flown solo through a less-than-optimal transit window.

  Rainer wasn’t that kind of unhinged. He’d known something was brewing and needed to move quickly.

  He watched the various simulations she’d created with different parameters. “This is some clever problem solving.”

  “That’s what I’m good at. Practical puzzles. You’ve seen my file.” She shrugged. Her intelligence was useless. NightPiercer only wanted her for her ovaries and womb.

  Intelligence came in several forms, and Crèche had distilled it into three basic types: raw, practical, and emotional. Raw was what most people thought of when they heard the term “genius”. Practical was the ability to solve puzzles and find solutions, but not necessarily having it rooted in math or logic. And emotional intelligence was exactly what it sounded like: the ability to navigate relationships and understand people.

  She’d been rated as having Very High Raw and even gotten Outstanding (the highest actual rating) on one of the raw subsets. In Practical she’d been Outstanding almost across the board, while landing off the scale in some of the subsets. Stupid she was not. Except with Emotional, where she’d been consistently graded “mediocre” or “below average” and even a “poor”.

  Pretty standard for someone to be mediocre across the board: average intelligence, average problem solving, average people skills. Most people were in the average range. That’s why it was average. Nothing wrong with being average. It was very common for those exceptionally strong in one area to be weak in another. Depending on a person’s aptitudes and areas of interest, that could be very bad. Someone with Outstanding Emotional that didn’t want to go into Medical’s Counseling division or Teaching or something similar and had instead dreamed of being an Engineer was going to have a bad time.

  Luckily, she’d wanted to be in Crèche from the start, and her superb Practical combined with her high Raw had made her an ideal pick. Crèche was as much art as it was science, and playing with a bunch of livestock did not require the interpersonal skills she clearly lacked.

  “I was giving you a compliment,” Rainer said.

  A compliment that wasn’t needed or even much of a compliment. She should have been able to do exactly what she’d done. She’d rather hear she hadn’t fucked up the conversation with Captain Tsu.

  Rainer stepped closer. She flinched, uncertain. He smelled of grease and wiring and sweat, and under it male and something musky that settled high in her sinus. She kept her head turned, although the shape of him remained pressed against all her senses. “It’s pretty obvious there were two explosions.”

  “No, there’s a difference between an explosion, or a fatigue failure and rupture that creates an explosion. You did run simulations for those, correct?”

  “I tried to. Can’t guarantee I got it right.”

  He moved so close there was no light between them. He lowered his head as if he wanted to say something else, but his body said everything. She didn’t want to see what she saw, didn’t want to feel the brewing warmth or the way her exhausted soul wanted to crumble against him. He hadn’t tried to kill her, but he was deep into… something… and his claims about red tape didn’t make things better.

  Something was brewing at the highest levels of NightPiercer.

  His scent thickened with interest and focus, all of the force of his impressive mind devoted to her.

  Dear Gaia, was he thinking of kissing her?

  He was.

  “I’ll get to work on the other dataset,” she said, summoning words around the strange spell.

  He straightened, and the spell withdrew, and she breathed out in relief.

  What was that? Some stupid primal instinct that had less sense than a chicken. Rainer was dangerous. Her stupid primal brain didn’t care. Maybe that’s what her brain stem liked about him. And that was very, very dangerous and bad for both of them.

  “Be careful,” he whispered. “Something tells me that what you’re going to find is dangerous.”

  “Are you talking about the shuttle or yourself?”

  A slow smile. “I was talking about the shuttle. Why? Are you afraid of me still? Afraid of what I may smell on your skin?”

  She backed up, flushing under her clothing and knowing he smelled it. Without another word, she fled the bay.

  Flattery That Isn't

  She brushed out her hair, staring at her reflection and pondering her reaction to the Commander. Rainer was dangerous. And he’d been a royal asshole to her too. The entire ship was full of assholes who didn’t like her on their territory.

  Humans said werewolves were territorial, but humans were just as territorial. She’d been purchased, at a dear, dear, dear price, for Rainer, their weird brilliant princeling who everyone loved to hate and who was clearly embroiled in some dangerous power struggle that Captain Tsu likely didn’t know about. She wasn’t like Clotho, who had a good Emotional score, and was such a talented musician all she had to do was pick up her violin for anyone to fall in love with her.

  People wanted Clotho around. They wanted her mother around, they wanted her father around. Her father, who was also a gifted musician and Crew foreman everyone respected for his fairness and good judgement and how hard he worked. And her mother, who was highly respected for her work as a Teacher and her beautiful weaving that made up her Dying Art.

  She’d come from a family that was artistic and good-natured, but strong-willed. Crèche had clearly chosen her mother for use with Omega genetic material hoping to tame the fierce nature and iron will that marked the best Omega wolves. Her own genetic father had been one of Hade’s Betas. The straw of semen had been traded for decades earlier. It had been sitting in Ark unused.

  She and Rainer had a
common pack ancestry. She hadn’t looked, but it was entirely possible that they might even share a common ancestor five or six generations back.

  The attempt had clearly failed to give the desired result. Her mother had gotten a second child in compensation. Not that she would ever have said so and probably didn’t think about it. It wasn’t like Crèche asked anyone’s permission to use Omega material.

  “Failed experiment. I’m a failed experiment.” She’d always been a bit defiant and just lied to herself she hadn’t been hurting anyone. If she wanted to grow out her hair and spend her earnings on maintaining it, she wasn’t hurting anyone. If she wanted to forgo recreation and save up for a hunt once a year, she wasn’t hurting anyone. If she wanted to aspire to the Pool, she wasn’t hurting anyone. If she wanted to pick up Navigation as a Dying Art, she wasn’t hurting anyone.

  Except a lot of little things added up to one big thing.

  “But you still got chosen.” She’d still been in the Pool, and Ark had sold her womb dearly. A hive of bees was an astronomical sum, but what she’d have expected to pay for a young, fertile female “quality” enough to match a Commander. And one possessed of enough stubbornness and temerity to deal with a wolf who had already burned through two wives.

  So there was that.

  “They believed you could do it,” she told her reflection. “They didn’t throw you out. They sold you, sure, but they sold you dearly and didn’t waste you.”

  NightPiercer’s Crèche was desperate, and they’d decided (and convinced Ark) that she was their best chance of salvaging the situation with the Commander. It wasn’t like Ark had needed the bees. Everyone needed to know it wasn’t going to be something that became commonplace.

  “Although hell, you’re going to get a really rank-tempered pup,” she said with a sigh. There was no guarantee their pup—if Rainer could even get her pregnant, which was a very big if—would be even half as smart as either of them. Regression to the genetic mean was a bastard.

  She rubbed the back of her neck, thumb moving over her tattoo briefly. Supervision. It’d been about a week, and Tsu had said no delay, so any day now. Once that was over, and they took her implant out, time to get on with the procreation.

  She turned away from her reflection.

  “Yes, I imagine our pup is going to be a terror,” Rainer said.

  She gasped. “How long have you been standing there?”

  He unbuckled his collar. “How long have you been talking to your reflection?”

  “Long enough to get hungry,” she said, mortified.

  “I’ll shower and we can find dinner. Captain Tsu mentioned bumping into you.”

  He blocked the exit, forcing her to squeeze past him, her body brushing against his. He didn’t twitch a single fiber, and his body didn’t yield a millimeter to make room for hers. Wedged between him and the doorframe, her breasts squished against his arm and her hip against his. His body was a boulder, but his scent a jumble of things. It reminded her of those sped-up videos showing the transition of day, night, weather, and seasons from old Earth.

  “And now you’re making me bump into you?” Warmth built under her breastbone, and between her thighs. She told her hips to move and squish the rest of the way past him, but her body refused to move.

  He didn’t speak. She couldn’t.

  Something inside her eroded like water against soil.

  She tore herself to the side and stumbled, gasping, and clutched her chest between her breasts.

  Rainer, his back still to her, just craned his neck around, still watching her with one eye.

  “Don’t,” she growled, breathing hard. “You’ll steal my food, then try to block my exit? Are you an officer or a rogue?”

  “A rogue,” he said, voice low and rough, but like velvet, not sandpaper. “Where does a well-bred wolf like you learn such ancient insults?”

  Her skin seemed to sparkle, like it was covered in some kind of terrible itch that needed to be scratched, and it was his claws that would scratch it best. She kicked that stupid instinct back into a trunk and shoved it into a closet in the back of her mind.

  Rainer pulled off his shirt. The muscles of his upper body flowed under his skin, chunks of him scarred, the rest of him flawless. He was a bit like Uranus’ moon Miranda: part typical rocky moon, part scarred and smeared, like something had splintered it, turned it molten, and then it had melted all back together.

  “I told him I handed you a dataset to test the gizmo,” he said as he removed his pants. “CPU cycles are at a premium on this ship. If there’s a way to get more computational power, he’s interested.”

  “And he didn’t ask what dataset you handed me?” She looked somewhere other than his perfect ass.

  “I am not the Third Officer because Captain Tsu feels the need to monitor my every move. I do not need to be told to investigate a device that may allow us to gain more CPU cycles. I am in command of this ship more often than you realize. I do not need to be constantly directed on my responsibilities or the needs of this ship like some low-grade junior crewman.”

  “We both know that was at best a half-truth. If he knew I was in your sandbox—”

  “It would be a technical breech of protocol that he’d rather not be informed of. Do not act like you don’t know something about breeching protocol as an efficient and effective means to an end.”

  She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling.

  “Like playing high-stakes strip poker to win the gizmo? I’m not insulting you. I despise officers who crow about ‘protocol’ to avoid something or shore up their authority. I believe you do too.”

  “You’re right. I am trying to use protocol to avoid something. I’m avoiding Gribbons having an excuse to storm in here and beat the snot out of me again. It’s not you they’re going to silver if Tech spots someone accessing your sandbox from these quarters, but your comm says you are in Engineering. Never call me a coward, Rainer. I’m not a coward, and I’m not lazy.”

  Rainer’s cold expression thawed a few degrees as he yielded a hair under her concern. “It won’t happen again. I give you my word.”

  Rainer might not have tried to kill her, but he was going to get her killed at this rate. She touched the still-bruised skin around her left eye. Telemetry data wasn’t sensitive. Everyone would probably be really happy if some aliens cruised by.

  At dinner, she saw Captain Tsu with his husband, and Commander Bennett eating with a few other of the less-junior officers. Bennett and Tsu both noted her as she walked in. Rainer nodded to acknowledge them. She managed to avoid eye contact, and as soon as they had sat, decided it was time for Rainer to talk so she wouldn’t have to. “Tell me about how Command views disruptive crew.”

  After a moment of weighing whether to answer or not, he said, “Command training on all ships teaches a cautious respect for disruptive people. There is a fine line between being toxic and being valuable.”

  “Valuable?” she asked. She’d often wondered how she’d gotten as far as she had considering she’d been constantly chided for her behavior, attitude, and preferred hobbies.

  Rainer half-smiled, sort of pulling his lips back to show his teeth. “Every leader needs someone who tells them no, asks questions, demand answers, and is comfortable being unpopular. No muscle or bone has ever become stronger in the absence of resistance.”

  She caught Tsu looking at them out of the corner of his eye. The Captain was eavesdropping. Again. This was a dangerous conversation. Time for something less controversial. “Tell me about your intelligence scores, aside from they are godlike.”

  “Godlike. That’s a new compliment. I’ve impressed you that much.”

  She sighed. “Are you familiar with the concepts of sarcasm and hyperbole?”

  Rainer’s expression didn’t change. “Uncharted Raw, Outstanding Practical, Poor-Variant Emotional. And you are Very High Raw, Outstanding Practical, Poor Emotional.”

  “A Variant tag. That’s not something they trot out
all that often, especially for Emotional.”

  “I am a unique specimen.”

  The only score lower than Poor was Deficient. Lower than that resulted in No Score and a Medical referral. Each score was an order of magnitude difference. The Variant tag was used to indicate that the person had scored so vastly different in so many tests that the overall composite wasn’t reliable, and came with big caveats.

  Still sounded like he’d been bred in a tube. “So you’re officially an Uncharted overall. Off the scale. In every subset?”

  He nodded.

  “And you still have three stripes with that charming personality of yours.”

  “My heart is in the right place.” Rainer placed a hand over his chest.

  “You mean where you buried it in an unmarked grave?”

  He chuckled. “Something like that. I’m still surprised Ark could be convinced to part with you for any price.”

  Tsu was still watching them. Bennett was also watching from his place, and not being discrete about it, tearing pieces of his bread into smaller pieces. Rainer’s back was to Bennett, which afforded her a perfect view of the First Officer.

  Everything she wanted to ask she couldn’t, and Rainer wouldn’t answer anyway. Jupiter’s auroras danced out of the corner of her eye, but Rainer’s presence commanded all of her attention. She’d never been one to fall all over an attractive member of either species. Her preference was for males, but she’d also been open to a wife as well, and pondering the vast possibilities would have been a waste of time. She’d had a reputation for being a strange duck when it came to sexual partners: selective, but not invested. She’d ignored the ribbing.

  Her priority had been to get high enough in seniority to be in a four-bunk, and ultimately, to get chosen from the Pool.

  Rainer, if he’d been around, would have been a problem. A problem that could have cost her everything she’d worked for.

  He’d already done that, though. She should be flattered that she’d been selected for such a prestigious assignment.