NightPiercer (Published / Sample)

Rainer

She poked at her breakfast. Nobody else at the long trestle table tried to convince her to eat. Her bunkmates had heard the solemn news the previous night, and by breakfast, everyone on her meal shift knew. Even the kitchen staff had heard. A cinnamon roll—a rare, exquisite delicacy—had somehow appeared with her meal. Complete with white-sugar icing and a little orange zest.

She managed two bites before it lost all taste.

"It's bullshit is what it is," someone whispered to someone else.

More gossip whispered its way down the tables, including the juiciest tidbit of all. A shuttle had been spotted on its way from NightPiercer several hours earlier. Not scheduled, no cargo manifest, no cargo crews ordered to wait for it.

"Whatever is coming in on that shuttle Command doesn't want us to know," the person next to her whispered.

The cargo bay staff had supplied the details that her scheduled shuttle to NightPiercer was the return route of a normal mail run put on the calendar three months prior. The shuttle today was not expected.

"If we're still here," her neighbor whispered nervously, lines of strain around his mouth, "if it's this hush-hush, it can't be good."

"If something were that wrong they wouldn't be able to keep it this quiet," Lachesis whispered back.

"Then what could it be?"

That was easy. "What if NightPiercer has figured out how to get telemetry on Earth and everyone's comparing notes on if it's time to go home?"

Her neighbor's face lit up, and he clapped his hand over his mouth before he yelped, and a scent of joy and anticipation rose up from him. "You're right," he said in a quick, hushed whisper. "They'd keep that really quiet until they were sure."

She hadn't heard anything, and she dealt with Ark's Telemetry all the time working on LightBearer, but that didn't mean they gave her all the data. Telemetry on all the ships had been unable to accurately image Earth for years. Or at least they thought they weren't able to accurately image Earth, since the readings made no sense.

After Earth's pole shift, its magnetic field and Van Allen belts had gone insane. Far worse than anyone had ever expected, and the motley fleet of ships had moved to the far side of Mars. The chaotic magnetic and gravitational pockets, and the intense magnetail streaming off Earth, had chased them even further out towards Jupiter. Nobody could tell if Earth's dynamo was still in its chaotic state, or if the Telemetry instruments had malfunctioned, been damaged, or were inherently faulty.

None of the ships had been designed to be more than lifeboats: get off Earth, drift about, go back. The ships were already well outside their design envelopes. The thrusters used to hold their position put constant micro-stresses on the hulls, coupled with decades of exposure to radiation, the solar wind, Jupiter's magnetosphere, and random space dust had strained Ark's hull in ways that had only been partially anticipated. Sensitive Telemetry instruments getting blasted and no longer functioning properly didn't surprise anyone.

The problem was none of the ships had enough fuel to jaunt over to Earth for a closer look, and if Earth was still spewing out radiation like it wanted to be a neutron star, the ship would get torched. It was a one-time, one-way trip.

She managed another bite of her cinnamon roll, then offered it to her neighbor. He took a tiny morsel, then passed it to his neighbor.

She licked a bit of sugar off her fingers, and movement at the front of the mess caught her eye. Someone had just strode inside, and it was their bearing that commanded her attention. He wasn't another early morning sap dragging themselves in for the left-over algae cakes.