NightPiercer (Published / Sample)

Changing Lanes

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 if 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."