A Confusion of Princes (21 page)

Most of the control panels were dead, liquid bubbling out of burst fluid transport lines and cracked vision-skins. But a couple of panels on the right-hand side of the bridge were still functioning to some degree, lending credence to my theory that the Null-Space concussion wave had hit only part of the ship with full force, and though a glancing hit was enough to kill everyone on board, it hadn’t taken out all the Bitek systems.

After some quick tapping and plucking on the nerve strands of the surviving panels, I managed to get a status report up on the vision-skin. What I found was very encouraging. The vessel had two ship-hearts. The main one was dead, dead, dead, but the smaller, auxiliary heart was still working. Most of its output was being lost due to severed lines, and if that continued, it would effectively bleed to death. But if I could get to it quickly enough and reroute its fluid supplies, that would hold it for a while. Then, with power, I could repair or regrow enough of the command system, get at least some of the Bitek thrusters back online, and then . . .

My next steps would depend on how the situation changed. There might be more ships back on the planet I’d observed, already boosting out toward me. Others could come through the wormhole at any time.

I tried not to think about that as I hurried out of the control room and started down and rimward, heading to the auxiliary ship-heart. If I could save the heart, anything was possible. If I couldn’t, there was always the capsule for a low-G getaway. It would at least take me to the planet, and I would be no worse off.

I was in a hurry, and so I was also a little careless. By the time I got to the auxiliary engineering space, I’d made my way among hundreds of floating, suited corpses. So I was rather surprised as the door ahead of me dilated and I saw a moving figure working by the side of the huge, pulsating orb of green and pink that was the ship-heart.

Whoever it was had their back to me, and I almost shot them, just as a precaution. But I stayed my hand, tapped the nerve cluster to make the door stay dilated, pressed myself against the wall, and keyed my external speakers.

‘Attention!’

The suited figure started, and one hand went to a sidearm.

‘Do not move or I will shoot,’ boomed out of my suit.

The right hand stopped and rested on the suit belt. I couldn’t see what the person was doing with their left hand, which was in front and hidden.

‘I have the ship-heart main nerve exposed,’ crackled a voice. A woman’s voice, tense and aggressive. ‘I will explode the heart, pirate!’

I thought about the situation for a second. My needlegun might not penetrate her suit, which looked like a considerably newer Mektek model than most of those aboard. Even if it did, she might not die instantly and could trigger the heart to destruct.

Negotiation seemed called for at this point, even though negotiation goes against the grain for Princes.

14

‘ I
’M NOT A pirate,’ I said. ‘I’m a survivor. You may turn your head slowly. I won’t shoot. For now.’

‘I’m keeping my hand on the nerve; my fingers are around it. If you shoot, I’ll clutch and it’ll blow.’

‘I understand,’ I said. It would be very annoying to lose that ship-heart now. Belatedly I realised that the explosion might also kill or seriously wound me, a jolt of sudden fear making me speak faster. ‘We can work this out.’

She turned her head. I couldn’t see her face, as she kept her visor silvered. I twitched to make Ekkie turn my visor transparent. Part of my domination training was to fix the subject with my eyes. Not that they were what they’d once been. For instance, I could no longer do any mimetic imprinting via eye blinking, or accurately measure someone’s pupil dilation to check if they were lying, or gauge minute shifts in blood flow and temperature and so on.

‘I’m not a pirate,’ I repeated. ‘My ship got hit with something on wormhole emergence. I was the only one who got to a life capsule. This was the closest ship.’

The woman’s visor slowly cleared. I couldn’t see much, as she had a breath mask covering her nose and mouth, but her eyes were a very dark blue, and very bright, in contrast to her skin, which was very pale.

‘How . . . how do I know that’s true?’

She spoke slowly, and with some effort. Either she was exhausted or in pain. Or both.

‘If I was a pirate, you’d already be dead,’ I said.

‘Point,’ she replied. ‘I guess . . . it’s too early for the pirates to be here, anyway. What . . . what was your ship?’

‘Merchant vessel
Zimit
, Five Worlds Shipping,’ I lied, using the fake background name Elzweko had left for me in the capsule’s information system. ‘What do you mean, “it’s too early for the pirates to be here”? Who blew your ship and the others?’

‘An Imperial!’ She said it like it was a curse. ‘It sliced through the wormhole picket, then the fleet, and took out the exit wormhole picket on its way out. Nineteen ships destroyed in less than ten hours . . . and not a thing we could do.’

‘How do you know it was an Imperial ship? I thought you said pirates.’

‘What else could have done that kind of damage? Besides, the Prince told us who she was, and that she would destroy us.’

Not exactly standard Imperial tactics, but quite plausible. I supposed there must be some reason the Imperial Mind or even just some senior Naval officer wanted these Fringe dwellers destroyed. But it was odd the Prince’s ship hadn’t stayed to complete the task.

‘So what do pirates have to do with it?’

‘The pirates come a day or two later,’ she said. ‘This has all happened before. Twice. Four years ago, and five years before that. Exactly the same thing. An Imperial ship clears the way, and then the pirates come in and loot everything they can before the Confederation fleet can get here.’

‘The Confederation fleet?’ I was feeling a bit short on data here. There were lots of Fringe polities that called themselves federations, so this wasn’t a clue as to my location. But why would a Prince do favours for pirates?

‘We joined the Confederation after the first raid,’ said the woman. She didn’t sound too good, and I noticed there was now pink foam leaking around the corners of her mask, indicating internal bleeding in her lungs. ‘It helped, the second time. At least the Confed fleet made the pirates leave without finishing the job. This time . . . I’m guessing there’ll be even more pirates. The Confeds might not think we’re worth the effort to save a second time. . . ’

‘You’re wounded,’ I said as I thought about salvaging her for future use. She was working on the ship-heart, so presumably was a Bitek engineer or had some training that could be useful to me.

‘I’m
dead
,’ said the woman with a bitter laugh. Pink froth bubbled out around the mask, more than could be whisked away. Her voice was almost lost as she drowned in her own blood. ‘I was out of the hull, inside the comm-beam mast . . . but I still got the edge of whatever . . . whatever hit the ship.’

‘But you’re still trying to save the ship-heart,’ I remarked. ‘Why?’

A coughing gargle answered my question, and the woman’s helmet slumped forward. I tensed for an explosion that did not come, then ran to her, quickly grasping her fingers to uncurl them from the tangle of nerves in the uncovered control ganglion.

The medical symbiote and applicator was in my thigh pocket, which opened at my command. I spent a few seconds looking over the woman’s suit for an appropriate port, but didn’t find one, so instead I unsealed her forearm. Blood misted out in a cloud of tiny droplets. I ripped the tab on the symbiote and loaded it into the applicator. For a moment it looked like the symbiote might be senescent, but after a few seconds the wrapper turned gold. I applied the applicator to the skin of the woman; it bonded, and the symbiote launched itself into her bloodstream, there to replicate and do good works.

I hoped it was in time, and that she was human enough for the symbiote to work. She looked human, but appearances can be deceptive.

The applicator shivered in my hand, and the square of display skin glowed with a demand for additional biological materials that the symbiote needed in order to effect repairs. I went back out and found the nearest corpse, dragged it down, and connected the feeder tube from the applicator.

I’d learned enough about humans in my training months to turn the woman’s head to the side, so when . . . or if . . . she regained consciousness, she wouldn’t see her former shipmate being scavenged in order to keep her alive.

Then I turned my attention to the ship-heart. The woman had already clamped off most of the outputs, keeping the fluid levels high. I quickly ran around and sealed off the ones that were still connected and then started the heart’s self-check and repair routines. Interestingly, this heart had a Mektek restarter in place of what originally would have been a purely Bitek system. Like the ship-heart itself, it was a copy of old Imperial tek, and so was very responsive to my Psitek commands. I told it to stimulate the ship-heart and accelerate the process of self-repair.

I followed this up by encouraging all the auxiliary automatic repair nodules and shiplouse hatcheries to their highest efforts, which was not easy, since I had to get close for my Psitek to work and most of them were in service conduits in the floor, walls, and ceiling. Many were simply inaccessible while I was wearing Ekkie, but I wasn’t going to take off my suit. The ship was maintaining a breathable atmosphere, but there was no knowing when that might fail. In the end I worked out a leapfrog system where I spoke to one nodule and ordered it to work on the next nodule in line, and so on.

An hour later, two important things happened.

The first was the appearance of an operational shiplouse, a Bitek drone assistant the size of my hand. It came scuttling in on its thousand legs from one of the inaccessible hatcheries and immediately went to work rebuilding a nerve complex with its tissue spinner. A ship like this would usually have hundreds of shiplice at work, but they had all been killed and most of the hatcheries destroyed, so even one was a good sign. A working hatchery could make a few every hour, given enough organic material and some inorganics, and there was no shortage of either on board now. Bodies, suits, and weapons would all be recycled in time.

The second important thing was that the woman woke up. I had removed the corpse already, as soon as the symbiote no longer needed additional material, and moved the woman to an acceleration couch in the crew alcove near the ship-heart. The symbiote had reported via the applicator’s image skin that she would live but would need to rest for some days while the symbiote continued its work. I was disappointed by that, since she would not be able to do much if any work on the ship, but provided we were left alone, there would be plenty to do even after she recovered.

I was not thinking of her as a person, you see, even despite my months in training with normal humans. Caught up in an emergency, I had reverted to type. She was just another mind-programmed asset, or at least that’s how I thought of her. At that stage.

‘What’s your name?’

I started at her voice, something that wouldn’t have happened while I was still a proper Prince. I would have heard the difference in her breathing seconds before, a change that announced consciousness.

I left the command ganglion I had been studying and went over to her. She had opened her visor and removed the mask. Now I could see her entire face. She was still pale from loss of blood, but I thought that she could have had a place among my courtesans, for she had an unusual beauty. Most of it was in her eyes, which though weary were still bright and had the hint of a smile in them, though it was a sardonic smile.

She was also younger than I had thought, or was the recipient of very effective anti-aging treatments. We were probably of a similar age, somewhere around nineteen Earth-standard years, though of course my chronological age was somewhat misleading, as I had so much directly downloaded training and experience.

‘My name is Khem. What are you called?’

‘I get called lots of things,’ said the woman. The girl. ‘But my name is Raine.’

‘Rain?’ I asked. ‘As in planetary precipitation of liquid?’

‘Yep. Only with an
e
.
R
-
a
-
i
-
n
-
e
.’

‘Raine.’ I said it again, grappling with the feel of it in the corners of my mouth. Like a lot of names outside the Empire, it felt peculiar to say and sounded even stranger to my ears.

‘Yes, I know it’s a stupid name.’ Raine sighed. ‘You don’t have to carry on about it.’

‘Why is it a stupid name?’ I asked. I was curious. Princes’ names were generated by priests according to a particular formula; there could only be one Prince who held a given name.

‘I said enough already!’ cried Raine. ‘I get it.’

I shrugged. Ordinary humans were puzzling creatures. At least the mind-programmed ones just did what they were told, no more and no less. The others were unpredictable, more unpredictable than my fellow Princes. But I didn’t intend to stay among Fringe humans long enough to learn more about their quirks and foibles. Which meant getting on with fixing this ship.

‘You are a Bitek engineer?’ I asked.

‘Me?’ replied Raine. ‘No. I’m a communication specialist. Well, a student. Second year.’

‘Ah,’ I said. This was disappointing. A communication specialist wasn’t much use to me. ‘But you were working on this ship-heart. You’d stopped some of its fluid loss.’

It was Raine’s turn to shrug, an action that obviously hurt. She gasped and her face went even whiter before she continued. ‘I’ve done the damage-control course, and I had a reserve tour on the old
Heffalurp
last year. One of the exercises was to bring the secondary ship-heart up.’

‘The
Heffalurp
?’ I asked. ‘Oh, that is the name of this ship. What system are we in, by the way?’

‘What
system
?’

‘I’m not an astrogator,’ I said patiently. ‘We did a lot of transits quickly, the last week or so. I don’t know which one we were up to when we got hit.’