A Confusion of Princes (24 page)

‘There are other ships,’ said Raine. ‘But I think they’d be kept close, to try to protect the Habitat. Even at full boost . . . eight hours is just too short. How long have you got?’

‘Around two hundred and forty hours,’ I said. ‘On full recycling, if Ekkie . . . my suit . . . keeps working.’

‘You call your suit Ekkie?’ asked Raine. I noticed she had a dimple when she smiled.

‘The previous owner called it something unpronounceable; I call it Ekkie for short,’ I said. I repeated my earlier question. ‘Is there anywhere closer than Kharalcha Four? A mining station or something? I can’t resolve anything in those rings around the gas giant in the sixth orbital.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raine. ‘I mean, I think there was some kind of palace thing there when this was still part of the Empire—’

‘What?’
I spat.

‘Still part of the Empire,’ Raine repeated. ‘Uh, do you mind if I sit up? It’s kind of weird looking up at you like this.’

‘Sit, lie down, it doesn’t matter,’ I replied. ‘What do you mean,
used to be part of the Empire
?’

Raine struggled to push the restraint web aside till I helped her shove it back into its dispensers. The stuff was supposed to retract automatically, but of course it wasn’t working properly.

‘I mean “part of the Empire”,’ she said. ‘Why is that so hard to understand? This was an Imperial system until about three hundred years ago. For some reason Prince Xaojhek left, with all the priests and everything, and that was it. No one took over; no one came back. There wasn’t even a visit from an Imperial ship till that first attack, nine years ago.’

I tried to take this in. I
knew
that the Empire never retreated from anywhere, never gave up a system or world. The Empire was always expanding, in a perpetual, triumphant conquest of the galaxy.

Or was it? Yet another of the pillars that had underpinned my early life was looking a lot less solid. I’d thought that Imperial Law was sacrosanct, that Princes always obeyed the Imperial Mind . . . perhaps the continued expansion of the Empire was about as true as all that was.

‘Kharalcha Four was once an Imperial world?’ I asked, thinking of the basically rural, undeveloped planets that were most typical of the Empire. ‘I mean, a rural food producer and so on?’

‘Sure,’ agreed Raine. ‘It still is, kind of. I mean, it’s all yokels and farms, and pretty countryside and not much of anything useful. Except food variety, I guess.’

‘So you’re not a planetsider.’

Raine laughed.

‘A dirtgrubber? Of course not. I’m from the Habitat. Gryphon torus.’

She tapped the symbol of the winged creature on the shoulder plate of her suit, and her laughter faded.

‘All of us on the
Heffalurp
were from Gryphon. But the other rings will have suffered too, with the rest of the fleet destroyed.’

‘The Habitat is an orbital environment, from Imperial times?’ I asked.

‘It was,’ said Raine. ‘There’s been a lot done to it since.’

I was beginning to think ahead again. If I could stay alive and get to the Kharalcha Four orbit, there might be some Imperial tek I could salvage. Princes typically had secret caches. Maybe there was even a ship hidden away that would answer to my Psitek.

But I had to get there first, before the air ran out.

‘What kind of comms do you have?’ asked Raine. ‘If I can get in touch with KSF headquarters . . . there might be a ship somewhere close that can pick us up.’

‘Not much that’s any use,’ I replied. The capsule had once had a superior comms system, but it had been ripped out before I got it. ‘Wide- and narrow-band rayder, basically. Nothing real-time.’

‘I’d better try now,’ said Raine. ‘We’re about a billion kilometres out from the Habitat; that’s a fifty-minute lag or thereabouts.’

I nodded. Almost an hour for them to get our message, another hour to get a reply, or for a nearby ship to be dispatched, if there was one. . . It wasn’t very promising.

Something moved in the corner of my eye. I turned quickly, reaching for a weapon, but it was only a shiplouse. I’d forgotten a few had come on board with us.

‘Hey, maybe the shiplice could fix the regenerator!’ exclaimed Raine.

I shook my head.

‘Different Bitek,’ I said. Which was true. I realised I needed to lie about how I worked with them, though, so I mimed patting my pocket and added, ‘Besides, I dropped the coding wand after I had programmed them to open the doors. Here’s the rayder hand unit.’

I pulled the comms control unit out of its socket, flicked it on, and handed it to Raine. She looked it over, adjusted a few settings, rotated the connections to the one she wanted, and plugged it into her suit. That was the best thing about most of the tek lying around the Fringe being Imperial tek or copies of it. Connectivity across teks and generations of tek was a fundamental part of Imperial design.

‘Calling KSF Tac-Command and any KSF ship beyond sixth orbital, any KSF ship beyond sixth orbital, this is Raine Gryphon, survivor of KSFS-17
Heffalurp
. I am in a civilian life capsule; coordinates and vector are . . .’

She looked at me. I flicked the holo display to bring up our position, tilted it toward her, and she read off the coordinates, heading, and acceleration.

‘The capsule is damaged and we have limited atmosphere. Rendezvous and retrieval urgent, any KSF ship, KSF Tac-Command.’

Raine repeated the message five times, while I thought about the situation. We were continuing to boost toward Kharalcha Four, but there was no question that even I wouldn’t make it. And Raine had far less air. I had to work out something that would save both of us.

I glanced across at her, still sending her message. I did need to save her, but I didn’t know why. I mean, there were logical arguments about the Kharalchans’ gratitude and so on, but that didn’t explain the almost overwhelming feeling I had that I must not let her die. It was an inexplicable, emotional response, one I had never felt before.

I didn’t like it, because it felt weak, but somehow I couldn’t stop it. I tried to tell myself that she was just like a mind-programmed servant of my household, but she wasn’t. They were all the same. She was . . .
different
. More interesting . . . and she was different from all the humans I’d met in my training. I’d got on well enough with some of them, but I’d certainly never felt like I needed to protect them.

What had she done to me? There wasn’t any real possibility that she had somehow introduced a behavioural virus into my mind. Whatever I was feeling had to be coming from inside me. . .

But there was no time to conduct any self-analysis. I had to work out what the hell we were going to do.

Raine stopped sending and looked at me looking at her. I looked away.

‘Now I guess we wait for a while,’ she said. ‘I’ll resend every ten minutes until we get a reply.’

‘What’s your exact atmosphere supply?’ I asked.

‘Oh, like I said, around eight hours,’ replied Raine. She didn’t look at her readout.

‘Exactly,’ I repeated sternly.

Raine’s nose twitched, but she inclined her head to check the readout.

‘Seven hours, twenty-three minutes,’ she replied. ‘Presuming minimal activity, which I think is a given, considering.’

She indicated the lack of room, patting the hull and my suit. We were crammed in very close together.

‘The symbiote could probably put you in a trance state,’ I said, thinking aloud. ‘But that would only be good for another eight hours or so, at most . . .’

‘No fun, either,’ said Raine.

I gave her a puzzled look, then I caught on, and smiled.

‘So you do have a sense of humour,’ said Raine. ‘I wasn’t sure if you were just one of those all-business-all-the-time military types.’

‘Me? A military type?’ I asked. I’d have to watch that. ‘I’m just trader crew. You’re the KSF officer.’

‘Uh, that’s not exactly true,’ said Raine. ‘I was kind of not meant to be on the
Heffalurp
. I mean, I am a cadet officer in the KSF Reserve, but . . . I was sort of a stowaway. That’s why I was inside the comms mast.’

‘Sort of a stowaway?’ I asked.

‘I was on the
Heffalurp
, dockside training, when the alert came. I was supposed to disembark, but I didn’t. When Uncle Lymond—the captain—saw I was still on board, we were under way, so he had me locked up in the comms mast lifepod station.’

‘“Uncle” Lymond?’ I asked cautiously. The only uncles I knew were randomly assigned priests. I had a vague recollection that in familial terms, an uncle was a male parental sibling, but I wasn’t completely sure about that.

‘My dad’s brother,’ said Raine quietly. She shut her eyes for a second. ‘He was so angry . . . and now he’s gone . . . all my cousins . . .’

She was silent for a while after that. I edged past her and examined the patched hole and the atmosphere regenerator, just in case there was some chance of repair. The shiplice came over and looked with me, their feelers running over the lumpy mass of the regenerator. But it was completely dead. I shuffled back to my sitting position. Raine was repeating the rayder message.

I thought about how I could get her additional air. Ekkie had a small, highly compressed reservoir that was mostly oxygen, and its regenerator was working well. Maybe if I bled the atmosphere from my suit into the capsule, and ran Ekkie’s regenerator with my helmet off . . .

I ran the numbers. There was some remnant atmosphere in the capsule, about eighteen per cent of normal. In my augmented days I could cope with that for hours, but only for a few minutes in my current state. However, adding all of Ekkie’s reserve would lift the pressure to fifty-four per cent normal. The problem then wouldn’t be lack of atmosphere but carbon dioxide buildup, as Ekkie’s regenerator wouldn’t be able to cope with two of us breathing for as long as it would cope with just me in the smaller, suit environment.

But it would give us both seventy-two hours, give or take, instead of Raine’s seven hours.

‘I’ve worked out a way to get you some more air,’ I said. ‘I can partially repressurise the cabin from Ekkie’s reserve, and then run the suit regenerator with my helmet and joint seals open. It’ll be thin, but it’ll give us three days.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Raine.

‘The calculations are pretty straightforward,’ I said. ‘I mean, three days, give or take a margin of two hours either way—’

‘No, I mean are you sure you want to do that? Three days might not be enough, and you said your suit could do ten days just for you.’

Was I sure? No, I wasn’t. In fact I was wondering why I was even suggesting it. But she was looking at me again. . .

‘I’m sure,’ I said. I braced myself and instructed Ekkie to vent its atmosphere reserve into the cabin.

When the pressure had built up sufficiently, I unsealed my knee joints, removed my gloves, and took off my helmet. Almost immediately my nose started to bleed. I pinched it closed and breathed slowly and shallowly through my mouth. The air was thin, and colder than I’d expected. But it was survivable.

‘Id’s all right,’ I said to Raine. ‘You cad take your helmed off.’

She took off her helmet and shook her head. Her reddish hair wasn’t as short as I’d thought, and was only kept back from her face by her comms headband, which she kept on.

Ekkie’s cilia kept my hair trimmed to some degree, but I was aware that I had the rough equivalent of a three-day beard, now caked somewhat with vomit and blood. I grabbed one of the shiplice and held it to my face, instructing it via Psitek to clean up the extraneous matter.

‘I didn’t know . . . you could do . . . that with a shiplouse,’ remarked Raine.

It was hard to talk in the thin air.

‘Uh, it’s in their basic response programming, but it’s not recommended,’ I said. ‘Got to . . . hold them just the right distance away.’

Its job completed, I set the shiplouse down and it scuttled away.

We sat silently for a while, adapting to the atmosphere. I watched the scans, and Raine repeated the rayder message. I tried not to keep looking at her, but I couldn’t help myself.

‘What? What is it?’ asked Raine when she caught my eye for the third or fourth time. ‘Is something wrong?’

I started to laugh and then I couldn’t stop laughing, and Raine was laughing too, then both of us were sobbing and that turned into coughing and panting for breath, and eventually I leaned back at one end of the capsule and Raine leaned back at her end. Later I learned that this was a reaction to severe shock, something Princes didn’t usually have to contend with, their systems automatically adjusting body chemistry to cope.

‘Yes,’ I said finally. ‘There is something wrong.’

That started us giggling again, and coughing, and then all of a sudden, a crackling voice sounded in the capsule and we were instantly quiet, all focus on the audio.

‘Raine Gryphon capsule, this is KSF
Tormentor
, outbound from K6. We have you on scan, will rendezvous eighty-one hours if you maintain course and acceleration. KSF Tac-Com reports wormhole stoppered, relay from KSF Top Mark “very well done Heffalurps” and “why are you there Raine?” Report status soonest.’

Eighty-one hours. A mere nine hours more than we could stay alive.

17

‘ I
’LL TELL THEM we don’t have that much time,’ said Raine. She breathed out hard, and coughed as she couldn’t get enough air back in. ‘So close . . .’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We can do it. I have another medical symbiote. If we both trance out . . . we should make it.’

‘But if anything happens, we won’t be able to do anything,’ protested Raine. ‘What if you put me under, but you stay conscious?’

I shook my head.

‘The margin is too tight,’ I said. ‘We both have to consume less oxygen and add less carbon dioxide. Tell them we’re going to trance out and we’re depending on them to get to us as quickly as they can.’

‘The
Tormentor
is a fast corvette with a Gryphon crew,’ replied Raine. ‘They’ll be pulling maximum G’s for sure.’

‘No gravity control?’ I asked.

Raine shook her head.

‘None of our ships have it, not anymore. Can’t get the modules, or the engineers to fix the systems.’