A Confusion of Princes (3 page)

‘No. I have nothing. Uh . . . where are we going and . . . why are we going anyway? Surely it would be better to stay here and . . . um . . . plan . . .’

My voice trailed off. Though I had long imagined the day when I would become a full Prince, none of my daydreaming had included being almost killed and then having to flee. Mostly it had consisted of looking at the specifications of various extremely fast and deadly starships.

‘We can’t remain here,’ explained Haddad. ‘This temple will not allow you to stay beyond the first hour, Highness, and we must reach a place of relative safety, somewhere where you can access the Imperial Mind. Had you planned which service to join for your initial career?’

Princes supplied the officers of all the key services of the Empire: Navy, Marines, the Diplomatic Corps, Survey, Imperial Government, Colonial Government . . . but they all sounded like hard work, and though I had expected I would join one of them at some stage, the thought of yet more training did not appeal to me. Also, it would mean putting myself into a hierarchy of Princes where I would be the lowest of the low. It would be much more fun to simply go somewhere interesting and be a Prince at large, preferably the only one around. Then I could do whatever I wanted.

‘Uh, I don’t want to commit to any service and all that training malarkey,’ I said. ‘I want to enjoy myself first. Get a ship—you know, a corvette or maybe something smaller, of course with high automation, head out for some distant stars, see something beyond this mouldy old temple, smoke a few Naknuk ships or the like. . . .’

I looked at my Master of Assassins.

‘That’s not going to happen, is it?’

‘Not advisable,’ said Haddad tersely. ‘The nearest shipyard that might have a vessel not already earmarked for a Prince or under the aegis of a Prince would be . . . Jearan Six. We’d have to go commercial from here, several changes, several lines—the risk would be extremely high. Also, it would mean delaying your connection to the Mind.’

‘Can’t I connect here, before we leave?’ I asked. I knew the procedure. Though I would later be able to communicate with the Imperial Mind wherever there were available priests to relay, my first connection needed to be from within the inner sanctum of a temple.

‘It is forbidden for Princes to enter the sanctums of temples other than temples of their own service when on duty, or on direct Imperial orders,’ said Haddad.

‘But I go to the sanctum here often . . . ah . . . when I was a Prince candidate I went there . . .’

‘Exactly, Highness. The optimum possible node now is the Temple of the Aspect of the Noble Warrior on Kwanantil Nine, which serves the Kwanantil Domain Naval Academy of the Imperial Navy.’

‘But you said a Prince can only enter the sanctum of a temple of their own service, or with direct orders,’ I said. My augmented and accelerated brain clearly wasn’t working as it should.

‘Yes, Highness,’ said Haddad.

‘You mean I’ll have to join the Navy.’

‘Yes, Highness.’

My dream of a slender space yacht, lavishly appointed and crewed by suitably attractive mind-programmed servants, disappeared, driven away by the fresh, sharp memory of the flower-trap’s sunbeam going over my head. Next time, there might be more than one assassin, more than one sunbeam. . .

‘In addition to connecting to the Imperial Mind, the Navy would also offer you a high level of protection, Highness. Apart from the vacation period, cadets at a Naval Academy or officers on active service may not be assassinated. Not legally, though accidents do happen. You must always be vigilant.’

‘It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?’

Haddad nodded. I wasn’t sure if this was in agreement or just some kind of punctuation.

‘What are the alternatives and the probability of success?’ I asked as crisply as I could. This line was straight out of one of my favourite Princely biographies, a Psitek experience of thirty-nine episodes entitled
The Achievements of Prince Garikm,
which I had lived through numerous times. Garikm was always snapping it out, or some variation, like the immortal short form, ‘Alternatives! Probabilities!’

‘Without a priest to calculate the probabilities I cannot say exactly, Highness.’

Oh yeah. I’d forgotten that when Garikm said the line, he had about fifty fawning priests standing by to figure out probabilities. All I had was one Master of Assassins and a lot of problems. I had also just begun to realise that the ‘biographical’ Psitek experiences were probably a load of crap. At least, none of them ever showed Princes just killing each other or organising assassinations. It was all formal duels and clever outmanoeuvring that left one Prince looking stupid. Not lying headless on the ground with a burning wound where their neck used to be.

‘Despite the lack of probability analysis, I believe a fast transit to Kwanantil Domain Naval Academy and entry into the Navy provides the optimal path for your survival.’

‘Right,’ I said. For a moment I adopted my ‘Prince Garikm thinking’ pose, but unlike when I’d posed in a Psitek simulation, it just felt silly now. Resting your chin on two bunched fists is pretty unnatural. Instead I paced around my room. I didn’t even notice I was flicking my fingers nervously until I hit my own leg and flinched.

What the hell was I going to do? Haddad knew far more about my situation than I did, and obviously had a much better grasp of what could be done. But could I trust him? Maybe there were some other alternatives, but how could I find out what they were in the twenty-odd minutes before we got kicked out of the temple? The temple that was the only place I really knew, though I would never call it home . . .

‘We must move soon, Highness,’ said Haddad as I continued my pacing.

I stopped and looked at him. He’d saved me once already, maybe twice.

‘Okay, damn it,’ I said. ‘I’ll join the Navy. So let’s go to Kwanantil Nine.’

I paused, then added, ‘Uh, how do we get there?’

‘I have an idea, Highness,’ replied Haddad. ‘But I am afraid it will not be a comfortable journey.’

He quickly outlined his plan, which of course I approved, given that I had no other ideas. Then he gave me two of his many weapons: a three-shot deintegration wand that went into two loops on my inside left sleeve, and an egg-shaped phage emitter that I had to initialise with a lick of my tongue so the Bitek agents inside would not act against me. That sat in the top of my boot, in a pocket that had always seemed extraneous frippery. My clothes had many such loops, pockets, and pouches. I had never wondered why they were there before.

‘I am ready,’ I pronounced.

But I wasn’t, not at all.

2

W
E TRAVELLED TO Kwanantil Nine aboard the largely automated museum ship
Beyond the Veil of Time
, positioned within a diorama depicting a scene from ancient Earth, a sporting contest of two pugilists surrounded by a crowd. Apart from Haddad and myself, the actors were all mind-programmed lackeys who, even while in the vast hold of the ship without an audience, performed their parts on the hour, every hour. Without alteration, save for the occasional replacement of one or both of the pugilists when they became too damaged, new ones being brought out of the exhibit’s internal cold store.

The diorama was contained within a crystal hemisphere some hundred meters in diameter. In addition to the arena where the pugilists fought, there was a tavern, where Haddad and I remained, disguised as drunken patrons. Should anyone enter the diorama, we needed merely to slump in our corners.

I was impressed that Haddad got us aboard without anybody noticing. The hour we spent sneaking through the temple, with Haddad circumventing various monitors, dodging guards, and then boarding the ship through a supposedly one-way waste umbilical, was very educational. At least after I got cleaned up I appreciated the educational aspects.

Perhaps the most important lesson for me was not to accept what I saw or heard at face value and to look beyond the official description or information to see if there was something I could use.

I had been a bit concerned that someone would come and look at the diorama. After all, you’d think if the show was constantly on, it was because some Prince wanted to come and see it.

But again, Haddad had chosen well. There was no Prince aboard, and the only crew were a bunch of priests who never strayed from their command- or engine-room shrines. The exhibit was just being kept in tune for delivery to its intended owner. It was the property of a most senior Prince, Governor Prince Achmir XII (the numeral referring to his eleven deaths). Achmir was the governor of the Kwanantil system, which I learned was an important fief of fourteen tek-shaped worlds and large moons.

So the ship was going to the Kwanantil system, and since there was a Naval Academy there, that’s where I was headed too. To sign up and wave goodbye to my long-held plans for frolicking about the galaxy without a care in the world.

Unfortunately the diorama was destined for Kwanantil
Four
, the capital world of the system, and the Naval Academy was located on a planet in the ninth orbit. Haddad said we could not risk a transit through Kwanantil Four, so we had to get off the ship before it arrived there.

But just as he had chosen the ship well, Haddad had also planned for this eventuality. He set it all out for me, just like Garikm’s own Master of Assassins did in the beginning of each episode of
The Achievements
.

The wormhole exit for the Kwanantil system lay beyond the eleventh orbit. Exiting it, the museum ship would slow for boarding and inspection, purely a matter of form given that it was operating under the aegis of Prince Achmir. Following that administrative check, it would begin to accelerate toward the inner worlds, but on a spiralling path that would take us close to Kwanantil Nine.

At the point of closest approach to the ninth planet, we would leave the ship.

I had approved of this plan in general, until the detail emerged that we would not be leaving in a lifeboat or smaller vessel, for any such craft would be fired upon by the guardships of the Naval Academy unless we could get prior authorisation. But I could not seek that authorisation as I had not yet connected to the Imperial Mind, and in any case, I had no household priests to relay my communications.

Instead of safe passage in a lifeboat, we would equip ourselves with protective suits and stealth mantas that would not be picked up by scanners until we were very close. The mantas were Bitek personal vehicular and reentry organisms that Haddad had been growing in the cellar of the tavern from molecular templates, feeding them with the biological material of the dead pugilists and sand from the arena. Shaped like the marine rays of Earth, they were some five metres long and four metres wide when fully deployed, containing pressurised gases in directional glands for manoeuvring in space, and their undersides were a heat-resistant ablative material to allow a gliding reentry into atmosphere.

But even equipped with the mantas, we could not successfully land, at least not alive. While the ninth planet had been partially shaped to support life, it still didn’t have much of an atmosphere, and our glide path would slow our approach speed to only four or five hundred kilometres an hour.

For the final descent, Haddad had also equipped us with contragravity harnesses, military-issue ones as worn by mekbi troopers rather than the superior variety used by Princes. Unfortunately, without the additional internal power supplies of these troopers, our contragravity harnesses would operate for only three minutes.

In the airlock, Haddad assured me this would be plenty of time and everything would work out. I was a bit annoyed again that he couldn’t tell me the probability of success, even though I knew we needed a priest from the Aspect of the Cold Calculator, who specialises in working out the odds. Because in the biosim Prince Garikm had at least a dozen Cold Calculators, I presumed every Prince would be given a whole stable of probability advisers. Of course, I was wrong about that, as I was about so many other things.

‘Have you used a manta before?’ I asked. We had talked at length about the Princes Haddad had served in the past. He told me all of them still lived, and the most recent hadn’t even died once, a most remarkable statistic. Though Haddad did not say so, I was beginning to understand that I had been assigned a very experienced and senior Master of Assassins, who was far more capable than I could have expected so newly emerged from my candidacy. As I would later learn, most new Princes were assigned apprentice assassins who were promoted to Master when they joined their Prince, a fact unsurprisingly linked to the high mortality rate of neophyte Princes. Most of whom, like me, would have begun their short Princely careers thinking that competition between Princes was like an ordered game, when in fact, as Haddad explained, it was a brutal struggle in which Princes did whatever they could get away with.

‘Once in training, three times operationally,’ replied Haddad. ‘The manta is a well-proven piece of equipment, and the environment of Kwanantil Nine is within deployable parameters. I would prefer better suits, as the atmosphere recycling in these is inferior and there is small margin for delay. However, it could be worse. Follow my lead, Highness, and we will soon see you connected to the Imperial Mind and established as a cadet of the Naval Academy.’

I nodded, stiff necked, and thrust my hands into the manta’s nerve sockets behind its head, establishing contact, as they had no Psitek controls. It rippled under my fingers, eager to launch into space and extend its body. I held it back using the slight variations in finger pressure that Haddad had mentally transmitted to me earlier as a tactile memory.

To aid our departure, Haddad had bypassed the safety devices to allow us to use the emergency jettison feature of the large airlock, blowing off the outer door and using the air contained within to shape our initial vector.

:Prepare for ejection: sent Haddad.

:Ready:

The outer door blew off, and out we went in a cloud of air and water vapour. The starfield spun around me, and for a moment I lost my bearings. Then I saw Haddad, his manta already rippling out like a dark shadow all around him. I lost him again for a moment as my own manta righted itself, but a minute later my internal guidance kicked in, my fingers pulsed at the manta’s nerve controls, and I was lying on the back of a fully extended manta that was gently pulsing its gas glands to match Haddad’s course and velocity.