Beyond Death (Perimeter Defense Book #2) (13 page)

I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

"Yeah, cool. A 'grown woman' spending her money like that...”

But Astra didn't notice the hints of mockery in my voice and became earnestly filled with joy that I approved of her decision. I just waved it off:

"Kindergarten, underwear on suspenders... Alright, Astra. What else can I do? Stay here in my cabin. I'll order another bed put in by the wall, then give Lika to her mother. You can sleep on her bed. And for now, both of you let me rest for at least five hours before the ship gets to Himora. My wife has pecked out all my brains. She has her own perception of what Astra being a grown woman means..."

But I was barely able to lie down when a message came in from Doctor Nicosid Brandt:

"My Prince, you asked me to tell you when Flora woke up from her crystal sleep. She's being fed and washed now."

I stood, leaving the two Princesses to keep watching cartoons, and set off for the starship's hospital wing. The old doctor asked me to wait another few minutes while he got the paralyzed girl ready to meet with me after four days of sleep. I was finally allowed in.

Florianna was half-sitting and half-lying on an antigravity bed hovering above the floor. The girl was dressed in a black robe that covered her body completely, even her hands and feet. The Truth Seeker's head was obscured by a hood. I smiled. The game designers hadn't put too much work into this and had simply plagiarized this dark outfit from the Sith warriors of
Star Wars
.

"An impressive sight. Should we just go straight to Darth Flora, or is Darth Veyerde better?" I couldn't hold in the nervous laughter. The names just sounded too funny. "How are you feeling after the crystals?"

“I'm not sure yet. It's as if I just learned a very important lesson, but the teacher was speaking an unfamiliar language. Like there are thousands of possibilities, but you can't grasp onto any of them... I need to grow and learn more to be able to use them.”

"This can't have been so necessary, Flora? Crystals have a very bad effect on the body."

"I couldn't be any worse off than I am now. That's why I agreed without hesitation when the Dark Mother's servants suggested I become a Mystic. But I'll figure that out later. For now, explain to me, Crown Prince Georg: how do I manage all this? A bunch of windows, some menus, a map, help..."

"What?" I looked carefully at Flora and discovered with surprise that I could now call up a popup on her:

Florianna Blidge (Veyerde)

Age: 13

Race: Human

Gender: Female

Class: Mystic

Achievements: Survived Truth Seeker Attack, Paralyzed in Combat

Fame: 1

Standing: 0

Presumed personal relationship: Unknown

How can this be? An NPC had become a player. That can't be possible, can it? Or maybe someone decided that the character would be interesting to play and chose to be the paralyzed girl?

“The doctor said that while I was asleep, there were two microcameras sewn into my eyes and an implant put into my brain. I woke up, my nose was itching like crazy, my eyelids hurt, and I couldn’t blink. There's always some kind of flashing in my eyes. How do you manage all this?”

Geeze. I can't believe this new player is covertly trying to get me to explain the rules of the game! This will be an interesting experience for us both. I'd be glad to teach him (or more likely her) to use the game interface.

"Flora, watch and listen. It's not as hard as it seems. In the main menu, you can open a map of the current room, call up popups on objects or words, see the big guide, call up the standing menu...”

* * *

"What's new in the game?" As usual, Mr. G.I. appeared in my dream exactly when I needed sleep the worst and could think of nothing else.

"I had a run-in with Duke Paolo royl Anjer and even, they say, offended him..."

"That's nonsense. There's just no way of talking normally with Paolo. He's pathologically greedy," Georgiy interrupted me and, it seemed, strongly underestimated what I had meant by a "run-in" with the Duke, supposing it had just been a normal argument.

I decided not to disenchant him of that notion and tried to change the topic.

"Miya came to me in a dream."

"Miya?! And what could that creature have possibly wanted?" the new topic aroused the most vivacious interest in my employer.

"She said that I had grown inadvisably close with another Truth Seeker and had to be taught a lesson. After that, Miya maimed a little girl, depriving her of the gift of speech and paralyzing her forever."

"That sounds like Miya, yes. But, I apologize, I'm totally on Miya's side here. Getting too close with Truth Seekers is dangerous for you. They can read thoughts you know. Sure, you may not believe in it but, believe me, it's true!"

"What makes you say that? Of course I believe in it," I began, going over the topic in detail once again.

"And did Miya happen to say where she's living now? Perhaps she left her address for me?" some hope slipped through in his voice.

"I didn't get an address. But, based on what I saw, I can say that she's near a warm sea. The climate was hot, and there were grape vines growing."

"What a bitch! She sure got sick of the February cold in Moscow quick. She and I had been planning to go somewhere in Cyprus or Greece together. It looks like she took off down there on her own... What a sleazebag! I can't even go out on the street here. There's snow and ice, rivers of meltwater in the streets, and mud up to your ears. What really gets you, though, is the head colds. And she's lounging around at resorts! Well, alright. You probably don't care about this at all. Ruslan, if something really interesting happens in the game, you can tell me later. And as for me, I'm gonna throw back some water to ward off a cold..."

* * *

The reeducation campaign undertaken by the colonel on the ore freighter crews had been to good effect. All the freighters came along together with the Sector Eight Fleet. They caught the beacon in the two seconds it was on and came to charge at the stations along the way in a timely and precise manner. Without the slightest problem, the fleet followed along the chain of beacons and arrived at the Li Colony star system.

Unlike uninhabitable systems with automatic warp beacons, there was a small colony in the Li system with two hundred people who lived under a transparent dome on the surface of a huge ice comet. It had once been a prison colony for only the most hardened criminals. Being sent to Li was the equivalent of life in prison without parole for an Orange House citizen. Those times came to an end in Leta when the watchdog police station placed to keep the colony in check with especially harsh measures was destroyed by a Swarm fleet during the war with the Iseyek. The colony itself was not touched by the insects, who thought it would be doomed without food and fuel imports coming in.

The Iseyek were wrong though. The people on the surface of the ice comet survived despite the extremely harsh conditions, starvation and freezing temperatures. The prisoners started extracting the methane and oxygen that were frozen into the ice, using the solar batteries and other equipment that had fallen to the surface from the station. And they were even able to track Swarm ships in the system, and sent that valuable reconnaissance to the Orange House fleet. When, after fifteen years of occupation, people were able to reconquer the Li Colony, there were no more than fifteen haggard inhabitants remaining alive at the frozen station. Despite receiving amnesty, the former prisoners refused to leave their base and began establishing a population of free citizens with their own tiny space port. Several times a year, private trading spaceships came here, and the colonists were able to trade the high-deuterium and -tritium oxygen to them in exchange for what they needed to survive.

While my ships recharged, I decided to take a look at this harsh ice world and meet its inhabitants. I had to don a space suit over my shoulders, which were still itching after the two Princesses’ art session. On my left shoulder, Astra, as she had planned, spiked me with a three-eyed skull flanked with a flourishing pattern. On my right shoulder, Lika tried to paint
Joan the Fatty
. But my daughter didn't have the artistic ability, so Astra had to put another black, three-eyed skull over the weird, angular starship, making it even more sinister than the one on the left.

And then a passenger-freight shuttle, filled with containers of food and equipment, touched down on a small, cleaned-off pad near the entrance to the tunnel that led under the dome. We had to walk very carefully. Our bodies were practically hovering due to the near total lack of gravity. The leader of the colony, a man named Janek, met us in the tunnel beyond the air-lock. He was a middle-aged man bundled up in fur clothing. He immediately invited me to his office.

"That's just about the last thing I expected to see here on this icy world. A member of the upper aristocracy!" Janek exclaimed, not hiding his surprise.

The first thing the local leader did was open a safe and retrieve a bottle he had stashed there.

"The alcohol regime here is strict. Only for the very biggest celebrations. With this climate and such low gravity, alcohol puts you on your ass in a second. And the people here are sturdy. They can get things done under unreasonable conditions, which is why liquor is forbidden – except for the most important celebrations: the birth of a child or midsummer, when our comet goes by the Li star, the ice on the glass melts, and the water boils here due to the low pressure."

Popori de Cacha appeared and inserted a thin straw unceremoniously into my glass. The Chameleon checked something only he could understand on his palmtop device connected to the straw and, without saying a word, nodded to me before slipping back into his camouflage. I thought that Janek would be surprised, but the leader of the colony took the sudden appearance of the Chameleon with utter calm, clearly evidence of his system's proximity to Sss.

"To the arrival of such an important guest!" Janek toasted, drinking his glass in a gulp.

I was expecting it to put some hair on my chest, with a strength at least as high as absinthe or even pure grain alcohol, but it was just wine in the glass, though fortified. Janek, on the other hand, having thought the welcoming host's mission accomplished, wondered directly:

"So, your Highness, I am prepared to hear your offer. After all, clearly such a busy man wouldn't make such a long journey just for a swallow of wine, right?"

"Indeed, Janek. I'll tell you directly: I'm interested in acquiring this star system and the loyalty of the station's inhabitants. Understand, I could take it all by force, but I do not need the glory of a boorish conqueror, when I could solve everything peacefully instead. My offer would be to declare that you will not accept anyone else as star system holder other than myself or people appointed by me. Do not try to interfere in the working of the warp beacon, and stop telling Duke Paolo about all ships that come to the system."

On my last phrase, Janek lowered his eyes. It wasn't hard to guess that Duke Paolo royl Anjer had already been informed of my fleet's arrival. Well, alright. My subjects had already turned off the Li Colony warp beacon, so the head of the Orange House could do nothing but fume in impotent rage.

"Alright, Prince Georg, I have understood your demands. My price is ten million credits for the star system and thirty new settlers for the station. No less than twenty of them women. We have a serious lack here."

"I'll give you twenty-five million credits. That'll be enough for you to pay for thousands of women to come work here in all kinds of professions. I have just brought fifty androids with me on the shuttle, packed and ready, and thirty of them are female. They are all set up with twenty-year contracts, so you'll have skilled workers living here for a long time..."

Based on how Janek's eyes lit up, I figured out that I had guessed right bringing the androids. We clapped our hands together, and soon I received an official certificate signed by the local powers that I was the holder of the Li star system. Yes, Duke Paolo royl Anjer could deny my rights to the Li star system all he wanted, but I had little to worry about now: in one way or another I had become the ruler of the system linking the Chameleons, the Swarm and my capital Unatari.

I had barely returned to
Joan the Fatty
and come out of the shuttle when a message came in from headquarters:

"Commander, the Kingdom of Fastel fleet has entered the system. Shall I sound the combat alert?"

I thought I had only invited one ship that was to bring my daughter to her mother on Fastel-XI – which is why I hurried into the fleet headquarters. The Kingdom of Fastel was on Duke Paolo royl Anjer's side, so formally we were enemies.

"Two hundred fifty miles to the enemy. It's a group of targets. Forty marks on the radar. They're returning correct friend-foe codes. It's the full first fleet of the Kingdom of Fastel. Three heavy assault cruisers: one
Flamberg
, one
Katana
, one
Yataghan
. Three light
Thrush
cruisers, five
Flycatcher
destroyers and twenty-nine
Pyro
frigates. Enemy flagship determined: the
Katana
by the name
Fastel Beauty
."