A Confusion of Princes (19 page)

Elzweko opened the locker that my original coveralls had come out of, but this time he let me walk inside. There were a dozen vacuum suits hanging along one wall. They were of many different types and origins, though all were old and well used.

‘You have fifteen minutes,’ said Elzweko. ‘Choose wisely.’

I ran along the row of suits, turning them on, which in each case took ten to fifteen seconds fumbling at switches and panels, save for the last one, which was a Naknuk Bitek suit that had its own rudimentary intelligence. I didn’t even bother with that one, because it would have been made for a single user, recognising its authorised wearer via a blood test or skin scrape.

But ten minutes later, as I ran through the test routines of the other suits and they all failed for one reason or another, I had to return to the Naknuk suit.

Naknuks basically spoke and wrote Imperial standard, because they only split off from the Empire four or five hundred years ago. I’d never been able to get the full story from the Imperial Mind, or from anyone else, but the available authorised version basically said that a whole House of about three thousand Princes had fled the Empire to set up a Bitek-only confederation way across the galaxy, shunning Psitek and Mektek. Of course, the Empire had kept growing, and the Naknuks hadn’t gone as far as they might have, so in recent decades there had been numerous clashes along a border region that contained several thousand disputed systems.

So I could read the information that scrolled across the suit’s external vision-skin without difficulty, but that only confirmed what I already suspected. The suit, which called itself Ekumatorozikilinee, was fully operational. But it would work only for its authorised wearer, one Star-Major Druzekh. Who was probably long-since dead, as the suit was over two hundred years old.

‘Three minutes,’ said Elzweko.

I ran the schematics again. The egg-sized Bitek brain that ran the suit was in a small hump at the back, just below the helmet neck rim. I bent close to it and focused my Psitek upon it, reaching out to make a connection.

It was like diving into warm mud, enfolding and closing over me, blocking out all exterior sensation and causing an intense feeling of claustrophobia that made my mind shriek to withdraw. But this was only a typical defence against Psitek intrusion, something I had encountered as a child in my Psitek lessons. I kept on, and broke through into the simple consciousness of the suit, impressing on it that I was its rightful owner, Star-Major Druzekh, replacing the genetic profiles it had for the Naknuk with my own.

I came back out of the suit’s mind as Elzweko said, ‘Two minutes.’

I sent Ekkie, as I had rechristened the suit, a command to open, and stepped inside. The suit closed up after me, the helmet visor slid shut, and various telltales glowed and flickered just above my eyes, displaying patterns of meaningful information. I’d have to work out what they were later, but for now, I could just interrogate Ekkie’s small but literal mind directly. It said the suit was sealed for vacuum, and all systems were operational.

‘Good,’ said Elzweko. ‘We go in through the topside airlock of the Feather, which is actually the connection for the zero-G projector; the sims are programmed not to use it. You have a meeting with your shift boss and will go straight into your first eight-hour shift. You ready?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I just can’t wait.’

The Feather, as the people in it called the orbital station, really wasn’t that bad. It was well organised, so I didn’t have to worry about people trying to kill me, or about inimical life-forms. And as long as Ekkie worked, it was comfortable enough, not too hot or too cold.

Sure, it was hard work, which didn’t come naturally to me. Mektek construction in zero-G and vacuum isn’t the easiest thing in the galaxy. I wondered why they didn’t use automatons of some kind until I saw the first accident with a reaction unit explosion. People were a hell of a lot cheaper to replace than any kind of automaton.

The hardest part for me was sharing a dormitory. Luckily we had our own sealed sleeping tubes, which afforded some measure of privacy. It was all I could do to put up with the inferior life-forms around me when I was working, let alone having to listen to them or watch them in the off shift.

I usually went into my sleep capsule instead and studied technical manuals. It passed the time, though again it was much slower and more difficult than the direct implantation I was used to. Mind you, I did find it easier to work out when they were wrong. With the direct-experience stuff you always had to fight against what it was telling you, even when the evidence that it was wrong was staring you in the face. Like the kinetic sliver loading on the
Zwaktuzh Dawn
.

So I got used to the eight-hours-on, eight-hours-off shifts, and the constant repetition of simple tasks performed in a difficult environment, and I even got somewhat used to living among other humans, though I kept myself as apart as possible.

In fact I got so used to it, I stopped counting the days until it would be over, fully expecting that Elzweko would leave me there for at least a month. But after only three weeks or thereabouts I was paged to meet an incoming shuttle—at the topside airlock, the one the people in the sims couldn’t even see. I went over there, still wearing Ekkie, and met Elzweko, who was wearing a sleek Imperial suit that made mine look like something from the pre-starflight era of old Earth.

He gestured for me to follow and led me through the airlock up into the internal ceiling of the training cavern.

‘So you made it,’ said Elzweko as we climbed out into the familiar Imperial corridor.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You learned faster than some,’ remarked Elzweko. ‘Though of course a fair few never learn at all. You still need to be careful. Think about what a Prince would do . . . then do the opposite.’

I nodded. It was good advice.

‘We’re sending you straight out,’ continued Elzweko. ‘There’s a storehouse ahead; you’ve got thirty minutes to pick out whatever you can find and fit into a survival capsule. The capsule piggybacks on an automated courier, preprogrammed for at least ten wormhole transitions, straight out toward the Lokowhik rim. After ten transitions, it’ll keep going until it drops you in the first system where it picks up enough tek transmissions to indicate a permanent presence of some kind, not just other passing ships.’

‘What if they’re Sad-Eyes, or Deaders?’ I asked. ‘Or Naknuk?’

‘You’ll be in Fringe space,’ replied Elzweko. ‘Not in the domain of any of our enemies. But it is possible you’ll encounter an enemy ship. If it’s Sad-Eyes, I suggest you overload the power plant on your capsule. Deaders don’t take prisoners. Naknuks . . . Naknuks you might survive. There’s nothing about you their Bitek will pick up as Imperial, and they do work with Fringe humans and the like. You got a Naknuk suit to work, I see. They’ll respect that.’

‘Speaking of the suit, can I keep it?’ I asked. I’d got used to Ekkie.

‘You can take whatever you have on you, plus whatever you can pick up in the storeroom,’ said Elzweko. ‘Just go through that door and keep going. Good luck, Lieutenant Khemri. Or should I say Khem, a trader originally from the Raboghad system, a place of no particular account? You’ll find some background details on yourself in your capsule’s info system, by the way.’

‘Khem it is,’ I replied. I held my hand up, palm out, in the fashion I’d learned in the training sim, a salute apparently common among humans in the Fringe.

Elzweko returned it, spun on his heel, and went out a door that led to the Empire and everything I really wanted to get back to. I continued on into a long hall loaded with what looked like the flotsam and jetsam of a hundred worlds, laid out on and under three lines of tables that stretched the full hundredmetre length of the hall. At the far end, the outline of a door fluoresced green, then immediately turned yellow as I entered. I knew I must pass through it as soon as it turned red.

Thirty minutes later, that door slid shut behind me, and I walked down a ramp to a small, deep internal dock where a slim, nonstandard automated courier ship sat on a launching rail. A disturbingly small, five-metre-long, three-metre-diameter cylinder was mounted on the courier’s back, the hatch on the end flipped open so I could see the acceleration couch inside.

This was my lifeboat capsule. I looked at it and wondered how I was going to survive the five weeks or so it would take to transit ten wormholes, let alone however long I’d be in space afterward.

I also wondered how I was going to stuff my loot inside. I’d taken Elzweko literally and brought with me everything useful I could find in the storehouse that I was able to carry.

All of it was very old, and mostly it was copied Imperial tek, and ancient copies at that, but all kept in good repair. I had managed to find:

A needlegun, a sidearm that shot slivers of ultradense metal at very high speed. It was a very effective weapon, limited in my case by the fact that I had only been able to find three compatible magazine/power packs, each loaded with a hundred needles.

A Bitek medical symbiote applicator and a living symbiote pack that still had three dormant symbiotes. Again, properly fed and watered, this could be a lifesaver for human or near-human patients. The symbiote could deal with a huge variety of diseases, poisons, and contaminants, and repair minor injuries or maintain life in the face of major ones.

A shipsuit made from a Mektek-Bitek composite somewhat resistant to puncture and energy weapons. Ekkie, my vacuum suit, was pretty good armour against a variety of weapons, but I would probably need something more casual to wear when a full-on Bitek spacesuit that made me fifty centimetres taller and fifty centimetres wider was inappropriate. The shipsuit was probably Imperial Survey issue of a century ago, but all the insignia had been replaced with the faded badges of Five World Shipping, some kind of merchant company from a Fringe polity of, I guessed, five habitable worlds, part of the false background that had been established for me that I would have to study en route.

And last but probably not least, a stasis box of Bitek templates for a whole bunch of useful items. Though trickier to activate, as they took careful handling and attention, not to mention various raw materials, with the templates I could grow a reentry manta like the one I’d used before; a kind of watchdog; two types of reconnaissance flyer (nocturnal and diurnal); and an aquatic rescue beast. It was unlikely I’d need to use all or even any of these, but I knew from my training that they were very valuable trade goods.

There were other items already in the survival capsule, a pretty standard load-out of rations, water, atmosphere-regeneration equipment, and some very basic and limited planetary survival gear. I checked through all of this and ran the diagnostics on the capsule. Like everything else I had, it was old but operational. As far as I could tell, it had been made on a Fringe world but was a direct copy of an Imperial Mektek model, with a few bits and pieces of Bitek here and there.

The capsule didn’t have any modern communication devices, only ancient Mektek rayder, wide- and narrow-band, line-of-sight, and so on. But they worked and were active. When I’d finally loaded everything in, done my checks, and clicked the restraints over the top of Ekkie, a toneless Mektek voice from the automated courier we were piggybacking on came through the rayder, warning me of imminent launch.

A minute later, the countdown began, and ten seconds after that the launch rail fired us out into space, on the first step of my voyage into the unknown.

It did not start well, as I discovered once again the limitations of my unaugmented body. The courier had gravity control, but it didn’t or couldn’t extend it to the capsule during launch. I was subjected to at least 7 G’s and was immediately knocked out.

I came to when the courier lit up its own drive and finally did extend its field, adjusting everything back to a comfortable single gravity. My nose was blocked and there was salty fluid in my mouth. I had a moment of panic till I realised my nose was bleeding and that Ekkie’s internal suit cilia were clamping my nose and suctioning the blood away.

Once the nosebleed was taken care of, I noticed that my head and back also ached, and as I tried to shift about to get comfortable, it was brought home to me again that this was going to be one long and tedious voyage.

The tedium was possibly the worst thing of all. Lying in a suit on an acceleration couch with barely enough room to stretch was bad enough, but there also just wasn’t enough to do to keep my mind occupied. I was on edge for the first wormhole transition, constantly watching the shortsighted, slow-to-update scans that were all the capsule could manage, but the courier was so fast and small that the few times I picked up any other craft, we’d left them behind before they could do anything, even if they’d wanted to.

By the fifth transition, I didn’t even bother watching the screens. I knew the courier would tell me if there was anything I needed to know.

By the ninth transition, I didn’t even try to stay awake. I’d been a month inside my suit, inside the capsule. While I was in reasonable physical shape thanks to the suit’s massaging cilia and my own exercise routines, mentally I was a mess. If there had been any drugs available to let me exit my own brain for a while, I would have taken them, but there was nothing of that kind aboard. There were painkillers, but they didn’t help. All I could do was try to sleep, do my boring exercises, and attempt not to go over and over all the possible scenarios by which I could return to the Empire, get into a temple, enter the sanctum, and become who I was supposed to be instead of the pathetic remnant of a Prince whose greatest feat of the moment was doing two thousand toe curls in an hour.