From the available evidence it looked like the Null-Space wave had only intersected with part of the ship, delivering a mortal wound if not an immediate death blow. But it was still dying, and I couldn’t depend on its maintaining atmosphere. So I kept Ekkie sealed when I clambered out, needlegun in my right hand and a light beam in my left, to supplement the suit’s headlights. It was dark in the dock, with only the emergency luminescents glowing here and there in the floor. I expected it would be darker still deeper inside the ship.
There was no gravity, but this kind of ship might not have had any gravity control anyway. Having just had a month in training on the Feather orbital station, I had no trouble with zero-G. Ekkie had grippers on its boots that quickly adapted to the Bitek surfaces of the ship, allowing me to walk without the stop-stick-swear-jerk-rebound motion common to zero-G movement with mismatched tactile aids.
It took me a few moments to overcome the airlock’s natural reluctance to allow an unknown visitor aboard, but as it lacked a connection to a higher authority, I was able to use my Psitek to manipulate the nerve cluster. After some trial and error, it dilated and let me through, as did the inner door.
I found the first bodies floating on the other side of the lock. Half a dozen men and women and one nonhuman alien, though it was clearly an accepted part of the group. All of them were in suits, and some of the suits were heavily armoured, but not the kind of armour that would do anything to stop a Null-Space concussion wave. Every blood vessel in their bodies had exploded in an instant, so I was grateful that the suits were sealed. There were enough globules of Bitek nutrient/waste exchange fluid floating around as it was without the addition of human blood and other liquids.
The various weapons of the group were floating near them, indicating that they were probably a Marine boarding or defence party. But like the ship itself, they were clearly not professional military. Every one of them had a different kind of suit from a different manufacturer, and all the suits had been heavily personalised or repaired in nonstandard ways, as had the eclectic mix of weapons.
The only indication that they were even pseudomilitary was from the insignia that had been painted on the sides of helmets or chest plates. They all had a kind of winged animal in blue and red, evidently painted by an automaton from a stencil, and done very quickly, which pointed to them being part of a militia rather than regular forces.
I made my way through this cloud of bodies and started checking the hatches on either side of the entrance chamber. I’d thought I might have a hard time finding my way to the bridge—it was a big ship and could be easy to get lost in—but I was helped by its essentially civilian nature. Unlike in a Naval craft, there were colour-coded signs at every intersection, hatch, ladder, or ramp. I quickly worked out the code and, with it, the fastest route to the bridge.
There were a lot more bodies on the way, floating loose, strapped into seats and couches, even wedged into corners. Most of them were in armour with the stencilled winged animal insignia, and were not crew but the same kind of militia as at the airlock. There were so many that I guessed the ship had expected a boarding attack. It was too slow and ill equipped for any boarding to be done from it, unless it was an assault on something that didn’t manoeuvre, like a station or a moonbase.
The bridge was sealed off, as I’d expected. The door nerve cluster took a bit more Psitek tickling than the outer airlock, but eventually it gave in and opened up. I entered cautiously, because the short entrance corridor ran through some kind of diamond-hard Bitek stone. I didn’t recognise the material, so there was a chance that this might have shielded the occupants from the Null-Space wave.
Inside, I saw that the shielding had worked, but only to a degree. The six bridge crew hadn’t died instantly. They’d had a minute or two before the massive haemorrhaging inside them had got too much for their suit medical systems. I noticed that two of the six had died out of their web cocoons, both of them with medikits in their hands but attached to other people. Surely they should have had the sense to use the paks themselves rather than trying to save others?
Not that it made any difference. But it is indicative of my Princely mind-set that back then I could not understand why anyone would sacrifice themselves for other people.
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 blo
od 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 Ear
th-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.’