A Confusion of Princes

  ‘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.’

  That meant the Tormentor really was going as fast as it could to get to us. Without gravity control the crew couldn’t take more than two or possibly three gravities’ acceleration for any length of time.

  ‘Tell them then,’ I said.

  As Raine sent the message, I got the symbiote applicator out and reattached it to her arm. Its vision-skin flickered, then updated. She was still low on blood, and the reduced atmosphere pressure and oxygen content wasn’t helping, but the symbiote had the internal bleeding under control.

  I told the applicator to order the symbiote to put Raine into a medical coma, as low as it dared go with her injuries. It sent back an interrogative, requesting additional blood before it could proceed.

  Raine finished sending the message for the third time. She bent her head down close to mine. I realised I was holding her hand in order to get a better view of the applicator vision-skin. It was telling me she needed at least another litre of blood.

  ‘Shouldn’t you load your symbiote first? In case there’s a problem?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got two more. It’ll be fine. You ready?’

  ‘I guess so,’ she said. She closed the gap between us and set her lips very ligh
tly against the side of my cheek. ‘I never said thank you, Khem. Thank you.’

  I sent the command to put her to sleep and gently pushed her back down into the acceleration couch, still holding her hand.

  ‘Goodnight, sweet prince,’ Raine whispered.

  I jerked her back up in surprise.

  ‘What?’

  How could she know I was a Prince? Even if we did manage to get rescued, if anyone else found out, I’d be killed, or taken apart to study, or who knew what. . . I’d have to kill her first. . .

  Raine’s eyes slowly closed, and the hint of a smile drifted across her face.

  ‘It’s a line from . . . an old, old Earth story,’ she muttered. ‘“And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” See . . . you . . . later. . . ’ I sighed with relief and laid her back down. She was already unconscious, drifting deeper . . . but she needed that blood.

  I opened the port in the applicator and was about to put my finger in to let it draw blood, and then I had a better idea.

  Shiplice were Bitek organisms. They had a kind of blood. The symbiote could probably use it.

  I used my Psitek to order the closest shiplouse over, and held it while I queried the applicator. The louse wriggled as the applicator’s probe sank in to test it. I quelled the little beast’s alarm, lulling it to sleep as the applicator thought about the matter before agreeing that it could indeed use the shiplice’s biological matter.

  I connected both shiplice up and, when the applicator was finished, took the husks and shoved them in a locker. Then I removed the applicator and loaded it up with a symbiote. Then I waited . . . and waited . . . for it to flash gold.

  It didn’t. The symbiote was senile, no use to anyone.

  The second one flashed orange. It wasn’t senile, but it wasn’t fully operational either. Generally speaking, introducing a half-dead or possibly crazed symbiote into your own bloodstream isn’t a recommended course of action.

  I sat there, wondering what I was going to do. I simply had to breathe less and exhale less carbon dioxide, or we wouldn’t make it. Lying back and thinking shallow thoughts wasn’t going to cut it. Even a normal or drug-induced sleep wouldn’t be enough.

  If I had still been augmented, I could just have dialled down my metabolism, telling everything to hibernate. But that was no longer an option.

  Or was it? My Psitek facilities still functioned. I’d had no problem programming the shiplice, or commanding Bitek nerve ganglions. Could I use my Psitek coercion abilities to tell my own body to go into a coma for eighty-one hours?

  There was only one way to find out.

  I tried to visualise myself as an enemy to be dominated, just as I would perform a Psitek attack on someone else. I made my consciousness separate and then sent out psychic feelers to my . . . no . . . my enemy’s mind, searching for the nodes that maintained the body.

  I felt my senses withdraw. My sight faded, and my hearing, and I was both inside and outside my body. I was acutely aware of my nervous system, the synapses firing impulses along immensely complicated routes. I could sense blood flowing, and oxygen interchanging in the lungs.

  I followed the nerve impulses into the brain and tweaked a little here and a little there. My breathing slowed. My heart slowed. Everything slowed down.

  I felt a surge of triumph. I had succeeded in putting my body into a coma.

  But I was still conscious, somehow separate from my body. Blind and deaf to the outside world, all I could sense was internal. I knew nothing of anything beyond my own skin. There was just the very slow drumbeat of my heart, but even that faded into the background.

  I had no sense of the passage of time. Maybe five minutes had gone by while I was trying this out, maybe five hours or even longer.

  This didn’t bother me at first. It was quite peaceful being a disembodied mind. I was relaxed, just floating along, calm and content. But after a while—how long, I don’t know—a nasty thought began to clamour for attention.

  What if I’d been in this coma for much longer than I thought? Maybe I’d been in it for days?

  I felt panic rising, but not in my body. My heart rate didn’t change, but I couldn’t tell whether it was fast or slow, as I’d lost any frame of reference. My blood pressure didn’t feel high. The panic was all mental, all within this separate consciousness I had somehow established.

  Then I started to wonder about something else. Not how long I’d been under, but if I could even get ‘back’ inside my body.

  I tried to stay calm, but I couldn’t. The panic rose and overwhelmed everything else, and all of a sudden nothing else mattered. I didn’t care if I was going to slowly asphyxiate, I just had to return to my physical existence.

  Desperately I retraced the nerve paths I’d followed, plunging along them, trying to find whatever it was that made my mental persona stay within my flesh. I felt like a shiplouse racing through maintenance tunnels in a frenzy, programmed to reach a critical malfunction but never getting there . . . and then . . .

  I was suddenly back in my body, gasping and coughing, my heart racing and my head aching. There was a bright light above my head, and some kind of alarm was emitting a high-pitched buzz.

  I blinked and tried to lift my head, but there was something across my temples. My wrists were restrained as well, and my ankles. I growled and tried to break the bonds, but I was weaker than I’d ever been, and I just flopped back onto my bed.

  Bed? I blinked again and turned my head sideways. I wasn’t in the capsule anymore. I was strapped to a bed, in a Mektek ship compartment, a ship with artificial gravity . . . or under boost close to 1 G.

  I took a tentative breath of air. It was ship air, but it tasted sweet to me. Judging from my restraints, things weren’t as promising as they might be, but even so, it was a lot better than being in a capsule with a slowly spoiling atmosphere.

  The door opposite the bed slid open. I couldn’t raise my head, so I couldn’t see who it was.

  ‘Raine?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said a much less pleasant, male voice. The owner of the voice came into view a moment later, bending down to look at me and then at a display panel on the bed. ‘I’m Medtech Kilgore. How are you feeling?’

  I had to think about that for a moment.

  ‘Uh, I’m all right,’ I said at last. ‘Am I aboard the Tormentor?’

  Medtech Kilgore gave me a sideways look.

  ‘You need to rest,’ he said, and touched the panel.

  I felt a drug infuse into my arm.

  ‘No! I just woke—’ The next thing I knew, I was staring at the light again, and the beeping alarm was going off again. I tensed my arms and legs. The restraints were still there. So was the band around my head.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked an unseen voice. Not Medtech Kilgore. It was a female voice, but not Raine’s.

  ‘Khem,’ I replied. Weirdly I felt a compulsion to add the missing ri, but I swallowed it.

  ‘Do you have any more names?’

  ‘N . . . no,’ I croaked. What was going on?

  A woman’s face leaned over me. I blinked it into focus.

  ‘Why am I tied down?’ I asked. ‘And that Kilgore drugged me. After everything I did for you, with the wormhole stopper and all.’

  ‘We’re grateful,’ replied the woman. Her hair was silver, but her face was younger and didn’t match. Rejuvenated in some way. There were lots of rejuv teks. Some worked better than others. ‘There’s just a question of your . . . identity and motivation.’

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘I’m a trader. My ship blew—’

  ‘We know what you told Raine,’ said the woman. ‘But there is something that doesn’t fit.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Why do you look exactly like the Prince who destroyed our fleet?’ asked the woman.

  ‘What?’ I asked again, trying not to overdo my puzzled frown. Inside I was thinking furiously.

  A Prince who looked exactly like me? That wasn’t possible . . . the
n my slow brain reconnected a few more neurons and I remembered Atalin from the Academy. The perfect cadet, who did look like me, who was maybe even my sister . . .

  But if it was Atalin, why would she have trashed the fleet here, of all possible systems? And why would she have broadcast her face?

  I felt a cold feeling spreading in my guts as I thought this through. None of this would be a coincidence. Morojal was manipulating something here, setting me up, and maybe Atalin as well. Making my test more difficult? Or something deeper?

  ‘You look exactly like the Prince in the message sent from the Imperial ship,’ repeated the woman. ‘She said her name was Atalin. Why do you look like her?’

  I could feel the pressure of drugs in my arm again. Truth serum of some kind, I supposed, but not working as effectively as it should have been.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I replied quickly, to try to answer before the drugs overcame me. Would they work properly on my nonaug-mented form? I didn’t feel overwhelmingly compelled to tell the truth, or at least not yet. ‘Maybe it’s a joke. My ship must have come in only minutes before the Imperial. Maybe she scanned me and just used my face. I mean, I’m not a woman, am I?’

  ‘Are you a Prince?’

  Not right now, I thought, and had a moment of panic as I wondered if I’d said that aloud.

  ‘A Prince?’

  I laughed, and tried to laugh harder. Hysteria would be better than truth. ‘A Prince? You must be joking. They’re like . . . supermen. . . I’m just a trader. . . Scan me, you’ll see—don’t they have like power plants inside and blaster fingers and armoured heads and I don’t know, all sorts of amazing . . . I wish I did have that. . . ’

  ‘We have scanned you,’ said the woman. ‘Several times.’

  Morojal had assured me there was nothing to find in this body. But what if she’d lied? I didn’t want to consider the possibility that she might be wrong.

  I could feel the drugs working deeper into me, but I hadn’t lost control. I knew I’d feel so good if I just unloaded everything and babbled. But I resisted it and tried to convey half-truths at best.