A Confusion of Princes

  ‘Do you have family, Khem?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Family? Uh . . .’

  I hesitated. I supposed it would sound too odd to their ears if I said I had no family. It might even give my true identity away, or make Alice even more suspicious than she already was.

  ‘I have a sister,’ I said, sticking to something that could be true. Alice might have a voice stress analyser on me even now. It might be the device Larod kept looking at. I couldn’t give Atalin’s real name, for obvious reasons, nor anything that sounded too Imperial.

  ‘Tyrthos,’ I mumbled through a mouthful of jelbery. ‘Haven’t seen her for quite a while. Different ships.’

  ‘And your parents?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Dead,’ I said, again with a high probability of truthfulness, as I thought of a man and a woman giving up their child to the selecting priests and the monofilament blades whipping across their necks. ‘Killed by Imperial mekbi troopers.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘Was this long ago?’

  I nodded, looked down at my plate, and said, ‘Yes. I’d rather not talk about it.’

  I had learned that from Raine, and it worked. Alice stopped asking me questions and soon left for some urgent duty.

  ‘You’re a survivor in more ways than one, I see,’ said Larod as he got up a few minutes later. He clapped me on my shoulder, and I restrained myself from automatically grabbing his wrist and twisting him to the ground, to then stab him with the not very sharp end of my spoon. I just wasn’t used to being touched without permission. But it showed as no more than a flinch.

  ‘I have to go downplanet, Raine,’ continued Larod, unaware of how close he’d come to death. ‘Check on some crops. Twenty-four hours, I think.’

  He clapped me on the shoulder again, this time leaving his hand there as he bent down close.

  ‘Welcome to the Habitat, Khem. And thank you for what you did. Stoppering the wormhole . . . and . . . for saving my daughter.’

  Before I could speak, he had gone, but not before I saw the look on his face, and the glistening in his eyes—and even with my decreased Psitek ability I could feel the strength of the emotion he was holding in check. An intense feeling of relief that was at the same time still threaded through with stress and fear of the future.

  ‘So,’ said Raine brightly. ‘What would you like to do now?’

  19

  WHAT I WANTED to do was grab her, kiss her, tumble to the floor with her, and have sex on the carpet that covered the downside emergency hatch. But I didn’t know how to initiate this. If she had been one of my mind-programmed courtesans I’d have just told her to lie on the carpet and prepare to receive her lord and master, but I knew both that this was somehow wrong for Raine and, more importantly, that it wouldn’t work.

  I didn’t think offering her credit or taking over one of her shifts would work either, which was how matters had sometimes been arranged in the training sim, in the startown and the Feather, respectively. But I knew from both those places that there were also much more mysterious arrangements, where the couples involved didn’t exchange credit or take on shifts, but I didn’t know how that worked.

  ‘Um, I’m not sure,’ I said. It was an odd feeling to say that. Even in the sim, I’d pretty much always known what I wanted to do, and how to get it, or at least I’d tried and either succeeded or learned otherwise. But now I didn’t want to risk making a wrong move, because . . .

  Because Raine had somehow become important. I didn’t want her to become an enemy, or to hate me, even though I knew this was a tactical error. I shouldn’t be caring about any human. I should be focusing on my mission.

  With an effort I turned my thoughts toward that mission.

  ‘Maybe you could show me around,’ I said.

  ‘Good idea,’ said Raine. ‘You okay to walk now?’

  ‘Yes. . . I think it was mostly a reaction to being drugged.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Raine, and made a face.

  For a moment I thought she was having an attack of some kind.

  ‘Uh, that’s meant to be a funny face,’ said Raine. ‘Again, making light of a bad situation.’

  She did it again, making her eyes goggle and her mouth twist.

  This time, I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t for at least a minute, and then when I finally got under control, Raine made the face again and off I went.

  It was another alarming thing, to not even be in control of my breathing.

  But I liked it. When I laughed, I could forget everything else, and it was a wonderful feeling, something I had never experienced before.

  I felt free.

  A few days later, Raine and I did manage to overcome our different societal programming, culture, and mores and get past the early stages of being deeply attracted to each other but without a clue about how to go about expressing this properly.

  It started badly, though. I had just been for my initial employment orientation, and found it to be as dull and boring as Raine predicted. I was forced to watch a holo show of how to find a leak and then patch it, and then had to practise said procedure several times over, even though it was incredibly basic and I could have done it in my sleep.

  I also missed Raine. We’d spent all our waking moments together and had even fumbled a kind of almost, not quite kiss the night before. Only I wasn’t sure if it had been intentional on her part, or if she had really slipped and just happened to fall into my arms and then our faces had met in an uncoordinated way and then . . . we’d sprung apart, even though no one else was there.

  When I got back to our living quarters, I looked for Raine immediately. She wasn’t in the shared living quarters, so I tapped the inquiry panel on her door, but it remained frosted and there was no answer. Somewhat let down, I went to my room, slid open the door and went inside, and—

  There was a silver box on my bed, just like the one the assassin had held, the novice in my candidate temple. The flower-trap that fired the sunbeam.

  ‘Khem!’ said Raine, close behind me.

  I stepped back, whirled around, and flung Raine to the floor, covering her with my body so that there was a slim chance she would survive when the sunbeam burned a hole through my chest.

  ‘Khem! What are you doing?!’

  I tensed, waiting for the sudden, sharp moment of my death.

  After a second or two, when it hadn’t happened, I pushed up with my arms and looked back into my room. The silver box was still on the bed. It hadn’t risen up and flowered to become a lethal weapon.

  ‘Khem?’

  I looked down at Raine, lying beneath me.

  ‘Uh, that silver box . . . it looks a lot like a . . . I thought it was a . . . kind of . . . bomb.’

  Raine blinked.

  ‘It’s a present,’ she said. ‘From me. Go and have a look.’

  I stood up sheepishly and went over to the box. My mind was a roiling mess because I’d just done something incredibly stupid and incredibly un-Princelike.

  I should have used Raine as a shield. Not the other way around. It was the second time I’d thought to save her no matter what the cost to myself.

  I had to be losing my mind, but somehow it was voluntary!

  ‘Open it,’ said Raine. She’d come in behind me and shut the door.

  I opened it. As far as I could see there was nothing inside. I showed her the empty container as she came into my arms and kissed me square on the mouth, leaving no doubt this time that it was intentional.

  I kissed her back and, as we subsided onto the bed, asked her, ‘So where’s my present?’

  ‘That kiss,’ said Raine as she slid her finger down the fastener on my shipsuit. ‘It’s a tradition here: we wrap a kiss and leave it on the bed of whoever we’re interested in.’

  ‘So you’re interested,’ I mumbled into her hair.

  ‘Very interested,’ she replied. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Crazily interested,’ I said.


  I feared that the crazy part was true. But right then, I just didn’t care.

  With Raine, I discovered that while my courtesans were perhaps technically more skilled, once again there was something different about her. Or perhaps there was something different about me. It wasn’t just the sexual activity I wanted with Raine. It was everything, even just holding her while she slept and I looked at her and listened to her quiet breathing.

  I had never known anything like it before, and I was both immensely happy and absolutely terrified.

  Terrified because I knew that I would have to give Raine up. I might be in a normal human body for the moment, and subject to all the ailings of a human heart, but I was a Prince of the Empire. I had to get back to who I really was. Didn’t I?

  When I was with Raine, I could forget about everything except just being with her. But after a week Raine was recalled to the KSF, like all the reservists. The Kharalchans were desperately preparing everything they could, for the wormhole was going to reopen in an estimated three to five months. Fortunately Raine wasn’t assigned to an active ship, but to a destroyer refitting in the shipyard, so she could come home. Even so, she had to sleep on board four nights out of seven.

  I missed her, and I was also deeply conflicted about what I was doing when I wasn’t with her, which was hunting for hidden Imperial caches while also doing quite a lot of hull patching. Because if I found a means to leave the Habitat, there could be no further delay. I would go . . . but that meant leaving Raine.

  In addition to my searching and patching, I spent a lot of time just observing what was going on, since any information might be useful to me, either in my preparations or when it came time for me to get the hell out.

  The major topics of conversation among the Kharalchans were all related to the current situation. The most challenging for me were their hatred of the Empire and just how much they despised Princes, who they thought of as being hostile aliens, no better than Deaders, who also shot up everything they came across (though Deaders then blew themselves up if it looked like they might lose, so I thought this was a pretty stupid comparison).

  Quite a few times I had to clench my fists to stop myself striking some ignorant Hab dweller who was going on about the Empire being a sick organism that was spread by a horrific disease vector called a Prince. But I did manage it, which would not have been the case before my training. I had come to terms with my current reality, however much I didn’t like it—except of course for the time I spent with Raine.

  Apart from slagging off the Empire, the next favourite topic was when the wormhole was likely to open, and when the pirates would come through, and whether or not a reinforcing fleet would get in first from the Confederation that Kharalcha had joined. They had a lot of hope invested in this rescue fleet coming through the system’s other entry wormhole, the ‘safe’ one that came in from an area uninfested with pirates. Almost everyone I talked to would begin by asking if I’d heard anything about the Confederation fleet, or offer some gossip that suggested their arrival was imminent.

  I didn’t believe it was, myself. As far as I could tell, this Confederation was a small grouping of only a dozen or so systems. They’d sent a fleet the last time, but I reckoned that made it less likely they would again. With limited Naval strength, they’d be asking what was in it for them. The Kharalchans already owed for the help they’d got the last time, and they hadn’t paid anything back.

  I tried not to think about the pirates. Because if they came, then Raine would go out to fight them, and most likely die somewhere in the utter cold and dark. Without me. Because I planned to be back in the Empire as soon as possible, a Prince again, with all these difficult thoughts washed away.

  But in the meantime, the only way not to think about the future was either to be with Raine or to physically wear myself out travelling all over the Habitat doing twice as many hull patches as any hull patcher before me. While also, of course, looking for hidden Imperial tek.

  In my first month I spent a lot of time in the Hub, at least in the parts where I was allowed to go. It contained all the docks, the main power plants, and so on, so at first I thought it the most likely place to find anything hidden away by the former ruling Prince. But after I’d managed to visit as much of it as KSF Security would let me, I changed my mind. The Hub was too much in constant use. As the most secure part of the Habitat it would be where the Prince would have deployed all his or her obvious ships, the mekbi garrison and so on. The temple would also have been in the Hub.

  So where would a sneaky Prince park some secret stuff and, most important of all, a secret ship?

  I kept my ears open for any hints, but the Empire had been gone a long time, and if there were any myths about old Imperial tek, I didn’t hear them amid the general abuse of Princes, the Empire, and so forth. Leak detection let me look into odd corners and spaces, but only a small part of my mind was intent on finding leaks. I was also reaching out with my Psitek senses, hoping that I’d get a reaction from something hidden away, something that was just waiting for a Prince to activate it.

  I got nothing for a month, except very bored with patching tiny pinprick holes. I decided I had to narrow down my search and really examine the Habitat structure for some likely hiding places.

  It took me a while, but when I eventually figured it out, I wondered why it had taken me so long. After all, I’d wandered past the visible part of it several times before. But once I’d targeted it as a likely locale and spent more time probing it with my Psitek, I was finally rewarded with the faintest whisper of a response from an Imperial Psitek system. I felt the slight frisson in my head as I looked out at a section of the Habitat that was perfect for hiding just about anything.

  The reservoir in Dolphin ring.

  This was the biggest single source of fresh water for the Habitat, occupying the lower fifty metres of a whole octant of the ring. A small part of it was open as a ten-metre-deep lake, which people could swim in if they wanted, but most of it was hidden under a nicely shaped hill loaded with broad-leafed atmosphere-renewal trees.

  I reckoned that somewhere deep inside the closed part of the reservoir was where I’d find something interesting. It would be easily accessible for a Prince, who didn’t need to breathe for a half hour or so. But very forbidding for a human. Even recreational divers would not be tempted by the dark depths of a reservoir, and since it was used for drinking-water storage, there would be health barriers as well.

  As soon as I found it, I thought about having a look in Ekkie, but I wouldn’t even get to the lake if I was seen wandering about wearing a vacuum suit, or even carrying one. I was sure that a number of citizens had been alerted to look out for me, and the Habitat’s security systems were programmed to keep an eye on me as well. Though both the human and system surveillance had holes I’d identified, I couldn’t get a suit all the way to Dolphin.

  But in the box of stuff the KSF had let me keep from my life capsule, I did have the Bitek template for what was described as an aquatic rescue beast. I read the data ribbon on it and discovered that dolphins weren’t mythical after all. This template was a distant development of an Earth dolphin, and it would grow a six-foot-long finned hybrid air/water breather with a tentacled snout and, best of all as far as I was concerned, a breathing spigot for a rider, with automatic oxygen regulation. It could swim along at thirty kilometres an hour with me aboard, dive to seventy metres, and fetch things.

  All I had to do was grow one from the template somewhere in the lake—somewhere that wasn’t under the Habitat’s watchful eye. Plus I’d have to feed it about a hundred and fifty kilograms of organic material over ten days.

  And after all that, I could well be wrong. There might not be anything very interesting there, or the Kharalchans might have found it long ago. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else old Imperial tek might be hidden—and the faint Psitek echo suggested it would be something good.

  Fortunately, the answer to how I might hide and grow my
aquatic rescue beast was presented the very next time I prowled along the shore, pointing my leak detector at the floor. Several people were lined up on the bank, about ten metres apart, each with a fishing pole. After the usual discussion about the wormhole, the pirates, and the Confederation fleet, I found that fishing was a popular pastime among many Karalchans. You just registered a spot on the shore and off you went. There were lots of fish, one of the better anglers told me. He showed me the five-kilogram salrout he’d caught. For a small fee, anglers were allowed to take fish home to eat. Or as I planned, not to take anywhere but feed to the template.

  When I took it out there, I studied the sky high above, and the Habitat wall, and tried to work out where the long-range lenses were. Then I looked about for a spot that was awkward to reach and most sheltered by the oxygenating trees, registered that as my fishing place, and sent in an order for fishing gear and a training course. Not a direct mind download as in the Empire, but an interactive holo simulation that worked reasonably well. Interestingly, the fishing gear that arrived wasn’t extruded Bitek but had actually been made on the planet, the rod from some kind of native wood and the reel and line from primitive Mektek metal and petroleum-derived substances. Apparently they fished in earnest down there.

  A few days later, my aquatic rescue beast was growing nicely in the shallows a few metres out from my fishing spot.

  Weirdly, even though it could only cause trouble, I really wanted to tell Raine about what I was up to, particularly as the aquatic beast neared its full growth. It took an effort not to blurt it all out in bed when we were chatting about what we’d been up to in the previous few days while Raine had been on duty.

  ‘Patches, patches, and leaks,’ I said with a smile. ‘What about you?’

  Raine turned in to me.

  ‘Does it bother you? The patching thing? I’m sure you’ll be able to get a better job soon . . . maybe join me on the Firestarter.’