A Confusion of Princes (17 page)

I got dressed quickly, thankful for the warmth and the illusion of protection. I had never been all that fussed about clothes, or the absence of them, being secure in myself. Now, even though I knew that these coveralls wouldn’t stop so much as an anaesthetic dart, they felt like armour to me.

‘Your harness has enough power to take you down,’ said Elzweko. ‘But not to come back up. You will be fetched when necessary.’

‘What am I going to do?’ I asked.

‘Learn how to be a normal human outside the Empire,’ said Elzweko. ‘And gain some basic skills that might serve you in the wider galaxy.’

‘You’re going to teach me?’ I asked as I put on the harness and checked it out.

‘No,’ said Elzweko. ‘I am going to guide and observe and, if necessary and possible, save your skin.’

‘Save my skin?’

‘We’re dropping into a simulation, one that we try to make as real as we can,’ explained Elzweko. ‘You’ll spend a month, or thereabouts, in each quadrant. First of all, you go to a typical Fringe settlement on a marginal world, where spacers pass through. If you survive that, we move on to the jungle, which has few humans but lots of inimical life. Then the junkyard, where you can learn more about the kind of tek you’ll see outside the Empire, most of it copies of old Imperial tek, with a few Sad-Eye and Naknuk examples. There are sentients there too, with a more organised social structure that will present a challenge. Finally you spend four weeks working construction on the Feather, the orbital station, so you know about native zero-G as an ordinary human. A lot of places out in the galaxy don’t have gravity control.’

‘A simulation?’ I asked. ‘On what level?’

‘On every level,’ said Elzweko gravely. ‘It starts about fifteen minutes after we land. We have ten thousand mind-programmed individuals down there, human, alien, various levels of sentience. But they are only mind-programmed to stay within the bounds, to not notice the artifice of their environment or tek they don’t have, like our zero-G rigs. Otherwise they behave as they would behave if it were real.’

‘So I could die as easily here as I might out in my “test”,’ I said. ‘Some training.’

Elzweko shrugged. ‘Train hard, fight easy. I’ll be guiding you, like I said, and providing some backup, at least to begin with. But yes, you can easily get killed down there.’

‘Do I get a weapon before we start?’ I asked. ‘And, uh, what’s it called? A balance of negotiable units for obtaining goods and services?’

Princes never paid for anything. They requisitioned, and unless it was already under the aegis of another Prince or requisitioned for Imperial purposes, they got whatever they asked for.

‘You mean money,’ said Elzweko. ‘Nope. No weapon, either.’

‘But I get fifteen minutes before the people . . . activate, or whatever you call starting the sim.’

Elzweko smiled and nodded.

‘Where do we land?’

‘The spaceport. They’ll think we came out of that orbiter, down from the station, recently arrived into the system.’

I looked over the balcony. The spaceport was a good two kilometres from the dome and the other buildings. As a Prince I could run that in a couple of minutes. As an ordinary man, who still felt a bit uneasy in the knees . . . maybe I could do it in six or seven. That left about the same time to find a weapon, and items of value, or both.

I wished Haddad were with me. I could really do with his help. A flash of anger toward him ran through me because he wasn’t at my side, where he belonged. But the anger faded quickly, as I had to concede that this current situation was beyond Haddad’s control.

Then, rather surprisingly, I found myself wondering what would happen to Haddad and the rest of the household. Would they be reassigned if I didn’t make it back from this training, or my test afterward?

It was an odd feeling, thinking about servants and their potential fate. Fortunately, it passed fairly quickly and I resumed concentrating on myself. After all, I was the one who was in the life-threatening situation.

‘Ready to learn?’ asked Elzweko. He waved his hand, and the railings of our platform retracted, so we stood on what was basically a diving platform.

‘Yes,’ I said, and jumped.

11

I
LEARNED MY FIRST lesson very quickly indeed. I had thought myself quite smart to realise that I would need to take a weapon and valuables from one of the sim participants before they were activated, and I achieved that. I even made the run in from our landing spot in six minutes, so I was able to ransack the pockets of two people in the ‘main street’ of the settlement and also take a sidearm from the holster of a man who was standing outside one of the dome buildings.

What I hadn’t thought through was what would happen when the sim did start a few minutes later and the man whose weapon I’d taken let his hand fall on his holster, clearly an instinctive reaction. Finding it empty, he took only a moment after that to look around and see the new face in town, which happened to be me, because I was still standing in the street taking in the ambience.

I also had failed to take the basic precaution of putting the weapon out of sight. With Princely arrogance, I had simply checked it over once to see how it worked and then tucked it into my belt, where it was clearly visible. So the next thing the man saw was his own weapon, apparently pickpocketed in a moment of inattention.

As I would learn, most people in that place carried multiple weapons. He drew a stubby handgun from inside his coat and began to raise it toward me. I also drew the weapon I had taken, all the while being amazed that it wasn’t already in my hand, my detuned reflexes now so absurdly slow.

I would have died then, permanently, if it had not been for Elzweko. Something boomed off to my right, there was a susurration of displaced air, and my attacker was flung backward and down to the muddy ground before he could fire. My own shot, a moment later, carved a line of molten dirt some distance behind where he’d been standing, indicating that I would have missed anyway.

Elzweko grabbed my arm then and hustled me away into a dark lane that ran between two buildings that had once, long ago, been spacecraft.

‘Move!’ he ordered. ‘He’s got friends.’

As we ran through the narrow, slushy streets, Elzweko told me that I had chosen a very bad target to rob. The dead man was a ship captain who had not only friends but a whole crew who were also his relatives.

‘Think of it as if you had killed a Prince of an important House, with many allies,’ said Elzweko when we finally stopped. I had no idea where we were, apart from the fact that it was still in the jumbled shantytown and not among the more ordered extruded cabins near the centre.

‘What do I do, then?’ I asked.

‘Change your appearance,’ said Elzweko. ‘Keep that weapon hidden. Chances are that no one got a good look at you, or won’t tell his crew anyway. Try to stay alive.’

‘How do I change—’ I started to say, but Elzweko just smiled and suddenly shot up into the sky, the faint, disappearing whine of his contragrav harness sounding to me like the tromp of doom.

I thought about what he’d said for a second, then stripped the top half of my coveralls down and tore out the pale blue undershirt liner. I put this over the top of the white coveralls. Then I put the stolen gun inside a thigh pocket and checked out the ‘valuables’ I’d stolen. They turned out to be a tin of emergency rations and some kind of entertainment device that lacked a power pack.

Fifteen minutes later, after some arrogant experimentation on my part almost ended in further disaster when I started out by ordering someone to give me information, I found a kind of market made of many small stalls near the central dome. There, I swapped the rations and the entertainer for a better disguise, a hooded fur coat that was probably real animal hide rather than extruded Bitek, with six orreks thrown in to close the deal. This was the currency used in the startown, amazingly in the form of actual physical hexagons of some kind of non-Imperial Bitek imprinted with Mektek fibres that held data indicating the value of the hexagon in ‘orreka rounds’ or ‘orreks,’ which apparently was the money of some Fringe polity that was nearby. In the simulation, of course.

Six orreks were not enough to buy anything useful, I soon discovered. I considered theft and murder to get some more, but after my initial experience I concluded that it would not be wise. Everyone in the startown was armed, it seemed, and many of them might well belong to family groups, crews, or gangs. I certainly didn’t need any more enemies looking for me, presuming that the dead ship captain’s crew were already doing so.

Which they were, as I soon discovered, overhearing two men and a woman asking the people walking ahead of me if they’d seen a young man in a one-piece white coverall carrying a Prang & Virl energy beam with blue Bitek grips. They answered in the negative, as did I—but I was trembling as I strode past, expecting at any moment to feel the sudden, savage pain of some impact or piercing shot in my back.

I spent the next three days constantly on the move, only one step ahead of a group I eventually observed to total two women and three men. This gave me quite a lot of time to think about the fact that even my smallest action among ordinary people would have consequences, possibly dire consequences, which was quite an alien concept for a Prince.

The startown was not very large, with only a few thousand inhabitants packed into an area the size of a middling Imperial battlecruiser, so it was difficult to avoid my pursuers.

Fortunately, no one seemed particularly inclined to help them. Most of the population of the startown were transients, ship crews passing through (or so they thought, doomed as they were to eternally repeat the simulation), leavened with those who had been left behind by their ships for various reasons and a very few who had chosen to stay on this frozen world.

All of them helped each other only if there was some reason to do so, either for commercial or emotional reasons. Like being family, or ship crew, which as far as I could tell meant much the same thing.

After a few false starts I found that I could earn sufficient orreks to pay for food and shelter simply by reactivating or doing minor repairs on old Imperial Bitek or Mektek, most of which was simply a matter of using my remaining Psitek abilities to turn the devices on. Again I almost made a bad mistake the first time I did this by not making enough of a show of looking at it, opening the case, and so on.

But I learned to disguise my abilities and to stay ahead of my pursuers, who weren’t really sure who they were looking for, and to get on after a fashion with the various people in the startown.

In many ways, the most important thing I learned in that cold, falling-down settlement was to readjust my thinking. I had to act as if everyone else around me was a Prince, not an ordinary human. Furthermore, I had to force myself to slow down and always evaluate what was going on instead of just reacting, for my immediate reactions were as suspect as I was now in this environment.

It wasn’t easy, and I was very glad when one afternoon Elzweko suddenly appeared in the doorway of the cargo container I was living in, which I paid three orreks a night for the privilege of doing so to one of the local bosses who controlled what was either a crew or a family, or some combination of the two.

‘Don’t shoot,’ said Elzweko as he twitched aside the blanket that served as a door.

I kept my handgun trained on him until he was inside and I was sure he was alone. It wasn’t the Prang & Virl energy beam I’d stolen on my first day. I’d got rid of that long since. This one was a simple chemical powder weapon that fired a slug of some superdense metal.

‘You changed your appearance pretty well,’ commented Elzweko. He sat down on a control chair that had probably once graced a long-ago paid-off passenger liner.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Most of it’s dirt.’

I still had the fur coat, but the coveralls had gone the way of the energy beam, traded for a much less warm but much more ordinary two-piece shipsuit of the kind worn by most of the inhabitants of the startown. I’d also picked up a soft helmet liner with a visor of amber-coloured translucent Bitek and was wearing that as well.

‘It’s been twenty-seven days,’ said Elzweko. ‘Time to go to the next quadrant. You can bring whatever you’re carrying right now.’

I was only carrying the handgun, and there was a knife in my boot. My spare ammunition, other clothing, a basic medikit, and some concentrated food and other stuff was all in a small pack. I had been thinking ahead, you see, and picking up useful items whenever I could.

I’d just made the mistake of not carrying all that stuff with me.

‘I’m touching my pack with my foot,’ I said. ‘Does that count?’

‘No,’ said Elzweko. ‘Come on out. The sim is stopped here.’

I followed Elzweko out into the cold, shivering as the chill air instantly bit through my clothes, fur coat and all. I had learned very quickly that cold can kill a normal human, as I was now.

I had also just learned that it would be a good idea to have all the essentials of survival on my person. Not in a pack.

I shivered again, this time not so much from the cold.

Elzweko misunderstood my second shiver.

‘You’ll like the jungle,’ he said. ‘It’s hot there.’