A Confusion of Princes (20 page)

Finally, the courier exited the tenth wormhole.

I woke with a start as the automated pilot suddenly spoke to me for the first time since we’d left, yanking me out of a dream where I was a Prince again, on the command deck of a ship that was a million times nicer than the interior of my crappy capsule.

‘Destination reached. Inhabited world life signs positive. Ship traffic positive. In-system combat within mission parameters. Releasing capsule on mark. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .’

‘Wait!’ I shouted. What did ‘in-system combat within mission parameters’ mean? I didn’t want to be dropped into
any
in-system combat!

The automaton ignored my shouting.

‘Five . . . four . . .’

I flailed at my restraints. I’d been sleeping with just the waist belt loosely fastened. Now I slapped the emergency Bitek foam button above my head. Nothing happened for a terrible second; then a greyish web sprayed out over my body, everywhere but my head. When the capsule left the courier’s gravity field, it would be with a sudden deceleration, maybe even more than the 7 G’s I’d experienced on our initial launch.

‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.’

A massive hand came down on me, smashing me against the couch. The emergency web set fast, holding me there. The capsule flipped, or maybe I just got turned inside out.

Everything went black.

13

I
CAME TO WITH the familiar sensation of cilia sucking away at my bloody nose and the unfamiliar beeping, wailing, and screeching of various alarm systems within the capsule. But the capsule was no longer decelerating, I was in free fall, and the restraint web was loosening. Woozily, I brushed the webs away, reached up, and snapped on the main control screen, a holographic cube that was supposed to appear in front of my face but had been made for someone shorter and defied all adjustment. It projected on top of my chest, so I had to crane my neck to get a proper look.

The warnings were all about dangerous objects on high-velocity paths that intersected our own current trajectory. It didn’t take even my dimmed-down wits more than a second to work out that first of all they weren’t fast enough or directed enough to be missiles or other projectiles and that as they had a wide variety of characteristics, what I was looking at was a whole bunch of fairly recent debris, some of it still venting atmosphere or other volatiles. In other words, I was tracking a rapidly expanding cloud composed of the remnants of a ship or ships after a spot of space combat.

We weren’t in any imminent danger from the debris, so I immediately pointed and dragged and flicked my fingers over the holo to make the capsule sensors have a look for something or somethings that were much more important than the leftovers of war: I needed to know if there were any intact and manoeuvring ships, or any power sources.

Not that the capsule had the sensor capacity to pick up an Imperial or other high-tek warship that wanted to stay hidden, but it should—eventually—find any of the usual sort of Fringe pirate or small polity vessel that might have been the cause of the recent fracas.

I waited what felt like a really long time before the display refreshed. No active ships came up, but there was a fading power source relatively nearby, in what appeared to scan as an almost motionless, but intact, hull. It was either a damaged ship or possibly one of the combatants attempting to stay quiet in a low-tek way.

Interestingly, the updated scan also showed power sources on a planet in the fourth orbit, both on the surface and in its immediate space. The cloud of debris lay between this planet and the wormhole entrance I’d come out of. There was also another, smaller cloud of debris somewhat farther out across the system from my position, most of the bits and pieces having a vector toward what the capsule guessed but could not confirm was a wormhole exit, though it very likely was, since there was a trail of wormhole-drive radiation typical of a ship or ships taking that exit.

All this suggested that the battle had taken place between an attacking force that had come out of the same wormhole I had and a defending force, probably from the planet, attempting to intercept the intruder. I’d thought that the more distant debris cloud might have been that intruder, but as the capsule built up a data image of the debris and found it likely to come from the same style of ship as the other defenders, I formed the opinion that the intruder hadn’t given a rat’s ring about the defence. It had come in, blown the shit out of them, and left. Quite possibly nothing would have happened if the defender had just avoided the intruder altogether.

This was merely my hypothesis, of course, based on very limited data. Later I would discover that it was, as you might expect, not entirely correct.

For the moment, I was most interested in the power source and the undamaged ship. The capsule had a pathetic propulsion system, a Mektek fusion thruster that could eventually wind up to a mighty 0.1 G. But even though it was slow, it would enable me to match velocity and dock with the target ship, provided it didn’t start moving of its own accord.

There was no other visible traffic in range of my scan, and the capsule wasn’t picking up any transmissions, lagged or otherwise, though there was a lot of suspicious noise from the planet that suggested some sort of ultra-broadband Mektek comm shield or scrambler was in use. I suspected there might be a bunch of point-to-point stuff going on as well, but the capsule was useless for intercepting those comms.

It was also pretty useless navigation-wise, but that was clearly part of my test. Once upon a time it would have had a navigation unit of some kind, and I could have worked out where I was from the type of star, the planet orbits and type, and so on. But there was nothing like that now.

I had no idea where I was, or how far away the nearest Imperial possession might be.

I thought about heading for the planet, but that dying ship was too close to resist. If I could get aboard and get its power plant fully operational, it might well be my first step back to the Empire and my real life.

Of course, it might also be a quick trip to oblivion, if the ship still had enough power for its targeting and weapons systems, and had a trigger-happy crew or automatics. While my capsule was obviously a lifeboat, that might not count for anything, depending on who had been fighting here.

I thought it was worth the risk.

My fingers flicked the holo. The capsule calculated an interception course. A faint, gentle pressure tickled at my stomach as the drive lit up. I let my head fall back and activated Ekkie’s self-test as I reached over to extract my various weapons and place them in suitable outside pockets of the suit.

It took a couple of hours to reach the other ship. As we got closer, the data on it resolved. I looked at the images and information and discounted the crappy guess from the capsule’s own ill-informed information store. It thought the ship was a clone of an Izhkhik-class battlecruiser, which even though it was six hundred years old would not be something to mess with. But I was sure the ship in question wasn’t a warship, or at least it hadn’t started out that way. It was about the same size as an Izhkhik, that was true, and it had a Bitek hull, but the similarities ended there.

This ship was, I thought, a cargo hauler that had had one of its main cargo bays ripped out in order to emplace what seemed to be some sort of very large missile launcher, and I mean
large
. I had only a partial scan, but the single projectile that was sitting in the launch bay stuck out a good fifty metres from the cargo bay doors (which were long gone), and that was probably just the actual warhead, some kind of penetrating fusion charge. The rest of the missile, hidden inside the cargo bay, was one big old fusion torch.

This was a strong hint that the ship wasn’t built as a warship, because if that missile lit up anywhere within a few hundred thousand metres of the ship, the torch would wreak almost as much havoc on the firer as the fusion warhead would on whatever it hit.

No, this ship wasn’t so much a missile launcher as a missile hauler. It would take the missile to a launching position, manoeuvre it out of the bay, and skedaddle before it actually fired. All of which would take forever, so the missile would only be useful for shooting at something static.

Not that they’d had any chance to do anything with it. There were some telltale scabs and blisters across most of the Bitek hull, marks I recognised from my Academy training. It was no wonder that the ship was pretty much dead in space—it had been hit with a relatively new and powerful Imperial weapon expressly developed to take out the personnel and systems of Bitek ships. Sometime in the past few hours, this basically civilian conversion had been hit with a Null-Space concussion wave that had instantly killed anything with a pulse that wasn’t shielded. As the ship was essentially a living organism, and this kind of vessel didn’t have backups of other tek, that meant both crew and ship systems were killed at the same time.

Except, I thought, I was still picking up a fading power supply. Any Bitek power source should have been knocked out instantly. I didn’t know what this meant, but there was only one way to find out.

The ship had half a dozen typical Bitek envelopment docks. I simply piloted the capsule into the smallest opening in a line of what looked like huge pockmarks in the hull, fortunately on the opposite side from the Null-Space burn. Even so, I was a bit surprised when the hole closed behind us as the capsule settled into the landing cradle, and more surprised when ship cilia made it fast and the dock was repressurised, indicating not only that there was sufficient power but that some part of the ship’s nervous system was still operating.

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.