A Confusion of Princes (23 page)

‘I’m not sure if I can move very fast . . . your capsule’s in L Dock, right? The smallest?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I just timed it, walking. Six minutes there. Two minutes to get in. One minute to launch. Three minutes at max acceleration . . . it should put us clear, given that the missile’s torch will have to burn through what’s left of the ship first. But we need to launch the missile at the wormhole as soon as possible—’

A vision-skin flashed, and the input slate flickered. I felt a sudden tremor pass through the ship.

‘Connection established,’ said Raine calmly, as if reporting to the bridge. ‘Target acquired. Launch routine initiated. Twelve-minute countdown begun on . . . mark!’

I grabbed her as she staggered out of the chair and lost her foot grip. I managed to stay upright and stuck on, and we half floated, half walked out the door. But in the corridor, Raine lost traction again and pushed me away as I tried to pull her up.

‘No! I’m too slow; you go!’

I didn’t reply, but in trying to pull her up, I lost my foot grip too and ended up near the ceiling. I hung there for a moment, till I triggered the directional jets on Ekkie’s manoeuvre rig and came back down, getting my boot soles stuck back on the floor and giving me an idea at the same time.

‘Lie flat!’ I ordered. ‘Arms outstretched.’

Raine obeyed, tearing her boots from the floor. She bobbed up slightly, enough for me to lean over and wrap both arms around her middle.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

I didn’t answer. I was sending a Psitek order, pushing every bit of my mental strength into it. Shiplice poured out of their accessways and spilled into the corridor, then turned to race away from us, their tiny minds imprinted with my desperate instruction.

:Open all doors and hatches between this point and L Dock and keep them open:

Then I pushed off, breaking my own grip, at the same time twitching to activate Ekkie’s main backpack thruster at a very low level. Bitek glands pulsed out reaction gas, and we shot along the corridor at a far faster speed than I’d anticipated, overtaking all but the leading shiplice.

I dropped my foot to try to slow us down with some minor drag, but it worked too well. My foot stuck for a moment, sending us careening into the wall just before the next hatch. I caught the blow on my shoulder, Ekkie protesting about bruises again, and tried to correct with my directional jets. It kind of worked as we started off again, but with a corkscrewing motion that got worse as we went through the open hatch, a shiplouse waving its feelers from the control nerve as we flashed past.

Raine shifted in my arms, dropping her arm and leg. I held her more tightly till I realised she was trying to compensate for the spin. We steadied and managed to take a sixty-degree turn and fly up a ramp with only minor collisions. The hatch ahead dilated, letting a veritable swarm of shiplice pour through seconds ahead of us. There were scores of them, far more than I knew were around.

‘Nine minutes to launch!’ shouted Raine. I hadn’t been checking the time with Ekkie and didn’t now. I was too busy negotiating the next ramp and then the door at the top of it, which barely dilated in time, parts of Ekkie scraping the door edges as we rocketed through.

There was only the airlock ahead now. I saw a shiplouse jump at the control nerve, and the inner door stretched open. Then I realised they couldn’t open the outer door unless the inner door was shut, a basic safety measure even though the dock was pressurised.

Hastily I killed the jet and dropped my feet, just enough to slow us down, or so I hoped. But again my soles stuck, jerking me to a much more sudden stop than I expected. Raine was torn from my arms and went barrelling along the corridor and into the airlock. I followed after her in a stumbling, sticking run. As soon as I was inside, the shiplouse shut the inner door and another one opened the outer door.

I never knew they were that smart. I pulled Raine up and we staggered over to the capsule.

‘Seven minutes,’ panted Raine. She was hunched over and holding her stomach. I guessed the medical symbiote had cut back on painkilling, correctly reading that the adrenalin level in her blood meant she needed to move.

I boosted her up and she crawled into the capsule. I jumped more than climbed in after her and immediately slammed the control to shut the hatch. A few shiplice came in with me, but I couldn’t be bothered with them.

‘Lie down!’ I ordered Raine, who had hunched up at the other end of the acceleration couch.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘Lie down!’ I bellowed, unwittingly sounding like every cadet officer I had ever known. ‘That’s an order!’

Raine lay down. That left about sixty centimetres of acceleration couch free. I crouched there, activated the holo control, and ordered an emergency escape launch and the crash webs.

Web hissed out over Raine and a bit wrapped itself around my middle in an uncertain way. The stuff had very limited programming, and it couldn’t cope with someone hunched next to the hatch instead of lying down where they were supposed to.

‘Three minutes,’ said Raine.

The capsule lurched, breaking free of the docking tentacles. I hoped the dock sphincter was still working; I’d forgotten to check it. But as I’d got the capsule in all right, it should open up automatically for anything trying to get out.

There was another shudder as the drive activated to manoeuvre us up and away from the cradle. I tapped the holo to get an exterior view from the front, and breathed a sigh of relief as I saw stars and space and the edges of the dock. It was open and we were heading out!

But all too slowly.

‘Call this emergency launch!’ I screamed uselessly at the capsule, my fat, suited finger dancing over the holographic keys. ‘Come on!’

The capsule shuddered a little more, and I felt a very minor acceleration shoving me sideways. But it was still too slow, and not for the first time I wished I was in an Imperial singleship. Or in fact anything better than the ancient slug I’d been saddled with.

‘Two minutes thirty,’ said Raine urgently. From her angle she couldn’t see the holographic view. ‘Are we clear of the dock?’

‘Just out,’ I said with relief. ‘Two minutes to go; we should get—’

I never finished what I was saying. The holoview flashed white, and an instant later we were hit by a sudden explosion of gas and debris and a massive surge in exterior temperature. The capsule spun end over end, sending me tumbling about as the crash webs lost their grip on my middle. Alarms shrieked and the holographic display shifted from an outside view to a sea of red symbols, reporting system failures and extensive damage.

The missile had launched early. The only thing that had saved us—for now—was the fact that the blowback from its fusion torch had to cut through several hundred metres of the
Heffalurp
’s hull. So instead of being vapourised, we were just hit by a whole lot of superheated ship atmosphere and lots and lots of the tiny bits of what used to be the ship and its systems.

Something clanged on the hull, sending a severe shock through the whole capsule. A hole as big as my fist appeared above the acceleration couch where Raine was wrapped in webs. Our atmosphere went out through it, spewing forth as frozen crystals and incidentally messing up the capsule’s attempts to right itself with its thrusters.

I lunged forward, ripped open the emergency locker amidships, found a Bitek seeking patch, and threw it in the general direction of the hole. The ball of goop exploded into a plate-sized circle as it left my hand and was sucked onto the hole by the departing air. Though there wasn’t enough pressure left inside to keep it in place, its own tiny suckers were already hard at work bonding to the hull.

Unfortunately this almost instinctive action of mine meant I lost my bracing position, and once again I was tumbled about, crashing into Raine and the sides of the capsule. She cried out in pain, Ekkie complained inside my helmet, and the holo display added some more problems as I tried to reorient myself and not throw up. I’d never had this problem as a Prince, but now the spin and tumble was making my gorge rise in my throat.

I bit back bile, pressed my feet and one hand hard against the sides of the capsule, and with the other hand took control of the module away from its rather stupid automated flight controls and started to fire the manoeuvre jets in a sequence that would get us stable again.

At least that was the plan. It proved harder than I thought, particularly as several thrusters were not responding to commands. I overcorrected, undercorrected, and made us spin and tumble in several different directions in quick succession, all of which was too much for my inner ear. I threw up several times, pointing my chin so the vomit would go down the suit and be dealt with there rather than collect in my helmet. Ekkie was pretty quick at clearing away fluids, but I really didn’t want to drown in my own spew.

Finally, I got the capsule under control and could actually take stock of what was going on.

‘Are we going to make it?’ asked Raine as I gingerly lowered myself back to a sitting position and looked down at her. Her face looked clean. The symbiote had saved her from vomiting, or else her suit was better at tidying up.

‘I’m not sure yet,’ I replied as I went through the damage report. It didn’t look too bad at first. We’d lost some manoeuvring ability, but the main drive was fine. All our existing atmosphere had blown out, but we had our suit supplies and there was a Bitek air regenerator . . . or actually, as I read on in this status report, I saw that this was no longer true. The air regenerator was defunct, as was the small reserve tank of oxygen. The debris that had made the hole I’d patched had come through the hull, the air tank, and the regenerator and then the inner compartment lining.

That still might not be a problem, depending on what else was happening and how long it would take us to get somewhere with breathable air.

‘Is the wormhole stoppered?’ asked Raine.

‘I don’t know yet!’ I snapped.

Raine shifted around but didn’t speak. My fingers were sliding over the holo, calculating our trajectory toward the planet and the transit time, as well as trying to get the sensors to make a sensible report instead of trying to track all the myriad bits of debris that were accompanying us away from what used to be the
Heffalurp
. There was nothing we could do about them anyway—if they hit us, they hit us.

Very slowly the data picture resolved.

‘The missile deployed to the target area and something just happened a moment ago,’ I said slowly. ‘I’m waiting on the wormhole energy signature. No ships showing up on scan so far.’

Raine didn’t answer. I looked over and saw that her eyes were screwed up tight and her lips were moving without making a sound.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Praying,’ she said without opening her eyes.

‘What? Preying? I don’t understand.’

Raine opened one eye to look up at me in puzzlement. I guess I didn’t look too good—there was still vomit caked around my mouth—because she shut it again pretty quickly.

‘Praying. You know, quietly asking an invisible, probably nonexistent higher power to ensure that the wormhole is closed.’

‘Uh, I see,’ I replied, though I didn’t see. While we had priests in the Empire, they were not go-betweens to some invisible entity who might or might not exist or have any power; they were agents of a completely real power. Princes didn’t pray to the Emperor. We just communicated with the Imperial Mind.

‘Does it ever work?’ I asked after a moment. I was still waiting for the scan to complete.

‘I don’t know,’ replied Raine. ‘Maybe.’

She hesitated, then added, ‘I was praying back in the
Heffalurp
, at the ship-heart. Then you came along.’

‘Not conclusive,’ I said. Most of my attention was on the scan as it slowly reported the wormhole energy state. The numbers were climbing, but hadn’t reached a level that indicated the wormhole was opening.

‘I know,’ said Raine. ‘I never really had prayed before. I’m not a believer like—’ She stopped in midsentence.

‘Like who?’ I asked. The numbers were static now. Was the wormhole actually closed?

‘Like some of the crew on the
Heffalurp
,’ she said.

‘So they probably prayed?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Raine.

‘But they all died. So this prayer thing clearly doesn’t work.’

‘I guess not,’ said Raine softly.

The wormhole energy signature started to fall.

‘On the other hand . . .’ I said, a smile slowly spreading across my vomit-stained face, ‘the wormhole is closed. And I’m not picking up anything as having come through before it did.’

‘All right!’

Raine pushed one hand out of the restraining web and held it up near me, gloved palm out. Unsure of what to do, I shook the top of her fingers gently. My smile was already fading as I looked back at the holo and our best possible trajectory toward Kharalcha Four.

It didn’t look good. At our maximum thrust of 0.1 G, it was going to take fourteen standard days—336 hours—and that presumed they had a deceleration web to catch us, which was probably unlikely. If we had to turn over halfway and decelerate, we were looking at twenty days.

Ekkie could keep me alive for about ten days without an infusion of fresh atmosphere. Raine’s suit was Mektek. It might have a Bitek air scrubber, but even so, I doubted it had an endurance beyond a few days.

‘Uh, how much atmosphere do you have in your suit, Raine?’

She dipped her head inside her helmet, looking at a readout near her chin.

‘Eight hours, give or take.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

16

‘ I
. . . take it that is going to be a problem?’ Raine asked. Even without my augmented hearing I detected a tremor in her voice, though she was trying her best to sound calm and in control.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘We’ve lost the capsule’s atmosphere reserve and the regenerator, and with the pathetic drive this capsule’s got, it’s going to take at least three hundred hours to get to Kharalcha Four. Is there anything closer? Or have your lot got any ships left?’