A Confusion of Princes (25 page)

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 lightly 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 . . . then 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.

‘Are you an agent of the Empire?’

‘No,’ I said. That was true, as far as it went. I wasn’t an agent. I was a principal.

‘Are you an enemy of Kharalcha?’

‘No.’ I shook my head.

‘What is your age in old Earth years, subjective?’

Why did they want to know that?

‘Nineteen, I think. Maybe twenty.’

There was some muttering behind the questioning woman. I thought I recognised that voice.

‘Raine? Is that you? Are you all right?’

‘I’m not asking that!’ said my interrogator. She had her head turned away and wasn’t talking to me. She obviously thought I couldn’t hear, or wouldn’t remember. ‘I think we’re done here. He scans human normal. I guess that Prince
was
just . . . I don’t know . . . appropriating a face. Maybe they don’t like us mere mortals knowing what they really look like. Or it was some kind of sick joke.’

I almost answered that, but I managed to turn it into a coughing fit. As I coughed away, I felt my restraints retract. I sat up and saw that Raine was there at the foot of the bed, looking fresh and clean in a dark-blue shipsuit with a single twisted line of gold on each sleeve. She smiled at me, the dimple appearing.

The other woman was in a green shipsuit, with three gold lines on her sleeve.

‘I’m sorry about that, Khem. My name is Commander Alice Gryphon. Raine has told us how important your help was in stoppering the wormhole and in her own survival. But we have to be careful, particularly in the current situation, and the Prince’s image thing was . . . odd. In any case, I believe that you can be transferred to the civilian side now. Welcome to Kharalcha Orbitplex One, or as it’s more commonly known, the Habitat.’

The Commander looked at Raine and said, ‘He’s all yours now, Raine,’ before adding to me, ‘I mean that somewhat literally. Visitors must be sponsored to leave the docks here. Raine is sponsoring you; she will be held responsible for your actions. In any case, you’re cleared to go, from both a medical and a security perspective.’

She left, and I sat there with my mouth open and my mind working feverishly away. Raine came over and stood near my bed, and I finally got my question out.

‘I’m at the orbital habitat on Kharalcha Four? I thought this must be the
Tormentor.
. . What . . . what happened?’

‘You’ve been out for eight days,’ said Raine. ‘When the
Tormentor
picked us up, the medtech said you’d rejected your symbiote after it put you into a coma, and they couldn’t wake you up. Even back here they couldn’t do anything. Just wait and see. I’m . . . I’m really glad you woke up, Khem.’

‘So am I,’ I said. Eight days? I shuddered. I wasn’t going to abandon my body again, that was for sure. I was lucky I’d made it back. ‘Uh, what do I do now?’

‘I thought . . . you can stay with me and my parents to start with,’ said Raine. ‘I think we owe you quite a lot—’ ‘Your parents?’ I interrupted. I didn’t mean anything in particular. It was just the whole concept of parents and knowing who they were, let alone living with them. But Raine blushed.