A Confusion of Princes (27 page)

‘That there’s a reasonable chance the Confederation fleet will come in time,’ said Raine. ‘They probably won’t arrive in time, or won’t commit enough strength. The
most
likely scenario is that the tenth-orbit wormhole will reopen in a few months and the pirates will come through and we’ll try to stop them with the pathetic remnant—’ ‘Raine,’ cautioned Alice. ‘These are operational matters.’

Raine stopped talking. There was a long silence. Larod gave me a direct look with a slightly raised eyebrow that I was obviously meant to understand but didn’t, then went on eating while also watching some kind of information feed that was scrolling across a patch of vision-skin on a kind of bracer or Bitek prosthetic reinforcement on his left wrist. It was all symbols that I could not immediately decipher.

‘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

W
HAT 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.