On the way down I’d seen a larger clearing that might or might not have had a building or habitation of some kind in it. I hadn’t seen it long enough to be sure. But I’d kept a careful eye on it and taken a rough bearing by the sun. The sun in the previous simulation quadrant had moved in a predictable fashion, so I was hoping that this one would too, though it was quite difficult to see through the canopy.
I figured if I could make it to the bigger clearing by nightfall, I might survive.
In previous times, before I was made mortal, I might have wasted a good ten minutes complaining and yelling abuse up at the sky. All that was gone now. Keeping my handgun ready in my right hand, I drew my knife from my boot, took a line from the sun, and set out through the dense undergrowth.
By nightfall, I was out of ammunition and had three deep scratches on my arm that felt bad, as if there was some poison in them. A vine had done it, or something I’d thought was a vine, before it lashed out and tried to draw me into a suddenly yawned open seedcase the size of a singleship.
But I reached the clearing. There was a building there, right in the middle. I ran for it, as the sun went down, and with its absence came a darkness deeper than any I had ever experienced, accompanied by terrible noises from the jungle behind.
In a panic, I ran straight into a wall and almost knocked myself out. The few seconds of disorientation calmed me as I lay on the ground, panting. The jungle was behind me, the thrashing and squishing and slashing noises had not followed beyond its fringe, and the wall I had run into felt like the familiar Imperial Bitek of standard Naval construction.
Unable to see at all, I slowly felt my way along the wall. Eventually, I came to a doorframe. Following its rim up, along, and down, I came to a control unit. There was a socket for a Bitek analyser, but I thought it might not be a good idea to put my finger in it. I was no longer unequivocally a Prince, and I remembered something about this body not having a typical Prince genetic profile. If this was an Imperial building, it would likely have anti-intrusion measures in place.
Instead, I reached out with my diminished Psitek senses— and immediately encountered a Psitek lock that was represented in my mind by a three-dimensional hexagonal grid of multiple levels, with over a hundred playing pieces, already in various positions beyond their usual start. A gold piece flashed, awaiting my orders for it to move.
I groaned aloud, which was stupid, but I just couldn’t help myself.
It was a puzzle lock, the game was unknown to me, and I had to beat the single-minded Bitek brain that lurked somewhere deep inside the building in order for it to open the door.
Something large whirred over my head. Without my augmented senses I had no idea how close it was, how large, or how dangerous it might be. I crouched lower against the door, listening, but the sound faded.
I focused on the game again, looking over the visualisation. The game appeared to derive from something like chess, for there were a dozen different types of pieces, some of them present in multiples, some of them unique. As I looked them over, it dawned on me that they were all starships of various kinds, ranging from classic Mektek projectile and spheroid shapes of the very early Empire to the more artistic and varied forms of more recent times.
I even recognised some of the ships from my candidate days of gazing at gazetteers of Imperial vessels and from The Achievements of Prince Garikm. There were twenty Kwygrel singleships, fast and deadly, but unarmoured; eight Jorgnul monitors, which were quite the reverse, being massively protected but slow; another eight ships that looked like they might be the progenitors of the Yaotin battleships I knew. . .
The piece that was illuminated was not a ship I recognised, but I could guess its class from its shape. It was a scout vessel, made to seek out wormholes . . . and as I thought that, I saw faint lines emanating from the piece, cutting through the various levels of the playing board.
I ordered it to follow one of the lines, and it sped through a dozen hexagons, rising up six levels. More lines, revealing other wormholes, sprayed out from its passage. Some of them connected with enemy positions, and some led to my own pieces.
A silver battleship moved, and one of my singleships vanished in a flash of rainbow light.
The game was on! I forgot about the noises in the jungle, and the astringent moisture that clung to me, and my empty gun and all too short-bladed knife. Instead I calculated position and possibility, and moved my pieces as if they were a fleet and the future of the Empire depended on my command.
Sometime later, the final silver piece retreated into the darkness off the board, and I felt the door make the merest move away from my shoulder. I pushed, and it gave way before sliding aside.
A bright light flicked on, almost blinding me. It was followed a moment later by a terrifying cacophony from the jungle edge, the sound of something . . . or several thousand somethings . . . scrabbling over the bare earth of the clearing to race toward the light.
I ran inside, almost gibbering with panic, instinctively reaching out for anything that might be a rapid-close button, while my mind was stabbing out close, close Psitek instructions.
My fingers touched a panel, or maybe it was the Psitek, for the door slid shut. I backed away from it and held my knife ready as the door and the wall and the roof above boomed and rattled with the sound of the assault of hundreds or thousands of crazed creatures.
Then, as quickly as they had come, the assault ceased. With the door closed, the light that had drawn them was gone, and they went back into the night.
I looked around, blinking.
I was inside one big, empty room. Right in the middle there was a pack—my pack that Elzweko hadn’t let me bring, which looked as if it still had everything in it, hopefully including the medikit that I needed for the poisonous scratches on my arm. I walked over to it suspiciously, keeping a wary eye out for some kind of trap.
There was a message cube on the bag. It glowed as I approached, so I backed off in case it wasn’t really a message. But it didn’t explode or anything. Instead the image of Elzweko rose up from it.
‘Good work, Khem. This building will fold itself up fifteen minutes after sunrise. You will be killed by this process if you are still inside. It will restructure itself again fifteen minutes before dusk. But you’ll have to beat the Bitek intelligence every time to get in. You’ve probably seen what gets attracted to the light here, so I’ve taken the liberty of removing the illuminator you had in your pack and given you a timer instead. Good luck.’
12
TO CUT A long story short, I survived the jungle, albeit with several scarred welts on my arm from that poisonous vine and a few other thankfully minor injuries. I even got kind of used to the panicked departure in the morning, of waking up in a frenzy, thinking I’d missed the timer only to find it had an hour or more to go. Then there was the almost equal panic at the end of the day as I wrestled with the game, desperate to get inside.
One evening, I didn’t win, so the door didn’t open. I spent the whole night awake, constantly creeping about the building, moving along whenever it sounded like something was coming close.
But like I said, I made it even through that, gaining an even greater perception of the mortality of myself and other ordinary humans. Also I learned to really hate hot, humid environments and not being able to see in the dark.
I never did find out what it was that roamed in great packs through the night, though I learned that what they followed were the luminous eyes of some larger creature that moved in small groups. I only ever saw the clustered, shining eyes once, but I think they belonged to arachnids of some kind, judging from the wisps of web that they left behind.
Elzweko gave me a zero-G harness on the thirty-second day, just when I was starting to get a bit panicked about being left there, which was probably the intention. I’d learned the earlier lesson, too, and had everything I possessed on me, which of course Elzweko had anticipated, so when I was dumped into the third quadrant, the junkyard, i
t was to the new-arrival processing, where some newtlike quadrupedal aliens I’d never even heard described before confiscated everything I owned, though they called it ‘compulsory purchase,’ and gave me a credit chip in a finger ring that I could use for what they called a ‘grubstake,’ which was working capital.
The junkyard, despite appearances, was very highly organised. The aliens, who were from a world called something that came out like ‘Shube’, and so were called Shubians by the human populace, held commerce in a very high regard. Everything had value to them and could be traded, including such basic necessities as being allowed to stay alive. A Shubian deathmaster came around every noon, and you could either pay to stay alive or die. Or fight the deathmaster, I suppose, though this seemed likely to be unprofitable since the Shubian deathmaster was nine feet tall, wore an armoured suit, and carried a chopper with a blade the length of my arm.
But the Shubians were fair, which is why they gave everyone who arrived on their asteroid (or what they thought was an asteroid) a grubstake based on whatever the visitor had on them. Then it was up to the new entrepreneur to turn that grubstake into sufficient funds to stay alive and prosper.
I would have been in trouble if that had been the first quadrant of my training, for I would almost certainly have tried to manage entirely on my own. But I had grown a little wiser from my experiences in the startown, and certainly wearier of my own company in the jungle, so I found a group of mostly humans—in that most of them were derived from some kind of old Earth stock, plus a few aliens—who had bought the rights to restore an ancient Imperial troop carrier, and I offered my services helping repair and reactivate its various components.
After demonstrating that I did in fact know something about several devices, and also surreptitiously using my Psitek to activate a Mektek-Bitek hybrid logic array they had thought completely defunct, I was given a contract.
All I had to do then was get along with a group of people who I still, at heart, thought were totally inferior and should do what I told them to do. Resisting this impulse took a lot of energy and thought, and one wearisome day a week later I told the two main shareholders in our little enterprise how I really regarded them.
Five minutes later I had a very bruised face and was looking for another contract or business opportunity, with only a few hours before the deathmaster’s noontime visit and my cash reserves denuded by a penalty clause I hadn’t noticed in my contract because I had arrogantly not bothered to read it all the way through.
But I had been picking up a few small odds and ends of Imperial tek while I’d been working on the troop ship. Things that the others thought were dead or burned out but I knew could be repaired, recharged, or reactivated.
One of them was a Mektek cutting beam that could be tuned to drill a hole as fine as a hair or fan out to burn a hand-sized hole in anything short of modern hull armour.
I took it over to a crew that was salvaging the contents of some kind of courier vessel fitted out with hundreds of small lockboxes, demonstrated what the beam could do to one of those locks, and was in business again.
This time, I kept my thoughts about my innate superiority to myself. I had to, because my jaw had swelled up so much I could barely talk.
Likely the enforced silence saved my life, and I got so used to the regular routine of not talking about how great I was, burning into lockboxes, and cataloguing the contents that I was actually annoyed when Elzweko turned up to move me on to the next quadrant. Because it could only be worse.
‘You like it here?’ asked Elzweko as I slipped on the contragrav harness.
‘Better than the jungle,’ I replied. ‘And the startown was too damned cold.’
‘Last one’s easy,’ rumbled Elzweko. ‘Long as you don’t get a hole in your suit, forget to tie on, or have a booster malfunction.’
‘I’ll handle it,’ I said. I gave him the sneer I’d kept bottled up for the last few weeks, but he didn’t notice.
‘We’ll stop by the launching platform to get you a suit,’ said Elzweko. ‘Do you have any preference what kind?’
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t care what kind of suit, I was rated on all types, but shut it again to let my thought processes catch up.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I want to choose it, and test it first.’
Elzweko smiled and gave a small nod of approval.
‘Onward and upward,’ he said, and launched.
It was odd to be back up inside an Imperial ship, even just up on the viewing platform above the vast cavern that contained the sim. That sounds weird, I know, since all the simulated quadrants were also inside the ship. But they certainly didn’t feel like it, and now I found myself feeling kind of out of place, so close to Imperial normality, but separate from it forever unless I could pass the test I was training for. Not for the first time, I regretted ever being picked out by the Arch-Priest Morojal.
Elzweko opened the locker that my original coveralls had come out of, but this time he let me walk inside. There were a dozen vacuum suits hanging along one wall. They were of many different types and origins, though all were old and well used.
‘You have fifteen minutes,’ said Elzweko. ‘Choose wisely.’
I ran along the row of suits, turning them on, which in each case took ten to fifteen seconds fumbling at switches and panels, save for the last one, which was a Naknuk Bitek suit that had its own rudimentary intelligence. I didn’t even bother with that one, because it would have been made for a single user, recognising its authorised wearer via a blood test or skin scrape.
But ten minutes later, as I ran through the test routines of the other suits and they all failed for one reason or another, I had to return to the Naknuk suit.
Naknuks basically spoke and wrote Imperial standard, because they only split off from the Empire four or five hundred years ago. I’d never been able to get the full story from the Imperial Mind, or from anyone else, but the available authorised version basically said that a whole House of about three thousand Princes had fled the Empire to set up a Bitek-only confederation way across the galaxy, shunning Psitek and Mektek. Of course, the Empire had kept growing, and the Naknuks hadn’t gone as far as they might have, so in recent decades there had been numerous clashes along a border region that contained several thousand disputed systems.
So I could read the information that scrolled across the suit’s external vision-skin without difficulty, but that only confirmed what I already suspected. The suit, which called itself Ekumatorozikilinee, was fully operational. But it would work only for its authorised wearer, one Star-Major Druzekh. Who was probably long-since dead, as the suit was over two hundred years old.
‘Three minutes,’ said Elzweko.
I ran the schematics again. The egg-sized Bitek brain that ran the suit was in a small hump at the back, just below the helmet neck rim. I bent close to it and focused my Psitek upon it, reaching out to make a connection.
It was like diving into warm mud, enfolding and closing over me, blocking out all exterior sensation and causing an intense feeling of claustrophobia that made my mind shriek to withdraw. But this was only a typical defence against Psitek intrusion, something I had encountered as a child in my Psitek lessons. I kept on, and broke through into the simple consciousness of the suit, impressing on it that I was its rightful owner, Star-Major Druzekh, replacing the genetic profiles it had for the Naknuk with my own.
I came back out of the suit’s mind as Elzweko said, ‘Two minutes.’
I sent Ekkie, as I had rechristened the suit, a command to open, and stepped inside. The suit closed up after me, the helmet visor slid shut, and various telltales glowed and flickered just above my eyes, displaying patterns of meaningful information. I’d have to work out what they were later, but for now, I could just interrogate Ekkie’s small but literal mind directly. It said the suit was sealed for vacuum, and all systems were operational.
‘Good,’ said Elzweko. ‘We go in through the topside airlock of the Fe
ather, which is actually the connection for the zero-G projector; the sims are programmed not to use it. You have a meeting with your shift boss and will go straight into your first eight-hour shift. You ready?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I just can’t wait.’
The Feather, as the people in it called the orbital station, really wasn’t that bad. It was well organised, so I didn’t have to worry about people trying to kill me, or about inimical life-forms. And as long as Ekkie worked, it was comfortable enough, not too hot or too cold.
Sure, it was hard work, which didn’t come naturally to me. Mektek construction in zero-G and vacuum isn’t the easiest thing in the galaxy. I wondered why they didn’t use automatons of some kind until I saw the first accident with a reaction unit explosion. People were a hell of a lot cheaper to replace than any kind of automaton.
The hardest part for me was sharing a dormitory. Luckily we had our own sealed sleeping tubes, which afforded some measure of privacy. It was all I could do to put up with the inferior life-forms around me when I was working, let alone having to listen to them or watch them in the off shift.
I usually went into my sleep capsule instead and studied technical manuals. It passed the time, though again it was much slower and more difficult than the direct implantation I was used to. Mind you, I did find it easier to work out when they were wrong. With the direct-experience stuff you always had to fight against what it was telling you, even when the evidence that it was wrong was staring you in the face. Like the kinetic sliver loading on the Zwaktuzh Dawn.
So I got used to the eight-hours-on, eight-hours-off shifts, and the constant repetition of simple tasks performed in a difficult environment, and I even got somewhat used to living among other humans, though I kept myself as apart as possible.