In fact I got so used to it, I stopped counting the days until it would be over, fully expecting that Elzweko would leave me there for at least a month. But after only three weeks or thereabouts I was paged to meet an incoming shuttle—at the topside airlock, the one the people in the sims couldn’t even see. I went over there, still wearing Ekkie, and met Elzweko, who was wearing a sleek Imperial suit that made mine look like something from the pre-starflight era of old Earth.
He gestured for me to follow and led me through the airlock up into the internal ceiling of the training cavern.
‘So you made it,’ said Elzweko as we climbed out into the familiar Imperial corridor.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You learned faster than some,’ remarked Elzweko. ‘Though of course a fair few never learn at all. You still need to be careful. Think about what a Prince would do . . . then do the opposite.’
I nodded. It was good advice.
‘We’re sending you straight out,’ continued Elzweko. ‘There’s a storehouse ahead; you’ve got thirty minutes to pick out whatever you can find and fit into a survival capsule. The capsule piggybacks on an automated courier, preprogrammed for at least ten wormhole transitions, straight out toward the Lokowhik rim. After ten transitions, it’ll keep going until it drops you in the first system where it picks up enough tek transmissions to indicate a permanent presence of some kind, not just other passing ships.’
‘What if they’re Sad-Eyes, or Deaders?’ I asked. ‘Or Naknuk?’
‘You’ll be in Fringe space,’ replied Elzweko. ‘Not in the domain of any of our enemies. But it is possible you’ll encounter an enemy ship. If it’s Sad-Eyes, I suggest you overload the power plant on your capsule. Deaders don’t take prisoners. Naknuks . . . Naknuks you might survive. There’s nothing about you their Bitek will pick up as Imperial, and they do work with Fringe humans and the like. You got a Naknuk suit to work, I see. They’ll respect that.’
‘Speaking of the suit, can I keep it?’ I asked. I’d got used to Ekkie.
‘You can take whatever you have on you, plus whatever you can pick up in the storeroom,’ said Elzweko. ‘Just go through that door and keep going. Good luck, Lieutenant Khemri. Or should I say Khem, a trader originally from the Raboghad system, a place of no particular account? You’ll find some background details on yourself in your capsule’s info system, by the way.’
‘Khem it is,’ I replied. I held my hand up, palm out, in the fashion I’d learned in the training sim, a salute apparently common among humans in the Fringe.
Elzweko returned it, spun on his heel, and went out a door that led to the Empire and everything I really wanted to get back to. I continued on into a long hall loaded with what looked like the flotsam and jetsam of a hundred worlds, laid out on and under three lines of tables that stretched the full hundredmetre length of the hall. At the far end, the outline of a door fluoresced green, then immediately turned yellow as I entered. I knew I must pass through it as soon as it turned red.
Thirty minutes later, that door slid shut behind me, and I walked down a ramp to a small, deep internal dock where a slim, nonstandard automated courier ship sat on a launching rail. A disturbingly small, five-metre-long, three-metre-diameter cylinder was mounted on the courier’s back, the hatch on the end flipped open so I could see the acceleration couch inside.
This was my lifeboat capsule. I looked at it and wondered how I was going to survive the five weeks or so it would take to transit ten wormholes, let alone however long I’d be in space afterward.
I also wondered how I was going to stuff my loot inside. I’d taken Elzweko literally and brought with me everything useful I could find in the storehouse that I was able to carry.
All of it was very old, and mostly it was copied Imperial tek, and ancient copies at that, but all kept in good repair. I had managed to find:
A needlegun, a sidearm that shot slivers of ultradense metal at very high speed. It was a very effective weapon, limited in my case by the fact that I had only been able to find three compatible magazine/power packs, each loaded with a hundred needles.
A Bitek medical symbiote applicator and a living symbiote pack that still had three dormant symbiotes. Again, properly fed and watered, this could be a lifesaver for human or near-human patients. The symbiote could deal with a huge variety of diseases, poisons, and contaminants, and repair minor injuries or maintain life in the face of major ones.
A shipsuit made from a Mektek-Bitek composite somewhat resistant to puncture and energy weapons. Ekkie, my vacuum suit, was pretty good armour against a variety of weapons, but I would probably need something more casual to wear when a full-on Bitek spacesuit that made me fifty centimetres taller and fifty centimetres wider was inappropriate. The shipsuit was probably Imperial Survey issue of a century ago, but all the insignia had been replaced with the faded badges of Five World Shipping, some kind of merchant company from a Fringe polity of, I guessed, five habitable worlds, part of the false background that had been established for me that I would have to study en route.
And last but probably not least, a stasis box of Bitek templates for a whole bunch of useful items. Though trickier to activate, as they took careful handling and attention, not to mention various raw materials, with the templates I could grow a reentry manta like the one I’d used before; a kind of watchdog; two types of reconnaissance flyer (nocturnal and diurnal); and an aquatic rescue beast. It was unlikely I’d need to use all or even any of these, but I knew from my training that they were very valuable trade goods.
There were other items already in the survival capsule, a pretty standard load-out of rations, water, atmosphere-regeneration equipment, and some very basic and limited planetary survival gear. I checked through all of this and ran the diagnostics on the capsule. Like everything else I had, it was old but operational. As far as I could tell, it had been made on a Fringe world but was a direct copy of an Imperial Mektek model, with a few bits and pieces of Bitek here and there.
The capsule didn’t have any modern communication devices, only ancient Mektek rayder, wide- and narrow-band, line-of-sight, and so on. But they worked and were active. When I’d finally loaded everything in, done my checks, and clicked the restraints over the top of Ekkie, a toneless Mektek voice from the automated courier we were piggybacking on came through the rayder, warning me of imminent launch.
A minute later, the countdown began, and ten seconds after that the launch rail fired us out into space, on the first step of my voyage into the unknown.
It did not start well, as I discovered once again the limitations of my unaugmented body. The courier had gravity control, but it didn’t or couldn’t extend it to the capsule during launch. I was subjected to at least 7 G’s and was immediately knocked out.
I came to when the courier lit up its own drive and finally did extend its field, adjusting everything back to a comfortable single gravity. My nose was blocked and there was salty fluid in my mouth. I had a moment of panic till I realised my nose was bleeding and that Ekkie’s internal suit cilia were clamping my nose and suctioning the blood away.
Once the nosebleed was taken care of, I noticed that my head and back also ached, and as I tried to shift about to get comfortable, it was brought home to me again that this was going to be one long and tedious voyage.
The tedium was possibly the worst thing of all. Lying in a suit on an acceleration couch with barely enough room to stretch was bad enough, but there also just wasn’t enough to do to keep my mind occupied. I was on edge for the first wormhole transition, constantly watching the shortsighted, slow-to-update scans that were all the capsule could manage, but the courier was so fast and small that the few times I picked up any other craft, we’d left them behind before they could do anything, even if they’d wanted to.
By the fifth transition, I didn’t even bother watching the screens. I knew the courier would tell me if there was anything I needed to know.
By the ninth transition, I didn’t even try
to stay awake. I’d been a month inside my suit, inside the capsule. While I was in reasonable physical shape thanks to the suit’s massaging cilia and my own exercise routines, mentally I was a mess. If there had been any drugs available to let me exit my own brain for a while, I would have taken them, but there was nothing of that kind aboard. There were painkillers, but they didn’t help. All I could do was try to sleep, do my boring exercises, and attempt not to go over and over all the possible scenarios by which I could return to the Empire, get into a temple, enter the sanctum, and become who I was supposed to be instead of the pathetic remnant of a Prince whose greatest feat of the moment was doing two thousand toe curls in an hour.
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 tha
t 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.