Chương 91: The Proximan Princess

Zurah V Orbit Imperium Stellarum August 13, 2848 The Proximan Princess must have been at least a century old. Arc only got a glimpse of the ship out of his window, but he could clearly make out the rotating wheel of compartments at the front of the ship, looking something like a looped string of oblong gray beads, which would provide passengers and crew with an approximation of gravity during when the Princess wasn't making a burn.

Down the length of the shaft to which the wheel was attached by long struts of metal were the thrusters, a full dozen of them each attached to their own fuel tank. The fact the ship hadn't been equipped with a grav-generator yet was the first clue to its age - well, the second if you counted the multitude of scrapes, burns, scuffs and repairs marking the hull as well-loved. But the real proof was the name.

"Iceni," Arc asked, as he pulled his suitcase down from the overhead compartment. He had to brace himself so that both he and his luggage wouldn't go spinning off across the aisle.

"When's the last time there was actually a princess imperial with any kind of connection to Proxima Centauri?" Seren Maria Cardona-Solaris was a princess imperial until she was killed during a shuttle accident in 2717 of the Imperial Standard Calendar, the AI answered, without any noticeable hesitation. Her father was a younger son of a rather politically powerful duke from Proxima.

"You were already curious, weren't you?" Arc asked her, with a smile, as he shuffled his way through the line of other passengers - few of whom seemed used to moving in zero-g. Most of them, he knew, weren't actually headed to Vidako: the Proximan Princess would be docking in half a dozen other systems on its current voyage, exchanging goods at every port.

The only reason that he had a direct flight was that, because of the war, the senate had passed a temporary measure giving all military personnel using civilian transport priority. To hear Cassie tell it, that had been the compromise: some of the senators, those from worlds particularly threatened by the Na'xir swarm, had wanted to press independent ships and their crews into service.

"Excuse me?" Arc turned, to see an old woman, one gnarled hand clutching the seat to her left, floating just behind him.

"Yes, ma'am?" He glanced up toward the luggage compartments, thinking that she might need help with her things.

"I just wanted to say thank you for your service," she said, and gave him a tremulous smile.

"My husband was a marine, you know. During the Singularity War."

"Oh." It took Arc a moment to catch up; he'd never actually been in this kind of situation before.

"Well, I'm still just a cadet, but thank you, ma'am. Do you need any help with your luggage?" Wrestling two different suitcases down the aisle and through the open airlock onto the Proximan Princess took a bit of doing, but Arc made certain that Mrs. Adaway was comfortably arranged in her seat, with her luggage stowed in easy reach, before he looked for his own seat.

He had to listen to her talk about what it had been like during the war - how she'd gotten married before her husband shipped out, and how many of her friends who'd done the same had ended up young widows.

"Sandhurst!" Vijay Iyer called, waving his hand from a section of seats in the third passenger compartment away from where Arc had finally deposited Mrs. Adaway. The older cadet was at the center of a cluster of gray tunics; while Arc at least passively recognized the faces of the upperclassmen, he also picked out three distinctly awkward looking younger people who looked like the slightest noise from the ship might send them straight up into the ceiling.

"They put us all in one place, I guess," Arc observed, as he drifted toward Iyer and the others, his battered old suitcase in tow.

"Last time I was all by myself."

"Last time the imperium wasn't under attack," one of the upperclassmen, a broad-shouldered man by the name of Nadarajah answered.

"Every other year, I just got a flight voucher. This year, we're scheduled with assigned seats."

"Let me give you a hand with that," Vijay said. He hooked his boot beneath one of the seats and took the front of Arc's suitcase, and together the two of them crammed it into the webbing meant to hold luggage in place.

"Thanks," Arc said. He found his numbered seat and settled in next to one of the new cadets who was still wearing civilian clothes.

"Arc Sandhurst," he introduced himself, and extended his hand. The young man laughed.

"I know who you are," he said, gripping Arc's hand exuberantly and giving it two quick pumps.

"Marco Soares, from Zurah IV. You gave us something to talk about in the algae farms for weeks."

"Get used to it, Arcturus," a young woman seated next to Vijay said.

"I know for a fact that my father is planning on trotting you out again at next summer's silk festival. You're a local hero now, after all."

"We'll see, Indira," Arc said.

"I think with the war on everyone's going to have a lot better things to pay attention to than me. I don't plan on getting into any more duels."

"Not if you bring your princess for a visit," she shot back.

"Which, once again, my father very much encourages you to do. He'll put you both up at the ducal palace."

"Wait," Nadarajah said.

"You're Indira Katari. You're the duke's youngest daughter."

"Correct," Indira said, shrugging her shoulders so that her dark hair fell across the jacket of her suit like a waterfall.

"And you know the duke's daughter, Sandhurst?" Vijay asked. Arc winced.

"I sort of made a deal with Duke Katari," he admitted.

"Simulator access whenever he's on world, and a place to run without being mobbed," Indira explained.

"In exchange for tutoring me in the sims before we shipped out. And an appearance with my father at the festival."

"It's been really bad," Arc explained.

"Every time I went out to jog, I was getting mobbed. Well, Indira's family owns nine thousand acres of mulberry trees, and it's all behind security fences. It was just about the only place I could run in peace."

"So, you already have piloting training," the final young woman in civilian clothes spoke up - for the first time since Arc had arrived.

"I've been training with my father's guard since he agreed to give me his recommendation this year," Indira said.

"But none of them won a duel for the honor of an imperial princess." She grinned.

"And your name?" Arc asked the final first-year cadet.

"Cui Jia," she said, without any further elaboration.

"What Miss Cui hasn't mentioned," Soares broke in, "is that she got top marks on the imperial entrance exam. The scores were posted. She could have got into any one of the three academies she wanted, but for some reason she's decided to get elbow deep in gun-grease and thruster fuel with the rest of us."

"I have my reasons," Jia said, and turned to the window. It was clearly a dismissal. Arc glanced over to meet Vijay's eyes and received a message through their AIs just a moment later: Mole rats. They'll settle down during Hard Burn. It was all Arc could do not to laugh at the thought of it. 𝝮 Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. During the burn out of orbit, they were pressed back against their seats by the force of the ship's acceleration.

Once the Proximan Princess cut her thrusters, however, they were in zero-g again until the habitation ring spun up to an approximation of one standard gravity, like an enormous centrifuge. At that point, the passengers were allowed to unbuckle their safety harnesses and move about the cabins. The trip out to the gate at L2 took just over six hours - slightly less than the same ride in the Vidako system.

During that time, Arc alternated between trying to sleep, reading the latest military analysis out of the LeShaii front, and listening to music. There were plenty of talking heads - mostly retired fleet officers who'd never fought an actual war but were eager to put themselves in front of an audience and take advantage of fifteen minutes of fame. At least one, Arc knew, was plugging a book.

How anyone could have written anything worthwhile about a war that wasn't even finished yet, and that had started less than a year before, Arc didn't know. But he did his best to scrape through the dross for any nuggets of reliable information. There was a massive fleet buildup at Tau Ceti, and everyone seemed to agree that there was no way the emperor would let an actual Imperium world fall.

That sentiment conveniently ignored the fact that the three LeShaii worlds which had come under attack actually were imperial worlds and had been since the fourth member species had joined the Imperium Stellarum. The initial attempt to destroy the hive on Hav'eth had been repulsed, and no one was quite willing to glass an entire subcontinent from orbit just yet, so Admirals Wai and Farragut had focused on going island to island, retaking every piece of ground on the planet one by one.

Arc imagined that once they were satisfied that they'd completely cut the hive off from any support, and had the logistics chains to support it, there would be a full-scale assault. Rear Admiral Cree Void Skimmer's flagship, the Carinus, had been destroyed preventing a Na'xir landing at Bian, C'rise's home world. The admiral had survived but lost almost the entirety of his ships. But the worst of the fighting was, so far as Arc could tell, at Shaii'veth.

The LeShaii home world still stood, almost certainly because Admiral Nakagami had gone there to take command personally. But there were two habitable worlds in the system, and the second had already fallen before the admiral had arrived. If the numbers being thrown around in the news reports were accurate - something Arc was doubtful of - Nakagami had brought three carriers. That would be nearly a third of all mechs and pilots serving in the imperium.

Arc wondered whether Ireti Ọlatẹru or Prince Bhaskar were with Nakagami at Shaii'veth. He hadn't seen either of them since their graduation ceremony, and then he'd hardly had time to do more than wish them well before heading up to Chel. When he'd about driven himself crazy reading and listening to panels of talking heads, Arc settled back and closed his eyes. There was a constant hum of chatter from the other cadets seated around him, and the civilian passengers beyond that.

Most of the passengers avoided even looking at those in uniform for more than a moment. Perhaps it is because seeing you all together makes the war more real to them, Iceni suggested. They aren't the ones who are going to fight it, Arc answered. Fortunately, he had a way to blot out the noise.

A package had arrived, halfway through the summer, from Vee, containing a refurbished set of headphones that did wonders at blocking out ambient sounds, and a set of audio files encompassing the entire discography of Vee's favorite band, Trillie and the Event Horizon.

Arc was absolutely certain that if he didn't have something intelligent to say about them by the time he saw Vee again - proof that he'd not only listened, but actually paid attention - that his friend wouldn't let him hear the end of it for the entire first semester. He started listening just to avoid the hassle but found that it was surprisingly easy to keep going. The Event Horizon were a true fusion band - something that could never have existed in a universe where humans, Alu'kans, and Toreans never met.

The first thing you noticed was Trillie's vocals, of course - the lead singer did things with her voice that, quite literally, no human could mimic. But her bass guitarist, Kala, somehow managed to sing harmony with a distinctive Alu'kan voice that anchored and supported Trillie's soaring notes.

The bass and the drums seemed to hum through Arc's body, pounding and driving one minute, and then like clouds breaking to let down a single ray of sunlight the next as the guitar and Trillie's voice built something achingly beautiful. He found himself tapping his fingers along with the beat and had to admit that Vee actually had taste.

Sometime through the band's second album, the Proximan Princess must have flipped and started her acceleration burn, because the hab ring stopped spinning and the attendants came around to make certain everyone was buckled in. He'd just started to dive into a live recording when Marco Soares nudged him.

"Coming up on the gate." Arc nodded and then closed his eyes again. It was a trip that he'd already made twice before, and there wasn't really anything to see. But he turned off the music anyway, because the new cadets were all abuzz with excitement.

"My vovô says you have to pray when you cross over, so the warp-ghosts don't get you," Soares muttered, as they all craned their necks to look out the windows. The gate itself was only visible by looking for the emergency lights: metal against the black of space just faded into the background, and despite how enormous a gate was, it was easy to lose just about anything in the distance between Zurah V and its closest neighbor.

The lights, though, picked out a roughly square frame measuring over a hundred meters on a side - large enough for even a carrier to fit through the middle. There were automatic vectoring thrusters attached, Arc knew, so that the computer systems which oversaw the gate could make adjustments if it began to drift out of the L2 point for some reason, or if an incoming asteroid or piece of debris necessitated evasive maneuvers.

Lines of deep, throbbing purple and indigo blue lit up the frame, pulsing in rhythm, almost as if waves of plasma were being poured through glass pipes embedded in the frame. It all looked very small and delicate, from a distance, but Arc knew that at the scale of the gate, those lights had to be as thick as a tree trunk. Automatic shades came down to cover the windows, to exclamations of disappointment from Soares and a few of the children seated around the cabin.

"Why don't they let us watch?" The fresh cadet asked.

"Because the ship is passing through a dimension that doesn't have the same laws of physics our bodies are adapted to," Cui Jia answered.

"Your eyes aren't equipped to handle the light from out there, and your brain isn't evolved to interpret whatever signals do come through. If we're lucky, you'll come out with a pounding headache. If not, you'll vomit all over the cabin and the rest of us will have to endure the stink of it for the next seven hours."

"Sounds to me like warp-ghosts," Soares muttered, and settled back into his seat. Arc knew they'd entered the gate when the world lurched around him. For a stretch of time that at once seemed to stretch on forever, and to be over in a mere instant, he felt his stomach trying to crawl up his throat. The hard lines of the luggage compartments curled up like burning paper, and his next inhalation carried with it the foul stench of something rotting.

Just when Arc thought that he would be the one to lose control of his stomach, everything was right again, and he let himself collapse back against the cushioned back of his chair to catch a breath of clean air.

"I hate that every time I do it," Indira Katari grumbled.

"It never gets any easier."

"So how long are we in here?" Marco Soares asked.

"That's it," Vijay said.

"It's over. We're in the Vidako system." He nodded to the windows, where the shades were already retracting.

"Now we just sit back and kill another seven hours to Vidako orbit," Arc said. He closed his eyes and put the music back on. 𝝮 The closer they got to Pinnacle Station, however, the more Arc's nerves started to creep up on him.

It wasn't anything about going back to the academy; he actually found himself eager for that - not only to get back into a cockpit, but to see his friends, and even to find out what kind of nightmarish scenarios Professor DeVault and Skuld would cook up using the latest intelligence from the front lines. No, he could admit to himself that his anxiety was about seeing Cassie again. Three standard months of exchanging video messages wasn't at all like being in the same place.

Three months of waking up alone, of not being able to put his arms around her or actually hold a conversation, three months of just watching the same half dozen recordings over and over again, trying to decide whether she'd changed. It was easy to believe that Cassie wanted to be with him when they were in the same place. But he couldn't help but wonder whether, once she'd gone back to Terra and the imperial court, she hadn't realized just how much he would never fit in there.

She complained to him about going to listen to this symphony or see the new production of such and such drama at a theater in New York or London; about how they had to host the senator from Hadiqa's birthday dinner, or the reception for the arrival of a new Singularity ambassador. It was an entirely different world, and Arc knew that there must be dozens of men better suited to helping her navigate it than he was.

The doubt gnawed at him in the space between the arrival of each message, and then he saw her face and her smile and she told him how much she missed him, and it went away for a little while. But never entirely - and he couldn't help but fear, at night when the thoughts were worst, that when he saw her on Pinnacle Station things would be different. That she'd have changed her mind about wanting him.

It made him bad company, Arc was certain, and he didn't think he said more than a dozen words during the entire flight in toward Vidakan orbit. When the Proximan Princess had docked at Pinnacle, he helped the other cadets get their luggage free, and they all walked to the airlock in a knot, with him taking up the rear. Just to make certain the mole rats didn't get lost, Arc lied to himself.

When he stepped out of the airlock onto the concourse, Arc cast about around him, looking for a familiar face - but even though he was looking for Cassie, his eyes went right by her at first, because of her hair. It hadn't really registered in the videos, but after nearly a year's worth of growth, it hung down to her jawline, cut in a sharp, angled line.

"Arc!" Cassie called out and rushed toward him. He had just enough time to drop his suitcase and catch her, and then she was kissing him, and the doubt he'd been pushing aside for months was gone.