Knowing she wastaking an unwarranted risk and not for the first time, she used asnippet to open a small peephole behind theslowly waving arms of a planton his nightstand.
Memnon sat at the footof his bed, wearing an ornate robe. He snatched a strip of fermentedfat from the hand of his attendant, some old fool against whom heheld some grudge.
The attendant retreatedto a corner just as another Quailu came in. She snatched the fat fromMemnon and took a large bite.
At first,Gabriella thought it was Ereshkigal but her mannerisms were allwrong. ThisQuailu was too brash,too lacking in thepassive-aggressive deferencethat his intelligence chiefhad elevated to an art form.
She’d overheardthe gossip while waiting for the messhall to empty out.Thisone was cousin to theempress herself. A Quailulady of unspeakably ancient lineage.
And crazy as ashit-house rat.
“I had plansfor that,” he grumbled.
“And I have plans forthis,” she replied curtly, reaching down.
Memnon’s robe felloff his right shoulder and he made a rumbling sound. Somethingundulated into view to the right of his waist.
Oh!Gabriella leaned back from the hole in the wall. Oh…ewww! She shuddered, scramblingaway from the peephole.
She got to her feet andstarted moving away, stopping as she remembered to cover her tracks.She closed the small hole in the wall as a thud sounded from Memnon’sroom.
“What the hellswas that?” theprincess demanded.
“Don’t come to mybed if I disgust you so much,” Memnon snarled.
Gabriella fled down thepassageway as quietly as she could. She could avoid having heremotions detected by the Quailu as long as she kept a certain levelof control but her shock had broken that control.
She’d felt herrevulsion a little too keenly but,fortunately, Memnon thought it was coming from the princess. Itwould be wise to get away from them before they felt anything elsefrom her.
She reached the maintrunk and sat to catch her breath. Relief threatened to bubble to thesurface but she hammered it down ruthlessly.
Relief might not be thestrangest emotion on a ship belonging to Memnon, where the crewconstantly balanced on the knife’s edge between life andextrajudicial execution but it could still draw attention her way.She calmed her breathing and stood.
Gabriellaneeded something new to think about, quickly. How do thosewater bottles work? She lookedaft. With a sigh, she trudged toward the junction near Engineeringwhere the training pod sat unused.
She was probablythe only one to use it since the ship had left the Rhuland dockyards.It was a cheaper model thanthe one she was used to. It was just a reclining seat with a neuralweb array built into the headrest.
The bottles, asit turned out, used a nanite-based… meta-material was the closestword in English though it didn’t quitefit… to create an artificial gravity field. They were tuned todeactivate in proximity to the electromagnetic signature of asentient brain.
The neural array, itslatest task complete, went back to its quiet, standby hum. Gabriellalay in the chair, looking up at the cable-runs with mild curiosity.
Why did the explanationseem so damned important?
Who gives a shit how the gravplate in a bottleworks? Her eyes grew wide andshe sat up. Luna had developed SOP’s for the fighter squadrons byadapting the Earth versions to standard imperial operations.
Gabriella had all ofthat in her head.
If Memnon was going tosterilize a planet how would he go about it?
He’d establishorbital superiority first, wiping out the local defenses. His nextstep would be parking in orbit to rain destruction on the population.
How does a ship maintain standard orbit? sheasked herself, her self-possession slippedin the excitement of the idea. The information flooding into herconscious mind was just what she was looking for.
“Hey!” avoice shouted from somewhere above her. “Who’s down there?”
“Shit!” shemuttered. Grabbingher satchel she hopped down the from the chair and raced off towardthe centerline of the huge ship. Shedived down a side passage just as a hatch snapped open over thechair.
“What thehells?” a voice said. “There’sa room down here!”
Shetook a deep breath, brought her emotions under control… mostly…and used a snippet to open a hole into the guts of the ship. Sheducked through into a dark space and closed the opening as a set offootsteps approached the intersection.
The steps hesitated atthe branch she’d taken, then moved away. She let out a breath,firming up her resolve to remain as blank as possible.
She knew themaintenance tunnels remained pressurized during combat because they’dbeen forgotten about centuries before therisks of explosive decompression had even been recognized.Now she was back in the ship’s guts and she still had no suit.
What other parts of the ship remain pressurizedduring a battle? she askedherself. Medbay, not a good choice,she decided. It was deep in the bowels of the ship.
She caught herbreath. Security? Of course. You don’t want prisonerswearing their suits in lock-down, do you? They might use them to workmischief, or even escape, because the brig’s lower level is againstthe ventral section of the hull.
De-pressurizingthe security section would have been a death-sentence for anyprisoners. That probablywasn’t much of a concern for Memnon, who seemed to prefer summaryexecution over incarceration anyway.
The place should bepretty quiet or, at least, quiet enough for what she had in mind. Shehad to get there, though, and she’d never make it if she had tocrawl through the cable tiers.
She cocked her head inthe darkness. Can I make a weapon in this situation?
Her escape and evasiondata came through for her. Part of the fighter pilot download, Lunahad made sure there was a way for her downed pilots to make weaponsfrom any source of nanites.
She didn’t have hersuit’s processor to translate her knowledge into PLC code but shewasn’t trying to build a shelter with its own fusion reactor. Allshe needed was an edged weapon.
She used her phoneimplant to request some of the spare nanites that every ship kept onhand for damage control. Once she had enough, she fed the necessarycode through her phone to form her weapon.
She opened a way backinto the maintenance tunnels and stepped out, a knife in her hand. Inthe wider spaces of the tunnel, it automatically morphed into ahalf-length spear.
She nodded approvingly.It was light but it didn’t need weight. She could put
