A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

Author:Garth Nix
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781741768008
Publisher: Allen & Unwin

15

I FROWNED. I’D NEVER said I would enlist in what must be a largely defunct militia.

‘It’s a joke,’ explained Raine. ‘Uh, meant to ease the tension of a stressful situation. You know, you laugh because otherwise you’d cry?’

‘Oh, right,’ I said. Princes made jokes—jokes were for equals. I was still having difficulty adjusting to my changed situation. ‘Can you walk?’

There was only a narrow window of opportunity to launch the missile.

‘I think so,’ replied Raine. She clapped a hand on my shoulder and stood up, remaining slightly stooped. Then she slid a foot out and took a step, and then another. I found myself walking by her side, partially supporting her weight. It made for slow progress, and I knew that I should leave her to make her own way and speed ahead to the missile bay.

But for some reason I didn’t.

The missile bay control room must have been a hastily rigged lash-up of Mektek and Bitek modules even before the concussion wave took out its Bitek components. I set Raine down on the command chair, where she tried to get a status report on the vision-skin, while I went and caught as many shiplice as I could find.

Raine watched as I dropped an armful of the creatures in the room and they scuttled into various access ports.

‘How did you program them?’ she asked curiously. ‘I thought all the louse-coding wands would be as dead as everything else.’

‘Uh, I’ve got my own,’ I said hastily, patting one of Ekkie’s pockets. ‘Just had to recalibrate. Is that control array working?’

Raine forgot the shiplice and turned back to the Mektek control panel. It was lit up now, drawing power from the ship-heart.

‘It’s functioning on the tertiary backup level, without a holo,’ she said, drawing with her finger on the emergency input slate that had slid out when the holographic controls failed. ‘But the missile isn’t responding.’

‘The lice need to reweave the nerve lines,’ I said.

Raine nodded. Her suited fingers danced on the input.

‘I’ve loaded the launch solution. It’ll begin to count down as soon as communication is established with the missile. Is there . . . is there any more activity at the wormhole?’

I checked Ekkie’s internal vision-skin. There had been no further report from the module. I couldn’t interrogate further as the comms were all one-way. I hadn’t had time to rig up anything fancier.

‘Nothing yet,’ I said. ‘The last scan I got, it looked like a few hours till something comes through.’

‘I guess we just hope that the shiplice work fast,’ said Raine.

‘If you’ve set the launch, we could go now,’ I suggested. ‘Get a head start away from that fusion torch.’

Raine didn’t answer immediately. Then she turned to look at me, fixing her eyes on my face. She blinked a couple of times. I found her gaze weirdly fascinating and wondered if the blinking was some kind of hypnotic domination effect, and cast my own eyes down. I was tempted to reach out with my Psitek, but if she

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