Page 30 of Alien Prince’s Fake Bride (The Tentacle Throne #1)
- Mareliux -
I lift my gaze from the instruments. “I did. You didn’t feel the immense surge of Syntrix, Umbra?
It totally knocked me out. And I should add that the Vyrpy attack is real, too.
Although these are both things that I should have thought of before, so I could fake them.
I suppose I’m not used to this kind of deception. ”
“I think that’s a good sign for who you are as a person,” Umbra says. “It was a good wedding. It must have looked real. Are you worried about what those soldiers will feel when you tell everyone that the wedding was fake?”
“I am,” I admit. It’s one of the things that has troubled me the most about this whole scheme.
Those are loyal soldiers, and they really think they just saw me get married.
“But once the deception is out, I will come here to Grefve and explain everything myself. As Emperor, if everything turns out well. They will understand.”
Grast and her squad exchange the gunships, camouflaging the dull black one they take out of the Gladiux and making it look as if it belongs to the base. Then they take one of the base’s sand-colored gunships and put it in the hangar on the ship, next to the seven black ones.
“Done, sir,” Grast reports on the comms. “We will stay down here in the hangar and do some maintenance on the ship. We may also want to modify it for the mission. If it becomes activated.”
“Very well, Colonel,” I respond. “There’s room for improvement, I’m sure.”
It takes a while to start the ship. I left most of the systems running after we landed, but some of them had to be turned off.
It’s a big ship, and there are endless safeguards and control programs that have to check that everything is all right.
Especially now that I’m the only real member of the crew, apart from Bellatriz.
Caret’ax isn’t much of a pilot, although he can land this thing if he has to.
And while Umbra is probably one of Earth’s greatest spaceship pilots, she’s never flown a real one.
“Umbra,” I say on impulse, “sit in this seat.”
She looks over. “The pilot’s seat?”
“The prince’s seat, strictly speaking,” I reply absentmindedly. One panel is doing strange things. “You can do everything from here. Come on, I’ll show you how some of these things work.”
She comes over, a cautious smile on her face. “You’ll really show me?”
I study the panel with the unexpected reading, switching back and forth between modes. For a moment it was showing sixteen people aboard, not just the three of us up here and the five down in the hangar. But now it’s behaving normally. Maybe it got confused about the new gunship in the hangar.
I shrug. “You’re a pilot. And you will soon need to know how this works, when we present Earth with some of our ships. It’s only appropriate that you know something about flying them. It’s not hard at all. You will have AIs to help you, most of them much quieter than Bellatriz, thank the gods.”
“ I’m actually not that talkative,” Bellatriz says from her scabbard. “ It’s just that most of the time I’m the only one who knows what’s going on.”
I help Umbra get up into my seat. She sits uncomfortably high up, but she can reach most of the controls. “How does that feel?”
“Nice,” she says, looking at the controls. “Most of this is very different from what I’ve used before.”
“For now, just focus on these two panels,” I tell her. “This is the main drive. This is the take-off panel.”
I show her how to take off, and when the ship is ready, she does. I stand ready to fix any bad mistake she might make, but after a short time she does everything right. She even adds a little bit of a flourish and shows a fine feeling for the systems.
“Not bad,” I say when we’re in orbit around Grefve. “You have a feel for the orbital mechanics.”
“Read about that since I was twelve,” she says, concentrating. “It’s easy — when you go faster, your orbit shifts higher. That’s all. Shall we break orbit?”
I raise my eyebrows at her eagerness. “Anytime you want.” I let her bring us onto a new course towards Khav. She does it well, following my instructions so quickly and so well that it makes me curious.
“Something is stopping me,” she says calmly. “My inputs are being dampened and changed.”
“ The AIs won't let you get anywhere near the ship's limits,” Bellatriz explains.
“Can you turn them off?”
I shrug and reduce the AI input to just intervene if Umbra's about to make a catastrophic mistake. “Umbra, how did you learn to fly that tinfoil contraption of yours?”
She keeps her eyes peeled on the instruments. “The shuttle? It’s a simple craft with only a few thrusters. I’ve done it in the simulator probably a thousand times. The simulator on the station is much better than on Earth, because the gravity is much weaker.”
I frown. “Are you translating this right, Bellatriz? Surely she said a hundred times.”
“ A thousand times,” Bellatriz insists. “ I believe it. Do you not see how smoothly she’s doing this?
She feeds the power from the drive with crazy precision, she knows exactly where it pushes on the ship.
She’s mentally adjusting for the gravitic pull of both Grefve and Bru, for the trajectory we had and the one we’re going to have, not to mention the inertial mass of the Gladiux and where to focus the virtual intersections of its points of momentum.
As far as I can tell, she’s working with nine inertia nodes in her mind at all times, simply imagining where they must be. The system AIs only work with six.”
I glance at the display that shows the ship as a green dot and the course we’ve had until now as a blue line. That line is remarkably smooth, with none of the usual sharp kinks. “Surely the AIs are adjusting her inputs somewhat?”
“No,” Bellatriz chirps. “ Nothing. It’s not necessary. All the AIs are confused. They think this is a test program that’s running. It’s a little different from your own sloppy piloting.”
“And this is her first time,” I marvel. “Umbra, I think you have a talent for this.”
“No,” she says, adding more power as we break orbit so smoothly it’s barely noticeable. “I don’t. That’s why I had to train so much. There were other cadets that were better right away. But I wanted to fly. So I practiced.”
I look over at Caret’ax. He has a rare smile on his face and raises his eyebrows at me as if to say ‘ told you Earth women are good’ .
I give him a shrug and a lopsided smile. ‘ And you were right’.
Umbra leans back from the controls, dangling her feet. “I think that’s it.”
I nod. “With the course laid in and the faster-than-light drive engaged, there’s not much more for a pilot to do. And after this display of skill, it would be ridiculous to not give you a full tour of the ship, the one we should have given you last time. If you want.”
Umbra bounces up from the prince’s seat and pushes her sleeve up, revealing her AI. “Can I use Vera to record? She’s charged up.”
“You can record most of it,” I concede. “Just turn her off when I ask you to. The way things are going, soon you will need to teach your planet’s other pilots how to fly the Khavgren ships we’ll give them.”
She gives me a big grin, energized by the piloting. “I’m sure all the hotshot fighter pilots on Earth will love being instructed by a little second lieutenant.”
“A little second lieutenant who’s bringing them real spaceships,” I add as we leave the control room and walk down the hallway. “If that were one of my officers, I’d say a promotion was in order. By the way, you did well today. The wedding, I mean. Superb acting.”
“I didn’t actually need to act much,” she says. “It all felt so real. And it didn’t last long.”
We step into the elevator. “It was perfect.”
I want to say more, but the things on my mind right now would sound weird to her. And to me.
We make our way through the ship, and I explain the most important things we see along the way.
“We’ll go check on Grast and her squad,” I decide when I’m getting tired of all the technical talk. “I want to know what they have planned if things go wrong.”
“I think if anything goes wrong,” Umbra says, “it will be because of people like Quaestor Preniat.”
“Perhaps. The Emperor has many spies, although I think I know who they are. There are others who are more devious. Oh, these are some of the escape pods.” I point to an outer wall, where twenty big circular hatches gleam dully side by side.
“Each takes fifty crewmembers. But they will probably take eighty Earthlings.”
The metallic tang of stale air and spilled lubrication fluids hangs heavy in the cramped corridor.
“We are a little smaller than Khavgrens,” Umbra ponders, her brow furrowed as she adorably gets up on tiptoes, her breath misting the round window of one of the pods. “Uh… looks like there’s someone in here?”
“I can’t imagine—,” I begin.
With a sharp hiss of depressurization, six of the escape pod hatches fly open, the edges of the portals momentarily rimmed with a frosty vapor before dark shapes writhe and flow out. The air thickens with a musky, alien scent, sharp and predatory.
“Vyrpy!” I roar as adrenaline floods my senses. In one swift, desperate move, I draw Bellatriz. The familiar weight of the sword is a small comfort against the sudden terror.
The sleek, gray monsters are all among us.
Their muscular bodies move with a disturbing fluidity.
Razor-sharp fangs glint in the dim emergency lights, and their claws, like obsidian shards, click against the metal floor.
Some of them are already between me and Umbra, their reptilian eyes fixated on her with chilling hunger.