Imperium X. Used as armor-plating. Why not? If you had enough of it...
The moving walls, he guessed, weren't a livie nightmare impossibility—they were most likely intended to help the ship repair itself. Close off an injured section, and send in repair robots.
So the ship was improvising and learning how to modify its resources into weapons.
Sten shot a door panel apart, as the moving walls were only a few meters away, and darted into the compartment. It was bare. Outside, in the corridor, the two walls stopped on either side of the doorway.
Stalemate. The ship would likely let Sten sit here for the rest of his life. The air was thick, he noticed. The ship must've shut off the corridor's air circulation. He could close his suit's faceplate, which would give him another, what, six E-hours before he ran out of air?
Fine. So get out as you got in. He went to the doorway, made himself into a smallish target for ricochets, and fired once at the far wall.
A smashing explosion, and shards of metalloid sang around me room. A crater. Not a hole. And the blast had eaten even more of the oxygen. Sten coughed in the smoke. How long would it take him to shoot through the wall, even if he buttoned up the suit? Unknown, but certainly longer than it would take pieces of shrapnel to finish him.
Could he use his knife to cut his way through? Possibly, given enough time, and enough leverage. Not probable.
Up there. A vent duct.
Too small.
But as he thought it, his knife was in his hand, slicing the grille away.
The duct was tiny. Sten would never fit. He looked into it— his forehead touching the top, his chin the bottom. Not only was it not much more than a forearm wide, but it turned through 90 degrees about an equal distance in.
Sten's palms were sweat-drenched.
He told his mind to shut up, and stripped naked. He kept the pistol ready. Hell, you can always shoot yourself.
Head turned to the side, he forced himself into the vent. One shoulder cocked forward, palms finding a hold on the smooth metal, pulling, pulling, legs flailing in the room behind him. He pulled himself three centimeters forward. Then another three. And another.
Then he stuck.
His chest and mind swelled in panic. Stop that, he told himself. You can't be stuck. You can always go back in the room and start over. You can always crawl out of anything you can crawl into.
That was a physiological lie.
Don't flail. Don't hyperventilate. Exhale. Wriggle. Exhale again. The lungs are empty. Goddamn it, no they aren't! Lose here and the Emperor wins... clot the Emperor, and with a great squirm he was in the vent, around the bend, and writhing, writhing down the tight passage not thinking, just moving, pushing his clothes and suit ahead of him, and then it opened down into a wider duct, and he could bring up a knee, and lift his head, and then it widened again, and again, and he was up, feet and hands sending him forward, bearwalking, and hell, now he could move upright, standing, this was just like the ducts you used as a private throughway back on Vulcan, when you were a Delinq and it wasn't so bad back there, was it? You've been through tighter squeezes, you lying clot, and isn't this about right? You do want the control room, don't you?
Sten unconfused his mental map. And agreed. He found a grille with an empty room on the other side, cut the grille away, and dropped inside.
A messroom. Tables. Cooking gear over there.
Then he heard it.
It sounded like a voice.
Sten quickly dressed, and moved silently toward the voice.
It was the Eternal Emperor.
He stood in the center of a large, bare compartment. Just in front of him was a shallow pool, now dry. There was a bare stand beside it.
The far wall was a monster screen, sensesmashing with the colors/not colors of N-space.
His back was to Sten. His arms hung empty.
Who had he been talking to? Himself? The ship?
Sten lifted his pistol, then hesitated. It was not any misguided sense of fair play—he'd shot many an enemy from behind without warning in his life.
But...
"In my end," the Emperor said, "is my beginning."
Sten jolted. The Emperor laughed, but did not turn.
"Of course, would there even be another beginning is the question?" the Emperor said, in a near monotone. "Or would the next refute beelzy, and return to that long line of milksops it took to breed me?
"And even if the ship bred true again, what would the path be? Would he... would my... perhaps you might call him my son... find his way, alone, back? Would he be able to cut out the telltale inside as I did, without it detonating?
"But," and the Emperor's voice slowed, "it's a question that'll never be answered, will it?
"Either way"—and as he spoke, he whirled, dropping into a gunfighter's crouch, Sten realizing here was the trap, the Emperor's right hand flashing for his belt, gun coming up, reflexpoint aim...
Sten fired, and the projection flickered, holograph flashing off, and then the real Emperor came around the corner, close, too close, real pistol about to fire, Sten's foot up leg blocking, the Emperor's arm thudding against the bulkhead, painshout and somehow his own pistol was gone, knife coming out of armsheath, into hand, and it was very slow:
Sten's right foot slid forward, just clear of the ground. It found a firm stance, half a meter in front of his left, as that foot precisely turned toe outward, and slid backward on its instep.
His knife-hand came up and forward, just as Sten's left hand caught his right, just at the wrist, clamped for a brace, as his hips swiveled, shock-impact and he full-stretch lunged, needlepoint attack lancing out, going home.
His knife buried itself in the Eternal Emperor's throat. Mouthgape. Bloodgush.
Sten recovered as the Emperor stumbled backward, back-ward, then fell, fell through all time and space, and his body struck the deck with the limp thud of a corpse.
Sten took two steps forward.
The Emperor's face held a look of vast bewilderment.
It softened, toward blankness.
And then the mouth that had ordered too many deaths twisted. Deathrictus—but Sten thought it to be a smile. The eyes that had seen too many years and too much evil saw nothing, looking straight up at the chamber's overhead.
Or perhaps they saw everything.
Time ran free again, and Sten was moving, diving for his pistol, and in a crouch. He was firing, firing like a madman. Into that empty pool, into that wallscreen, and, in now-realized carefully spaced shots, around the room.
An end...
... there would never be another beginning for the Emperor.
Fire gouted from the walls, and multicolored smokes whirled.
The ship screamed.
Emergency alarms... distorted metal... self-destructing cybernetics and electronics...
Perhaps.
But the ship screamed.
And Sten ran for the control room.
Sten swung the targeting indicators across the bulk of the ship. One here... two here... three here... four here... five here... six here... seven targeted here.
One reserve.
Fire when...
... the first charge blew, the screen told him, the demo pack in the control room that Sten had set for a fifteen-E-minute delay as he fled toward the meteor hole and his ship.
One blast, and the robot mining ships brainlessly processing AM2 somewhere in the distance would be stopping. But they could be reprogrammed and recontrolled, if anyone wished. Later.
Sten slammed fingers down onto firing keys, a dissonant chord of hellfire.
Seven nuclear-headed Goblin XII missiles spat from the tacship's launch tubes, and, ignoring the jumble of N-space input their sensors shouted to them, homed as ordered on the Emperor's birth/death ship.