Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [122]
"Still, it has turned out for the best, Mr. Chairman." Cain maddeningly insisted on being optimistic. "And he was right about the Soldier compies. It's illogical to hold that against him."
"He did it just to spite me. The harder we push, the less he cooperates."
"Maybe we should try a different tactic. Sometimes pushing doesn't work," Cain pointed out, earning even more of the Chairman's ire.
"Prince Daniel is my different tactic."
As stimulants coursed through his body, the Prince stirred, groaned, then vomited. Medical specialists rushed forward to clean him up and record his vital signs. The young man's fingers twitched, his eyelids fluttered. A long, haunted groan drifted from his lips. His body shuddered and writhed as he retched again, but after so many weeks on thin nutrient solutions, his stomach had nothing to bring up.
The medical specialists ignored the conversation as the chemicals were purged from the Prince's bloodstream and stimulants brought him all the way to consciousness. The young man groaned more loudly and finally awoke. His skin was grayish and damp with fresh sweat. His eyes were yellowed, bloodshot, and unfocused. Daniel stared at the ceiling, as if trying to remember how to see. He squirmed to cast away the gauzy threads of bad dreams. "Where am I?" His voice squeaked like new shoes that hadn't been broken in.
Basil leaned over, regarding the Prince with a baleful glare. "You are in a room where your future will be decided. Consider it your last chance." He looked scoldingly at the medical technicians, sniffing the sour smell of vomit and medicines in the room. "Everything always requires more time than I expect. We'll be in my offices. Call us when he's cleaned up and coherent enough to hear what we have to say. And I'm a busy man, so don't take too long."
When some of the grogginess had dissipated, Daniel sat propped up in his bed, looking like death warmed over twice with a malfunctioning heating plate. First he'd slipped into a near-crash state of metabolic shock from his long enforced coma; when he returned to consciousness, he screamed for ten minutes.
Basil hadn't been there to watch the unpleasantness; all that mattered was for Daniel to remember the misery. The young man's arms had been strapped down, more as a reminder of his helplessness than as any real preventive measure, since his limp limbs were too weak to cause any damage.
By the time Basil, Deputy Cain, and OX returned, the disgraced Prince remembered full well what he'd done to earn his punishment. He had defied the orders of the Chairman, run away from the Whisper Palace, and (most unforgivably) behaved in an unspeakably foolish fashion while in the public eye. Thus, his drugged stupor, the long limbo of nauseating nightmares, and his pathetic bodily deterioration had all been a fitting sentence. Henceforth, Prince Daniel would never be more than a breath away from remembering how easily he could be squashed.
The young man literally trembled with fear as the Chairman stood over his bedside without saying a word. Basil didn't need to speak. He turned to look at the Teacher compy, then at his deputy. "Mr. Cain, remind me again why we brought OX here. We've had enough problems with compies lately."
"Sir? OX was constructed centuries before Soldier compies and their Klikiss instruction sets. No need to worry about him."
"But why is he here?" Basil insisted.
"Because we need him to see this. OX is going to teach our Prince how to conform. Trust me, it's for the best, Mr. Chairman."
Breathing so fast and hard that he skated on the edge of hyperventilation, Daniel listened while OX mechanically explained the current situation in the Hansa,