Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Legroeder explained to the captain.

Can you do this without damaging the net? Glenswarg asked.

We’ll have to watch the stresses if we do make contact. But right now we see no other way.

Glenswarg’s reluctance was palpable. Very well, since we can’t seem to raise their captain on the flux-com. Is there anything you need us to do here?

No, we just need to concentrate. With your permission… Freem’n? One more time?

Deutsch recreated the coil.

After two more tries, they finally came together on the rhythm and direction. The coil sailed out toward the glittering net of the other starship. Catch it! Legroeder shouted.

The shadow figures in the other ship’s net moved and shifted, and stretched their own net…

And missed.

Two more failures followed. And then, at last, the shadows in the other net moved together, and caught it.

The line snapped taut. The sudden strain in Phoenix ’s net left them all gasping. The net was stretched out like a nylon stocking with a boulder in its toe.

As they struggled, a voice reverberated down the net. Are you guys for real-l-l?

Startled, Legroeder sharpened the focus. He nearly jumped out of his skin at the sight of two, no three, faces peering back through the net at him. Hello, Impris, he called. We’re Phoenix. We’ve been looking for you. What is your condition?

Our condition? said a different Impris voice, this one tinged with hysteria.

The first voice: We’re stranded!

I know. We’ve been—

Are you stranded, too? cried the Impris rigger.

No, we’re— Legroeder hesitated —the rescue party .

RESCUE? There was stunned silence in the joined nets. Do you know how to get us out of—

It’s impossible! interrupted the second voice. We’ve been here forever!

You’ve been here for a very long time, Legroeder said. But we’re hoping to help you. We need to bring our ships together. If we can draw both of our nets in VERY GRADUALLY, we might be able to do it.

The Impris rigger acknowledged. There was a sudden jerk on the net.

EASE OFF! Legroeder shouted.

The pressure eased.

Legroeder glanced back at his alarmed rigger-mates, and together they began to draw the net in slowly. Deutsch soon got on the com to the bridge, asking for as much power to the net as the flux-reactor could give them. The effort was difficult and unnerving. What would happen if they overstrained the net?

Behind him, the Narseil worked with dark, silent determination. As the riggers hauled in the line, like sailors on some ancient sailing ship pulling with their backs, the two ships drew slowly, almost imperceptibly, closer together.

On the bridge of starship Impris , Captain Noel Friedman stood with his hands on his hips, glaring from one control station to another. A strange, slow-motion pandemonium seemed to have taken hold of his crew—and truthfully, he wasn’t in much better shape himself. A glance at his own reflection had shown a white-haired man, wild-eyed and unkempt, scarcely a man Friedman would have wanted to trust with his ship. When the summons to the bridge had echoed through the ship, he had been jarred out of a dazed stalk through the corridors. How long had he been doing that? And how long had his bridge crew looked like escapees from an asylum?

Tiegs, the sanest of the bunch, had been on duty for most of this eternity as rigger-com; he was darting urgently back and forth among the com-console and the various bridge officers. Johnson, the navigator, was running around shouting like an evangelist that rescue was at hand. Gort and Fenzy, on systems, looked like two old drunks trying to decipher whether or not it was all a hallucination. The rest of them looked as though they were dreaming and happy to have it that way.

Friedman stared at the image in the monitor, reflecting on Tiegs’s report. Voice contact with another ship. The question was, were they in contact with spirits, or flesh-and-blood humans? That ship in the monitor looked awfully solid. But so had the other ships down through the years… all the ships that had turned out to be nothing but vapor, jests of a malicious universe.

Or had they? Tiegs had maintained all along that those were real ships they’d seen, real voices of real riggers. Soho… Mirabelle… Ciudad de los Angeles… Centauri Adventurer … Friedman had never been sure himself. One way or another, they’d all slipped back into the night like dreams. But this one… could be different, he thought, rubbing his stubbly chin.

Captain Friedman felt it in his gut, though he couldn’t have said why. That black and gray ship out there, with its net stretched out toward Impris like a piece of ethereal taffy: Could this really be their rescuer?

“Tiegs,” said Friedman to his earnest young officer, “is that thing actually in physical contact with our net? Can you confirm that?”

Tiegs hesitated. “Well—actually, Poppy says it is, and Jamal agrees. But—”

Friedman frowned.

“—Sully says it isn’t, and they’re arguing about it right now.” Tiegs touched his ear, listening to the conversation in the net. “Sounds like Sully’s getting a bit worked up. Claims they’re hallucinating, and wants Poppy and Jamal to leave the net.”

Friedman closed his eyes, pondering through the haze of a sudden migraine. It was beyond him how the rigger crew had lasted this long together, after all the times their visions had turned to dust. The headache still thudding, he opened his eyes and studied the monitor again. The image of the other ship had grown noticeably. “That’s no goddamn hallucination,” he muttered. “Tell Sully to get out of there before he screws up the whole operation. If they need someone else, get Thompson.”

Tiegs pressed his throat mike. “Sully, Captain’s orders are to come out of the net. Do you read me on that, Sully?” He touched his ear. “Did you hear me on that, Sully?” Tiegs shook his head. “We may have a problem getting him out.”

Friedman strode to the rigger-station where Sully was reclined behind a scratched and smudgy window. He rapped on the window, then pressed the com-key. “Sullivan, get your ass out here on the bridge!” After a moment’s thought, he added more gently, “We need your help on something.”

He stepped back, waiting. The window opened, and Sully squinted out at him as if he’d just emerged from a cave. Staggering, Sully climbed out of the station. He was a big man, with sandy hair. He looked as if he’d been in the rigger-station for days.

Friedman steadied him with one hand. “Sully, I want you to keep an eye on the monitor here and keep me informed about what’s happening.” And stay out of trouble, for God’s sake.

Sully looked around in puzzlement, then shrugged and went to stand in front of the monitor. “I see we have the hallucination up here on the screen,” he said matter-of-factly.

“That’s right,” said Friedman. “That’s exactly the sort of thing I need you to tell me. Let me know if it gets any closer.” He turned to Tiegs. “Find out if those two need help in there. And find me my backups.”

Tiegs nodded and returned to the com.

Friedman stabbed a finger at Fenzy, a lanky fellow who had gotten up from his station to stare open-mouthed at the screen. “You—fire up the fluxwave and see if you can put me in contact with that ship’s captain out there.”

Through the joined nets, the faces of the Impris riggers were growing larger and clearer. There was definitely a haunted look about them, Legroeder thought; the ghost images earlier had not been all wrong. While the spectral faces staring back did not necessarily reflect the physical appearance of the men in the other net, they undoubtedly echoed the men’s states of mind. Was it surprising that they looked this way, if they had spent the last hundred twenty-four years in the net, waiting hopelessly for rescue?