Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

The captain was being smarter than he was, Legroeder realized. They were all exhausted. Very definitely, the smartest thing they could do right now was to go get some sleep.

Sleep, unfortunately, did not come easily. Legroeder kept thinking about Impris , floating beside them. He was desperately eager to cross over and physically touch the ship, and at the same time, the prospect filled him with fear. Several times, as he was just drifting off, he awoke again with a sudden, burning sense of dread—an inexplicable feeling that something was waiting to haunt him in his sleep. He told himself not to be foolish; he was just overtired.

Something out there… hidden…

Go to sleep.

In the end, with some help from the implants, he did sleep; but even in the depths of sleep, he remained aware of an irrational fear… a feeling that there was a monster in this realm, lurking just out of sight.

When he awoke, he felt as though he had not slept at all. He had the strangest sense that he had somehow slipped through time as he slept. (I don’t feel quite right,) he murmured to his implants, as he was getting dressed.

// We register an inconsistency in your biological clock, compared with our clock mechanism. //

(Explain.)

// We cannot. //

Cannot, he thought, frowning to himself as he looked in the mirror and gave his umbrella-cut hair a quick swipe. His eyes looked bleary. He sighed and went to find the others.

It wasn’t long before the riggers were gathered, with rolls and cups of murk, in the briefing room off the galley. “I just spoke to the captain,” Deutsch reported. “They’re about to open the boarding tunnel to Impris . Let’s see if we can get it on the monitor here.” Deutsch made some adjustments to the wall screen, and soon had a picture of three Kyber crew members, including the first officer, making their way through the Phoenix airlock and then into the tunnel-shaped boarding tube. As the three men floated toward Impris , half the screen showed them dwindling down the tube and half showed a view, apparently from a shoulder-mounted camera, of the other ship drawing near. The Impris airlock opened as they approached.

Legroeder realized he was holding his breath, and forced himself to exhale.

“We’re in the airlock now,” reported the first officer on the comlink. “ Airlock’s closing.” The image became shadowy as the other ship’s hull came between the men and Phoenix , but the voice transmission was still clear enough to hear: “ Cycling and opening on the inside…”

Standing in the briefing room, they could make out the door sliding open, and a large group waiting inside Impris .

“Hello!” called the first officer.

The Impris crew surged forward, engulfing the contact party. At first, their voices were indistinct; and then Legroeder heard: “ MY GOD, ARE YOU GUYS REAL? OH, MY GOD—!” And then it was a total chaos of greetings and introductions, as the bewildered crew of the lost ship met the first humans from outside their hull in over a century.

Legroeder and the others watched for a while, then turned back to their part of the business at hand, which was to try to figure out a way to get both ships the hell out of this place.

“I think,” said Cantha, “that we’ve pretty well confirmed where we are. But we still don’t know how Impris got here, and or even for sure how we got here.”

“Oh, that’s great,” said Derrek, the Kyber rigger, who seemed alternately impressed by and resentful of the Narseil success.

Cantha’s neck-sail stiffened. “We appear to have passed through a quantum fluctuation as we entered the underflux fold. Unfortunately, it interfered with our ability to map what was happening. We really need to talk to the Impris riggers.”

“The raindrop—was that the quantum fluctuation?” Legroeder asked.

“We believe so,” Palagren said. “It was most likely a wave function connected to something deeper in the spacetime structure. We’re still trying to understand why we found Impris right here when we passed through, instead of a dozen light-years away, where we thought she was.”

“Are you saying we traveled that distance instantaneously—or was she actually here all along?” Legroeder asked.

“We’re not sure the question actually has meaning in this context,” said Cantha. “I’m not sure what the concept of distance means in the fold. But a more immediate question is, can we find a way back out through the quantum fluctuation, or is it a one-way passage?”

Derrek looked ill.

Legroeder prompted Palagren, who said, “To answer either question, we have to understand exactly what went on when we came through. We need to put our flight recordings through some intensive processing—which Cantha has already begun.”

“I’m sure of this,” said Cantha. “It’s related to the phenomenon of quantum linkage across spacetime. We’ve always known that individual particles can be quantum-linked across vast distance—but no one’s ever seen such a large-scale effect before, that I know of.”

Legroeder mulled that over. “What about the problem we had grappling Impris ? Was that quantum fluctuation, too?”

“Probably,” said Cantha. “We know that the time flow is altered here. We’ve measured shifts in simultaneity, and all of us—” he gestured to the other Narseil “—have felt disturbances in the tessa’chron. But I still don’t know how to interpret—”

He was interrupted by a call on the intercom. It was Captain Glenswarg, and he sounded annoyed. “ Researchers and contact personnel report to the boarding area at once. Riggers Legroeder and Deutsch—for the third time, dammit, report to the bridge!”

Legroeder exchanged a mystified glance with Deutsch. “Have you heard him call before?”

“Nope,” said Deutsch. “But I’m acknowledging now. Shall we go?”

“Keep us updated,” Legroeder said to the Narseil, as he and Deutsch headed out of the room.

In the corridor, he heard another call from the captain—this time saying, “ Riggers Legroeder and Deutsch, stand by to go aboard Impris. Please acknowledge and report to the bridge for your instructions.”

Legroeder looked at Deutsch, puzzled.

They found Glenswarg stalking back and forth before the consoles. “Call Legroeder and Deutsch again,” he was instructing the com officer. Then he turned around. “Oh—there you are. Good of you to make it, for Rings’ sake.”

“We came as soon as you called,” Legroeder said.

Glenswarg looked annoyed. “I called four times .”

“Four—?” Legroeder began—and suddenly realized what was happening. They’d heard the captain’s first call after the third one. We’re in trouble . “Captain, I think you’d better get your people mapping everything they can on temporal instabilities in the area.” He explained what they had heard, and when.

Glenswarg’s scowl deepened as the implications sank in. “Just what we need,” he muttered. “Well, until we find something we can do about it, I suppose we should go ahead with our plans. You need to talk to the riggers over there. Make damn sure you report back regularly,” He stuck a finger into Legroeder’s breastbone. “Err on the side of calling too often. If anything like this happens again, I want to know. And don’t stay long. Got that?”

“Yessir.”

“Get going.”

On the boarding deck, they found that a number of Kyber crewmen had already gone back and forth between the two ships. The Impris crew were reportedly eager to speak with their rescuers. “Captain said to conduct you straightaway to Impris ,” said the Kyber lieutenant in charge of transfer operations.