Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

“I’ll be careful,” Legroeder assured her. “Thank you.” He passed through the door into the hangar and paused to let his eyes adapt to the gloom. There were several modest-sized spacecraft in the hangar, with various bays and panels open for servicing. One small craft was in an advanced stage of disassembly. Legroeder had to skirt around the front of the first ship just to find a path back through the hangar. Two ship-lengths back, against the righthand wall, he saw three giant grey eggs. They were rigger-station simulators, used for testing repairs to the flux-reactors and rigger-net equipment. As he walked back alongside the ships, Legroeder saw a flicker of actinic light on the far side of the hangar. Someone was working with a photonic torch on the underside of a third ship.

The door was slightly ajar on simulator three, letting light escape. As he approached, he could see a full bank of controls and monitors—and the back of someone’s head. Suddenly the door slid the rest of the way open, and the couch rotated, and his old comrade Jakus Bark blinked up at him from beneath the brim of a battered duckbilled cap. “Legroeder,” he said, rubbing his left temple. An implant glittered beneath his fingertip. “Wha’d’ya know?”

Legroeder’s voice caught. “Hi… Jakus.”

Jakus squinted. “Shit, man—good to see you. I heard somethin’ on the news that you got out. Man, I didn’t think anybody would ever get out of there. Way to go!” His voice trembled as he peered up at his former crewmate.

Legroeder had to reach to find his own voice. A host of feelings were welling up inside him, most of them violent. “ You made it out,” he said finally. “Imagine my surprise to hear about it.”

Jakus’s eyebrows went up a fraction of an instant, and then he laughed—a nervous bark that echoed in the little chamber.

“They didn’t seem to remember it at the RiggerGuild,” Legroeder said, with forced evenness. “About you coming back.”

“Well, heh—that’s the RiggerGuild for you.”

“Yeah,” Legroeder said. “So how’d you get out?”

Jakus shrugged. “I was on a raider ship that blew up, a couple of years ago. I was the only one to get out alive. How about you?”

“Escaped,” Legroeder said. “Not a fun story.”

“I bet not.” Jakus gave another nervous laugh. He gestured at the simulator panel. “You like my new job?”

“Yeah, real nice place here.” Legroeder looked around at the hangar, then back at Jakus. “I get the feeling you’re not too happy to see me—if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Well—no, it’s not that, man. Shit—let me get out of here—” Jakus lurched forward out of the reclining seat of the rigger-sim and grabbed the edges of the doorway “—I been sittin’ awhile.” He hauled himself out of the giant egg and stood upright, towering over Legroeder by half a dozen centimeters. His hair looked thinner than when Legroeder had last seen him, and his face more chiseled. “I just wasn’t expectin’ you to turn up here out of the blue, that’s all. How the hell’d you find me, anyway?”

Legroeder ignored the question and glanced around again. “What is it you do here, anyway?”

“Pretty much what it looks like.” Jakus shrugged. “Refit ships, test ’em out for the customers. It’s not too fancy a shop, but it’s better than some places we’ve seen, right?”

Legroeder didn’t argue. No doubt it was better than the raider outpost, where every moment was a battle between fear and despair. But how had a rigger like Jakus wound up in a place like this? He’d been a good rigger in his time. Before the pirates…

“So what’s up, Renwald?” Jakus leaned back against the simulator shell. “You didn’t drop in just to say hi, I guess.”

Legroeder felt his gaze narrow. “No. I didn’t.” A knot was tightening in his stomach. “I came, actually, to ask you about your testimony before the RiggerGuild.”

“Testimony?” Jakus grunted.

“Yeah. Testimony. About the L.A . You want to tell me about that? About why you lied to the Guild about what happened to the L.A .?”

Jakus looked away. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he said, rubbing his nose. “I didn’t give no testimony.”

Legroeder snapped, “I saw the recording of it, Jakus. You blamed me for what happened to the L.A .”

Jakus gave that nervous laugh again. “Nah, I didn’t really. I remember now. I didn’t know what you were talking about at first.”

Legroeder drew his lips back. “You said you and the captain tried to tell me that Impris wasn’t real—and that I was the one who put the ship in danger.”

Jakus looked down at the floor. “Yeah, well—isn’t that what happened?”

“You sonofabitch!” Legroeder slammed the side of his fist against the shell of the simulator. “You saw that ship just the same as I did! And it was Captain Hyutu who gave the order to move in, and you backed me up when I made the identification!”

Jakus’s eyebrows went up. “Did I?”

“Yes. You damn well did.” Legroeder let his breath out with a hiss. “What’d those pirates do to you, Jake? Back then, I could’ve trusted you to tell the truth. Instead of lying to protect your own little ass—”

Jakus jerked a little.

“—or whatever the hell it is you’re protecting.”

Jakus said nothing. His right eye had begun to twitch, and he rubbed at the tic with his finger. As Jakus shifted his head, Legroeder noticed that a second implant behind the man’s right ear was alive with a tiny, erratic red flicker. Was Jakus connected to something or someone right now? Or was he just thinking?

“The truth ,” Jakus said slowly. “Easy word for you to use. What exactly do you mean by it?”

Legroeder snorted. “Do I have to explain the word ‘truth’ to you?”

Jakus worked his mouth for a moment, then cocked his head toward the glowing interior of the rigger-sim. “Well, hell, Renwald, we’re both riggers, right? We both know that half the time there’s no way you can tell what’s real and what isn’t, in the Flux.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jakus. Is that thing whispering so loud in your ear you can’t even hear yourself think anymore? You and I know what we saw.”

“Not real,” Jakus said, with a shake of his head. “Not real.”

“You know it was real!” Legroeder shouted. “You heard the distress call. Hyutu wasn’t even in the net, and he heard it! If anyone was responsible, it was him.”

“Show some respect,” Jakus said, with a shiver. “A little respect for the dead, okay?”

Legroeder was drawn up short. “Who’s dead?”

“Hyutu.” Jakus make a throat-slitting motion with his finger. “The pirates did ’im. You and me, we were lucky to get out with our skins.”

Legroeder scowled. “How do you know? Did you see it happen?”

Jakus shrugged. He tapped the silver disk on his temple. “You had one of these Kyber things, you’d be able to see things a whole lot better. Understand stuff you don’t know now.”

Legroeder felt a chill at Jakus’s words. Kyber things? “Is that it?” he whispered. “Is that what took your—” he struggled for the right word “— integrity from you? The implants?”

That brought a sharp laugh from the other man. “We gonna talk about my integrity now? Oh, yeah, Renwald—you must’ve had loads of integrity, the whole time you were pilotin’ pirate ships, burning innocent people. Oh, yeah.”

Legroeder’s face grew hot with bitterness and shame. “I did what I had to, to survive. I don’t deny that I rigged ships for them.” There had been no choice, if he’d wanted to live. And it was only his exceptional skill as a rigger that had kept him free of an implant; he’d persuaded his captors that he could rig better without those things in his head.