Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

“That’s when people started blinking out .” Jamal studied the opposite wall for a moment, rubbing with a thumb and forefinger at his lips. He looked back at Legroeder. “Let me tell you. That scared us real good. Real good.” His eyes filled with fear as he spoke.

Legroeder remembered their effort to increase power when they were trying to grapple Impris with the net. It had only made the problem worse.

“So do you know how to get us out or not?” Poppy asked.

Legroeder hesitated, and Deutsch spoke instead. “We have thoughts on the matter,” he said.

Jamal burst into bitter laughter. “You have thoughts? Well, isn’t that a relief! Rings, man— we’ve had thoughts! ”

Legroeder flushed. “He means that the Narseil riggers who got us in also think they can get us out . But—”

“But they don’t know, is that it?” Jamal’s laugh gave Legroeder a shiver. “Hell, man, don’t tell me you came all this way just to sit and rot with us!”

“Not that we don’t appreciate the company,” Poppy added.

Legroeder exhaled softly. “We hope our situation is somewhat improved from yours. For one thing, we have the benefit of more than a hundred years of rigger science since you flew. Plus, we have a hybrid crew—with and without augmentation.”

“I see you’ve got some augmentation yourself,” Poppy said pointedly, reminding Legroeder that in Impris ’s time the Kyber were a dreaded enemy, considered barely human.

Legroeder frowned. “I do have augments, but I don’t use them much while rigging—unlike Rigger Deutsch here, who uses them extensively. So we’re pairing our skills. Plus, we have two excellent Narseil riggers, who have a good understanding of the latest research.”

“If they understand it so well—”

“What I’m trying to say is, we have a variety of different viewpoints—”

Legroeder was interrupted by the movement of a dark shadow over his head. He glanced up in alarm. It looked like a large ocean breaker, rising over him from behind. It was not a shadow on the walls, but a darkness in the air itself. It curled over, well above his head, and came down past the far side of the table, before curling under the table. Then it stopped, hovering, enclosing the conference table in the tube of its curling wave of blackness. “ What the hell?” Legroeder whispered.

Deutsch rose on his levitators and approached the leading edge of the shadow. He rotated in midair, inspecting it from various angles, his regular eyes and his cheekbone eyes swiveling. “I can’t tell what it is,” he murmured. The augments on the side of his head were afire with activity. Floating forward, he telescoped his left hand out toward the phenomenon.

“Freem’n, wait—”

Deutsch reached into the wave until his hand disappeared. Then he pulled it back out. “Seems okay,” he said, turning his hand over. “Whatever it is, it didn’t hurt me. Let’s have a closer look.”

“Freem’n, wait!”

Deutsch floated forward and leaned into the shadow. “ ’S okay…” His voice became muffled, then cut off. Abruptly, as though yanked, he toppled headfirst into the shadow.

“Freem’n!” Legroeder yelled, jumping up. But his friend was gone, lost in the wall of darkness. Legroeder swung to Captain Friedman and the Impris riggers. “ What’s going on?”

Jamal and Poppy were shaking their heads.

A heartbeat later, the wave of darkness surged forward. Before he could move, it engulfed him, too.

Legroeder blinked, stunned. He was sitting on a cold metal deck, in a very deep gloom. “Captain? Freem’n?” There was no answer. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he realized he was no longer in the meeting room. Then where was he? There was some illumination: emergency or night-lighting, emanating from hidden sources spaced along the base of the walls. His eyes adjusted slowly. He was in a corridor. He could hear a distant ticking sound, and a noise like the closing of a door. “Hello?” he called.

There was no answer.

(What can you tell me?) he asked the implants.

// We registered a discontinuity in all readings. Our chronometry is totally desynchronized. //

(In other words, you don’t know much.)

// Acknowledged. // The implants sounded almost rueful.

Legroeder groaned to his feet and looked both ways down the corridor. There was nothing to indicate where in the ship he was, so he chose a direction at random and started walking. In due course, he came to a series of doors outlined in a pale luminous blue. A hum was audible behind the wall. He tried two of the doors, but they didn’t budge. Probably an engineering area—ventilation or hydroponics or something.

He continued walking, but his feelings of unease grew steadily. Was anybody here? He felt as if he were on a ghost ship, the only one still alive.

He drew a breath, cupped his hands, and bellowed down the corridor, “HALLOOO! ANYBODY HER-R-RE?” He turned and called the other way.

At first there was no answer. Then he heard an amplified voice calling back, “ Legroeder? Is that you?”

His heart quickened. “Yes! This way!”

Deutsch appeared around a corner, some distance down the corridor. He was an eerie sight, floating toward Legroeder on his base with his augments winking slowly on the sides of his head. “Are you all right?” he called.

“Yah.” Legroeder hurried to meet his friend. “Thank God! I thought I was the only one left.” He stopped and turned around. “Do you have any idea what happened? I was—was—” He suddenly stopped, shaking his head. He had completely lost his train of thought.

“Time,” Deutsch said. “That’s all I know. There was a time fluctuation. My internal clocks are all scrambled. It’s ship’s night now.” The Kyber’s eyes, glowing in the dark, made him seem more robot than human. “Did we just lose a bunch of hours?”

Legroeder blinked. “Weren’t we just—?” He shook his head; he was having trouble remembering where he had been. “We were… talking… in the meeting room.”

“Yes,” Deutsch said.

“And that wave of shadow—”

“Temporal displacement wave, I think,” Deutsch said slowly.

“It pulled you right out of the meeting room—and then hit the rest of us—”

“Which, by my reckoning, was about ten minutes ago. I’ve been wandering the passageways,” Deutsch said.

“Did you see anyone? ”

“A couple of people. When they saw me, they ran the other way. I think they thought I was a ghost.” Deutsch scanned the corridor. “Do you know what I’m wondering?”

“ I’m wondering a lot of things.”

“Well, I’m wondering where we were, physically, between the time we were in that meeting room, and now.”

Legroeder cleared his throat uneasily. “You have any thoughts on that?”

“Yeah, but you won’t like it.”

“I already don’t like it.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking maybe we were far away… especially if this quantum fluctuation that Palagren and Cantha talk about is spread out over a large area. Or maybe we weren’t exactly in existence at all.” Deutsch’s round glass eyes seemed to loom in the near-darkness.

Legroeder chewed his knuckles for a moment, trying to focus constructively. Before he could come to any conclusions, he was startled by a strange-sounding cry behind him in the corridor. He turned and saw three people walking toward him. Or not so much walking as rippling toward him, stretching through the air like ghostly time-lapse holos, then contracting forward. They were talking, or possibly shouting; their voices were distorted, incomprehensible.