Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

“Excuse me,” Harriet said pointedly. “If it is true, then we need to know. It could constitute objective evidence that Impris is still out there.”

“Oh. Yeah.” For a few minutes there, Legroeder had lost sight of his own troubles. “But Fandrang doesn’t seem to have come up with any answers.”

“Well—” Harriet pressed a finger to her lips. “If Impris is still out there—and we know it is—then we’re back to the question of why someone, aside from the pirates, wants nobody else to know. Wants it badly enough to hide evidence of a danger to all riggers.” She tapped the compad screen and looked around. “I wonder where our host—oh, there he is.”

“What do you think?” McGinnis said, coming through the door.

“It’s damn sobering,” said Legroeder. “But if this Inspector Fandrang was so well respected, why weren’t his suspicions ever investigated further?”

McGinnis sat down heavily, his face creased with the now-familiar pained expression. “Why, indeed?”

“And why were these documents removed from public access?” asked Harriet. “I can only think of two plausible reasons. One is that they were discredited upon examination.”

“I’ve found no evidence of that.” McGinnis clasped white-knuckled hands in front of himself.

“Then the other is that they endangered someone’s position, power, or money.”

McGinnis made a clicking sound with his tongue, and almost smiled. He riffled the documents in his hands.

“What are we talking about?” Harriet asked. “A cover-up by the shipping line?”

McGinnis shook his head. “None that I could see. Oh sure, there might have been a wish not to alarm potential passengers—and perhaps liability concerns. Certainly, for the Golden Star Line, it was preferable for the public to think that the ship was destroyed by the Narseil than that it didn’t come back because its riggers had… how shall we say, faded into the Flux .”

“Well, that right there—”

“But that’s not all there was to it,” McGinnis interrupted. “That much would have come out eventually, if there hadn’t been someone who wanted it hidden, badly enough to see to it that history was rewritten .”

“And who might that have been?” Harriet asked.

McGinnis rested the documents on the table with care. “I don’t know—if I can tell you—that.” He seemed to be struggling again, a grimace creasing his face. “I can show you what information was hidden. But by whom is… difficult.” He drew one slow breath after another, until the grimace faded. “If we had the time, I could take you through some of the ways the truth was obliterated in the public record—or altered enough that it might as well have been obliterated. But to really understand that time period… you’d have to visit a historian I know.”

Harriet cocked her head with interest.

“A Narseil. By the name of El’ken.”

Legroeder stared at McGinnis in astonishment. The Narseil historian El’ken . Even Legroeder had heard of him. “But if the Narseil were framed for the loss of the ship—”

“You won’t necessarily receive a warm welcome. Even a century later, El’ken hasn’t forgotten, or forgiven. The breach has never really healed. But for reasons of his research, El’ken lives here in this system, out in the first belt. Asteroid named Arco Iris. I’ll give you a reference, if you like.”

“But why would someone go to such trouble to discredit the Narseil? It makes no sense.”

McGinnis, eyebrows raised, seemed about to nod in agreement; then his movement froze, and he squeezed his eyes shut in obvious pain. A warbling chime sounded somewhere, and he seemed to be struggling against an urge to turn his head.

Harriet reached out her hand. “Mr. McGinnis—”

“No,” he whispered, his face pale. The chime continued, insistently. McGinnis stood up awkwardly. “If you’ll… excuse me… for just a moment…”

Legroeder felt an inexplicable urge to reach out, to stop him. He felt his hands clench as McGinnis disappeared into the hallway. A moment later, he heard the sound of a door locking.

He and Harriet stared at each other. Legroeder’s heart was hammering; he didn’t know why. He swallowed and picked up the Fandrang report again. Across the table, Harriet did likewise. But neither of them could read long without their gazes being drawn to the back of the room.

Robert McGinnis locked the door to his office and tested it with a shaking hand, then lowered himself into his desk chair. He drew a slow breath as he turned on the neural-interface panel. His head was throbbing from the inner struggle. The chime had been a summons from his security monitor. He was under assault, this time not just from his own implants, but from the outside. The enemy had been blocking his outside transmissions earlier; now they were trying to force their own way in through his security shields. Not a physical attack, of course. No, this was much worse…

There was so much he had wanted to say… about criminals in government, and the Kyber, and their meddling with all of space commerce… but he couldn’t risk, because the barrier he’d built between his thoughts and the implants was beginning to fail. And now it was too late to say it directly to Legroeder and Mahoney. But perhaps there was another way.

This was all happening far faster than he’d anticipated. The enemy must have glimpsed enough through his mental barriers to at least suspect his intentions. Now they would do everything in their power to stop him—everything short of revealing themselves to the rest of the world. But he, McGinnis, was expendable. This was the battle he had been dreading. A battle to the death.

It was a battle he could not hope to win. The augments had always been stronger, but he had been protected by their owners’ desire for secrecy, and their belief that he would remain valuable as a guardian of information, and a powerful agent at need. He doubted they cared much about his value now.

But perhaps he could still win the war. For himself. For those two out there. For the rest of civilized space. For his last thirty years of effort.

// Open link… access requested… //

Denied. Denied. Denied.

The noise level in his skull was ballooning. He could feel the rictus on his face, the twitching of his eyes. If he could just keep control a little longer… keep the compartments of his mind separate, the barrier between the artificial and the natural, the augment and the McGinnis. If he could keep the implanted chips at bay long enough to get his guests out of here and the information with them… before the intruding signal took command and turned him, as he knew it would, into a machine that would ruthlessly kill the very people he was trying to help…

And long enough for one more thing.

To find a way to preserve the information in his own thoughts… in spite of the tremendous power of the augments. He heard Rufus barking somewhere outside, was aware of Rufus’s presence at the edges of his mind, the chips that he himself had implanted in his dog, linked to his own. Rufus, he thought, can I do this to you? It would be risky; it could kill the dog. But what else could he do?

He could feel the augments searching like a roving eye, trying to discover what he was doing. I’m sorry, boy. Whatever happens… I need you to do this for me… one last service …

He made an adjustment on the interface board, hesitated only a moment, then closed the circuit. With one part of his mind, he felt a projection channel opening into the living room. In another part, he felt a burring sensation, and then something that felt like great stores of grain slipping away, down a long, long shaft…