Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

…as all that was Robert McGinnis, all the memories that were his life, slipped away like sand through a broken hourglass. And when it was all gone, there would be light, as the fire roared, and peace…

Peace .

“Did he just shoot at us?”

Legroeder glanced over his shoulder. He thought he’d seen a laser flash. “If he did, he missed by a mile. He couldn’t have been aiming for us.” But if McGinnis hadn’t aimed for the flyer, what had he aimed for? Legroeder scanned, but couldn’t see any other craft in the sky.

“Look down there!” Harriet shouted.

He was just beginning to break out into a southerly heading; he banked back into an orbit around the house instead. “What is it?”

“I thought I saw something. Fire, I think. In the house!”

“Jesus!” He banked steeply, ignoring Harriet’s gasp, and peered down at the house. There was no mistaking it: smoke was curling from a second-floor window. “The whole place is going up!”

“We’ve got to do something!”

“We can try to get back down, but I don’t—”

Whoop! Whoop! A light flashed on the console with the audible alarm, and the flyer lurched sickeningly. He fought to steady it.

Harriet’s voice was tight with fear. “What was that?”

“His forcefield. It won’t let us back in! We can’t go down!” Legroeder snapped a series of switches on the console. Finally he found a remote for the forcefield, but it blinked: ACCESS DENIED. “It’s demanding a password. Harriet, I don’t think there’s any way we’re going to get back in there.”

“Let me try.” Harriet began keying in everything they could think of: McGinnis. Rigger. Impris … After the fifth attempt, the screen flashed: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT! SECONDARY OVERRIDE CODE REQUIRED! “Oh, hell. Legroeder—”

“Yah.” He strained to watch the house as he maneuvered outside the forcefield. Unfortunately, the barrier was hard to see. The alarm sounded and the flyer bucked again. He took them farther out, but lower. If he could bring them down near the edge of the clearing… maybe the forcefield ended before the start of the forest. “I don’t know what kind of a shield this is. I wonder if it would let us walk through…” He interrupted himself as he saw something ahead and below. “What’s that?”

“It’s the dog!”

Rufus was running in a zigzag toward the edge of the clearing. Legroeder slowed the flyer, watching, as the dog burst through the forcefield with a sparkle, bolted in alarm into the woods, then reemerged and tried to run back in through the security field. It half-slid, half-bounced off the invisible barrier. Terrified, it disappeared into the woods again. This time it didn’t come back.

“Hell!” Legroeder pulled the flyer into a savage climb. “We’re not going to get in that way, either. Harriet, there’s not a damn thing we can do.”

“My dear God,” whispered Harriet, pointing at the house.

There was a flicker of flame inside the windows now, and a thicker plume of smoke curling into the air. Legroeder cursed. “Let’s get some altitude and see if we can call for help.” He flicked the com switch. “Can you handle that?”

Harriet didn’t waste time answering, but starting calling out a Mayday. She got only static in reply. “Can you get us farther from the house?” Whatever had been blocking their com-signal before was apparently still doing so. Legroeder boosted them quickly to five hundred meters altitude. Harriet finally got through and reported the fire to a regional control center. An emotionless voice told her that units would be on their way at once. She glanced at Legroeder. “Should we wait for them to arrive?”

Legroeder hesitated, scanning the sky for other craft. The question kept running through his mind: Why had McGinnis told them to flee? And what had started the fire? Was McGinnis under attack, and if so, by whom?

“Legroeder?”

He shook his head finally. “I think we’d better get the hell out of here, like he told us to. I don’t know what started that fire, but if someone was coming after him, then they’re pretty damn sure to come after us, too. I’m glad you didn’t broadcast our names just now.”

Harriet was silent.

“Look,” Legroeder snapped. “I don’t like leaving him, either. But he wanted us to take these documents and keep them safe. And we aren’t going to do that if we get caught by whoever decided to take him out.”

“Okay,” she said quietly.

Legroeder was already turning the flyer away from the estate. He took one last look back. It wasn’t going to make much difference when rescue teams arrived, he thought; if that forcefield didn’t go down, the rescue workers would be as helpless as he and Harriet had been.

He shook his head, pushed the throttle out to full, and was jammed back in his seat as the sport flyer accelerated.

The link broke with a jarring twang, but not before Major Jenkins Talbott caught the image that McGinnis had projected back into the link: fire… destruction… termination .

Talbott cursed violently, trying to reestablish the contact. C’mon, c’mon… But there was no longer any carrier signal from the implants, even on the lowest level. The screen in front of him had turned to static—how the hell?—and all of the house monitors had shut down. Damn! McGinnis had somehow silenced his personal implants. There was only one way Talbott could think of to do that.

The man had taken his own life. Deliberately, and probably premeditatedly.

That can’t be…

Talbott leaned back and hollered to the tech on the other side of the cramped control room. “Jerry, ’d you do something to cut the signal from McGinnis?”

“Not a thing,” came Jerry’s drawl. “What’s wrong?”

Talbott didn’t answer. He scrolled back through the log. It took a few minutes of searching, but there it was, hidden in the noise: McGinnis issuing a termination command—on himself. Jezu . How could he have done such a thing? And why? Mr. Big Ex-Marine had never rebelled before—at least not until he’d let that rigger and his lawyer onto his property. What the fuck…

Talbott hit the controls; the display in front of him switched to an overhead satellite view. It zoomed in with quick jumps until McGinnis’s house emerged from the forest, smoke and flames billowing.

“Talbott—what’s going on with McGinnis?” squawked a voice in his headset. His commanding officer.

Crap . Talbott cut from the remote link and switched over to the local.

“Major?”

“He killed himself and his house is burning down,” Talbott snapped into the com. Christ, was there anything else that could go wrong with this operation? Maybe he’d at least taken Legroeder and the lawyer with him.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Don’t move.”

Talbott wasn’t about to move; he was glued to his seat. He pulled back a little on the satellite-zoom. About the time Colonel Paroti showed up to lean over his shoulder, he saw what else could go wrong.

“What’s that flying away from the house?” Paroti asked, stabbing at the lower left corner of the display.

Talbott was already reaching for the e-com to call in backup. But he knew it was too late. “That’s McGinnis’s flyer,” he muttered.

“I thought you said McGinnis killed himself.”

“He did—I think.”

“You think?”

“Well, I don’t have the body, for chrissake. But yeah, I’m pretty sure. That may be the rigger and the lawyer, taking his flyer.”