Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

But who’d appointed him a seeker of truth and justice?

There was a strange shifting sensation in his mind, as the voices wrapped around and around…

To learn the truth of Impris… to find answers among the Kyber…

Shift…

There may be others interested in these questions…

He felt a sudden confusion. Not all the voices were his, or his implants’… and he noticed certain color patterns that had come together, ruby and cerulean reflecting and joining in halos… and the implants, his and Deutsch’s, were skittering and handshaking and opening tiny dialog boxes of thought…

(Is it your thoughts I’m hearing?) he said to Deutsch.

(Didn’t you know?)

He hadn’t been sure, at first. It wasn’t threatening, so much as startling. (It’s strange,) he whispered. They were joining across a distance: he and Deutsch standing on two stages in darkness, each spotlighted, calling out to each other. To share? Through stories on stage?

The Kyber rigger shut down half the lights on his side, and turned the rest to standby illumination. (You can darken or illuminate what you want. For a rigger, it should be easy.)

Legroeder practiced flicking lights on and off, revealing and unrevealing. (Perhaps,) he said thoughtfully, (it would be useful to share some history.) He found himself going back in time, his subconscious spinning an image, which sprang to life on his stage like a holo projection.

A ship under attack…

*

It was the Ciudad de los Angeles , caught in a surprise attack by the raider, pummeled by Flux distortion and wails from the pirates’ amplifiers. A torpedo exploded, threateningly close.

And then, with a subconscious edit, the image cut to:

The bridge—officers shouting, captain trying to raise the pirates on the ship-to-ship fluxwave (this image a little blurry, but Legroeder hadn’t been there; he’d been in the net at the time; this was a reconstruction).

Cut to:

The rigger-net, where terror and bewilderment raged like a forest fire. They were under assault and their captain was wavering. Should they fight? Flee? Lightning flared in the Flux, indistinguishable from the fire of weapons.

Then word came through from the bridge:

Let the raider ship grapple them… the battle was over…

*

(Your ship?) murmured a faintly metallic voice.

(Yes. “Ciudad de los Angeles,” she was called. “City of the Angels.”)

(Bad…)

*

Bad enough, but it wasn’t over…

His imagination supplied the images he hadn’t witnessed personally—the battle raging, a nightmare uncorked—terror in the corridors, commandos overrunning the ship, killing in reaction to the slightest resistance, seizing passengers and crew without mercy, without concern for age, mothers and children alike…

Cut to:

A small boy, Bobby Mahoney, hauled screaming from his cabin, terrified and kicking; finally shot with a stunner and dragged off to the hold of the pirate ship…

Cut to:

Riggers stumbling out of the rigger-stations to face armed commandos, then herded off to similar holds…

And later taken back to the raider fortress, and forced into service as riggers aboard pirate ships that would go out and start the same thing all over again…

*

The final image quivered on the stage, until Legroeder breathed it away with a sigh. It was a terrible burden, and yet a relief to let it out. He had tried so long not to think of it.

On the facing stage, Rigger Freem’n Deutsch was mulling over what he had seen. (Very disturbing,) he said, with an inflection of uncertainty. (Would you mind if I—?)

His voice faded into silence. The lights came up on his stage.

*

For several heartbeats, nothing.

And then, in the spotlight glow, a lumbering freighter—and coming alongside it, a raider. There was no contest, once the firing began—except, unaccountably, on the bridge of the freighter, where the captain lost his head and screamed to his men to resist…

Like Legroeder’s image, this one had the hazy outlines of reconstructed memory. Deutsch was just coming out of the net when the fighting on the bridge began. It didn’t last long, just enough time for shouts of outrage and several bright flashes of laser fire, and then…

Searing pain, followed by numbness…

Deutsch fell, aware of his legs no longer holding him up.

Blackness…

*

He came to, twice. Once, for an instant, to the corridors bumping past at a dizzying sickening angle; something felt very wrong, but he didn’t know what, it was a mind-wrenching blur. Then blackness again.

The next time was in a narrow infirmary cot, with ghostly sensations and nothing else where his legs used to be. And in his head, the buzzings of his new augments, testing the connections to the auxiliary equipment being integrated to his body…

*

Legroeder was stunned. (They saved you? The ones who took me would have left you there to die.)

(These would have, too, except my crewmate José…)

(Rigger-mate?)

(Yes, he carried me like a sack; told them I was the best rigger in the fleet; they couldn’t lose me. He risked his life, insisting.)

Legroeder marveled at the courage. Would he have done that? (Where’s José now?) He felt a sudden chill. (He wasn’t… on the bridge here…?)

Deutsch’s thoughts darkened, the lights lowering on the stage. (He died, his first flight out with the raider fleet. I think he wanted to, by then. He was sorry he’d saved me; sorry any of us lived to be put to this kind of work.)

I’m sorry too, Legroeder tried to whisper.

(It was bound to end one way or another. Those who live by the sword…)

*

The raider ship Flechette , coursing through scarlet-glowing clouds of the Flux, joining battle. Nose flickering, lightning flashing, booming sounds reverberating through the Flux. On her bridge, a cyborg captain bent on leading them into conquest.

And in Deutsch’s head, a tiny jangling, an implant or an instinct telling him something was not right. When the captain ordered them in for the kill, the jangling got more insistent, as though he should do something to stop this. For an instant, he imagined a Priority One command message trying to get through; but within seconds, it was lost in the chaos and confusion…

Cut to:

Blinding flare of a flux-torpedo, and the wrenching upheaval of the Flux shearing the net. Smoke and ruin on the bridge. People screaming; the captain glaring, eyes blazing, against the back wall—dead. Crewmen crumpled from the radiation burst.

Deutsch, staggering from the fluxfield chamber, where fate and the chamber shielding had protected him from the burst. He surveyed the devastation in horror and disbelief… and finally numbness as his implants shut down the worst of the awareness so that he could function. But they could not shut out the sight of his fellow riggers, smoking in their stations…

Cut to:

Darkness.

*

Legroeder felt his own darkness welling around him, felt himself mourning Deutsch’s friends. What a strange feeling.

From across the gulf of darkness: (We were both forced into service. Your story could have been mine. We have both suffered great loss.)

(Yes. And you thought you were dead—and then hoped you were free. And now you wonder…)

Deutsch stared across at him from his stage. Questioning with his eyes the scenario that Legroeder proposed: returning to the very heart of darkness, the pirate outpost.

Legroeder thought he sensed a flicker of something—some inkling of hope, or maybe destiny, that even Deutsch didn’t recognize.