Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

The attack on the Melanie Frey .

They’d savaged the ship like an animal with newrabies, tearing at its own body and its enemy alike, no awareness of boundary between self and other. DeMort was the most bloodthirsty of all the captains he’d served under, and his own riggers had no more certainty of safety from his fury than did his victims. It made them fight harder—out of fear, to deflect the madness outward—at someone else, anyone else.

The Melanie Frey ’s crew had resisted. Stupid, maybe, but the raiders had come upon them so suddenly that they probably had no time to think. They had fought instinctively, not realizing the futility. The battle destroyed the ship, costing the pirates a prize vessel, plus three quarters of its crew and passengers. Captain DeMort, infuriated by the resistance, sent a berserker impulse through the command-link into the implants of the boarding crew. For a full hour, the commandos ransacking the ship had gone mad…

And into the net, to give his riggers a taste for blood, DeMort had fed a live image of the fighting.

Not fighting: carnage.

Of all the horrors, the one that most pierced Freem’n Deutsch’s heart was the sight of a young boy set upon by a maddened commando. The boy fought heroically, for the moment or two that he lived, after clawing with his hands at the face of the armored pirate.

That commando, and a dozen others, never emerged from their berserker state and instead had to be ordered into stasis. Whether they were mindwiped upon their return to base, or simply terminated like useless equipment, Deutsch never knew.

None of the riggers were capable of flight for some time afterward. The pirate ship drifted away from its prey, sickened and helpless, like an animal that had swallowed poison.

It was Captain DeMort’s last voyage in command of a raider ship. But it was not Deutsch’s last as rigger of a raider…

*

Under Te’Gunderlach of Outpost Ivan, it was also brutal, to be sure, but Te’Gunderlach maintained at least a veneer of rationality behind his tactics. Still, it was no surprise when Te’Gunderlach’s aggressiveness, in the end, put the ship into a trap from which there was no escape…

*

P1 alarm, P1 alarm…

Deutsch’s heart pounded as he relived the memories. He tried to slow it, but his augments resisted his efforts. Why did he keep thinking about a P1 intervention? What was going on here—an autonomic system failure? No, there was a response from his central monitor: // High heartrate necessary to assist in coping and processing… we are reanalyzing your memories of a Priority One code… //

Deutsch remembered the jangle of an alarm during the fight with the Narseil, and a momentary conviction of wrongness about what Te’Gunderlach was doing. He recalled now an inner maelstrom that had passed too quickly before—voices calling out to him, from or through the augments. He couldn’t tell what they were trying to say; but then, the net had taken some bad jolts during the fight. Had his augments suffered damage, scrambling the P1 message?

// All circuits are intact; however, there may have been loss of data… //

Loss of data… echoes of voices… and the oddest resonance between those voices and his sharing just now with Legroeder…

He shivered with uncertainty. Where could such a message have come from? The echoes were strangely powerful. And alongside them was the image of what Legroeder had done—something that he, Deutsch, had never found the courage, or the opportunity, to do. Legroeder had risked his life to save a victim from capture.

Risked the wrath of a raider captain.

And now this preposterous plan of the Narseil.

Through the ringing dissonance of the memories, Deutsch found himself asking the question: Would he ever find it in himself to risk his life that way? Would he?

Legroeder blinked awake from a dream about Bobby Mahoney… and about the bosses of Outpost Ivan. Strange . He had never laid eyes on Bobby Mahoney in the flesh—and of course, he had never met the bosses of Outpost Ivan. Yet the images—one a reconstruction by his own mind, and the other someone else’s memory—were replaying in his mind now with the clarity of real life. The gazing-crystal joining with Deutsch had left a more powerful impression than he would have guessed. Feeling unsettled, Legroeder had a cursory breakfast in the galley before reporting to the bridge.

Fre’geel was there with Palagren. “We’re going to get underway today,” Fre’geel told him, looking up from the captain’s console.

“So soon?” Legroeder asked in surprise.

“We can’t keep drifting. We’ve pulled enough nav data from their library to get us going in the right general direction. How are you doing at persuading our prisoner to help us?”

Legroeder hesitated. “I’ve started to get to know him a little. He’s not eager to go back, that’s for sure. And I can’t promise he won’t betray us if we do make it to their base. And yet…”

“What, Rigger Legroeder?”

He scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “Well, he has no love of the Kyber, that’s for sure. I believe he might actually have some sympathy for our cause.”

Fre’geel’s eyes gleamed. “Did he tell you this?”

Legroeder shook his head. “Not in so many words. It’s something I sensed. A feeling.”

“A feeling,” Fre’geel echoed. He studied Legroeder for a few dozen heartbeats. “Very well, Rigger. Today we will fly with our own crew and see how we do. But afterward, you will continue in your efforts to secure Deutsch’s cooperation.” Fre’geel made a burring sound. “And you will report to me on your progress.”

Legroeder nodded. “He was a free man taken prisoner, same as me. I think we can talk.”

“Let us hope so.” Fre’geel turned to the other waiting riggers. “Take your stations, then.”

The two ships parted in silence, in the Flux. H’zzarrelik fell astern of the captured pirate ship, drifting in the gently flowing current. Soon the Narseil ship looked like a toy model behind them, small and silver in the orange mists.

The Narseil ship, piloted by her secondary crew, would follow Flechette for a time. Later, as they drew closer to the raider base, H’zzarrelik would vanish into hiding in the mists of the Flux, monitoring Flechette ’s progress as best they could with long-range instruments. If Flechette got into trouble, there was little the Narseil ship could do to help. H’zzarrelik ’s mission was to await Fre’geel’s team’s return—or a transmission of data—and to safeguard the information already captured. Efforts to contact the nearest Narseil Navy ship for a transfer of prisoners had proved unsuccessful, so the return of H’zzarrelik was crucial. If Flechette failed to make contact or reappear, H’zzarrelik would slip away like a spirit in the night and carry the existing data and prisoners back to the Narseil authorities.

To say that Flechette and her Narseil crew were expendable would have been an extraordinary understatement.

Legroeder tried not to dwell on that, as they flew deeper into Golen Space, and farther from any possible help. Palagren was humming in the net before him, seemingly unconcerned with danger. In the keel, Ker’sell muttered darkly to himself. Neither of them had said a word to Legroeder about their thoughts on trusting Deutsch. But Legroeder could guess what they were thinking.

They flew through streamers of cloud that morphed slowly from something out of a bright, sunny afternoon to a sky full of scattered thunderstorms. They cautiously skirted the dark weather. They were still learning the ways of this ship, and didn’t want to push too hard, too fast.