Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Tracy-Ace’s implants glittered as she peered at him. Abruptly, she laughed out loud. “Yes, it’s good. Very good. Now, finish up. Based on our briefing, I think I can make you a useful citizen here. There’s a lot I have to show you.” She drained her mug. “That’s assuming you decide to stay, and we decide not to ship you back to Barbados. But there’s plenty of time to decide.”

He cleared his throat. “Ah. Well… I do want to stay…”

There was a sudden movement off to his left, and he saw the shop’s other occupant stirring. Tracy-Ace was glancing that way now, and for a moment, her expression seemed to become still, almost frozen. But her implants flickered energetically, and for just an instant, Legroeder had a chilling sense that something was passing between Tracy-Ace and that other man. Legroeder squinted, and saw that the man was bald, and dressed in light colored shirt and pants, and had an unsettlingly luminous quality about him. The man nodded in their direction, and Tracy-Ace nodded back. Just as Legroeder started to shift his gaze back to Tracy-Ace, the man abruptly vanished. Winked out.

Another hologram? Legroeder shot an inquiring glance at Tracy-Ace. “Who was that?”

Tracy-Ace shrugged; she seemed slightly uncomfortable with the question. “Just someone I know.” She slid out of her seat. “Good. So let’s go get you settled. Ordinarily I’d have someone else take you to your quarters, but I’m off duty.” She paused, pursing her lips. “You know, you seem like a very interesting man, Rigger Legroeder. I believe I want to oversee your case myself.”

He nodded cautiously, wondering if this was a good development or an ominous one.

“Come on. We’ll take the flicker-tube.”

He took a last bite and dusted his hands together. “What’s a flicker-tube?” he asked, braving one last swallow of murk.

“They don’t have flicker-tubes on Barbados, either?”

Legroeder thought a moment. They did not, he decided.

Tracy-Ace shook her head. “Rings,” she said, “I don’t know how your people manage. Let’s go.”

Legroeder bristled on behalf of his fictitious home, and followed her out of the joe shop.

It seemed, as they walked through the halls, that everyone they passed was moving quickly, as though on urgent business. Even so, Legroeder felt that something was missing, some element of ordinary random bustle. Or maybe it felt emptier than he expected. “I thought there’d be more people around,” he murmured, half unconsciously.

Tracy-Ace glanced at him sharply, and he wondered if he’d said something wrong. But she answered calmly enough, “There’s been a big shift of personnel lately. More and more people have been sent out into the field, to work in fleet preparations.”

Legroeder tried to hide a twinge. “Fleet preparations?” Preparations for what?

Tracy-Ace glanced sharply again. Was he being tested? He took a stab. “Are you talking about the pirate fleets?”

That brought a laugh.

“What’d I say?”

“Usually, it’s the people who don’t like us who call us pirates ,” she said abruptly. “The preferred term around here is raider .” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Usually defined as ‘raiding for that which should be ours.’ ” She laughed again, in a hollow echo of the first.

Legroeder tried to interpret the sound. Was she making a commentary on the raiding—or on his naiveté? “I guess I’ve picked up some of the Narseil’s language,” he said apologetically. “Most people on the outside , you know, do regard the Kyber fleets as pirate ships.”

Tracy-Ace cocked an eyebrow at him and lengthened her stride. “Well, that’s not the fleet I meant, anyway.”

“What, um, fleet did you mean?”

“You really don’t know?”

He shook his head.

“The colony fleet.”

Colony fleet…?

At that moment, they came around a corner into a brightly lit area that looked like a transit platform, except instead of cars, it was filled with clear vertical cylinders.

Legroeder blinked at the sight.

“You’ll see later,” she continued. “This is where we catch the transport between sectors.”

He was struggling to keep up with the cascade of new information. Transport between sectors … He remembered it had looked as though the sprawled-out structures in this outpost were anchored separately in the Flux. It had seemed an unlikely arrangement.

“The habitats float independently, but they’re joined by the flicker-tubes,” Tracy-Ace said, as though reading his mind. “It avoids certain instability problems of large structures, and gives us greater safety in the event of an attack.”

“Have you ever been attacked here?” Legroeder asked, remembering uneasily that part of his mission was to gain intelligence that might permit just such an attack.

Her eyebrows bristled. “No. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. And if it did, we could absorb some hard punches and still survive. Our leadership has always been very strong on taking the long view.”

As they talked, people were crossing the platform in both directions, stepping in and out of the clear cylinders. Those who stepped into the cylinders sank out of sight through the floor; others emerged from below like slow-rising pistons.

Tracy-Ace led him to a pair of empty cylinders, side by side, and touched the two simultaneously. “We’ll be linked. Go on and get in.” She stepped into one capsule as Legroeder stepped into the other. The capsule closed around Legroeder with a puff. “You with me?” he heard.

“Yup.” His breath went out with a whoof , as the capsule dropped away from the platform. He looked down. They were falling, Tracy-Ace before him, into a glowing, golden tube of energy. It curved downward and away, seemingly to infinity. In the distance, he could see the arc of the tube intersecting with other strands like threads of a spiderweb. Tiny droplets of light were moving through the tubes; he guessed them to be other passenger capsules in transit. It was impossible to judge his velocity.

“So this—” his words came out in a gasp “—is a flicker-tube?”

Tracy-Ace’s voice was a chuckle in his ear. “This is a flicker-tube.” He could almost imagine her standing beside him. “Okay, now I can fill you in…”

“I, uh—” He cut himself off as a shower of images sprang up around him, painted on the blurred inner surface of the tube. The images changed with an almost cinematic flicker as they shadowed him in his glassy chariot. He reeled from the sheer volume and speed: strobing glimpses of faces and ships and places, and fast-changing shots of what looked like space-station construction. “What the hell is this?” he breathed.

“It’s the flicker feed,” Tracy-Ace’s voice said. “It conveys news and information to people when they’re in transit. It makes use of slack time.”

Legroeder wished he had something physical to hang onto. The motion through the tube was a blur, and the images were now a blur, too. “How is this conveying information? I can’t make out a thing.”

// We are processing… //

“If your augments are any good,” Tracy-Ace said, “they’ll be picking it up and storing it for you. Don’t worry about trying to follow it consciously—”

Thank God. Legroeder closed his eyes for a moment. He was startled to find that he was still seeing the images. (What’s going on? I thought it was being projected on the tube wall.)

// Meant to look that way. But no, it’s coming through us. //