Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Sighing, he tossed his bag off the bunk and lay down. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last slept, but he knew it was way too long.

Sleep, however, did not come easily. When it did, it was a troubled affair, blurred with wakefulness. It felt as if his brain were continuing to fire at a scattergun pace—his dreams and the activities of the implants intertwined with one another, synaptic impulses rocketing up and down in a frenetic series of discharges. Even asleep, he was aware of the intense activity… dreams coming silently and escaping again, pushed out by the next, and the next, in an unending cascade. Images from the flicker-tubes, from his long-ago past, from battle, from the gazing crystals…

He awoke at one point, exhausted but unable to keep his eyes closed. Without thinking about it, he stumbled to the desk and switched on the com. He glanced briefly at the study programs, but found he was too groggy to concentrate. He idly began running searches. After noodling aimlessly for a few minutes, he narrowed his search. Prisoners… Narseil… Freem’n Deutsch … He wasn’t even sure what he was looking for; he just wanted to know if there was reason to hope for their safety.

The implants flagged him briefly, asking if he really wanted to proceed. He brushed the caution aside irritably; he didn’t know why the Kyber trusted him, but Tracy-Ace had said it was okay to play around.

He wasn’t making much progress; but somewhere into his third attempt, he finally woke up to what he was doing. Dear God, what an idiot . Was he giving himself away, showing his concern about the Narseil? He sat back, feeling sick.

The implants spoke up. // Our monitoring did not show you betraying any incriminating data. //

(Except my doing the search in the first place. Why didn’t you stop me?)

The answering voice was clearly meant to be soothing. // Our programming does not include interference in personal activities, barring clear and present danger. //

And I assured you it wasn’t dangerous, he remembered, rubbing his forehead. What the hell time was it now? Fourth-quarter two . What the hell did that mean? He didn’t understand the time-keeping system here.

// If you like, in the future we will note such activities as dangerous… //

(Fine.) He reached to turn off the com.

The implants stopped him with: // You have a message waiting. //

(What? Where?)

And then he saw it, a tiny dingbat at the corner of the comspace. He blinked at it, and it expanded, and he heard Tracy-Ace’s voice saying, (Sorry, Rigger Legroeder, that com-search is off limits. But I’ll tell you what you need to know, next time I see you. In the meantime, if you can’t sleep, why don’t you give those study programs a try.)

For several heartbeats he sat absolutely still, neither moving nor breathing. And then he realized that she hadn’t sounded angry or suspicious. Maybe, after all, it was okay for him to wonder what had become of his former shipmates—even if they theoretically were the enemy.

Tracy-Ace wasn’t done. (Someone I know’s going to want to talk to both Deutsch and the Narseil crew, by the way. So don’t worry about their being executed in the near future.) She chuckled. (Now, get some sleep.)

The message dingbat closed.

Legroeder stared in dumb amazement at the com for a full minute. Then he sighed, rose, and went back to the bunk to try to follow her suggestion.

It was no use, he thought after a half hour of tossing fitfully in the bunk. Once more, he went to the com console. This time, he brought up the orientation programs, and sat for over an hour listening to droning voices and watching images of station layouts and command hierarchies as the workings of everyday life and lines of authority were explained to him. He was aware, as he followed in a semi-daze, that much more was being conveyed through the augments, and that they were going to be even busier digesting the new load of data than any of them would have guessed possible.

As he threw himself back onto the bunk for one more attempt at sleep, it occurred to him that he had just been given, with almost no effort on his part, some of the very information he had come here hoping to steal.

Amazingly, he did sleep, though not peacefully. He dreamed of mysterious machineries relentlessly thrumming, surrounding him and filling him with incomprehensible activity.

At one point he stirred to the piping of a com signal and he half-woke with the memory of the frenetic dreams fading like a half-forged, coded message. But he didn’t quite make it to wakefulness before he drifted back under and this time was swept up by a wave of images and sounds like a breaker crashing in from the sea.

Memories of Golen Space. The Fortress of DeNoble. Barracks of the captives, more a warren than a human habitation. The bunk on which he rotated shifts with three other men, the mattress that smelled of things he tried not to think about. The raider flights. And between missions, days spent working on weapons arrays and flux-modulation reactors. Days spent dreaming of work stoppage, of suicide. And each day, walking past the window of the punishment center…

Stop… please … he whispered, struggling to wake; but the memories were like a surround-holo, relentless. He couldn’t move, couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears. Prisoners who tried a work stoppage? They were only tortured for a few days with electrosynaptic shock. But those who tried suicide or sabotage? They were strapped into chairs, gnawed by alien parasites, condemned to a lifetime of screaming agony, dying slowly… only to be resuscitated by robot life-support systems. They were the examples: suffering the boss’s eternal wrath for defying the law of the fortress. According to rumor, the boss had once led a bizarre religious splinter sect, inspired to ever-higher standards of torture by ancient legends of purgatory.

Why do I keep remembering…?

And one other memory: he never knew her real name, but among the prisoners she was known as Greta the Enforcer. A woman of exquisite beauty and deadly malice. What her actual position was in the DeNoble hierarchy, Legroeder never knew, either; but in his one encounter, begun as a seeming invitation to special “favors,” he’d been left shaken, dizzy, heart pounding with fear and humiliation. It was rumored that she used pheromones and charm equally as weapons, and just as no man could resist her appeal, neither did any escape the pain that she enjoyed inflicting.

Legroeder, in the depths of sleep, groaned, wondering how he had survived as long as he had at DeNoble, wondering how he’d ever found the courage—or madness—to escape.

And now, to return voluntarily to it all, to new punishments… torture and incentive, reward and punishment… all in a blur that he could only imagine, shivering… struggling to awaken… visions of Tracy-Ace/Alfa and the pirates of Ivan strapping him into a chair alongside his Narseil comrades…

Bzzzz… bzzzzz… bzzzz…

What was that noise, like killer bees swarming—?

Bzzzzzzzz…

He sat upright in bed, shaking. “What—what—?” he stammered.

The door paled and Tracy-Ace strode in.

He shuddered, the aftershocks of the final dream-quakes still rocking back and forth in his mind.

“You’re alive,” she said, looking as if she were surprised to find him still breathing. “Rings—you look awful! I’ve been trying to call you for hours. Why didn’t you answer? Are you sick?”

He rubbed his forehead, struggling to fight his way out of the dream fog. “Uh—I guess I was really asleep,” he said thickly, sounding as if he had marbles in his mouth. “How’d you get in?”