Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Doubts crowded in, warring for his attention. How could he have let himself do this? Was he a complete idiot? How could he know he wasn’t being used? Manipulated. Set up.

He glanced in her direction. She was sound asleep with her back to him, but snuggled close. Peaceful as a lamb.

What’s the matter with you? Can’t you just enjoy , without wrecking it by worrying?

Enjoy what—sleeping with the enemy?

His ears were ringing as he drifted back off to sleep.

He awoke to find Tracy-Ace’s arm flung over him, her face against his shoulder, her hair against his cheek. She stirred, pressing a leg against him before flickering an eye open and murmuring, and any thought he’d had of drawing away vanished instantly.

She pulled him out of bed and into the shower. Engulfed in a haze of warm mist, Tracy-Ace was just drawing him close again, sending a rush of arousal up his spine, when a memory surfaced in his thoughts, a conversation with Com’peer back at the Narseil station. The surgeon and her team had just finished changing the DNA in his gonads. “ That’s where raiders like to do their testing… more humiliating that way…”

He swallowed and tried to divert his thoughts, but there was no hiding the loss of arousal.

“You okay?”

“Uh, yes—fine!” he wheezed. He forced a grin, then seized her in a fierce hug. What have I done? Thinking with my gonads. What have I done?

She nuzzled his neck, but clearly wasn’t fooled. “Let’s get dressed and get something to eat,” she said, hurrying out of the shower. “Then let’s go talk business with the Boss.”

“Yes, let’s,” he muttered, trying not to sound as if he had just been punched in the solar plexus.

The Boss. The single syllable, even in the silence of his thoughts, made him shiver.

After a barely-touched breakfast, they walked to Section 29, which they had passed yesterday. It was, she said, the nerve center of the station, and indeed of the entire Outpost Ivan organization. The security at the entrance was just as threatening as at the maintainers’ facility.

Inside, though, the operations center had a surprisingly cobbled-together look, with a great deal of electronic equipment, and people sitting at stations of indeterminate function. Legroeder tried to cover his apprehension by peering over some shoulders, but Tracy-Ace pulled him onward. “This way,” she said, heading to the back of the room.

This way . Legroeder kept his eyes open for anyone who looked like a Boss. Would he be a walking display case of augmentation? Tracy-Ace brought him to a semicircular alcove in back, several steps up on a kind of dais, where a swivel chair sat in the middle of a cluttered array of at least fifty tiny console monitors. The chair was facing away from them; blue smoke billowed up from it. Tobacco smoke, with a sharp, pungent sweetness. Legroeder wrinkled his nose. He hadn’t smelled that since DeNoble. He hated it.

The chair rotated to face them. A bald-headed man without a trace of augmentation rose, waving a cigar in his right hand, as Tracy-Ace led Legroeder up the steps. “Legroeder, this is our Boss, Yankee-Zulu/Ivan. YZ/I, Rigger Renwald Legroeder.”

“Legroeder,” said the Boss. “We meet at last.” He puffed from his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke upward.

At last? Legroeder wondered, staring at the Boss. Why—was I expected? And where had he seen this man before? Yankee-Zulu/Ivan was extremely pale-skinned, especially on his bald pate, slightly heavy of build, and a few centimeters taller than Legroeder. He did not seem particularly augmented. Not at first. A moment later, Legroeder’s impression of that changed. The Boss’s eyes were cerulean blue, glowing from within. But it was not just his eyes; his face was suddenly aglow, as well, with a pale golden light. And now his hands—and through his silken shirt and pants, the rest of his body.

An illuminated man.

Now he remembered where he had seen this man before. It was in the joe shop, where Tracy-Ace had first debriefed him. The Boss had been quietly observing, from the back of the room. And for one instant, Legroeder had seen him aglow.

Yankee-Zulu/Ivan stuck out a hand, and as Legroeder shook it uneasily, waves of light rippled up the Boss’s arm, shining through the shirt sleeve as though it were gauze. Legroeder could not keep his eyes off the moving light. As it passed over the Boss’s shoulder and torso, it disappeared. But a moment later, pulsing threads of green, blue, and red became visible beneath the Boss’s skin.

“Are you wondering if you should run away?” Yankee-Zulu/Ivan asked, with a rumble that grew into a hard-edged laugh.

Legroeder drew himself taller, but didn’t answer.

The Boss turned to Tracy-Ace/Alfa. “You didn’t prepare him for our meeting,” he said.

“Oh, we did some preparation,” Tracy-Ace murmured, with a sideways glance at Legroeder that made him flush.

“Is that so?” said another voice, behind the Boss. A tall man, dark haired with red skin, stepped out of an unnoticed shadow in the back of the alcove. “Will you introduce me to your friend?”

Tracy-Ace tensed; her expression turned sour. This was the man they had seen walking into the command center yesterday. Someone you won’t need to worry about . “Hello, Lanyard,” Tracy-Ace said. “How nice to see you here. Rigger Legroeder, I’d like you to meet a colleague of mine—”

“Come on, now,” said the tall man. “You can call me a friend.”

Tracy-Ace ignored the comment and continued speaking to Legroeder, taking him by the wrist as though to lead him through the room. “This is Group Coordinator Lanyard, who is a member of Outpost Ivan’s Ruling Cabinet.”

Legroeder felt his implants flicker to life as information flowed to him through his wrist. // Lanyard/GC is not just a member of the Cabinet, which oversees Outpost policy, but also of the current political opposition to this Boss. There may be a balance-of-power struggle here; he is considered a potential threat. Tracy-Ace was not expecting Lanyard/GC to be present, and isn’t pleased. He formerly had a… relationship… with Tracy-Ace/Alfa, which ended badly. //

Legroeder did his best to hide his scowl.

“Lanyard is here as—?” Tracy-Ace paused and stretched out an inquiring hand.

“An observer,” said Yankee-Zulu/Ivan at once, which seemed to bring a frown—quickly concealed—to Lanyard’s face.

Legroeder’s augments flashed him a quick schematic. // The command hierarchy places Yankee-Zulu/Ivan at the top of the power structure. However, he remains in power at the pleasure of the Cabinet, which does not make day-to-day decisions, but grants him authority. YZ/I oversees the outpost from this operations center, through direct feeds to his internal augments as well as visual information in this room. //

Legroeder nodded inwardly. Here it was, then. All this way he had come, to learn what he could about the operation of the fortress; and here was the man who ran it—if he really was a man, under all that glowing skin. Except, apparently his power was not absolute.

YZ/I was watching Legroeder with evident amusement. He puffed out three smoke rings and watched them disperse, then glanced back at Lanyard before asking Legroeder, “So—have you found our world here to your liking?”

Legroeder opened his mouth, and closed it, moving his head to avoid the smoke. He glanced at Tracy-Ace, but she had turned poker-faced.

As his gaze shifted back to Yankee-Zulu/Ivan, Legroeder drew a sharp breath. Instead of a man, he was gazing at a man-shaped holo, an image of the Kyber armada coursing through the swirls of the Deep Flux. The colony fleet. Was it underway already? Bound for…? He wanted to ask, but YZ/I the man seemed to have utterly vanished into the image. Legroeder glanced to the side and suddenly realized that all the monitors around him were filled with images of space, forming a mosaic curtain. It was a picture he recognized: the Sagittarian Dust Clouds, inbound across the galactic sea. It was a course toward the rich star clusters known by various names in the Centrist Worlds, the clusters a war had been fought over.