Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

YZ/I’s gaze softened and he sighed. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

Legroeder nodded thanks, his head spinning.

“Any agreement we reach is for Ivan only,” YZ/I continued. “I can’t speak for the other bosses.”

Legroeder nodded again. “What about information about Impris , and a ship?”

“You’ll go with the best we’ve got. KM/C could cause us trouble, so we’ll have to send some escort.” YZ/I rubbed his temple in thought. “Not too much, though. Can’t have it looking like an armada.”

Legroeder’s heartrate was slowly easing. “Who are you sending with me?”

“I think… two or three Narseil riggers of your choice, and—Freem’n Deutsch, as well. He will represent our own rigger force. You, however, will be the lead rigger.”

“Me?”

“You have the experience and the will to see the job done right. Don’t you want it?”

Legroeder shrugged. “All right.”

“Good. We’ll begin preparations immediately.” YZ/I called an aide from the ops room and began muttering in the man’s ear.

Tracy-Ace stepped closer and squeezed Legroeder’s hand. He felt a surge of the link, and a bewildering array of emotions, triumph and gratitude among them. This struggle had been as much between her and YZ/I as between the Boss and Legroeder. He found himself wishing he were alone with her.

“Oh, yes,” YZ/I said suddenly. “In case you’re wondering, Tracy-Ace/Alfa will not be flying with you. I have other things I need her for. But what the hell—it’ll give you something to look forward to when you get back, eh?”

Legroeder felt his face redden.

YZ/I laughed in satisfaction. “You’d better get going, if you want to be the one to break the news to your Narseil captain.”

Tracy-Ace gave Legroeder a tug. It took no further persuasion to get him moving from YZ/I’s presence.

They finally got a chance to talk, on the way to the detention area. “I misled you about what I knew,” Tracy-Ace said, when they were in a corridor with no one around. “I’m sorry.” She turned to face him.

He swallowed, licking his lips. “You, uh, weren’t the only one to do that, I guess.”

“No.” A smile flickered across her face. “But, you know, we might not have gotten a chance to know each other… the same way… if we hadn’t.”

Legroeder remembered the anger he’d felt when he first realized that she had deceived him . He took her hand. “I guess not. I’m glad, anyway… about last night.”

As their hands joined, he felt a tingle, and a flickering of augments. And… not quite a voice, but a presence. Did it because I wanted you … couldn’t help it… not just a job. Do you believe me? I believe you, he thought; want to believe you. How could so much have happened, in such a short space of time? The answer was flowing through his fingertips, of course; it might otherwise have taken years. He felt a knot in his stomach, a vague dizziness. Like a lovesick puppy. Memories of a few hours ago were popping like camera flashes in the juncture between them, and his blood pressure was starting to rise.

“Let’s get going to see Fre’geel,” he said raspily, afraid he would lose all ability to control his thoughts.

She drew a slow breath and they turned and continued down the corridor.

Legroeder could not help chuckling as they hurried toward the detention center. Fre’geel and the others, he guessed, were going to be very, very surprised.

In the shifting sands of time, the starship seemed always to be sliding, falling, never quite at a point where human intervention could bring it under control. It was not the slide of time itself that befuddled its occupants so much as the endless spinning pirouettes, the sideways shifts and turns that left them eternally breathless and anchorless.

And anchorless the starship was, in a network of splintered spacetime that stretched up and down the spiral arms of the galaxy, and from one end of time to the other…

Jamal awoke with a start, sweating and shaking. He sat for a moment, staring into the darkness, listening to the sounds of Impris around him; then he growled to his cabin for a nightlight. As the pale orange glow came up, he peered around, breathing heavily, reassuring himself that everything in his cabin was normal. As normal as anything could be on the haunted ship.

Except in his head. The nightmare was back again, returned to plague him. Damn you, he thought. Damn you damn you …

Cursing the thing that lay in wait for them—great writhing monster of the Flux, lurking invisibly, waiting for them to move their net in the wrong direction…

Jamal shut his eyes, willing the image away. Poppy had been complaining of it two nights ago, and last week Sully. Where the hell was this vision coming from? It couldn’t be real.

The monster stretched in a tortuous line across the sky—a great threatening serpent, turning this way and that, looking for them. No question about that: it was looking for them. Looking to devour any living thing that fell within its reach. And they were falling… falling…

Jamal’s eyes snapped open again. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, counting to ten. Do not let it control you, he thought grimly. It’s only a dream.

Only a dream.

A dream to fill an already nightmarish existence, stranded in a limbo without end, without hope. God, was it just his subconscious? Or was this realm of insanity finally becoming complete? No, surely it was just a nightmare.

Bad enough that one of them had it. But why all of them? Was it possible they were infecting each other with their fears—like a damn virus from the subconscious? If they weren’t careful it would overwhelm them all.

Overwhelm us, but with what… what’s worse than this kind of eternity?

He didn’t mean to, didn’t mean to close his eyes until he’d cleared his head of this image, but his brain was too tired, too desperately craving sleep, and before he even knew what was happening, he slipped helplessly back into the shifty, perilous world of his nightmare…

Impris Patrol

Jakus Bark had decided that few things were more tedious than being on a raider patrol. Lying in wait, the rigger-net stretched out into the void, the ship floating… bor-r-r-rinnggg . From time to time the riggers roused themselves from the tedium to scan the distant Flux for moving ships. The latter was almost unnecessary; when ships did come into view, they were noticed immediately by the AI component of the net. But in four weeks out here, it had only happened twice—for just one kill, and that a decrepit freighter not worth salvaging. The other sighting had disappeared without coming within range.

Jakus thought they were wasting their time here, drifting in hiding, keeping one eye out for the shadowy, intermittent trace of Impris —lost and unreachable in some weirdly separated pocket of the Flux—and another eye out for spaceship traffic that might be drawn toward the ghostly vessel. This was chickenshit piracy, dicking around waiting for ships to come along the Golen Space edge of the trade routes so that they could lure them in with distress calls. Why didn’t they just go out and get the ships they wanted?

He supposed it worked, though, or the higher-ups wouldn’t still be doing it this way. The distress calls seemed to work a kind of magic—both the real ones from Impris and the fake recorded ones from Hunter , which they used when the prey were too far away to pick up the real ones. What really made it work, of course, was the way Impris wandered around so unpredictably. Whatever realm she was in, its connection to this one was pretty freakish. Now it loomed into view over here; now it popped up over there. That made it pretty well impossible for the Centrist shippers to identify one region or another as unsafe for travel, even if they’d known for sure about Impris . It was also about the only thing that made patrol interesting for Jakus, when the old ship decided to take a hop and they had to follow. Well—that and the attack, of course.