Eternity's End (35 page)

Deutsch gazed at him assessingly. "You might find these somewhat more powerful than your pearlgazers." He said it as though they were two men standing in a shop talking about the latest innovations in meditation gear, the tensions of the recent battle forgotten.

Legroeder nodded. "May I?" He reached out to touch the tip of a long, blue crystal. Deutsch's arm telescoped out and picked the crystal out of the case and handed it to him. Legroeder sat back in the desk chair and held the sapphire-like gem up to the light. It appeared to have its own inner fire: threads and facets of self-contained light.

"We start separately," Deutsch said. "The interaction between the crystals will come, as we meditate. If that's a problem..." His silver eyes peered at Legroeder. Legroeder shook his head. "All right, then." Deutsch held the ruby crystal almost reverently in his hands.

Legroeder allowed his gaze to drift downward into the depths of the crystal. It already felt different from the pearlgazers: more active, more alive. And yet the approach was the same, to let his thoughts flicker inward... to let them settle into the object's inner fire, until the stirrings of the subconscious sent them swirling in a new direction.

He heard his augments urging him on; then they melted out of sight.

Slow, deep breathing...

He felt himself slipping downward, drawn by the crystal. His thoughts came together in sparkles of cerulean blue, like plankton in the sea... or particles of knowledge in a datanet, forming threads of light, commingling and joining. Voices chattered in the distance. His own thoughts? The implants?

He became aware of droplets of light moving against darker surroundings, sketching zigzagging paths outward. The augments, reaching out... as if they knew what they were doing, even if he did not. He watched, hypnotized by the patterns drawn in liquid light...

Only gradually did he become aware of crosstalk between crystals, voices murmuring distantly. So many inner voices... asking why he was doing this. Why he was doing the mission.

Because I must
.

But why?

For my friends... for me
...

A tangled vine of voices, his own inner voices, curling around the knots of questions.

To strike at piracy... to find truth
...

But who'd appointed him a seeker of truth and justice?

There was a strange shifting sensation in his mind, as the voices wrapped around and around...

To learn the truth of Impris... to find answers among the Kyber
...

Shift...

There may be others interested in these questions
...

He felt a sudden confusion. Not all the voices were his, or his implants'... and he noticed certain color patterns that had come together, ruby and cerulean reflecting and joining in halos... and the implants, his and Deutsch's, were skittering and handshaking and opening tiny dialog boxes of thought...

(Is it your thoughts I'm hearing?)
he said to Deutsch.

(Didn't you know?)

He hadn't been sure, at first. It wasn't threatening, so much as startling.
(It's strange,)
he whispered. They were joining across a distance: he and Deutsch standing on two stages in darkness, each spotlighted, calling out to each other. To share? Through stories on stage?

The Kyber rigger shut down half the lights on his side, and turned the rest to standby illumination.
(You can darken or illuminate what you want. For a rigger, it should be easy.)

Legroeder practiced flicking lights on and off, revealing and unrevealing.
(Perhaps,)
he said thoughtfully,
(it would be useful to share some history.)
He found himself going back in time, his subconscious spinning an image, which sprang to life on his stage like a holo projection.

A ship under attack...

It was the
Ciudad de los Angeles
, caught in a surprise attack by the raider, pummeled by Flux distortion and wails from the pirates' amplifiers. A torpedo exploded, threateningly close.

And then, with a subconscious edit, the image cut to:

The bridge—officers shouting, captain trying to raise the pirates on the ship-to-ship fluxwave (this image a little blurry, but Legroeder hadn't been there; he'd been in the net at the time; this was a reconstruction).

Cut to:

The rigger-net, where terror and bewilderment raged like a forest fire. They were under assault and their captain was wavering. Should they fight? Flee? Lightning flared in the Flux, indistinguishable from the fire of weapons.

Then word came through from the bridge:

Let the raider ship grapple them... the battle was over...

(Your ship?)
murmured a faintly metallic voice.

(Yes. "Ciudad de los Angeles," she was called. "City of the Angels.")

(Bad... )

Bad enough, but it wasn't over...

His imagination supplied the images he hadn't witnessed personally—the battle raging, a nightmare uncorked—terror in the corridors, commandos overrunning the ship, killing in reaction to the slightest resistance, seizing passengers and crew without mercy, without concern for age, mothers and children alike...

Cut to:

A small boy, Bobby Mahoney, hauled screaming from his cabin, terrified and kicking; finally shot with a stunner and dragged off to the hold of the pirate ship...

Cut to:

Riggers stumbling out of the rigger-stations to face armed commandos, then herded off to similar holds...

And later taken back to the raider fortress, and forced into service as riggers aboard pirate ships that would go out and start the same thing all over again...

The final image quivered on the stage, until Legroeder breathed it away with a sigh. It was a terrible burden, and yet a relief to let it out. He had tried so long not to think of it.

On the facing stage, Rigger Freem'n Deutsch was mulling over what he had seen.
(Very disturbing,)
he said, with an inflection of uncertainty.
(Would you mind if I—?)

His voice faded into silence. The lights came up on his stage.

For several heartbeats, nothing.

And then, in the spotlight glow, a lumbering freighter—and coming alongside it, a raider. There was no contest, once the firing began—except, unaccountably, on the bridge of the freighter, where the captain lost his head and screamed to his men to resist...

Like Legroeder's image, this one had the hazy outlines of reconstructed memory. Deutsch was just coming out of the net when the fighting on the bridge began. It didn't last long, just enough time for shouts of outrage and several bright flashes of laser fire, and then...

Searing pain, followed by numbness...

Deutsch fell, aware of his legs no longer holding him up.

Blackness...

He came to, twice. Once, for an instant, to the corridors bumping past at a dizzying sickening angle; something felt very wrong, but he didn't know what, it was a mind-wrenching blur. Then blackness again.

The next time was in a narrow infirmary cot, with ghostly sensations and nothing else where his legs used to be. And in his head, the buzzings of his new augments, testing the connections to the auxiliary equipment being integrated to his body...

Legroeder was stunned.
(They saved you? The ones who took me would have left you there to die.)

(These would have, too, except my crewmate José... )

(Rigger-mate?)

(Yes, he carried me like a sack; told them I was the best rigger in the fleet; they couldn't lose me. He risked his life, insisting.)

Legroeder marveled at the courage. Would he have done that?
(Where's José now?)
He felt a sudden chill.
(He wasn't... on the bridge here...?)

Deutsch's thoughts darkened, the lights lowering on the stage.
(He died, his first flight out with the raider fleet. I think he wanted to, by then. He was sorry he'd saved me; sorry any of us lived to be put to this kind of work.)

I'm sorry too, Legroeder tried to whisper.

(It was bound to end one way or another. Those who live by the sword... )

The raider ship
Flechette
, coursing through scarlet-glowing clouds of the Flux, joining battle. Nose flickering, lightning flashing, booming sounds reverberating through the Flux. On her bridge, a cyborg captain bent on leading them into conquest.

And in Deutsch's head, a tiny jangling, an implant or an instinct telling him something was not right. When the captain ordered them in for the kill, the jangling got more insistent, as though he should do something to stop this. For an instant, he imagined a Priority One command message trying to get through; but within seconds, it was lost in the chaos and confusion...

Cut to:

Blinding flare of a flux-torpedo, and the wrenching upheaval of the Flux shearing the net. Smoke and ruin on the bridge. People screaming; the captain glaring, eyes blazing, against the back wall—dead. Crewmen crumpled from the radiation burst.

Deutsch, staggering from the fluxfield chamber, where fate and the chamber shielding had protected him from the burst. He surveyed the devastation in horror and disbelief... and finally numbness as his implants shut down the worst of the awareness so that he could function. But they could not shut out the sight of his fellow riggers, smoking in their stations...

Cut to:

Darkness.

Legroeder felt his own darkness welling around him, felt himself mourning Deutsch's friends. What a strange feeling.

From across the gulf of darkness:
(We were both forced into service. Your story could have been mine. We have both suffered great loss.)

(Yes. And you thought you were dead—and then hoped you were free. And now you wonder... )

Deutsch stared across at him from his stage. Questioning with his eyes the scenario that Legroeder proposed: returning to the very heart of darkness, the pirate outpost.

Legroeder thought he sensed a flicker of something—some inkling of hope, or maybe destiny, that even Deutsch didn't recognize.

(You can show us the way in, and the way out. And how to find the information we need.)

Deutsch's image shook its head. He didn't have to say: Why should I? If he helped the Narseil and got caught, he could be hung, or tortured, or mindwiped...

Legroeder searched for that flicker of hope again; perhaps he had only imagined it.

But the connection with Deutsch had become compelling. He wanted to keep the momentum alive.
(There are other things I can show you,)
he whispered...

A more neutral memory: crewing a ship called
Lady Brillig
, with three riggers named Janofer, Gev, and Skan. A happy crew, for a time. But though all three of the men were smitten with Janofer, only Skan found the way into her heart, and even that didn't last. It seemed almost inevitable that the chemistry could not hold, and in the end it didn't.

Later, much later, he saw Gev Carlyle again; but this time Legroeder was flying under duress for the raiders, and Gev Carlyle was the prey.

(And was your friend captured?)
Deutsch asked.

Legroeder remembered the terrible risk he had taken, to fake unexpected turbulence in the Flux.
(I found a way to free him.)

The next image was of the stinging rebuke he and his fellow riggers received—and yet, they persuaded their captain that it was bad luck that had caused them to lose their quarry. Now, recalling the moment, Legroeder wondered why he'd never found the courage to save others the same way he'd saved his friend.

Deutsch seemed to recognize the feeling, and for a few moments, there was a subdued silence in the connection.
(It was brave of you,)
Deutsch said finally, and the images that followed seemed to reflect his confusion over how to respond. It was a series of fragmentary images, glimpses of raider society in a bewildering order, all suffused with an emotion that Legroeder had trouble recognizing. Was it regret? Or Deutsch's own guilt for the degree to which he'd allowed himself to be absorbed into the raider culture? Flickering through the images were glimpses of that jangling alarm that Deutsch had heard at the start of the battle with
H'zzarrelik
, and then lost in the confusion.

Legroeder tried, in frustration, to follow.

But rather than clarify, Deutsch changed to images from his more distant past, from times before his capture by the raiders. Learning to fly as a youth, in the balloon fleets of Varinorum Secundus. Later, as a rigger, flying a race down the Grand Canyon Nebula, a strange formation that extended deep through the layers of the Flux. Legroeder sensed echoes of the exhilaration of the race, still alive in Deutsch's memory. It was enough to make him think that perhaps now was the time to raise another subject...

A mighty and storied ship, soon to be lost in the streams of the Flux,
Impris
gleamed against space, and cut through the mists of the Flux like a speedwhale of Cornice III. Her passengers enjoyed a view that few but riggers usually saw. As she passed by the Great Barrier Nebula, the sight caused even the most jaded of star travelers to draw a sharp breath.

Dissolve to:

The same ship, somehow untarnished by the years, slipping out of the mists like a ghost on a fog-shrouded moor—wailing for help, and drawing the innocent to their doom.

Cut to:

A raider ship closing in on would-be rescuers...

Cut to:

Loss. Darkness. And through the darkness a man, Legroeder, searching the skies with a tireless gaze, searching for answers, searching for the lost
Impris
...

(I know of this ship,)
murmured the other rigger.

Startled, Legroeder cast his gaze to the other stage.
(You do? Can you tell me more?)

(I know
of
it. I have not seen it myself.)
Deutsch hesitated.
(There is knowledge of it at the outpost.)