Eternity's End (36 page)

Legroeder suppressed a rush of excitement from Deutsch's words.
(Do you think there might be a way to—)

(No, no... )
Deutsch shook off the question, and before Legroeder could rephrase it, Deutsch was speaking again, illuminating his stage, sidestepping the question of
Impris
and offering new memories, new stories...

They went back and forth for a time, but eventually Legroeder found his focus slipping, and questions he wanted to ask were vanishing from his thoughts before he could raise them.

(We must stop,)
he said, and slowly withdrew his thoughts from the glowing interior of the crystal. He rubbed his eyes, bringing them back into focus in the real-time and real-space of Deutsch's cabin.

Deutsch's mirror eyes glinted as Legroeder carefully replaced the crystal in its case. Legroeder couldn't tell if Deutsch was watching him or staring still into his own ruby-colored crystal. "This has been... interesting," Legroeder said. "But I must be going. It will be a difficult day tomorrow." He hesitated. "Thank you."

Deutsch remained motionless, as though he had not heard. But as Legroeder was turning to leave, the Kyber's voice rumbled, "You're welcome."

Legroeder made his way back out into the corridor, and then to his own cabin. He was stunned to realize, as he fell into his bunk, that three hours had passed in the company of the Kyber rigger. And he was aware, drifting off, that he was by no means finished with this experience. This was going to be a night filled with dreams.

Many dreams...

Chapter 19

Into the Heart of Darkness

Freem'n Deutsch remained lost in the world of the gazing crystal for a long time after the other rigger left. His good-bye to Legroeder was generated by a general services augment, which took over the niceties of social interaction when his real thoughts were busy elsewhere.

And busy they were: pondering the visions Legroeder had shown him, and his own memories that Legroeder's had awakened.

He was stunned to realize how completely he had shielded himself from memories of his own life—memories of a time when he, too, had been an innocent rigger, reveling in the freedom and exhilaration of the net. Memories of the time before he was taken by storm, legs burned off, life transformed to the darkness of captivity and forced labor. His story was remarkably similar to recollections Legroeder had shared, and the remembrance had primed his thoughts for the emergence of far darker visions...

Right now his augment-matrix was struggling to control those visions, to keep them from erupting and destroying his mental equilibrium. It wasn't quite working; the visions were too powerful to keep out; having begun, they were now an unstoppable force, wracking his mind and body with nausea and revulsion.

It was one thing to have endured an attack as victim; but the other kind of darkness came from living through the maelstrom as an attacker, loosing the great waves of fury that sent the quarry reeling in terror...

DOOM DOOM DOOM
...

The drumming would reverberate in his sleep as long as he lived, even when his protection circuits were supposed to suppress it. And rising from the drumming was the growing din of other sounds... the screams, the crackle of weapons... gunshots echoing in the canyons of his mind...

And the smoldering crimson glow of fire, illumining all of his memories...

Deutsch shuddered, struggling to make it stop. Why weren't the protection circuits working? Something was wrong, something gone squirrelly, something not keeping the damn memories under control.

Almost as though the augments
wanted
him to remember...

Before the trade to Ivan, rigging under the flag of Carlotta, it had been even worse than under Te'Gunderlach.
No, damn it, stop
. He didn't want to relive...

The attack on the
Melanie Frey
.

They'd savaged the ship like an animal with newrabies, tearing at its own body and its enemy alike, no awareness of boundary between self and other. DeMort was the most bloodthirsty of all the captains he'd served under, and his own riggers had no more certainty of safety from his fury than did his victims. It made them fight harder—out of fear, to deflect the madness outward—at someone else, anyone else.

The
Melanie Frey
's crew had resisted. Stupid, maybe, but the raiders had come upon them so suddenly that they probably had no time to think. They had fought instinctively, not realizing the futility. The battle destroyed the ship, costing the pirates a prize vessel, plus three quarters of its crew and passengers. Captain DeMort, infuriated by the resistance, sent a berserker impulse through the command-link into the implants of the boarding crew. For a full hour, the commandos ransacking the ship had gone mad...

And into the net, to give his riggers a taste for blood, DeMort had fed a live image of the fighting.

Not fighting: carnage.

Of all the horrors, the one that most pierced Freem'n Deutsch's heart was the sight of a young boy set upon by a maddened commando. The boy fought heroically, for the moment or two that he lived, after clawing with his hands at the face of the armored pirate.

That commando, and a dozen others, never emerged from their berserker state and instead had to be ordered into stasis. Whether they were mindwiped upon their return to base, or simply terminated like useless equipment, Deutsch never knew.

None of the riggers were capable of flight for some time afterward. The pirate ship drifted away from its prey, sickened and helpless, like an animal that had swallowed poison.

It was Captain DeMort's last voyage in command of a raider ship. But it was not Deutsch's last as rigger of a raider...

Under Te'Gunderlach of Outpost Ivan, it was also brutal, to be sure, but Te'Gunderlach maintained at least a veneer of rationality behind his tactics. Still, it was no surprise when Te'Gunderlach's aggressiveness, in the end, put the ship into a trap from which there was no escape...

P1 alarm, P1 alarm
...

Deutsch's heart pounded as he relived the memories. He tried to slow it, but his augments resisted his efforts. Why did he keep thinking about a P1 intervention? What was going on here—an autonomic system failure? No, there was a response from his central monitor:
// High heartrate necessary to assist in coping and processing... we are reanalyzing your memories of a Priority One code... //

Deutsch remembered the jangle of an alarm during the fight with the Narseil, and a momentary conviction of wrongness about what Te'Gunderlach was doing. He recalled now an inner maelstrom that had passed too quickly before—voices calling out to him, from or through the augments. He couldn't tell what they were trying to say; but then, the net had taken some bad jolts during the fight. Had his augments suffered damage, scrambling the P1 message?

// All circuits are intact; however, there may have been loss of data... //

Loss of data... echoes of voices... and the oddest resonance between those voices and his sharing just now with Legroeder...

He shivered with uncertainty. Where could such a message have come from? The echoes were strangely powerful. And alongside them was the image of what Legroeder had done— something that he, Deutsch, had never found the courage, or the opportunity, to do. Legroeder had risked his life to save a victim from capture.

Risked the wrath of a raider captain.

And now this preposterous plan of the Narseil.

Through the ringing dissonance of the memories, Deutsch found himself asking the question: Would he ever find it in himself to risk his life that way? Would he?

Legroeder blinked awake from a dream about Bobby Mahoney... and about the bosses of Outpost Ivan.
Strange
. He had never laid eyes on Bobby Mahoney in the flesh—and of course, he had never met the bosses of Outpost Ivan. Yet the images—one a reconstruction by his own mind, and the other someone else's memory—were replaying in his mind now with the clarity of real life. The gazing-crystal joining with Deutsch had left a more powerful impression than he would have guessed. Feeling unsettled, Legroeder had a cursory breakfast in the galley before reporting to the bridge.

Fre'geel was there with Palagren. "We're going to get underway today," Fre'geel told him, looking up from the captain's console.

"So soon?" Legroeder asked in surprise.

"We can't keep drifting. We've pulled enough nav data from their library to get us going in the right general direction. How are you doing at persuading our prisoner to help us?"

Legroeder hesitated. "I've started to get to know him a little. He's not eager to go back, that's for sure. And I can't promise he won't betray us if we
do
make it to their base. And yet..."

"What, Rigger Legroeder?"

He scratched his jaw thoughtfully. "Well, he has no love of the Kyber, that's for sure. I believe he might actually have some sympathy for our cause."

Fre'geel's eyes gleamed. "Did he tell you this?"

Legroeder shook his head. "Not in so many words. It's something I sensed. A feeling."

"A feeling," Fre'geel echoed. He studied Legroeder for a few dozen heartbeats. "Very well, Rigger. Today we will fly with our own crew and see how we do. But afterward, you will continue in your efforts to secure Deutsch's cooperation." Fre'geel made a burring sound. "And you will report to me on your progress."

Legroeder nodded. "He was a free man taken prisoner, same as me. I think we can talk."

"Let us hope so." Fre'geel turned to the other waiting riggers. "Take your stations, then."

The two ships parted in silence, in the Flux.
H'zzarrelik
fell astern of the captured pirate ship, drifting in the gently flowing current. Soon the Narseil ship looked like a toy model behind them, small and silver in the orange mists.

The Narseil ship, piloted by her secondary crew, would follow
Flechette
for a time. Later, as they drew closer to the raider base,
H'zzarrelik
would vanish into hiding in the mists of the Flux, monitoring
Flechette
's progress as best they could with long-range instruments. If
Flechette
got into trouble, there was little the Narseil ship could do to help.
H'zzarrelik
's mission was to await Fre'geel's team's return—or a transmission of data—and to safeguard the information already captured. Efforts to contact the nearest Narseil Navy ship for a transfer of prisoners had proved unsuccessful, so the return of
H'zzarrelik
was crucial. If
Flechette
failed to make contact or reappear,
H'zzarrelik
would slip away like a spirit in the night and carry the existing data and prisoners back to the Narseil authorities.

To say that
Flechette
and her Narseil crew were expendable would have been an extraordinary understatement.

Legroeder tried not to dwell on that, as they flew deeper into Golen Space, and farther from any possible help. Palagren was humming in the net before him, seemingly unconcerned with danger. In the keel, Ker'sell muttered darkly to himself. Neither of them had said a word to Legroeder about their thoughts on trusting Deutsch. But Legroeder could guess what they were thinking.

They flew through streamers of cloud that morphed slowly from something out of a bright, sunny afternoon to a sky full of scattered thunderstorms. They cautiously skirted the dark weather. They were still learning the ways of this ship, and didn't want to push too hard, too fast.

Still, Legroeder was relieved when they set the stabilizers and left the net to the backup crew of Narseil riggers for station-keeping.

According to the guard at the door, Deutsch had not emerged from his cabin since Legroeder had left. "Unless he snuck out through the ventilation system," the Narseil commando said huskily, with an unreadable expression. Humor? Legroeder wondered.

He signaled at the door. When there was no answer, he pressed the handle. The door slid open and he stepped in, blinking in the gloom. The room smelled like a sauna. "Freem'n?" The only light came from the ruby crystal in the hands of the Kyber rigger. Deutsch was sitting exactly where Legroeder had left him; he seemed not to have moved a muscle. But the crystal in his hands was glowing far more brightly than before, casting a blood-red glow over Deutsch's half-metal face.

"Freem'n?"

There was a long pause. Finally he saw a shift in the pirate rigger's gaze—not the main eyes, but the two peripheral-vision eyes atop his cheekbones. Just behind them, the augments on his temples were flickering erratically.

The voice-speakers crackled, "Rigger Legroeder."

"Yes. Are you all right?"

"No," said Deutsch, with a series of clicks.

"Do you need help?"

For a long moment, Deutsch sat utterly still. Legroeder was wondering whether to call for medical aid when Deutsch spoke again. "How sure are you that you want to do this thing, going back to our base?"

Legroeder turned up his hands. "There are no if's about it. That's why we came."

Though Deutsch's eyes were inexpressive, something in the shape of his mouth conveyed pain. "I do not wish to go back to that life," he said finally.

"Neither do I," said Legroeder. "That's why we're going. To take some action against it."

"And... you hope to learn something about that ship, yes?
Impris?
"

"Yes." Legroeder hesitated. "And we have reason to believe there are people at your outpost sympathetic to our cause."

Deutsch's lips pursed. "Your commander spoke of an underground movement."

"Which we hope to contact. But regardless, we'll continue our mission." Legroeder cleared his throat. "I have to know what to tell the commander. Will you cooperate?"

Deutsch sighed. When he spoke, his voice was ponderous, as though he were deep in thought. "It's the strangest thing. I feel as though... for reasons I don't entirely understand... I may be meant to do this thing with you. I don't know why. Or how. But the feeling... comes from deep within."