Eternity's End (24 page)

If he thought they were going to give him time to acclimate to the changes, he was wrong. Before he could blink, he was being subjected to lectures on combat and undercover operations, interspersed with physical training in everything from hand-to-hand combat to deep-cyber penetration of shielded intelligence systems.

The basic plan of action was simple enough. Their ship, posing as a passenger liner, would put itself in harm's way, in a region of space known to be patrolled by ships of a certain raider tribe. Upon contact with a raider ship, the Narseil would be prepared for a diplomatic encounter if it occurred—but if attacked, they would attempt to capture the pirate ship, and then use it as a cover to make their way to its home base. Once at the raider outpost, their goal was to gather intelligence through the local networks, contact the underground, and get out as quickly as possible.

It was a risky plan, obviously. They were counting on a combination of Narseil fighting skill and potential assistance from their contacts in the raider organization. Indirect messages received from this outpost had suggested a possible interest in opening lines of communication with the outside. The problem was, the messages were of uncertain reliability; however, it seemed possible that they represented a genuine underground movement within the Free Kyber organization.

To the Narseil Command, it had seemed a risk worth taking—especially if, in the long run, it might lead to a reduction of hostilities.

"Academic El'ken is more hopeful about that than I am," Mission Commander Fre'geel said during one discussion. "I doubt we'll find this particular leopard changing its spots, as you might say. If someone is looking for us and wants to talk, we'll talk. But I am operating on the assumption that this will be an undercover intelligence mission, from beginning to end. We can hope that any underground element that wants to find us, will. But we have no way of looking for them; we must
assume
that we are on our own. If we're in a fight, we intend to win it. And not just win, but take captives and a flyable raider ship. That could be the hardest thing of all."

"Except, perhaps, getting out again afterward," Legroeder pointed out.

"Well, yes—there is that. And that is why everyone, including you, Rigger Legroeder, must be trained in all phases of combat. We might have to fight our way out."

It was hard to argue with that line of reasoning, and Legroeder threw himself wholeheartedly into the training. After two days of lectures, rigger-sims, and hands-on training with Narseil weaponry, he was brought to a large cavern the size of a sports arena. From a balcony, he looked down on Narseil commandos in training—in one corner storming an office complex, in another working their way through a jungle setting (
a jungle?
), and in still another making their way deck by deck through a mockup of a ship, opposed by holographic adversaries. At one end of the balcony, he peered through a window into an enormous zero-gee chamber, where spacesuited teams were rehearsing a ship-to-ship assault.

"This way, please!" his trainer called. Legroeder turned from the window and dutifully followed to the suit-up room. Having gear fitted to him took two hours—and for the next two, he ran and climbed and shot—and tried not to
be
shot—all with a heavy pack on his back, and holo-enemies popping up like targets on an arcade game. At the end of a long obstacle course, he found himself being urged into a pool for water-borne hand-to-hand combat training.

That was where he reached his limit.

"Swim yourself!" he gasped, and threw himself down, wheezing for air.

"What's the matter?" asked his trainer, a Narseil weapons specialist named Agamem.

"I'm not an amphibian, and I don't want to drown, that's what's the matter!" Legroeder snarled. He had never been a strong swimmer. He had nearly drowned once as a boy, when he'd lost his footing in the shallows of a river beach, and gotten caught in an undertow. The memory still haunted him, twenty years later. "Why the hell should I train in water combat, anyway?"

"We want you prepared in all environments," said Agamem.

"Yeah, well, we're trying to penetrate a pirate outpost. Unless I wind up falling into the local pirate Y pool, I don't think I'll have to fight anyone in the water.
Comprendo?
"

Agamem looked puzzled, but perhaps recognized that an alien species might have different training requirements. "Very well, then. How about another round of corridor fighting?"

Legroeder nodded. That he would do. It was entirely plausible that there would be fighting in corridors. Although he had little interest in or native talent for fighting, he did have a survival instinct. He would take all the training he could get.

"Let's go, then."

"Give me a moment to rest, okay?"

"Will your enemy give you time to rest...?"

The implant training was another matter altogether. The Narseil had embedded what seemed at times a controlled madness in his skull, and he had to learn to master it. The knowledge bases, the processing enhancements, the memory caches... none was impossibly difficult in isolation, but taking them as a group was like trying to herd a group of drunken pirates.

During commando training, he'd mostly kept them turned off. But in rigger training, his teachers insisted that he practice using the implants. His trainers seemed puzzled by his difficulties; but Legroeder felt as if his head had become a cage full of wild animals, and his confusion and frustration were overlaid with fear that the augments were gaining the upper hand.

Palagren and Cantha led him to a sim-room filled with rigger-stations that looked like giant clamshells propped open at a forty-five degree angle. Legroeder climbed into the opening of one and lay back on the soft body of the clam—a neural hydrocushion. The clamshell snicked closed, leaving him surrounded by darkness and silence, except for a reassuring whisper of circulating air. He tried to relax, alone with his thoughts... and his implants. A minute later, the com and the net came alive. Cantha was at the control center on the outside. Though not a rigger himself, Cantha was an expert in rigger theory, having done advanced research at the Narseil Rigging Institute. He would be overseeing much of the training.

"Are you ready?"

"As ready as I'll ever be." A moment later, Legroeder's head filled with voices: library inputs, head-up data displays, com status reports on everything from the rigger-net interface to his own kidneys. He tried to corral the voices into the background, but the only thing that seemed to work was to turn them down to near inaudibility; and that left him with an annoying and useless low-level buzz. In the end, he simply tried to ignore the voices, droning in the background.

First Cantha let him fly alone, to regain the feel of being in a net and to acclimate himself to the Narseil equipment. Though he wouldn't have mistaken the sim for the real Flux, the net responded well as he "flew" virtual currents of wind and sea. After a while, Palagren joined him, and then another rigger, named Voco. For the rest of that day, they flew programmed sim voyages, polishing their skills together along both familiar and unfamiliar star-routes.

The next day was more of the same.

Legroeder struggled with the difficulty of rigging with aliens in an alien environment, and of adjusting his flying style to theirs. The Narseil were restless riggers—using a lot of sea imagery, but also changing images frequently in an effort to gain new leverages or insights. When Legroeder invoked his implants for assistance, he found himself quickly overwhelmed by inputs. It didn't take long before he had the whole crew struggling to maintain control of their virtual ship. He was thankful that these were only sims; the Narseil probably thought he was a hopeless incompetent.

"You must
control
your augments—be their master," Cantha urged. "You are their master. You are like the conductor of one of your human symphony orchestras, and you must think like one." Legroeder felt more like a musician trying to produce a concert on a synthmixer, but unable to control anything except the master volume while a gaggle of musical voices rippled through his skull.

The breakthrough came on day three of his training. The night before, he'd tossed and turned in his sleep, dreaming of struggling with the strings of a dancing marionette, and thrashing helplessly in a tangle of threads. He'd woken up trying to remember what had followed that dream; it was something important. Were the dreams part of his training? They certainly felt similar. The first sim of the day gave him a tangle of maneuvers to perform, with full input from his internal nav-libraries. The streams of data nearly overwhelmed him. But he was determined to overcome it.

He was flying down a cataract—a simulation of a region of the Flux known as the Hurricane Flume. Palagren and Voco were at the keel and stern, with Legroeder in the lead position. He was having trouble keeping the ship centered in the flow. It was a white-water rapids, fast approaching a sheer drop into a waterfall. The dashing water tossed the ship from side to side, threatening to capsize it. Legroeder's head reeled with data from the nav-library, suggestions from the augments' tactical advisor, and warnings from Cantha on the outside. It was too much; he was losing control. If he didn't shut off the implants, he would crash for sure.

A memory of the dream jumped into his mind: the helpless feeling of swinging in a tangle of marionette strings...

As he was about to turn off the augments, the scene around him blinked out and he heard Palagren shout:
We've lost sensory input! We're on internal nav only
.

Legroeder cursed. Cantha had thrown a simulated emergency at them, forcing him to use the implants. He was already failing.
Focus, damn it, focus!

And then he remembered, like a punch to the stomach, the dream that had followed the marionette dream. All those strings had turned to streams of water, erupting in a complex of geysers that towered into the sky...

And the image of Com'peer's lava storm came back to him, and he remembered how he had controlled that image by treating it not as an inner switch, but as a landscape feature of the Flux. He realized now what he needed to do. He
could
master the welter of inputs—not with the built-in controls, maybe, but by changing it all to image and letting his subconscious take charge. Let it
all
be streams of water. He didn't need to conduct an orchestra; he needed to rig through his own mind.

As though in response to his thoughts, the white water image sprang back, and a great gusher of spray went up. For a frozen instant, as the ship dashed through the water, he saw—like a mushroom cloud at the center of his mind—a thundering wave of foam that was not a part of the white water of the Flux at all. It was datastreams from the augments gathered together in a curling wave. He could see, glimmering in its interior, the silver threads of a dozen or more individual inputs. He touched the streams and they bent to his touch. With difficulty at first, then with growing skill, he reshaped them into forms that curved toward him when he wanted them, and out of his way when he didn't.

He felt the ship coming back under his control. He quickly damped out the back-and-forth yawing, and felt the Narseil behind him slipping into a closer coordination. The three riggers and their ship shot down the Hurricane Flume and out, dropped along a dazzling white waterfall, and spun away downstream. Legroeder laughed in triumph and heard the Narseil hissing their approval, and he knew that he had finally won the lesson, and it was one he would not soon forget.

For the next two days, his training accelerated to a blur. Battle sims were added to the basic rigging practice, and soon Legroeder was steering the fictitious ship as frantically as he had once piloted a scout ship out of the mine-strewn fortress of Outpost DeNoble. It was something he was good at, and he'd certainly done enough battle flying in captivity, but now he was being tripped up by something altogether different.

It was his rigger-mates, the Narseil.

He had always known that the Narseil had some kind of weird time sense, which was one of the things that made them exceptional riggers; but he'd never encountered it firsthand. They called it, in their own translation to human speech, the
tessa'chron
, or extended time. A form of temporal persistence, it enabled them to see the "present" as a smear of time fore and aft, ranging from about a second, under ordinary circumstances, to several seconds under stress. Battle, even simulated battle, seemed to bring it out in them. No doubt it was useful to them to have a continuing momentary glimpse into the future; but for Legroeder it meant always feeling half a step behind. The implants helped; they couldn't give him the same time sense, but they could reinterpret some of the information that the Narseil were pouring into the net. But that meant adjusting to a whole new level of implant function.

It was going to take practice. A
lot
of practice.

In the meantime, the rigger crew racked up a score of six victories to three losses against programmed enemies, all in encounters in which they were outnumbered and outgunned by their adversaries. Mission Commander Fre'geel pronounced their progress satisfactory, and decreed additional exercises.

"We're ready to go," announced Cantha at breakfast a day later. "We'll be boarding this evening, and departing during the night."

The announcement stunned Legroeder.

"Is this a problem? Don't you feel ready?"

"Well—not to invade a stronghold, no." Legroeder suddenly felt a desire for a few more days of commando training. He suddenly felt hazy on the actual strategic plans. He suddenly wanted to go lie down in a meadow.

The Narseil chuckled, an almost musical sound. In the days they had spent together, Cantha seemed to have developed a pretty good understanding of Legroeder's feelings. "None of us feels quite ready, either. Don't worry, we'll keep training on the ship. But you know—beyond a certain point, our strategy is going to have to unfold on the fly. If things go according to plan, you and I won't have to fight; we'll just follow the marines in."