Eternity's End (52 page)

"You think you can just waltz in here and tell me what to do! Guards, take this man to—" YZ/I suddenly broke off and jerked his gaze over to Tracy-Ace. They stood facing each other with silent glares, joined as though by a high-voltage charge. Legroeder watched them in numb bewilderment, trying not to think about the neutraser muzzles that were pointing at his chest. Tracy-Ace's implants were pulsing at a frantic rate; YZ's face looked like a contained explosion. What the devil was going on between them?

Suddenly Tracy-Ace cried out in pain, staggering. YZ/I turned with a curse to one of the soldiers. "Stand down your men. I'll call you if I need you."

The soldiers melted away. Tracy-Ace rubbed her temple and stood straight again, scowling.

YZ/I looked down at the floor where his cigar lay smoldering. Then he looked up at Legroeder. "I will negotiate—not with you, but with the Narseil commander—on a timetable for ceasing hostilities. If we come to agreement—and I think we will—you'll do the mission. Agreed?"

Legroeder forced himself to draw a breath. "One more thing."

YZ/I's eyes danced with fire. "
What
, damn it?"

"A small thing—to you. There's a boy..." He told YZ/I about Bobby Mahoney and Harriet. "Would you try to find him? See if he's okay? Release him?"

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.

PART THREE

Deep into that darkness peering,

long I stood there wondering, fearing
...

—Edgar Allan Poe

Prologue

Impris

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...

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.

Action was what Jakus wanted. Not the wait, but the hunt.

He hadn't always felt this way. He hadn't always been a pirate, not even at heart. But something had changed after his capture by the raiders of the DeNoble fortress. At first he'd merely been a prisoner working under duress in the nets of pirate ships. But to his surprise, he found exhilaration in the blood hunt, in the search for ships to conquer and capture, or to loot and destroy. This was especially true after his transfer from the backwater of DeNoble to the real powerhouse, Kilo-Mike/Carlotta. The augments helped, of course, urging him on whenever he felt his determination slipping. But it wasn't as if he were under the
control
of the augs;
he
was in command, not some goddamn little superconducting crystal.

By the time of his special assignment to Faber Eridani, he'd become a well-equipped soldier, trained in the arts of espionage and undercover activity. At least
he
thought so. And then—how incredibly annoying!—Renwald Legroeder, of all people, had somehow managed to escape from DeNoble. And not just escape: he'd come to Faber Eridani, and found Jakus, and challenged the perfect story he'd planted to explain the loss of the
L.A
.. Once that cover was compromised, his bosses had insisted on faking his death and getting him off Faber Eri. They should have just killed Legroeder, in Jakus's opinion, but the people at the Centrist Strength shop had been too damn slow on the uptake. They hadn't wanted to complicate matters by being implicated in a felony murder; never mind that they decided
later
to try and kill him, and then botched it...

But at least the whole fiasco had brought Jakus back to active duty with the raider fleet. And peering out into the quiet landscape of the Flux, he knew that it was better this way, even if he was bored right now. Because the time would come when they would strike. And his excitement this time would be not just for the thrill of the fight, but for the Free Kyber Alliance. For the colony fleets.

He could stand to wait awhile for their prey. When it came, they would strike like a cobra. Fast and deadly.

Captain Hyutu would see to that.

Chapter 26

Faber Eridani: Harriet

"Peter, you are such a sight for sore eyes!" Harriet exclaimed, as the PI was conducted into the meeting room at the Narseil embassy.

The Clendornan seemed aglow with pleasure. "It is good to see you, too! Both of you."

"It feels like forever since we left," Harriet said.

"Since we got
back
," said Morgan. "We've been holed up in this embassy way too long."

The Clendornan chuckled. "It's only been a couple of weeks. Of course, by the time we finally get you out of here, it might
really
feel like forever." He chuckled at Morgan's groan, and then became serious. He looked as he always did when he had something important to say; his wedge-shaped head was slightly tilted, and his mouth was crinkled in a smile on one side, and tight and expectant on the other. "Are you ready for some encouraging news?"

Harriet laughed. "Believe me. We're ready."

"I thought you might be." The Clendornan opened his compad on the table, and as he looked up, his grin seemed almost human. "We finally got our hands on the preliminary McGinnis site report. It wasn't easy; it seemed to me that
someone
really didn't want us to see it."

"North?" asked Harriet.

Peter shrugged. "Hard to say for certain. But that's my guess."

"Why? What did it say?" asked Morgan. "If they didn't want us to see it, that must mean the results were in our favor."

The Clendornan nodded. "Nothing's official yet, but I think you can quit worrying about the arson charges against you. It turns out the house fire was caused by built-in incendiary devices."

Harriet drew back, stunned.

"What do you mean,
built-in
devices?" Morgan asked quietly.

Peter's eyes glimmered with purple fire. "Precisely as I said. Self-destruct devices, apparently. I didn't believe it, either, until I read the whole report. Why would a man build such things into his own home? It made no sense. But the investigators were most thorough, and that's what they found— along with evidence in the com logs that McGinnis triggered them himself."