Eternity's End (60 page)

Cantha's voice cut in from the bridge.
We're getting a call on fluxwave. It's from the captain of Impris
.

Legroeder wanted to cheer.
Can you let us hear it?

Stand by,
said Cantha, and then a new voice filled the net.

—is Noel Friedman, captain of Faber Eridani starliner Impris. To whom am I speaking?

Glenswarg's voice filled the com.
This is Captain Jaemes Glenswarg of Kyber-Ivan Phoenix. Captain, we are extremely pleased to have found you. Are you in need of assistance?

Are we—?
The other skipper's voice was choked with emotion.
Captain, we are
very
much in need
...

As the captains conferred, Legroeder and his rigger-mates continued drawing
Impris
closer. Progress grew faster as the nets shortened and became stronger. Sooner than Legroeder would have imagined, the ships were nearly alongside each other. Legroeder signaled his fellow riggers to begin reaching all the way around
Impris
with the
Phoenix
net. It felt to him as if they were about to embrace a long-lost, estranged family.

As his crewmates handled the net, Legroeder called across to the
Impris
crew,
I'm Rigger Legroeder. We met once, years ago. I was aboard Ciudad de los Angeles then
.

Ciudad de los Angeles!
echoed an astounded voice.
Have you come back to haunt us, then?

Legroeder blinked in astonishment. They
had
heard the
L.A
. riggers! With sudden exultation, he remembered his own first reason for being here. He had witnesses!
Are you recording all this, Cantha?
he shouted into the com.
Get it all! Every word!
As Cantha muttered an acknowledgment, he called,
Impris—we heard your distress call seven years ago, on Ciudad de los Angeles. We couldn't help you then—but we've come back to get you!

The confusion in the other net was palpable.

What do you mean—?

Seven years—?

Deutsch murmured to Legroeder,
It might be better not to try to explain too much right now
.

Legroeder nodded agreement.
Impris, you're caught in a fold of the underflux. We will do our very best to get you out. May we grapple and dock?

At that moment Glenswarg came on the com to tell the rigger crew that they had permission to dock with
Impris
. Legroeder drew a deep breath of triumph and relief.

As the riggers began to enfold
Impris
in their net, he had a sudden unsettling vision of the joined nets echoing with manic laughter.

Chapter 30

Ghost Ship

The grappling with the net turned out to be more difficult than Legroeder expected, despite
Phoenix
's net having been built for just such operations. Just as they were about to close around
Impris
, the passenger liner began to ripple in their grasp like a great silver fish. Afraid they might lose it, Legroeder called for more power to the flux-reactor. The shimmying became worse; it was like trying to hold onto a frightened whale. A low groan began to reverberate through the net.
Everyone, stop!
Legroeder cried. His pulse thudded in his ears as the net relaxed. Gradually, over several seconds, the reverberations subsided.

Impris—what just happened?
he called.
Do you know what caused that instability?

What instability?
came the answer.

Legroeder blinked.
You didn't feel yourselves shimmying in our net a moment ago?

Pause.
We didn't feel anything
.

Legroeder turned to his crewmates.
Did
you
feel it?

Indeed,
said`Palagren.
Give me a moment to speak with Cantha
...

As the Narseil turned his attention to the com, Legroeder asked Ker'sell,
What did you feel?

Ker'sell's voice sounded sluggish, as though he were in a daze.
Time,
he said slowly.
There's something wrong with it
.

What do you mean, wrong?
asked Legroeder.
Do you mean the tessa'chron? Is there something in the immediate future?

Ker'sell hesitated, as if embarrassed.
It's not that. It's as though it's... blurred,
he said finally.

Was this a Narseil admission of a weakness? Legroeder wondered. Ker'sell turned away, avoiding his gaze. Legroeder glanced down at Deutsch, who simply looked annoyed at the situation.

Palagren spoke again.
Cantha thinks what we were seeing was a temporal flutter. They measured no spatial anomalies from the bridge, but all of the Narseil felt a blurring in the tessa'chron
.

That's what Ker'sell said. What's it mean?

Palagren took a moment to readjust himself in the net.
I'm not seeing a clear window on past, present, and future. It's difficult to explain. My viewframe is smeared out, as if something's... vibrating the spacetime continuum
. He looked closely at his fellow riggers. He did not appear to share Ker'sell's embarrassment about the subject.
We may be feeling continuing quantum effects from our passage into this layer
.

Legroeder shivered.
How much do we know about that?

Palagren answered cautiously.
Cantha and Agamem are studying it
.

Well, if you figure it out, don't forget to tell us,
Deutsch muttered.

Palagren looked at him wordlessly for a moment.
Cantha suggests that we pull tight for a hard dock without actually encircling Impris with the net. He believes a physical joining might keep the two ships in better synch
.

I concur,
said Captain Glenswarg, coming onto the com circuit.
Pull us in as close as you can. We'll fire tethers across
.

Legroeder signaled the other riggers, and they began drawing the two ships together as before. When the gap had closed to a hundred meters, the captain ordered magnetic tethering cables launched across to anchor on
Impris
's hull. Bumper forcefields were turned on, to keep the ships from colliding, and the tethers drawn in. Finally Glenswarg ordered a boarding tube stretched between the ships. Before sending anyone through, he asked Legroeder if there was a chance of bringing the two ships out into normal-space.

Legroeder hesitated before answering. The captain's desire was understandable; they all wanted to know that they had done more than just join
Impris
in eternal limbo. And yet...

If I may interject,
said Cantha,
I believe it would be unwise to try. Until we understand better how we got
into
this fold, we could run the risk of burrowing ourselves in deeper
.

Glenswarg's silence sounded like a curse.

Captain,
said Legroeder,
I think the sooner we get over there to talk to their crew, the better
.

All right, then—stabilize the net and come on out,
Glenswarg said.
I'll send in the backups
.

"Fine work," he said, when the four riggers were standing on the deck with him. "Now I want you to go get some rest."

Legroeder started to protest, then saw the other ship begin to ripple in the monitor with a slow-motion distortion. He held his breath.

"Don't worry, I'll call you when it's time for you to go over," Glenswarg said, reading his thoughts. "But first, we need to establish safe passage. That's going to take time. And I'm not about to risk
you
people until I have to. You're the only ones who have any hope of getting us out of here again."

The captain was being smarter than he was, Legroeder realized. They were all exhausted. Very definitely, the smartest thing they could do right now was to go get some sleep.

Sleep, unfortunately, did not come easily. Legroeder kept thinking about
Impris
, floating beside them. He was desperately eager to cross over and physically touch the ship, and at the same time, the prospect filled him with fear. Several times, as he was just drifting off, he awoke again with a sudden, burning sense of dread—an inexplicable feeling that something was waiting to haunt him in his sleep. He told himself not to be foolish; he was just overtired.

Something out there... hidden
...

Go to sleep
.

In the end, with some help from the implants, he did sleep; but even in the depths of sleep, he remained aware of an irrational fear... a feeling that there was a monster in this realm, lurking just out of sight.

When he awoke, he felt as though he had not slept at all. He had the strangest sense that he had somehow
slipped through time
as he slept.
(I don't feel quite right,)
he murmured to his implants, as he was getting dressed.

// We register an inconsistency in your biological clock, compared with our clock mechanism.//

(Explain.)

// We cannot.//

Cannot, he thought, frowning to himself as he looked in the mirror and gave his umbrella-cut hair a quick swipe. His eyes looked bleary. He sighed and went to find the others.

It wasn't long before the riggers were gathered, with rolls and cups of murk, in the briefing room off the galley. "I just spoke to the captain," Deutsch reported. "They're about to open the boarding tunnel to
Impris
. Let's see if we can get it on the monitor here." Deutsch made some adjustments to the wall screen, and soon had a picture of three Kyber crew members, including the first officer, making their way through the
Phoenix
airlock and then into the tunnel-shaped boarding tube. As the three men floated toward
Impris
, half the screen showed them dwindling down the tube and half showed a view, apparently from a shoulder-mounted camera, of the other ship drawing near. The
Impris
airlock opened as they approached.

Legroeder realized he was holding his breath, and forced himself to exhale.

"We're in the airlock now,"
reported the first officer on the comlink.
"Airlock's closing."
The image became shadowy as the other ship's hull came between the men and
Phoenix
, but the voice transmission was still clear enough to hear:
"Cycling and opening on the inside..."

Standing in the briefing room, they could make out the door sliding open, and a large group waiting inside
Impris
.

"Hello!"
called the first officer.

The
Impris
crew surged forward, engulfing the contact party. At first, their voices were indistinct; and then Legroeder heard:
"MY GOD, ARE YOU GUYS REAL? OH, MY GOD—!"
And then it was a total chaos of greetings and introductions, as the bewildered crew of the lost ship met the first humans from outside their hull in over a century.

Legroeder and the others watched for a while, then turned back to their part of the business at hand, which was to try to figure out a way to get both ships the hell out of this place.

"I think," said Cantha, "that we've pretty well confirmed where we are. But we still don't know how
Impris
got here, and or even for sure how
we
got here."

"Oh, that's great," said Derrek, the Kyber rigger, who seemed alternately impressed by and resentful of the Narseil success.

Cantha's neck-sail stiffened. "We appear to have passed through a quantum fluctuation as we entered the underflux fold. Unfortunately, it interfered with our ability to map what was happening. We really need to talk to the
Impris
riggers."

"The raindrop—was that the quantum fluctuation?" Legroeder asked.

"We believe so," Palagren said. "It was most likely a wave function connected to something deeper in the spacetime structure. We're still trying to understand why we found
Impris
right here when we passed through, instead of a dozen light-years away, where we thought she was."

"Are you saying we traveled that distance instantaneously— or was she actually here all along?" Legroeder asked.

"We're not sure the question actually has meaning in this context," said Cantha. "I'm not sure what the concept of
distance
means in the fold. But a more immediate question is, can we find a way back
out
through the quantum fluctuation, or is it a one-way passage?"

Derrek looked ill.

Legroeder prompted Palagren, who said, "To answer either question, we have to understand exactly what went on when we came through. We need to put our flight recordings through some intensive processing—which Cantha has already begun."

"I'm sure of this," said Cantha. "It's related to the phenomenon of quantum linkage across spacetime. We've always known that individual particles can be quantum-linked across vast distance—but no one's ever seen such a large-scale effect before, that I know of."

Legroeder mulled that over. "What about the problem we had grappling
Impris
? Was that quantum fluctuation, too?"

"Probably," said Cantha. "We know that the time flow is altered here. We've measured shifts in simultaneity, and all of us—" he gestured to the other Narseil "—have felt disturbances in the tessa'chron. But I still don't know how to interpret—"

He was interrupted by a call on the intercom. It was Captain Glenswarg, and he sounded annoyed.
"Researchers and contact personnel report to the boarding area at once. Riggers Legroeder and Deutsch—for the third time, dammit, report to the bridge!"

Legroeder exchanged a mystified glance with Deutsch. "Have you heard him call before?"

"Nope," said Deutsch. "But I'm acknowledging now. Shall we go?"

"Keep us updated," Legroeder said to the Narseil, as he and Deutsch headed out of the room.

In the corridor, he heard another call from the captain— this time saying, "Riggers Legroeder and Deutsch, stand by to go aboard
Impris
. Please acknowledge and report to the bridge for your instructions."

Legroeder looked at Deutsch, puzzled.