Eternity's End (64 page)

"Augments? Yes. I do." Deutsch raised a hand to stop Poppy's protest. "Look—if you guys want your ship to fly out with us, then we
have
to link the two nets together. I only know one way to do that. That's for Legroeder and me to link ship-to-ship through our augments." Ignoring their reluctance, he turned back to Legroeder. "Yes, I think that's probably the way to do it."

Legroeder nodded, lips tight. This was bound to be unnerving to the
Impris
riggers. It was unnerving to him, too. "If it's okay with everyone, I'll inform Captain Glenswarg and head back over." He rose. "Could someone show me the way out?"

Stepping into the airlock, Legroeder peered uneasily through the outer hatch window. The connector to
Phoenix
was still there, still intact. But one of the
Impris
crewmen on watch was saying in a trembling voice, "A few minutes ago, that whole thing was gone. The ship and everything. I hope you know what you're doing."

Legroeder tried not to show the fear that was tying his stomach in knots. What if one of the ships winked out while he was in the connecting tube?

Before he could reconsider, he slapped the hatch control. The inner hatch hissed shut, and the outer hatch hissed open. He stepped out into the tube.

He'd forgotten about the weightlessness. His first step sent him tumbling into flight. With a gasp, he caught a handhold and brought himself up short. Behind him, the hatch slid shut with a
thunk
. He was alone in the tunnel between the two ships. Where were the Kyber escort crewmen who had brought him over? He tried not to look at the Flux swirling around him, just beyond the transparent wall of the tube.

He pulled himself along quickly, but it was impossible to ignore the Flux; it was a magnet, drawing his gaze outward, to its vapors of blood. He was breathing in short, quick gasps; he could smell his own acrid fear. Jesus. He had to get across before he went crazy, just get across...

...but there was a tapping sound that blurred his concentration, and a strange, ringing vibration in the air... it was becoming impossible to think...

The tapping was in the walls, all around him. He was in a shipboard compartment; he wasn't sure for a moment
which
ship.
What's happening to me?
Turning, he realized he was in an engineering section, and it didn't look like the Kyber ship. He was surrounded by panels of controls, and the hulking shapes of enormous coils that hadn't changed much in a hundred years, just enough to notice.

He was inside
Impris
's fluxfield reactor, in one of the interstitial spaces... and he wasn't wearing a shielded suit...

His vision was blurring, knees buckling; he couldn't last here for long...

In the briefing room, Deutsch felt a sudden dizziness; in the same instant, his inner monitors told him that the connection to
Phoenix
had been lost again. He wondered where Legroeder was; had he made it back to the Kyber ship?

A com unit was chirping somewhere in the room, a voice rasping something about the other ship having flickered out again, and the connector tube...

Deutsch leaned forward and shouted, "Was Rigger Legroeder in that connector when it went out?"

"Gone, they're just gone..."

The Flux was pulling at him as he tumbled. He was back in the connecting tube. Legroeder lunged for a handhold and missed, then finally grabbed another. What the hell was happening? Thank God that reactor had been at low power, or he'd have been fried.

He fought his way toward the hatch—then stopped.
Wrong way. Damn. Turn around
. The Flux tore at his eyes, a living, devouring thing. Had the fluxfield lines caught him, pulled him into a quantum fluctuation? His heart was pounding; he could feel the sweat as he struggled, hand over hand, down the tube toward
Phoenix
. The coils of the Flux were wrapped around the tube like a cosmic boa constrictor, squeezing. He gave a last mighty shove from a handhold, and crashed into the
Phoenix
hatch.

It was closed. He grunted, terror crawling up his neck as he groped for the switch.

What if it didn't open?

What if the ship blinked away again?

He choked back a scream—suddenly realizing he might
trigger
the unthinkable with his own emotions. He was a rigger... he was a rigger...
damn it, think like a rigger
...

He pounded on the hatch switch.
Open, for God's sake—open!

The hatch slid open, and he tumbled into the airlock. He slapped clumsily at the inner switch, and the hatch slammed shut. He clung, gasping, to a handhold, hanging by his arms. Finally, as the inner hatch opened, he sank to his knees. Gravity had never felt so good.

His heart was still hammering as he stumbled onto the bridge. Palagren and Cantha were hunched over one of the computers. "That was fast," Palagren said, looking up—and then his eyes narrowed as he registered the strain on Legroeder's face. "Are you all right?"

"You look like hell," said Captain Glenswarg. "Where's Deutsch?"

Legroeder struggled to catch his breath. "He stayed. He wants to work with the
Impris
riggers, and try to fly it out with them. With us."

Palagren's gaze was dark. "That could be risky."

"But can we do it?" asked Glenswarg.

"Captain—"

"Our orders," said Glenswarg, "are to bring
Impris
out if we can. We want the ship, not just the people. We need every bit of information we can get from her." He glanced at Legroeder.

"That's right," Legroeder gulped. "And from what Captain Friedman says, even if we
tried
to get all of her passengers over here, we probably couldn't." He explained.

"Well," said Palagren, "it's an open question:
Can
we fly the two ships out in formation? Or once we power up the two fluxfield generators, will the interaction between them and the quantum fluctuation throw the whole thing out of control?"

Legroeder remembered all too clearly what had just happened to him in the connecting tube. "First tell me how we're going to get
one
ship out."

"Ah." Palagren scratched the base of his neck-sail. "We have developed a plan, Cantha and I. It will not be easy, and it involves a degree of risk."

"Which is—?"

"On the one hand, that we lodge ourselves permanently in the underflux; on the other, that we disappear in a spray of neutrinos."

"Oh."

Palagren swung back to the console. "Here, let me show you what we have in mind. We have been looking at this business of the dreams, and we've found evidence of a physical feature that correlates with it..."

What the Narseil had found, from a careful mapping of the Flux lines of force, was an indication of what they called a
deep quantum flaw
, a fracture not just in local space as they had thought before, but in the primordial fabric of spacetime itself, situated beneath even the present level of the Deep Flux. Though they could not say much about its size or extent, they believed it was the source of the fluctuations that had drawn
Impris
and
Phoenix
into this trap in the underflux. It was entirely possible that similar flaws were the bane of other ships lost in the Deep Flux, as well.

The influence of the flaw could be felt well beyond its actual location. This, Cantha believed, could explain the dreams of the riggers. They, of all the souls on the two ships, were the ones whose psyches were most directly exposed to the Flux. It was no coincidence that they shared the fears about, and possibly a subconscious awareness of, a great monster lurking deep within the Flux. "There really is a monster there," Cantha said. "That's why you're feeling it."

"In order to get out," said Palagren, "we must locate the quantum flaw. The opening that brought us
into
the Deep Flux does not appear to offer an exit. To find another way, we must seek the point of origin of the openings..."

Legroeder listened in sober silence. The Narseil plan was audacious—and not a little desperate. They would try to make the ships sink
deeper still
—by suppressing even further the action of the nets, by bringing them to a state of controlled, meditative stillness. They hoped to accomplish two things: one, to reduce the dangerous interactions between the two ships' fluxfields; and two, to allow the natural eddies and ripples to draw the ships down into the lowest layers of the Deep Flux. There, they hoped, they would find not just a clearer view of the underlying quantum flaw, but also a pathway out.

"There are no guarantees," Palagren noted.

Legroeder remembered the Narseil's warning about vanishing in a spray of neutrinos. But he couldn't think of a better idea. And remaining where they were was unthinkable.

Captain Glenswarg was already persuaded; Captain Friedman was a little tougher to sell on the proposal. By the time they reached him by com, on the
Impris
bridge, there had already been one more time dislocation aboard
Impris
. "How do we know it won't make matters worse?" Friedman asked.

Before Legroeder could answer, Deutsch, on the other bridge with Friedman, pointed out that they were already on a nonstop course toward chaos; and surely it was better to try even a risky course of action than none at all. Before
he
could finish talking, Jamal stepped into view. His eyes were wide as he said, "You're going to deliberately take us
toward
that thing that we've been dreaming about?" Turning, he gesticulated toward Poppy, who was standing still as a statue, fear frozen on his face.

"We talked about it before, remember?" asked Legroeder, thinking,
it wasn't much more than an hour ago
.

"Yeah, but I didn't think we were going to fly right into the thing's face!" Jamal protested. "It's not like we exactly
agreed
to it."

"No, we didn't," Poppy whispered, behind him.

Legroeder drew a breath, wanting to close his eyes and go somewhere far, far away. "We talked about the fact that it might be necessary."

Palagren stepped up beside him to speak into the com. Jamal's eyes grew even wider at the sight of the Narseil. "You are right, that this is a dangerous plan," Palagren said. "But we know what will happen if we stay. The situation will grow steadily more desperate. We won't have saved you; we will have doomed you, and us, to watching each other die... very slowly."

"But—"
You Narseil,
Jamal seemed about to say. He didn't complete the thought aloud.

Friedman faded out of the image, then reappeared. "If I may point out—we have watched people die here, and it is not pleasant."

By now, they had all heard the story: the boy who in despair had poisoned himself with a fast-acting poison—or so he had thought. Due to the time distortions, he had died for almost a year, ship's time. The captain had finally moved him to the bridge, where time seemed to move faster, to complete the process.

The two
Impris
riggers stood silent. They had no answer.

"I don't know about you," Friedman continued, "but I think a hundred and twenty-four years are enough. Let's do it."

Poppy and Jamal looked at each other, then at Deutsch. "Will
he
be flying with us?" Jamal asked.

"You can't ask for a better rigger on board with you," said Legroeder.

"He has those...
things
," Poppy said.

Legroeder drew a deep breath. "Yes. And those
things
may be what enable us to get you out. Give him a chance. I think you'll be surprised. Right, Freem'n?"

Before Deutsch could reply, Friedman said, "Consider it done. Riggers, make ready to sail."

Poppy and Jamal frowned. But if they were tempted to argue, something in the captain's expression persuaded them otherwise. One after another, they turned reluctantly toward their stations.

Departure had to await the engineers' completion of their work on the
Impris
powerplant. Legroeder's anxieties mounted with the delay, but they didn't dare fly without ensuring that
Impris
's flux-reactor and field components were properly tuned. Twice more, the other ship flickered out, leaving those on the
Phoenix
bridge holding their breaths. But when it reappeared the second time, they got the all-clear call from the Kyber engineers on
Impris
, and the riggers hurried to their posts.

As the rigger-station closed around him, Legroeder thought of how tired he felt, and how much he longed for a good night's sleep. It was foolhardy to fly while exhausted. But it would be worse to wait while things deteriorated.
(Whatever else you guys do, make sure I stay alert, okay?)

// Roger wilco,//
he heard in reply.

Legroeder was joined in the
Phoenix
net by Palagren and Ker'sell, and Cantha in Deutsch's place. They had decided that Cantha's inexperience in the net was outweighed by his knowledge of the quantum flaw. Cantha would ride in the top gun position, as observer and advisor. Legroeder, while still in command of the net, would fly in his accustomed stern-rigger spot; Palagren was in the lead position, and Ker'sell was at the keel. If Ker'sell still harbored any suspicions about Legroeder, he was keeping them to himself.

In the
Impris
net, Freem'n Deutsch would be the commanding rigger. There had been some argument about that; the
Impris
riggers had not been eager to relinquish control. But Captain Friedman had agreed that it was the best way to fly the ships in formation—with Deutsch's and Legroeder's augments linked by flux-com.

Is everyone ready?
Legroeder asked across the joined nets, as the connecting tube was drawn back to the Kyber ship. Deutsch murmured acknowledgment, as did the Narseil. Jamal and Poppy muttered ambiguously to themselves, probably trying not to show their fear.