Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  McGinnis struggled to focus his eyes on the kitchen counter. His heart was pounding with the terror... and with the jubilation of having won one more time.

  Always one more time. But the augments were not without deeper resources; and he knew their masters would be infuriated by his victory, his discipline and determination, and yes, his superior mental strength. Once the battle was truly joined, he couldn't win forever. He was weary, so weary. Soon the tiger would gain entry, and then his part in this war would be over. He'd bought a little time. But how much—a day? An hour? He hoped it would be long enough to do what he had to do.

  The supreme irony was, he actually shared many of the stated goals of the hated masters of his augments—he too longed for humanity to reach out again to the more distant stars. But this collaboration with pirates... never. Never.

  And now... out in the other room were two people he prayed he could trust—two guests who had fallen like angels into his life, to carry on the fight. Perhaps once they had the information and understood it, he could pass the burden at last. So weary...

  But he had to give them time to absorb the knowledge, to begin to comprehend it before he dared open his own thoughts to explanation. He had to buy his guests a little more time.

  He let his breath out slowly and ran his finger down the menu list on the cookmate. His guests might be angels, but they still needed to eat.

  * * *

  Legroeder adjusted the screen of his compad, and started with the Fandrang report. It began with an investigation of certain piloting reports from Impris of difficulties in navigation. The outcome, according to the abstract, was uncertain.

  Legroeder read the introduction:

  ...into circumstances surrounding the loss of the passenger starship Impris, owned and operated by Golden Star Lines of Faber Eridani. Once considered the "Princess of the Starlanes," Impris disappeared en route from Faber Eridani to Vedris IV, in the thirteenth week of the year 217 Space. This was in time of war; however, no evidence has been found of hostile action.

  Indeed, this report will examine certain troubling events noted prior to the final journey, events investigated by the author and his associate, Mr. Pen Lee. The investigators traveled aboard Impris three times prior to her disappearance, observing and interviewing her crew. By chance, the author left the ship immediately before her last fateful journey; however, Mr. Lee remained aboard and is presumed lost with her passengers and crew.

  The nature of the earlier events is difficult to summarize, and about them no firm conclusions can be drawn. They certainly call for a fuller investigation; they may present clues to rigging hazards that all would do well to understand. A fuller study may clarify the nature of that hazard—representing as it does the latest of the uncertainties and perils that have accompanied peoples of all kinds for as long as men have "gone down to the sea in ships."

  This much is known about the final voyage of Impris: she departed Faber Eridani on the last day of the twelfth week of 217 Space (local date: Sunday, Springtide the thirty-fourth), at 2635 local evening time, bound for Vedris IV. She carried a full complement of 74 crew, under Captain Noel Friedman, and 486 passengers, including Mr. Lee. Her itinerary called for a brief layover at Vedris IV, before continuing on into the Aeregian sector.

  Impris never reached Vedris IV. No communication was ever received from her. No evidence of her destruction has ever been found—though wreckage in interstellar space is notoriously difficult to locate. Though she traveled in time of war, she was far from areas of active conflict. Hostile action cannot be completely ruled out, but neither is there evidence to support...

  Legroeder scratched his head. "There's no mention of piracy as a possible explanation for her disappearance."

  Harriet glanced up from her viewer. "This was written just after the end of the war. If I'm not mistaken, there wasn't much piracy, even in Golen Space, for at least a decade after that."

  "That's right," said McGinnis, who had come back into the room and was working at the bar. "The raider culture developed after the war—though you can trace much of its origin to the war and its fallout. I'm surprised you don't know that."

  Legroeder felt a flash of irritation. "All right—so I flunked history. Give me a break, will you?" During the seven years of his captivity, he'd come to know a lot about the raider culture and its ways of operating, but very little about its past.

  McGinnis inclined his head in apology, and Legroeder read on.

  In the two years since her disappearance, several reports have been made to the RiggerGuild of purported sightings of Impris by riggers flying in the same region of the Flux, though not on identical routes. Upon investigation, these reports were dismissed by Guild authorities as imaginative constructs by riggers who, it must be said, are preselected for an ability to create vivid imagery. Nonetheless, these reports did bear certain similarities to the earlier reports by Impris's own riggers, which triggered the initial phase of this investigation.

  The statements from the Impris riggers will be examined in detail in the main body of this report. In brief, however, they concerned two distinct, but possibly related, classes of phenomenon: 1) a series of unexplained sightings of ships in the Flux; and 2) a series of difficulties experienced by the crew in returning from the Flux into normal-space.

  The sightings, three in number, came to be referred to by the Impris crew as "ghost ship" sightings. The ships, while bearing markings of known worlds, appeared only briefly and did not respond to efforts at communication, nor could all riggers in the net confirm the sightings. The riggers came to describe these events as sightings of the "Flying Dutchman"—a reference to ancient legends of a haunted seagoing ship, a vessel doomed to sail through eternity with neither port nor rest nor hope.*

  Was this a whimsical designation, reflecting the imaginary nature of the sightings? Or was it a truthful and accurate observation of a ship or ships caught in some dreadful layer of the Flux, unable to reach port or even respond to communication?

  *References to the Flying Dutchman are hardly new to star rigging. The legendary ship Devonhol has long been a part of rigger lore, despite the lack of historical evidence for the existence of such a ship.

  Most of this material was familiar, so Legroeder skipped ahead to the main body of the report. Fandrang and Lee had conducted extensive interviews with her rigger crew and captain. Fandrang noted that even after in-depth analysis, he found it impossible to draw conclusions. Nevertheless...

  We found surprising consistency in the sightings, even when reported by different sets of riggers on separate occasions—similarity in the sudden but fleeting manner of the other ships' appearances in the Flux, in the reception of faint distress calls, and in the subjective impressions of there being something wrong aboard the ghost ships—specifically, a sense of a "living presence" within the ghost ships, as though there were live riggers in the other ships' nets straining to reach out to make contact...

  Captain Friedman regarded these sightings as significant in terms of the psychology of his own rigger crew—thus his request for outside consultation—but he discounted their reality in physical terms. (See Appendix A: "Captain Friedman Interview.") It was the captain's belief that a pattern had developed within the rigger crew's imaging, predisposing them to "see" things like ghost ships during certain kinds of Flux transition. His concern was more for the possibility of group hallucination among the rigger-crew, with attendant risks to the safety of the ship.

  Our own survey of the Impris rigger-crew supported no such concerns at the time—though of course now, with the disappearance of the ship, we must reconsider all possibilities. (See Appendix B: "Rigger Interviews 1-17.") We found all members of the crew to be clear minded, cooperative and helpful—at least within the bounds of normal rigger variance. Several were rather private individuals, a common enough trait among riggers, and several exhibited low levels of anxiety concerning our presence and the matter we were investigating. However, none of these obse
rvations caused us to consider detaining the ship in port or to request replacement crew. Indeed, we felt that it was a fine crew.

  What did concern us was the possibility of some physical effect arising from repeated passage through the interstellar Flux. This is a vaguely stated concern, but it is difficult to be more precise without further data. Could problems be traced to certain regions of the Flux? If so, why were similar problems not noted on other ships? Were the difficulties experienced in exiting the Flux (Appendix C: "Prior Navigational Anomalies") somehow related to the sightings, real or imagined, of the ghost ships? These were among the questions we sought to answer.

  Legroeder read with growing interest. The navigational difficulties Fandrang referred to mostly seemed to involve transient conflicts of imagery in the net. Shared imagery, of course, lay at the core of flight with a multi-rigger crew. One rigger had described a tenuous feeling in the net, a temporary difficulty in finding anchor points in the Flux. This reference was not to physical points in space or time, but rather intuitive compass points in the minds of the riggers. Without such anchors, riggers would find it impossible to make navigational connections back to normal-space.

  Legroeder skimmed ahead, looking for an explanation. He found, not an answer but a suspicion, further into the text.

  "What's he talking about with these EQ levels along starship routes?" Harriet asked, peering over the top of her glasses. Apparently she had reached the same section.

  "EQ is an old mathematical expression for energetic turbulence leaking into the Flux from black holes, star formation, matter annihilation, that sort of thing. No one uses the term much anymore. It was an approximation for something no one quite understood."

  "Do they understand it now?"

  "Well—we're using different measurements now. It's still an imperfect science. From what I hear, the Narseil come closest to having a good theoretical understanding."

  "So maybe they should have been brought in on this investigation?"

  Legroeder stared back at her reflectively. "Yeah, maybe. Except... they got blamed for it, right?"

  "Ah. Yes," Harriet said.

  Legroeder continued reading.

  ...in comparing the flight histories of Impris with those of other ships flying well-established routes, we found Impris crews experiencing a 37 percent higher-than-mean EQ exposure. In fact, the very stability of the crew during her final year resulted in even greater EQ exposure than the "average" Impris crew over the ship's lifetime.

  Tables followed, which Legroeder only glanced over. He hadn't looked at this sort of thing in a long time, and it hadn't gotten any easier to read over the years. He pushed ahead to the conclusions.

  No intimations of carelessness or negligence should be inferred from these findings. All flights appear to have been conducted within lawful limits; nevertheless, the fact emerges that the flight paths of Impris's normal runs did expose her to areas of relatively high EQ.

  One important factor may turn out to be the star-birthing region of the Akeides Nebula—a navigational "caution point" along the route between Karg-Elert 4 and Vedris IV, and a sightseeing attraction for passengers. Though unquestionably a beautiful sight, one must ask: is the nebula also a hazard to those who pass by it? This report draws no conclusions, but we believe the matter deserves further study—not just with respect to the Akeides Nebula, but EQ exposure in general. More will be said about this in Section 4...

  At this point, the report shifted to a history of the Fandrang/Lee investigation, including logs of the observation flights. Legroeder flipped through the pages awhile, then sat gazing into the fire in the fireplace, lost in dark thought on the possibility of there being something in the Flux, something unidentified, that could so drastically interfere with a rigger's ability to find his way among the stars.

  "Legroeder? What do you make of it?" Harriet had a troubled expression on her face.

  He turned from the fire, shrugging. "I wish I knew."

  "Well, you're the rigger. Does this stuff seem plausible?"

  "Which? The ghost ship sightings? The EQ readings?"

  "Any of it. All of it."

  Legroeder sighed. "Who can tell? But if any of it is true, then riggers need to know."

  "Excuse me," Harriet said pointedly. "If it is true, then we need to know. It could constitute objective evidence that Impris is still out there."

  "Oh. Yeah." For a few minutes there, Legroeder had lost sight of his own troubles. "But Fandrang doesn't seem to have come up with any answers."

  "Well—" Harriet pressed a finger to her lips. "If Impris is still out there—and we know it is—then we're back to the question of why someone, aside from the pirates, wants nobody else to know. Wants it badly enough to hide evidence of a danger to all riggers." She tapped the compad screen and looked around. "I wonder where our host—oh, there he is."

  "What do you think?" McGinnis said, coming through the door.

  "It's damn sobering," said Legroeder. "But if this Inspector Fandrang was so well respected, why weren't his suspicions ever investigated further?"

  McGinnis sat down heavily, his face creased with the now-familiar pained expression. "Why, indeed?"

  "And why were these documents removed from public access?" asked Harriet. "I can only think of two plausible reasons. One is that they were discredited upon examination."

  "I've found no evidence of that." McGinnis clasped white-knuckled hands in front of himself.

  "Then the other is that they endangered someone's position, power, or money."

  McGinnis made a clicking sound with his tongue, and almost smiled. He riffled the documents in his hands.

  "What are we talking about?" Harriet asked. "A cover-up by the shipping line?"

  McGinnis shook his head. "None that I could see. Oh sure, there might have been a wish not to alarm potential passengers—and perhaps liability concerns. Certainly, for the Golden Star Line, it was preferable for the public to think that the ship was destroyed by the Narseil than that it didn't come back because its riggers had... how shall we say, faded into the Flux."

  "Well, that right there—"

  "But that's not all there was to it," McGinnis interrupted. "That much would have come out eventually, if there hadn't been someone who wanted it hidden, badly enough to see to it that history was rewritten."

  "And who might that have been?" Harriet asked.

  McGinnis rested the documents on the table with care. "I don't know—if I can tell you—that." He seemed to be struggling again, a grimace creasing his face. "I can show you what information was hidden. But by whom is... difficult." He drew one slow breath after another, until the grimace faded. "If we had the time, I could take you through some of the ways the truth was obliterated in the public record—or altered enough that it might as well have been obliterated. But to really understand that time period... you'd have to visit a historian I know."

  Harriet cocked her head with interest.

  "A Narseil. By the name of El'ken."

  Legroeder stared at McGinnis in astonishment. The Narseil historian El'ken. Even Legroeder had heard of him. "But if the Narseil were framed for the loss of the ship—"

  "You won't necessarily receive a warm welcome. Even a century later, El'ken hasn't forgotten, or forgiven. The breach has never really healed. But for reasons of his research, El'ken lives here in this system, out in the first belt. Asteroid named Arco Iris. I'll give you a reference, if you like."

  "But why would someone go to such trouble to discredit the Narseil? It makes no sense."

  McGinnis, eyebrows raised, seemed about to nod in agreement; then his movement froze, and he squeezed his eyes shut in obvious pain. A warbling chime sounded somewhere, and he seemed to be struggling against an urge to turn his head.

  Harriet reached out her hand. "Mr. McGinnis—"

  "No," he whispered, his face pale. The chime continued, insistently. McGinnis stood up awkwardly. "If you'll... excuse me... for just a moment..."

>   Legroeder felt an inexplicable urge to reach out, to stop him. He felt his hands clench as McGinnis disappeared into the hallway. A moment later, he heard the sound of a door locking.

  He and Harriet stared at each other. Legroeder's heart was hammering; he didn't know why. He swallowed and picked up the Fandrang report again. Across the table, Harriet did likewise. But neither of them could read long without their gazes being drawn to the back of the room.

  * * *

  Robert McGinnis locked the door to his office and tested it with a shaking hand, then lowered himself into his desk chair. He drew a slow breath as he turned on the neural-interface panel. His head was throbbing from the inner struggle. The chime had been a summons from his security monitor. He was under assault, this time not just from his own implants, but from the outside. The enemy had been blocking his outside transmissions earlier; now they were trying to force their own way in through his security shields. Not a physical attack, of course. No, this was much worse...

  There was so much he had wanted to say... about criminals in government, and the Kyber, and their meddling with all of space commerce... but he couldn't risk, because the barrier he'd built between his thoughts and the implants was beginning to fail. And now it was too late to say it directly to Legroeder and Mahoney. But perhaps there was another way.

  This was all happening far faster than he'd anticipated. The enemy must have glimpsed enough through his mental barriers to at least suspect his intentions. Now they would do everything in their power to stop him—everything short of revealing themselves to the rest of the world. But he, McGinnis, was expendable. This was the battle he had been dreading. A battle to the death.