Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  Legroeder felt faint. "Meaning, if we don't get out soon, we won't get out at all?"

  "Precisely."

  "And have you come up with a way to do it? To get out?"

  "Possibly. That confirmation of the dreams might be an important clue. If there is a deeper structure... and people, riggers, are somehow sensing it subconsciously..."

  Legroeder frowned.

  "Hold on a moment, Legroeder. Palagren wants to talk to you."

  Legroeder waited, drumming his fingers on the table. Finally he heard Palagren's voice. "Are you there? Did Cantha tell you that we have to move fast?"

  "Yes. But he didn't say how we were going to do it."

  "We think we have a way. But we nee-e-e-d to-o-o ta-a-a-a-l-l-l-k-k..." Palagren's answer suddenly stretched out into a long distortion of his voice, then faded away.

  "Palagren? Palagren?"

  // We have lost the connection.//

  (Can you get it back?)

  // We are trying, but there is no longer a com-signal.//

  "What is it, Legroeder?" Deutsch asked.

  Legroeder gestured sharply. "See if you can raise the ship."

  Deutsch became very still, then shook his head.

  Friedman reached for his own com-set. "Bridge! Has there been any change in the other ship?"

  "Excuse me, sir?" came the answer.

  "The other ship. Phoenix. Is there a change in its condition."

  There was a pause. "I'm not sure what you mean, sir. What other ship?"

  "The ship that docked with us a few hours ago!" Friedman shouted.

  "Sir?" said the voice on the bridge. "We haven't had contact with another ship in at least a month. Is there... a problem, sir?"

  "With me? No." Friedman snapped off the com in frustration, then snapped it back on. "Bridge, give me a time and date check."

  "Certainly," said the bridge officer, sounding relieved to have a question that could be answered. "It's now 1730 hours. And we're showing, let's see, day six hundred fifty-two."

  Friedman stiffened. "Thank you." He snapped off the com.

  "What?" Legroeder said.

  "The bridge is two days behind us. Your ship hasn't arrived, as far as they're concerned." Friedman's face was ashen. "This has never happened before. It's definitely getting worse, isn't it?"

  Legroeder took a deep breath. "Yes," he whispered. "Yes, it is."

  Chapter 31

  Splinters in Time

  "I would like to suggest," Deutsch said, "that we forget about what day it is, or whether our ship happens to be out there right now."

  "Excuse me?" said Jamal. "Are you aware of what's happening here?" You Kyber, his eyes seemed to say.

  "I do understand," said Deutsch. "We must assume that, at some point, our ship will reappear. When that happens, we should be ready to move."

  "Agreed," Legroeder said. He had been running through various scenarios in his head, and the one that scared him the most was the one where they waited too long and found they'd missed their opportunity to escape. "It's clear Palagren has a plan for attempting to fly out."

  "Great. What good does that do, if we don't know what it is?" Poppy muttered.

  "But we should be ready to act when we do find out what it is. And—" Legroeder focused inward for a moment "—the first question is whether we should try to fly the two ships out together, which could be very difficult and dangerous, or instead just get everyone over to Phoenix." He turned to Captain Friedman, whose eyes he'd been avoiding. "I'm sorry, Captain. We must consider the possibility."

  Friedman's face had turned even whiter, if that was possible. "You don't know what you're saying," he whispered. "We have passengers who are hiding, crewmen disappearing and reappearing..." He shook his head, and appeared to regain strength as he drew a deep breath. "I don't think we could ever be sure we had them all. And some people would never willingly leave the ship."

  Including you? Legroeder wondered.

  "We cannot assume that everyone will be rational about it."

  "Well," said Deutsch, "I think we would all prefer to bring Impris out, if we can do it safely. Our people very much want to study it."

  Jamal's voice was a flat twang of skepticism. "I don't know how we're going to get one ship, let alone two, out of this—whatever you called it—fold in the underflux." His nostrils flared. Prove it to me, his gleaming white eyes seemed to say.

  Legroeder couldn't; he could only guess what Palagren had been about to say. But it had something to do with the hidden structure in the Flux. "The Narseil seemed to think that those dreams of yours might be an important clue in how to get out."

  Jamal shuddered. "Man—if you are trying to reassure me, that's not the way to do it."

  Legroeder persisted. "I think the dreams may be trying to tell us something about the Deep Flux. And the more you can tell us about them, the better."

  Jamal glanced at his crewmates, shrugged, and began talking.

  * * *

  "...I don't always see the same thing, but it's always the same feeling—you know what I'm saying? That there's something out there." Jamal's voice fell to a murmur, straining. "Something that... devours."

  Legroeder suppressed a shiver as his own memories surfaced. "Suppose," he said, following a sudden hunch, "that you had to confront this thing—whatever it is. To get your ship out. Could you do that? Could you face it?"

  Jamal shook his head. "I just want to get away from it, man."

  "But suppose it's what's keeping you here." Legroeder's voice became husky. "Suppose, to find your way past it, you had to make it real. In the net. Could you?"

  Beads of sweat were forming on Jamal's forehead.

  Legroeder felt a sudden wave of dizziness, and leaned heavily on his elbows for support. (What's happening?)

  // We have contact with the ship.//

  "Thank God!" he gasped.

  "For what?" said Poppy, who had been sitting tightlipped since giving a terse description of his dreams.

  "Our ship is back," Legroeder said. He held up a hand. (Put me through.)

  // We have a voice channel—//

  "Phoenix," Legroeder snapped. "Can you hear me?"

  "Legroeder?" called Cantha. "Are you there? For a few minutes, it looked like you flickered out. Not you—the whole ship."

  "Tell me about it. Look, Cantha—we have a crew here that's ready to do whatever's necessary to get out." Right? he asked with his eyes, of the Impris riggers. Jamal scowled, while Poppy looked as if he had been drained of emotion. After a moment, Jamal nodded reluctantly; then Poppy. Good. "I think I should probably get back over to Phoenix to plan with you and Palagren," Legroeder said to Cantha.

  Jamal sneered at that. "What, you're going to cut and run now? And leave us here?"

  "I'm doing nothing of the kind," Legroeder said, with annoyance. "But we've got a lot of planning to do." He turned in his seat. "Freem'n, what do you think?"

  Deutsch raised his chin. "Okay—but how about I stay and work with these guys. That okay with you?" He surveyed Friedman and the two Impris riggers, who looked frightened at the prospect. "Flying out of here is going be a real bitch, you know. Anyone else think formation flying, through instabilities and quantum fluctuations, might be hard?"

  Poppy squinted hard at him. "You've got those—" He jerked his chin at Deutsch.

  "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, Legr
oeder 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."