Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  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...

  * * *

  Impris Patrol

  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."

  Harriet lowered her eyeglasses, trying to find words. "Let me understand this. McGinnis booby-trapped his own home? Why would he—unless—"

  "—unless he felt deeply threatened," Peter said. "A longtime threat, so grave that he was prepared to destroy himself, his home, and all of his records, rather than... what?" Peter gazed steadily at Harriet. "Of course, he didn't destroy his records. He gave them to you instead."

  Harriet drew a deep breath, trying not to succumb to dizziness at the implications. "But what was the threat? Why was it so great that he was willing to take his own life?" She pinched her brow, thinking of the records now in their possession. She was more grateful than ever that they had secured copies in various safe locations. She looked at Peter again. "There's something you're waiting to tell me."

  Peter gave a lopsided grin. "Not tell you. Show you. Remember the dog?"

  "What dog?" asked Morgan.

  "McGinnis's. Harriet remembers, don't you?"

  "How could I forget?" Harriet shuddered at the memory of the dog convulsing outside McGinnis's house, and then bursting through the security forcefield to flee the fire. She still felt guilty for leaving it. But then, she'd left McGinnis, too.

  "Well, one of my people has found it. Brought it back, alive and well."

  Harriet felt her heart race, without quite knowing why. Morgan clapped her hands and cried, "And we get to adopt it?" Harriet eyed her, and Morgan shrugged. "Well, why not?"

  Peter eyed Morgan ba
lefully. "I'm pleased that I could amuse you. Perhaps, if all works out, you will get to adopt it. But as a matter of fact, the dog turns out to be carrying some extremely useful information. I brought a vid to show you." He pulled a cube from his pocket.

  Harriet pointed to the player the Narseil had provided them. Popping in the cube, Peter said, "This first one was shot at a safe house outside the city, where we first brought the dog."

  The recording was of moderately amateurish quality. It showed the brown dog, Rufus, in a sparsely furnished room, with two of Peter's assistants—one apparently controlling the camera, none too steadily. Harriet watched in silent fascination. The dog looked gaunter than she remembered, but seemed unharmed.

  "That's my assistant Norman," Peter said, pointing to the man on screen who was crouched in front of the dog, trying to calm it. "Irv's doing camera. He's the one who caught it. Irv's afraid of dogs. I was proud of him."

  Harriet nodded, fascinated by what was developing on the screen. The dog was clearly terrified, and growing more so every time it opened its mouth to bark. The reason quickly became obvious. Instead of a bark, what came out were garbled, but almost human, sounds. "What is that?" Harriet asked, leaning closer to hear. It was a husky, hissing voice. "It sounds like words!"

  "Mhhusssst rrrr t-hhelll..." rasped the dog.

  "Is the dog talking?"

  "Hrrrrr... musssst trrrrelll..."

  "Must tell?" Harriet looked at Peter and demanded, "Is that what it's saying?"

  Morgan was shaking her head. "You can't be serious." But the look of skepticism on her face was evaporating as the dog strained to be heard—and then cringed, as though from the sound of its own voice.

  "Very good, Harriet!" Peter said. "It took us much longer to figure it out. But look at this—" He pointed to the screen, where the dog was now pawing at something on the side of its head. The camera zoomed in, and something twinkled behind the dog's ear.

  "An implant! I remember now, Legroeder noticed it."

  "Exactly." Peter fast-forwarded the playback. "There's more of this stuff, which you can watch later if you want. But once we realized that it was trying to get us to notice the implant, then we started getting somewhere." The playback resumed, with Norman whispering soothingly to the dog and gently touching the implant. He murmured, almost inaudibly, "—get you hooked up. We'll get some equipment on you, boy." With those words, the dog's ears perked up and he began licking Norman's hand frantically.

  "The dog understood," Morgan said in astonishment.

  Peter stopped the playback and changed cubes. "Exactly. We didn't have the right equipment on hand, so we had to do some hunting around. Once we had him hooked up to the right implant com-gear, this is what we heard."

  The second vid started with the dog being connected, with some difficulty, to a modified headset. Rufus remained calm during the hookup procedure, but as soon as the equipment was turned on, he became excited. He barked sharply, twice. And then—not from the dog but from the speaker on the nearby console—came a human voice. Strained and distorted, it was nonetheless recognizable as the voice of Robert McGinnis.

  "If you can hear these words, know that the information I am about to give you is extremely urgent—and extremely dangerous. If possible, forward it to Rigger Renwald Legroeder, or attorney Harriet Mahoney—or failing that, anyone looking for the historical truth of the lost starship Impris. Be aware—this information concerns not just Impris, but also present-day interference in local spacing affairs by agents of the so-called Free Kyber Republic.

  "Time is short..."

  Harriet felt her breath tighten, as Peter paused the playback. "McGinnis must have been recording this at the same time he was getting you out of the house," Peter said. He unpaused the vid. As the dog sat utterly still, with a strange look of intense concentration, McGinnis's voice continued:

  "I do not know if I will survive the next minutes or hour. I am... under heavy attack from the Kyber pirates who installed these damnable implants in my skull. Thirty years ago they tried to make me their agent on Faber Eridani, and nearly succeeded. I have endeavored to make them believe that they succeeded, while safeguarding the Impris records that they wanted destroyed or altered. With great difficulty, I have managed to deceive my own implants. But no longer.

  "I repeat: I am under attack from within—possibly driven by external transmission. The implants have discovered my deception. I am... resisting... under great duress... an almost irresistible command... to kill... Rigger Legroeder and Mrs. Mahoney, to whom I have just released the Impris records. I made a hurried judgment as to their trustworthiness, and I pray I made the right decision. I must resist long enough to let them get clear. I wanted to tell them so much more. But I may have only minutes now before I must end this battle... for good... if I am to keep from destroying them.

  "I'll upload what I can into Rufus's implants, and hope that it may do some good, if it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. But if it does... to hell with... what can you do to me that you haven't done already?" The voice became terribly strained. "You... bastards!"

  For a moment, there was silence, and then he seemed to regain strength.

  "Do not allow this recording to fall into the hands of the Spacing Authority or the RiggerGuild. Both are under the influence of the Free Kyber, the Golen Space pirates. Insidious bastards! For years, they've distorted the events of history, betraying their own people to the Kyber. I do not know who to trust in positions of authority—or if you can trust anyone. I only know, the infestation goes very high..."

  There was another break in the recording. The dog's ears twitched, and he seemed about to whine. Peter raised a finger to wait, and then came a last, gasping sentence.

  "I will now upload the data log. Take care of Rufus for me..."

  His voice trailed off, and there was a rasp of static. Rufus emitted a long howl. Then he lay down and rested his chin on his forepaws, seemingly oblivious to the com set strapped to his head.

  Peter turned off the recording. "That was recorded yesterday. My people are working now to see if they can retrieve the data upload. It's some kind of neural-net recording—very difficult to decipher."

  Morgan's eyes were wide. "There are some pretty damning statements in there."

  Peter's eyes glimmered. "Yes, indeed. But no names, no dates, no events. Not yet. That's what I'm hoping we can get from the recording."

  Harriet nodded, listening with only half her mind, as she remembered: ... pray I made the right decision. She heard a voice, and only slowly became aware that it was her own. "He killed himself... so he wouldn't kill us..."

  * * *

  Peter was preparing to leave when a call came on his collar-com. It was Pew, his Swert associate. "What have you got?" Peter asked. And to Harriet and Morgan: "I sent him up to Forest Hills, near the Fabri preserve. Remember the car that took Maris O'Hare was spotted there... some sort of traffic thing?"

  Harriet nodded, as Pew reported in a foghorn voice, distorted by the com. "Nothing from the traffic incident, Peter. But it transpires they made a fueling stop here. An attendant remembers them—that two people got out and walked around the car—the attendant does not recall looking inside the vehicle." But the attendant did remember their being joined by a local, someone new in town, who lived up in the hills nearby. The attendant was suspicious of newcomers and outsiders, including Pew. "But I persuaded him to tell me which way they headed."

  "Do you have the location?" Peter asked.

  "General area. Going to check further, now. I wanted to apprise you."

  "Don't get too close," said Peter. "I'm going to send some backup. Where are you now?"

  "At the hydrostop." Pew gave him the address and number.

  "Stay put until I contact Georgio. I'll call you back."

  Peter smacked a fist into his hand and gazed at Harriet and Morgan. "The rental car was returned two hundred kilometers west of here. But only after it went north to a rendezvous in this little town. Doe
s that suggest anything to you?"

  "It certainly does," said Harriet. "That's near the Fabri native lands. I wonder if Vegas has any connections there."

  "I don't know about that. But it suggests to me that I'd better go with Georgio," Morgan said.

  "Why, in Heaven's name?" asked Harriet, a knot tightening in her stomach. "You're not a detective."

  "We've been over this before, Mother. If we find the people holding Maris, we're going to have to line up the legal case fast. You can't be there, but I can. I'll start by producing the hospital documentation showing that they claimed they were taking her to this other hospital in—wherever it was. Arlmont?" Morgan paused only momentarily as Harriet frowned at her. "Then we can call in the local or provincial police. If they're honest, we can at least get Maris into protective custody in another hospital." Morgan hesitated. "Assuming she's still alive, of course."

  Harriet's heart sank as she thought of the attempt on her life and Legroeder's. And yet, Morgan was right. They just might have a chance to save Maris, after all.

  "All right," she muttered at last. "You win. Go with Georgio—but you by God be careful!"

  * * *

  Adaria kept her wings close about her as she scurried from the Elmira Public Library, satchel held tightly in her arms. She blinked a trace of a tear from her eyes. She was going to miss the library, and her work. She would miss the friends she had made here. She would miss living in the company of interesting humans.

  She would not miss the intimidation and fear, however.

  She would not miss the insidious presence of Centrist Strength, and government officials who meddled in the business of truth preservation, which was a proper business of libraries.

  It is not good, that people should be driven from such a calling—that the preservation of truth should be interfered with. But what can I do? One Fabri?