Legroeder's heartbeat quickened as he saw her gesturing and giving orders. Lieutenant Zond brought them through the circle. It took Tracy-Ace a few moments to notice them; she turned with a big grin, her eyes shining—and did a double take when she saw Legroeder's hair. She didn't say a word about it, but strode forward with an outstretched hand to greet him. "Rigger Legroeder! Welcome back to Outpost Ivan!"
Legroeder had been wondering how he should greet her. Taking her cue, he clasped her hand in an official welcome. He felt an electric tingle at her touch, and her beaming if slightly unfocused smile. For a moment, he felt a giddy desire to enfold her in his arms; but then the tingle fled, and her smile and hand moved on, leaving him empty as she turned to his Narseil friends. "Welcome back, all of you! And congratulations! You've accomplished an astounding feat!" Tracy-Ace made a sweeping gesture to the starliner. "Impris! You brought her back safely! Who would have believed it?"
As she marveled, Legroeder found himself feeling ignored by Tracy-Ace. Is it because we're in public? Or is something going on? He cleared his throat. Don't be a fool; she could hardly hug you in front of everyone, could she? I don't care; I don't like being ignored. He cleared his throat again. "Did you get our preliminary report?"
"Indeed, we did," boomed a voice beside him, and Legroeder turned to see a larger-than-life holo of Yankee-Zulu/Ivan floating beside him. "It's an incredible story. Simply incredible. We want to hear every detail."
Legroeder inclined his head in acknowledgment, wondering why YZ/I had chosen to appear in holo, rather than in person.
"We're expecting the Impris officers to emerge momentarily," Tracy-Ace said, her temple implants racing with activity. For an instant Legroeder thought he caught the familiar twinkle in her eye, and he suppressed a flutter of excitement. "We have people standing by to give Impris a royal welcome. We've got medical teams, engineering teams, hospitality teams..."
Hospitality teams? Legroeder suddenly saw a new holo—a large brass ensemble poised just outside the circle. Okay... He let out a long, slow breath, waiting for the hatch to open. Trying to ignore Tracy-Ace. Focus on Impris... on the mysteries of the ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman of space. It would soon be crawling with Kyber techs. He felt a sudden surge of resentment. Damn it, these were his mysteries to reveal, his and the others who had gone through it with him.
A shout went up. A dark opening appeared in the airlock. The brass ensemble played a triumphant fanfare. And now, emerging ahead of the other officers and crew, were Captain Noel Friedman and Rigger Freem'n Deutsch. The captain's face looked as if it were about to crack, straining between joy and solemnity; but Deutsch, though his facial expressions were concealed behind metal skin, appeared to Legroeder to be grinning from ear to ear.
"Welcome back to civilization!" boomed the voice of YZ/I.
"Thank you," Friedman whispered, looking around.
Legroeder could not contain himself. He strode forward to greet Friedman and Deutsch. "Captain!" he cried. "Freem'n! Am I glad to see you!"
The solemnity on Captain Friedman's face finally cracked. "Halleluiah!" he cried, raising his hands joyfully. "Landfall! By God, I never thought I'd see the day again!" He cocked his head in puzzlement, as he pumped Legroeder's hand. "Is that you, Legroeder? What the hell's happened to your hair, man?"
"Well, it's, uh—" Legroeder gestured helplessly "—I'll have to explain later." He suddenly realized he wasn't observing any kind of protocol here. "Captain Friedman, may I introduce you to the leader of the Outpost, Yankee-Zulu/Ivan?" He gestured to the holo of YZ/I, who was lit up like a Christmas tree. "And Tracy-Ace/Alfa, YZ/I's right-hand assistant."
"Welcome to Outpost Ivan of the Free Kyber Republics," Tracy-Ace said smoothly, stepping forward. "We're delighted to see Impris, and to extend our hospitality to you, to your crew, and to all of your passengers."
The brass ensemble struck up another welcoming tune.
Friedman bowed with obvious relief. "Thank you. Thank you all for coming to the aid of my ship and crew. We are honored to accept your hospitality." He gestured to the emerging officers. "Needless to say, we are eager to get back to our home port. But we would be most grateful for your assistance with repairs and supplies and so on."
Freem'n Deutsch stood just behind Friedman, looking inscrutable. Legroeder held his breath, watching Tracy-Ace.
Tracy-Ace bowed. "Captain, we will assist you with medical treatment and whatever else you need."
"Indeed," said YZ/I's holo. "And after all the time you've been away, we hope you might enjoy a look at our modest outpost. I think you'll find it rather different from Faber Eridani."
"Yes, of course," Friedman said. But a shadow had crept over his face. "We certainly appreciate the offer of help. Including the medical—though I'm afraid for many of our people, the needs are more psychological than medical. It has been... a difficult ordeal."
"We understand—and we'll do our best," Tracy-Ace promised.
"Some of them," Friedman continued, "might be reluctant to leave the ship. It is difficult to explain..."
"Then our people will go to them," Tracy-Ace said. "Captain, we would very much like to study your ship. We hope to find some explanation for what you and your crew have gone through."
"Certainly, you may look," Friedman said. "But I think you'll learn more from the riggers who brought us out. Rigger Deutsch here. Rigger Legroeder. The Narseil."
Legroeder suddenly knew why he felt a slowly tightening knot in his stomach. Yes, it was the riggers who knew; the ship would tell them nothing. And it was he and the Narseil who knew most of all. And that made them a valuable—perhaps dangerously valuable—commodity. Was it his imagination, or was Deutsch peering at him with eyes that seemed to reflect his own thoughts?
He spoke suddenly, to release the tension. "I believe you're right, Captain. It's not the ship we need to understand; it's the Flux. My Narseil colleagues and I have been working very hard to formulate answers—for all of us." He turned to YZ/I and Tracy-Ace. "We'll be happy to go over it all with you at your earliest convenience." But I don't know how you're going to take what we have to say.
"The sooner the better," rumbled the image of YZ/I. "Why don't you come on down now?"
Tracy-Ace's implants flickered with intense activity. She cocked her head and raised a hand. "Excellent idea. Lieutenant Zond, would you care to escort—?"
* * *
It was probably just as well that Tracy-Ace wasn't with them, Legroeder thought as they approached YZ/I's operations center. He had enough to think about right now without wondering what was going on in her mind. Freem'n was at his side, but they'd had no chance to talk privately. Behind them walked all of the Narseil except Agamem, who'd been sent to report back to Commander Fre'geel. Legroeder's thoughts were starting to percolate with memories of the passage, and a flood of further questions, many of them coming from the implants in his skull. It was going to be hard to keep his head clear for this meeting.
A man was just leaving YZ/I's command platform as they approached—a dark-haired, red-skinned man. It took Legroeder a moment to place him; he was the one who'd argued with YZ/I and Tracy-Ace during their previous meeting. He searched his memory for the man's name. Lanyard/GC. Old boyfriend of Tracy-Ace's or something. A pain in the ass. Legroeder was glad he was leaving, not arriving.
"Thank you for sharing your concerns with me," YZ/I called after Lanyard, who seemed to give a silent snort. As he passed, Lanyard glanced at Legroeder and the Narseil with what seemed a mix of curiosity and derision.
Legroeder forgot Lanyard as YZ/I boomed out, "Wonderful to see you! All of you! Come in, come in!" The glowing man greeted Legroeder with a hearty handshake. "I was afraid I'd never see you again. And here you are! Incredible mission—just fantastic!" YZ/I's face rippled with light as he waved them all into the command section of his operations center. He sealed the section off with an opaque force-screen. "So, Legroeder. How's it feel to be back?"
Legroeder laug
hed, in spite of himself. "Glad to be here. Glad to be alive."
"I can imagine," said YZ/I. He studied Legroeder for a moment. "Nice haircut, by the way. Did you do that yourself?"
Legroeder sighed deeply. He thought he heard the Narseil chuckling behind him. "You could say that, I suppose." He cleared his throat. "Anyway—we're here, and we're ready to report."
"Excellent." YZ/I rubbed his hands together expectantly. "I wish I could have been there at the docks in person. But I'm afraid that... well, certain political concerns precluded that. I do apologize. Now, tell me everything. Everything that happened. Everything you learned." His face and body shimmered with moving patches of color. YZ/I spread his hands and looked piercingly at Legroeder.
Legroeder frowned, trying to frame words. "I can tell you what happened," he said finally. "But telling you what we learned—that's going to be more difficult."
"Then let's start with what's easy," YZ/I said.
Legroeder felt momentarily at a loss; he gestured helplessly to his fellow riggers.
"Come, gentlemen," YZ/I laughed. "Impris is sitting in my docking port. You found her." He clapped his hands together. "Don't be bashful. Tell me how you did it."
"Perhaps I can summarize," said Cantha. And in a husky murmur, the Narseil gave a recap of the search for and discovery of Impris. He paused for breath, then briefly explained how the time instabilities had forced their hasty departure.
YZ/I's eyes were intense with interest. "So the key discovery in all of this was the spacetime... 'quantum flaw.' Is that right?" He rummaged in his seat pockets until he found a cigar. He inspected it thoughtfully, as though by mulling over the cigar he might comprehend the meaning of the phrase, quantum flaw.
"Yes," Legroeder said, finding his voice again. "And we can't explain it fully, because we don't understand it fully. We can tell you how we got into the flaw, and how we got out, but I'm not sure we can tell you why."
YZ/I stopped in the middle of lighting his cigar. "You don't know why you did what you did?"
"We know why we made certain decisions. But in the larger sense—it all happened so fast that by the end we were operating almost wholly on instinct."
YZ/I puffed. "And once it was over, and you had some time to reflect back on it?"
Legroeder snorted. "Once we got out of the flaw, we had a little something else to think about—a ship named Hunter. I presume Captain Glenswarg informed you about our brush with KM/C?"
"Yes, he did," YZ/I said. "It was exactly as we feared—Carlotta did not take kindly to having their prize lure taken out of the water."
"No." Legroeder reflected back on the discovery that his former captain was trying to kill him. "No, they did not."
"Well, I'm glad our people were able to take care of it without too much trouble," YZ/I said casually. "I understand you people were very good in the fight, too."
"Thank you," said Palagren with, Legroeder noted, a dry Narseil sarcasm that YZ/I almost certainly missed.
"But back to what you were saying—about your findings."
"Well—" Legroeder drew a deep breath "—we don't have a definitive picture of the quantum flaw yet. We do have a huge amount of information that we're still analyzing." And mapping? Is that what's going to come out of all this?
YZ/I stared at him for a moment. "Still analyzing. Okay. But tell me this: are my ships in danger of disappearing into the quantum flaw the way Impris did? If you recall, that was one of the things I sent you to find out." He rippled with white light, flicking his gaze from one rigger to the next.
Legroeder's head hurt, buzzing with a sudden burst of activity from the implants. "I think they are," he said at last.
"You think they are? You think they're in danger?"
Legroeder drew another slow breath under YZ/I's glare, and caught a slight nod from Palagren and Cantha. "Let me rephrase. The danger exists, definitely. It can happen again, and probably will. But I can't tell you—yet—exactly where the dangers exist..." He shook his head; it suddenly felt full of cobwebs. He wasn't purposely being vague. And yet his thoughts... what the devil was going on?
"Why not?" YZ/I demanded, puffing smoke. "Are you saying you don't have the knowledge? Or that you aren't planning to share it with us?" His voice was suddenly full of needles.
"Uh—"
Palagren raised a hand to interrupt. "May I be so bold as to ask a question in return?"
YZ/I cocked his head, frowning. "You may ask."
"Thank you. I was just wondering, what would we expect in return for providing that kind of information?"
YZ/I's eyes narrowed. He clicked his teeth together, though whether in surprise or admiration of Palagren's bluntness wasn't clear. "Well, I promised you the ship, and your freedom, didn't I?"
He paused a beat, and Palagren said, "When?"
"Eventually. What do you want? Some kind of preferred treatment?"
Palagren opened his mouth and closed it. "Could you define 'eventually'? And 'preferred treatment'?"
YZ/I glared around his cigar. "Better than nonpreferred treatment. Let's quit screwing around. How useful is your information?"
Legroeder felt his own lips tighten, as Palagren made a soft hissing sound. Useful isn't the right word, he thought. Indispensable is more like it, if it's what I think it is.
"Look," YZ/I said. His eyes flicked from one to another. "You all went out and risked your lives to bring this ship back, on the strength of my promise to release you. Right? Well, if I repeated that promise now, would it make any difference? I could still renege just as easily, if that's what you're afraid of."
How reassuring, Legroeder thought, noting that YZ/I had not repeated the promise. The Narseil seemed to be waiting for Legroeder to respond; this was human psychological territory. He cleared his throat.
"What?" YZ/I asked.
Legroeder let his breath escape. "We're not trying to hold out on you. But until the information is processed—which we cannot do overnight—there's only so much we can share. Right, Palagren? Cantha?"
Palagren's neck-sail rippled in agreement.
YZ/I squinted through the cigar smoke. "All right, then—let's back off a little. Tell me what you do know. Tell me what it felt like." He waved his hands, inviting elaboration. "You were caught in this fold. Tell me what your instincts told you was going on..."
Palagren made a hissing sound, and began to describe the riggers-eye view of their flight out through the quantum flaw...
* * *
"The passage was utterly harrowing," the Narseil concluded.
"To say the least," Legroeder muttered.
Palagren glanced at him. "And I don't know how repeatable it would be. I think we were very, very lucky."
YZ/I looked troubled, as they by turns described their experiences. He questioned each of them with urgency, and a surprising degree of technical understanding. Legroeder was struck by how similar their impressions were in general, and yet how different in detail. Deutsch, in some ways, had the most interesting experience, since he'd been leading a team of human riggers who were wholly unprepared mentally. "Those men had some images during the transit that I would not want to see again in the net," Deutsch murmured, the modulated tones of his synthetic voice belying the emotions that Legroeder guessed he was feeling. "If we had not been so closely linked to Phoenix, I doubt we'd have made it through."
"I must speak with these Impris riggers," YZ/I mused, when Deutsch finished. "But gentlemen—I'm still waiting to hear what caused Impris to fall into the fold in the first place. Was it just bad luck—or did they do something wrong, eh?" He squinted through the cigar smoke boiling in the air, and suddenly his manner seemed to suggest that they were old friends, catching up. "Was it because they'd rigged together too many times? Or was it their route?" He held out his hands. "Tell me why."
It was Cantha who replied. "We don't know for sure. We had only a brief time with the Impris riggers, before the time distortions forced us to act." Cantha's dark-gr
een cheeks puffed out, and his oval eyes stretched even further, vertically, making him look like a large cobra.
"You have no opinion on why she was trapped, then?"
Cantha flicked his fingers. "If you want my opinion—I believe there was an element of bad luck in the route they followed. They may have frequented a route that took them—perhaps over and over—close to the folds, and the underlying flaw, without their ever being aware of it. They may have been perilously close on those occasions when they reported difficulty. And then, one time, they didn't just come close."
"They fell in?"
"Precisely." Cantha paused. "This flaw is extremely long, and possibly infinite, and branches through several dimensions. I doubt it's an isolated cosmological phenomenon. Other flaws may be closer to the surface in some places and farther in others. But in any case, difficult to detect, with our current state of knowledge."
Legroeder stirred. "Cantha's being way too conservative. Coming out of the flaw, I saw quite clearly... that space is full of these things." He gazed hard at YZ/I. "If you want to find them the hard way, the surest thing you can do is send a whole fleet through the underflux."
A long silence followed, during which YZ/I seemed frozen. Then he breathed again, and rose slowly to his feet. "Gentlemen," he said, "I want to show you something." As he turned, the back wall of his command center paled, and a doorway opened. "If you would follow me, please..."
Legroeder and the others exchanged glances as they followed YZ/I down a darkening passageway. The only light, for a few seconds, came from YZ/I's body, and the tip of his cigar. Then all the darkness around slowly came to life with stars, a sprinkling at first, and then a multitude. The stars were below them as well as above, and on all sides. They seemed to be standing on a narrow catwalk, suspended in space. Legroeder's pulse quickened as he saw the swirl of the galactic spiral arm; then the stars slowly wheeled until they were looking directly into the Sagittarian sector, in the direction of the galactic core. Out in those clusters of stars and nebulas, he knew, lay the Well of Stars, the next great sector of space to be colonized. By the Free Kyber, if YZ/I had his way.
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