Eternity's End (43 page)

// If you mean information about your past, and your true identity, no.//

(Good.)

// But there was a certain amount of handshaking involved, and personal protocol exchange. Most of it was strictly augment-exchange protocol.//

(Do I hear a "but"—?)

// But there had to be certain personal-preference exchanges to establish how and what would be transferred. To establish "trust," as it were. That could be part of what you sense.//

He wondered uneasily just how much "personal preference" information had been exchanged. How could protocol exchanges make him feel not just warmth, but a certain actual attraction toward this pirate whom he hardly knew? These augments were beginning to scare him.

// We're only here to serve.//

(Mm.)

"...be staying here in this sector," Tracy-Ace was saying. "This is where we put visitors and people who are... between jobs. You know, like unemployed heroes." She flashed a grin at him—and he flushed, realizing that he felt such a palpable attraction that he had to shove his hands firmly in his pockets to keep from reaching out and touching her. He countered the thought by thinking about his imprisoned comrades, and wondering when he might dare to ask about them.

Tracy-Ace had quickened her long-legged stride. They walked, rode lift-tubes, walked some more. When they finally stopped at a closed door, they might have been in the hallway of a cheap apartment building anywhere in the known galaxy. Tracy-Ace pressed her hand to the plate beside the door. "Number 7494," she said. "Remember that." The door paled and she ushered him into a room the size of a crew cabin on a starship. "Your new home."

Legroeder surveyed the place. It was plain but neat: narrow bunk, tiny desk with com, table, sling chair. Perfect for a monk. Heaven, compared to what he'd lived in for seven years at DeNoble. His bag, which he had last seen in his cabin on
Flechette
, was sitting on the bunk. They were efficient here. He could forget about any hopes he might have had about sneaking back one day to transmit a message from
Flechette
.

// That was hardly a serious option, you know.//

(Well, yes, but... )

// The underground. Finding the underground is your only real option now.//

(I am aware of that, thank you.)

"You ought to be comfortable here," Tracy-Ace was saying.

"Thank you." He struggled to find words, and hoped she wasn't reading his thoughts. "I guess—it'll take time to learn my way around. And to figure out—I don't know—what I'll be useful for." It was starting to hit him all over again how alone he was here. With the unraveling of the Narseil plan to get in, get info, and get out, it was really all up to him. Suppose he couldn't contact the underground. What then? Sign on to another ship, and try to broadcast a message in flight, before they killed him?
H'zzarrelik
would wait out there for fifteen days before heading back with their prisoners. Once they were gone, there would be nobody to broadcast
to
.

"You'll learn fast," Tracy-Ace said, touching his arm. "I'm going to set you up with some study programs, to get you oriented."

He'd felt an electric tingle at her touch, and was trying to pretend he hadn't.

"We'll find things for you to do, don't worry."

He forced a nervous smile. "Okay—what's next, then?"

"What's next is I go back to work. And you—you look like you could use some sleep. When you're ready, here's where you can call up the study programs." She stepped over to the desk and showed him the controls. "Why don't I come back later to show you around?"

He nodded, covering his surprise. He couldn't deny being pleased by the personal attention. "I guess I could stand to sleep a few hours." He was exhausted, actually, and the adrenaline was starting to wear off. "What time is it? When do
you
sleep?"

Tiny lights sparkled at the corners of her eyes. "It's third-quarter evening. A lot of people will be on sleep cycle during the next six or eight hours. I'll be working, myself; I don't need much sleep. My programs handle REM processing right in the node, so I can pick up sleep functions while I work."

Legroeder didn't know whether to be envious or sympathetic.

"I'll be free in about ten hours. Will that give you enough time? We have to confine you to quarters until your case has been reviewed. But if you get hungry, you can call up some snack pantry items on the com here. Anything else you need?"

Yes, he thought. The com address of the underground. "I guess not. Is it okay if I play with the com system a little?"

She gave him a look. "As long as you don't try to access anything that it wants you to stay out of." She touched his arm and moved toward the door. "Bye, then." He couldn't answer; he was mesmerized by the tingle. "Oh—if you need to reach me, use this code." She turned to the desk com and placed an index finger on the reader-plate. "There, it's stored for you."

As she went out and the door opaqued behind her, he felt a pang of self-recrimination at the pleasure he'd just felt.
She's the enemy, remember? What the devil are you thinking?

Sighing, he tossed his bag off the bunk and lay down. He had no idea how long it had been since he had last slept, but he knew it was way too long.

Sleep, however, did not come easily. When it did, it was a troubled affair, blurred with wakefulness. It felt as if his brain were continuing to fire at a scattergun pace—his dreams and the activities of the implants intertwined with one another, synaptic impulses rocketing up and down in a frenetic series of discharges. Even asleep, he was aware of the intense activity... dreams coming silently and escaping again, pushed out by the next, and the next, in an unending cascade. Images from the flicker-tubes, from his long-ago past, from battle, from the gazing crystals...

He awoke at one point, exhausted but unable to keep his eyes closed. Without thinking about it, he stumbled to the desk and switched on the com. He glanced briefly at the study programs, but found he was too groggy to concentrate. He idly began running searches. After noodling aimlessly for a few minutes, he narrowed his search.
Prisoners... Narseil... Freem'n Deutsch
... He wasn't even sure what he was looking for; he just wanted to know if there was reason to hope for their safety.

The implants flagged him briefly, asking if he really wanted to proceed. He brushed the caution aside irritably; he didn't know why the Kyber trusted him, but Tracy-Ace had said it was okay to play around.

He wasn't making much progress; but somewhere into his third attempt, he finally woke up to what he was doing.
Dear God, what an idiot
. Was he giving himself away, showing his concern about the Narseil? He sat back, feeling sick.

The implants spoke up.
// Our monitoring did not show you betraying any incriminating data.//

(Except my doing the search in the first place. Why didn't you stop me?)

The answering voice was clearly meant to be soothing.
// Our programming does not include interference in personal activities, barring clear and present danger.//

And I assured you it wasn't dangerous, he remembered, rubbing his forehead. What the hell time was it now?
Fourth-quarter two
. What the hell did that mean? He didn't understand the time-keeping system here.

// If you like, in the future we will note such activities as dangerous... //

(Fine.)
He reached to turn off the com.

The implants stopped him with:
// You have a message waiting.//

(What? Where?)

And then he saw it, a tiny dingbat at the corner of the comspace. He blinked at it, and it expanded, and he heard Tracy-Ace's voice saying,
(Sorry, Rigger Legroeder, that com-search is off limits. But I'll tell you what you need to know, next time I see you. In the meantime, if you can't sleep, why don't you give those study programs a try.)

For several heartbeats he sat absolutely still, neither moving nor breathing. And then he realized that she hadn't sounded angry or suspicious. Maybe, after all, it was okay for him to wonder what had become of his former shipmates—even if they theoretically were the enemy.

Tracy-Ace wasn't done.
(Someone I know's going to want to talk to both Deutsch and the Narseil crew, by the way. So don't worry about their being executed in the near future.)
She chuckled.
(Now, get some sleep.)

The message dingbat closed.

Legroeder stared in dumb amazement at the com for a full minute. Then he sighed, rose, and went back to the bunk to try to follow her suggestion.

It was no use, he thought after a half hour of tossing fitfully in the bunk. Once more, he went to the com console. This time, he brought up the orientation programs, and sat for over an hour listening to droning voices and watching images of station layouts and command hierarchies as the workings of everyday life and lines of authority were explained to him. He was aware, as he followed in a semi-daze, that much more was being conveyed through the augments, and that they were going to be even busier digesting the new load of data than any of them would have guessed possible.

As he threw himself back onto the bunk for one more attempt at sleep, it occurred to him that he had just been given, with almost no effort on his part, some of the very information he had come here hoping to steal.

Amazingly, he did sleep, though not peacefully. He dreamed of mysterious machineries relentlessly thrumming, surrounding him and filling him with incomprehensible activity.

At one point he stirred to the piping of a com signal and he half-woke with the memory of the frenetic dreams fading like a half-forged, coded message. But he didn't quite make it to wakefulness before he drifted back under and this time was swept up by a wave of images and sounds like a breaker crashing in from the sea.

Memories of Golen Space. The Fortress of DeNoble. Barracks of the captives, more a warren than a human habitation. The bunk on which he rotated shifts with three other men, the mattress that smelled of things he tried not to think about. The raider flights. And between missions, days spent working on weapons arrays and flux-modulation reactors. Days spent dreaming of work stoppage, of suicide. And each day, walking past the window of the punishment center...

Stop... please
... he whispered, struggling to wake; but the memories were like a surround-holo, relentless. He couldn't move, couldn't shut his eyes or his ears. Prisoners who tried a work stoppage? They were only tortured for a few days with electrosynaptic shock. But those who tried suicide or sabotage? They were strapped into chairs, gnawed by alien parasites, condemned to a lifetime of screaming agony, dying slowly... only to be resuscitated by robot life-support systems. They were the examples: suffering the boss's eternal wrath for defying the law of the fortress. According to rumor, the boss had once led a bizarre religious splinter sect, inspired to ever-higher standards of torture by ancient legends of purgatory.

Why do I keep remembering...?

And one other memory: he never knew her real name, but among the prisoners she was known as Greta the Enforcer. A woman of exquisite beauty and deadly malice. What her actual position was in the DeNoble hierarchy, Legroeder never knew, either; but in his one encounter, begun as a seeming invitation to special "favors," he'd been left shaken, dizzy, heart pounding with fear and humiliation. It was rumored that she used pheromones and charm equally as weapons, and just as no man could resist her appeal, neither did any escape the pain that she enjoyed inflicting.

Legroeder, in the depths of sleep, groaned, wondering how he had survived as long as he had at DeNoble, wondering how he'd ever found the courage—or madness—to escape.

And now, to return voluntarily to it all, to new punishments... torture and incentive, reward and punishment... all in a blur that he could only imagine, shivering... struggling to awaken... visions of Tracy-Ace/Alfa and the pirates of Ivan strapping him into a chair alongside his Narseil comrades...

Bzzzz... bzzzzz... bzzzz
...

What was that noise, like killer bees swarming—?

Bzzzzzzzz
...

He sat upright in bed, shaking. "What—what—?" he stammered.

The door paled and Tracy-Ace strode in.

He shuddered, the aftershocks of the final dream-quakes still rocking back and forth in his mind.

"You're alive," she said, looking as if she were surprised to find him still breathing. "Rings—you look awful! I've been trying to call you for hours. Why didn't you answer? Are you sick?"

He rubbed his forehead, struggling to fight his way out of the dream fog. "Uh—I guess I was really asleep," he said thickly, sounding as if he had marbles in his mouth. "How'd you get in?"

"I overrode the lock." Tracy-Ace squinted at him. "You don't look like you slept very well." She got him a glass of water. "Should I come back later?"

He took a few sips, choking, as he tried to process her question. He thought of his dream and wondered:
Are you the one who orders the tortures here?

// Hold, please. We're working to compile relevant information for you... //

His head reeled. But indeed, some of the information he'd gained was starting to swarm into focus. This outpost was different; they used different methods of persuasion here. He knew more about Outpost Ivan than he'd have guessed possible in such a short time. In the midst of all that dreaming chaos, his implants had been processing the info-dumps that the flicker-tube and the study programs had given him, half a lifetime ago.

// We've been comparing past and present... //

(Wait a minute,)
he thought with sudden bitterness,
(are you saying that I dreamed all that stuff just so you could analyze it?)