Eternity's End (44 page)

// It helped us to establish a perspective, yes.//

Perspective, he thought, shaking his head. Christ.

Tracy-Ace was frowning. "Does that mean yes or no?"

He blinked. "Huh? What did you ask? Give me a minute here, I, uh—"

Tracy-Ace cocked her head. "Are you having a flicker-tube hangover, or do you always wake up this way?"

"Flicker-tube... hangover," he mumbled. "That must be it." He squinted, looking around for the time. "How long was I asleep?"

"About fourteen hours. Look, I'll give you a few minutes to get showered. Then I think we'd better go get some breakfast into you."

He nodded, rubbing his eyes. He suddenly realized that she'd changed clothes since he'd last seen her. She looked more than a little sexy, dressed in a short gold skirt over black tights, and a patchwork black-and-gold blouse. Her temple implants were flickering, drawing his eye. Now why did he think
that
made her look good? He drew a sharp breath, thinking of... Greta. This is the face of the enemy. Remember that.

"Great," he said huskily. "Thanks."

After she was gone, he tossed off the thin blanket and stepped into the mist-shower, aware of his nakedness as he wondered vaguely: what was one supposed to wear while touring a raider compound with a lady pirate, anyway?

Walking with Tracy-Ace, later, he discovered that the implants had done a pretty thorough job of organizing his headful of new information. He found himself with a silent guide in his head, producing tiny captions for him as they passed through the station.

// ...To your nine o'clock, note the flicker-tubes leading to the new docking port construction site. Just under a thousand workers there... //

He glanced left.
(New docking port? You mean they're expanding this place?)

// And further to your left, a departure portal to the location of Outpost Ivan's contribution to the Free Kyber colonizing fleet... //

Legroeder staggered a little, his heart pounding. He turned to peer back at the flicker-tube portal they had just passed. The colonizing fleet. He had managed to put that out of his mind.

"Something wrong?" Tracy-Ace asked, pausing. She'd been talking all this time, he had no idea about what.

He drew a slow breath. "No," he said, forcing himself to rejoin her. "Nothing wrong."

They continued walking.

Colonizing fleet. He was dying to ask her about it. Terrified of what she might say.

He hardly noticed as Tracy-Ace tugged him faster along the promenade, while he contemplated the thought of the Kyber worlds moving out of Golen Space, colonizing... the Centrist Worlds? No, that didn't make sense.

It must be something else...

He only gradually became aware of the tingling in his arm, mostly after Tracy-Ace took her hand away to gesture toward a food-plaza. "Breakfast," she said.

Breakfast. Legroeder tried to think what he had been feeling a moment ago. She'd been touching his arm—but as a polite gesture, or a personal touch—or was she making a data connection? He cocked his head at her. "Were you reading my mind a moment ago?"

Was that a twinkle in her eye? "And if I was?"

That startled him; he'd been expecting a denial. "Usually people ask first."

She gazed appraisingly at him. "What if I said I was letting
you
read
my
mind?"

"Uh?"

Tracy-Ace raised her chin slightly. The gems around her eyes glittered with reflected light from the ceiling. "I thought it might be helpful," she said. "During the download yesterday, I caught a few things about you—"

He drew back.

"Nothing profound. But I sensed you didn't quite trust me. And if we're going to—" she paused "—work together... I thought it might help if you knew more about me."

Legroeder felt flattered and puzzled at the same time.
Why,
he started to ask,
would you care if I trusted you?

Before he could voice the thought, he was startled by the appearance, inside his head, of two converging arcs of ruby light signifying new information about Tracy-Ace. She was twenty-seven years old, Free Kyber standard calendar. No immediate family, but a couple of cousins who might have been real biological relatives. Parents, from one of the old Kyber worlds: came to join the Free Kyber alliance, and died in a border dispute when she was four.
(Oh.)
Raised by the local childcare collective. Adept in the system; rose to the ranks of node administration before most of her contemporaries had even finished school. For three years, Node Alfa.

She was peering at him, emotions unknown.

Liked the challenge and the responsibility—and the proximity to power. Socially unattached, but willing to consider unusual liaisons. Had a fondness for rebels.

He felt his blood rise, wondering if he qualified as an "unusual liaison." Or a rebel.

// That part of the analysis is ambiguous. Shall we probe further?//

(No, thank you.)
He cleared his throat. But Tracy-Ace was talking—about
him
—and he'd missed the first part of it. Something about his being useful to the outpost.

"...have skills we need, and knowledge. Possibly for special operations. I believe my boss will want to talk to you, soon." Tracy-Ace was studying him again. "I see you wondering. But part of my job is to evaluate people and situations, to look for the unexpected. To make judgments for the benefit of the outpost. And the Republic."
And the colonizing fleet?
At the outer corner of her left eye, a tiny red bead glowed for a moment, as though she were photographing him for a security check. A smile flashed across her face. "Besides—I rather like you."

He felt a moment of lightheadedness. Was it the implants, fracturing away all of the normal inhibitions? Everything seemed accelerated here. A momentary vision of Greta the Enforcer flickered across his mind, giving him a shiver.

If she noticed or understood his shiver, she didn't show it. He was still trying to think of a response to her statement that she liked him.
The face of the enemy
.

"Let's get some food," she said. "Then there's something I want you to see."

He followed her through the food-plaza. The choices were some kind of bread, some kind of curd, and some kind of soft cereal. He took a small serving of each, plus a cup of murk. Tracy-Ace led him to a line of tables looking out over a huge balcony. No, not a balcony—a holo.

Legroeder stared out at an enormous view of the Flux. In the foreground were sprawling structures that he hardly noticed, because behind them were swirling gas clouds that seemed vast, almost galactic in scope. They might have been a bright emission nebula, a star-birthing grounds. But this was something different. His rigger's intuition told him: this was a boundary layer. Not the boundary between normal-space and the Flux, which would have been impressive enough for structures to be anchored against. No, this—he felt with absolute certainty—was the transition zone between the familiar layers of the Flux where starships flew, and another place deeper and more mysterious, and far more perilous.

"You know what it is?" Tracy-Ace said.

He opened his mouth, but couldn't speak.
The Deep Flux
. He knew it by name only. It was an underlying region of the Flux so unstable and unpredictable that riggers avoided it, always. He had never heard of anyone flying in it and returning, though the Narseil Institute had reportedly done some experimenting along the border regions. But the Kyber—? Was this just an impression-image, a work of art?

"Is it real—this view?" he murmured.

"Oh yes," she said, gesturing to the lower part of the image, at the indistinct structures in the foreground.

He couldn't quite make out what they were. Man-made, certainly. A station? Docking ports? Ships? He shivered at the thought of man-made structures hovering on the edge of such cosmic instability.

"Let me change that view a little," said Tracy-Ace.

There was a shimmer as the perspective shifted, magnifying the foreground. His breath left him in a rush. It was a fleet of a hundred or more glittering starships, gathered around what looked like a cluster of asteroids. Long, curved limbs like sea-urchin spines arched out from the central bodies to the starships.

Legroeder felt as though his heart had stopped beating. "What is it?" he whispered.

"The colony fleet," she said.

He swallowed. "Headed toward—?" Not the Centrist Worlds, surely.

"New hunting grounds," she said softly, watching his reaction. "What do you think?"

His voice caught.
I am a Kyber, unafraid of bold Kyber initiatives. Unafraid
... "It's—" he said, trying not to stammer "—
impressive
. We, uh—don't have anything like this in—Barbados."

Tracy-Ace stared at him for a moment, then laughed out loud. "No," she said finally. "No, I guess you don't."

"Don't have what in Barbados?" asked a familiar metallic voice.

Legroeder turned.

Freem'n Deutsch was floating toward them.

Chapter 23

The Maintainers

"Freem'n!" Legroeder cried. "Are you all right?"

Deutsch floated to the table. "As all right as ever. Mind if I join you?"

"Please do," said Tracy-Ace.

"We've met before, I believe. Tracy-Ace/Alfa?" Deutsch said.

"Yes. Good to see you again." To Legroeder she explained, "I asked him to meet us here. Since you were wondering about him."

Legroeder opened his mouth and closed it. Finally he let a smile crack through. "How did you—the last time I saw you, you were frozen in some kind of—"

Deutsch waved a cybernetic hand. "Leghold trap. I saw the damn thing coming, but not in time to get out of its way."

Legroeder winced at the memory. "It looked painful."

"Infuriating as hell, I can tell you that," Deutsch said. "When they finally killed the switch, it knocked me out cold. I woke up in the infirmary. That's where I've been until about an hour ago." He nodded to Tracy-Ace. "Thank you for bringing me out. I'm looking forward to getting back to work."

Are you? Legroeder thought. This was a danger point, when Freem'n had to make his own reentry into the Kyber world. Just how closely would his interests coincide with Legroeder's now?

Tracy-Ace was watching them both with obvious interest. Freem'n seemed to be doing an excellent job of acting. He had to persuade his superiors, presumably including Tracy-Ace, that his actions with the Narseil had been taken either under duress or in order to sabotage the Narseil mission. Had he already been debriefed? Legroeder could read nothing from Deutsch's face.

"That's what we were hoping to hear," Tracy-Ace said. "In fact, there might be another job coming your way soon." She glanced at Legroeder, who realized he was holding his breath. He let it out slowly, hoping that Deutsch wouldn't decide to explain what
really
had happened.

Legroeder shifted his gaze back to the holo, momentarily forgotten in the excitement of seeing Deutsch again. The Deep Flux. The waiting Kyber fleet. "Weren't you about to tell me about that?" he asked Tracy-Ace.

"The Free Kyber Republic Joint Fleet?" she said. "What would you like to know?"

"Well—for one thing, why do they
appear
to be poised at the edge of the Deep Flux?"

Tracy-Ace chuckled. "That's right, you don't know about this on Barbados. Well, they're poised there because they have a
long
way to go. I'm not free to discuss the specific destination. But as I said, new hunting grounds. Away from the Centrist Worlds."

Legroeder tried to think through the implications of a vast pirate fleet setting out to colonize new worlds. If the Kyber were going
away
from the Centrist Worlds...

Good riddance?

That seemed unlikely.

"But why the Deep Flux?"

Tracy-Ace's gaze was steady. "That's the shortcut our planners have chosen. Too slow, otherwise."

"But..."
Shortcut? To slow death?
"...the Deep Flux is unnavigable. It's unstable; it's unmappable. I've never heard of anyone rigging it and coming back alive." Or coming back at all.
Where could they be going that it would be worth risking the Deep Flux?
The very thought reminded him, with a shiver, of the way
Impris
had vanished.

Tracy-Ace cocked her head slightly. "All that used to be true."

"
Used
to be?" Legroeder blinked. "Are you telling me that you know how to navigate the Deep Flux? Go in and come back out again? Go where you're supposed to go?" Not possible. Was it? Dear God.

Tracy-Ace gave the slightest of nods. "There are some problems, still. But it does work."

Legroeder glanced at Deutsch. His cyborg friend was sitting silent and expressionless, easy enough to do with those damn silvered lenses for eyes.
"Problems?"

"Perhaps Rigger Deutsch could explain it better," Tracy-Ace said. "Rigger Deutsch?"

Freem'n whirred for a moment. "You know some of it already, Legroeder. The differences in our rigging techniques—"

"You mean the augments?"

"Of course. In our experience, the main problem with navigating the Deep Flux is the huge range of complex sensory elements that have to be translated and decoded before they can be perceived clearly. For that, we think you need augments."

Legroeder stroked his temple, trying to consider Deutsch's words without seeming to be puzzled. He didn't want to make Barbados seem like a
complete
backwater outpost. He was certainly aware that the augments changed the overall look of things in the Flux; it was one reason for his aversion to them. He didn't
want
the look of the Flux changed from something he could understand intuitively.

Deutsch seemed to read his thoughts. "It
is
one area in which the use of augments is superior." Deutsch paused. "I take it the Narseil, in your observation, haven't made much headway in this regard?"