Star Rigger #06 - Eternity's end by Jeffrey A. Carver

Author:Jeffrey A. Carver [Carver, Jeffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, Science Fiction, Fiction, General, Space Opera, Interplanetary Voyages, Life on Other Planets
ISBN: 0312856423
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2000-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing . . .

—Edgar Allan Poe

Prologue

IMPRIS

IN THE shifting sands of time, the starship seemed always to be sliding, falling, never quite at a point where human intervention could bring it under control. It was not the slide of time itself that befuddled its occupants so much as the endless spinning pirouettes, the sideways shifts and turns that left them eternally breathless and anchorless.

And anchorless the starship was, in a network of splintered space-time that stretched up and down the spiral arms of the galaxy, and from one end of time to the other . . .

JAMAL AWOKE with a start, sweating and shaking. He sat for a moment, staring into the darkness, listening to the sounds of Impris around him; then he growled to his cabin for a nightlight. As the pale orange glow came up, he peered around, breathing heavily, reassuring himself that everything in his cabin was normal. As normal as anything could be on the haunted ship.

Except in his head. The nightmare was back again, returned to plague him. Damn you, he thought. Damn you damn you . . .

Cursing the thing that lay in wait for them—great writhing monster of the Flux, lurking invisibly, waiting for them to move their net in the wrong direction...

Jamal shut his eyes, willing the image away. Poppy had been complaining of it two nights ago, and last week Sully. Where the hell was this vision coming from? It couldn't be real.

The monster stretched in a tortuous line across the sky—a great threatening serpent, turning this way and that, looking for them. No question about that: it was looking for them. Looking to devour any living thing that fell within its reach. And they were falling . . . falling . . .

Jamal's eyes snapped open again. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, counting to ten. Do not let it control you, he thought grimly. It's only a dream.

Only a dream.

A dream to fill an already nightmarish existence, stranded in a limbo without end, without hope. God, was it just his subconscious? Or was this realm of insanity finally becoming complete? No, surely it was just a nightmare.

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-rmnggg.

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