Nightfall_at_Algemron h-3

by Диана Дуэйн

  Delde Sota had withdrawn from Gabriel, standing still for a moment, planning out how to handle her intervention, concentrating. Gabriel stood there and shivered, for the wash of terror and pain that he had picked up earlier was even stronger now. The battle was in full career, and it was not going well for the Concord. The External ships were slicing them up with great energy beams like blades, and the Star Force weapons were just sliding off them, unable to inflict any similar damage. Kroath were landing on Galvin and Alitar, killing people, stealing people. Here and there, bizarrely, were the VoidCorp ships, waiting, doing nothing, but everywhere else, local space was full of the silvery bloom of lost atmosphere as ships burst apart, spilling their crews into vacuum, exploding. One swung past with an External ship in pursuit as another ship akin to it blew not far away, and Gabriel got a sudden sense of familiarity.

  "Schmetterling!" Gabriel cried.

  "Schmetterling comms." There were screams in the background, sirens, a voice yelling "Get me that damage report! What the hell's happened to the main battery?"

  "This is Gabriel Connor. Get me the captain. I think I can save her ship."

  A pause. Then that fierce voice. "I thought I would have taken help from one of them sooner than from you, but the ruthlessness of the situation makes liars of us all. What have you got? Did you find what you were after?"

  He had no immediate answer for that. "Listen, I think we can even up the odds a little. These guys have a shield—"

  She swore. "Tell me about it. I hit them with everything I've got and it makes no difference!"

  "I think I can do something about that. If it works, they're going to lose those shields shortly. They may not even realize it's happened at first."

  "I'll pass the word, but you'd damned well better hurry up!"

  Gabriel felt around inside the installation and was shocked to feel the wave of power growing in it, beating against him like a wind felt from behind.

  "It won't be long. There's information we'll be dumping to Schmetterling's computers—and to all the other ships in the fleet. It has to get back to the Concord. It's the hardware and software information for a similar shield."

  "Well do it, then! We have a few problems up here at the moment, and I don't have—" An explosion, and sudden silence. Gabriel frantically groped for the contact but couldn't get it back. "Delde Sota, go!" he screamed.

  In her mind, she fled down her contact with Schmetterling, still alive though her audio comms were gone. She had carrier; it was enough. Down into Schmetterling's computers, which resisted her for ages—several seconds at least—Gabriel could hear the doctor's cry of frustration as she worried her way through course after course of firewall meant to prevent just this kind of attack. Then she found a chink, slipped through, and was in.

  Now the tricky part. She was intent. She was also a doctor and was not distracted by the blood and screams that she could "hear" all around her. She was in the middle of a procedure. Doctor Sota ran down the circuitry and solids of the ship's computer, found memory empty there, and impressed the plans on it—the equations, the installation's own visualization of the hardware needed to manage the mass reactors and gravitic coils and all the other changes and tweaks that would be necessary to make the new shield work.

  All around Gabriel, the power of the Precursor facility was building to its peak. He was still afraid, afraid that it wouldn't be enough and that all these ships full of brave and desperate people were going to die.

  The power peaked.

  "'Delde Sota!" Gabriel shrieked.

  She did not bother to answer with her voice. She knew he could feel her flashing out of the computers in Schmetterling and leaping to the computers of other ships in the fleet. In microsecond jumps, she printed the data in their computers' memories, firewalling them so they could not be accidentally overwritten or altered. A moment of approval and surprise, even for her, as she slipped into the Lighthouse's Grid and planted the data there. The sheer size of it impressed her. Then on to the rest, packing the data down into every one of even the tiniest ships. Some exploded behind her, but she did not stop. She kept up the dance from machine mind to machine mind until every one still extant had the data.

  The Precursor facility's power was beating harder against Gabriel, impatient to be let go, but he had to wait until Delde Sota had done what was needed. She was still in the midst of the dance, checking her work, making sure that none of the ships' computers had dumped the data.

  "Done!" she cried.

  With the power of the Precursor facility rushing through him like the great waterfall on Danwell, Gabriel picked up one image he had not intended to. The landscape inside Elinke Dareyev's mind, now suddenly flooded with horror and grief as she saw the huge spheroid ship swing away from cutting up Tournant not twenty kilometers from her, then come in with that great blade of energy ready to slice Schmetterling in two. This is it, he heard her think. My people, my poor people, oh, my poor crew! She got ready to die, but shouted, "One more time! All weapons, fire!"

  " Go!" Gabriel said to the facility.

  The force blasted out around him, through him, whiting out Gabriel's world in a torrent of power and pain. He had no idea what kind of pulse was being generated. It seemed to him to be running around under the crust of the planet as if under a skin, then pouring out of from every crack and crevice, blasting into all neighboring space and propagating at lightspeed, possibly faster. Were there tachyons and other faster-than-light particles involved in this? No way to tell for sure. All he could do was concentrate on bearing this, not losing himself in it, for there were more things he would need to do afterwards. The pulse tore through all local space, and he could feel it begin to impact the Externals' ships. Where it touched them, something happened that he was not sure how to define. As the pulse touched those shields, he could feel them. They seemed to be in the process of creating subatomic particles that did not actually exist. Fire from the Concord ships hit the enemy vessels, creating patches of these not-really-existing particles, and the patches turned the ships' fire away—until the firestorm stopped, at which time they vanished.

  Except now, when the pulse hit the ships generating the screen. For a millisecond, the ships were completely screened—and then suddenly their screens could no longer generate the particles at all. The hulls of the Externals' ships were suddenly just so much metal and alloy.

  Gabriel felt Elinke watching hopelessly as that External ship swung toward her, swung in close with that blade of energy.

  A line of fire from Schmetterling struck the ship.

  The great spherical monstrosity cracked open, spilled atmosphere and bodies out into the void, then cracked again, flaming wider, and blew up in a dazzling array.

  "It works!" Delde Sola cried and burst out laughing.

  Gabriel laughed, too. It works!

  "Captain," Gabriel shouted down the comms link, "it worked! It worked!"

  "What did you do?" Elinke yelled, and over her shoulder yelled again, "Where the devil are my front batteries, someone's going to have their pay docked in a minute! "

  "I can't explain right now," said Gabriel.

  "Well, what do I care? Will it last?"

  "For these ships, yes," Gabriel said. "They'll never screen again."

  "We'll find out in a moment," Elinke muttered. "Here comes another one. Forward batteries, are you up now? That one, there, hit him!"

  The torpedoes and the forward energy weapons both let go together. The energy weapons took the big approaching sphere amidships, and the torpedoes followed, hitting slightly off to one side. It exploded brilliantly.

  There was a long pause. "You're the devil himself," Elinke Dareyev's voice said. "I've always said so. Are you sure this will last?"

  "It's permanent, Captain."

  "Good. Then all we have to do is deal with two-to-one odds," she said. Her voice was grimly pleased. "We'll all just have to shoot twice, that's all."

  Inside the facility of which Gabriel was no
w a part, the battle now seemed to have begun happening inside everyone who watched. They were all being drawn in as the power turned its attention away from Gabriel and began to focus outward, as the facility witnessed what it had been placed here for, a great stroke against the enemy that had destroyed its makers so many millions of years before. Through Delde Sota it flowed into them from a thousand viewpoints, for she was in the system Grid and the tactical sub-Grid connecting the Concord vessels. For his own part, Gabriel was struggling for control, unwilling to be forced permanently into this status. Limiting that power too strictly now could mean the end of everything for the Verge, and so Gabriel walked the edge of that glassy razor with care, trying to keep a steady course and not to let emotion tip him over one way or the other.

  The fear was still there. He could see, as his friends could see through him, the terrible carnage that the Externals' ships were wreaking—great blasts of energy lancing out, flowers of fire blooming in the night, carving up Concord, Galvinite, and Alitarin ships. Already something was happening. Something was beginning to shift. Ships that had fired again and again at their enemies without result were now getting results—those of them that had survived that long—and were throwing themselves feverishly into the offensive, looking to make up lost time. The biggest Concord ships, which had been cautious not to throw themselves too hastily into battle with the very biggest External ships, now went after them with a vengeance. Even the Lighthouse slowly moved into the center of the battle, its terrible weaponry lancing out and wreaking the same kind of destruction on the Externals that they had been meting out to the Concord fleet. The odds were still bad, but the tone of the fight had changed. People were still dying, Gabriel knew, but at least they were now doing so with the hope that it might make some difference.

  They watched for a while, knowing that there was no danger of attack to them at the moment. As the minutes passed, slowly at first, then more quickly, the tide of battle began turning. The Concord ships took the battle to the Externals in earnest, and now the ships that bloomed fire and breathed atmosphere into the vacuum were more often those of the invaders. There was a long hesitation, an uncertain period during which the fighting went on much as before—but then slowly the External ships gathered together and started to make for the outer reaches of the system as if to regroup. The Concord ships pursued them, and even more of the External vessels made starfall as minutes and tens of minutes and an hour and two hours went by. .

  The Marines inside the cavern were recouping themselves, dealing with their dead and binding up the wounded. Gabriel looked out of the pillar at where Grawl was working on Helm.

  "What a song this will make," Grawl was saying as she bound up his face and eye with pressure tape. Gabriel sucked in breath as he watched her do it, for the eye clearly would never be the same, no matter what bionics could be installed in the ruined socket later. "Great was the slaughter. The kroath fell in

  heaps. Then Helm Ragnar's son strode forth with the axe and paid the price for wisdom: an eye—" "The meter will need work," Enda said, "but you begin well."

  Gabriel stretched, came up against the resistance of the crystal, and abruptly felt it bend in front of him. He was that crystal now. No need for this, he said silently, and slowly the glasslike substance started to retract, slipping back down into the fibril bed of the master facility.

  The Patterner, too, was coming undone from its shackles and came over to Gabriel. Harbinger, it said, your initiation is done.

  Gabriel stretched. then felt something odd in his glove. Or rather, something odd that was not in his glove. The stone was gone.

  I am the stone now, Gabriel thought. Everything that it had been, directional source, ancient personality, power feed, information storage core, all of that was part of Gabriel now, wound into his DNA, engraved on his genes. I am what it was, he thought, a map. a guidepost. The harbinger. The one who shows the way. And if there were ever children at some point down the line, they would carry the same map in their genes. They would always know the way to wonder.

  He glanced idly at Angela.

  She looked up at him from an injured Marine whose head she was holding in her lap. Well, who knows? He heard her think. Maybe just once.

  Gabriel swallowed.

  He turned his attention silently upward and outward. The battle had plainly reached that moment when the enemy says to itself, "This is not fun any more. We aren't winning." The system was almost empty of External ships now, except for the remnants of those that had been destroyed. A few of the great spherical ships still lingered in the outer regions of the system, but one by one they were vanishing into drivespace as the Concord vessels took control of the area, most massing over and around Argolos. The VoidCorp ships that had turned up also took themselves out into the darkness, vanishing into the darkness beyond the farthest fringes of the Algemron system.

  "They're going to have some explaining to do about that," Gabriel said softly.

  He would be interested in hearing them. Probably they would make the excuse that they had initially been as over-gunned as the Concord ships had been. He would have loved to hear how they explained leaving just as the Externals lost their shields and became vulnerable.

  That would keep. He would probably have plenty of time to see their reaction in the Grid news to that. while spending all his time in custody, before the trial and afterward.

  Helm came over to him, the dislocated left arm bound against his side at the moment. Delde Sota had done a field relocation but would want to do more work on it later.

  "You know." Helm rasped.

  Gabriel looked at him quizzically.

  Helm gave Gabriel a one-eyed look of amusement. "Aw, it didn't work. I thought we could all just sort of think at you now."

  Enda came up beside him. "That is a sure way to give him a headache," she said, "assuming he doesn't have one already."

  Gabriel smiled at her somberly. "I ache all over, and my head feels like it might fall off shortly, but there are other things to do first."

  "Yeah," Helm said. "I was thinking."

  Gabriel heard the thought but said nothing about it for the moment. "We should get suited up," he said, "and get the hurt people out of here."

  Helm looked at him a little strangely.

  You know what he has in mind, Enda said silently.

  I do, Gabriel said. I won– 't do it.

  He turned to the Patterner, which stood nearby, watching the others prepare to leave. This facility is too dangerous to leave open, Gabriel told the creature. There are inhabitants of this system who would attempt to make inappropriate usage of it.

  This facility has no further use, the Patterner said. When you depart, it will be destroyed.

  That shocked Gabriel a little. Don'tyou think it would be wise to keep a backup?

  It felt around in his mind for his meaning and then made a simple sense of negation in reply. The data was not copied but transferred. It was always intended to be held inside a life form. It had been hoped that we might serve that purpose, but it seems life is more than intelligence and free will. When there were no more of our makers left and our prototype program was discontinued unfinished, that data was stored solid, but such storage is merely static and is seen as far more insecure than that in living beings.

  Oh?

  That was their way, it said. That is the way the programming was laid in. You must now see to the propagation of the data yourself.

  Gabriel laughed a little, seeing that what he was going to have to do with Jacob Ricel's memories for his testimony was the same thing he was going to have to do with the mapping information of which he was now the sole bearer. More homework, he thought. Is the testing stage ever going to end?

  The Patterner gave him a dry look with all those eyes.

  What about you, Patterner? Gabriel asked.

  I and my other selves are done, it said. We have fulfilled our programming and our purpose. Go well., Harbinger. Fulfill your programming as
well.

  It fell silent. Gabriel felt for its mind. and found that it was gone.

  He looked at Enda, sad and a little shocked. "That was sudden."

  She shook her head and turned to look at the others.

  The Marines, suited and waiting, stood a little distance away, regarding Gabriel with expressions of which

  he could make little. There was horror in some of them and awe in others. Some seemed afraid to look at him. Others seemed unable to take their eyes off him.

  Gabriel could only shake his head and wonder what they saw. He had seen too much of the insides of others' minds for the moment. For the next little while, the only mind he wanted to see the inside of was his own. It would take a while to get a sense of what it looked like these days, but he would have plenty of time for that.

  He turned to Enda again. "Let's get my cousins here into Longshot and Lalique." Helm looked thoughtfully at Gabriel.

  "Give them a ride back to Schmetterling, but you and I will go in first." He put his arm through Enda's, and they headed toward the corridor entrance. "I have an appointment to keep."

  Chapter Nineteen

  They were aboard Schmetterling for several days before anything significant happened. Mostly everyone in the system was preoccupied with repairing damage done during the battle, helping add their own information to the master report that was being assembled, and simply recovering.

  Gabriel was returned to the same cell where he had previously been kept, and Enda and the crews of Longshot and Lalique were allowed to visit him pretty much at will. Gabriel spent his first day aboard in collapse, and the next couple of days trying to sort out what had happened to him. For one thing, he understood the strange looks on the faces of Bertin and the other Marines. When he had finally had strength to get up and have a shower and a shave, the first look in the mirror shocked him. The hair had a little ways yet to go before it became completely white, but the eyes, his eyes, were now silver-pale, gone white as Precursor glass. That he had not expected. Shaving had taken a long time that day.