Nightfall at Algemron

Jacob Ricel!

He turned.

The man was gone.

A moment's incredulous uncertainty went through Gabriel. Did I hallucinate? he thought. Did I just see someone who looked like him?

Itch. From the luckstone in his pocket, a sudden twinge of heat and power surged that he felt right through his hand.

No, dammit! Gabriel thought. Just a few doors behind him was the cross street, and he had glimpsed an alleyway leading from it between two buildings on the nearer side. Probably a service or delivery access. If he had gone that way.

Rina Welsh was maybe ten meters ahead, walking between Helm and Angela and talking animatedly to them. Grawl's broad back was briefly between her and Gabriel.

He immediately turned in his tracks, and trying not to hurry in this city full of armed people, this city where every move you made was noticed, he headed back the way he had come, feeling in his pocket and looking down at the ground like someone who had lost something. Gabriel retraced his steps—keeping them small steps, resisting the urge to let them lengthen into strides.

At the corner he paused, looked down the cross street along the ground. Two doors down he saw a shadow slip hurriedly into the alleyway.

Gabriel turned the corner and made for the alleyway. Behind him, in the main street, he could suddenly feel Enda look up in confusion and not see him there. Looking around for him—

He tried to draw in his attention like a tortoise hiding its head, tried to keep her from feeling where he had gone. At this moment of all moments, he did not want her to get involved. Gabriel walked casually and quietly into the alleyway, while inside he tried hard to bring to bear the half-unwanted talent that had been creeping up on him since Danwell and was getting stronger all the time. Come on, he said to that silent presence that was more or less inside him. I help you do what you're trying to. You help me, now.

A pause. A wash of sudden confusion from that interior core of thought and feeling that was not his own.

Come on, he thought again as he went quietly down the alley. It seemed blind, but there was no telling whether there were surveillance devices of some kind down here. He tried hard to look like a briefly confused tourist. Where's he gone? I need him. I need him alive. I've got questions for him, and I must have answers. Where is he?

Possibly confused by the sudden intensity, that interior presence gave no answer.

Then out of a little doorway that at first glance had seemed empty, Ricel jumped him.

Gabriel grappled with the man, intent on not hurting him and not allowing Ricel to hurt him back. They lurched back and forth in the alleyway.

That Ricel seemed unarmed heartened Gabriel. Then again, no one was allowed to go armed on Galvin. Where's his escort? Gabriel wondered. He must have slipped them somehow. There was little time to spend wondering how Ricel had managed to fool the Galvinite authorities into letting him pass.

What's he doing here?

Silly question. I'm here.

Whether I'm going to be able to find anything out from him.

They struggled, both hampered by their need not to be noticed and by the tight quarters in which they were fighting. Ricel was more interested in getting away, as he had been on the Lighthouse, but Gabriel was not going to allow that, not this time. He blocked Ricel's hands as they clawed at his face and tried to hammer into his head. Then he did a leg sweep and took one of Ricel's legs out from under him. Ricel went down. Gabriel threw himself on top of him, and this time, unlike at the Lighthouse, he did not miss.

They wrestled futilely on the ground for a few moments. Gabriel had already had this kind of encounter with the man once and had come off the worse. This time, though, he was not going to let that happen. He rolled, got a good grip on Ricel, turned over, came down on top—

"Gotcha!" he said softly.

Here it was, the moment he had been looking for, waiting for, for the better part of a year and a half. no, more like two years. Here under his hands was the man who had tricked him into killing one of his best friends and an ambassador he served with pleasure, a woman he respected above almost everyone else he had met in the service. This was not just someone who looked like him or was disguised as him either. This was the man himself, with the right wrinkles in the right places, the man he had served with on Falada. Here was the man who had destroyed his friendship with Elinke Dareyev—a loss he still felt profoundly, partly because he wasn't sure what might have come of it some day, partly because he also missed Elinke's friend and lover who died in the same accident, that mad spirit Lem, one of life's nice people who did not deserve such a sudden and terrible end. The terrible urge to kill Ricel, just kill him and be done with it came up, but Gabriel instantly crushed it down and away. Dead men make poor witnesses.

If I can ever get him off this planet to a proper trial, Gabriel thought desperately. He could just hear Norrik saying, "We shoot spies." Whatever else he might be, Ricel was certainly a spy. Gabriel could see himself in the weird position of trying to save Ricel's life. and failing. It would be too damned much irony for one day.

He didn't even have the freedom to simply beat the man into a pulp. Gabriel was getting into a very bad mood.

"I want some answers out of you right now," he said softly to Ricel. "They'll be here in a few moments. Why did you do what you did to me ?"

Ricel's eyes focused briefly on him.

Gabriel shook him. "Come on, talk," he hissed. "Why did you do it? Why did you set me up?!"

Ricel struggled one last time. Gabriel's hand clamped on his throat. Ricel tried to resist, but Gabriel squeezed harder and did something that had worked with the VoidCorp agent on Danwell: he "bore down" with his mind, trying to create a sense of pressure and inevitability. All his anger weighed in behind it, making the pressure real.

Ricel's head twisted from side to side, as if he was trying to avoid a gaze he couldn't escape. "You had to," Ricel gasped, "they said you had to be split away. Discredited. She—"

He fell silent. That listening presence inside Gabriel "heard" something else: a sudden internal cry, desperate and horrified, as some kind of trigger snapped.

. and the body struggling with Gabriel began to spasm.

Gabriel gulped. Suddenly he knew what the trouble was. No, it's not fair!

Implanted suggestion. What it had been implanted to do was hard to tell. Gabriel suspected that somewhere inside Ricel, a blood vessel had just blown itself out. The brain was beginning to die.

Not fast enough, Gabriel thought.

He pushed himself upright and closed his eyes. He had done this once with a healthy brain, and with help, on Danwell. Now there was no help, but he had no choice. He remembered how it was done. No nonsense about "reading" a mind as if it were text, but more a business of listening, sealing everything else away, listening for the whisper in the darkness, and looking for the light that the buzz and business of your own mind would drown out otherwise. Four minutes to work in, no more. So make it happen. Darkness, silence, listen .

Dying. Not dead yet, but soon. Last time, on Lighthouse, the danger had not been equivalent. This time his masters could not afford to let him be captured and questioned. This time.

Gabriel brushed past the narration for the moment. It would wait. He concentrated on the small fleeting images, burning bright up out of the darkness and fading again. One of them was central.

A slide.

He had been one of six. One had died when they were "young"—if that was the word you used when all of you were cloned to become conscious for the first time when the body they had grown was already the equivalent of twenty-five standard years old.

Their childhood had lasted about three years. The people who took care of them made sure it was a good one, not for any concern about the individual "children" involved, but because the psychologists among them knew that this was the best way to produce a stable and reliable product. This one had various vague happy memories of that time, including a slide that he was particularly fond of. He would climb up its ladder and hurtle down it again and again, while behind the glass wall of their playroom he could hear, clearly enough, the amused laughter. The watchers had liked it, too. That made Jake happy.

They all had longer names—Jake's was DW003 43FER—but they didn't use those with each other. He was simply Jake Three, or Threefer for short. Those, the psyches told them, were their grown-up names, the names they would bear proudly when they went out to work for the Company, but meantime they had to earn them. Right now they had to do that by studying hard. Later, there would be other ways.

Their adolescence—what they were allowed to have of one—lasted about three years. They were only allowed to leave the growth facility under carefully controlled conditions, which meant with about ten staff members around them. There was sex, but only with other clones, and that was also carefully supervised. The figures behind the glass walls might have been absolutely silent and the far side soundproofed, but you knew they were there, because after all, it was sex, wasn't it?

There was a certain amount of rebellion, but it was carefully channeled into their training. Their training was the most important thing in their lives: the game that kept them together, that made them something important, the purpose for which they had been bred (as they were constantly reminded).

They were trained in weapons first, which delighted them. They became expert with everything from chainswords to laser rifles, and they continued that training right through until their time in the facility was over and they were adjudged to be adult. They were trained in hand to hand combat, various kinds of small-craft flight, and checked out on various "positions" on bigger craft.

They were taught all kinds of ways to conceal information, both physically and virtually. They were taught bare-brain encryption and every known non-machine cipher. They learned quick recognition, "fast memory," brain printing, and many of the other techniques that turn a human brain into a recording device for audio or visual input without needing any kind of hardwiring. There had been several sessions—none of them knew how many—of deep sleep work and hypnotherapy to help them cope. All of them suspected that they were having deep triggers implanted, including the one which would make sure that if they fell into the hands of a sufficiently competent enemy, they would never reveal the secrets of the force that had trained them. They even joked about it.

"Now that we're ready to die," Jacob One said one night, "they'll let us out to live."

They knew that they had been bred and trained for the really dangerous work, missions too perilous to send less talented or committed Employees on. They were eager to get on with it.

At last had come the time when they all graduated. The clones were split up. They had all gone through counseling to help them handle that, the usual conditioning to help them see it as a graduation exercise rather than a tragedy, but it was still a wrench, and it took some months before any of them were really able to do anything without looking over their shoulders to see what the others thought. Nonetheless, proud to be Employees at last of the greatest force in the known worlds, they went out to do their jobs and repay the kindness of the Company that had raised them.

They had all been put "where they would do the most good," some of them working for VoidCorp Intel, some of them slipped into other Intelligence services among the stellar nations. In the case of Jacob Three and one of his brothers, they had entered Concord Intel, the heart of the Company's deadliest enemy.

It was exciting work, dangerous, uplifting—for Jacob at least—that sense of winning the Game, putting one over on everybody. That sense of "gotcha" overcame the staggering boredom. In some cases he might stay in one place, one job, doing nothing for months, a year, two years. Then the word would come through: cause this person to vanish. Steal this document. Pass on this message. He would do it and then quietly settle up his affairs to leave. It was the Game to do everything so that no one ever noticed, so that no trail was left, no betrayal. It was very important for Jacob and his brothers not to be noticed, for their work was increasingly becoming the removal of other Intel assets, sometimes the Company's own, who had become too dangerous to leave running.

But there came a time when someone did notice. After that, everything changed.

Jake Three had been given an assignment on a Star Force vessel. "Stay there," they told him. "Hold down this job. You're going to pretend to be from Star Force Intel. Someone there will approach you, or we'll identify him for you to contact. Either way, jolly him along. Once or twice you'll be asked to have him get you some minor piece of information. The third time, it will be less minor. You will use him to carry out an intervention, and he will take the fall afterward. He's getting too close to one of our assets aboard, and we want him away from her. After he goes down, you'll be withdrawn, so just sit tight."

It was just one more job, and Jake had carried it out exactly as instructed, but when he was withdrawn, it hadn't been VoidCorp that did it. The Company's protection failed him or was somehow subverted. He refused to believe that they might have abandoned him. He woke up to find himself not in a safe house or protected facility but strapped on a floater with a man's thoughtful face looking down on him.

That face belonged to a bald man, small and quiet, who simply said, "I have some questions for you. You will answer them for me now."

That had been a little more than a year ago. Jake Three had not believed in hell until then. He believed in it now and knew for a fact that it was run by Lorand Kharls.

He had finally escaped it only by offering the single thing Kharls wanted: that he should change sides. His body itself rebelled against the idea. No surprise there. His conditioning had been arranged that way, but there were drugs and more conditioning and much "sleep work," after which Jacob would wake up hardly knowing his own name. The final solution triggers had been subverted or removed—he didn't know which. Kharls finally offered him the choice to do what Jacob had been ordered to do next anyway, but to do it for Kharls's side. Jacob had resisted this as long as he could, but when it finally became plain that Kharls would simply have him put to sleep like some kind of damaged animal if he didn't cooperate, Jacob agreed.

He went out to space again, feeling damaged inside. but alive. He always hoped against hope that his own people would find him, rescue him, and put him back the way he had been.

But it never happened. He was alone, a "tainted asset." He knew the phrase all too well and knew what it meant. His own people would be far more likely to kill him than help him. His own clone-brothers, if they met him, would be bound to do the same.

Finally, the word had come from Kharls's people. He was to come here and investigate certain matters. One of them would be a familiar one. When Jacob had heard that, he had gone along with it all meekly enough. Concord Intel had its competencies. They had managed to set him up in a solid identity here. But he waited, and once he was here he made a few other quiet contacts, activating assets he knew were here—his Company's assets. He had received a new set of instructions from a quiet, husky woman's voice over the comms in his apartment one night. They would get him out after it was all over.

He never realized that there might have been a pattern in the words she spoke to him over the comm. There had been no obvious code words, but there had been one trigger left, one last failsafe, the one which the Concord people had not found and disabled.

Fool, he thought. I was a fool.

It was going dark quickly now.

Behind him, in the alley, Gabriel could hear footsteps, heavy ones. Helm, he thought. For all his bulk, Helm moved faster than any of them in light gravity like this.

"Gabe!"

"Not now," Gabriel whispered, keeping his eyes closed, diving into the darkness.

Ricel was struggling now, arms flailing as the seizure locked his lungs and his nerves in spasm. Gabriel shut his eyes and thought hard. There was something there in the background, lurking.

The conditioning, he thought, from the Concord side. He could see it, like the inside of one of the irradiated onions Enda sometimes made him peel, though this structure was not nearly as tidy. Here was layer after layer of quarreling instructions and interdictions, big parts of Ricel's mind that other parts were not permitted to look at, areas fenced off by chemical or attributional barbed wire, blocked away except at certain times or under certain circumstances, waiting for key words or triggers to be issued. It was a terrible patchwork of a mind. It had been a wobbly enough place when it started, but now it looked like a building that had experienced an earthquake and been partly rebuilt, then had suffered another, and another, and had been reconstructed each time by people intent on removing or entirely subverting earlier structures. The original structure was still in there somewhere, but it had been terribly compromised. The load-bearing members had been cut into, and now, now.

Now it was all crumbling. Here on this damned grim world it had all gone to pieces finally. So let it end now. It was going to anyhow.

Gabriel tried to push his way in, tried to shoulder his way underneath the collapsing beams as the dust and detritus of a disintegrating mind came sifting down all around him. They came down illuminated in a growing darkness, as if fire lived in the debris, glimmering a little as it fell and went out. Pieces of memory, pieces of mind, fell down all around Gabriel, and the observing presence in the back of his mind warned him, You had better get out of here. It will take you down with it. Unwise to stay in a dying mind—

They had told him that at Epsedra, too, when he stayed with his buddy, who had been shot, and pulled him out. Crazy to stay! You can't help him! Leave him with the medics! Then later on he was shot himself, but Gabriel couldn't make himself care because he knew he had done the right thing. He would do it now. He stayed there, stayed while Ricel's mind came fully undone and cast itself loose from the moorings that held it into the body. All over now. All done. Now it began, the long coast down into the darkness, down one last time.

The slide, Gabriel thought sadly.

Half lost in terror, the other seized on the image from a time when there was no fear. The slide. Climb the ladder, laughing. Pause at the top, teetering. Look down to the bottom, but there the bottom was only darkness, and there was no telling what was down there or who might be there to catch him.

Sorrow. A pause. It was all over.

Bye, Threefer, Gabriel said.

Jake Three jumped and went down the slide into the darkness.

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut so as not to see what Threefer saw as he went down, down into the darkness, out the other side.

"Gabriel."

It was too dark to see. There was no telling who was calling him. "Gabriel."

He could find no voice with which to answer. He could find no direction in which to turn. It was dark. Light sifted down through the darkness, unperturbed. A great distance away, someone said, the darkness comprehendeth it not.

"Gabriel!"

His eyes snapped open. His back hurt wretchedly. He was kneeling over what he held in his arms, the cooling body of a man. Strange how quickly you became aware of the wrongness of the temperature.

There was a clatter of footsteps at the end of the alley. Gabriel looked up after a few moments and found Welsh and a number of men in dark uniforms and goggled helmets staring down at him from all sides. Helm and Delde Sota and Grawl and Angela crowded against the sides of the alleyway.

"It must have been heart failure," Gabriel said, as if every death was not heart failure to some extent. "I heard him." He looked down at the very still face, the eyes still open and looking up past him, the hands clutching him so that Gabriel had to pry them away. It took some effort.

"Just like that," Gabriel said. "Just like that. After—"

"Gabriel," Enda said.

The sorrow with which she spoke the word was also part warning. Gabriel did not need it. He knew where they were and who surrounded them, but the irony of it, after all this while, was terrible. It's all over now, Gabriel thought, and who can I tell? What evidence is there? What evidence will there ever be that can stand up in a court?

He let go of Jacob Ricel and stood up.

It led to questioning, a lot of it, as Gabriel had thought it would. He and the others spent several long hours in the nearest police station, all of them being questioned first by the police and then by the army. Finally, last in a long line of questioners, Gabriel was not at all surprised to see Major Norrik turn up.

He sat down across the table from Gabriel, dismissed the guard, and waited for the door to close.

"So tell me what happened," he said.

Gabriel knew better than to protest that he had already told about thirty people. "I thought I had lost something out of my pocket back there at the cross street. This." He brought out the luckstone and put it on the table.

Norrik looked at it blankly. "It's a rock."

"It's some kind of silicate mineral, a composite," Gabriel said. "Some planets have beaches full of them. A friend gave it to me as a souvenir a while back. I'm kind of attached to it." He was studiedly telling the truth, not knowing what kind of voice analyzer they might have working on him right now. "At the time I thought maybe it had fallen out and gotten kicked into the alley. I went down there a little way to look, and then I heard this noise like something grunting. This man was down there having some kind of fit." Gabriel shook his head.

"It wasn't anyone you knew or recognized?"

Here it came. "No," Gabriel said.

Norrik looked at him. "Why did you leave your guide?"

Gabriel shrugged. "I just wanted to find the stone, that's all. It's a keepsake, a luckpiece." He made a face. "Turns out I'd forgotten that I put it in one of the top pockets. I didn't realize that until after all this was over, with this poor guy."

Norrik simply looked at him for several moments. Some of these people have implants, Gabriel thought. Who's he listening to, and what are they reporting on me?

Or is he listening to something else entirely? The thought was awful. It reminded him of that sensation that he did not want to feel at all—

At last Norrik nodded. "Mr. Calvin," he said, "your stay here is starting to prove inconvenient. We'd appreciate it if you'd leave the planet immediately and move on to your next destination without delay."

"Our drives won't be charged yet—" "You will be confined in your ships until they're charged, then you'll depart immediately."

"Uh, fine," Gabriel said, "no problem with that." He paused a moment then said, "What will happen to that poor man?"

"Reaction mass," said Norrik. "The parasitic heat from handling his remains will go to help our war effort. Not a hero's death, possibly, but a fate that all good Galvinites approve."

Gabriel nodded.

There followed a prolonged silence, then Major Norrik stood up. "The transport will be waiting to take you to your ships," he said, "and when your drives are charged, an escort will see you up to space and out to your starfall point."

Gabriel nodded to him again, trying to look suitably abashed for having caused trouble. Inside him, so many feelings were roiling that he hardly dared try to focus oh any one of them.

"I should mention," Norrik said as Gabriel turned to the door, "that you should not return to this system. You are now classified as a person under suspicion to be detained by any of our forces that come in contact with you. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Gabriel said.

"That will be all."

Gabriel went out of the room.

Inside his head, faintly, he could feel something writhing, stroking against itself in the warm green darkness, watching him in a thoughtful way.

The others were standing around in a windowless holding area, while two armed Galvinite Army staff watched them. Gabriel was put into this room with them.

Enda came to him, looked at him closely, and asked, "Are you all right?"

Gabriel nodded. "A long day," he replied, knowing she would understand.

After a moment another officer, a policeman, came through the door and looked around at them. "All right," he said, "there's a shuttle waiting for you people." He glanced up briefly at the humming sound of the covered stretcher with Ricel's body on it as it passed the door. He looked over at Gabriel. "Was it quick?" the policeman asked. "Did that guy suffer much?"

"It was pretty quick," Gabriel said softly. As regarded the suffering, he preferred not to go too deeply into it. No one here would understand. He barely understood himself.

"Right. Come on. The shuttle's waiting for you."

They were herded out to it and sealed in—the back of the shuttle being a windowless affair of the kind that the Marines would have used to transport prisoners or corpses. For all of that, the return was less stressful for Gabriel than the outward journey, partly due to having other things to think about. Once out on the landing pad again, Gabriel walked toward Sunshine with the greatest relief, practically ignoring the Galvinite soldiers that flanked him and Enda.

A couple of bored soldiers were standing by Sunshine's lift column. They looked at Gabriel and Enda's ID chips, exchanged a few words with the armed escort, and then nodded unconcernedly as they stepped aside for Gabriel to hit the lift control. It came down, and he and Enda stepped in and let the door close behind him.

When they were on Sunshine's deck again, Gabriel merely turned to Enda and said, "Let's dump our data."

Enda got the transfer going, and Gabriel called Helm.

"Gonna be fun sitting here cooling our heels for two days," Helm said. "They won't even let us socialize ship to ship."

"We'll cope," Gabriel said. "Doctor Sota around?" "Identification: present," her voice said. "Handling comms at the moment?"

It was a quiet way of telling Longshot that Gabriel was about to encrypt transmissions at his end, using the algorithms that the mechalus had installed in Sunshine and later in Lalique.

"Affirm," Delde Sota replied.

Gabriel reached into the display and shifted intership comms into encrypted mode. "Change of plans," he said. "When we leave, we're still headed for Coulomb, but we need to make one stop on the way. Crow."

"Crow?" Helm said. "What the devil's at Crow that we need to go that far out of our way?"

"'Lighthouse," Gabriel answered, "as I see from the schedule we picked up passing through Aegis. It's getting there next week, and it'll still be there when we turn up in three weeks. We won't be hitching or staying longer than it takes to recharge our drives, but there'll be stuff I very much need to drop off."

Gabriel could hear Helm shrugging. From Lalique, Angela said, "Always wanted to see that thing, even if there's no time to stop and shop. You're on."

Chapter Seven

Two days later, Sunshine, Lalique, and Longshot lifted with ten small FSA ships surrounding them. Together, the three ships made starfall, Lalique in a blaze of blue, and Longshot all flowing with crimson. Sunshine went into drivespace in a rush and flow of a deep purple almost ranging into the ultraviolet—the fabled lucky "black starfall."

That first night in drivespace, Gabriel was desperately weary, but there was something he felt he had to do before he slept. He stayed up into the wee hours, making a recording of absolutely everything he could recall from his prolonged, final brush with Ricel's mind. He was terrified that he would forget it, but more, he was terrified that if he did not immediately report his version of what had happened to someone in a position to do something about it, he would be lost. It was all just too convenient that Ricel should die here and now before Gabriel was about to embark on business during which Kharls certainly knew Gabriel wanted no tails or trails on him. If explanations weren't made now, the ones required later might

take forever. or prove fatal. The last thing Gabriel needed, was another murder rap hung on him by a Concord Marine prosecutor already suspicious of Gabriel's semi-acquittal on Phorcys and unwilling to accept the assessment of the police on Galvin.

Gabriel had originally thought the task would take him only a couple of hours. He was mistaken. Every time he would start unravelling a particular memory of Ricel's to detail it fully, other buried or unexpected details associated with it would come rushing back. Again and again this startled and frightened him, so he would have to stop, get his breath back, and start again. If there was one thing he didn't want, it was Jacob Ricel's memories stuck in his head.

What if they are, now? he wondered. What can I do about it? His memory, he had noticed, was already a lot better than it used to be—one of those changes Delde Sota had told him about, a kind of side-present from the stone. Useful enough for everyday things. but this, this was another story.

Please let these memories fade, he pleaded inside him, on the off chance that some passing spacer's deity might be listening. Please let it go away like a normal memory, go vague.

About four in the morning, he was finally finished—or rather, he couldn't bear to continue—and his voice was faint and hoarse.

He canned the message into Sunshine's data tanks as an encrypted mail addressed to Lorand Kharls. It would go out to the drivesat relay aboard Lighthouse, and once that was done, Gabriel could continue on his original course out into the dark. A last fling, he thought. For when he next returned to the more populated parts of the Verge, he was going to have to face up to the Marines at last.

I'm so tired of running, Gabriel thought.

After a little while, Enda appeared from her quarters, to which she had retreated after their takeoff and starfall to have a nap. Carrying the little squeeze bottle she used to water her ondothwait plant, she looked into the living area and said, "I would have thought you'd have taken some rest by now."

Gabriel shook his head slowly and replied, "I won't be able to sleep for a while, but I'm glad you're up. I have to tell you what happened down there."

Enda blinked. "But I was with you, for all but the questioning anyway."

"That's what I mean, partly. You were with me for this part, too, but not the part I saw—if 'saw' is even the word."

He told her about the creatures he had heard inside the major. She listened with the rapt and concerned look of someone attending to a sleeper newly wakened from nightmare. "Horrible," she said at last. "Where would such a thing have come from? Did that man know it was— they were—inside him?"

"I don't think so," Gabriel said. "I got a sense that it was controlling him very delicately, but it won't always be doing that. It will slowly get stronger and stronger, and he will become weaker and weaker until finally he will be no use to what is inside. Then it will—" He rubbed his head, for it was beginning to ache a little. "I think it will move on and find another host somehow, or breed, or both."

She shuddered. Gabriel could completely understand the reaction.

"There was more to it than that," he said.

Gabriel fell silent for a moment, turning the stone in his pocket over and over. He probed in a gingerly manner at the memory of his encounter with the creature's thoughts—no, their thoughts—as if it had

been Ricel's memories that he had just now been turning over. In a way, he was half afraid to do it, for the things with which he had been in contact were still alive, and Ricel was dead. That Ricel, anyway.

"There were many more of them," he said, "many more. tangles, I guess that would be the word. Many colonies, living inside various people, various hosts. I don't think the hosts necessarily have to be human. It doesn't matter. They can communicate, I think, over long distances—if communication is even really the word for it."

"What are they doing?" Enda whispered.

"Controlling people," Gabriel said. "It's all about control."

"To what purpose?"

Gabriel probed the memory again but got nothing back. "I'm not sure," he said slowly. "There wasn't a lot of that, but there does have to be a purpose."

He closed his eyes and looked into his mind again, trying to bear more weight on the images. Very slowly, with difficulty, they began to resolve in places. The paradigm seemed to be hologrammatic. Even the most fragmented part of one thought or image-in-thought seemed to preserve parts of others, many others.

What Gabriel got this time was not so much an image as a concept. Others. There are more like us, not like us in terms of species, but in motivations, intentions. They want what we want. We want what they want, what they will have.

More. More like us.

He opened his eyes, shook his head, then decided not to do that again, for the headache was becoming blinding.

"There are a lot more of them," he said softly, "a big group of some kind"—he searched for the proper word—"an association. Different creatures meeting for a common purpose."

"What purpose?"

He held his head quite still. "I didn't get enough," he said, "or I can't get more now. For all I know, they get together to play cards."

"Gabriel," Enda said, "this is most terrible. Someone must be told about these creatures." "Who?" Gabriel said.

"Your friend Lorand Kharls at least," Enda said.

Gabriel had been thinking about that. "I don't know," he said. "I have a few days to decide about that yet. Just." He leaned forward, rubbing his head. "It's hard to interfere with communications in transit, I know that once a message goes into a relay, those conduits are pretty much watertight, yet at the same time I'm not sure that they're completely safe from tampering. I would really hate for someone to decrypt this information and start spreading it around. People are paranoid enough as it is, but more to the point, if it got out, and someone or something associated with these things worked out that the information had come from me." He shook his head. "Life for the two of us is dangerous enough at the moment. I don't want it getting more so. If I become a target for some secret society of unknown aliens, then so do all of

you ." "If you do not pass this information on to someone able to make the most of it, and quickly," Enda said, "you put more people than just us in danger as well. What if something should happen to us after we leave Crow? It would be unethical to leave this plane of existence without having passed on this information."

Something about the turn of phrase was amusing, and Gabriel cracked just a slight smile. "I'll endeavor not to do that," he said.

"If you are going to play the situational ethics game at this elevated a level, Gabriel," Enda said, "you must play it fairly and from both sides at once, which is, at any rate, the requirement for any truly talented player. We are all in a position to make our own choices about how to face this new danger, but you, I think, have a responsibility to protect those who are not able to make the choice for themselves by making sure the data that defines the necessary choices is in the hands of those who must have it. If you are uncertain about passing this information to Lorand Kharls via transmission, you must consider whether it is now time for you to do so in person."

"The only way I could do that," Gabriel said, "would be if Concord forces took me to him, and you know what that would mean."

"Of course I do," Enda said. "I did not say the consideration would be a simple matter or necessarily pleasant, except insofar as any ethical act is pleasant in and of itself."

Rather to Gabriel's horror, he could see her point. "No," he said, "pleasant probably wouldn't be the word I would choose, especially not after Ricel." He shuddered.

"What did happen to him?" Enda said.

Gabriel let out a long angry breath. "There are two possibilities," he said, "and both of them might be true. One is that coming face to face with me and having that little contretemps so compromised what he was doing there that he had to suicide immediately, knowing that the Galvinite police would be on him within a few minutes. The other is that somehow I killed him."

Enda looked at him in shock. "Gabriel, you would never—"

"Oh, wouldn't I?" Gabriel said. He was angry at himself, partly because until yesterday he would have agreed with her. "Did I set off one of his conditioning triggers by being in his mind and wanting to kill him? Did his own mind misread that as an instruction to die, right then because that was what I wanted him to do?"

Enda opened her mouth and closed it again.

"I don't know," Gabriel said. "I might have killed him." He turned away. "I told Kharls as much in my report. That will go out via the drivespace relay at the Lighthouse."

"I take it you did not care to return to Aegis to use the relay there?"

"No," Gabriel said. "I want a little while to recover from what happened, and when I finally go back into Concord space again, I might as well surrender myself because there's no chance of finding any further evidence to clear me. The one man who might have done that is dead."

"Delde Sota wondered," Enda said, "whether you were being made over in some other image." A harder one, Gabriel suddenly "heard" her think. There were no words as such, but he got a quick image of reactions, emotions, edges being sharpened, tempered. To hone, Enda thought, or to shatter against the rocks…?

Gabriel blinked and said, "Maybe." He was unwilling to respond in speech to the intercepted thought, not being sure what kind of protocol there might be among fraal for such things. "Whether I am or not, they're waiting for me, and it might look better if I go to meet them willingly rather than having to be dragged."

Enda nodded. "Your choice." "What will you do?" Gabriel asked.

Enda gave him a thoughtful look. "If you have a while to make your larger choices," she said, "so do I, but I think it is safe to say that you will not be alone to make them. Meanwhile, there are less fraught choices before us. Sugar in your chai or black?"

"Black," Gabriel replied.

Enda headed off to the galley.

Gabriel sat and looked at the image on the sitting room display of the great blocks of text that he had dictated for Lorand Kharls, and then he shifted the view back to Enda's green fields. There would be time enough for the dry words and what would come of them in the weeks to come. All the same.

He reached into his pocket and fingered the luckstone there. When luck won't assist you outright, Gabriel thought, you do your best to make your own.

Three more starfalls and twenty-five days later they arrived at Crow. The primary itself was a weary little orange K-class star with only a few planets—all rocky airless globes except for the middle one, simply called Crow II. That world was mostly steppe and sand with a sparsely settled colony in its northern temperate region, built around an old terraforming project that, though much scaled back in recent years, had still met with some success. Breather gear was necessary for those who went out of the colony domes under the dark violet sky, but it was thought that in perhaps another fifty years there might be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to start active addition of the nitrogen necessary to make the mixture safely breathable. The population was tiny—maybe ten or twelve thousand humans and fraal.

"Which is why I don't understand what that's doing here," Helm muttered to Gabriel over comms, when they came out of drivespace.

It was a convenient starfall, for the Lighthouse hung there gleaming in orange light from Crow. Gabriel looked at it a little longingly from the pilot's compartment where he was watching the data heralds come up on the main display as the infotrading system synched with the Lighthouse's drivesat relay.

"I did some research," he said. "They had some kind of attack here thirteen years ago. Nearly wiped out the whole colony."

" 'Some kind of attack'?"

Gabriel looked idly toward Longshot and Lalique, which had come out of drivespace slightly before Sunshine had. "A pattern you might recognize," Gabriel said, rather grimly. "Little round ships came out of nowhere and killed half the population apparently. Then they just vanished. So did a lot of the rest of the population. The place has been building itself back up, but only very slowly. The Concord, needless to say, is in and out of here all the time. I had a look at the Lighthouse's schedule for the past couple of years. For a place with no huge political importance, it comes to Crow an awful lot."

"Huh," Helm said from Longshot. "Someone thinks it's a good idea to have a drivesat relay here pretty regularly, even if it's only a temporary one."

Gabriel nodded.

Angela's voice came in over comms. "Your offloading going all right, Gabriel?"

"No complaints," Gabriel said. They hadn't had that much to offload in any case, and that one message was away now. No recalling it. He sighed. "We've applied to see what they've got for us that's going in the direction of Coulomb."

Angela laughed. "Oh, no, another 'Will we ever get to Coulomb after all?' run."

"Don't tease," Gabriel said. "It's a big responsibility, infotrading. People depend on you to get their data where it's going on time."

"Which, as I remember, is why you went for the slow stuff, last time," Helm said. "Well, yes."

"Gabriel just likes to worry out loud," said Angela.

He had to laugh at that. "As for you, Miss Social Services. don't push your luck."

She laughed. "You don't scare me. Besides, it's Grawl's turn to cook tonight, and if you're not nice to me, I'll bribe her to burn it."

There was a rumbling sound somewhere in the background of the pickup from Lalique. "What?" Angela yelled over her shoulder. A confused noise echoed in Lalique's background. "Uh-oh," Helm said.

Gabriel chuckled and watched the infotrading system finish passing its information to the Lighthouse's drivesat relay. As the inbound part of the cycle started, he found his hands clenching on the arms of the pilot's couch. Nothing came in but the usual infotrading system maintenance information, news of new node-assignments, changes of system addresses, addition of new traders in the network, deletion of old or defunct ones.

Nothing from my father.

The expectation that there would be something so soon was unrealistic anyway. Gabriel berated himself for having willingly opened that wound of uncertainty again. You brought it on yourself, he thought.

A moment later he could hear the shouting again from Lalique.

"What's going on over there?" he called.

Grawl's voice came on, snarling with annoyance. "They have lost my whilom!" "What?"

"Half our big stuff isn't in the cargo hold," Angela said from the background.

"Those miscreants!" Grawl shouted, "I shall make such a satire on them that they will all break out in blotches and their mates will snatch them bald! Their young will grow no claws and their friends will see the error of their ways! Their—"

"She has broken meter," Enda said from the doorway of the cabin. "I missed the beginning of that. What is this about?"

Gabriel shook his head and said, "I have a hunch, Angela. Just hang on and keep her from cursing anyone else for a few minutes. You wouldn't want her to waste the energy."

He got up and made his way back to Sunshine's cargo hold. A glance inside told him what he needed to know. He went back uplevel and paused in the living area, waking up the display there and tapping it into comms, showing both Lalique and Longshot's pilot cabins.

"Grawl, relax," he said. "Stand down the heavy weaponry. We've got it over here. Two whilom carcasses, it looks like."

"What's half our meat doing in Sunshine, for pity's sake?" Angela said.

"They must have misloaded it at Erhardt Field," Gabriel said. "Possibly a genuine clerical error. We knew they were going to take the shipments apart and look for—oh, whatever Galvinite security people look for when they're being congenitally nosey. So they did it, and then they repacked it incorrectly."

Coming toward him from the pilot's cabin, Enda sniffed. "Fraal eat meat," she said, "but we are not quite that carnivorous. I do not know if I like the statement implicit in their redistribution of the cargo."

Helm laughed. "That's the crankiest I've ever heard you," he said. "They even got under your skin, huh, Enda?"

She looked at him in mild shock. "It is something of an overreaction, is it not?" she said. "My apologies."

"Oh, no, Enda, it was funny!" Helm said. Then he realized he was talking to the air. Enda had gone past Gabriel back to her quarters, and the door gently shut behind her.

"What did I say?" Helm said. "I didn't mean to make her mad."

"I don't think she is," Gabriel said. "Helm, don't worry about it. Suit up and come over to help me get this meat sorted out."

All the same, while he was suiting up himself, Gabriel wondered about the little incident. Enda was normally the most inoffensive of them all, and Gabriel would have thought, until now, almost impossible to offend. It was a little strange.

He snorted at himself as he donned his helmet and touched the seals closed. I'm complaining about someone being a little strange? he thought. After what's been going on with the stone lately?

If I was worried about becoming less human than I used to be, I guess that part of my behavior is still human enough.

For the moment.

"Another forty-five hours for recharge," Helm said, "then we jump. Coulomb, still?"

"Not for the star itself," Gabriel said, "but in that general direction. In terms of exact coordinates, I'm not sure exactly where we're headed."

They were halfway through dinner in Lalique's sitting room—a pleasant place for it. All the space made it possible to eat without getting your elbows in your neighbor's plate.

"Well, five light-years at a time," Helm said, "and we'll be in no danger of overrunning whatever you're looking for. Now, if you could do ten at a time like us."

"I get the feeling you're beginning to enjoy rubbing this in," Gabriel said. "I'm beginning to wish we'd gone ahead and bought that new ship or that I could get someone to die and leave me one."

Helm snickered. "Don't get your hopes up."

Enda rolled those expressive eyes of hers and turned away with a slight smile to pour herself some fruit juice. Grawl had cooked this evening, doing an entire half-side of whilom. She was expert at the more carnivorous kind of cooking, and seconds and thirds had been happily dispensed to the participants.

"It is good to see you frail creatures exhibiting some kind of appetite," she said, sawing off another rib steak for herself.

"I've got the coordinates sorted out, anyway," Gabriel said and felt around in his pocket for the chips on which he was carrying the data. "You can lay them in when you get back." He handed one to Angela and one to Helm.

"Query: method of determination?" asked Delde Sota.

Gabriel looked sheepish. "I hold the stone and turn myself until it feels right," he said, "then the fighting field programs an equivalent and isolates the coordinates."

Helm guffawed. "Better hope we don't wind up at Aegis again," he said. "What if that thing's homing in on where you were born or something? Maybe it thinks you want to go home to spawn."

"Spawning is fairly low on my list of things to do at the moment," Gabriel said. He poured another glass of kalwine for himself then handed Enda the bottle. "It's not my home the thing's looking for. Its home, possibly. or one place it identifies as such."

"You hear it thinking?" Grawl said, looking up from the last bite of the ribs she was holding daintily in her claws.

Gabriel shook his head. " 'Thinking' isn't the word." "Feeling?" Angela asked.

"I don't know about that either," Gabriel said, then he laughed. "Sorry. It's frustrating. There aren't a lot of words for the things it does, but when I make the image in my mind of what I'm after—the big 'facility' that the little edanwe on Danwell told me was 'not too far off—the directional quality in the stone's response is really noticeable. The correlation's clear in the heads-up display for the navigational system. It worked well enough at just seat-of-the-pants stuff on Danwell. We'll see if it works out here."

Delde Sota looked somewhat mischievously at Gabriel. "Commitment: and if you do spawn, we get to watch."

He laughed and said, "No promises. about spawning or otherwise. You want to write that kind of

scientific paper, you're going to have to make the details up."

Dinner went on as long and cheerfully as usual, and about the time the cook began to fall asleep, the separate ships' companies went back to their ships. Their first jump out into the darkness in search of Gabriel's unknown "facility" would be in forty-three hours, though there was no need to hasten out of the Crow system with the Lighthouse hanging there, silently benevolent and extremely well armed.

When they got back to Sunshine, Gabriel was ready to turn in immediately, but Enda sat down in the living area and stared at her display of the green field rippling in the wind. Her expression was a little troubled.

"Indigestion?" Gabriel asked, knowing this was not the case.

She glanced at him with some amusement, but the emotion was edged with discomfort. "Gabriel," she said, "I fear I am not myself at the moment."

"What? Because of the way you answered Helm earlier?"

"Not at all." She looked rather guilty. "I believe it is the stone."

"What?"

She laced her pale hands together as Gabriel sat down opposite her. "Gabriel," she said, "I feel it looking at me, and I am not sure the look is a friendly one. Do you understand what I mean?"

"About the looking," he said, "yes, but not about the unfriendliness."

"It." She shook her head, gazed at the display, which was showing green fields wavering in a silken wind, a favorite display of hers. "It is keyed to you, that stone, or it s a key, and you are the lock for which it was made—or which it is remaking to fit it. That is what Delde Sota warned you of, is it not?"

"It wasn't so much a warning," Gabriel said, "as an advisory."

"Yes. The problem, I believe, is that it is keying itself to you and to you alone—and becoming less tolerant of others nearby, especially lifeforms that have the ability to mindwalk." She sighed. "If I read the situation aright, it began turning you into a mindwalker on Danwell. You had a great deal of help: a group of communal telepaths, and a considerable incentive to communicate with them. Friendship, support, danger."

"You had that, too," Gabriel said.

"Yes, but not the stone. It took you through that particular challenge and out the far side. Now it has another challenge for you—a larger one. You do not yet know entirely what this one entails, and neither do I. You will find out, but the stone does not easily tolerate the presence of others whom it fears may interfere with its business."

"You speak of it fearing, making things happen. as if it were sentient. Is it?" Gabriel asked, for this was the one question that had been taxing him most lately.

Enda tilted her head halfway over in a gesture of uncertainty. "I would not know how to say. Sentience is such a slippery subject to define, even when you have it. nearly as bad as consciousness. I mean, you and I know we are conscious, but how do we know?"

Gabriel blinked. That was high on a list of questions that had not been bothering him.

"Let it lie," Enda said. "The point of all this is that I am not you, and the stone does not entirely trust anyone or anything that is not you. It has begun turning its attention to me with increasing intensity more and more often. I feel it as a physical discomfort at the moment. I can bear it. The stone has offered me no violence, mentally or psychically speaking. Should it attack me, I do not have the training or the power to stop it. If it should take a dislike to me. I would have to leave, Gabriel. I could not bear to stay with it in such a confined space."

Gabriel swallowed. "How long has this been going on?"

"Since Danwell," Enda said. "It was always on the borders of my consciousness before then, but at Danwell, something happened. I was judged, as you were, by whatever force or presence was lying hidden in the edanweir group unconscious. Both of us, fortunately, were not found wanting—otherwise we would not now be alive, but the stone itself was also. perhaps not judged, but. upgraded? Reprogrammed perhaps? Or maybe it had new programming added. It is becoming increasingly vigilant about protecting you, I believe, though its definition of protection may look odd to you."

"I think it made Jacob Ricel turn up," Gabriel said. This was a thought that had been lurking fairly unformed in the back of his mind and turned up again now.

Enda looked thoughtful at that. "Maybe," she said. "I do not know how it could do such a thing, but I suspect that it could. It does not seem to hold cause and effect the same way we do, and sometimes I think I can feel things twisting around it."

Gabriel nodded. "I feel something like that too," he said. He reached into his pocket.

"No, please," Enda said, "not right now. Seeing it makes me uncomfortable." She sighed. "I just felt I had to tell you that these feelings were growing on me, Gabriel. If I do have to leave you, it will be most against my will. We are good friends, and you have a great work that you are doing, for which you will need all possible friends around you, all the help you can get. If it comes to a choice between dying and leaving in hopes that the situation may improve, I think I will choose the second option."

"Well, of course," Gabriel said. He was trying hard, though, not to reveal how shaky he felt. The thought of being without Enda—

"I fear we are both too much mindwalkers now," Enda said, "to be able to conceal such feelings from each other—not without considerable effort, which you have not yet learned to focus properly. It is always the danger of that particular art, one of the reasons why I put it aside when—" She broke off. "No, later for that as well. I think I will have some chai."

"Don't worry about losing your temper," Gabriel said. "You lose it less obviously than anyone I know. You barely register on the tiff scale."

She smiled at him, the dry look of someone who does not entirely believe a compliment. "Perhaps someday you will see me really angry," she said, "and see how many tiffs it registers. Meanwhile."

She got up and went down to the galley. Chapter Eight

Some forty hours later they set out from Crow. Gabriel checked the Lighthouse one more time for any

messages that might have come for him. One more time he found nothing and cursed himself quietly. If Enda noticed this, she said nothing of it.

The next several starfalls and the days between them were routine. insofar as any jump made not to a specific star, station, or facility can be considered routine. At the end of it, nearly two months after leaving Crow, Sunshine, Lalique, and Longshot came out into empty space with all their weapons hot, looking around with concern. This was by far the most dangerous kind of starrise to make, but there was no one here as far as they could tell. For his own part, Gabriel would have given a great deal for a starrise detector, but such equipment was far beyond his means. He also wished that he had some clear idea of what they were looking for.

"So where is it?" Angela asked, only partly teasing.

Gabriel sighed. "Not here."

"You can tell already?" said Helm.

"I can tell that the reading is stronger than it was, but not that much stronger," Gabriel confessed. "Definitely I know that it's not anywhere nearby, not anywhere we could use system drive to reach anyway. We need to keep going in the same general direction as the last starfall. I'll give you another set of coordinates when the drives have finished charging."

They met again for dinner in Longshot this time. It turned out to be one of Helm's "I did it with a handlaser" dinners, a one-pot dish of the kind in which he so excelled.

Gabriel took a lot of good-natured chaffing during the meal about his stone not having produced the goods. "It might take a lot more jumps," Gabriel said. "I'm warning you."

"That means there might be some wisdom in not eating all the meat right away." Angela threw Grawl a look. "This means you."

"I will try some other forms of protein for a while," Grawl said, "especially if Helm is cooking them with his handlaser, but I expect to come out at some civilized world within, say, the next month or so."

"No guarantees," Gabriel said.

Angela gave him a look that he had trouble reading, and for the moment, not a whisper could he hear from the inside of her head.

That, Gabriel thought later when they had all parted for the evening, was something that was beginning to bother him. It was getting to the point where he could habitually hear not people's thoughts as such, but a kind of background noise made by their thinking and their emotions. It was like the faint rumble through a ship's system drive, except that it came in a slightly different flavor and timbre for each person. Sometimes it went away, but not often. Lately, he had awakened to think that the stardrive was malfunctioning in some new and interesting way, because he could hear and feel that vibration. except that it was no vibration. It was Enda.

The stone knew about fraal. It had known about them for a long time. That familiarity was plain, and also—strange to Gabriel—it had some obscure trouble with fraal, some problem. It seemed not to like them very much.

That made Gabriel wonder. Maybe Enda is right, he thought, and the stone sees her as some kind of rival or potential interference with its business. How do I tell it that it doesn't have anything to worry about? Its business is mine, for the moment.

Lying in his bed in the dark with the stone in his hand, he wondered if even that was open to question occasionally. There were moments when the fine hairs stood up all over him at the thought of what he was becoming. Some of his memories, Gabriel found, were becoming hazy. He had to concentrate to see them clearly. Some of them, quite old memories from his childhood, were becoming hazy enough that he had to look hard to remember whether they had really happened or whether they were dreams. In some cases he could no longer tell.

His mind was being altered. Compressed, Gabriel thought, to make room for something else? What else? There was no telling.

Delde Sota's warnings were beginning to seem more urgent to him now. When the changes had been merely physical and external—the hair going white, even the beard silvering rapidly now—those had seemed less threatening, but when things started happening in the inside of his head.

Still, Gabriel thought, this is the path I've chosen.

Or so I like to think. Has there been any choice in this? Has the stone been calling the shots ever since it got itself into my hand? What's it looking for when I use it to hunt down this old trove of alien science that the little edanwe—or what was hiding inside her—told me about? Granted, the Concord can use these things. In fact, he suspected that the Concord was going to need to have these things to protect its people, the civilization they'd managed to build so far, but that's not the stone's concern. It doesn't mind.

At least he didn't think it minded. He was almost afraid to try to look into that further.

But what does it really want?

Long silence. No answers came. In his hand, the stone declined even to glow.

Fine, Gabriel thought and put it off to one side on the shelf, turning over to go to sleep.

You Just be that way, he said to the stone. I'll find out myself, eventually,' and when I do, well see which of us is really running this show.

After recharging their drives, they jumped again. Again, five days passed during which Gabriel mostly avoided the stone and went back to studying the starship catalogues. Enda teased him mildly about this and occupied herself with her own routine, cooking, reading, listening to the fraal choral music that she favored, looking at "canned" entertainments and news programs downloaded from the Grid at Aegis or from the much bigger Grid that the Lighthouse carried with it.

When starrise came again, Gabriel had been awake for nearly twelve hours already, unable to bear the excitement, the thought that there might actually be something there this time, but they came out again in empty space, all the stars distant, not even an uninhabited one nearby. Gabriel nearly did not need the stone, or his slowly burgeoning ability, to hear Helm thinking, Now what? There's nothing here .

The three ships drew together in the darkness and linked up by comms.

"Everybody okay over there?" Helm asked.

"No problems," Gabriel said, looking at the mass detector. "Except one." "There's nothing here," said Angela from Lalique.

Gabriel sighed and wished she wouldn't belabor the obvious.

"Gabe," Helm said, "this is really beginning to seem like a waste of fuel."

Gabriel flushed hot with embarrassment. "Look," he said, "I warned you that it might. The stone—" "That thing might be wrong, you know," Helm said. "Has that occurred to you?" "Yes, it has, but—"

"Well, when are you going to start acting on the idea?" Helm growled. "It's all very well to blow your own food and fuel and funds chasing all over the black backend of nowhere, but when you—"

"Helm, I didn't—"

"Oh, what's the use of trying to talk sense to you? The hell with it." Helm chopped off his comms.

Gabriel sat there torn between frustration and anger, for he could understand Helm's viewpoint all too well. From Lalique there was nothing but silence.

Gabriel swallowed. "Well," he said, "we'll charge up again and head out. Who's cooking tonight?"

"Opinion: my turn," Delde Sota said as Longshot's comms crackled to life again.

It meant dinner in Longshot, which right now did not seem to be such a great idea. "What are you going to feed me?" Gabriel muttered. "Crow?"

"Assessment: cooking area here large," said Delde Sota dryly, "but not large enough to take a whole planet."

"Huh," Gabriel said, not sure how hard his leg was being pulled. Still, he reluctantly agreed that he and Enda would come over.

Normally, visiting Longshot amused Gabriel somewhat, for Helm's ship reflected a rather spartan lifestyle that was only slowly changing. One whole cabin of that fairly ample space was allotted to "things I don't know where to put"—a farrago of packed-up mining equipment, old entertainment chips, and a surprising amount of souvenirs and clothes, all pushed into that cabin and tied down. Every now and then, having acquired some new hobby or interest in his travels and then gotten bored with it, Helm would bundle up everything and stuff it into that cabin. "Adding a new layer," as he put it. When the three ships connected their tubes—Longshot having two airlocks made this their normal configuration when laying over for a recharge—Gabriel came over and found Helm engaged in this, while shouting suggestions over his shoulder at Delde Sota. The doctor was in the galley halfway down Longshot's long central hallway.

Angela and Grawl looked over his shoulder in a mixture of curiosity and bemusement. "You ask me," Angela said to Helm, who was lashing a plastic box full of chips down onto the top layer, "you're the one who should be looking for a new ship, not Gabriel. You're a pack rat."

"What's all this stuff?" Gabriel said.

"More music," Helm said. "Delde Sota keeps saying I should broaden my horizons."

"Opinion: only thing about him which is not already broad enough," Delde Sota said from the galley.

"Huh." Helm snorted. "Gabe, you want some new music for your system, take a look through here later. Lots of stuff."

He sounded gruff but no longer actively angry, which relieved Gabriel somewhat. As regarded "looking

through" the cabin, Gabriel had half been hoping Helm would offer. There were always interesting things to be found there. Last time, he had been going through a small box of anonymous looking datacarts and had found one that was an examination of "The Market's Best Small Arms." The holo showed fine small weapons of all kinds being test fired by good-looking, scantily clad women of various species. He had found it fairly educational, though perhaps less so about the small arms than about the women.

"What exactly is a pack rat?" asked Grawl as they made their way down toward the dining room. "Is it a creature of the Stellar Ring?"

"It never occurred to me to ask," Gabriel said. "Though my mother used to talk about them."

"Mine, too," Angela said. "I think I remember her telling me that it's this kind of bird that looks for shiny things and hides them away."

Enda came out of the galley carrying tongs and glasses. "Like a peewit perhaps?" she said. "What's a peewit?" Angela asked.

Helm laughed and brought up the display installed on the far wall, and they called up a "bestiary" resource stored in Longshot's computers, finding neither peewits nor pack rats, but coming across much other interesting information on creatures such as sirens, scraaghek, and Minshore crystals.

"Wouldn't have thought you'd be much interested in xenobiology, Helm," Angela said.

"Man's got to know what he's shooting," Helm said mildly.

"Or shooting at," Enda said, coming in again with the bottles of wine and reconned fruit juice.

"Exactly," Helm said as Delde Sota brought in the entree, a huge pot of brown wailenta.

They all picked up their tongs and dug in. The conversation wandered off among the usual wild tangle of topics, but all the while Gabriel could hear everyone avoiding the one topic that he knew was most on their minds: yet another starfall, no results. This is while we're still in space that's not too far off the beaten track, he thought. What happens if we have to go somewhere genuinely out in the middle of nowhere?

I may have to go alone.

Though Enda will come.

• Assuming she can bear it, said the back of Gabriel's mind. If the presence of the stone became too much for her to bear—and she was already showing stress from it—she would part company with him.

Dinner went on through dessert. Eventually Gabriel got up for a stretch and to go down to the end of the hallway to visit the head. When he came out, Angela was halfway down the hall, looking into the "junk" cabin.

"Uh, sorry, didn't mean to keep you waiting." "I wasn't waiting for that," she said quietly.

"Huh? Oh," Gabriel said. While he could hear the faint under-nimble of her mind, on a note that suggested something out of the ordinary was going on, he didn't have a clue what it might be.

Angela looked at him. "I have to ask you," she said. "I really hate to, but I have to. Are you all right?"

"All right how?"

"In your head. You know. the stone."

Gabriel laughed briefly. "I'm sane, if that's what you mean."

"Are you sure?"

The look she gave him made him plain that she wasn't.

"Look," Gabriel said, "Delde Sota seems to think I'm all right. She would have said something if she wasn't certain."

"She has said things to you," Angela replied, "several times."

"In a general way," Gabriel said, "yes. She says there are some changes happening inside me, and she's not sure where they're going."

"That's mostly the problem at the moment," Angela said, "being sure where we're going. Are you?"

"If you mean do I know where we're going, no. That's the whole point. If you mean can I feel that there's somewhere specific that we're going to, then yes. No question."

Angela leaned against the bulkhead wall, her arms folded. "Are you sure," she said, "that the stone isn't just making you. I don't know. making you think that, feel that, for some reason of its own?"

That struck a little too close to home. "I don't have any reason to think so," Gabriel said. "It didn't act that way at Danwell."

"It might now."

"Just why exactly would it?" Gabriel said. "Do you know more about it than I do? It sounds like you think you do."

Angela's eyes widened for an instant then narrowed into the beginnings of genuine anger. "Gabriel, if you can't get it through your head that we're concerned about you," she said, "that might by itself be an indicator that something's going on in your head that wants looking at. We just don't want to see this thing dragging you halfway across the galaxy for no reason."

"It's not for no reason, believe me," Gabriel said, turning away. "There's something big going on here. really big."

"But you would have to believe that, wouldn't you?" Angela said. "Haven't you given any consideration at all to the idea that—"

"That what? That this whole thing is some kind of delusion? Look, Angela, you don't have to come along, if you're so concerned. I wouldn't want to waste your time and Grawl's."

"That's not the point! Idiot! As if we've been doing anything all that important with our time until we sold you that contract." She swallowed. "Gabriel, you're just. you've just stopped listening to people, to what other people think. All the time it's 'the stone' this and 'the stone' that. Sometimes it looks like that thing is all you're really concerned about in the world, and if people are going to go along with you out into the middle of nowhere because of that."

He looked up at her slowly and said, very softly, "Maybe that s all I'm concerned about these days.

What else have I got? If I go back to Concord space, they'll just sling me in jail. I have no new evidence to bring to my trial, even though I now know for sure what Ricel and his buddies were up to—a lot of it, anyway. They're just going to chuck me in a cell if I go back. What else is left but to go out and go away, if you can't go back? So I'm going out to see if I can find what the stone says is out there, and whatever it was living inside that little edanwe back on Danwell. If people are going to start leaving now—Enda might have to—then I understand that you might feel you need to as well. So you go right ahead. Helm's got business of his own. Maybe he'll take off, too."

She stared at him. Then she suddenly took a few steps forward and put her face quite close to his.

"You just listen to me," she said, even more quietly. "You are such a stubborn cuss. You just don't know how to let anyone tell you they're worried about you, do you? Goddamned Marines, all thick skin and thick heads. I don't know how you ever got a medal for being shot, because I can't imagine how anything ever got through that hide of yours. It's like Helm's armor—confused armor, though, because it bounces the friendly stuff off as well as the enemy slugs. I don't know what Enda's problem is. You'll have to sort that out with her, but as for me and Grawl, do you think we care about being all the way out here, wherever we are? That's not the issue. It's your big echoing empty head that's the issue, Gabriel! We've seen that there are plenty of people after your butt. You seriously think we'd leave you here to cope with them by yourself? We may not have been together long, but you plainly don't know us real well if you think so. We just want to make sure that you're genuinely running this show, whatever it is, that your admittedly tiny mind is more or less in one piece, though I imagine that just finding it must have been a real piece of work for the Marine psychs, and even Delde Sota must have to get out a magnifier."

She glared at him.

Gabriel opened his mouth and closed it again. Then he said, "I really am running this show, and I'm sure I'll be able to tell if it stops being that way. Satisfied? But why should my telling you that resolve anything? There's been no change in the situation between when I first told you so five minutes ago and now, when you've spent most of the five minutes belittling my mental capacity, except that now I know you think I'm an idiot."

The opinion was certainly mutual, which made him grin suddenly and then try to get rid of the grin with only partial success. What helped the grin loosen and fall off, finally, was the flash of thought. Maybe I was wrong. Something has changed after all.

Gabriel's only problem was that he couldn't tell whether that was her thought or his.

Angela looked at him with some annoyance. "And a weird one," she said. She paused, as if looking for something to add to this, and then brushed past him and made for the head.

Gabriel made his way back down to the dining area. Everyone was talking animatedly about a picture of an Alitarin drexen on the display, and Helm was making some unlikely suggestions about how it might have sex. It was all entirely too casual for Gabriel, who was not fooled. The rumble of mind-noise got considerably louder as he came in, though as usual he could catch no whiff of content. He sat down and poured himself a glass of wine and joined the conversation.

Much later, when he and Enda were making their way back to Sunshine to prepare for the next jump, Gabriel said, "Well?"

Enda gave him a large, blue-eyed, innocent look.

"You must have heard it," he said.

They slipped in through the airlock, and it shut behind them. Enda touched the control to start the tube retracting. "A fairly quiet fight as such things go," she said. "Surely very low on the tiff scale."

Gabriel had to laugh a little, even though he was still feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. "It would have been nice if it had resolved anything, but you guys knew what it was about."

"We knew."

"And?"

"We are with you, Gabriel," Enda said. "All of us. It is business as usual." He really wanted to believe her. He sighed and went to bed.

Their next starfall turned out exactly like the last one: empty space, no worlds, no moonlets, nothing but the usual amount of dust. Gabriel let Enda make the routine contacts with the other ships and let her arrange dinner, but he didn't attend. He just couldn't face the others.

During that quiet time he sat in his cabin with the stone in his hands, trying to wring some kind of concrete results out of it, some definite kind of directional information about what he was hunting. or any information at all.

It was rather like trying to wring blood out of, well, out of a stone. There were no results, though Gabriel sat and listened with all his might. He queried the stone in words and images and generally hammered on it with his mind like someone using a sledgehammer on a pebble. The pebble resisted him with the nonchalance of an object on which entirely the wrong tactics were being used.

He sighed. Maybe they're right, he thought. Maybe I am crazy. This kind of travel's crazy enough, anyway.

Gabriel had a vague memory of reading about some ancient explorer on Earth who sailed west to find land that was supposed to be in the east, the idea being revolutionary at the time because his people had lost (in one of those cultural hiccups that happen sometimes) the information that the world was round. He had sailed to the very edge of his exploration envelope—well beyond it, in fact, so that his crew was apparently thinking seriously of throwing him overboard—when land finally appeared. The situation had exercised its own ironies, of course. The man had not reached the place to which he had originally been heading, but someplace else entirely, and the journey that had been planned to make him rich and famous instead wound up bankrupting him. The phrase, "Sail on! And on!" kept recurring in Gabriel's memory. Now he knew how the poor guy had felt.

He went back to his labors with the stone. An hour went by, then two, and still nothing happened. Finally he just lay back, let out a long exasperated breath, and then shouted silently into that maddening interior silence.

COME ON! he yelled inside his head. Can't you give me something more concrete than Just this vague "thataway" feeling? Don't you believe in star maps? You may have belonged to some species umpty-thousand years old, incredibly ancient and advanced and all that crap, but you must have had maps!

Nothing.

Then came a slow sense of something looking at him from a great depth of time.

The hair stood up all over Gabriel. It was that silent presence that sometimes spoke in the back of his mind, but he had never had a contact quite like this before. Rather than the stone demanding his attention, he had summoned it. It was answering. slowly, patiently, as if he had awakened it hours earlier than expected, and it was restraining itself from what otherwise could have been a very intemperate response.

An image of stars drifting in huge currents washed past his point of view like sand in water—thousands of years' worth of movement in a few seconds, endless eddies and currents of motion, tumbling the stars and their systems among one another, out again, and onward through this arm of the galaxy. The movement was slow and graceful, but Gabriel knew that it had been sped up by a factor of millions for his sake. Millennia of movement were happening every second, as the myriad relationships among the stars shifted, shifted, and shifted again by tens and hundreds of light-years.

How much good, the image seemed to say, do you think our maps are going to do you now? You must go looking. Were we with you, we could not do better ourselves.

Darkness fell— wham!—with the contact cut off as suddenly as a door being shut.

Gabriel sat there and blinked. Suddenly his stomach turned over, a queasy flip, and he hurried into the head and had a prolonged discussion with the waste reclamation utensil. Possibly his body was outraged on some very elementary level by being forced to experience so much time, even indirectly, and it retaliated by attempting to throw up everything Gabriel had eaten since he first went on solid food.

When Enda came back a few hours later, Gabriel was in the pilots' compartment, sorting out the coordinates for the next jump. "Everybody okay?" he asked.

"They are fine," Enda said. She slipped out of the big silken shawl she had been wearing over her vest and kilt and laid it aside over the back of the left-side pilot's couch. "Are you all right? You look pale."

He nodded, trying not to think about how he had gotten that way lest the recollection trigger a repeat performance. "As soon as we're recharged, we can go." Gabriel said.

Enda sighed. "Four days yet. More uncertainty."

Gabriel glanced back at the console to see if it had finished digesting the coordinates. It had, and it was blinking in a manner that at first scared him, until he suddenly realized what it was. It had been too long since he had seen this reaction. He began to grin.

"What is it?"

Gabriel grinned harder. " Look—!"

Enda leaned in toward the console. Gabriel hit the comms control and said, " Longshot, Lalique, we have our coordinates for the next jump."

"What's the rush?" Helm's voice came back, faintly annoyed.

"I just thought you'd like to know," Gabriel said. "The coordinates I've worked out from the stone. they match a previous set."

"And?"

"It's Coulomb."

Helm whooped, and Gabriel felt entirely better, stomach or not.

Four days later, they jumped. Five days after that, they made starrise in an extravagance of white fire such as Gabriel had not seen for some while. Sitting in the pilots' couch with Enda across from him, he watched the blazing whiteness wash down the front viewports and caught the first glimpse of the little, weary, orange-red star about twenty million kilometers away.

In Gabriel's pocket, the stone flared with brief, definite warmth and went quiet again. Enda flinched. It seems, Gabriel thought, that what we're looking for is here.

Chapter Nine

"I still can't believe it," Helm said over visual comms a few minutes later. " We could have come straight here weeks ago!"

"If we'd known that this was where we were coming," Gabriel said.

Lalique was online as well, and Angela's face replaced Grawl's broad, striped visage after a few minutes.

"We were here months ago!" Helm said. "Why didn't that thing act up then ? Why didn't it lead you here then?"

"Maybe because I wasn't trying to make it lead me anywhere?" Gabriel said. "We came in after the craziness at Eldala with not much on our minds but dumping our data, picking up some more, and going straight back to Aegis. Frankly, I was so wrecked at that point," he added, "that this thing could have been jumping up and down holding a sign, and I wouldn't have noticed."

Angela snickered.

Helm gave Gabriel a wry look and said, "Okay, I take your point. You had a bad time of it. We shouldn't give you a bad time too." He sighed and looked at the weary red-orange star. "Well, you don't have any data to dump this run, but now what?"

"Opinion: do tourist things," Delde Sota said.

Gabriel grinned and said, "I think the doctor's idea is excellent. We'll go see the Glassmaker sites." "Aren't you carrying something a little unusual in the way of admission tickets?" Angela asked. Gabriel nodded to her. "This planet isn't that carefully policed," he said. "It's nothing like Algemron." "Thank God," Angela muttered.

"Anyway," Gabriel said, "we shouldn't have any trouble making our way just about anywhere on the planet we care to go, and then we'll see what we find."

"Query," Delde Sota said: "stone indicating more strongly?"

Gabriel glanced over at Enda, who was looking rather uncomfortable. For her, the question would have been unnecessary. He gave Delde Sota a wry look. "It's practically shouting in my ear. The source of whatever energy it's been tracking—if it even is energy—is definitely Ohmel. Even now, I think I can tell that the source is on the side turned away from us. The 'signal' has oscillated a couple of times now from loud, to louder, to just loud again."

"Rotation," Grawl said.

"I think so, yes."

They made contact with Ohmel control at Charlotte, found out where they could land at the port, and made their way down into atmosphere. They had spent little time here on the last passage through the system, Gabriel having been too weary after the events at Danwell to care about staying, but now they would have a little while to get more familiar with the place. Last time there had been scant opportunity to notice much except that the port facilities were in astonishingly good shape for a world so far out at the end of things.

Ohmel itself was an old world, cold and dry, with only the occasional lake here and there to break the red-brown surface. Coulomb was a very elderly star, perhaps not as far along as Mantebron, but (as Grawl put it) "well stricken in years," with maybe another couple of hundred thousand years to run before it finally died. Meanwhile, its inhabitants did not seem to be much concerning themselves with far-future occurrences. They were getting on with their lives. Lights were twinkling down there as Ohmel's broad terminator drew itself across Charlotte Port and night slipped in behind. The town attached to the port was small and prosperous and a good place to start a business as long as one of your names was Ngongwe.

The three ships made for the same landing spots they had used the last time over on the transient side of the port. There were a good number of cargo ships on the non-transient side. That came as no surprise, for the Ngongwe family, one of the ruling houses of the old vanished Leodal stellar nation, had parlayed their foothold here over a number of generations into a small but flourishing trading organization, the proceeds of which had enabled them to essentially buy the planet. Most of their trade was done around Aegis, Algemron, and Lucullus, but sooner or later most of the ships came back here for service, retrofit, or (if they had gone that far down the road) breaking. The Ngongwes had not become as rich as they were now by letting anyone else profit from their salvage.

Sunshine's skids touched down on the cracked concrete of the landing pad, and Gabriel glanced around in the dusk at the surrounding low buildings.

"What's the temperature out there now?" he asked.

"Three degrees below zero C," Enda said and reached into the central holodisplay to wake up the infotrading system. "A lovely spring evening on Ohmel."

The infotrading system automatically came online and started hunting in the local ether for the frequency that the planet's Grid used. After a few moments, it found the ingress/access nodes, and the Ohmel system and Sunshine's infotrading system went into synch with one another and began exchanging ID and security codes.

From the voice comms, a cheerful rich voice belonging to a man named Tabin Ngongwe, the port infotrading officer, said, "Sunshine, you back again so soon? We don't normally see a trader twice in the same six months."

Gabriel was slightly surprised at being remembered. "We came back for the tourist season." Tabin laughed. "What you got for us? You hauling inbound or just passing through?"

"We're empty at the moment; the systems are just gossiping to confirm status," Gabriel said. "Anything outbound?"

"Depends, Sunshine. Where you headed?"

Gabriel suddenly found himself feeling cautious, but he couldn't say why. "Not clear about that just yet," he replied. "We thought we'd just stay a few days and see the sights."

There was a roar of laughter at the other end. "Here? There's nothing here!"

It was a comment that Gabriel had heard before from natives of other planets, sometimes with even less reason than someone on Ohmel.

"We'll take a look at the outbound list early next week," Gabriel said. "I'll have it ready for you."

He closed down comms as the infotrading system finished its business and displayed the NO DATA TRANSFER. BEGINNING PURGE CYCLE heralds.

"It is kind of funny," Gabriel said, "to come straight back here."

"Maybe," Enda said. After a moment she added, "You are thinking that you know perfectly well why the stone did not bring you here the last time?"

"Mmm, partly, I was too tired, and I think I was still in shock. Can you go into shock after being telepathically wrung out?"

"You saw me do it on Danwell," Enda said. "For a human new to mindwalking, it strikes me as entirely likely." She looked out the front ports at the dark. "For my own part it was such a strange experience, that contact, and then the interfacing with the great machine down there in the old facility. I am not sure that I came away from it entirely unchanged, either."

"It wasn't so much that I was thinking of," Gabriel said. "After the little edanweir looked into me."

"If 'after' is the word we are seeking," Enda said. "Causality took some bending that morning, as did my perception of the flow of time—yours, too, I think. We were both sifted, both examined, by whatever that presence was that looked at you through the child." She got up, stretched, and looked at Gabriel speculatively. "Otherwise I am not sure that I could have done what I did with the device that spoke so forcefully to me regarding its use. What it was bending—time or space or both—I am not sure, but I was permitted its use because we two were linked. Or rather"—she headed down the hall—"because I was linked to you and therefore permitted access."

Gabriel turned that over in his mind. "Are you all right?" he said. "The stone—"

"Believe me," Enda said, "I know. Its pressure against me is increasing all the time. I am maintaining, for the moment, mostly by trying to be very quiet of mind, but we are moving among uncertainties here. I do not know what will happen if the stone becomes much more active." Enda went down to her quarters to change into wanner clothes. "I would say this. You should be careful with yourself, for any attempt by the rest of us to investigate these places without you and the stone is likely to be disastrous. Just a feeling I have. The excitement of exploration is heady stuff, and I would not attempt to deprive you of it, but do not get yourself killed in the exploration we are about to undertake. If you do, we are all likely to experience something similar."

Gabriel swallowed hard and went for his coat and breather gear.

They met up with the other four, all of them wearing heavy coats and the breathers, which were sufficient for Ohmel's springtime. Together, they all went out to dinner at a place not nearly as good or as fancy as the one on Algemron—rough stone walls, a textured composite stone floor, rustic chairs and tables and a limited menu—but the atmosphere was much better.

"Actually," said Helm, "if you came here in the winter, you could say that it didn't have any atmosphere." There were groans. "Terrible," Enda said. "Helm, you should be ashamed."

"Factual correction," Delde Sota said: "does have atmosphere in winter, but mostly lying on the ground."

More groans. "Better poor meal in comfort than stalled ox in military dictatorship," Delde Sota said.

"Sssh," said Enda, for "dictatorship" was not a word one used too loudly on Ohmel. There were many who would take offense at its use since it was an accurate description of the present regime. Lady Kfira Ngongwe was a true daughter of her house, meaning that as far as she was concerned she owned Ohmel and had no intention of simply letting the Concord waltz in here and liberate the place.

"Why is the ox stalled?" Grawl said. "I thought it was an animal. Is it a some kind of biomachine?"

This devolved into a long discussion of Standard idiom and many more bad puns, which Helm and Enda both considered a high form of humor. When the meal was done and they were nursing the last of their drinks, they began making quiet plans for the next day.

"It is good to have a guide with a 'detector' of sorts," Enda said. "At least we will not be going into this blindly, not knowing what trouble to expect."

"No," Gabriel muttered. "We're going to get into trouble right away, which will be worse." Helm looked at him sharply. "You didn't mention trouble."

Gabriel laughed. "I didn't think I'd have to. You've got the bestiary. You know what kinds of things live here."

They had all spent some time after that dinner at Helm's running copies of the bestiary through its paces. There were numerous lifeforms known to be associated with Glassmaker sites, some of them believed to be directly associated with the Glassmakers themselves—creatures they either created or altered from others extant elsewhere.

The arachnons were the ones Helm had been most concerned about. Anything that could either rip you apart with synthodiamond claws or spit nitric acid at you if it couldn't reach you was worth taking more than passing note of.

"Yeah, well, I'll be wearing my armor," Helm said, "and I suggest everyone else does the same. Those of us who don't have any, we're going to have to fake something up. Meantime, that's just generalized trouble. Anybody could have that. Anybody sent you any postcards about what to expect?" He glanced at the stone.

Gabriel let out a long breath and replied, "Nothing specific, but Helm, this place is alive. It's like the place on Danwell but bigger. I can tell that from even here, and it's more dangerous. The Danwell site was an untended facility."

"Opinion: could have fooled me," Delde Sota said.

"The machines were somewhat alive, as we reckon things," Gabriel said, "but there was no one there to tend them, no caretakers. This place has those—the stone can tell—and we're going to have to deal with them."

"Will not the stone make that road open to you?" Grawl asked. "What use giving it to you, otherwise?"

"I don't know," Gabriel said. "It worked that way at Danwell." He glanced at Angela. "No telling if it's going to do any such thing here."

She gave him a look.

"Does the stone give any indication of exactly what those caretakers are?" Enda asked.

"If it does," Gabriel said, "it doesn't know how to tell me." Or, he thought, it's refusing to. He shook his head. "I may have to improvise when we get there. Meantime, the best we can do is arm ourselves sensibly, go in carefully, and have the ships handy so we can make a quick getaway if we have to." He looked over at Delde Sota. "One thing, though: the werewisps. I don't think the weather here gets quite as bad as it does on High Mojave, but the nights are still going to get very cold. Are they going to get cold enough to bring the werewisps out in strength? Those things could suck all the power out of a ship in a hurry."

"Assessment: even one or two are strength enough for me," Delde Sota said. "Initial response: borderline situation, as planet is on inward swing, approaching perihelion four months twenty-nine days approximately. Orbital 'spring' indicates nighttime temperatures plus-minus negative thirty degrees C, but no colder."

Helm shivered. "Remind me to get out the woolies." Grawl looked at him. "What is a 'woolie'?" "They're in the Awful Cabin, I bet," Angela said. Helm threw her a look. "As a matter of fact—"

"Ahem," said Delde Sota. "Assessment continues. Temperature may be rather milder in central areas, but worst-case suggests no lower than negative thirty. More realistic suggestion negative fifteen degrees C."

"You won't even notice," Angela said to Grawl.

"I would prefer not to spend nights on the planet surface anyway," Enda said, "if that can be avoided."

"Well, let's see how it goes," Helm said. "No use tying ourselves into arrangements that may seem unnecessary. If the temperature starts dropping suddenly, though. we're out of there."

"No problem with that," Gabriel said. "Tomorrow morning?"

"Sounds good. After we find unbearable amounts of the unknown riches of the ages, we can come back and do the town again."

It seemed like a good plan. They finished their dinner and paid the bill, then walked back along the cold, quiet, narrow streets to the port parking area. Charlotte was more a town than a planetary capital, home to no more than fifteen thousand souls, and "downtown" was no more than a square mile of shops, retailers and restaurants—almost all of which had "Ngongwe" somewhere in their names. It was not very long before they came to a place low in a small dip in the local landscape of gentle hills. Here nestled an area of lights, service buildings, and landing lights now down to half-illumination for the evening.

Gabriel was strolling along looking at the lights and noticed Angela walking along beside him, giving him a thoughtful look. "Mmm?" he said.

"Was that an apology back there?" she said very quietly.

Gabriel thought about that and then said, "maybe."

She smiled slightly. "Well, then this might have been one too."

They nodded at one another in agreement.

"I was worried is all," Angela said.

"Oh?" Gabriel said. "I thought it was mostly Grawl who was worried."

"Absolutely," said Angela. "In fact, in the future I'll let her do all my worrying for me." She glanced up ahead of them where Grawl and Helm were walking side by side and discussing the virtues and vices of flechettes.

"Seems wise," Gabriel said. "She's built for it." "Seriously—"

"Don't mention it," Gabriel interrupted. "You had your reasons. Can't blame you for that." "Even the part about your tiny brain?" Her voice sounded smaller.

"I haven't had it weighed recently," Gabriel said. "There might be some truth in it, who knows?" He grinned at her.

Angela nodded and wandered along to gradually catch up with Grawl. Gabriel went after, his hands deep in his coat pockets, fingering the stone.

Halfway down that dark road, a little ahead of Gabriel, Delde Sota suddenly stopped and looked up into the night, which was cold, but not yet seriously so, now no more than negative ten C or so.

"What?" Gabriel asked, looking up, and then saw what she saw.

Stretched right across the starry sky was a huge black splotch. Only a very few stars were sprinkled across it, compared with the more normal starfield scattered across the rest of the heavens.

"Identification: the Great Dark," Delde Sota replied.

"The galactic rift, isn't it?" Gabriel said.

Delde Sota nodded, and together they stood for a moment while the others walked on. "It calls," Delde Sota said.

Gabriel looked at her in slight surprise. It was not often that she broke into sheerly human speech or forgot her initial modifier, and she never did so by accident.

"Yes," Gabriel said. "It does."

The more he looked up into that darkness, the more true he found the statement. He was briefly transfixed, and the stone in his pocket, which he had been turning over habitually in his fingers, reacted—not in the usual way, but by going cool, then cooler, and finally actually cold.

Gone, something inside him said, looking up at that great darkness. In his head, his point of view swung bizarrely so that he was not looking up into the sky but sideways or down over the edge of a great chasm, a huge gap in things. It was more than a merely physical emptiness. It seemed more the symbol of a greater one, a lack, a loss, a defeat. Long ago, said that silent presence in his head, somehow sad, and that sorrow awakened and stung briefly. Long gone .

Then the world resumed its rightful position, and Gabriel was standing on the ground again, not clinging like a fly on a wall to a precarious foothold with millennia of darkness lying beneath him, waiting for him to fall in silently and be lost. A long way down, said the human side of him, trying to make light of the image or impression he had just received. Irremediable loss, ages old. Something had happened, something that had not worked. Defeat, retreat, an ending. and the answer or solution or end of it all, far away into that seemingly bottomless darkness, far away on the other side of the night that never ends.

"What're you two looking at?" Helm's shout came back.

Gabriel glanced over at Delde Sota, who gazed back, uncommunicative for the moment, and that, too, was strange for her. For a moment the soft amber light from the landing area reflected in her eyes, making her seem strange and otherworldly.

Helm came along and looked up at the sky. "What was it? A ship?"

Gabriel wondered how he could explain, and finally shrugged and said, "Look at it up there. No stars."

Helm glanced up and said, "Yeah, just the good clean darkness, something that our kind can't mess up." He elbowed Gabriel genially and went after the others.

Gabriel followed, wondering how true that was likely to remain.

Chapter Ten

He went to sleep more quickly than he had in a long time. It seemed to have something to do with being on a planet and the perceived stability of such a place. However, he got little rest, for immediately he began to dream—something else that had been happening all too frequently of late.

The dreams were innocuous at first, and even in the midst of them he began to relax. Stars made up the background at first, great panoramas of them, slowly changing—not the kind of thing you would normally see from a driveship, where the stars stayed the same, alternating with the dead black of drivespace.

Then his viewpoint drew back somewhat, and another shape got between Gabriel and the stars: a great darkness. It took him a while to realize that this was not some natural phenomenon like the darkness of the rift beyond Coulomb but something made, a ship—if ship was even the right word for it. There was what seemed a large base, under which huge structures had been built—the stardrives, Gabriel guessed. Above it all was a mighty complex of supports and some clear building material. Inside, all the lights twinkled, and Gabriel realized that he was looking at one of the great traveling city ships of the fraal. Inside that clear structure—a huge elongated dome—he could see what looked like buildings, tall spires

with arched pathways between them. Tiny lights, small and faint as stars, glittered in them everywhere. A city of hundreds of thousands, all caught in glass like some rare plant, protected from the cold and dark outside.

In space there should have been no sound, and there was none, but he heard it nonetheless, the soft buzzing susurrus of many minds—thousands of them, tens of thousands—passing by in this empty place in the night. Fraal, he thought, coming from where? Going where?

Away, he realized, away from humanity and the human worlds, leaving it all behind and heading out into the darkness to try to find their homeworld. Strange that any species should be able to travel so far and for so long that it could no longer remember for sure where it came from. Many of those minds looked into the darkness and inwardly cried, How long must we travel? How may we ever we come home when we have lost the way? Where is home? Are we the ones who left, or have we become so different that there is no home for us any more?

We have wandered too long. We are not what we were. Take us back!

But one voice among the many cried out, No! I will not be what we were. I cannot be what is gone and well gone, and I would not have the rest of us be so, either. We must be what these present times allow us to be, what our own selves make us.

An image of some great meeting, under that domed sky. The fraal made no attempt to light that sky to look like day under some atmosphere, under some sun. The oldest night shone down through the dome, and outside it the slow stars went by. Here that single voice had been lifted and was heard without much concern by the others gathered in their thousands and tens of thousands. They had heard her voice before, and nothing had come of it.

You may go your way, if you feel so, the answer came in chorus, the many agreeing, all speaking together in the favorite way of fraal, almost in song. Many others have done so, gone the way you wish. You will be happy among those others, the humans and their like, but when you have been there a while, young as you are, having lived among them and learned their ways, will you be fraal any more?

Fear stirred inside her, but she said to them regardless, I would sooner not be fraal than I would go through this life always saying, This is not what I am looking for, or That is not what we once had! None of us have ever lived in this ancient past we seek so fruitlessly, and it keeps us from living here and now the only lives we have!

They laughed at her. It was not unkindly laughter, but it was infuriating, and Gabriel had heard its like before: from his father occasionally, or from others who knew that eventually you would get over this craziness of yours, that eventually you would see reason and come around to their way of thinking. It was the kind of laughter that made you, perhaps irrationally, turn your back on what you had and strike out into the darkness, though you shook with fear as you did it.

She faced them down, that great assembly that she had called, as any one fraal may. The single voice, though valued among fraal, was also feared as something that might be used as a weapon. Safe speech, among the fraal, lay in numbers, and "the lone voice in the dark" was how they characterized madness.

You, she cried, you all have heard the voice whose words I speak now, the one that does not look back with Joy on the old world but fears it and what it will make of us if we return. Does an adult climb back into its cradle or the sling in which its mother carried it? Is that the best thing to do with the rest of our lives? The uneasy dreams that make us all stir and cry out once or twice in a life are there for a purpose. They warn us of what happens if we succeed in returning to our childhood. It was in search of adulthood as a species that we went out into the night. Will we reJect it now, when it is Just beginning to come within our grasp?

The violences and strifes ofthe humans and the weren, the sesheyans and the t'sa and all the others, said the chief of the voices that strove against her, these are nothing to do with us. Their passions are not ours. Their fears, their hatreds are not ours. By drawing too close to them, by remaining among them and sharing in their wars and migrations and seeking after power, we endanger ourselves.

Is life merely about being safe, then? she cried. It was not for safety that we undertook this long Journey, but for difficulty, heroism, pain, and passing through pain into triumph, for courage, danger and deliverance from danger! All of them seek these same things, though the details may vary. They hunt truth and Justice as we do. They seek meaning, and where they do not find it, they seek to make it and so become godlike, for meaning, like matter, is made out of nothing! If you will leave them now to their fates, having Judged them too dangerous, too untidy, then when the equal and opposite reaction occurs, and the universe Judges you in your turn, you will be right to be afraid! No other voice will speak for you then. No one will say, Evil beset me, and you did not stand by idle but were our help. We were trapped, and you helped us find a way out. We were alone and hungry, and you fed us and bore us company!

It is easy, said several of the chief voices together then, to speak ancient sentiments in meeting and seem bold and compassionate, but it is harder to enact them without consensus. You have had none before, and you have none now. Perhaps it is time that there should be an end to your incitements.

She was silent then for several breaths. All that great assembly grew silent as well to see whether she would join her voice to theirs again.

Finally she spoke. We shall see how easy it is, she said, to act instead of merely speaking, and to act by commission instead of omission. You shall see me no more. You may hear of me and may speak of me in chorus if you like, but at the last, each of you will have to think of me alone and hear me, alone, in your minds. Will you dare?

She left them.

Astonished, they watched her go. She took with her, as was her right, one seed from the city's gardens. No one understood why she took that particular one, the slowest growing plant of all, the least likely to come to flower away from the conditions for which it was designed. Some saw it as a challenge, as her words had been, and they were glad to see her go. All around her, afterward, the silence fell, the silence that she had been trying to break ever since, with what success they would never know.

In the dream, Gabriel could hear the chorus of fraal voices raised to drown her and her memory out. He could see the little island of light and minds and voices drift away into the darkness, hunting an old dream.

. and that was when it began to shift. The voices all changed, grew ragged around the edges, and the light and the colors died, and that black blotch where there were no stars started slowly to creep across the sky, eating the stars that were there, blotting them out. The dream started to become nightmare as Gabriel started to feel, much too clearly, the many forms that nightmare was now learning to take. The writhing, stroking, strangling curl of the creatures living inside those like Major Norrik, and the acid pain and fury trapped inside the bioengineered skin of the kroath. Other anguishes, some that cut and some that burned, but all together, all working for the one cause now, not to conjoin voices, but to blot out and

strangle all voices that were not theirs. A terrible low roar of hating mind out of the night, and the darkness ate all the stars, and as the last star went out, it screamed—

Gabriel jerked upright in bed, sweating. The stone, across from him in its customary place on the shelf, was glowing softly, pulsing in time with his heart.

Gabriel wiped his head and grabbed the stone as if it was some kind of anchor or lifeline. It was somehow cause to all these effects. He was terrified of it, but avoiding the fear would get him nowhere now. He waited until his breathing calmed and the stone's pulsing slowed, and then he lay down again, but it was a long while before he could get to sleep. He did finally manage it; and he dreamed again, but this time he was less frightened to see the darkness come creeping against the stars. In the dream, he stood watching and said, irrationally, Now we begin to be warned against you. Now we are prepared. Come do your worst.

Silent, the dark tide washed over him, but this time Gabriel laughed. Chapter Eleven

The next morning Gabriel was the first one up. He got dressed in a slightly heavier than usual singlesuit and boots and made chai, drinking it black. Helm called from Longshot to discuss a schedule for the day's flying, and then Angela called to see if Gabriel wanted anything from the provisioners in town. They were assembling a shopping list when he heard the door open down the hallway and saw Enda in one of her long silky morning robes with all her long silver hair down her back come out to see about some chai herself.

The shopping list took a few more minutes, and Gabriel did not rush Angela. When Grawl's roars of "Hurry up!" from behind her finally encouraged her to finish, Gabriel got up from his seat at the dining table and went across to the galley for more chai. Enda slipped away as he came out, but by her door, she paused and looked at him.

Gabriel was still very uncertain about the protocol for these things. Finally, he simply said, "I had a dream last night."

"So did I," Enda said. She looked abashed and distressed. "It is one I have not had for a long time. I am sorry to have troubled you with it."

Gabriel shook his head. "I'm sorrier to have seen it."

She sighed. "Well, I was angry at first. We all have our privacies, and that was mine, but then I realized that it was not your fault. It comes, perhaps, from sleeping on a planet again. The mind relaxes, lets barriers slip. I would have told you eventually anyway, and—" She broke off. "Well."

Gabriel shook his head. " 'They asked me to leave,' you said. You didn't tell me that it was a City Administrator that they asked to leave!"

She sipped at her chai and made a face. "Gabriel, how in the name of physics can this still be so hot after you made it such a while ago? You missed your career. You should have been an engineer of some kind. The heavens only know how far a starfall would take us now, the way you bend the rules."

He sat down with his cup. "I'm not going to bother you about this," Gabriel said. "I'm sorry I trespassed. I wouldn't have known how to stop, though. I get into one of these and it just sort of carries me along."

"Never try to direct vision," Enda said. "If you do so, it stops being a vision and starts being about control. There is enough of that about."

She sat down and pulled her hair back, starting to braid it. "A long life," she said softly, "but still that moment comes back to haunt me, every now and then."

"How old were you?" Gabriel said.

Enda sighed, pulling the braid around to watch what she was doing. "Just past a hundred, a youngster telling my elders what to do. I had worked my way up to the posts just below that position, and the council of elders and speakers elected me to the administration. They merely got what they had asked for."

"So did you, though," Gabriel said, and the suddenness with which this thought occurred to him surprised him.

She looked at him a little sharply, then leaned back with that small curl of rueful smile that he had seen often enough before. "To have the gauntlet thrown down before me, to be forced to take up the challenge, yes, perhaps I did. So I went out into the night and started to become someone else, a Builder rather than a Wanderer. The city went on without me, as it knew well how to do, being thousands of years older than I, but it caused talk. No fraal quite so high in Wanderer society had defected before or has done since. As for me, I only spoke what others were thinking but mostly had not yet dared to do. It is so often thus with the universe. A hundred people think something, and as the pressure of the thought grows, one of them, standing at a convenient moment in space and time, suddenly utters it. Months later, years maybe, it is as if everyone had the same idea at once, and no one can remember that first voice—except the one who stood up and said it and then afterward thinks, 'What made me do that?' for the next two hundred years."

"Well," Gabriel said, "anyway, I'll try not to do that again."

"Seriously, Gabriel," Enda said, "do not push your vision around. It has reasons for where it wants to go."

He got up. Whatever her chai might be like, his was now cold, and he needed a refill. "All right," he said, "but now I see that you do, too."

She glanced at him as she finished her braiding, uncertain what he meant.

" 'We were trapped, and you helped us find a way out,' " Gabriel said quietly, his back to her: " 'We were alone and hungry, and you fed us and bore us company.'" He reached up for the sugar bowl.

Enda chuckled and said, "Yes, well, an old sentiment, much quoted, though sometimes the universe will quote you back at yourself with particular force. So what if it did, one day when I was on Phorcys and heard a story of a young Concord Marine who, it seemed, had a great deal more hidden in his depths? What if it did occur to me that such 'quotations' are never without purpose and that sometimes timing is crucial? It became obvious to me that I had been purposely put in your path to be of help to you. Do not ask me how. I am as hazy on the details as anyone else might be, but if one who claims to listen to the universe as a lifeguide starts to do so only on certain occasions or when it is convenient, things will not turn out well." She drank her chai. "If I have enjoyed myself since, well, you cannot blame me for that. Only the powers of evil claim that doing good is boring."

"Gabriel," Helm's voice suddenly came over comms, "are you guys ready yet? We're hot to trot over here. The doctor wants to go sightseeing."

Gabriel grinned and said, "Ten minutes." He started finishing his chai. Enda finished her braiding and slipped into the corridor, making for her room.

"Enda." Gabriel said. She looked at him. "Even if you did have fun, thanks anyway."

She bowed to him, a deeper bow than he had ever seen her use to anyone, and then she went off to get dressed.

About half an hour later they were in the air, heading in the general direction of Ohmel's north pole. They had left a sketchy flight plan with the port authorities, because no matter how secret you're trying to be, it's never wise to head off into mostly unknown territory without leaving at least the news that you've gone. Helm would have preferred to keep it all secret, but Gabriel refused. All of VoidCorp could have been hot on his trail, and he still would have insisted on what Helm jovially started referring to as "the suicide note." He did, however, let the port authorities think that the party was only going up to see the known, secured site.

"As for that," Helm had said, "why do we have to wander all over the landscape in atmosphere? I could be up in orbit until you find what you need, and then come down again."

"Helm, I can't get a decent fix from up high. I need to be down low for any kind of precision."

"You should get a better stone. Somebody stuck you with the monkey model."

Gabriel could think of no immediate response to this, and Helm had gone off chuckling.

Now that they were actually in the air, Gabriel was paying less attention to Helm's commentary on the landscape and more to the stone. Since they took to the air it had been warming steadily in his hands, and Gabriel was leaving the actual piloting to Enda at the moment. The warmth was not unbearable, but the stone was beginning to generate a peculiar buzz, a vibration that Gabriel was not entirely sure wasn't in his own mind or muscles. He would have liked to check this with Enda, but on no account would she touch the stone, and she seemed at the moment not even to like to look at it.

As they headed north over the red-brown terrain, Gabriel's mind kept harking back to last night's experience—he wasn't entirely sure it was wise to call these things "dreams"—and thinking there was more to Enda's departure from her people than merely the old disagreement between Wanderers and Builders. Maybe, as she had said, she had merely articulated something that many fraal had been feeling, yet in her case, as Gabriel remembered it from her "tone of mind" in the dream, something else had been going on inside her as well. She had a sense of something wrong with the way her people had been conducting their lives, a fatal flaw slowly expressing itself. Enda still had no idea what that flaw might be, though plainly the search for it had driven her for the first part of her life. Now Gabriel thought Enda suspected that the force or presence that had looked into her soul through the edanwe child had seen something of what she felt was wrong and could not understand. If it understood, it was not revealing what it knew.

She might be right about the connection between us, Gabriel thought, and it having something to do with our judgment on Danwell, but I really don't want to push her on this.

He glanced over at her. Enda was looking through the side viewport as she flew, gazing down at the ground. "The very beginnings of summer," she said to Gabriel. "Can you see it? Just the faintest haze of

violet and blue over things—lichens and the simplest of the plants waking up. In a month this place will be ablaze with color as everything awakens and makes use of the water and the air while they are available." She glanced at him. "How is our direction?"

"We're all right," said Gabriel. "North still."

They went on northward in formation with Longshot and Lalique. Only twice did they pass any settlements. This came as no surprise, for Ohmel was still very sparsely settled—maybe forty thousand people on the whole planet, and fifteen thousand of those were in Charlotte. The rest were divided among thirty or forty hamlets, villages, or towns, little domed communities all of them, for there was no use building a place to live that was unliveable for half the year. In fall and winter when the atmosphere froze and became snow, and water was just another kind of stone, all human and other life retreated into the domes and tended the underground hydroponics farms and greenhouses that kept everyone alive.

The secured site was at a place called Boxcar, which was about thirty degrees south of Ohmel's arctic circle. It was cold enough that they would all probably add a layer or two under their coats, and one of those layers would be armor. While Boxcar had long since been scoured by the archaeologists and declared empty of the dangers associated with the Glassmakers or any of the other Precursor races, Gabriel preferred to be cautious.

If things went well, shortly after that they would come to the unsecured site, and that would be another matter entirely. The Ohmel government, insofar as it paid attention to such matters, did not encourage citizens or visitors to explore unsecured sites. It made sure that such access was expensive and difficult for anyone who didn't own a long range ship or other transport that would make access possible. Otherwise, it was assumed that you might do as you pleased, and that the reputation of the sites would help them to police themselves.

There were numerous cases every year, both on Ohmel and on High Mojave, the other best-known home of Glassmaker sites, of explorers going out and not coming back again. Some of these, admittedly, were half-witted tourists who insisted on making their way out to the sites, and their failure to return was variously considered by the locals as merely the universe "culling the herd." There were plenty of ways to come to grief on Ohmel that did not involve anything unusual: the terrain, the fierce weather—during the cold season, the most volatile gases had a tendency to freeze and condense out of the air, a particularly emphatic kind of snow—and what was left of Ohmel's biosphere could also be deadly enough for the unprepared or incautious. At the same time, there were explorers who went out well-equipped, well-prepared, people expert in their fields, steady, sensible old hands, who also did not come back. About those deaths, the rumors were rampant.

Some of the rumors were plainly ghost stories, products of an information vacuum. Others were possible enough, if unsubstantiated. The Glassmakers had dabbled in the creation of sentient and semisentient life with varying levels of success. Some of their creations, like the werewisp, had been possibly too successful. They had no natural enemies and roamed the empty places in the long nights, looking for energy to drain. Explorers, typically (and necessarily) well supplied with powered equipment to hold off the terrible cold and do their other work, might as well have stood out in the frigid darkness and banged dinner gongs. Then there were other lifeforms, like the arachnons, less scattershot in their tactics but far more deadly and much more specifically associated with the old Glassmaker sites. They were guardians, some said. Others said they were simply engineered creatures that had lost their programming. In either case, they could be deadly. Numerous people had gone out to study them and had sent no data back nor come back themselves.

Gabriel had no desire to become one of these. Even though Boxcar was supposed to be safe, he would be wearing his armor, and everyone else would too.

"How close are we?" he asked Helm over comms.

"About fifty kilometers," Helm said. "Ten minutes at this speed."

Gabriel sat with the stone in his hands and felt the "buzzing" in it increase. It was in a tiny way like the experience of hearing all those fraal minds had been in the dream, but somehow this was more like hearing a recording of the minds. A sense of immediacy was missing, though the other content and "meaning" was still there. Now if only I could figure out exactly what the content meant.

"Coming up on it now," Helm said after a few minutes.

Enda, piloting, swooped down lower and dropped much of her speed. The others came in on either side, matching Enda's reduced acceleration. They all looked down.

There was very little there. Gabriel had read some time back, while investigating Glassmaker matters, that the ruins on Ohmel had suffered badly and were not nearly as spectacular as those on High Mojave. "Ruins" was a poor word for the buildings left on High Mojave. Delicate spires and domes of a glasslike material, they were so tough that nothing could break them. Even a subsidence of land under one of the more spectacular sites had done nothing but spill the glittering minarets on the ground below the cliff where they had stood, and now they lay there undamaged but drastically relocated.

Here, though, little or none of the original glasswork remained above ground. There was apparently some of it under the surface still, but the archaeologists, having found nothing remarkable enough to get their patron organizations to fund them any further, had left it all mostly buried. As their ships circled the site in the advancing morning, Gabriel could just make out the occasional buried glint of "glass," low shapes of opaque white or pale translucent green in the sun.

Enda shook her head, looking down on the site as she brought the ship around. "Think of how old that is," she said. "How many millions of years."

"Lots," Gabriel said and concentrated on the stone. He was rather shocked to find that the buzzing was dying off slightly.

"Where do you want us to land, Gabe?" Helm said. Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "I don't." "What?"

"This isn't it," Gabriel said, clenching the stone in one fist and trying to maximize the contact. "The stone's calming down. Swing north again and see what we get."

They turned north and headed slowly away from the Boxcar ruins. Gabriel closed his eyes.

Stronger, yes. The buzz was increasing. A little more to the left.

"A little farther to the west," Gabriel said.

Enda angled Sunshine a little that way. The "signal" got stronger.

"Whatever it is that the stone's been homing on," Gabriel said, "it's not that. That site's dead." "So we're going unsecured right away?" Helm said. "Joy."

"Oh, come on, Helm," Gabriel said. "You know you love it. Think of all the weapons we can bring along

with us."

"Think how little use they're going to be," Helm muttered, "against arachnons, for example."

"I thought you said you were ready for anything, Helm," said Enda, chuckling softly. "What a bastion of caution and conservatism you become at times like this."

"Mmf," Helm said.

They made their way northward. Gabriel stopped looking at the scenery, which at this point was pretty much red-brown rocks, outcroppings, and canyons. Instead he concentrated on the output he was getting from the stone.

"We're pretty close," he said, with some surprise. "In fact, we're very close." "Query: how very 'very'?" Delde Sota asked. "I almost understood that," said Angela from Lalique.

"Me, too," Gabriel answered. "Delde Sota, I'd say no more than two or three kilometers. Helm, don't overshoot it. Slow down!"

Enda slowed Sunshine still more. "Straight on?" she asked.

Gabriel tried to feel what the stone was trying to show him. "A little more to the west," he said.

"A canyon here, Gabe," Helm said, watching him from the center display.

"Right," Gabriel said. "Drop down a bit."

"Into it?"

"Yeah."

"How far?"

"I'll tell you."

Gabriel cupped the stone in his hands and tried to shut everything else out. Inside his mind he could just faintly see a kind of glow, like the glow from the stone, growing slowly stronger.

"Down more," Gabriel said as he watched that faint pearly light. It was hard to keep track of exactly what it was doing. The effect was like the light inside your own eyelids when you've been looking at the sun—very vague and diffuse.

"This is quite a deep canyon, Gabriel," Enda said. "I am not sure where we will find a place to land, except at the bottom."

"That might have to be it," Gabriel muttered. "Farther down."

Down the three ships dropped on their system drives, very gently, nearly hovering. Gabriel felt the glow growing stronger and then suddenly paling off again. "No," he said. "Stop and back up a little."

Enda coaxed the ship up again. Gabriel was more aware of this by the slight inroads he now had into her mind than by any feeling of the ship's movement. "Right here," he said.

"Gabe," said Helm's voice, "that's pretty nearly a sheer cliff face. A few little skinny ledges on it are about wide enough to take one of you. I might have trouble, and nowhere to land close by but a ledge about ten meters up. I wouldn't be sanguine about the ships' ability to stay there for long without the whole thing falling out from under them."

Gabriel opened his eyes and looked at the cliff face. It was striated beautifully in cream, brown, and red. It was very weathered, and with very few exceptions—mostly the little ledges Helm had mentioned—it was as vertical as anyone could hope. There was no sign of anything in the neighborhood even remotely glassy. There were, however, some deep cracks, wide enough for even Grawl to get through.

"The whole thing must be buried," Gabriel said. "Helm, tell me you have a grav belt or two in the Awful Room."

"I had one once, but I never used the damned thing. Sold it off. Now I wish I hadn't!" "Too late. I guess we'll have to climb. What about ledges underneath us?" "There's a couple," Helm said. He paused a moment then said, "Follow me."

About another twenty meters down were two separate parts of a big outcropping with room enough for the three ships. "I wouldn't go out late at night to take a leak," Helm said as he landed, and the others came down on either side of him.

Gabriel could see his point. Longshot was sitting right by the edge of the outcropping, and there was a thirty-meter drop directly beside her.

"Surely if you did that," Grawl said, "it would freeze in midair." "For a poet," Helm said, "you can sure be pragmatic sometimes." "What's the temperature now?" Gabriel asked.

"About three degrees C," replied Helm. "Heat getting trapped down here a little, seems like. It might stay warmer at nights, too."

"Or it might get colder," Angela said. "You'll want to keep an eye on that."

Gabriel looked out the front viewports at the canyon wall. The stone twinged and sizzled in his hand. "This is it," he said. "Let's get out there and look around."

It took perhaps half an hour for everyone else to get kitted out—cold weather gear, breathers, armor, weapons. They met at the edge of the outcropping and looked over the terrain.

It was a very confined, restricted kind of place. The canyon walls seemed almost to lean in over the viewer, a claustrophobic and unsettling effect. Beyond that, there was nothing overtly threatening about the place. Chilly wind whined down the canyon, making it seem more like negative ten C or so. Here and there a pebble tinkled downslope when someone put his foot down incautiously. There was no other sound.

Helm was looking down from the outcropping. "Actually," he said, "this isn't too bad. We climb down there then climb up the far side."

"One of us could always hover and drop the others on one of those little ledges," said Angela.

Helm snorted genially. "Not to run down your piloting, Ange, but you want to try that with that big barge of yours here? In this wind? You're braver than me. Then the one doing the flying gets to stay behind."

"No chance," Angela said hastily.

Gabriel looked up at the cliff on the far side. "It's a little less vertical than it looks," Gabriel said, "and it looks like there's plenty of handholds."

Helm grunted. "Good thing," he said. "Well, I have climbing gear and a couple of harnesses. We can go up two at a time."

"Where exactly are we going?" asked Grawl.

Gabriel was still gazing at the cliff face. "See that big crack there," he said, "where it looks like the strata shifted? That's big enough for us to squeeze through."

"Better hope there's something on the far side," Helm said.

"Oh, there's something there all right," Gabriel said. "If we can only get at it."

Helm went to fetch the climbing gear. These, too, Gabriel realized, had been packed away in the Awful Cabin, and once more he became determined to find time to go through that place from top to bottom and see what else Helm might have stuffed in there.

It took another twenty minutes or so to get the first two, Angela and Enda, into the harnesses. Enda was quickest. "I have used these before," she said as she was buckled into the harness.

Helm looked at her curiously. "Didn't know you went in for climbing."

"I do not," Enda replied, "but in the Wanderers' cities, there is so much to be serviced, and not all of it can be handled by machines."

Gabriel laughed inwardly at the image of Enda as a window washer, but he remembered that she had worked her way up through a lot of jobs to city manager. Maybe it's like hotel work. They say the best way to become a manager is to learn all the jobs from the bottom up.

"All right," Helm said. "You're on belay now. Down you go."

Down the two of them went, alternately clinging to handholds and footholds or spinning like spiders briefly when no holds were available. At the bottom, Enda slipped out of the harness and called up to Helm, "It will not be hard coming up. The cliff does not shelve significantly, and there is plenty of support for an upward climb."

"Right," Helm said. He and Grawl started pulling the harnesses up, and Grawl finished making fast to Lalique's skids the rope that would remain in place for access when they climbed back up again. Helm came over to check the knots, while Gabriel and Grawl harnessed themselves.

"Looking thoughtful," Gabriel said to Grawl as she gazed across the way at the cavern wall.

"I am making notes," Grawl said. "This will make a fine song some day."

"Assuming we find something."

"We have already found something," Grawl said, "or so you say." Gabriel nodded. "That's not it, though."

Grawl glanced at him, an odd expression. "Your meaning is dark to me."

He tried not to smile, mostly because he could feel the tension in her gut and recognized it. He had it, too. "You don't like heights either."

Grawl bared her fangs. then let the look relax into a smile. Gabriel would not have thought it was possible for a weren to look sheepish.

"I did not care to mention," she said. "It makes poor reading in the tales later."

"I wouldn't have mentioned it either," Gabriel said, "but if I throw up on the way down, I just wanted you to know that it's nothing personal."

"Spew," Grawl said, "is normally about as personal as it is possible to get. Nonetheless, warrior, I take your meaning."

Together they went on belay and made their way down. Gabriel was much relieved by knowing Helm and Delde Sota were up there keeping an eye on the ropes, but the tension remained, and he concentrated on controlling his stomach as he descended. It was no more than a minute or so before he was on the rocks and sand and gravel at the bottom of the canyon, shrugging out of the harness and feeling profound relief. Climbing would not be as bad as descending, but he still wished he could do without it entirely. The thought of standing on that narrow ledge across the way was making his stomach flipflop again.

While he was waiting for Helm and Delde Sota to come down, Gabriel took out the stone and walked a little way up the canyon, trying to see if he could find any other indication of a way in. In his hand, even through gloves, he could feel the stone buzzing and stinging in a generalized kind of way.

The going was difficult, strewn with boulders and jagged rocks of every kind, some rounded as if water had passed there, and some sharp, the cracked remnants of rockfall. Gabriel picked his footing carefully, tried to keep his attention on the stone—

It stung him. At the same moment he tripped and whacked his shin against the sharp edge of a fallen shelf of stone in front of him.

"Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow," Gabriel said, in too much pain for the moment to even swear properly. When he had recovered a little, he looked at the stone in his hand. It was pulsing softly, the light hard to see in the bright day here. He looked around, trying to make out what it might have been reacting to.

Off to his right on the far side of the canyon, a glint of light reflected off something polished. Not stone.

Glass?

"Gabriel," Helm shouted at him, the sound thin in the frigid air, "come on!" "No," he yelled back, "over here!"

Gabriel made his way over to the bright spot through the boulder-tumble and the cracked rocks, and finally came up to it. It was about three meters above the lowest level of the canyon and barely visible, just a ragged, partially obscured patch of glassy stuff about a meter across, more or less the shape of an

oval laid on its side and pale green in color. It was perfectly smooth and unscratched, like a mirror.

The others came along. Helm, fully armored and looking like an aggressive mobile gun rack, brought up the rear. The big gun in his hands was a Ric ZI stutter cannon, and Gabriel felt much better and also started wondering where he had been keeping that one.

"Look at this," Gabriel said.

They gathered around the patch of glass. Those tall enough to reach it touched it. "That's something," Helm muttered, "but how did that get inside all this?"

Delde Sota looked around her. "Analysis: all sedimentary," she said. "Original stone. Not later accretion."

"You mean," Angela said, "that someone built this facility here, and then the seas rose and deposited all this silt here, and the silt settled out into these layers and turned to stone, and then the sea dried up, and all this got carved away over time.?"

"Open-ended assessment: fifty or sixty million years total, give or take a million," Delde Sota replied.

They all were quiet for a moment or so, thinking about that. "Well," Angela said at last, "can we get in through this?"

"No telling," Gabriel said. "This might be just a wall. I remember them having to shock the glass at High Mojave, trying to make it flow or create an opening. Sometimes it took them months to find the way in."

He stood up on a nearby boulder, took the stone in his hand, and laid it against the glass.

Nothing.

"Well, come on," he said irritably. Nothing happened.

Gabriel closed his eyes, concentrated on the stone, thinking opening thoughts as hard as he could. He opened his eyes again. Nothing whatsoever had happened.

"Perhaps electricity would work better," Enda said, "since that was what they were using at High Mojave.?"

"Or maybe." Helm said. He started to sling the stutter rifle over his shoulder and go for the other piece of heavy armament he was carrying.

"'No!" Gabriel shouted. The forcefulness of the objection surprised even him. Is the stone starting to get into the act now? he wondered.

"No," Gabriel said, as the others all looked at him. "I don't think that's it. Come on," he said, "let's look up and down the canyon at this level. We may find another piece that is an access."

"One we do not have to climb to," Grawl said enthusiastically.

They spent the rest of the morning and all that afternoon walking up and down the canyon, trying to find more glass or an access to the northern cliff, but there was none. Gabriel spent the second half of the

afternoon simply sitting with the stone, trying to coax some more useful response out of it, but he had no luck. The canyon had fallen entirely into shadow when he finally looked up at Helm and Enda, who were coming back up the canyon toward him.

"Getting kind of late, Gabe," Helm said, looking around him. Above the canyon, twilight was beginning to fall, and the darkness would follow fast. Helm always wore a distrustful look at times like this, but with the evening drawing on, that look was now more distrustful than usual.

"Yeah," Gabriel said and looked down at the stone. "This thing isn't helping me much at the moment. Maybe we should call it a night."

Helm looked around. "I'll check the instrumentation when I go back in," he said, "but I don't think anything alive or mechanical has come near us all day, and I don't think anything's going to. Enda?"

She paused a moment then shrugged. "We may as well stay here," she said, "as leave and have to go through this whole operation again tomorrow. Additionally, I would dislike to attract too much attention to our goings and comings."

"Right," Helm said. "We can leave the cliff for tomorrow. Come on, folks, let's get ourselves back up to the ships and have some dinner."

Half an hour later, it was dark, and they were all inside Lalique, having dinner there—nothing fancy, just hot-packs shoved into the little galley oven. Everyone's appetites were sharp. Whether it was the cold, the exercise or the excitement that was responsible, they all ate twice what they normally would have, so that dinner took a good while. Some of them got sleepy afterward, out of all proportion to the exertion.

"Gonna go back and have my nap now," Helm said. "I'll take the late watch. Doctor?"

"Status: not weary at the moment," Delde Sota said. "Will stand this watch until 0200?"

"0300 would do better," Helm said. "Gabe, leave your comms on when you go back." He headed off, taking his various guns, and Delde Sota went after him.

"I will stand watch over on our side of things," Enda said. "There is no sleep in me tonight, I am afraid."

Gabriel nodded, for he knew why. He was all too able to hear how Enda heard the stone's buzzing as a tiny endless nagging noise, annoying like some little singing night insect singing a note specifically designed to drive you and no one else crazy.

He went back to Lalique s galley and got himself another cup of chai, not wanting anything stronger tonight. Gabriel wanted all his senses undulled, though he wasn't sure what he hoped would happen.

Angela was cleaning up the dining area when he got back. "This is so frustrating," Gabriel said, sitting down on one of the sofas. "The whole thing was supposed to just pop open and spill its guts when I arrived."

She laughed at that, taking the last of the plates and bowls away. "Might be you have to go up that cliff, whether you want to or not," she said from the galley.

"Grawl won't thank you for that assessment."

"Probably she won't," Angela said. She came back in and sat down on the lounger that was cattycorner to Gabriel's. She looked at the wall display, which was showing a view of the canyon, centered on the "glass spot," and augmented for IR and movement. Nothing was happening out there. Starlight shone.

The wind blew. Nothing more.

Angela looked at the uneventful darkness and blew out an annoyed breath.

"You ought to get some sleep," Gabriel said.

"Hah," Angela said, "but so should you, if it comes to that."

"No chance," Gabriel said. "Not in this situation."

"Me either," said Angela. "It's like getting shot at."

"Now when have you ever been shot at?" he said.

"Oh, it's happened once or twice," Angela said. "Mostly I try to avoid it. It has unfortunate side effects, like causing you to develop big holes in your body."

Gabriel's mind, however, was on another unfortunate side effect that males sometimes experienced upon being shot at, and from which he was also suffering at the moment. Not that anyone had shot at him, but the excitement of being here on the planet in potentially dangerous circumstances was now producing the same result. A good meal and a slight rest, especially in the presence of Angela, were all making it worse rather than better. He was presently thinking hard about how he was going to stand up without one particular embarrassing symptom of the side effect showing. The singlesuit tended to rather unfortunately emphasize the presence of the symptom. Now if I can just turn a little this way, Gabriel thought, and started to get up.

Then he stopped himself. Why am I doing this? I don't want to get up. I know perfectly well what I want, except I must be nuts, and she'll kill me if I ask her.

"Something on your mind?" Angela asked.

"Uh—" Gabriel swallowed. "Now that you mention—"

"Yes," Angela said.

"Huh?"

"Me, too," Angela said with a knowing smile. He looked at her.

"It affects me like that, too," she said, enunciating clearly, as if for someone who was hard of thinking. "For cripes sake," she added, "just this once. could it hurt?"

Put that way, Gabriel thought, she may have a point.

"Well?" she said softly.

He widened his eyes a little. She nodded once, waiting.

Gabriel very slowly pulled her close and kissed her very slowly. It was surprisingly easy. After a moment, he said so.

Angela looked at him in heavy-lidded amusement. "Did you think it was going to be hard?" "I hope it is," Gabriel said.

Angela smacked him in the head, not very emphatically.

"I'm sorry," Gabriel said. "Earlier it would never have occurred to me. In fact, exactly the opposite."

He had an idea that he was possibly making an error. He remembered Hal, a long time ago now, saying, "Never admit to any woman that you would never have considered sleeping with her. This is a sure way to have someone wind up on charges for assault—her, not you. No jury in the military would convict either."

But Angela was decidedly un-military.

"Which just goes to show you," Angela said, reaching out, "that brains, too, can grow suddenly and without > warning."

She turned out the light.

Some hours later, Gabriel slipped quietly back into Sunshine. His feelings were more than complex at the moment, especially since he knew that Enda would be sitting up keeping watch.

She simply looked at him from the pilot's couch and said, "Did you want some chai? I made an extra supply. In the pot."

He went back to get some. Normally he wouldn't have bothered this late at night, but he much doubted at the moment that mere chai would be able to do anything to keep him awake once he lay down again.

With his mug, he leaned over the free pilot's couch and looked out the front ports at the cliff on the other side of the canyon, into which a little starlight filtered. "If they wanted to hide that," Gabriel said, "I'd guess it worked."

Enda nodded. "Is everyone all right over there?" she said.

"More than all right," Gabriel said idly.

Enda gave him a sidelong look. "Grawl?"

"She was on watch when I left."

She nodded again and said, "A pleasant night."

"Yes, it was," Gabriel said and drank his chai.

"Gabriel."

He looked at her.

Enda was wearing one of those small demure smiles in which fraal specialize. "Perhaps you would do me a favor."

"Mmm?"

"I realize that you probably took this particular action out of consideration for me, but the next time by your favor. leave the stone here."

Gabriel stared at her. and then turned, very quickly, very quietly, and went to bed.

Grinning.

Chapter Twelve

It was more of a doze than a sleep, and much later he had trouble remembering the details, but the dream itself was straightforward enough.

Eyes were looking at him.

At first this unnerved him, then Gabriel decided he had nothing to lose and looked back. I have a right to be here, he cried into the echoing darkness. I'm the one who was sent. Give me what I came for!

What would that be?

What exactly am I here for? He considered for a moment, then said, My people are in trouble. There are forces coming from outside that mean to wipe us out. It's wrong to let that happen!

A long silence, while the presence over there in the darkness considered that. It was not the one with which Gabriel had been communicating before, but it was possibly related to it somehow, but then probably all these Precursor races knew each other, he thought. I mean, a hundred million years ago, who else would they have had to talk to but each other?

He had a clear sense that this conversation was passing through some kind of a translator, that whatever was on the other side was stranger than he could possibly imagine, yet at the same time, he was related to it somehow, for the stone had been changing him. It, too, had been learning to perform this translation by being in his company for so long. Changing.

It suddenly occurred to Gabriel to be sorry for the stone. He had been complaining about the changes in him that it had been causing. Now the idea presented itself, not as a possibility but as a certainty, that it was changing too. A nature as unchanging as, well, as stone, was being forced to shift into a new one. For a purpose.

The change of viewpoint so staggered Gabriel that he hardly knew what to do or say for a moment. Finally he just kept quiet.

This has happened before, said whatever was on the other side of the translation. This'? Gabriel asked.

The ones from outside, said the one who had been listening. The Externals. Their presence in this galaxy is nothing new.

Well, that's a relief. Gabriel said. Or I guess it is. So what did you do about them ? We died, said the other. Gabriel swallowed.

I'd like to avoid that if possible, he said after a moment. I mean, in the short term.

It may not be avoidable, said that voice sorrowfully, in any term. Much depends on whether the new enemy is more powerful or wiser than the old one… and whether the new antagonists are capable

of doing better than we did.

Gabriel could see the point of that, but it didn't make him any less tense. He could see—or feel—all those eyes looking at him, a long unblinking regard, made worse by the sense that some of them had no eyelids to blink with anyway. No one had ever had anything but theories about what the Glassmakers or Precursors looked like. It was the merest guesswork that they were human-sized or human-shaped, all based upon the size of some doors that had been found in sites on High Mojave. There was something about those eyes that made Gabriel very uncertain about the theories, no matter how many university qualifications their propounders might possess.

This enemy is powerful enough, Gabriel said into the darkness, remembering the tremendous ships that had come slipping up out of drivespace just off Danwell. Nor did power mean just ships. He thought of the kroath, the terrible strength and savagery of them and of what their existence said about the creatures who willingly created them.

As for the rest of it, Gabriel said, you will have to let us have the technology and see for yourself whether we will do better than you did. We cannot do worse.

You can, said that old voice—or voices. You can fail to die. You can survive to be their slaves, their creatures, without hope of ever being freed. Death would be preferable. At least they cannot reach you there. Should you succeed as we succeeded, there would at least be a chance for those who come after you—as we made one for you .

Then give us what we need to fight! Gabriel said. Our present technology is behind theirs at the moment, and that's where the difference must be made.

Assessment must be completed, said the voice.

All right, Gabriel said. Go ahead. I'll wait.

It has been in progress for some time, said whatever was listening. There was a choral quality to this presence Gabriel started to realize. Not just one voice but many, and an odd sense that some of it was here now and some in some other time. The past? The future? No telling.

Then let's get finished, Gabriel said.

All the eyes looked at him. There was a shifting, a rustling in the darkness.

Shifting, a rumbling through the fabric of things. the low, slow rumble, the sound of shifting stone.

Gabriel's eyes snapped open. All around him, Sunshine was shaking. Over comms from Lalique he heard Angela yell, "My God!"

Gabriel hurled himself out of bed, ran to the front viewports, looked out.

Outside, above the canyon, dawn was beginning. In front of them, he saw the cliff sliding away. As Gabriel watched, he could see the stripes and layers of stone moving, shattering, sloughing away from something underneath them. Surely it was an illusion that the "something underneath" was actually shrugging them off, as a buried creature shrugs away the mud or silt that has settled over it since it came to rest. oh, fifty or sixty million years total, give or take a million.

The whole front of the cliff slipped away, gently and with little fuss, though a great deal of dust went up,

and here and there some flake of stone under pressure snapped off and went flying through the air with great force, pinging into one or another of the ships. Over comms, Helm swore loudly at a deep impact mark left on Longshot's hull, as if the ship had not already had more than enough micrometeorite strikes in its time to take the sheen off the factory finish. When the dust cleared, they were all standing in their ships and staring out at a canyon nearly filled with rubble almost up to the level of the little outcropping on which they were parked. When the light got better, they would be able to walk straight across to what was now a single unbroken wall of gleaming green glass.

"Gabriel, did you trigger something? A time lock?" Angela asked, looking a little unnerved.

"I don't know," Gabriel said. "Somehow I doubt it. Other things may have been involved." The conversation he had just finished, for example.

If it was in fact finished, Gabriel wondered. Somehow, I don't think so.

They waited until the sun was properly risen before suiting up and going outside. It was still shadowed in the canyon and would be until Coulomb got some more height. Slowly and with care, they made their way across the tumble of fallen and shattered rock until they came to the foot of the wall.

The top level of the canyon wall opposite still lay atop the "glass" wall, hinting at a structure that supported it and ran in. The wall itself towered up at least ten meters high in front of them, all perfect, seamless, and while not opaque, still far too thick to see though. Delde Sota ran her hands and her braid over the surface, shaking her head in wonder.

"Mensuration: perfectly flat within tolerance of point zero-zero-zero-zero-zero one millimeters," she said.

Helm, too, was running his hands over the material. "You think they ever built ships out of this?" he said. "They would have been somethin'."

"It's an interesting image," Gabriel said. He stood there with his hands on his hips, looking up at the wall.

"So what now?" Helm said. "You said they shocked their way in on High Mojave."

Gabriel stood there. "I wouldn't like to do that," he said. "There's always the possibility that someone here might get annoyed. Anyway, I've got this. I'm supposed to use it."

He had the stone in his hand. He moved up to the wall and stroked the stone along it.

Nothing.

"This may take a while," Gabriel said. "Maybe you should all sit down and make yourselves comfortable."

They did, and Gabriel for a while simply walked up and down that wall, touching the stone to one spot, then another, seeing what he felt. The stone showed nothing at all visually, no glow or pulse. After a while he stopped looking at it and simply walked along with the stone against the wall, his other hand laid against the glass a little ahead of it, eyes closed, trying to see what he could feel. That slight buzz or sting from the stone was still there, a constant low-level sensation like a tremor in the muscles. Slowly, though, Gabriel began to feel a variation. A slight increase in the "buzz" down toward the eastern end of the wall, a slight paling or brightening of a faint glow in his mind.

He followed it down, moving slowly, watching that glow behind his eyelids for any increase. It was a very

subtle, faint effect, liable to be lost right away if he opened his eyes for any reason. It was maddening in its way. The stone had been shouting at him all this while, and now he was required to hear it whisper.

Gabriel grinned suddenly at that, realizing what was going on. Testing. he had been being tested for a long while now, and this was just another test.

He leaned against the glass and did his best to let his mind go empty and dark. This was not normally the kind of thing a young man Gabriel's age was good at, but hours in drivespace, sitting for days in the silence of a ship where the sound of the drives tended to fade into nothing, taught him more than he needed to know about the art of letting his mind unfocus, of letting time pass unhindered. The outside noises ceased to matter. The wind faded away, and the others' conversation faded with it. Darkness, silence, as if the inside of the mind was featureless as drivespace.

. nothing.

. nothing.

. and a little spear or curious pinprick of light, of energy looking curiously at him from the wall, from very close by.

Without opening his eyes, Gabriel reached out and put the stone directly on it. Everything flowed.

"Holy Thor on a pogo stick," Helm whispered.

Gabriel opened his eyes. All around him the glass was moving, drawing away from him, not as if it was afraid, but almost with a flourish, as if it had been waiting for the chance to do this and had only been waiting for the right kind of invitation. Helm, Angela, Grawl, and Delde Sota came slowly closer. Enda hesitated.

"It's all right," Gabriel said, peering into the darkness behind the glass. There was a large space leading into the body of the cliff, all faced and floored with the same kind of glass, all glowing faintly.

He stepped in, pausing only to look at the edge of the doorway that had opened for them. Surprised, he reached out to touch it. "This can't be more than a centimeter thick," he said, yet leaning back to look at it the stuff from outside again, he could not see through. The optical effect was as if the glass was several meters thick.

"Come on," Gabriel said.

They all went in, Enda last, looking around with curiosity. The space in which they found themselves was perhaps a hundred meters by a hundred, all smooth glass except toward the far side of it, the side leading into the cliff. There a meter-high tangle of delicate rods and threads of glass or metal lay scattered all across the floor and piled against the wall.

Gabriel glanced at it, then at Helm. "Razor filament?"

"Yup," Helm said as he unslung the stutter cannon again, clicking off the safety.

Angela and Grawl glanced at each other then unshipped their weapons as well. Gabriel pulled out his mass pistol—a Nova 6 that Helm had given him—and transferred the stone to his left hand. If there was razor filament here, then there were arachnons here as well. or had been. Gabriel was not willing to take the chance that they were gone.

Slowly they made their way forward, Gabriel taking point and disliking it intensely but not having much choice. Helm and Delde Sota were behind him, Grawl and Enda and Angela behind them. A soft sound as they walked made Gabriel pause and turn to see the outer wall quietly sealing itself behind them. The others glanced at this too.

"I do not much like that," Enda said. "The glass is more like steel when it comes to trying to shoot your way out of it. Should we become trapped here."

Gabriel shook his head. "It wouldn't be accidental, I think," he said. "We're either going to get out of here with what we came for, or I don't think we're going to get out at all."

Delde Sota gave him a look. Her braid peeked around from behind her back and began knotting itself into intricate designs. "Opinion: game disturbingly zero-sum," she said.

"That may be," Gabriel said, "but I have a feeling it's the only game in town."

They made their way on toward the razor filament. "Why pile it up against the wall?" Helm said.

"Unless there's a passage behind it," Angela said.

"Or unless there's not," Gabriel said. He paused and looked at it. The stuff would slice to ribbons anyone who tried to force their way through. They could shoot it up, but the flying fragments would probably do them as much damage as a flechette pistol. He put the stone in his pocket for a moment, pulled off his glove with his teeth, pushed it into his breast pocket, and came out with the stone again. He went over to the wall on the left side, and cupping the stone, laid his hand against it.

"Nothing here," he said after a moment. He then crossed over to the wall on the right, reached up, and laid the stone against it.

A tiny sense of movement in the wall, molecules shivering together a little farther down. "Here," Gabriel said and put the stone against that spot.

The glass flowed away from him, revealing a long corridor, glowing slightly, which led around the large hall they were in and onward into the cliff.

"What was that?" Helm said, glancing back at the razor filaments. "A DO NOT DISTURB sign?" "BEWARE THE CROG more likely," Angela said. "Could be either," Gabriel said. "Well, shall we?"

He led them inward, not hurrying. Soon that corridor dead-ended. Gabriel stood before it, briefly confused. then, on a hunch, he reached forward. The dead end drew aside as the outer wall had done, leaving a space exactly ten centimeters taller than he was and twenty centimeters wider.

"Thank you," he said and stepped through. Helm came through behind him—but not before the door had contracted itself to a lower height and a broader width.

"Uh-huh," Gabriel said softly, continuing forward and starting to think with mild derision about all the theories about the shapes of the Precursors, theories based on the shapes of their doors. When a door could flow like water, who knew what shape its builder would normally be? Who knew whether the shape the door held as you approached was not one it had assumed from looking at you and working out what you needed?

He put the thought aside for the moment as he walked. The corridor they were in was shortly joined by others, some winding into it from the sides, some seeming to come from inside the cliff, and all sloping gently downward. Gabriel paused at the first large junction and looked down the three other corridors joining it. They were all of the same smooth green glass, all of hemispherical cross-section, some of them quite low, some taller. Gabriel gestured at one of the lower ones with his hand and saw it draw away and grow taller. All down the length of the corridor its roof stretched upward, and its cross-section narrowed slightly.

"I still want to know where those arachnons are," Helm said softly.

"Maybe down one of those," Gabriel said, "if they were the last to use it half an hour ago—" "Or half a million years," Angela said. "No telling."

"Attention," Delde Sota said, gesturing down one of the right-hand corridors with her braid. "More filament."

It was finer than the last batch, so much so that it was hard to see, strung across the whole breadth of the corridor. Delde Sota advanced slowly, the corridor reshaping itself to her height, and the sticky filament stretched effortlessly with the movement of the clear green-tinged glass.

"Could be unfortunate to run into this at speed," Delde Sota said. "Nearly as much so as the razor filament."

Gabriel nodded and said, "I wish there was a way to tell how old this stuff is." But there was none, at least not that he knew.

He turned back to the main junction and closed his eyes briefly, consulting the stone for some kind of advice on which way to turn. Where the most power is, he thought, the main part of the facility. the most important part.

Assuming the two had anything to do with one another. The stone gave him an indication to his left and down.

"All right," he said softly. "Delde Sota, my eyes aren't as good as yours in this light. Maybe you'd come walk behind me and look over my shoulder so I don't run into any of those things all of a sudden."

He went forward with Delde Sota behind him and followed the stone's hints inward and downward. Once or twice he stopped and consulted the stone at places where corridors joined, and it nudged him left or right. Gabriel went the way it indicated, listening hard as he went, but he heard nothing but the others' footsteps behind him, the occasional chirp or ping of a weapon announcing its load status or charge level, a mutter from Angela, a growl from Grawl. Sometimes he could hear Enda's mind much more plainly than usual, as if the walls reflected her thoughts and concentrated them like sound. She was fascinated but cautious, and always nibbling at the edge of her consciousness was the constant awareness of the faintly malign regard of the stone, watching her.

Malign? I need to have a talk with this thing, Gabriel thought as he consulted it one more time and was told to turn a corner into another corridor. Gabriel did and then stopped immediately.

"Uh-oh," he said. "More razor filament." The corridor was completely blocked with it and did not stretch up and out when Gabriel entered. He eyed the stuff from a meter away.

Delde Sota's braid snaked past him and poked delicately at the blockage, its thinnest strands weaving themselves gingerly among the outermost filaments for a moment. "Assessment: strong filament," she said. "Hard to judge thickness. Helm?"

"My pleasure," he said, stepping forward as Delde Sota backed out of the tunnel, followed by Gabriel.

A second later the roar of the stutter cannon filled everything. It went on for what seemed like ages, and Gabriel was half-deaf when Helm finally lowered the gun and peered into the tunnel.

"Tough, that," he said, and let loose with another twenty-second burst of mobile thunder.

After that he straightened up and said, "Clear."

Gabriel shook his head at the thought of anything that could withstand a stutter cannon at that range for that length of time, and he went carefully back into the tunnel again—for it stayed tunnel-like, declining to stretch itself as the earlier corridors had done.

Bent half over, down Gabriel went with the others following him in varying degrees of discomfort. Helm probably had the least trouble, followed by Enda, who was more or less of a height with him. Down at the far end of the tunnel, Gabriel could see a difference in the light. It was brighter there. He came down to the end and put his head out.

"Great gods," he whispered.

Slowly he stepped into the great echoing open space that lay at this end of the tunnel. It was as if the builders of this place had set out to make a tribute to some great natural cave, but with less accidental formation and more grace. Formations of every kind hung from the ceiling and grew up from the glassy floor.

"What a wonder the world is," Enda breathed as she came out to stand near Gabriel.

He had to agree with her. This was nothing like the straightforward geometrical precision of the facility on Danwell—so little like it that Gabriel started wondering if the same species had created both these places. At this end of time, judging from just the evidence, there was no way to tell, but these people, whoever they had been, were most definitely artists. This might be a weapons depot or energy-manufacturing center, but it was also a work of art.

Endless spires and spines of crystal reared up here, acre-broad sheets of reflecting glass as polished as water lay scattered beneath the glittering sky. Glass cascaded down from ceiling and walls in a hundred shapes—curtains, spears, ropes, liquid flows caught as if frozen in the act of splashing, some with drops actually still hanging in midair as if caught by a fast imager. In reality, the drops were held in place by hair-thin threads of glass as strong and hard as steel. There were stalactites and stalagmites of the glass, but not simply dripping straight down. No, nothing so commonplace. They were mock chandeliers, swags, and twisted and braided cables of glass woven through one another, wound around pillars and posts of glass in cream and green and glowing rose. There were streams of cabling on the floor, like frozen serpents, which he looked at and had trouble swearing hadn't just moved. Up high near the shining ceiling, in shadows that dwelled there despite the softly glowing surroundings, there were tiny glints of light, and Gabriel looked up and couldn't swear that they weren't eyes, watching. He found he was having trouble just standing still and being there, for he didn't think he had ever seen a place more beautiful or more terrible. The beauty spoke for itself; the terror was because the makers were all gone.

The same thing will happen to us, Gabriel thought. No matter how successful we may be as a species, sooner or later time comes for us all. Your sun goes nova or dies of old age. Your planet goes cold and

loses its atmosphere. Things run out of steam, give up, kill each other off.

All around him he thought he could hear a faint sound in the air, like chimes, sad notes colluding in a minor key, melancholy and melodious, endlessly resigned. Deep they made the resting place. Subtle they wrought it, strong to bear the years, wise to do their work, but they are gone, all gone. Gone a long time now.

In the middle of the sad song, Gabriel's head turned as he heard the delicate tickle-tickle-tickle sound of little feet running on glass.

Those were eyes, he thought.

The source of the sound came out from behind a pillar of glass and looked at them. Then another one came out, and another. And another, and another.

They stood about a meter high. The bodies had thirteen segments, each one legged in triplicate, the legs staggered at one-hundred-twenty degree intervals so that when they moved they gave the impression that glittering crowns were coming toward you. The central segment had a ring of six glowing eyes and huge mandibles that worked together softly all the time. Slowly they surrounded the group.

Arachnons.

"Gather together and don't do anything sudden," Gabriel said softly. "We haven't damaged anything. Even if they're controlled, they may let us pass."

"If they're not controlled?" Helm asked through clenched teeth.

There was no answer to that. Gabriel shook his head and for the moment just watched the arachnons circling them.

Slowly they began to press in. Helm cocked the stutter cannon. "Don't, if you can help it," Gabriel said. "Don't! Really, Grawl, I mean it!" The weren glared at him, growling. "This is a not a time for misplaced sentiment!" "Whatever it is, it's not misplaced. Just trust me on this!"

They were pushed together as the arachnons pressed in closer. Some of the creatures were already lifting those razory claws, raking at the group as they were pushed closer together still.

"Don't let them hit you," Gabriel said, "especially with the acid, but stay out of their way! It matters."

Then one of them leaped at Gabriel, all its claws outstretched.

Shit! There was nothing to do. Gabriel lifted the pistol, let the creature have it right between the eyes, then threw himself to one side. From behind him, a roar of other shots broke out. There was nothing left when Gabriel scrambled to his feet but a scattering of dry shards and glittering broken bits.

He stared at the remnants then looked down the long corridor reaching into the darkness of the cliff.

"Well, so much for not breaking anything," he said softly. "Now what?"

The other arachnons stood still and watched them. Gabriel clutched the stone, trying to feel about for some hint as to what to do next.

Nothing.

Come on, he said. I don. 't want to hurt you or any of these. I was told to come here. I came. Now what?

A little shuffling movement came from the arachnons. All those eyes were dwelling on Gabriel now. Is it just me, he thought, or is the expression changing?

Two of the arachnons standing between Gabriel and the far end of the cavern drew aside, slowly, leaving a ga p.

"That looks like a hint," Gabriel said.

He stepped forward slowly, watching the arachnons. They watched him, but they made no move to hinder him. "All right," Gabriel said. "Let's go this way."

"I'll just play rear guard," Helm said, looking at the arachnons less than kindly as the others went on behind Gabriel.

They continued through the cavern, the arachnons coming close behind but never nearer than a meter or so. The ambient lighting of the place began to trail off in this part of the cavern, and increasingly Gabriel had to slow down, choosing his path between the glass constructs standing up from the floor. Twilight fell around him until only the upstanding slabs and twisted pillars of glass glowed. and he suddenly caught sight of a dark shadow reflected in one slab of crystalline glass as he passed it. Human once, the figure was now green-hided, armored in glowing-veined armor, clawed, and hunchbacked. Kroath! Kroath here in the darkness—!

Gabriel lifted his pistol, horrified, then caught a motion from another side in another slab of glass. A smaller kroath this time, thin-armed, frail, small, but twisted and terrible. Something about the way the head armor was constructed raised the hair on his neck.

Then Gabriel suddenly knew what he was seeing: that strange image that had occurred to him long ago, of Enda as a kroath. He had rejected it violently then. He did the same now, realizing that this moment was the origin of the image, and that a shattered fragment of it had somehow reflected back into the past, into his mind.

"Cut it out," Gabriel said under his breath, trying to calm his breathing down. "I'm not interested."

But someone was. Suddenly the place was full of reflected images, moments of old fear, old pain. The dripping, glassy cold of the glacier on Epsedra, battle after battle with the little ball-bearing kroath fighters, the VoidCorp cruisers bearing down on them at Danwell, the horror of the tangle inside Major Norrik. Again and again, the terrible flower of fire as the shuttle blew up, taking the ambassador and Gabriel's friends with it.

Stop it! Gabriel cried inside him, clutching the stone as all around him in the crystalline interfaces old dreads and new ones played themselves out. I'm not interested. They're all gone, all over with. These are illusions!

The reflections surged toward him, faces twisting with pain and rage, fire and smoke and energy bolts rising around them, and Gabriel lost his temper. " Stop it!" he yelled.

The stone flared in his hand, not with heat but light. The light pierced right through his hand, too bright to see. The images flamed in the fire of it, impossible radiance filtered through flesh and blood and shattered. A great cry like half the windchimes of a world being murdered went up, and all the light and the terror

went out of the air before him and fell ringing and glittering to the ground in bright shards.

Gabriel stood there in the darkness, shaking with fury and astonishment, and looked around him, completely confused. Pillars and slabs of glass lay everywhere, broken, ruined.

Slowly the others scuffed through the splinters and fragments, gazing around. "Boy," Helm said as he looked around with some satisfaction, "when you chuck your toys out of the pram, you do it proper."

"I'll do it again, too," Gabriel growled. He turned toward the deeper darkness and yelled, "It's me! It's me, for gods' sakes! Will you cut it out?"

The others looked around them, waiting for some response. None came. "Maybe they're just checking," Angela said quietly.

"Maybe they are. Well, they can stop checking!" Gabriel yelled.

The echoes said checking! checking! checking!. and died away. All around them glass and crystal chimed in peculiar harmonies to the words. Enda began to shiver.

Gabriel looked at her with some concern then turned away, for the harmonics he was hearing were beginning to bother him, too. All around him, the crystalline structures of the cavern shivered with sound, partly of his own making, partly rogue harmonies generated by his shout. Slowly the sound died away.

Behind them, the arachnons moved forward, pushing Gabriel and the others forward again.

Around them, to Gabriel's eyes anyway, the light was brighter now. How much of that did they see? he wondered. Must ask later. For the moment he concentrated on walking, while inside his hand the stone pulsed, pulsed stronger. They were going the right way. Up ahead was what he had come to see.

The cavern narrowed into a glassy thoroughfare about ten meters wide then suddenly widened out again. The light ahead was stronger. As they stepped through, Gabriel saw what it was coming from. He simply stopped and stared in amazement.

The whole place was full of great long glittering filaments of glass, interlaced, spun thin as silk or thick as cable, and all intricately interwoven in what Gabriel knew were patterns, though their symmetries were too subtle for him to grasp. Some of the strands shone with their own light, some with light reflected from the others. The immensity of this cavern dwarfed the last one, and everywhere it was hung with curtains and cables of glass running with light. Here and there, pathways through the great pattern were obvious, but Gabriel was chary of entering any of them. He wanted to be surer of his welcome.

At the same time, he was having to deal with the strange sensation of something inside his head. Well, something different inside my head, Gabriel thought, for there had been enough alien presences and voices and whatnot in him that he was beginning to feel like some kind of tourist attraction. This presence, though, was footing it very delicately among the strands of his thought, picking them up, matching them against each other, trying to make something of the color and the gauge. It seemed friendly. At least, nothing it was doing at the moment was precisely painful. That might be a misdirection, but Gabriel doubted that at the moment. Anything that could have killed him twenty minutes ago but had not would likely not be thinking seriously about it now.

"Uh, hello?" Gabriel said, a little more loudly than he might usually have spoken, like a guest announcing himself in the airlock. "I'm here now! Can we get on to specifics, please, before it gets dark? Really dark? That dark?"

He showed whatever was stepping carefully around in his mind that particular image, the strange one he

had experienced in Charlotte. Falling into the abyss, not just a physical fall but an emotional and ethical and historical one as well. All those things that made life worth living for humans, fraal, weren, t'sa and all the rest of them, lost, gone into the darkness, lost for millennia.

"I understand what we're playing for here," Gabriel said. "Won't you come meet me, so we can talk about it?"

Out from among the shining, woven webwork, something came stepping on five, ten, fifteen legs. It looked at Gabriel with about thirty hot blue eyes.

Its body was an oblate spheroid around which the many legs were spaced, some of them in contact with the ground, some of them held higher for manipulatory uses. The upper limbs worked together busily, doing something delicate that Gabriel could not easily see. The creature wore all those eyes in a cluster atop its head and a belt of them around the waist of the spheroid. All those eyes were blue. The creature looked at Gabriel, inclining its body to help the top eyes get a better view, and spoke to him in his mind in a voice that glittered.

Identification, it said in his mind.

I am a man, Gabriel said replied, concentrating on answering the same way. He was finding this communication hard to bear. He thought from his brief looks inside Enda's mind that he knew what a dispassionate mind was like, a cool assessment of the outer world. Now he saw that he was much mistaken and that he and Enda were, from this creature's standpoint, enough alike to be easily mistaken for one another, all runny passions and wet biological mindsets. Here was coolness apotheosized, the genuine mineral mindset, rational, crystalline, organized, and curious. Curious. He would not have believed that anything so mineral could have been so ravenously curious about its surroundings, but then, it was perhaps crystals that had first learned how to grow.

Man, the creature said, as if it was not the deeply defining term that Gabriel knew but just another name for just another thing, yet the curiosity made that judgment less painful than it might have been. The creature was genuinely interested in him.

"Your species is known in the classifications," it said.

The thought now sounded like speech, at least to Gabriel. Apparently, the creature had decided to directly access Gabriel's speech center for communications.

"You look a little like the creature my people would call an orbweaver," Gabriel said, "but very different, too."

"There are likenesses," replied the creature, "but I am not one of the orbweavers. I began from the same design, but many more features were added, tending toward a far more sophisticated level of interaction, communications, and control. I am a prototype." Was that a touch of pride he heard in that voice? "One of only three."

"How should I call you?" Gabriel said. "I am the Patterner," the creature said.

He looked over his shoulder at the others. "Are you hearing this?" he said. Enda said, "I hear whispers and chiming. Nothing else."

The others shook their heads.

Gabriel turned back to the Patterner. "I'm sorry we blew up your arachnon," he said.

"That does not matter," the Patterner said. "Their function is to protect this facility." Its thought indicated the webwork all around it, and Gabriel realized that this was all one huge computer, which the Patterner had built and programmed to maintain this facility. "It was tasked to attack you to observe your reaction."

"Oh?"

"You responded when it was appropriate to do so," said the Patterner. "You did not overrespond. This has been evaluated."

"Good," Gabriel said. He was enjoying the glitter and the aural shimmer of its thought and voice twined together, interwoven. It apparently did its weaving in more than one idiom. "That other business back there. that was part of the testing, too?"

"That last proving was the second-most important aspect being evaluated," the Patterner said. "Timebinding. What use in giving weaponry to one who cannot tell the past from the future, even under stress? Both are important. Discard one and the other is lost as well. One must be able to choose between the old and the new response and see which one will work better for the task at hand."

Gabriel thought about that for a moment. "And the first most important?"

It looked at him, and Gabriel now saw that with the very tips of the top legs it was knitting a strand of glass idly into something Gabriel could not make out.

"Passion," it said, "we lack, but the short-lived biologicals, so our builders instruct us, have in plenty. Again we now see that they were correct."

"They were correct about most things, it seems," Enda said.

The Patterner looked at her. "They are also dead," it said, "so we see, here at the end of things, how that benefited them." It gazed up at its knitting briefly. "No matter. If they are not alive, you are, and we were told that one would come seeking their legacy. It awaits you."

"Then take us to it," Gabriel said.

"We cannot do that," said the Patterner. "It is not here."

"What?"

"You seek the main facility. You shall come to it. That is now ordained, as it always was, but it is not here. The main stronghold of our makers is not in this system."

' 'Now you're going to tell me," Gabriel said, "that you don't have a map."

For a creature without access to human expression, the Patterner nonetheless managed to give him a very dry look. "On the contrary. That facility and this one are in constant communication, but you could not have come to that other facility without having come here first. This is."

The concept that flooded into his mind was not one that would fit in a single word. It included parts of the concepts for "testbed," "research facility," and "place ofjudgment." This was courtroom and prison, exercise ground and playroom, school, examination room, and graveyard. Gabriel swallowed as he got a sense from the Patterner how routinely it was expected that the examination room would lead directly to the graveyard in most cases.

"Having been here," it said, "you are now enabled for access to the other facility. You may proceed there. You will find there the basic equipment, in terms of technology, which will enable you to proceed with your plans."

"Uh," Gabriel said, "so you'll tell me where it is?"

"You have already been told," the Patterner said. "You will recognize the location. Meanwhile, I am authorized to tell you that they are coming."

Gabriel's head whipped around. "Who?"

"The enemy against whom our builders strove," it said, "and you strive now." "The Externals ?"

"They are coming in union and in force," it said. "They know of this site's activation and the successful processing of a facilitator. It has been expected. They will now move to take possession of the technology at that site."

"How would they know?"

"From that," it said, indicating the stone.

Gabriel opened his mouth, closed it again.

"There are forms of broadcast emission that do not involve energy spectra with which you seem to be familiar, except anecdotally," the Patterner said. "Analysis of your vessels confirms this. You have little time. Estimation of some thousands of hours at best, some hundreds of hours at worst. No closer approximation is possible."

"Where are they headed?" Gabriel said.

"This region first," the Patterner said. "Here they failed before, though it took all the lives of all our builders to stop them. This area."

Gabriel saw in his mind a swirl of fire in the night, one which was still there, identifiable from the classic emission colors of the nebula, though the shape was much changed. "The Lightning Nebula!"

"Your evaluation would seem to be correct. They are creatures of habit, and their memories are long. They were driven out from there. from here. Therefore, they will lake this part of space first and then move inward."

"In hundreds of hours," Gabriel whispered. "Oh, gods." He swallowed. His mouth was dry. "Where is this other site, the one with the weapons?"

Then he saw it in his mind, amid the streams of stars: a yellow sun, eleven planets, two of them habitable. "Oh, no," Gabriel moaned. He turned to the others. "Algemron. It's at Algemron!" Mouths fell open, and those whose pigmentation made it possible blanched. "Gonna be kind of a problem going back there," Helm said.

"You have a gift for understatement," Gabriel said. "It's not just that they'll shoot us on sight. We've got to get the news to someone who can make use of it in time, and we have to do it now. We can't spend months and months getting back there!" "Any suggestion as to how?" Angela asked. Gabriel could only shake his head.

"That facility is now activating," said the Patterner, "pending your arrival. You must proceed there forthwith and make use of the enabling equipment before the Externals reach it."

"Or before someone else does," Gabriel muttered.

The thought of what would happen in that system if either the Galvinites or the Alitarins got their hands on the kind of Precursor technology that had been available at Danwell gave Gabriel the shakes. Things back there had been heating up enough as it was. If they found out about this.

"We've got to get back there right away." Gabriel said. How in the worlds would they reach it in time? Their small ships simply could not make the journey fast enough. He was ready to turn and run straight out the way he had come, but first he said to the Patterner, "Is there anything else you need to know?"

"Ideally we seek the totality of knowledge in the universe," the Patterner said. "Your contribution to this, however, is now complete."

Gabriel had to smile at that, terrified and upset as he was at the moment. "Thank you, then," he said. "We should go."

"Wait," said the Patterner.

Its top legs finished their knitting and brought the little object down for the eyes to look at again. Then one clawed limb hooked the thing, another one cut the thread that the Patterner had been spinning from, and a third limb took the object from the first one and flung it at Gabriel.

Startled, he nonetheless caught it one-handed with the hand that held the stone. The object prickled Gabriel's hand slightly. It was a little open latticework of Precursor glass, and it caught a dull glow from the stone, which ran down the filaments.

"Instruction: do not lose this object," said the Patterner. "It will complete the programming work at your destination."

"Which programming work?" Gabriel said.

"The programming that has been in progress on your facilitator," said the Patterner, "and on you."

He looked at the lattice thoughtfully and finally put it in his pocket. "Is there anything we can do for you?" Gabriel asked at last.

There was a pause, as if this had not been a question that the Patterner was expecting. Finally, it said, "Succeed where our builders failed."

It turned away and vanished into the veils and webs of glass. With the soft tinkling noise of their feet on the glassy floor, the arachnons followed.

Gabriel looked at the others. He was shaking with both anticipation and terror, and he was having trouble telling which of them was the stronger.

"Come on," he said. "Let's get out of here right now."

Chapter Thirteen

They made their way back toward Charlotte. Gabriel let Enda do the flying, for his mind was in turmoil over everything he had just been through.

There was other business going on as well. To complete the programming, the Patterner had said. Such a light act, to pitch him that little piece of glass. but a lot more was going on inside him. In his head he could feel the tickle-tickle-tickle of delicate glass claws on a glass floor, as things were rearranged, connections made or remade. Inside his mind, something was weaving together the strands of old thought and new thought—mind that was and mind that was about to be. It didn't hurt. yet, but he was beginning to be afraid in a way that he hadn't been before. Softly, in the back of his mind, he could hear the sound of chiming. Back there in the shadows, eluding him when he tried to look right at them, images were stirring, preparing themselves to be released.

I am being reprogrammed, he thought. More, I am being rebuilt into something else—a weapon—but whose finger is on the trigger?

If it's not mine, Gabriel thought, it's not going to be anybody's.

He reached into his pocket and could find nothing there by feel but the prickle of glasswork. Gabriel fished it out and then stared.

The stone was inside the delicate shell of glasswork now. How the devil did it get in there? Gabriel thought. It was too big to have fit through any of that latticework.

Regardless, it was in there now, and the whole business was glowing softly, pulsing with his heartbeat. As he watched, the latticework itself was fitting more and more snugly around the stone.

He shook his head and put the stone away. Enda was looking tense.

"Yes," she said. "Before you ask, I should tell you that I can feel it. It is changing you, and I fear that it will try to change anyone else who gets too close. Gabriel, it makes me very afraid."

"Not half as scared as it makes me," he said softly. "I'm really in it this time, Enda. Danwell was nothing to this. I'm afraid to go to sleep, now. Will I still be me when I wake up?"

She had no answer for him. For Enda, that was most unusual. Gabriel found himself becoming more frightened than ever.

There was nothing to do but cope with it, for there were other plans to be made. Gabriel reached out into the center display and triggered the comms link to Longshot and Lalique.

"Helm," he said, "Angela, this needs to be a short stop. We'll check the outgoing data manifest and be on our way."

"Right," Helm said. "Where to?"

"Aegis," Gabriel said. "Best bet, anyway. Lorand Kharls has been based there recently, and there's the drivesat relay to reach him if he's not. More to the point, the Concord's there in some force. I'll." He had been feverishly doing math in his head over the many ways "several hundred hours" could be construed. "I'll have to turn myself in when we get there," he said. There was the admission, final. All the

hopes of the last year came crashing down behind it. "Once I do, and tell them what's about to happen, all hell will break loose and Concord cruisers will head out for Algemron. I only hope it won't be too late. We'll. look, there's no need for you guys to get into the middle of this."

"Buddy," Helm said, "you need to get one thing straight. Concord or not, we're staying with you. Haven't come this far with you with all this crap going on to lose sight of you now."

"Goes double for us," Angela said. "This is a poor time to expect us to run off and try to save our own skins. Someone has to be nearby who saw what you've been doing the last little while and makes sure you get credit for it. One of your witnesses might be dead, but not all of them."

He glanced at Enda. You had to have known they would say that, he clearly heard her think, and you know my answer, too.

Gabriel let out a long breath that was mostly unhappy, but not entirely. He really wished they would all take themselves somewhere safe.

"There is nowhere safe, Gabriel," Enda said aloud, partly for the others' benefit. "If the powers that have created the kroath and the powers that attempted to wipe us out at Dan-well are now coming out in force, then nowhere from the Verge to the Stellar Ring will be safe for long. There is no point in running and hiding. Any hiding place would be at best temporary. Better to be at the sharp end of things. That way, if death comes head on, at least it can be clearly perceived and prepared for."

There was no arguing with that.

"I'm not wild about the death part," Angela said, "but Enda's right about the rest of it. Charlotte then for about an hour, and as soon as your transfer's done, let's go to ground and sit tight until our drives finish charging, then straight out of here and make for Aegis."

It was all they could do at the moment. It would be late afternoon in Charlotte when they landed there, and Gabriel's stomach, making its own bid for attention through the tinkling and buzzing going on in Gabriel's head, growled expressively and said something to him about dinner.

He let out a breath's worth of amusement and reached into the display to activate comms again, running one finger down the rolling list of text and lighting on the one for the port infotrading officer at Charlotte. "Tabin," he said, "you have that outgoing manifest for me?"

There was a pause. "Forward it over to you in a moment, Sunshine," said a male voice, not Tabin's.

Gabriel sat and drummed his fingers on the arm of the pilot's couch and let out a sigh. That was when the shadow passed over his mind.

He groped at the image, got a grip on it, pulled it close and clear. Oh, gods, he thought. Big, bulky, long and sleek, weapon ports opening as it dropped down through the upper layers of atmosphere. He had seen that shape before, awash in drivespace, heading toward Danwell. There was only one of them this time, but in the present circumstances, one was no improvement on three or more. One VoidCorp cruiser was more than enough to make their lives annoying, and it was heading straight for them.

He thrust his hand into the display again and pulled the fighting field down over him while Enda stared at him in astonishment. She then caught the tenor of his mind and started to do the same.

"Helm," Gabriel yelled down comms, "we've got company! Get out of here!"

"What?" Helm said. "Nothing showing on—"

He fell silent for an instant and then started to curse.

"Dammit, Gabriel, how'd you see that thing coming?" Angela yelled at him. "Grawl, hurry up!"

"Don't try it!" Gabriel cried. "You idiots, forget it! It's me they're after! What are you going to try to do, fight a cruiser?"

"Watch me," Helm said. There was considerable enjoyment in his tone of voice. "I have a cherry bomb or so in the hold that I've been waiting for a special occasion to use."

"Helm, no!" Gabriel yelled. "This isn't the time! Think about the people down there in Charlotte. You'll toast the whole lot of them!"

Helm swore again. Gabriel was in swearing mode himself, but he could at least try to get away. "Split up!" he yelled, "Get out of atmosphere and make yourselves scarce in the system fringes. When your drives are charged, make starfall, and we'll see you at the place we agreed!"

Where the Marines will arrest me, right in my father's back yard, Gabriel thought, feeling completely heartsick as he reached over his shoulder for the controls for the rail gun. When fighting in the field he didn't need the virtual aids any more, but sometimes they were comforting. In the field he saw the gridwork of Charlotte laid down underneath him at the edge of the horizon, overlaid on the green and red lines of planet latitude and longitude. Above him, the sleek-shaped mass of the VoidCorp cruiser was coming down fast on system drive, its weapons hot and ready.

Tracked again! They tracked us again! There was no point in swearing now. It was too frustrating. The only ones who could afford starfall/starrise detection equipment were the very ones you would typically be running away from. They have to have been following us from Algemron, Gabriel thought, or even Aegis. The idea made the hair stand up all over him. This VoidCorp ship had been following them through those long jumps into the darkness, into places where it could have caught Sunshine and the other two ships, and no one else would ever have been the wiser. Then a thought still worse occurred. They should have been able to catch up with us easily, Gabriel thought. Why didn't they?

He hated uncertainties like that as much as the certainty presently hanging over their heads. The cruiser was here now. There was no way to fend it off, certainly no way for the Ohmel government to do anything. They had no force sufficient to deal with the likes of the great dark over-weaponed monster that was falling toward them.

Then the call came that he was fearing. "Sunshine" the cool voice said over comms, "This is VoidCorp vessel CL 7119. Land or be destroyed."

"Not real wild about threats at the moment, VoidCorp cruiser," Gabriel growled.

"That hardly matters. If we can't have you, they won't." Of course he knew that "they" meant the Concord. "With us you stand a chance of staying free. We know you were set up. Let us get you out of here, and they'll never get their hands on you."

To his horror, that struck home. The image of his father, bewildered and shamed as his son was arrested in Aegis, very likely tried there. he would never recover from it. Never. It was all too likely that Gabriel would have another life on his conscience, later if not sooner.

The temptation was considerable.

Gabriel swore.

Helm cut in over the secure channel. "If we keep that thing busy for just a few moments, Gabe, you can slip by and run for it."

Gabriel toyed with the idea, but he couldn't take the chances of the effect it might have on the city. "Helm," he said, "nice try, but the present version of 'keeping them busy' involves you and Angela being blown straight to hell while I escape. That's not an option." He took a deep breath. "Enda, give me control."

She looked over at him, unnerved again. "You have control," she said.

"They're not going to take potshots at Charlotte," Gabriel said, leaving his virtual gun hovering in fieldspace off to one side in case he needed it. "The Ngongwes still have some pull—not enough to get rid of them maybe, but if they're going to take us, there are going to be witnesses." He opened the frequency to an open channel in the hopes that someone out there might be recording this. "VoidCorp vessel CL 7119, we are landing. Repeat: we are landing."

With that, Gabriel streaked straight at the huge shadow that was falling at them from the sky. He had entirely too good a view of the terror of it, the gunports open and their conduits glowing, ready to fire. Suicide was not in the plan, if it ever had been—not knowing what he knew, not knowing where the news had to go now if the Verge was to be saved. Gabriel threw Sunshine aside at the last moment and dropped swiftly toward Charlotte Port.

He understood now the cause of that silence from the port infotrade office. They did have starfall/starrise detectors. They had known that VoidCorp ship was coming. When the cruiser had come out of drivespace, Charlotte had been warned by VoidCorp not to alert Gabriel in any way to its presence. He had had a little warning but not enough.

If I hadn't been resisting this process, Gabriel thought, this rewiring, reprogramming. would I have had more warning?

It was a thought he hated to entertain, but now he had other problems. If VoidCorp got hold of him, and he didn't tell them what he had found, soon enough they would turn to other methods to get what they wanted. They had not turned from the worlds' biggest company into the worlds' biggest corporate stellar nation by being nice to their competitors, and as far as they were concerned, everybody was VoidCorp's competitor. They would turn Gabriel's mind inside out and find out everything they needed to know about the Precursor site on Ohmel and the one in the Algemron system.

Except, said that silent commentator inside him, that you do not yet know exactly where that facility is.

Gabriel blinked.

It added, they might find that your mind has much more than it used to. Accessing it in an unfriendly manner might make them very, very sorry.

There was something odd about that voice at the moment. Gabriel puzzled at it and then realized what it was. It was becoming more human.

Change, it said, is rarely all one-sided. Physics militates against it. When even observation affects both observer and observed, how much more will interaction do?

Gabriel swallowed, trying hard to keep from crashing and doing his best to lose the thread of this conversation. You 're the Patterner, he thought.

Yes, and the programmer, the cool voice replied. While a program is being first run after being newly rewritten, or while still being rewritten, it behooves the programmer to oversee the process.

That's nice of you, he thought. Is there anything you can do about that? In his mind, he indicated the VoidCorp cruiser now following close behind him.

Here and now, it said, no, but you have little to fear from them.

Great, Gabriel thought. On my own again.

The port swelled below them. Gabriel was taking aim for his usual spot and wondering whether it would be possible to make a run into the city from there. But no, that might start them shooting at the place. No point in that.

"Not near the buildings, Sunshine" said the voice from the VoidCorp cruiser. "Out in mid field. It wouldn't be a good idea to try anything sudden."

They're in a rush, it occurred to him. Why are they in a rush?

In the back of Gabriel's mind, the chiming was briefly becoming noisy again. Can you hold that down a little back there? Gabriel thought in some annoyance, not knowing whether it would make any difference. The "program" was running at its own speed and with its own imperatives. Things were knitting together, reshaping themselves.

As he dropped toward the landing spot in the middle of the field, suddenly one particular set of connections completed themselves, and Gabriel shivered all over and groaned, " Uh—!" with the force of it. Enda looked at him in concern, ready to take control if she needed to. Gabriel throttled back and settled Sunshine toward the spotty, cracked tarmac, trying to keep his vision straight over the one that was now overlaying it.

The shadow, the second shadow falling over him and the third in company with it, shapes both desperately feared and very welcome, dropping toward the planet in a hurry.

"Take over!" he whispered to Enda as he struggled with his swirling vision and the twinkling cacophony in this mind. "I need a moment. Stall them, Enda! Don't let them hurt us, but stall every way you can!"

The VoidCorp ship was landing a few hundred meters from them, settling its vast bulk down. Dust flew in all directions as it did, and the sky around the port, normally buzzing with a modicum of light air transport, suddenly became very quiet. A moment's pause, and then a couple of small armed shuttles came out of a bay near the cruiser's rear and flew toward Sunshine.

Off behind them, Gabriel could see in the fighting field where Longshot and Lalique were coming down fairly close to Sunshine.

"Helm," Gabriel said over closed comms, "if you ever saw sense before, see it now. Don't come out!" "If you think I'm going to let them—"

Gabriel closed his eyes and felt the shadow dropping lower. "They're not," he said. "Someone else will, though. Don't overreact, Helm. That's the big danger in this particular game."

The two VoidCorp shuttles landed close to Sunshine. About thirty heavily armed men poured out of them, surrounding her.

" Sunshine," said another voice over comms, "open up right now and come out, unarmed, with your hands up."

Gabriel got up, looking at Enda. His vision seemed to have a light, hazy pulse to it, but at least the world had stopped spinning.

"Gabriel," Enda said, "if you go with them, you know they will kill you sooner or later. Probably sooner."

"They'll try," he said, "but Enda, we've got to play this out for the moment. Trust me."

She sat very still for a moment, regarding him with those luminous blue eyes. "Of course I will go first," she said finally, then unstrapped herself and went over to the lift column. She touched the cycling control to unlimber it from inflight status and enable it for ground use, then reached for her breather gear, hanging nearby. The door in front of her slipped open. "What are you planning?" she asked.

Gabriel shook his head.

"Then I will wait for you," she said, and the door closed.

The lift went down. Gabriel put on his own breather gear, then stood there with his eyes closed, his hands against the lift column, just breathing, feeling the tickle-tickle-tickle going on in the back of his head. Hurry up, he thought. There was so much more at stake now that he was willing to let the question of his humanity go by the boards. There are more important things.

Assuming that I get out of this alive.

Through his hands he felt the lift slip into locked position down at the bottom of the column, felt the column shiver slightly as the door slid open down there. He could faintly hear voices as Enda was taken, as armored men got in and closed the door. There came the faint rumble of the lift starting back up again.

He clenched his hand around the stone and saw the image more clearly than ever. The shadows were down in the atmosphere now and coming closer. Only a minute or so.

The lift door opened, and the armored men spilled into Sunshine, saw Gabriel, and grabbed him. Two of them hustled him immediately into the lift. The others went down the corridor to see if anyone else was inside.

Gabriel stood silent, looking at the faceless, helmeted, armor-shelled men who were squeezed into the lift with him. One way or another, he knew this was the end of his free time. From now well into the foreseeable future, he would be a prisoner of one kind or another. At the same time, those shadows dropped closer, blocking out the sun for a moment.

The door opened. The cold hit his exposed skin like a hammer, and his ears popped painfully as he was suddenly exposed to the low pressure of the atmosphere.

The soldiers hustled him out. and paused.

Even in the thin air, the sound of klaxons and alarms was noisy. Over everything, between them and the lazy orange-red light of Coulomb, a great shadow fell, burying them in darkness. Then came a moment of light and another shadow, this one bigger and lower. The VoidCorp troops stood and stared above them as the two Concord cruisers dropped low. One of them held station, hovering. The other landed between Sunshine and the VoidCorp vessel.

That moment was all Gabriel needed. He sagged as if he was fainting and reached into his waist pocket

as he did so. The trooper on his right looked down at him in shock and mild annoyance. Gabriel didn't even bother to pull the pistol out from his pocket. He grabbed the handle, aimed the barrel in the direction of the guard, and squeezed. There was a loud pop, a smoldering hole appeared in Gabriel's pocket, and the guard took the round from Gabriel's little gun right in the faceplate. As Gabriel pulled away, the other trooper who had been holding him whirled and aimed his own weapon, but Gabriel was already rolling under Sunshine's skids and away to the far side of her. Over on that side, a Concord shuttle was landing, and before it was even down, Marines were spilling out of it.

Running as fast as he could, Gabriel fired a few shots under Sunshine's belly—more to discourage pursuit than in an attempt to harm anyone.

The Marines grabbed Gabriel roughly as he plowed into them, but he found it impossible to care. One armored soldier, whom Gabriel thought might have been a woman, disarmed him and led him toward the shuttle as her comrades took up a defensive position around the shuttle. As he was pulled into the shuttle, he saw another group of Marines from another shuttle storming toward Sunshine.

It's over, he thought. The limited freedom he had enjoyed these past several months was now gone. Once again, his life was about to change irrevocably. Well, then, he thought, let it begin.

The female Marine—whom Gabriel now saw as a sergeant by the insignia on her armor—and two other guards hustled him into the shuttle.

"Glad to see you," he said. He waited for what he knew would follow, and he didn't have to wait long.

The sergeant grabbed both his wrists and roughly snapped on a pair of sturdy handcuffs. "Gabriel Connor, I hereby arrest you on charges of murder, criminal manslaughter, sabotage, terrorist acts."

Gabriel tuned her out as the list continued. He would hear it all again soon enough, probably in excruciating detail. After the sergeant finished reiterating his rights, she secured Gabriel onto a rough metal bench and ordered him to sit tight. The sergeant departed, but the guards sat down across from Gabriel. They held their weapons with casual confidence and said nothing.

The shuttle door slid shut behind the sergeant. Moments later, Gabriel felt the familiar tremor as the shuttle lifted off the ground.

It was a matter of some moments before the field was secured again. Gabriel could not hear the comms conversations that he knew were going on, but in this particular case he knew what the gist of them would be. Two Concord cruisers outgunned the one VoidCorp vessel. VoidCorp would withdraw, though with ill grace. If they did ever catch him again.

At the moment, the odds of that seemed small, since there were so many other things that were likely to happen first. Gabriel sighed.

Enda ? He whispered tremulously in his mind.

A pause. I am all right. I am with the Marines.

You acted fast, he said.

When the universe sends one such a splendid distraction, she said, it is a shame not to use it, but you anticipated that, did you not?

I had a hint. I wasn 't sure, but I'm glad it paid off.

You must let me know in future, came the reply, when you have such hints. They will lower my blood pressure somewhat. There was a touch of asperity there, and Gabriel laughed. It sounded much more like the normal Enda. The Marines took Sunshine, Gabriel. I saw most of it from the shuttle. I fear we may have a mess to clean up when we go home.

I'll look forward to it, he replied. We're landing now. See you shortly… I hope.

Be very careful, Gabriel.

A few moments later someone opened the door and stuck in a gun barrel so broad that Gabriel thought he might have been able to wear it as a hat.

"Nice Aggie," Gabriel said.

There was always something reassuring about a flechette gun, though at the moment, pointing the way it was, he would have preferred reassurance that it wasn't going to go off.

"Yeah," the man holding it muttered. "Come on, bud. Out. Now."

He went out the narrow central aisle of the shuttle, past other armed Marines and down the side stairs into the ship's shuttle bay. Elsewhere in the bay, other shuttles were landing and decanting more Marines. Gabriel had half-hoped that coming aboard a Star Force cruiser would feel like a sort of homecoming—albeit a rather dreaded one—but strangely enough, it didn't. He felt like an unwanted trespasser, and the Marines and Star Force personnel surrounding him did nothing to disabuse him of that notion.

Gabriel stood still, unwilling to make any many sudden moves that might annoy the numerous Marines standing around with their weapons trained on him. Some of them ahead parted to the left and right in order to let someone come through. Two uniformed figures approached.

Gabriel stood there and gave each of them a small bow as they stopped a couple of meters away. "Captain Dareyev," he said, "and. it's Commander Delonghi now, isn't it? See, I told you he wouldn't be vindictive."

The two women glanced at one another then back at Gabriel. Elinke, he thought. That ice-hard blonde hand someness of hers had not changed in the slightest in the past few years. It had occurred to Gabriel more than one that Elinke Dareyev was one of those women who would wear her age lightly well into her one-sixties or –seventies and then it would all come crashing down on her with no warning, leaving her merely distinguished instead of beautiful. There was no point in thinking of her like that any more though. Any friendship was all over between them.

Delonghi, with that dark hair of hers and those big brown eyes, looked less happy to see him than Dareyev did.

"I'm a little surprised to see you two working together," Gabriel said.

"It became time to share data," Delonghi answered. "Things have been going on that require cooperation between our forces." She gave him a look.

He gave it right back to her in spades, for he knew that she knew about the Externals. "Cooperation is important," Gabriel said. "More so now than usual, so listen to me, because this is vital. We have to get to Algemron."

"After the way you left recently," Dareyev said, "I would hardly have thought it was a priority."

Gabriel swallowed and said, "Yes, well, that can't be helped right now, but we have to go back. I'm sure you'll insist on taking me there in custody. That's just fine, but let's get on with it."

"You might give me a sense first of why I should listen to anything you have to say," Elinke said. "You've already betrayed every thing you should have stood for, and Star Force is not in the habit of letting her prisoners dictate ships' destinations."

"I'm sure it looks that way to you," Gabriel said, "but let's go see Lorand Kharls. He'll explain once I tell him what I know."

"You're not going to see anything but the inside of a cell for a while." She motioned to Gabriel's guards. "Hand him over to security, then accompany them to his cell."

Elinke began to turn away as two of his guards grabbed his forearms and began pushing him forward. Gabriel shrugged them off fiercely.

"Elinke! Elinke, you've got to listen to—"

"Quiet, you!" The guards grabbed him, more fiercely this time. They began to drag him to a nearby corridor.

Elinke and Delonghi disappeared into a pack of officers and technicians who were quickly rushing off toward another corridor—probably to finish dealing with the small matter of the VoidCorp ship. The captain had already turned her attention elsewhere, shutting Gabriel out of her world for the time being. Gabriel struggled, but the Marines were prepared this time, and he couldn't break free.

"Captain!" he shouted above the din of a docking shuttle. "Captain, you've got to listen to me!" One of the guards jabbed the butt of his rifle into Gabriel's kidney. His knees collapsed, and he would have fallen had the guards not held him so tightly. "Elinke! Call Kharls! Tell Kharls we have to get to Algemron! Elinke!"

Chapter Fourteen

Gabriel was taken to a temporary holding cell lit by harsh ceiling lights that gave no warmth. The tiny room, no more than two meters square, had a cold metal bench set into the wall across from a large window that looked out onto the main cell block. He sat down and was about to try contacting Enda again when Captain Dareyev appeared before the window. He couldn't be sure under the harsh light of the cell, but he thought he could see the silhouette of someone else a few paces behind her.

"AH right, Connor," Dareyev said tersely, "you have two minutes to say your piece. Out with it."

It all came out in a rush: the stone, Ohmel, the rockslide, the Glassmaker site, the arachnons, the Patterner. Gabriel left out the more intimate details, but he must have told it all inside of two minutes because the captain stood motionless, not saying a word, but listening intently. When he had finished, she said nothing, just stood there looking at him.

At a loss for words but desperate to convince her, he asked, "Did you tell Kharls I'm here?" She ignored the question and simply said, "How did VoidCorp know where to find you?"

He was taken aback by the sudden change of subject, but it was something that had been on Gabriel's mind as well. He thought of that inner voice saying, The stone… There are forms ofbroadcast emission with which you are not familiar.

"Well?"

"I don't know," he answered truthfully. "If I did, don't you think I would have done my best to stop it?"

"That," Dareyev replied through a tight smile, " I don't know. I know you're a traitor to the Concord, but exactly where your loyalties lie, I'm still not sure. You tell me."

"You think I'm VoidCorp!" Gabriel was genuinely shocked, but he pushed his rising anger down. He didn't have time for this. "I am not VoidCorp, nor have I ever been. Would they have chased me across half the Verge, forced my ship down, and grabbed me with armed soldiers if I was one of them? If you can't believe that, if you won't even listen to me, then call Lorand Kharls. Please. You have no idea how important this is."

"You're not going to see anyone without my approval," Dareyev replied, "though it is amusing that you should ask for him, since he's been in the neighborhood recently."

"I should think so," Gabriel said. "Schmetterling's been his base for a while now."

"He's not aboard," she said. "It seems your information is outdated. He's at Algemron."

Gabriel blinked. A chill went over him, for he had long since had the sense that Lorand Kharls did not often go to planets unless they were literally or figuratively ready to blow up.

"It really s heating up over there, then," he said.

"The other Concord Administrator there called him in for emergency consultations," Dareyev replied. "They've got their heads together now, but they're both sure that another Galvinite offensive is about to start, and not just some little skirmish—another big one. We're going to be in the middle of a war unless something can be done to stop it."

"Offensives," Gabriel said. "You have no idea how offensive things are about to get, and they have nothing to do with it. Elinke, please—"

She gave him a cold look.

" Captain." Gabriel corrected himself. "They're coming. More trouble than you've ever seen in one place."

"Who is coming?"

Gabriel glanced around and dropped his voice. "Do you know what kind of—" He stopped himself. Hundreds of hours, the Patterner had said. There was no time for this. "Please, we've got to get to Algemron!"

She looked at him. Her voice took on a quiet coolness. "What exactly were you doing on Galvin, Connor?"

Gabriel clutched his head and moaned. "I went there to shop, but someone else was shopping, too—for me. I found Jacob Ricel there, Captain."

She stared at him. "He's dead."

"A couple of him are," Gabriel said, "but the one you think was dead didn't die until a few weeks ago. Unfortunately he died without making a confession in front of anyone but me."

Elinke smiled slightly. "Convenient, that."

The fury flared up in Gabriel. He took a couple of steps toward the window until he was centimeters from the thick glass and said, very softly, "I am tired of being thought a liar when I'm not lying and a traitor when I've never been one. Some of that at least will come out at the trial, but if you don't get me back to Algemron now, there will never be a trial, and your sorry little vendetta is going to be swallowed up in the destruction of all human life in the Verge! You are going to be up to your chest rivets in the biggest war you ever saw, and everything you have—every weapon, every ship—is going to be worth no more than a bucket of warm spit against what's coming for you. You are all going to die. We are all going to die, unless you get moving now!"

A brief silence. "Without proof," Dareyev said after a moment, "all your ranting is going to get you nowhere."

"Proof," Gabriel said. "Damn it, Elinke! What kind of proof will you accept?" She started to object to his use of her name again, but he slammed the flat of his hand against the glass, silencing her. "In a few days you'll have all the proof you need when everyone and everything in Algemron is nothing but a smoking ruin!"

Shaking her head in quiet exasperation, Dareyev started to turn away. Gabriel was about to scream at her again when the dark silhouette behind her stepped forward into the light.

"A moment, Captain." It was Aleen Delonghi. Elinke stopped and faced Gabriel again, but she stepped no closer.

"What are you doing here?" Gabriel asked.

"Haven't we already been over this?" Delonghi replied. "For the time being, Captain Dareyev and I are working together. Now you can answer my questions, or we can both leave and you can await your permanent cell."

Still furious but left with no other choice, Gabriel sat down again. "What were you doing on Ohmel?" "I already answered that when you came in."

"Indeed," she smiled. He could tell she was enjoying this, and it only made him more furious. "You said that you were 'led' there by your little rock. This 'Pattern' creature—"

"Patterner," he corrected her.

"'Patterner," she emphasized with a gracious nod, "told you that a similar facility exists somewhere in the Algemron system, and only you can activate it. Is that correct?"

"Yes."

"That's absurd."

Gabriel clenched his jaw. He had hoped to be able to convince Elinke. As stubborn and narrow-minded as she could be, she was still no fool, but Delonghi was prolonging this just for the sheer joy of it. I should

have shot her on Danwell when I had the chance, Gabriel thought bitterly. Kharls would have probably even thanked me.

"However," Delonghi broke his reverie, "we still have a good many hours until our drives are charged, and if there is indeed a newly-discovered Precursor site on Ohmel, we would do well to have a look before the Ngongwes swarm into it."

"You're suggesting that we actually go see this site?"

Dareyev said. She seemed as genuinely stunned as Gabriel was. "You actually believe him?"

"I believe that there may indeed be a Glassmaker site down there," Delonghi said. "Whether or not the rest of his tale is true remains to be seen, but it wouldn't hurt to find out. Would it, Captain Dareyev? It would give us the proof we need—or lack thereof. If by some chance what he says is true, we would be fools to ignore it."

There was a long, painful silence as the two women faced each other.

"Very well." Dareyev finally conceded. "I'll have the site secured. It shouldn't take long."

She turned to go, but Delonghi stopped her. "Captain, I suggest that you go and that you take Connor with you. If what he says is true, you will certainly need him to access the facility and escort you safely through. I would go myself, but with this VoidCorp business so recently settled, I have other duties which I must attend to immediately."

"As you wish." Dareyev nodded. She seemed resigned but was still obviously unhappy about the whole thing.

Delonghi walked away, leaving Gabriel's field of vision. When she was out of earshot, the captain approached his cell again.

"I'm doing this in the slim chance that you might be right, Connor, but don't think for a moment that you can use this as a chance to escape. We're going down with Marines who won't hesitate to decorate that site with your insides, and I'll see to it that Schmetterling keeps a close eye on things, so watch your step."

Before he could think of a reply, Elinke Dareyev turned and was gone.

Even though no other incoming ships were showing on their starfall/starrise indicators, Darwin, Schmetterlings sister-ship, stayed on watch a few million kilometers beyond Ohmel. Meanwhile, Schmetterling dropped into a low orbit above Ohmel so that they could keep a close eye on the goings-on below and be ready to offer any assistance. A scarce half-hour after the VoidCorp ship departed the system, Schmetterling's bay doors opened and disgorged a large troop transport. The bulky gray craft quickly burned through the atmosphere and landed with great delicacy some half-kilometer from a large canyon, where it was now early evening. A few minutes later, Gabriel, Captain Dareyev, and an assortment of armed guards were standing outside the glasslike surface of the canyon wall. Gabriel held back, watching the Marines and Elinke touch it, walk up and down it, and peer through it. It lay before them flat, shining, and unmoving in the darkness.

Gabriel walked up to it with the stone in his hand. He didn't even have to do anything. The wall drew open for him, and he led them inside.

"Don't shoot at anything," he warned the guards. "The arachnons in here may not all be controlled."

The armored soldiers looked at each other. Elinke nodded to them then went after Gabriel down the shining corridor.

They saw no one else until they came into the second cavern, the great one, the museum of pillars and slabs of crystal. Gabriel was seeing this place rather differently now, as a kind of imaging facility, a room full of windows. Right now, to him, the windows were all clear. He had seen what he needed to see for the moment.

At the place where the cavern narrowed before heading into the main computing facility, the arachnons were waiting for them. They stood there, all those oblique, cool eyes trained on the Marines, their mandibles working thoughtfully. The Marines fingered their weapons and were thoughtful right back.

"Don't," Gabriel said. "Really. I don't know if I could stop them." He headed toward the arachnons, and they made way for him to pass.

Carefully Elinke came behind him, glancing around the passageway. The Marines came after, looking as uneasy as their captain was refusing to.

The inner cavern was full of light, glittering and streaking along the lines of the vast webwork. "Patterner?" Gabriel said softly. His voice fell strangely silent into the chamber. No echoes. Elinke unholstered her weapon. "Don't," Gabriel said. " Please, Captain."

Already, after his last brush with the Patterner in mind, he was getting a clearer sense of what this place could do. It was not primarily a weapons facility, but there were things here that could be put to terrible uses if the right (or wrong) people got their hands on them. Because of this, the Patterner was prepared to do everything it could in order to prevent that.

"They know I'm friendly to them." Gabriel grinned. "They don't know about you."

"You seem to be friendly with all kinds of people," Elinke said, glancing around her. "Amazing you haven't got more of them killed."

Gabriel breathed out in guilt and annoyance.

The webwork shivered a little, and the Patterner stepped out through the glimmer and sheen of it. Elinke's pistol snapped up, training on it.

"Why are you still here?" the Patterner said, looking from Gabriel to Elinke. "The danger is great. I have explained this to you."

"This lady," Gabriel said to the Patterner, "will be taking me back to the other facility, but first she wanted to be convinced of why she should do it."

"Utmost necessity," said the Patterner, and silently it added, The program implementation continues smoothly?

Gabriel wasn't sure if "smooth" was the word he would have chosen. I am suffering no ill effects, he said. So far.

"I am under no obligation to make explanations to you," the Patterner told Elinke, who had slowly lowered her sidearm. "This being has been expected for some time." Elinke looked at Gabriel very strangely. "His presence is necessary for the implementation of the main facility."

"That's at Algemron," Gabriel said.

"The Externals, whom I see you know, have been alerted to his status and will attempt to obtain him and use him to access that facility," said the Patterner. "This must be prevented."

At the mention of the Externals, Gabriel saw Elinke's eyes widen slightly.

"Delonghi mentioned them, did she?" Gabriel said. "Or maybe Kharls? Well, it took long enough." "What do you mean he had been 'expected for some time'?" Elinke asked.

The Patterner looked at her. "The assessment object, which was prepared for him alone and which he carries, has been in circulation for approximately a tenth of a galactic rotation. It was known that a being of the correct structure and qualifications would eventually manifest itself. This is the being."

Elinke stared at him. "Are you trying to tell me that you've been waiting for Gabriel Connor for—what? Five thousand years?"

"Fifty thousand," the Patterner replied.

"It wasn't me specifically that they were waiting for," Gabriel said. "I think I just sort of won the lottery." Even as he said it, he was not entirely sure that the Patterner hadn't meant exactly what it said.

Elinke closed her mouth and looked around. "I don't see why I shouldn't believe you're making all this tt

u p.

The Patterner looked at her in complete bemusement, then, rather coolly, it said, "Do you mean 'falsehood'? That is an invention of the younger races."

Elinke flushed.

"Listen," Gabriel said. "This is obviously a Precursor facility, Captain. This"—he pointed at the Patterner—"is a member of a species engineered by the Glassmakers—or the Precursors—but it's a little late to fight over terminology. These people are in the literature. Explorers have run into them before and have been greatly assisted by them or greatly killed, depending on their behavior. I know you know all about it. Now here you are in the middle of a Patterner's interface, and you have the bald-faced gall to tell something ten million years old—"

"Fifty million," the Patterner interrupted.

"—Fifty million years old that you think maybe it's lying? Just to get me off some kind of hook?" He could read it in her clearly. In fact, the clarity of the notion shocked him.

Elinke flushed harder.

"Look," Gabriel said. "The proof is all around you. Now I tell you, as this good creature has told you, that the Externals are coming. It's going to be like it was at Danwell, but worse—much, much worse because we don't have the kind of weaponry that we had there. yet. If you don't want to be up to your nostrils in kroath and gods know what else, we need to get to Algemron."

Elinke looked at the Patterner.

"I would advise this course of action," it said.

After a brief silence, Elinke nodded. "All right. My people will have been questioning your friends, and unless they've found some evidence of wrongdoing on their part, there's no need for us to hold them. After you've said your good-byes to them, they can go about their business. and then we have a journey to make."

"Oh, no." Gabriel said. "They go, too, or I don't go."

Dareyev glared at him and said, "You don't have a lot of choice in the matter." "I have more than you think," Gabriel said.

Even now he could feel the slow strength swelling up inside this place, reacting to the greater threat that was coming. He had been drawn into synch with this facility so that the strength of the link between him and it could be tested and evaluated for the needed links of the next facility, the one at Algemron. Now it occurred to Gabriel that the link went both ways.

Patterner, he said silently, perhaps you might do me a favor?

The Patterner listened to the suggestion. That can be implemented.

Then please do.

"Captain," Gabriel said, "you had better call your ship." "What?"

"Call Schmetterling," Gabriel said, "if you'd be so kind."

She looked at him as if he was out of his head. Then she reached down to her belt and undipped the comms unit. " Schmetterling. Ops officer."

"Captain," the voice said urgently, "we've been trying to raise you. You're in a blackout area." "Not at the moment," Dareyev said. "What's the situation?" "We've just lost ship's lighting." She blinked. "What do you mean?"

"The lights are out. Also, the engines are down, though they shouldn't be. Their systems and all the others check out fine. There is no fault that we can find, but they are still inoperative. We can't budge."

Elinke shook her head and then saw the look on Gabriel's face.

"Stand by," she said and killed the audio.

"Your ship is not going anywhere," Gabriel said, "until you agree to this."

The Marines looked decidedly nervous. They had the discipline to remain perfectly still, but every one of them was looking at the captain for direction.

"You can't be doing this!"

Gabriel sighed and sat down with his back against a glass pillar, while from its shrouding of webwork the

Patterner watched. "Tell me when you would like me to turn it back on."

"You are so full of—"

Gabriel sat there quietly in communication with the Patterner, mentally looking to see what it was doing with the power management field that underlay and affected the whole canyon area, and incidentally, Schmetterling. Then he said silently, Here, let me do something.

Captain Dareyev's comm unit chirped. She pulled it out. "Yes?"

"Ma'am," said her comms officer, sounding rather confused. "Now ship's lights are blinking on and off." "Well, find out why they—" "They're blinking in code, ma'am." "What?"

"They're blinking the code pattern for the letters G and C. Repeating: G, C. G, C."

Elinke turned to stare at Gabriel. Then, very softly, she said, "You always did have a tendency to rub it in when you were right about something. One of your more unlikeable traits."

"We're wasting time," Gabriel said as he stood up again. "Every minute you make me sit here waiting for you to get sensible is a minute lost in the defense of the Verge. Potentially the best part of that defense is waking up right now, waiting for me to show up and tell it what to do. If anyone else gets near it, I can't vouch for what will happen next. The place has its own safeguards, and until I enable a level of response that's a little more flexible, it could do almost anything if approached by the wrong people."

"All this is going to happen if you don't get there?" she said. "Gabriel Connor, a couple of years ago, you were just another Marine, and then you turned traitor. Now you think you're the center of the universe—"

"Very occasionally," the Patterner interrupted, "someone who thinks that is right, whether it suits those around him or not."

There was a silence at that. Elinke looked from the Patterner to Gabriel.

"I can wait," he said, "but when we get to Algemron and find the system in flames, it won't take long for the word to get out as to whose action—or inaction—caused it to fall. You think my court-martial's going to be an event? I wish I could get the concession to sell the tickets to yours. except that we'll all be dead by then, and half the Verge will be a memory, which sort of cuts in on the number of spectators."

She looked at Gabriel, then let out a long breath. "All right," she said. "Your friends will ride inboard where I can keep an eye on them. I don't want them sitting outside Schmetterling in their ships, making who-knows-what mischief."

"I'm sure they'll find that entirely satisfactory," Gabriel said.

Elinke's comms unit cheeped again. "Ma'am," said the comms officer, "it's stopped. We have the lights back, and they're behaving normally."

п<-р| • О"

"The engines?"

There was a moment's pause, then, "All systems are functioning normally, Captain."

"Good. Secure the ship," Elinke told the officer. "We'll 'be leaving immediately upon recharge"—a long pause—"for Algemron."

"Thank you." Gabriel sighed.

"Let's go." She nodded to the Patterner. "A pleasure to meet you," she said, for all the world as if she had been invited along to tea and was now returning home. Then she turned and marched out, gesturing to a couple of the Marines to bring Gabriel along.

He went in the middle of the group, trying not to let his amusement show. I wish this had occurred to me an hour ago, Gabriel said silently to the Patterner. It would have been fun pulling all the power out of that VoidCorp cruiser and watching it crash.

You would have been out of range, the Patterner said. This facility is not made for long-range operations.

And the other one?

It is the chief long-range facility, the Patterner answered.

That was useful information, but it scared Gabriel even more. It was imperative to get there before VoidCorp found out it was operational. or the Galvinites, or the Alitarins.

Then there was the problem of the Externals, who knew the place was operational.

I do not fully understand the reason for your desired intervention, however, the Patterner said.

I was bluffing, Gabriel replied.

The Patterner understood the term from Gabriel's mind. I do not understand the mechanism by which it works, the Patterner said. The captain acted as ifunder compulsion.

She believed, Gabriel said, that what lias happened once will happen again.

An unusual religion, the Patterner said.

We call it logic, Gabriel said. It doesn 't always work, but I wasn 't going to tell her that. I wanted her to do something, and now she's doing it. We 're getting to where we need to be.

Bluffing, the Patterner said, musing over the implications. Exploring this phenomenon might be useful.

After this is all over, Gabriel said, we ll sit down and play poker with Helm. You ll get more than enough exploration out ofthat.

Assuming we live to do it, he thought as he went out with the Marines to rejoin Schmetterling.

The crews of Sunshine, Longshot, and Lalique were reunited inside Schmetterling after the ship finished her recharge and made starfall. After searching them and removing all their weapons, the Marines had treated Gabriel's friends with all courtesy, giving them comfortable if cramped quarters on a deck that had rooms set aside for visitors.

Gabriel, being a prisoner, had a cell in the brig, which, being on ship, was no more luxurious than his cell on Phorcys had been. There was a small snug meeting area down at the bottom of the cellblock, just the

other side of (he main Marine security post that guarded the cells. The others could come and see him there at mealtime.

Quite soon after his installation in his new cell, Gabriel was brought down to the meeting area where he had a visitation from a Marine legal officer who came to see him. He was accompanied by a recording officer, also a Marine. Shortly thereafter, an expressionless Elinke Dareyev joined them.

The legal officer read out Gabriel's arrest warrant. It went on for some pages, and finally the man asked, "How do you plead?"

"Not guilty," Gabriel replied.

Elinke looked away.

"So entered," said the legal officer. "Counsel will be appointed for you when we reach Algemron, and the case will go forward before the Concord Administrator at his earliest convenience."

The legal officer and his assistant got up and left.

Gabriel turned to Elinke and said softly, "He had better hurry, Captain. Time is going to be very short."

She looked at Gabriel coolly and said, "I had thought that you might have taken this quiet time to reassess your position."

He wanted very much to laugh, but it would have been counterproductive. "About what happened on Falada? Captain, I know what happened there. I think you know more about it than you've been letting on, too, but I am in no position to press you on that. Nor do I intend to say anything or do anything that might harm the progress of the trial. I intend to clear myself, though at the moment my options in that regard seem very limited." He looked up at her. "The status of testimony and evidence telepathically acquired is a very fuzzy area. We may wind up redefining it somewhat."

She raised her eyebrows, an unconcerned look. It did not fool Gabriel. He felt her unease.

And there's an idea, he thought. There was the way he had "pressed" on Ricel before he died. He had been in no position to resist that. She would not be, either. It would finally lay to rest the question of whether or not she had she lied about Ricel's association with Concord Intel, and if she had, why had she lied?

Elinke had been his friend. He resisted the idea of doing; anything like that to her—for the moment anyway. But when it comes down to it, when it looks like the case is going to go against me at last, will I still be so noble?

The other question came up at the back of his mind. Will I even care then? The reprogramming will surely be finished then. What will I be? How will I feel?

He shook his head and said, "Captain, please. Let's put the question of the trial aside for the moment. There are more important issues. The Externals."

Elinke leaned back on the couch, looking at her folded hands. "When my Intel contact first told me about them," she said slowly, "I thought it was some new distillation of the paranoid rumors that you always get out here in the Verge. You would have heard them as often as anyone else aboard ship. Conspiracy theories, secret plots and threats. there's something about this part of space that breeds them in people. Whispering campaigns, crazy ideas, or so I would have thought."

Gabriel nodded. "After Delonghi told you what the Concord knew about some of the alien attacks—the kroath, for example—you found it difficult to believe, and Lorand Kharls called you in."

She looked at him strangely. Gabriel let her, for he had caught a glimpse in her mind of it happening exactly that way. "Yes," she said. "He was persuasive."

"He showed you the pictures."

She looked at him more strangely still.

"Someone had to get some eventually," Gabriel said. "Kroath and other things. Is there any record of a kind of communal telepathic worm colony that lives inside people?"

"Teln?" Elinke said, sounding uneasy.

"Is that what they're called? Teln, yes. Well, there are teln on Bluefall and on Algemron." Gabriel shied away somewhat from the memory—the stroking, writhing warmth, the quiet subversion of a mind from the inside, the incessant pressure on the vulnerable human will until it grew into a new shape that better suited that pressure, bent to it, served it. "I met one of them up close a couple of times there—if it's actually possible to meet one of them."

Elinke's look was shadowed.

"There are a lot more of them, aren't there?" Gabriel said. "Not that this is something that would be widely advertised."

"The experts think so," Elinke said after a moment. "There have only been a few tangles actually found. It's the usual theory, though. For every one you find in a situation like this, expect a hundred."

"More like a thousand," Gabriel said. "The people of Algemron hate each other so that it's possible to believe any amount of irrational behavior from them. It's a terrific hiding place for what's actually underneath." ; "If you're trying to suggest that the whole war between Galvin and Alitar was caused by the teln."

"Oh, no," Gabriel said, "but it's a great place to take cover while you're working on something else. When the others arrive in the system, the teln will be ideally placed to cause the maximum amount of trouble and confusion among the humans in whom they're emplaced."

Elinke frowned. "Do you have any better fix on 'when they arrive'?"

Gabriel shook his head. "The Patterner's implication was that they were no more than a few starfalls away."

The captain got up and started to pace. "That's another problem," she announced. "I wish we had had one more ship with us at Coulomb. I was unwilling to leave Darwin alone there to cope with whatever might happen in another hundred and twenty-one hours."

"For the moment," Gabriel said, "no one's going to be able to get in there without me. The Patterner will see to that, but the place shouldn't be left unguarded for long, for the sake of the people living on Ohmel. As soon as we get to Algemron, ships should be detailed to go there and set up some kind of constant presence. I'll work out arrangements with the Patterner to let the researchers inside and so forth. The Ngongwe family may not like the presence of Concord, but considering the status of the facility—and the threat from the Externals, who'll want to get in there too if possible—they're going to have to deal with the increased attention the best they can."

Gabriel leaned back and rubbed his eyes. Assuming he lived through the next couple of weeks, there was still going to be a lot of work to do.

Elinke watched him quietly. After a moment, she said, "Why vow?"

Gabriel shook his head again and said, "I was standing in the right place at the right time, and someone gave me this." He reached into his pocket and came up with the stone. It was now tightly held within the lattice of Precursor glass, and its glow was muted. "Just as I was once standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Jacob Ricel handed me a chip."

Gabriel didn't look at her. He just closed his eyes and waited to see what would happen.

A flurry of images went by, all with a strange cast to them. He had not yet before looked very far into Elinke's mind. Gabriel wobbled a little as he looked at himself from Falada's bridge, standing there rigid with fear and confusion, young and scared. The image was so tinged with fury and grief that the rigidity looked like anger, like some cold hostility held carefully in check. He saw himself again through Elinke's eyes, that fury gone cold during the trial as her voice said, Jacob Ricel is not known to me as a Concord intelligence operative.

In the next heartbeat, the back of her mind said, perfectly audibly, But as a VoidCorp Intelligence operative… yes.

Gabriel's eyes snapped open.

What a nasty way, he thought, to tell the truth and still manage to send me away. You're quite sure? the prosecutor had said. Quite sure.

They asked her no further questions, because it suited them to leave the matter right there.

One more question could have saved me. assuming she would have answered it truthfully, but she would not have, not then.

The fury had whited everything out for her. Her grief for Lem had made it all seem all right. Later, when her judgment was cooler, months cooler, she had found herself wondering what she should have done, how she could have handled matters better.

Gabriel opened his eyes, unwilling to look any further into this right now, but one good thing had come of this meeting: he had an answer to the question that had haunted him for the past year. Now if he had to die, he could do it with his mind concentrated on the business at hand.

"That incident on Falada destroyed a lot," Gabriel said. "The innocence of youth. maybe it's overrated these days. How many of us have an 'innocent' childhood, when we're exposed to the Grid from before the time we can talk? If something in me was killed, it was the sense that I was at the center of things, that the things happening to me would necessarily be fair, or good." The words came with some pain. It was the kind of thing he might have said to Elinke Dareyev a long time ago, when she was still his friend. "Maybe having that die wasn't a bad thing. It was a shame it happened the way it did, but it left me open for other things, maybe for fate to operate, if there is such a thing."

Elinke got up to leave.

"I have to say this to you," Gabriel said. "If I had known what that one errand done for Ricel was going

to do, I would have shot myself sooner. Stone or no stone, fate or no fate, I would not have passed on that chip."

He knew he might be damaging his case by speaking to her so, but he had to do it. Possibly it was by way of apology to her for seeing, in her mind, what he had no permission to see.

The captain of Schmetterling, once the captain of Falada, looked at him and said, "I could almost believe you."

Gabriel could find nothing to say to that.

"You did pass it on," she said, "and for that, you are going to have to pay."

"And you," Gabriel said. "You, too, may have one payment to make before all this is over."

Her eyes were uncomprehending. "I don't know what you're talking about."

There was nothing strange about that, for Gabriel himself was uncertain what shape the payment would take. "It may not matter," Gabriel said. "Let's worry about it in a few weeks. If we still have the leisure to do that, then it will be an issue. Otherwise we're just wasting your time and mine."

She looked at him oddly and said, "Spending so much time with a fraal has been turning you into a mystic."

Gabriel laughed. "Captain, if anything it's made me a lot more pragmatic than I used to be. You learn not to ask for answers before they're ready, not to understand the ones you get, and when you finally get them, to check them after a month or so, because the answer has usually begun to mean something else."

She raised her eyebrows and went out.

Chapter Fifteen

For a prisoner on a Star Force vessel, fifteen days in drivespace and the nine days spent between starrises and starfalls waiting to recharge could have been desperately boring, but Gabriel had no intention of letting them pass idly. In particular, he had Algemron on his mind. In between sharing meals with Enda, Helm, Angela, Grawl, and Delde Sota and socializing with them during the limited hours during which this was allowed him, Gabriel spent a lot of time on those parts of Schmetterling's Grid to which he was permitted access via the display in his cell. Mostly he wanted news of what had been happening in the Algemron system, and there was entirely too much of it. One whole day he spent reading, blitzing himself with data. The second and third days he spent resurrecting the old art he had learned while in service with Ambassador Delvecchio: guessing or predicting what was really going on behind the public reports.

The simple fact that there were two Concord Administrators in one system at the moment was enough to suggest a level of trouble much more serious than just a war. Mara DeVrona had been stationed there for some years now, ostensibly as the head of the Neutrality Patrol in charge of organizing convoys and managing Pariah Station, but Gabriel immediately recognized this for the blind it was. No one sent Concord Administrators to run a single facility of any kind. They were emplaced to manage whole areas and to make those areas run as well as they could. Their methods might be unorthodox, but they tended to work.

DeVrona had a reputation of her own. A fierce little woman with close-cropped gray hair and an athletic build, she was quick, decisive, and sometimes abrupt, but not the "mean little cop" that her detractors sometimes tried to make her out to be. She had briefly been a study of Gabriel's while he was working with Delvecchio, for the situation at Algemron had borne some superficial similarities to the one at Thalaassa. It was not widely known outside Concord diplomatic circles, but DeVrona was quietly working to bring this war to an end by boosting the ability of the Alitarin government and people to resist their stronger neighbor. She was also trying to gently leverage the situation into that position best characterized by the statement, "Fighting is no fun any more. We're not winning." The situation might, of course, blow up, but then this one had been blowing up periodically for many years. There was much to play for and a good deal to lose, but not enough so as to make playing unviable.

Mention of her was made in the news, but her usual description as "Concord meddler" had for the moment been usurped by Lorand Kharls, of whom some passing note had been taken in the major news services. For his own part, Kharls had posed for the obligatory shots in his impressive formal uniform, holding the tri-staff. This served to emphasize his presence as an ambassador of goodwill from the Concord. Then he had retired to Olnant, the Concord cruiser to which he had transferred from Schmetterling, and had gone into "consultations with his advisers."

Gabriel snorted softly at that. Kharls's advisers might be anyone, even cashiered exiled Marines when the occasion demanded it. But at the moment, he had his feeling that Kharls and DeVrona had their heads together, working out a strategy for handling the upcoming close approach of Galvin and Alitar.

Meanwhile, both planets' news was otherwise about very little else, though the Galvinite and Alitarin news services were filled with a great deal of contradictory content.

The respectable services, especially on the Alitarin side, talked about "restraint," "not repeating the mistakes of the past," and "measured response." Gabriel took this to mean that the military was broke. The government was trying try to avert the whole campaign this year by convincing the Galvinites that while they had plenty of money, they had better things to spend it on. The "respectable" levels of the Galvinite media were shouting about "honor," "patriotism," and "righteous anger." The tabloid levels were yelling about "revenge" and "we'll get our own back" and "protecting our husbands, wives, and children from the ravages of a mindless, valueless enemy." Gabriel took these stories and announcements, all concocted at one level or another by the FSA, to mean that the Galvinites were well-budgeted, restive, annoyed at the presence of the Concord, and eager for a push that would leave them with more of their enemies' territory.

The Galvinite side bothered Gabriel rather more than the Alitarin, possibly because of the monotone quality of it—one voice, one hymnal, all voices singing on one note and scaling slowly up to a shriek. While the Supreme Commander was an excellent speaker, her rallies that Gabriel repeatedly watched were getting very good at that particular sound: more than a cheer, not quite a shriek but getting there, with a sort of rumble or growl on the edge of it.

One of Gabriel's instructors in Group Psychology had once said, "There are lots of noises mobs make—confused, angry, cheerful, annoyed—but there's one in particular, and when you hear it, you'll know it. When you hear it, leave. You'll want to anyway. It gets right down under your skin. If you're going to stick around, be in armor, and don't let that sound spoil your aim."

Gabriel was convinced that the sound of the crowds in these clips was a close match to what his instructor had meant. The other side was doing at least as much haranguing, but it felt weaker. They knew they were losing, but no one was going to breathe a word, lest the Galvinites find out. The problem was that the Galvinites knew it already and were preparing for what they thought would be the first of several pushes that would end it all in their favor.

They may not have time, Gabriel thought. Nonetheless, he kept wading through the news, everything that Schmetterling had downloaded until she left Algemron for Coulomb. He had nothing better to do with his time, and it was the kind of activity that Delvecchio would have described as "character building."

Sometimes he paused to consider the source of the information that had sent Schmetterling to Coulomb in the first place. Gabriel had long suspected that Concord Intel, Star Force Intel, Marine Intel, and VoidCorp Intel were all digging holes in one another's security. He had also suspected that all of them, or almost all of them, had planted agents inside all the others. Gabriel was equally sure that some of the players in the game knew where their opponents' pieces were placed and were intent on leaving the pieces exactly where they were for the purpose of feeding them bad data, which would come out at the other end and betray its origin. The whole business made his head hurt, but somehow Concord Intel had come up with the goods this time. Either they have a mole in VoidCorp Intel, he thought, or they extracted a mole in their own system and squeezed it until it bled.

Either way, if I ever find out who it was, I owe him a favor.

Meantime there was still plenty of news to work with. The tension in Algemron had dissuaded most infotraders from establishing regular hauls—one of the reasons why Gabriel and Enda had had so little trouble running in there to start with. The local governments knew that those to whom such things mattered—specifically the Concord—would read some of their news. They were trying to make it look as if this upcoming Close Approach was going to be nothing special, and that meant that one way or another, it was going to be.

Gabriel, lying there on the bed and staring at the display hanging from the wall, went back to one scrap that had caught his attention in passing. Later he found himself coming back to the story repeatedly—a sure sign, as the ambassador would have said, that it meant something that Gabriel hadn't yet understood. Now the little piece was beginning to obsess him.

"Display," Gabriel said. "Run 'weirdbit.' "

It ran it again for him.

The clip proceeded. It was a tailoff of some kind of advertising for the war effort, the martial music that the Galvinite Grid used for transitions between pieces, and then the image.

Outside at the military port of Fort Drum, craft were taking off and landing, but the shot had been taken from outside the port walls so that anything really interesting was hidden.

"A major step forward today for the forces of truth and justice," the voice said matter of factly, "the capture and return to the FSA of the wanted terrorist, Erik Mahon."

The view shifted to a close angle of a man in forearm and leg shackles being bundled out of a Galvinite Army shuttle and onto the tarmac. He was short, red-haired, and stocky, with a broad open face—an expressionless face at the moment, one apparently determined to show nothing to the slightly smiling men with the very big guns that surrounded him. Gabriel could see the slightly bigger smiles in the background, the gloating looks, the side-wise glances that suggested that, while no one might be hitting this guy now, they would be later. The man found his footing and started to walk, closely surrounded by the soldiers and the officers from the Galvinite Intelligence Directorate.

"This notorious assassin and bomber had eluded capture for nineteen months after the atrocities at Wayrene and Duithurt, where more than four hundred FSA citizens died. Mahon, thought to be a disciple of the rogue Churgalt insurrectionist Bender Davis, was captured on Alitar and turned over to FSA forces with the aid of an independent diplomatic initiative backed by the ISA."

That was all.

Gabriel stopped the image of the man's retreating back as the soldiers hurried him into one of the port buildings. He stared at it. The Churgalt Insurgency was based down in the jungles of the equatorial region of Galvin, an inaccessible area that might have been designed for the successful concealment of a rebel operation. The Churgalt Insurgents were a nasty little secret that the FSA tried to keep quiet, but word about them had leaked out while Gabriel was still serving on Falada. At the time, he had found slightly amusing their claim that the FSA government was in league with some kind of unknown alien. Now, having met Major Norrik, he wasn't laughing any more.

Even though the premise had sounded amusing at the time, Gabriel hadn't had any doubt that there were a good number of people on Galvin who found the government desperately oppressive and would have liked to overthrow it. Unfortunately, the Churgalt people were in no condition, operationally or in terms of popularity, to do any such thing. Nevertheless, the Insurgents remained a thorn in the Galvinite Army's side, an uncomfortable indication that not all Galvinites loved the war or the government.

This story by itself, therefore, was no great surprise. Whenever Churgalt agents came out into the cities or exposed themselves in any other way, the government hunted them down mercilessly, but this particular terrorist had been caught and turned over to them by the ISA.

The ISA was the Imperial State of Algemron. otherwise known as Alitar.

Now why did they do that? Gabriel wondered.

The two planets, for all the reasons that come with centuries of war and atrocity, hated each other desperately. The two worlds would normally do anything to prevent one another from receiving normal trade or even normal flow of data. It was something of an indication of Gabriel's good luck that their three little ships hadn't been descended on and blown out of the sky by an Alitarin task force.

Why then this odd little bit of sudden cooperation? A "terrorist" wanted by one side, suddenly handed to it by another? The "responsible" news services made a big deal of it, saying that it showed how little need there was for an outside presence in the system, that responsible behavior of adult states working through a process to gradually resolve I heir differences, blah, blah, blah.

Gabriel caught the word "outside" in that one journalistic piece and immediately became alert. "Outside" meant "Concord." He knew that from the bad old days monitoring Phorcys and Ino, another pair of planets stuck in the same star system with each other and equally stuck with a hate/hate relationship, though one of slightly different provenance. This was a message of sorts, and it was addressed to the Concord .. though not directly. They were meant to see it, comment on it, and (if possible) to draw the wrong conclusion from it.

Now it was just a matter of working out what the right conclusion was.

Gabriel went back to studying that frozen image. ". with the aid of an independent diplomatic initiative backed by the ISA." The phrase was vague enough to make anyone attempting to answer the "who" part of a news question fairly turn around in their skin with frustration. No attribution. Almost as if no real person had been responsible at all. "An initiative." As if you might step out one morning and see an initiative walking down the street and scratching itself. Naturally, the FSA government was unwilling enough to make any reference to Alitar, but that they should do so in a news story like this and suggest, even admit, that their enemy had helped them.

Gabriel sat up on the bed, leaned over, and rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He very much wanted to lie down and rest a while, no matter what might happen to him while he was asleep.

Tire government, said Delvecchio's remembered voice in his head, that's just code for "a whole lot of people." Your job, when someone mentions "the government," is to find out which person they mean. Then you can work out who just did what to who.

That was the question here. Who on Alitar would willingly help Galvin? What did this mean? Who had spoken to whom and done what deal.?

It would continue to bother Gabriel until they reached Algemron. I need more data.

There were plenty of other things to bother him anyway. Likely enough the other set of problems awaiting him at Algemron would drive the first batch out. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the stone. The glass latticework had actually melted into it now. or maybe melded was a better word, since heat had thankfully not been involved.

Still twanging at the edges of his consciousness was the Patterner's remark, You still do not know where that facility is. Gabriel was hoping vehemently that the Precursor facility now preparing itself for his arrival was not on one of the two inhabited planets, or matters would immediately become a lot more complex than they already were. Then again, he thought half in despair, why shouldn't it be on one of them? Things are already about as bad as they can be at the moment. Why shouldn't they be worse?

He had no idea where the site might be. His reasoning was hampered by the fact that Precursor facilities were old. If the whole system wasn't old—and it had been suspected for some time that there were star systems in which not all the planets had "formed out" at the same time—then the planet itself might need to be.

Algemron, to judge by its stellar type and general behavior, was nowhere nearly as old as Mantebron or Coulomb and their various planets. It appeared to be a respectable G star in its stable middle years, but appearances could be deceiving. It could, for all he knew, be cooling more slowly than was usual for stars of its type, possibly one of those atypical "former Os," blue-white a long time ago but balanced at exactly the right ratio of size-to-heat to slide much more slowly down the main sequence than usual.

Gabriel didn't have enough data to support that theory: Schmetterling carried a lot of gazetteer and hard info on her Grid, but not so much theoretical or detailed astronomical data. He was going to have to let that lie for the moment. If he was right, and the star was older than it looked and had experienced flares or luminosity, then maybe he had reason to be most suspicious of Calderon and Ilmater, the two innermost planets of the Algemron system. They might be more of an age with the star and might have suffered the consequences of whatever irregularities it went through in its earlier stages.

They were seared bare, both of them, too close to the present Algemron to be inhabited. Ilmater was mostly rock, Calderon a wilderness of molten metal with here and there a seasonal outcrop of solids. Early in the system's development, there had been frequent attempts to set up bases to mine metals and other strategic elements on Calderon. Many of them failed, betrayed by the vulnerability of such installations to attack—first in the colonial period disagreements between the Austrins and Thuldans, then later when the Alitarins and Galvinites became involved. Presently five Austrin metals extractions plants were operational on Calderon, but their positions were as precarious as those of any other installations built there. If war broke out in earnest, Gabriel was willing to believe that these would be among the first casualties.

Then there's Ilmater. that planet presented its own problems. At closest approach, it was only about 0.4 AU from Galvin, and the Alitarins had often attempted to establish a base there, while the Galvinites had done everything they could to block it. After the cease-fire some years back, the Alitarins had finally given up on these attempts, probably preferring to devote the needed funds to rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of the homeworld. Gabriel had a feeling that it had never entirely left either side's minds, and activity on Ilmater would immediately produce a lot of hostile interest.

He shook his head. The whole age question was insoluble without a lot more data, and he was unlikely to be able to find what he needed in time to do him any good. Besides, he thought then, what about Danwell? That would seem to throw the "age" theory out the window. Danwell was a youngish planet, as far as he knew, with a lot of active mountain building.

"Damn it," Gabriel muttered. The best he would be able to manage would be to use the stone to sense directly for location when they came out at Algemron.

He laughed briefly then, for as they had all sat at dinner the night before, Helm had once again fired the question at) him. "We were at Algemron! Why didn't that damned! stone set off its little warning bells then, for Thor's sake, instead of dragging us all the way to Coulomb?"

Gabriel could only shake his head. The Patterner had spoken of "ongoing programming." It was possible that the right "circuitry" simply had not been in place in Gabriel's head either to sense the facility in Algemron or to do anything with it if he had sensed it. That was all theory, too, at the moment, and he could only laugh and say to Helm, "We wouldn't have been able to get near it then anyway on our own—not with the Galvinites all over us as soon as we turned up. Now at least we have a chance."

"The only problem," Angela said, "is that then we were driving our ships, and we're not driving this one. What happens when we get to Algemron?"

"You'll all be free," Gabriel said, "so the captain says. I don't see why she would change her mind about that between now and then. If they'd seen cause to keep you when they first laid hands on you, they'd have said as much, but as to what else happens when we arrive." He shook his head. "It's a mess over there."

They had been reading the news too. They agreed with him, and dinner broke up in rather somber mood. Only Delde Sota paused just before going out and slipped her braid around his wrist to touch the medchip embedded (here and assess his condition for herself.

The look that crossed her face had struck Gabriel as unusual.

"What?" Gabriel asked.

Delde Sota's face could be difficult to decipher at times. The slightly slanted eyes and the high cheekbones always made her look slightly haughty, and her thoughtful expressions sometimes could be misread as unduly cool, but now she glanced up at Gabriel as the microfibrils interwoven with the prehensile end of the braid interfaced with the chip, and the look in her eyes was actually faintly envious.

"Possibly not as bad an outcome as expected," she said quietly.

"What makes you think that?" Gabriel said.

He had been nervous enough about going to sleep just the night before. This morning he had awakened feeling not much different than yesterday—but such were the events of the recent days that he mistrusted that judgment.

"Great increases in brain connectivity," she said, "as if hardware 'bandwidth' was increasing. Myelination in corpus callosum increasing."

"Is that good?"

"Assessment: it's impossible," she said. "Baseline: you are long past period for active brain growth. Good thing, head probably big enough already."

"Hmf."

"Nonetheless growth occurs but not in mass. Quality of brain tissue shifting somewhat. Balance shifting somewhat toward white matter, away from gray. Interconnectivity among neurons increasing considerably over early baselines. Considerable opportunity here for study, research. Possible useful spinoffs for various scholia of medical treatment. May get to write that paper after all."

"You'll get to be famous, finally."

Delde Sota drew her statuesque self up and gave him lordly look. "Fact: fame fleeting. Service lasts. Nice to get the occasional citation out of it, however." She undid her braid' from around his wrist, gave him a curious little half-nod, and went out.

Now, as usual, he sat wondering what she'd meant. His mind still felt as if it were his own. The nervousness he had felt the other day was easing off a little. Maybe it was just all so new.

He would have given a great deal to be able to live in time, oh, a year ago say, when sleep was just that, something you could depend on, something that happened at a fairly regular time, and after which you did not wake up and find out that your corpus callosum—whatever that was—was bigger or smaller or missing. That was another world, he thought as he lay down, and who knows what it'll all turn into tomorrow.

Chapter Sixteen

The next evening they were all at dinner in the common room of the brig when the door opened, and Elinke Dareyev came in.

She stood there looking cool and captainly. Bearing the timing in mind, she was almost certainly on her way to dinner in the officers' mess, and Gabriel's insides seized a little at the thought of the last time he could remember seeing her at such a time. It had been the party after the peace agreement between Phorcys and Ino was sealed, the night before it was signed, the night that that other Marine, long gone home now, Big Mil, had given him the stone.

The night before it all had changed.

Everyone looked up at her. Gabriel rose to greet her, a sudden access of the old reflex from his Marine days, and rather oddly, to Gabriel's turn of mind, so did Helm. Enda bowed her head a little to the captain, and Angela. She looked up at Dareyev, and there was an unusual flicker in her eyes. Gabriel saw the look pass between them, saw Dareyev turn away, frowning, and saw Angela do the same.

Jealousy was his immediate assumption.

Then he made a face. Come on, Gabriel thought. Elinke was right. This thinking you're the center of the universe can really get in the way of rationality sometimes. You may be a primed weapon, but that doesn't mean that every woman you see has her eyes on you.

"Captain," Gabriel said.

Elinke looked around at all of them. "I just wanted to let you know," she said, "that we'll be making starrise at Algemron in seventeen and a half hours. All of your ships will be returned to you, and you'll be free to pursue your business in the system once we make position and are secured. If I were you, I'd leave the area with all due speed. The indications are not good."

Gabriel looked at her. "Starrise indications?" he said.

"I did not feel it was fair to make this starrise without telling you," Dareyev said. "Before we left, the starfall indicators gave us positive indications of an indeterminate number of incoming vessels making for Algemron space. Most of them will arrive within the next hundred hours. Some will arrive sooner. Many of our own vessels and those of other friendly stellar nations are incoming as well, per orders from the Concord Administrators in the system, but that space is about to become a battleground, and you would be well advised to take yourself to safe haven immediately."

Helm looked at her and said, "Space around Algemron is not entirely controlled by Galvin and Alitar, or by the Concord either, for that matter."

She nodded. "I agree, but when the Concord passes this information on to the planetary governments, it will almost certainly cause both governments to go to their highest states of alert. They will both send their fleets out as soon as logistics enable them to do so, and they will start shooting at anything not identifiable as their own—as well as at one another, of course."

"They would have started this anyway," Gabriel said.

"I think you're right," Elinke replied. "The upcoming close approach was already appearing to be more active than the last. Now it is starting, and we are very unsure what will happen when their war—almost certain to be a rather smaller war—brushes up against the beginning of this big one."

She looked at them one by one, though not at Gabriel. "Those of you who are not under durance here, I say again that you're free to go. Please do so." She turned to leave.

"Captain," Helm said.

She paused and looked at him.

"We've come a long way with Gabriel," he said. "We're not going to drop him off in the middle of anybody's war and run away. I do not hire myself out to the military, but I have a suspicion which side in this war Gabe's going to wind up on. and I'll fight on that side and take my chances. After that, I want a chance to testify at his trial."

Grawl looked up at Dareyev as well and said, "Warrior-leader, he speaks for us as well. To our capacity, we will fight, but I reserve the right to make the songs afterwards."

Elinke produced a very dry expression. "In the middle of a major fleet engagement, I intend to decline the invitation to get involved in a copyright dispute. You'll have to handle that yourself. As for the rest of you. don't say I didn't warn you."

She nodded to them all and went out.

Enda looked over at Gabriel. "Not a lot of information there for you, was there?"

He shook his head. "I didn't expect there to be. I don't think she's entirely made up her mind what tack to take. There's always the question of what orders she may find waiting for her when she gets there. She may be reluctant to commit herself and then find herself having to do something else entirely."

Enda looked at him. "If things become hectic, this may be the last chance we all have to be together before having to take the ships out and decide what to do next."

"We'll stay close to Schmetterling if they let us," Helm said. "Otherwise we may need to get on out to Pariah Station so we have a quiet place to make plans."

Gabriel nodded.

They did not linger over it. They made their good-byes casually—purposefully so, Gabriel thought, as if they would all be meeting again after the next starfall/starrise cycle. Except the symmetry was wrong here. They were in starfall already and about to come out. Everything was inverted. Nothing was going to be the same again.

Finally Gabriel was left alone in the common room, and from there he made his way back to his cell and waited to be secured there. For the next couple of hours he watched the news from Algemron again, heard again that crowd-roar with the shriek at the edges, and could only feel very sorry for the people who were wasting their breath. Quite soon, they were going to discover what Gabriel already knew too well: that wars are not won by shouting.

Several hours along in this process, he blinked and realized that there was a now-familiar noise that he had not heard an hour or two previously, when he should have: the sound of the solenoid clicking shut in the door to his cell.

Gabriel stood up, bemused, and went over to the door. . then paused. He hated to look foolish by trying the lock and finding himself shut in.

He tried it, and the door slipped open.

Gabriel stepped out into the hall. It was dimmed down to almost-dark and empty—he was the only prisoner at the moment. Down in the meeting area, he could see a faint light.

He made his way quietly down there, every moment expecting to come across a Marine guard who would order him back the way he came. None such appeared, and the door to the outer guard post was closed.

Gabriel stood in the doorway of the meeting area. It was dim in there too, and the couches had been folded down from the wall. The display against the wall was on, faintly lighting the room, and someone indistinct was sitting on one of the couches watching Verge Hunter, for as he came in he heard the traditional cry, "Not for myself, but for the Force!" He didn't quite know whether to laugh or burst out crying. Too many memories of hearing Elinke Dareyev shouting that at the end of a boozy officers' mess, too many memories of watching it during late stardrive nights on Sunshine. All gone now. All over, those parts of his life. both of them.

Gabriel looked at the figure sitting curled up on the couch and waited for his night vision to kick in. After a moment, he saw that it was Angela.

"Uh," Gabriel said and went and sat down near her. "My door seems to have been left unlocked." "I know," Angela said. "I asked the captain."

Gabriel looked at her, opened his mouth, and closed again. Angela Valiz and Elinke Dareyev. together in the same room, alone. He realized suddenly that that was a conversation he would have paid the intelligence organization of his choice a lot to record for him.

"When?"

"A couple of days ago. She only said yes a little while ago. I didn't really have a chance to tell you."

"You didn't." Gabriel paused. "You didn't tell her you were social services, did you?"

She gave Gabriel a very annoyed look. "I told her I was worried about you, and that I thought you might possibly feel like some company tonight, under the circumstances."

"What circumstances would those be?"

"That tomorrow we were coming out at Algemron," Angela replied, "and no matter what she decided to do with you when you got there, you were probably going to be in a lot of trouble. With a battle this size about to occur, anything might happen."

"Mmm," Gabriel said.

"And frankly," Angela said, "I thought I might be able to use a little company myself." He looked at her and smiled just slightly. "Well," Gabriel said, "just this once." "Just this once."

Gabriel pulled Angela close and buried his face in her neck. He held her to him, hard.

Much later, in the near darkness, still holding her, Gabriel's eyes opened. He stared at the ceiling, but that was not what he saw or heard.

Somewhere on the other side of the darkness, light was stirring inside the stone. Something was breathing. Something knew he was coming, and it was waking up.

The initial indication had come four days ago, a flicker of sensation along nerve-lines that were the strings in space and the less palpable ones in drivespace, the gossamer threads of subdimensional energy that held everything together. Something had plucked one particular string, a very central one, and slowly the resonance was spreading throughout the unseen structure. One note, making the string next to it vibrate and then the next one and the one after that. One long harmony, dissonant at first, then resolving.

This is the time.

The time is here.

The time is here, but not the man . so the harmony, the knowledge, had said several days ago. One ship was moving closer to the place appointed, through the night that stretched between and under the realities, and the harmonies were shifting, the note was changing.

Soon the one waited for, the man, would be there, and then it would be the time. Everything would be ready.

They would come back.

He would be there. The two sets of circumstances, both set in order so long ago, would come together at last.

Then maybe. maybe.

Gabriel lay there looking into that plangent darkness and felt himself about ready to lose his temper again. They will come back, he thought. Who's that? No response.

All right, he thought, be cryptic, but "maybe?" All this power, all this preparation, and the best you can do is "maybe?"

A pause while the silence parsed his statement and composed a reply.

Yes or no, it came back after a while, cool and unconcerned, rests only with you.

"Wha—" said a soft voice in the darkness.

"Just a dream," Gabriel said, desperately hoping that this was true.

"Well, go back to sleep."

That being all Gabriel could do, he did.

Chapter Seventeen

The ship's grid carried the starfall, a great wash of pale blue fire running down over everything and revealing Algemron's yellow star again. The imager showed little more than that before shutting down, and Gabriel turned away from it and started putting his things back into the little bag that Enda had brought over from Sunshine. He was about to be moved again, he felt sure.

When the Marines came for him to escort him to the bridge, Gabriel was ready for them. They took him away without a word, escorting him down the long white corridors to a lift. Gabriel did not need to speak to them to know the level of tension in the ship. He could have felt it in the air even before the stone had started doing things to his head, and now the place seemed to be positively singing with it—the feel of taut nerves and racing minds, adrenaline rushing. His back actually started to hurt from it.

The bridge itself, when Gabriel got there, was darkened down to alert lighting, cubic displays and screens alight everywhere, and over it all ran a cacophonous babble of incoming comms. Gabriel had not been on many cruiser bridges in his time. His last memory of one, Falada's bridge, was terrible enough for him mostly to have stifled it—or rather, he had little left of it except for the frozen look on Elinke Dareyev's face as she stood there on the big central dais gazing down on him, friend turned enemy and accuser. Now she was striding around from station to station around that big star-backed space and looking over her people's shoulders angrily.

She swung on Gabriel as he was ushered in. "Do you know what's going on out there?"

He looked past her toward the great main viewports. Stars shone untroubled through them. There was nothing to see.

"The only thing I'm sure of," he replied, "is that the Precursor facility out there is awake." "You bet it is!" she said. "I don't believe anyone in the system appreciates your little joke!"

"Excuse me, Captain?" Gabriel asked.

"You know what you pulled in that other facility back on Ohmel." "I'm not doing it here."

"Connor," said the captain, "both Alitar and Galvin comms are reporting sporadic power losses, transmission losses, broadcast power interruption, you name it. Ships in flight have crashed. People are dying down there."

"Captain, I'm not doing it! That's doing it." He waved his hand at the darkness, at the Precursor facility. Gabriel could feel it clearly through the skin of the ship, now, like sun on his bare body or an energy bolt going by too close through lightly rated armor. It stung, an unsettling sensation.

"Well, you'd better start talking it out of doing it, because the war is starting right now. Galvin and Alitar both think that their systems failures are some kind of attack from the other side, and they're sending their fleets up right now—those that are ready to move. Too damned many of them, in Galvin's case. They're going to be all over local space in a little while, shooting at anything that moves—"

"Crap," Gabriel said softly. Against what was coming, a united defense was going to be the only hope. Even a few ships one way or another might make a difference against the vast fleet incoming. Numbers weren't everything, you couldn't always tell.

"That includes us, you might remember," Elinke said. "So if you have any way to affect this facility, this is the time to do it."

Gabriel put his hand in his pocket and closed his eyes for a moment. The stone was throbbing—that stinging, insistent pulse, wanting something but not being able to do it for the moment.

"I can't affect it remotely," he said, "and I don't know for sure what needs to be done, anyway. If we can find the place, I can get into it and start figuring out how to make it behave."

She stared at him. "What do you mean 'find it'? I thought you knew where it was!"

"It's here in the system, all right," Gabriel told her. "I can feel it. What's that way?" He pointed down toward the floor of the ship and to the right.

"Talk to the navs officer," Elinke said. She made her way up to the dais and to her control seat, smacking its arm. The local 3-D representation of local space came to life all around her, so that she was suddenly a black-clad figure seemingly surrounded by a great globe of stars. Elinke gathered the representation in around her with a gesture of her arms and pulled one part of it closer to study. The noise of the comms all around was getting louder, angry voices elsewhere in the system shouting commands, screaming entreaties for help, confused babble coming from every quarter.

Gabriel made his way up to the navs officer, a short fair young man with a long nose and very blue eyes, which were wearing a coolness at the moment all out ofjoint with the way he was feeling inside. The name Viipunen was stitched onto his uniform. Gabriel got a sudden flash of the man's fear as he looked over to one side at the starrise/starfall detector, a most unusual piece of equipment for a ship as small as a cruiser to have, but this cruiser had been Lorand Kharls's base of operations, which had caused it to be rather better equipped than might have been expected. The display, about a meter high and a meter deep, showed space out to about fifty light-years, a bit more room than could be covered by Schmetterling's normal starfall of thirty-five. The display was littered with tiny sparks. Gabriel had trouble judging how many at a quick glance. Hundreds would not have been too high an estimate.

"Listen," he said to the officer, "before we get started—here are my shipmates?"

The officer glanced at him, then looked over his shoulder at Captain Dareyev. She had heard the question. She nodded and waved a hand at him. "They're down in the bay, getting their ships ready. Let him talk to them if he wants to." She turned her back and got back to assessing the strategic situation.

"Right. My ship," he sad. " Sunshine."

"Is that the little one?"

Gabriel gave him a look. Most private ships looked small next to Lalique, even Helm's. "Don't rub it in." The nav officer smiled very slightly, touched his controls, and nodded at Gabriel. "Enda?" Gabriel said.

"Here, Gabriel. Getting the systems up and running." "What's the plan?"

"All of us will make for Pariah Station," she said, "unless you can provide something better."

"I'm looking at things right now," Gabriel said. "I'll tell you that they don't look great."

He was aware of the navs officer watching him intently. He didn't want to say anything that the man would take as compromising Schmetterling's security.

"Well, we knew that before," Enda said, "but I am glad you were able to contact me, Gabriel. Two things. First, seeing that battle may ensue, I have left your suit for you. It is in the shuttle bay, and the Marines said they would see that you got it. Second, when I came in I turned on the info-trading system to load the local Grid. I got rather more than that, however. There is a drivespace relay in the system."

Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the tactical display in the midst of which Captain Dareyev stood. It was so cluttered with ships of all kinds, little red and blue and yellow blips that he could hardly make out the real stars that formed its background, but there was one very large blue one that stood out.

"'Lighthouse is here," Gabriel said.

"That would make sense. I did not see the system heralds come up. I was attending to other things." He was almost certain she meant the weapons. "The system has! picked up some mail for you."

His eyebrows went up. "What is it?"

"I cannot tell. It is password-locked."

He sighed, leaned close to the pickup, and whispered his password.

"Thank you," she said. There was a moment's silence. "Shall I read it?"

"Yes. Who's it from?"

"I cannot tell. The headers are encrypted."

Not my father. Gabriel blinked hard a few times. "Read it."

She paused. "It says, 'Message received. Contents noted.'"

"No other comment?"

"And no signature," Enda said. "The origin nodes and transit path have been disguised." "All right," Gabriel said, deciding to let it lie there.

Captain Dareyev said to him, rather pointedly, "Where exactly are we supposed to be going, Connor?"

The nav officer turned to glare at him.

"Later, Enda," Gabriel said. "Feel for the stone."

"Ah," she said. "I will do that."

"Tell the others I said good luck. Keep them posted."

I will, he heard her think, quite clearly. There was a flash of fear of the situation behind that, fear of the stone, but she was managing them both.

Can we stay in touch this way? he asked silently.

Difficult to say. I believe the effect may not propagate well over distance when one or more ofthe parties are under stress.

Stress, Gabriel thought. Wonderful.

"Connor!"

"Yes, Captain," he said. He nodded to the navs officer. "All right, this is going to look weird. so bear with me." He pulled out the stone and closed his eyes, feeling for the source of the sensation that he had only been sensing bluntly and generally until now. "I'm going to point, and I want you to take a bearing identical to the direction in which I'm pointing. Then we're going to have to go in that direction at best speed."

"No problem," said the young man's voice. "Tell me when you're ready."

Gabriel concentrated on the stone, on the source of the stinging sensation, that feeling of something out there alive. and angry. That was a new one on him. If he had gotten any emotional effect from the facility on Ohmel, it had been one of patience, cool waiting, calm evaluation, and utmost logic with no passion or emotion of any kind. This place, though, felt as if it had woken up enraged. It was running power through conduits that had not been used for a long while, systems that had been offline for ages. and now it was having to compensate for a whole new set of baseline energy readings in its area. Gabriel was shown, in a flash, a great sheaf of criteria and qualities of this system that had changed and to which the place was now having to adapt.

People, he thought. There was no one living here when it was last active a few minutes ago. or a hundred years. He shook his head.

"There," he said to the navs officer, pointing as exactly as he could toward the heart of that awakening, testy energy. "Can you work with that, Mr. Viipunen?"

"I think so."

He opened his eyes again and watched the young man work briefly at his console. The starrise/starfall indicator next to him went briefly dark, then filled with a system schematic for Algemron. One small white

light, slow-moving, indicated Schmetterling. From it, a white line ran outward, down into the plane of the ecliptic and into the space between the little white globes marking the small gas giant Dalius and the icy planet Reliance. Between the two worlds, a faint band of representative glitter lay.

"The asteroid belt," Gabriel said. and suddenly smiled slightly, for things were now starting to make sense. "Can you go higher definition on this?"

"Yes, sir, I can," replied Viipunen, doing it, "but there's hardly any need, because I know what you're pointing at already." The tank shimmered, and the white line now ran in through its top, out through its bottom, and very nearly speared a small irregular shape tumbling through the sparks of light that represented the rest of the belt.

"Argolos," Viipunen said. "Is that what you're after?"

"Has to be," Gabriel said. "Has to."

Argolos was one of two big fragments left over from the destruction of the planet that had once occupied this orbit. The astronomers said that another star with its own system of planets had come straight through this system, millions of years back. One of the planets of the other star had managed somehow to collide with Havryn. Havryn had nearly been torn apart but had managed to resettle itself, though at the price of the loss of most of its kinetic energy. It was now just about the slowest-rotating gas giant known. After the dust settled—literally and figuratively—the space between Dalius and Reliance had filled up with the wreckage of the collision, the remains of the other planet. Two big pieces remained: Wreathe and Argolos, both of them rich in heavy metals and big enough to be mined.

How old was the star that passed through here? Gabriel thought. How old were its planets? He grinned more broadly. Accidents did happen in space, but not accidents like this, and not where the Precursors were concerned.

"That's it," Gabriel said.

"Argolos, Captain," said the navs officer.

"Damnation!" Elinke said. "You mean we're going to have to run all the way out there, when right here we've got—"

Alarms began to go off, and people changed stations in a hurry. Gabriel heard several of them say to one another, "Casting gunnery loose. I have your weapon. I confirm it hot—"

Captain Dareyev pointed at part of the starry display englobing her and beckoned it bigger. It ballooned until she was in the midst of a three-meter globe of stars and tiny globes, the globes moving in a pattern, each tagged with a small letter-and-number label that followed it.

"We have a Galvinite fleet coming at us, fifteen vessels in quarter-englobe. Six corvettes, six cutters, three frigates, no problem."

Gabriel swallowed. He had heard reports of this kind from Elinke before, but the numbers had been smaller.

"Navs, shape us one thirteen on the ecliptic, best solution for Dalius. I'm going to go in low and shake up our little friends' gravity grids a little, and then we'll consider our options. Comms, warn that fleet off and tell them my rules of engagement now allow their destruction, and I think that would be a real pity. Then get me Namur—my compliments to Captain Estevan. I think we should get together and have a little shooting match right now. Give her the coordinates—"

"Captain!" Gabriel interrupted.

"It's kind of a shame, since there are other things we're all probably going to be shooting at," Elinke said, wheeling in her display to bring the neighborhood of Dalius up big, "but I have a job to do, and if these people put themselves in my way, too bad."

"Captain!"

She looked at him with annoyance that for once was not directed at him. "Sorry, Connor," she said. "No time for your side trip at the moment. We're going to be busy."

"If I don't get out there, Captain, it's going to be disastrous for everyone. You know why. Please let me."

She frowned at him through that cloak of stars, while she touched one after another of the enemy ships with a finger, targeting them for her gunnery crew in one color, marking those for Namur in another. "If you think I am going to let you depart custody at this point, Connor, you had better think again."

He was getting desperate. "Look, I'm glad to give you parole, but you've got to let me get out there, or there won't be any trial."

"Let me take him out, if there's a problem," said a soft voice from one side.!

Gabriel turned. Aleen Delonghi was standing there, not in Intel uniform to Gabriel's surprise, but kitted out as a Star Force commander. She looked over at Dareyev, who raised her eyebrows.

"If you lose him." Dareyev warned her.

"Oh, no," said Delonghi, "not at this point. Our people have too many questions they want to ask him."

Captain Dareyev studied both of them. "Kharls trusts you," she said after a moment. "That's good enough for me." She turned to Gabriel. "Go with her. Comms, have a small detachment of Marines go with them—a shuttle's worth."

"Thank you, Captain." Gabriel said.

"Don't thank me yet," said Elinke with a dry look, "and don't get killed. You're needed for that trial you seem so eager to save us all for."

"I'll keep him safe for you," Delonghi said, "never fear."

They headed off the bridge together, on the egde of another blast of klaxons.

"They're really coming this time, aren't they?" she said as they ran down the corridor toward the lift for the shuttle bay.

"They really are."

In the bay, half a dozen Marines joined them. "Get him suited, and give him some armor," said Delonghi. "He's going to need it where we're going."

"Eighteen on the chiton, forty-four inseam on the greaves," Gabriel said, and the other Marines looked at him in brief surprise. then some faces changed as they remembered who he was.

He blinked. The wash of discomfort and distrust that came to him from them was very hard to take. This

gift of mindwalking, he thought, if it is a gift, is not all it's cracked up to be. There was no time to waste wishing it gone. He needed it now, and anyway, Gabriel thought, it's too late. I'm hardwired.

One of them, a young woman with a mass cannon slung over her back, returned from an armory cabinet at the side of the shuttle bay with a breastplate, apron and leg pieces, and Gabriel's suit. Gabriel suited up and strapped on the armor with the speed of long practice, noticing the names on the chitons around him. Lacey, Dirigent, Rathbone, MacLain, and on the young woman's chiton, Bertin. It sounded familiar.

"You were on Falada" Gabriel said, very quietly.

She looked at Gabriel. "Yes."

"Well met, shipmate," Gabriel said, knowing all too well what response he was likely to get.

He got it. Bertin turned away without a word. Gabriel finished checking his armor then looked up at Delonghi, who had been watching this. She had a gun. Everyone else had a gun.

"Well?" he said.

Delonghi looked at him then shook her head. "I gave parole."

"Don't know if my trust extends that far," Delonghi said. "Let it lie for now. We'll see how you behave. Get in."

They piled into the shuttle.

"Captain's done us a favor," Delonghi said as she slipped into the pilot's seat and started heating the shuttle up. "When she swings past Dalius, she'll have brought us a lot of the way we needed to go anyway. Time to Argolos won't be more than, oh, twenty minutes from there."

Gabriel nodded and gulped. He could feel some kind of large shadow moving over him, and he wasn't sure he liked the feel of it, for he didn't know what it was.

Yes I do, he thought then. It was like this on Ohmel when the VoidCorp cruisers turned up. Something coming out of drivespace. Something big.

But it hadn't happened yet. It would happen soon, though. He wished he was somewhere that he could see, but soon enough they would be on Argolos, and he ought to be able to get a glimpse from there.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Enda ?

Nothing.

Enda?

Very faintly he heard the answer. I hear. Argolos, Enda!

So I thought. I am glad, Gabriel! I thought I caught an image, a white line— That was me. Can you feel the stone?

It is faint. There is an anger that interferes—

That's on Argolos, Gabriel told her. This facility doesn 't feel like the other one. This may not be as

easy—

I did not think that one was particularly easy, she replied. The stone was like a live thing then—and an angry one. What it may become like now.

Gabriel started to shake his head then stopped himself. Gods only knew what the Marines would think. Got to make some conversation here, Enda, he said. Tell the others—

Helm knows. We follow.

Tell him I'm with a bunch of Marines. He's not to try anything dumb, like a snatch. I need to work with these people. Some ofthem are friends. Gabriel felt like laughing at the next thing he needed to tell her and had to stifle that too. Delonghi is here.

Is she indeed?

She's the one who pried me out ofthere, Gabriel said. I tell you, I don't know what to think of my fellow human beings any more. You think you know them, and then…!

Ironic laughter from the other end of the tenuous thread of communication. If you—

Snapped. Gone, as Delonghi lifted the shuttle out of the bay, and all around him Bertin and Lacey and the other Marines sat and fingered their weapons.

"Cent for your thoughts, Connor," said Delonghi. She brought the shuttle around in a big curve away from Schmetterling, and once again Gabriel got to appreciate the big deadly curves of her from underneath, the gunports open and hot, Algemron's light on her sleek sides. Good luck, he thought.

A sudden sense of shock from a mind very ordered, very excited, very ready inside Schmetterling. but not ready for this, not for hearing him when he wasn't even there, like a sudden pang of a overactive or overburdened conscience.

Elinke—

Gabriel shied away from that contact. He had already learned too much from his first one. He didn't want any more right now.

"Wouldn't know that they're worth that much at the moment," he replied.

She glanced at him from the pilot's couch, bringing the shuttle around expertly and bringing up the navigation display. Argolos showed in it, tumbling gently some ten thousand kilometers away. Delonghi locked the ship onto it and touched the autopilot to life.

"Keep an eye on it," she said to Rathbone, who was co-piloting.

tf\7 t tt Yes, maam.

They rode in silence for a while, as Delonghi checked her own weapons and slung them about her. Then she looked over at Gabriel.

"I suppose," she said, "that all this comes as a surprise to you."

He nodded.

"Look," she said, "if I was wrong the last time we met, maybe this is my chance to put it all right." "All of it?" Gabriel said. "You were going to blow my ship up. You were going to shoot me." "You threw me in a meat locker," she said, "and assaulted me telepathically." The other Marines were looking at her in some bemusement as she said this. "All right," Gabriel conceded, "it's true about the meat locker."

Lacey, Diligent and even Berlin turned their faces away from Gabriel, but this did nothing to hide their smiles. He could "hear" them from the inside in perfect clarity. He was not going to say anything about the telepathic "assault."

Well, it was assault, maybe, he thought, but she was lying to me. I had no choice.

She was hiding something. She was working with someone else. gods know who. I never did find out.

Just for that moment the thought tempted him. He might have refrained from using this technique on Elinke, but Delonghi was no friend of his, and whatever favors she did him, Gabriel was sure she was doing for her own reasons.

The stone was inside his suit glove. That had seemed the simplest way to stay in contact with it. Now he considered how best to proceed. Reach out very carefully and—

"Ma'am," said Rathbone, "we've got company."

Delonghi looked away from Gabriel and said, "What?"

"Three ships. Looks like the ones we were carrying in Schmetterling."

She looked at the tactical display and saw the ships' IDs displayed.

"Yes indeed," Delonghi said. "I was wondering if they would turn up. Thought they would have cut and tt

run.

Gabriel opened his mouth to say, "You don't know them very well," and then closed it again. For the moment he put aside the thought of "leaning" on her and merely said, "Look, Commander, I've told them they're not to try anything dumb. I have no desire to leave custody at the moment, no matter what you might think."

"If they come near you," she said, "if they try to come near me, I will personally fry them. Do you hear me? Even if I believed your bona fides, which is a moot point right now, I don't believe in theirs. I promised the captain I would bring you back for trial in good condition, and I will." She smiled slightly.

Gabriel fell quiet for a moment. Enda, he thought.

A faint response. Query?

Stay out of sight. She's not going to be reasonable. She 'll shoot if she sees you come near. Noted.

Feel for the stone.

Yes. A shiver. Gabriel felt slightly guilty making her expose herself to it, but it was the only way for her to be sure where he was.

They skimmed low over Argolos. It was a good-sized fragment of rock that was a little embedded ice. Several small domed mining facilities were scattered here and there over the moonlet's surface. Along with the scratches and gouges of many abandoned attempts and many more scars caused by crashed ships were several destroyed facilities dating back to earlier times—places that had been wiped out by attacks.

"All right, Connor," said Delonghi, looking down at the scarred surface of the place with a skeptical expression. "Where's what you're looking for?"

"Can I get Mr. Rathbone to hover for a bit," Gabriel said, "so I can get a directional fix?"

Rathbone reached into the central display and made a couple of adjustments. A few moments later, the shuttle was proceeding in a path identical to the moonlet's, nearly stationary above it, as the moonlet tumbled very slightly below.

"Good," Gabriel said. "Hold that, please."

He closed his eyes and felt down below him. At first he expected a stronger-weaker-stronger pattern, like the one he had gotten from the site at Ohmel, but this time it seemed less straightforwardly directional, more diffuse.

He opened his eyes again, startled by the conclusion. Nearly the whole moonlet was full of this particular Precursor facility.

In fact, he thought, that might be what held the thing together when it hit the gas giant all that while ago. He swallowed and had hard work of it; his mouth had gone dry at the thought of how much Precursor material might be buried in such a place. It also amazed him slightly that no mining operations here had managed to come up against any Glassmaker material.

Maybe not, Gabriel thought. Increasingly he was beginning to believe that nothing associated with these places was accidental.

"All right," he said after a moment. "Just land anywhere." Delonghi gave him a cockeyed look. "Anywhere?"

"Probably somewhere away from one of the domes would be better," Gabriel replied. "See if you can find something like a cliff face or a ravine."

They found one after a few minutes—the remnant of some rocky hillsides up near the "pointy" end of the moonlet, mined once or twice and then abandoned. The pilot landed the shuttle there, and Gabriel and all the others checked their suit gaskets and then stepped out into the light gravity of the moonlet's surface.

All this while Delonghi was watching Gabriel like someone she expected to catch in a trick. He walked over to one of the nearer hillsides with all the Marines and their weapons in tow and stood there with his fist clenched on the stone, deep in concentration.

It was all over. It was under his feet. It was buried in the hill. Gabriel could feel it under him, alive, breathing like some gigantic beast. He felt like a character in one of those ancient pre-space stories of a mariner who lands on what he thinks is an island. Everything is fine until he builds a fire. Then the "island" arches its back, rolls him and the fire and everything else off into the endless sea, and the great maw

opens to devour him.

I don't care much for the first part of that image, Gabriel thought, but the "great maw" is useful. He closed his eyes again, tried to feel where the most likely contour was.

There. Just off to the left, down and in.

I'm here, he said to the facility. Let me in.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

Then just the slightest tremor. growing stronger so that I he ground began to rattle, unheard but plainly felt under the Marines' feet. Delonghi found herself bouncing in place in shock. Little rocks danced around, and big boulders jumped and bumped in their sockets. Dust was jolted up into the hard vacuum and floated like a siliceous fog a meter or so above the surface, twinkling and jittering with the transmitted energy in Algemron's light. Lacey and Berlin lost their footing, fell down, and got up again with annoyed expressions. Gabriel shook, too, but he shook in harmony with what was shaking underneath him. He didn't fall. not even when the hill stood up.

It hunched up slowly, shrugging away the dust and the stones that had overlaid it. The first thing to emerge was the spire, which Gabriel had hardly expected. He had thought this would be like Ohmel, all subterranean, but this one apparently felt no need to hide. The glass grew while they watched, spinning itself up into five slim minarets, one off to the side, and a sixth one taller than all the others. This last was a towering spike, past which the silent stars slid, their light catching in it, running down it in a way that suggested the facility buried underneath here would let not even that energy be wasted. The place glittered, for this glass was less greenish than what Gabriel had seen on Ohmel, more like crystal. It grew up spikily through the ground, pushing upward, flowing as if molten, but the glass looked cold as ice, clearer than any ice Gabriel had ever seen. After the spires came the roof of the facility—or its roof for the moment. Gabriel had the feeling that this whole structure could and would resorb itself into the greater mass below if there was need. The personality of the place was definitely more active, more aggressive than the one or Ohmel, and even though he and it had obviously been built or rebuilt for one another, Gabriel shivered a little at tin touch of the presence inside it, waiting impatiently for him It had been waiting for a long, long time.

Delonghi and the Marines were staring at this in awe. "How does it do that?" she whispered.

"Will," Gabriel answered. "The glass moves when the will moves it. and until it does, unless it does, nothing else can make the slightest impression on it. Come on."

He led them toward the broad domed wall, crowned with spikes and spines, that now stood thirty meters high against the hard starry dark. The wall drew aside for him.

Gabriel paused on the threshold. Enda ?

Nothing.

It's open, he said into the silent dark. It's perfectly visible. We 're going in. You can see their shuttle parked outside.

No answer. He would only have to hope she had heard him.

Gabriel rested the gloved hand containing the stone against the doorsill as he went in. As he did, he felt the whole place shiver around him, almost flinching away from his touch. It had been waiting for a long while, but even now it might have to wait longer.

Lacey and Bertin went in first, at point, then stepped aside for the others to follow them into the great central hall that lay open before them. They all looked down and around at the long corridors, six of them, which led from the central hall, downward into the heart of Argolos. From the inside, the glass was full of light, though none of this showed on the outside. Delonghi went over to one of the walls and touched it thoughtfully.then took her gloved hand back quickly.

"It's alive!"

"It's a vessel for life," Gabriel said. "I don't know if it's necessarily the same thing." He looked around, clenching his fist on the stone again, saying, Which way?

No immediate answer.

Well, I'm here. Get on with it!

Nothing, though. Gabriel frowned. It was strange.

Diligent, Rathbone and MacLain were now quartering the area, examining the openings into the long, smooth, shining corridors and looking up at the great dome that now rose above them.

"There's atmosphere in here," Dirigent said.

"Is there?" said Delonghi. She went over to look down one of the corridors.

MacLain was looking at a gauge on the outside of his sleeve. "It's inside the green zone for humans," he said. "Pressure's good."

"I'd just like to know how it's staying in here," said Lacey.

"It's some kind of invisible barrier," Gabriel replied. "Go back there to where the wall was, where it let us in. You can feel it a little as you pass through."

Delonghi looked curiously up at the dome. It appeared clear, but no stars were visible through it, only darkness. She shook her head. "Okay, people. Go ahead and reconnoiter. Check these tunnels to five hundred meters, see what you can see, then report back."

Berlin and Lacey led the way again, heading inward. The others followed.

"We really ought to stay together," Gabriel said.

"Well," she said, "I'd prefer to do the first part of this by the book, anyway." She walked over to examine the nearby wall again.

Gabriel closed his eyes for the moment and stood still, concentrating on the stone, trying to find out what the problem was. Where was the direction he was expecting?

Nothing.

He swore. Suddenly it was as if the crystal had gone opaque, as if there were a glass wall in his mind, and a blank one. He opened himself out as wide as he knew how and listened with everything in him.

Nothing.

n/~> tt

Connor.

Still listening, he opened his eyes, looked at Delonghi, and felt what he had not been open enough to feel before.

Curl. The green warmth, the writhing and stroking. It pressed, pressed on her mind, and there was no way she could fight it, none at all. It had been there too long. The only question was how much Delonghi there was in there anymore.

All this in a single moment of absolute shock and horror. Gabriel opened his mouth to say he didn't know what—

Everything whited out.

Gabriel crumpled. What was that? What—

The stone in his glove seared him. Then he knew. The teln in her had attacked him, tried some kind of psionic blast on him. The stone had protected him, but the protection wasn't enough. The blow hit him again, and everything whited out in pain again. Slowly, after a few moments, the world came back.

It came back to show her straddling him. Her helmet was off. She was wrestling his off. Her face was terrible, a complete study in serenity, pleasure, the warm stroking and writhing tangle inside her quite invisible, but its influence showing in her eyes. Those big, beautiful brown eyes. The windows of the soul, they called them. So they might be, but from out of those windows, there was nothing looking but teln.

". had enough of you," the voice was saying softly, invitingly. "Now we'll see what use you can really be. Come now, lover. Give us a kiss."

Her hands grabbed his head. Blank-eyed, smiling, she lowered her face to his, ready to cough out the larval tangle that would climb into Gabriel's mouth and possess him.

Gabriel moaned. and his fist, with the stone in it, came up and hit her full in the side of the head. Delonghi screamed as the force of the blow knocked her sideways off Gabriel. He staggered to his feet. She did too, screaming, "How can you? You can't—!"

She was fumbling around for her gun, which had gone skittering away when Gabriel hit her. Gabriel thought about going for it, too, then discarded the idea. Just blowing her apart isn't going to be enough, he thought, I don't want those things crawling around in here. Everybody in the place could wind up infected. He had no idea whether you needed a "threshold" number of larval teln for an infection to take place. Right now, he didn't care.

She spotted the gun a few meters away and made for it. Gabriel staggered after her, swung, and missed. His body was suffering from the after effects of the mindblast. Nothing was working right. He was seeing three of everything. It could be worse, Gabriel thought. I should be completely immobile, but the stone spared me that.

She was in better shape. She turned, kicked out, and caught Gabriel in the solar plexus. The stone couldn't help him with that. He went down, rolling and retching. She jumped onto him again, grabbing for his head.

Can't just lie here! Can't! Can't—!

He thrashed and writhed as best he could, rolled again, threw her off, pushed himself up to hands and

knees. She came down on top of him again. He rolled, trying to get rid of her, all the while weakly cursing himself inside. Now he knew why she had been so willing to blow up his ship and nearly everything else in the area when they had first met at Danwell. Delonghi herself might not have wanted to be quite so thorough, but the teln inside her had been willing to take such action, letting her take the heat for them as an inexperienced officer overreacting to the situations with which she was presented. It was a good enough disguise.

But I was in her mind. Why didn't I hear them? There were too many answers to bother with right now.

Gabriel rolled and struggled to keep her face away from his. I was too inexpert, he thought, too new to this. Too attuned to humans and the edanweir at that point to successfully hear what I heard—or to hear it as separate thought rather than something of her own. Gabriel remembered pressing on her mind while interrogating her and hearing the flashes of fear/terror/fear/anguish. He had thought they were her.

They were not. They had been half-heard thoughts from the teln, trying to protect themselves, desperate not to be detected.

Then Norrik, the man looking at him. was Delonghi in the Algemron system then? Was Norrik's tangle in contact with hers? Had they identified Gabriel to her, alerting her to his whereabouts, to his plans? Possibly they had picked up some telepathic seepage from him—

Gabriel moaned and tried to shake her off. If he didn't, those things would shortly be crawling down his own throat. The stroking, writhing, creeping warmth would grow inside him, until he would not be able to resist it, until it would be all right, until they would own him.

That was the goal, of course. He had led her right to the Precursor facility, had opened it for her and made it available. Now the Others would come, and they would know what use to make of it. They would learn from Gabriel, too, what more uses to make of it. For within six or eight months, they would own him, body and soul. After that, he would die, used up by the tangle, but by then it wouldn't matter. They would have gained everything they needed from him, and the Verge would be falling before them, with the Stellar Ring to follow. Everything would go. Bluefall, Grith, Danwell, all of it.

No. No.

It would be so nice, not to have to think any more, not to have to worry, to be taken care of. They will take the best care of you, and you won't worry forever. You'll learn how to stop. We will teach you. Slowly you'll learn not to worry, not to think, so restful, so peaceful, no more troubles, think how lovely. let it happen, just let it happen, rest.

The wave of peace, rest and the promise of a mind emptied of all its troubles washed over Gabriel. He didn't want to move. He didn't need to move. Just rest, just let it happen. rest. lie still and rest, and let. it. happen.

No.

No, I won't! STOP IT!

The answering pain in his glove was like a knife driven through his hand. Gabriel screamed and rolled out of Delonghi's grasp one last time. It was all he had in him. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees again. He could hear the sound of footsteps. He tried hard to stand up, knowing that the Marines would assume that Gabriel had attacked Delonghi. They would restrain him, and after she had recovered, when

she had more privacy, she would move in on him again, and this time she would succeed. He got up, watched Delonghi come slowly toward him—

A deafening roar suddenly shook the ground, and a stream of flechettes came from the direction of the front door, ripping her right arm off.

She staggered back, shrieking, but it was not just her voice in the shriek. They were screaming, too, both in mind and through her throat, horrified, furious at their plans being interrupted.

Gabriel reeled back, startled out of his balance. In the doorway, Helm stood in his ancient battered armor, holding flechette guns in both gauntleted hands. Delonghi clutched the bleeding ragged stump where her arm had been and somehow, horribly, managed to lurch forward, making for the gun on the floor.

The next stream of flechettes took her left leg off between hip and knee. She fell over sideways and should not have gotten up again. except she did, hauling herself up, actually bearing weight right on the shattered, bleeding bone, reaching out for the gun—

The flechettes ripped out one last time and tore her right in two.

When he recovered, he saw Helm still standing in the doorway, holstering the flechette guns. Delde Sota, Grawl, Enda, and Angela were immediately behind him, all suited and all armed sufficiently to storm some unsuspecting city.

Bertin, Lacey and the other Marines came out of the tunnels, saw Helm and the others, and lifted their weapons.

"No, don't!" Gabriel shouted. "It's not what it looks like!"

Helm lifted what he was now bracing with his other hand, the back end of the long stock tucked under his armpit, and all of them froze. None of them had anything to match a plasma gun, and the big open bell looked more than ominous.

"Helm, don't do it!" Gabriel yelled at him. "They're on our side!"

"Of course they are," Helm said, though his tone was faintly ironic. "I'd never do such a thing. However."

He took a few steps forward, looking at the two halves of Delonghi. "Huh," he said and poked at one half of the shredded corpse with his foot. "Lookit that. You," he said, pointing at Bertin, "and you"—pointing at Rathbone—"come here and look at this."

They came over slowly, regarding the assortment of restricted but nonetheless present firepower that was being concentrated on them.

"'Look at those," Helm said.

They looked down at the writhing remnants of the teln tangle, spilled out and writhing, all green and wet in the red wetness on the floor.

"Your boss there," Helm said, "assuming she is your boss—is nobody you want to be working for. Anybody you know have stuff like that in them?"

Rathbone and Bertin looked at each other. Rathbone turned away and began having difficulty controlling his stomach.

"Yeah," Helm said. "Delde Sota?" She handed him the flamer.

"Whatever she may have been before," Helm said, "she wasn't human anymore. Think a little housecleaning's in order."

He turned the flamer on Delonghi's remains until the ragged, oozing meat and green writhing worms scorched down to bubbling juices and finally to smoking black tar. Gabriel winced, hearing the death-shriek of the teln tangle and hearing it echoed elsewhere around the system, twice, twenty times, fifty times, a hundred, more.

To his astonishment, the others, both Marines and Gabriel's friends were wincing, too. "You heard that?" Gabriel managed to croak.

Plainly they had. Enda turned off to one side and began discreetly and genteelly to retch.

"Absolutely." Gabriel rubbed his face and went to get his helmet. "Helm, what's the story out there?"

"Gettin' hot," Helm said. "Everybody's gone completely bufu. Galvinites shootin' up Alitarins everywhere in sight and attacking the Concord vessels as well, but you saw that. You think these things are to blame?"

Gabriel shook his head. "Maybe some of them, but Helm, they were getting ready for this war anyway. This is a nice excuse." Still. Gabriel found himself thinking of the slightly dazed-looking man who had been sent back to Galvin by the Alitarins. Does he have a tangle inside him? He thought. Is there someone in particular they're trying to affect? Or some other plan—

His head was spinning. He put the thought aside for the moment, for it was too easy just now to let paranoia overwhelm common sense.

"The system is filling up with ships, Gabriel," Enda said. "The drivesat relay does indeed belong to the Lighthouse. They have been broadcasting to everyone who will listen about the incoming alien vessels—not that the Galvinites or Alitarins seem to care at the moment." Her expression was rueful. "There have been some peculiar arrivals as well. VoidCorps vessels, many of them."

"Doing what?"

"Nothing. That is the great mystery. Waiting, it seems, but for what? It seems as if everything else in near space is on its way here to fight."

"It may not be enough," Gabriel said. "Oh, gods, come on. We've lost too much time already!"

He got back into his helmet, not knowing for sure what might be farther inside the facility. He was afraid. Delonghi and her tangle might be dead, but that didn't mean that he was now safe—or by extension, the others with him. How exactly does telepathy travel? he wondered. How fast, and how far? Does being in drivespace stop it? Or speed it up? For even before Schmetterling had made starrise, Gabriel had felt the Precursor facility here waking up. Who knew what could be heard from what distance?

He thought of the teln and shivered briefly at the memory of the stroking, writhing thought buried inside Major Norrik, how it had looked at him. Are those things sensitive to the stone? Gabriel wondered. They

were all in contact with one another to a greater or lesser extent. at least that was what Delonghi's had intimated. Was word passed about that a "facilitator" was on the move, that something was happening?

There was no more time for to spend up here. He turned to the Marines, who were looking dubiously at Helm and Delde Sota.

"Who's CO now?" Gabriel asked.

"Me," Bertin said.

"Well, cousins," Gabriel said, using the old Marine affectionate name—and he meant it and didn't care what they thought about him using it, "you know what we were coming for, what the captain sent me to do. Do you want to come along? If you can't, if your oaths won't take the strain, my friends will hold you here." He looked at Bertin. "If you—"

He staggered and went to his knees, the stone flaming in his palm again, the vision overcoming him.

The shadow, the overarching shadow. Here. Now.

"Oh, gods," he whispered, "they're here."

Delde Sota and Enda went to him. "What?"

"Helmets," Gabriel said. "Quick. I need to have a look outside."

Everyone helmeted up again. Gabriel managed to get back to his feet and go after Helm, assisted by Delde Sota with Enda on his other side. He was weak. The shadow was in his heart as well as his mind—the cold of it, the pain struck him deep.

As they came near the exit, all of them slowed a little. The moonlet tumbled as usual, but it did so very slowly. This had been the bright end when they came in. It still should be, yet it was oddly twilit outside.

Followed by the Marines, they made their way hurriedly through the barrier and looked toward Algemron.

It was speckled and patched with many hundreds of little dark shapes, far into the system. a sick sun, a paling sun, which should have cast all their shadows sharp and black behind them, but now was only dim.

"When she said 'indeterminate,'" Helm whispered, "she wasn't kidding."

As they watched, starrise fire erupted in sickly purple-blue around a huge shape that slowly extruded up and out of drivespace: a great spherical ship, dark green, blooming up out of the nowhere into the here, and coming between them and the sun to blot it out entirely.

It was nightfall, but a kind that Gabriel had never thought to see and didn't want to see now. Behind him the others fell silent, horrified.

It slipped away, coming out of direct alignment with Algemron. The sun shone again, if weakly, and that image lasted not much longer, for the great mass of ships producing it was already making toward the outer planets. Gabriel was grimly amused by their bearing. It was so arranged that they would come in past the two inner planets first. They had apparently shared Gabriel's suspicion that this facility might have been planted there.

"They'll wipe out everything else that gets within range of them on the way here," he said, "but it's here they want." He did not say, And me.

The Marines were staring up at all this in horror.

"Buddy," Bertin said, "if you can do something to stop this,! we're with you." She looked around at her comrades. Heads nodded all around.

Gabriel swallowed hard. The emotion that seized his throat at her words had not been anything he had been prepared for. "Come on."

They went back inside. Gabriel stood in the midst of the front hall and once again clenched the stone in his fist, hissing at the pain. It had burned him when he screamed his rage and defiance. Got to find a way to teach you not to do that, he thought. Now stop stalling. Which way now?

This way…

He startled at that silent voice. Patterner?

One ofthe three. We are all one. Come! Be quick!

"Down here, troops," Gabriel said.

He went off down one of the left-hand tunnels without a moment's hesitation. After the first moment or so, the stone almost began pulling him along, as if someone's hand was in his, hurrying him. Enda went after Gabriel. The others and the five Marines brought up the rear.

"I heard you," Enda said softly as Gabriel paused at a turning and went right, "and with great clarity, greater all the time. If you are not a mindwalker now, I do not know what to call by such a name."

"I thought," Gabriel said, "you said you had little training in this art."

"No one ever has all they need of it," Enda said. "Gabriel, I told you the truth. I know enough to get by, but my family did not consider me much of a mindwalker. I was always the one who preferred to work with physical things—suits, ships and gardens. They despaired of me."

"I think you did just fine," Gabriel said. "Now all we have to do is stay alive through this so that we can hunt that old city of yours down and I can go in there and kick some fraals' rear ends for throwing you out of there. They have no idea what they lost."

She smiled as they went around a great curve, downward and downward, a spiral. "I take that very kindly, Gabriel. I too will kick some fundaments at your trial, if given the opportunity."

He laughed gently as they trotted down the long curve together.

"Here we are," he said, "acting as if we're going to survive this. You know as well as I do that that big ship is sending down smaller craft this minute, and this place is going to be full of bad guys shortly."

"Can you not seal the outer entry?"

"I tried," Gabriel said. "Seems like there are still some things to be done before my control here is complete."

"You had better get on with it, then."

Gabriel had to laugh. Silently, in his mind, he said to the silent presence that was listening, Where were you?

Waiting.

You might have let me know!

Not while that was here. It pointed through Gabriel's mind at the dry baked stain on the floor of the main hall. One ofthe enemies.

Your makers seem to have had a whole lot of them.

There are many, some surviving from the ancient days, some new ones. We have no power against them by ourselves. Only you can empower us.

Gabriel blinked and raced down the tunnel, Enda coming fast in his wake. "I thought we had a problem," he said, "and I was right. What's down here can't defend us against what's coming."

"They can't?"

"Not at the moment," Gabriel said. He had heard the qualification in what the Patterner was telling him. He could only hope that he had read rightly what it meant. "We have to defend it… for a while."

"Hope you got someplace good for us to hole up," Helm said, catching up with them from behind, "because that big ship." He gulped. It wasn't a sound that filled Gabriel with any reassurance. "We've seen that one before, Gabe, one of those green warty veiny ones. We know what it means."

"Kroath sphere ships," Gabriel said, "and kroath."

"The ships can't hurt this stuff, though," Angela said, glancing around at the "glass" as she caught up with them.

"No," Gabriel agreed, "which is a slight advantage, because it means they can't just fire on it and bring it down and kill us all, but I can't close it up either—not right now anyway. That means that the kroath are going to come down here after us."

"Opinion: bad place to be trapped," said Delde Sota, bringing up the rear. "You know any good places?" Helm remarked.

Delde Sota gave Helm a look that Gabriel found completely opaque. For the first time, he caught a clear flash of feeling from her, absolutely the essence of mischief—a bizarre feeling in the present circumstances, but one which nonetheless made him laugh out loud, just a short sharp bark of amusement.

"Several," Delde Sota said, "highly inappropriate for discussion now. Many more important matters to attend to. Will take this up again with you later."

They had been going around in increasing downward spirals for some short while. Now Gabriel, his friends, and the Marines came out at one side of a wide hemispherical space some hundred meters across. Empty, the glass of all its walls gleamed and glowed, the ceiling towering a hundred meters above them.

The Patterner grew up out of the flat glass of the floor.

"It's all right, it's with me," Gabriel said hurriedly, as Lacey and Bertin trained their weapons on the bizarre creature rising up out of the solid-seeming floor, or that was what it looked like at first glance. Gabriel thought of the way the Patterner at Ohmel had slipped in and out of hangings of what seemed

impenetrable webwork. He knelt down to look more closely at the floor. This was not the usual smooth glass, but rather the Patterner's typical web-work, here packed so closely together that it was a solid, yet he could see the fibrous structure of it, all swirled together and interknotted like delicate weed in water. If the other facility had been a computer—and the other Patterner had said it was—then this was more like a brain.

While the Marines looked around apprehensively, Delde Sota was on her knees, too, stroking the surface with her braid. She glanced up at Gabriel. "Was discussing corpus callosum earlier," she said. "Similarities to this material. Pure neural fibril, packed side by side rather than end to end. Maximized bandwidth." Such as has been forming inside your own brain, he heard her think.

From above, Gabriel could hear a mutter and rumble, and the whole facility shook.

"What just landed on top of us?" asked Helm.

Delde Sota looked briefly distant look as she gazed out at the upper world through the sensors of Helm's ship. "Advice: neglect to ask."

The Patterner came gliding over to Gabriel on its many legs, a graceful waltzing motion. Harbinger, you are awaited, it said. Immediate complete interface is required. We are here to assist.

"Then let's do it," Gabriel said.

At the edges of his mind, he could hear a faint wash of cries and screams. Local space was becoming too full of human, fraal, and other species' anguish. The terrible sound would become more audible if something didn't happen fast. What frightened Gabriel most was the possibility that, if he failed, he would hear no more of those voices at all, because they would all be gone.

"What needs to be done?" he asked.

Growth, replied the Patterner.

Then it started. There was a shivering in the substance on which they stood. Fingers and tendrils of the crystalline matter began to extrude slowly upwards around him where he stood, some thin as hairs, some as thick around as his wrist, all perfectly clear. They tangled around his feet and shins and knees, slowly climbing upward as if he were a tree being wrapped in vines.

He shivered at first, but then other sensations started that made it plain that merely being held in place by threads and ropes and cables of living glass was going to be the least of his troubles. Activated by the presence and nearness of the glass and moderated by the stone down in the fist of his spacesuit's glove, Gabriel could feel the new connections in his mind starting to awaken—an itching, fizzing feeling. His consciousness began to feel hot and tight inside, as if the brain growth of which Delde Sota spoken had actually started to push his skull out from the inside, pressure, an uncomfortable pressure, looking for release. It was not actively painful yet, but Gabriel thought that it soon would be. The sweat started out on him.

Unfortunately he could also feel other things happening. On the surface, a dark shadow lowered, and small dark-green shapes were pouring out of it and into the entrance hall high above them, making for the corridors.

"They're coming," Gabriel rasped. "Can you not stop them?" Grawl asked.

"No."

"What do we do?" Angela said. There was only the slightest tremor to her voice. Gabriel swallowed. "Keep them out."

"Do our best," Bertin said, then nodded to her companions. They started sorting themselves around the perimeter of the space.

"You got it," Helm said.

Helm began detaching weapons from the gun rack on his back. Gabriel found time for just one incredulous thought: to wonder where and how he had laid hands on some of those weapons. Half of them were strictly military and highly illegal. The others were only moderately illegal, depending on what jurisdiction you were in at the time, but Helm had never worried much about jurisdictions. The Marines were giving him looks that were half envious and half admiring as Helm passed guns the size of small trees to Angela and Grawl and Enda, and finally, having handed another one to Delde Sota, he paused by Gabriel.

The webwork of glass had grown up around Gabriel to his waist and was swiftly extending upward. "How do you get out of that?" Helm asked conversationally. "Maybe I don't," Gabriel said.

No time to worry about it now. A memory surfaced of some old story his father had told him about a magician stuck in a rock—in some kind of crystal coffin. Now he was becoming the magician. Unfortunately, he was feeling painfully short of magic at the moment, and though he had known in his heart that this final battle would come eventually, it had never occurred to him that he might have to stand, immobile and imprisoned with empty hands while his friends fought. and won or lost it.

He was damned if he wouldn't fight. He turned to look down at the Patterner. It, too, was now anchored in place to the milky floor, the delicate legs wrapped about with the glass, the eyes set around the middle body now peering out between more cables of crystal as they grew and wound upward.

Patterner, Gabriel said to it, we have other problems to deal with while this is going on. There's a war starting out there. We need the weapons.

What weapons?

Gabriel stared at it. Don't tell me that there aren't weapons here! Or some kind of defense! The other Patterner said—

There are instrumentalities here that may serve you, said the Patterner before him, but completion first.

The tension and pressure, the hot prickling sense of connections knitting and awakening in his mind, was worsening. Memories began firing in his mind uncontrollably—not in order, nothing like the march of memory that you were supposed to suffer when you died. These came completely at random.

Childhood, fishing on the beach.

His father turning to his mother late one night as they sat in the sitting room. A sunset over the ocean.

Gabriel's last day in school.

His first day in the Marines. Glimpses of space. The first time he had killed. His first starfall.

The drip of water in the glaciers on Epsedra.

The frozen fury of Elinke Dareyev's face. Behind her, the recording of Ambassador Delvecchio's last shuttle trip played.

Gabriel blinked, hot tears ran, but he could do nothing, couldn't move, couldn't speak—

Tramping, clattering noises came from the corridor entrance. The kroath—

His friends and the Marines were looking at each other. He could see them, feel their terror, their exhilaration. Bertin nodded at her people, and the safeties came off.

"I haven't killed anything at all today," Helm growled as he checked the charge on his weapon. "Good place to start."

"No ethical problem here," Delde Sota said, checking her weapon as well. "Cannot kill what is already dead. Simplifies matters. Oaths intact."

Enda stood there, small and frail in her little spacesuit, checking the charge on the mass rifle that Gabriel usually used. She glanced at the door then looked over toward him.

Inside, something kept rifling through Gabriel's memories, as if trying to see if everything was there. Ricel's memories were there, too. They were rifled as well, and Gabriel struggled against it, but the struggling was no use. In his palm, the stone burned fiercely as Gabriel watched that other life go by.

Then Gabriel suddenly realized what Ricel had been practice for. Yes, the stone had made all that happen, too.

Gods only knew how many years of tweaks and changes to what would otherwise have been history's normal course that the stone had made to make sure that Ricel was there for Gabriel, that his mission went forward, that the ambassador died, that Gabriel was semi-convicted by the Phorcyns and fled—always with the stone in hand. It had made sure that Ricel died in front of him so that those memories were laid out in front of Gabriel, utterly necessary, otherwise irretrievable. All unwittingly he had done his homewofk, further investigating those memories—digging, laying them bare, refining the connections to them, in his own interest, he'd thought at the time. Now Gabriel wondered.

Now the facility here knew that Gabriel had mastered the fine art of absorbing another's memories, sorting and compiling and filing them away for himself. As a result, now it had another set of memories for him. These were much bigger, much more complex, much more important. Some changes had been made in his own mind so that he would be ready to handle the new load. Everything was now ready.

The shriek brought his eyes open, distracting him. He saw the first few kroath come through the entrance. The noise had been Grawl, letting loose a warcry of her people, leveling her weapon, and firing. Gabriel got a first whiff of that terrible sour acid odor, the slime that surrounded the bodies of the undead inside their armor. The kroath went down, its abdomen torn into jagged strips of sizzling armor. It straggled up again. Enda was firing at it now, then Angela, and finally Lacey and Rathbone. Together they brought it down, only to see it straggle up one more time, aiming its dark plasma weapon, firing—

More kroath came. Their armor was too strong to make it a simple matter to take them out. Their shrieks and screams of rage and pain filled the air. Before Gabriel had not been equipped to realize that the kroath were not mere automata, reactivated corpses moving and fighting, but that there was also some semblance of consciousness inside them. They walked in anguish and fury that could never be quenched, a madness of mind degraded to programming. Memory was nearly lost. Even worse, memories were stripped of their associations so that old loves and familiar faces might pass in front of them and they would not know them, would kill them with unconcern, and then afterward never understand why the pain inside was even greater than it had been before. That endless anguish.

Gabriel wanted to weep for them, but there was no time for it now. It was kinder simply to mince them so small they could never be put back together again, burn them to ashes, blow them apart.

The Marines and Gabriel's friends were all doing a fair job of that at the moment. The kroath bodies were piling up so that the entry was somewhat choked with them, but even as they were torn apart by the big caliber fire, the armor broke and let out that terrible acid slime. It ate bodies and armor alike so that the pile kept getting smaller, and more kroath came climbing in over it. It was like trying to stop the tide from coming in. Even as he watched, Dirigent went down with a dark plasma bolt through the chest. The others closed ranks over his body, still firing, and all Gabriel could think of was what would happen when his friends' guns ran out of ammunition, when their charges ran down.

All around him the facility waited. Gabriel stood shuddering and helpless, wholly imprisoned in the crystal now. Here they were, waiting, a vast set of memories in a glass matrix, preserved for him and only for him. It was the map. The master map of the other Glassmaker sites— all the other sites, all their secrets, everything they held. All this treasure of data was ready to pour into Gabriel, old wine into a new bottle. Ready for use at last.

If he accepted it.

If he didn't.

He could hear the whole facility listening to his thought.

Every fiber of it was alive, waiting, and desperate. Outside his crystalline prison, dark plasma bolts flew. Enda rolled out of the way of one and fired. Helm stood blasting away with the D6 tucked under one arm and a reloaded flechette gun in the other. Another kroath went down in the doorway and got up again, while another climbed over it and leaped into the room. Grawl's fire took them both down.

You must accept it!

Oh, must I? Gabriel asked.

It all came down, finally, to this: become the chosen vessel of this huge and terrible knowledge and make sure that humanity and its allies received it. For without it, they would not survive.

Refuse it, and it will all be destroyed now… for no one else is capable of handling it. The others who can handle it, too, are not worthy. They will take this information and use it. Within twenty years— thirty?—mankind and its allies will be gone.

The other choice was to take the knowledge, and.

Change. Irreversible, change impossible to describe, impossible to understand. from this side of the process. Knowledge was promised on the other side, but by then it will be too late. Accept the knowledge and become. more than human? Less? Or will there even be words that are capable of describing the difference?

Gabriel breathed in, breathed out. This was what the stone had been preparing him for. If he refused the change, he would never be complete, never know what might have been.

I get to keep my humanity.

For a little while, replied the Patterner, until you die .

Gabriel gasped for breath, struggled inside the crystal for a way to help his friends. They all had their backs turned, fighting the kroath: Helm, who had been made more than human to start with; Delde Sota, who had built herself that way, slowly, over time; Enda, who had never been human but knew more about it than some; Grawl, never human either, but involved with the species as her people had been for many years; Angela, as human as Gabriel was now—more so, for the stone had not changed her.

Yet, said the Patterner.

The choice is still mine?

Yours alone. Without your willing acceptance, all that has gone before is meaningless.

"Gabriel!" Angela shouted at him, looking over her shoulder while changing charge packs. The bodies were beginning to pile up in the doorway, but other kroath still were pushing in from behind. "Just this once, could you hurry up and do whatever? "

Just this once.

He closed his eyes, took one last deep breath, and said to the Patterner, Do it. Chapter Eighteen

He had tried to brace himself, but nothing could have prepared Gabriel for the incandescent stream of power that blasted into and through him, burning him from within. He tried to hang onto some sense of himself, but it was lost in moments, seared away in the access of light that completely inhabited him, filled him like liquid—