Nightfall_at_Algemron

"Assessment: archaeotypically hominid-masculine response," Delde Sota said, flipping her braid in the air in an I-give-up gesture. "Follicular obsession. Opinion: only fortunate the perseveration does not concern iphyphallocointrinism." She rolled her eyes as she said this, and Gabriel tried hard to fix the last word in his mind so that he could look it up later. "Warning: more important things to be concerned about. Idiomatic description: your body is becoming less your own and more something else's." She paused. "Incorrect. Someone else's."
"As long as it's still mine," Gabriel said.
"Precisely the problem," Delde Sota said, "since the 'someone else' in question is you. Alert: mind/body is a spectrum, not a dichotomy! Shift one part, other parts shift as well. Physical affects mental as profoundly as mental/physical." She looked at him narrowly. "Example: rather odd events just now on Danwell. Alien machine acting as mind/body extension. Conjecture: unaffected?"
Gabriel kept quiet for a moment and thought about that. The strange dreams he had started having before Danwell had not stopped, though their emphasis had changed. Since then, he had been feeling. well, not exactly tired, not physically anyway, but as if he had overextended himself somehow. At least he had been feeling that way for the first few days after that last battle. The feeling had gone away. Now he was beginning to wonder whether it had done so too quickly.
"No," Gabriel said, "I don't think so."
Delde Sota let out another long breath and said, "Statement: remiss of me to leave client unsupervised during period of unpredictable change. Addendum: if toadstools do occur, would not like to lose chance to publish."
Gabriel gave her the driest look he could. "Ambulance chaser."
Delde Sota gave him that look right back, with interest. "Notification," she said, "skilled enough practitioner has no need to chase. Knows where to stand so that vehicle stops right in front of her."
Gabriel smiled too, though he had to force it a little, and closed down the display.
Much later that evening, after they had made their first starfall on their way to Algemron, Gabriel lay in the dimness of his little cabin, under the blanket, with the luckstone in one hand.
He had begun to feel it looking at him.
The feeling had first crept up on him when they arrived at Danwell, and it had been increasing since. It was not an unfriendly regard, particularly. just a sense of being thoughtfully, carefully watched.
It wanted something.
Yet the wanting was very cool, dispassionate. There were no emotions attached to it that Gabriel could sense, which was just as well.
He wished he knew what it wanted, so that he could get it out of his life.
Is that even possible any more? Gabriel thought. There were the physiological changes Delde Sota had spoken of.
In the dimness, he glanced across the room toward his mirror. He knew that if he got up and looked at himself, he would only see again what he had been trying not to see every morning: all the hair that was coming in silvery white, the hair of an old man. Though not entirely white yet, it would be soon.
What else in him was aging in ways he didn't know about? Was he just going to wrinkle up and die suddenly, without warning? Delde Sota felt his organs were in good enough order for a man in his mid-twenties, but would they stay that way for long, and if so, for how long?
He had no choice really but to pursue the course he was now committed to follow. The hints and visions, the dreams and hunches that were occurring to him now. following them had become Gabriel's life. Only that way would he be able to come to the end of the path they were drawing for him. Once the stone had what it wanted—or whatever the unseen power that lay behind it wanted—then he would be able to pick up his own life again, try to knot up the parted threads of it, and find his own way.
Probably into a cell, said that chilly voice at the back of his mind.
He lay there a moment more, then put the stone aside and turned over in the bed to try to get to sleep. It would be tomorrow all too soon, and he would have to embark on the one errand that held him to what now seemed the most distant part of his life, the part before the Marines. Tomorrow would either see that particular thread snapped or reinforced. After that, what would happen to him.
Only the stone knew. As the room light cycled down to complete darkness, the last thing Gabriel saw was the light dying out of the stone, leaving it black and dead.
After that, for a long time in his dream, dark-green thought stroked and tangled in and out through itself, incomprehensible, uncomprehending.
In his dream, Gabriel stirred and moaned.
Chapter Three
In one of the many white-on-white corridors of the Concord Cruiser Schmetterling, Commander Aleen Delonghi stood outside the closed door and hesitated, not entirely willing to go in. She could hear noises coming from inside.
Nonetheless, she raised her hand to knock. You did not keep a Concord Administrator waiting when he summoned you.
The door slipped silently open, and the slim dark-visaged young man she had been expecting to see was standing just inside it. "Yes? Oh, it's you, ma'am. Come in. The Administrator will see you."
She stepped in, rather out of her depth. She did not normally expect to see Lorand Kharls in the ship's gymnasium. He had an office, a perfectly nice one—if somewhat underfurnished for someone of his station—and she had never seen him out of it. In fact, there were people aboard Schmetterling who claimed he never left it at all. Apparently their information was in—
CRACK!
The sound brought her head around fast. The gym was mostly empty, the majority of the equipment
folded away into the walls. The lights were dimmed, glinting somewhat brassily off the white walls and ceiling since the holography equipment was presently running. Off to one side, wearing nondescript dark blue sweat gear, Lorand Kharls was fighting with himself.
That would have been most people's first impression, anyway. Kharls held the tri-staff of his office crosswise in front of him, and he was circling warily around a holographic simulation of himself, also holding a duplicate of the staff. The hologram's imaging field was charged, so that when there was any physical incursion into it, a big spark and shock-noise was generated. As she watched, Delonghi saw it happen again, the administrator feinting, feinting once more, a fake high, another one low, and then a change of grip on the tri-staff and a big swinging blow at his twin, who danced back—but not far enough. CRACK! Kharls danced backward as the other plunged forward, the staff whirling in its hands. The hologram brought the staff around end-on to Kharls, held it poised just for a moment—
Something that looked entirely too much like lightning lanced from the end of it. Kharls leaped to one side, still holding the staff, hit the ground and rolled, came up out of the shoulder roll, lifted the staff as if to parry the other's next attack, and then flung it.
It left his hands like a spear, spitting lightning as it went, and flew straight through the center of his adversary's body. The shadowy Kharls dropped its own weapon, made as if to clutch at the tri-staff, and then lost coherence, shivering into interference-pattern insubstantiality, then into static snow, and then darkness.
Kharls let out a long breath, went over to pick up his staff, then looked over at Delonghi, leaning on the weapon.
"Would you care to dance, Commander?" he asked.
She swallowed. "I prefer the waltz," she said and went over to him, not so slowly as to suggest she was afraid.
"It's been a very full day," Kharls said, "and I would hope you would forgive me asking to see you just now, but there's no other time available for the next twenty-four hours or so, and I didn't want to wait."