Nightfall_at_Algemron

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?"