Nightfall_at_Algemron

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."