Nightfall_at_Algemron

"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 welclass="underline" 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!"