Nightfall_at_Algemron

"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.