Nightfall_at_Algemron

It came back to show her straddling him. Her helmet was off. She was wrestling his off. Her face was terrible, a complete study in serenity, pleasure, the warm stroking and writhing tangle inside her quite invisible, but its influence showing in her eyes. Those big, beautiful brown eyes. The windows of the soul, they called them. So they might be, but from out of those windows, there was nothing looking but teln.
". had enough of you," the voice was saying softly, invitingly. "Now we'll see what use you can really be. Come now, lover. Give us a kiss."
Her hands grabbed his head. Blank-eyed, smiling, she lowered her face to his, ready to cough out the larval tangle that would climb into Gabriel's mouth and possess him.
Gabriel moaned. and his fist, with the stone in it, came up and hit her full in the side of the head. Delonghi screamed as the force of the blow knocked her sideways off Gabriel. He staggered to his feet. She did too, screaming, "How can you? You can't—!"
She was fumbling around for her gun, which had gone skittering away when Gabriel hit her. Gabriel thought about going for it, too, then discarded the idea. Just blowing her apart isn't going to be enough, he thought, I don't want those things crawling around in here. Everybody in the place could wind up infected. He had no idea whether you needed a "threshold" number of larval teln for an infection to take place. Right now, he didn't care.
She spotted the gun a few meters away and made for it. Gabriel staggered after her, swung, and missed. His body was suffering from the after effects of the mindblast. Nothing was working right. He was seeing three of everything. It could be worse, Gabriel thought. I should be completely immobile, but the stone spared me that.
She was in better shape. She turned, kicked out, and caught Gabriel in the solar plexus. The stone couldn't help him with that. He went down, rolling and retching. She jumped onto him again, grabbing for his head.
Can't just lie here! Can't! Can't—!
He thrashed and writhed as best he could, rolled again, threw her off, pushed himself up to hands and
knees. She came down on top of him again. He rolled, trying to get rid of her, all the while weakly cursing himself inside. Now he knew why she had been so willing to blow up his ship and nearly everything else in the area when they had first met at Danwell. Delonghi herself might not have wanted to be quite so thorough, but the teln inside her had been willing to take such action, letting her take the heat for them as an inexperienced officer overreacting to the situations with which she was presented. It was a good enough disguise.
But I was in her mind. Why didn't I hear them? There were too many answers to bother with right now.
Gabriel rolled and struggled to keep her face away from his. I was too inexpert, he thought, too new to this. Too attuned to humans and the edanweir at that point to successfully hear what I heard—or to hear it as separate thought rather than something of her own. Gabriel remembered pressing on her mind while interrogating her and hearing the flashes of fear/terror/fear/anguish. He had thought they were her.
They were not. They had been half-heard thoughts from the teln, trying to protect themselves, desperate not to be detected.
Then Norrik, the man looking at him. was Delonghi in the Algemron system then? Was Norrik's tangle in contact with hers? Had they identified Gabriel to her, alerting her to his whereabouts, to his plans? Possibly they had picked up some telepathic seepage from him—
Gabriel moaned and tried to shake her off. If he didn't, those things would shortly be crawling down his own throat. The stroking, writhing, creeping warmth would grow inside him, until he would not be able to resist it, until it would be all right, until they would own him.
That was the goal, of course. He had led her right to the Precursor facility, had opened it for her and made it available. Now the Others would come, and they would know what use to make of it. They would learn from Gabriel, too, what more uses to make of it. For within six or eight months, they would own him, body and soul. After that, he would die, used up by the tangle, but by then it wouldn't matter. They would have gained everything they needed from him, and the Verge would be falling before them, with the Stellar Ring to follow. Everything would go. Bluefall, Grith, Danwell, all of it.
No. No.
It would be so nice, not to have to think any more, not to have to worry, to be taken care of. They will take the best care of you, and you won't worry forever. You'll learn how to stop. We will teach you. Slowly you'll learn not to worry, not to think, so restful, so peaceful, no more troubles, think how lovely. let it happen, just let it happen, rest.
The wave of peace, rest and the promise of a mind emptied of all its troubles washed over Gabriel. He didn't want to move. He didn't need to move. Just rest, just let it happen. rest. lie still and rest, and let. it. happen.
No.
No, I won't! STOP IT!
The answering pain in his glove was like a knife driven through his hand. Gabriel screamed and rolled out of Delonghi's grasp one last time. It was all he had in him. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees again. He could hear the sound of footsteps. He tried hard to stand up, knowing that the Marines would assume that Gabriel had attacked Delonghi. They would restrain him, and after she had recovered, when
she had more privacy, she would move in on him again, and this time she would succeed. He got up, watched Delonghi come slowly toward him—
A deafening roar suddenly shook the ground, and a stream of flechettes came from the direction of the front door, ripping her right arm off.
She staggered back, shrieking, but it was not just her voice in the shriek. They were screaming, too, both in mind and through her throat, horrified, furious at their plans being interrupted.
Gabriel reeled back, startled out of his balance. In the doorway, Helm stood in his ancient battered armor, holding flechette guns in both gauntleted hands. Delonghi clutched the bleeding ragged stump where her arm had been and somehow, horribly, managed to lurch forward, making for the gun on the floor.
The next stream of flechettes took her left leg off between hip and knee. She fell over sideways and should not have gotten up again. except she did, hauling herself up, actually bearing weight right on the shattered, bleeding bone, reaching out for the gun—
The flechettes ripped out one last time and tore her right in two.
When he recovered, he saw Helm still standing in the doorway, holstering the flechette guns. Delde Sota, Grawl, Enda, and Angela were immediately behind him, all suited and all armed sufficiently to storm some unsuspecting city.
Bertin, Lacey and the other Marines came out of the tunnels, saw Helm and the others, and lifted their weapons.
"No, don't!" Gabriel shouted. "It's not what it looks like!"
Helm lifted what he was now bracing with his other hand, the back end of the long stock tucked under his armpit, and all of them froze. None of them had anything to match a plasma gun, and the big open bell looked more than ominous.
"Helm, don't do it!" Gabriel yelled at him. "They're on our side!"
"Of course they are," Helm said, though his tone was faintly ironic. "I'd never do such a thing. However."
He took a few steps forward, looking at the two halves of Delonghi. "Huh," he said and poked at one half of the shredded corpse with his foot. "Lookit that. You," he said, pointing at Bertin, "and you"—pointing at Rathbone—"come here and look at this."
They came over slowly, regarding the assortment of restricted but nonetheless present firepower that was being concentrated on them.