Nightfall_at_Algemron

"I think you did just fine," Gabriel said. "Now all we have to do is stay alive through this so that we can hunt that old city of yours down and I can go in there and kick some fraals' rear ends for throwing you out of there. They have no idea what they lost."
She smiled as they went around a great curve, downward and downward, a spiral. "I take that very kindly, Gabriel. I too will kick some fundaments at your trial, if given the opportunity."
He laughed gently as they trotted down the long curve together.
"Here we are," he said, "acting as if we're going to survive this. You know as well as I do that that big ship is sending down smaller craft this minute, and this place is going to be full of bad guys shortly."
"Can you not seal the outer entry?"
"I tried," Gabriel said. "Seems like there are still some things to be done before my control here is complete."
"You had better get on with it, then."
Gabriel had to laugh. Silently, in his mind, he said to the silent presence that was listening, Where were you?
Waiting.
You might have let me know!
Not while that was here. It pointed through Gabriel's mind at the dry baked stain on the floor of the main hall. One ofthe enemies.
Your makers seem to have had a whole lot of them.
There are many, some surviving from the ancient days, some new ones. We have no power against them by ourselves. Only you can empower us.
Gabriel blinked and raced down the tunnel, Enda coming fast in his wake. "I thought we had a problem," he said, "and I was right. What's down here can't defend us against what's coming."
"They can't?"
"Not at the moment," Gabriel said. He had heard the qualification in what the Patterner was telling him. He could only hope that he had read rightly what it meant. "We have to defend it… for a while."
"Hope you got someplace good for us to hole up," Helm said, catching up with them from behind, "because that big ship." He gulped. It wasn't a sound that filled Gabriel with any reassurance. "We've seen that one before, Gabe, one of those green warty veiny ones. We know what it means."
"Kroath sphere ships," Gabriel said, "and kroath."
"The ships can't hurt this stuff, though," Angela said, glancing around at the "glass" as she caught up with them.
"No," Gabriel agreed, "which is a slight advantage, because it means they can't just fire on it and bring it down and kill us all, but I can't close it up either—not right now anyway. That means that the kroath are going to come down here after us."
"Opinion: bad place to be trapped," said Delde Sota, bringing up the rear. "You know any good places?" Helm remarked.
Delde Sota gave Helm a look that Gabriel found completely opaque. For the first time, he caught a clear flash of feeling from her, absolutely the essence of mischief—a bizarre feeling in the present circumstances, but one which nonetheless made him laugh out loud, just a short sharp bark of amusement.
"Several," Delde Sota said, "highly inappropriate for discussion now. Many more important matters to attend to. Will take this up again with you later."
They had been going around in increasing downward spirals for some short while. Now Gabriel, his friends, and the Marines came out at one side of a wide hemispherical space some hundred meters across. Empty, the glass of all its walls gleamed and glowed, the ceiling towering a hundred meters above them.
The Patterner grew up out of the flat glass of the floor.
"It's all right, it's with me," Gabriel said hurriedly, as Lacey and Bertin trained their weapons on the bizarre creature rising up out of the solid-seeming floor, or that was what it looked like at first glance. Gabriel thought of the way the Patterner at Ohmel had slipped in and out of hangings of what seemed
impenetrable webwork. He knelt down to look more closely at the floor. This was not the usual smooth glass, but rather the Patterner's typical web-work, here packed so closely together that it was a solid, yet he could see the fibrous structure of it, all swirled together and interknotted like delicate weed in water. If the other facility had been a computer—and the other Patterner had said it was—then this was more like a brain.
While the Marines looked around apprehensively, Delde Sota was on her knees, too, stroking the surface with her braid. She glanced up at Gabriel. "Was discussing corpus callosum earlier," she said. "Similarities to this material. Pure neural fibril, packed side by side rather than end to end. Maximized bandwidth." Such as has been forming inside your own brain, he heard her think.
From above, Gabriel could hear a mutter and rumble, and the whole facility shook.
"What just landed on top of us?" asked Helm.
Delde Sota looked briefly distant look as she gazed out at the upper world through the sensors of Helm's ship. "Advice: neglect to ask."
The Patterner came gliding over to Gabriel on its many legs, a graceful waltzing motion. Harbinger, you are awaited, it said. Immediate complete interface is required. We are here to assist.
"Then let's do it," Gabriel said.
At the edges of his mind, he could hear a faint wash of cries and screams. Local space was becoming too full of human, fraal, and other species' anguish. The terrible sound would become more audible if something didn't happen fast. What frightened Gabriel most was the possibility that, if he failed, he would hear no more of those voices at all, because they would all be gone.
"What needs to be done?" he asked.
Growth, replied the Patterner.
Then it started. There was a shivering in the substance on which they stood. Fingers and tendrils of the crystalline matter began to extrude slowly upwards around him where he stood, some thin as hairs, some as thick around as his wrist, all perfectly clear. They tangled around his feet and shins and knees, slowly climbing upward as if he were a tree being wrapped in vines.
He shivered at first, but then other sensations started that made it plain that merely being held in place by threads and ropes and cables of living glass was going to be the least of his troubles. Activated by the presence and nearness of the glass and moderated by the stone down in the fist of his spacesuit's glove, Gabriel could feel the new connections in his mind starting to awaken—an itching, fizzing feeling. His consciousness began to feel hot and tight inside, as if the brain growth of which Delde Sota spoken had actually started to push his skull out from the inside, pressure, an uncomfortable pressure, looking for release. It was not actively painful yet, but Gabriel thought that it soon would be. The sweat started out on him.
Unfortunately he could also feel other things happening. On the surface, a dark shadow lowered, and small dark-green shapes were pouring out of it and into the entrance hall high above them, making for the corridors.
"They're coming," Gabriel rasped. "Can you not stop them?" Grawl asked.
"No."
"What do we do?" Angela said. There was only the slightest tremor to her voice. Gabriel swallowed. "Keep them out."
"Do our best," Bertin said, then nodded to her companions. They started sorting themselves around the perimeter of the space.
"You got it," Helm said.
Helm began detaching weapons from the gun rack on his back. Gabriel found time for just one incredulous thought: to wonder where and how he had laid hands on some of those weapons. Half of them were strictly military and highly illegal. The others were only moderately illegal, depending on what jurisdiction you were in at the time, but Helm had never worried much about jurisdictions. The Marines were giving him looks that were half envious and half admiring as Helm passed guns the size of small trees to Angela and Grawl and Enda, and finally, having handed another one to Delde Sota, he paused by Gabriel.