Nightfall_at_Algemron

The webwork of glass had grown up around Gabriel to his waist and was swiftly extending upward. "How do you get out of that?" Helm asked conversationally. "Maybe I don't," Gabriel said.
No time to worry about it now. A memory surfaced of some old story his father had told him about a magician stuck in a rock—in some kind of crystal coffin. Now he was becoming the magician. Unfortunately, he was feeling painfully short of magic at the moment, and though he had known in his heart that this final battle would come eventually, it had never occurred to him that he might have to stand, immobile and imprisoned with empty hands while his friends fought. and won or lost it.
He was damned if he wouldn't fight. He turned to look down at the Patterner. It, too, was now anchored in place to the milky floor, the delicate legs wrapped about with the glass, the eyes set around the middle body now peering out between more cables of crystal as they grew and wound upward.
Patterner, Gabriel said to it, we have other problems to deal with while this is going on. There's a war starting out there. We need the weapons.
What weapons?
Gabriel stared at it. Don't tell me that there aren't weapons here! Or some kind of defense! The other Patterner said—
There are instrumentalities here that may serve you, said the Patterner before him, but completion first.
The tension and pressure, the hot prickling sense of connections knitting and awakening in his mind, was worsening. Memories began firing in his mind uncontrollably—not in order, nothing like the march of memory that you were supposed to suffer when you died. These came completely at random.
Childhood, fishing on the beach.
His father turning to his mother late one night as they sat in the sitting room. A sunset over the ocean.
Gabriel's last day in school.
His first day in the Marines. Glimpses of space. The first time he had killed. His first starfall.
The drip of water in the glaciers on Epsedra.
The frozen fury of Elinke Dareyev's face. Behind her, the recording of Ambassador Delvecchio's last shuttle trip played.
Gabriel blinked, hot tears ran, but he could do nothing, couldn't move, couldn't speak—
Tramping, clattering noises came from the corridor entrance. The kroath—
His friends and the Marines were looking at each other. He could see them, feel their terror, their exhilaration. Bertin nodded at her people, and the safeties came off.
"I haven't killed anything at all today," Helm growled as he checked the charge on his weapon. "Good place to start."
"No ethical problem here," Delde Sota said, checking her weapon as well. "Cannot kill what is already dead. Simplifies matters. Oaths intact."
Enda stood there, small and frail in her little spacesuit, checking the charge on the mass rifle that Gabriel usually used. She glanced at the door then looked over toward him.
Inside, something kept rifling through Gabriel's memories, as if trying to see if everything was there. Ricel's memories were there, too. They were rifled as well, and Gabriel struggled against it, but the struggling was no use. In his palm, the stone burned fiercely as Gabriel watched that other life go by.
Then Gabriel suddenly realized what Ricel had been practice for. Yes, the stone had made all that happen, too.
Gods only knew how many years of tweaks and changes to what would otherwise have been history's normal course that the stone had made to make sure that Ricel was there for Gabriel, that his mission went forward, that the ambassador died, that Gabriel was semi-convicted by the Phorcyns and fled—always with the stone in hand. It had made sure that Ricel died in front of him so that those memories were laid out in front of Gabriel, utterly necessary, otherwise irretrievable. All unwittingly he had done his homewofk, further investigating those memories—digging, laying them bare, refining the connections to them, in his own interest, he'd thought at the time. Now Gabriel wondered.
Now the facility here knew that Gabriel had mastered the fine art of absorbing another's memories, sorting and compiling and filing them away for himself. As a result, now it had another set of memories for him. These were much bigger, much more complex, much more important. Some changes had been made in his own mind so that he would be ready to handle the new load. Everything was now ready.
The shriek brought his eyes open, distracting him. He saw the first few kroath come through the entrance. The noise had been Grawl, letting loose a warcry of her people, leveling her weapon, and firing. Gabriel got a first whiff of that terrible sour acid odor, the slime that surrounded the bodies of the undead inside their armor. The kroath went down, its abdomen torn into jagged strips of sizzling armor. It straggled up again. Enda was firing at it now, then Angela, and finally Lacey and Rathbone. Together they brought it down, only to see it straggle up one more time, aiming its dark plasma weapon, firing—
More kroath came. Their armor was too strong to make it a simple matter to take them out. Their shrieks and screams of rage and pain filled the air. Before Gabriel had not been equipped to realize that the kroath were not mere automata, reactivated corpses moving and fighting, but that there was also some semblance of consciousness inside them. They walked in anguish and fury that could never be quenched, a madness of mind degraded to programming. Memory was nearly lost. Even worse, memories were stripped of their associations so that old loves and familiar faces might pass in front of them and they would not know them, would kill them with unconcern, and then afterward never understand why the pain inside was even greater than it had been before. That endless anguish.
Gabriel wanted to weep for them, but there was no time for it now. It was kinder simply to mince them so small they could never be put back together again, burn them to ashes, blow them apart.
The Marines and Gabriel's friends were all doing a fair job of that at the moment. The kroath bodies were piling up so that the entry was somewhat choked with them, but even as they were torn apart by the big caliber fire, the armor broke and let out that terrible acid slime. It ate bodies and armor alike so that the pile kept getting smaller, and more kroath came climbing in over it. It was like trying to stop the tide from coming in. Even as he watched, Dirigent went down with a dark plasma bolt through the chest. The others closed ranks over his body, still firing, and all Gabriel could think of was what would happen when his friends' guns ran out of ammunition, when their charges ran down.
All around him the facility waited. Gabriel stood shuddering and helpless, wholly imprisoned in the crystal now. Here they were, waiting, a vast set of memories in a glass matrix, preserved for him and only for him. It was the map. The master map of the other Glassmaker sites— all the other sites, all their secrets, everything they held. All this treasure of data was ready to pour into Gabriel, old wine into a new bottle. Ready for use at last.
If he accepted it.
If he didn't.
He could hear the whole facility listening to his thought.
Every fiber of it was alive, waiting, and desperate. Outside his crystalline prison, dark plasma bolts flew. Enda rolled out of the way of one and fired. Helm stood blasting away with the D6 tucked under one arm and a reloaded flechette gun in the other. Another kroath went down in the doorway and got up again, while another climbed over it and leaped into the room. Grawl's fire took them both down.
You must accept it!
Oh, must I? Gabriel asked.
It all came down, finally, to this: become the chosen vessel of this huge and terrible knowledge and make sure that humanity and its allies received it. For without it, they would not survive.
Refuse it, and it will all be destroyed now… for no one else is capable of handling it. The others who can handle it, too, are not worthy. They will take this information and use it. Within twenty years— thirty?—mankind and its allies will be gone.
The other choice was to take the knowledge, and.
Change. Irreversible, change impossible to describe, impossible to understand. from this side of the process. Knowledge was promised on the other side, but by then it will be too late. Accept the knowledge and become. more than human? Less? Or will there even be words that are capable of describing the difference?
Gabriel breathed in, breathed out. This was what the stone had been preparing him for. If he refused the change, he would never be complete, never know what might have been.
I get to keep my humanity.
For a little while, replied the Patterner, until you die .
Gabriel gasped for breath, struggled inside the crystal for a way to help his friends. They all had their backs turned, fighting the kroath: Helm, who had been made more than human to start with; Delde Sota, who had built herself that way, slowly, over time; Enda, who had never been human but knew more about it than some; Grawl, never human either, but involved with the species as her people had been for many years; Angela, as human as Gabriel was now—more so, for the stone had not changed her.
Yet, said the Patterner.
The choice is still mine?
Yours alone. Without your willing acceptance, all that has gone before is meaningless.
"Gabriel!" Angela shouted at him, looking over her shoulder while changing charge packs. The bodies were beginning to pile up in the doorway, but other kroath still were pushing in from behind. "Just this once, could you hurry up and do whatever? "
Just this once.
He closed his eyes, took one last deep breath, and said to the Patterner, Do it. Chapter Eighteen
He had tried to brace himself, but nothing could have prepared Gabriel for the incandescent stream of power that blasted into and through him, burning him from within. He tried to hang onto some sense of himself, but it was lost in moments, seared away in the access of light that completely inhabited him, filled him like liquid—