—then not just a flood of light, but billions of individual sparks of it, each gravitating to one particular spot, one cell, one strand of DNA, one atom, and etching itself there. Every spark meant something. He was a map. Here and there, as the blindness began to fade and the dazzlement passed, Gabriel caught glimpses of what was now written inside him, in every celclass="underline" a star here, a patch of nebula there, a planet indicated somewhere else, all the other Precursor sites, all that information was now stored in him. It had written itself in his genes, as it could not have done without his consent. For as long as he lived, that data could be used by him and his delegates, and should there ever be children, they too would carry it. and their children, and theirs after that.
Wonderful, he thought, dazed, so now what?
He opened his eyes to see a troop of bigger kroath forcing their way past the ones who had been coming
in the first wave. Their armor was hugely broad across the shoulders, and their claws lanced out further. Grawl roared a terrible cry at the sight of them, realizing that as the other kroath had been made of men, sesheyans, or fraal, some of these were weren. With her scream, one of them launched itself at her—
Helm raised the D6, pulled the trigger, and the charge gave out. He dropped it, reached over his back, came up with something else, something squarish that he shook a handle out of.
An axe ?
Gabriel stared as Helm, in that battered armor, threw himself at the kroath, slashing, the axe whirling, seemingly appearing in several places at once. One of the kroath's arms fell away at the elbow. The kroath struck Helm with the other, but the claws made only marks on his armor. Helm was set like a rock, as if he were anchored into the floor like Gabriel and the Patterner.
Helm struck it and struck again, slashing off the other arm. It staggered at him, went down, oozing acidic slime. There were no other weapons nearby, nothing more effective to grab, but Helm spread his legs and planted himself firm and yelled, "Anybody else?"
Lacey had gone down next to where Delde Sota lay firing. The doctor grabbed the poor kid's mass rifle, yelled, "Helm!" and threw it to him. Helm caught it out of the air one-handed as he was hitting the next kroath with the axe. He slapped the axe back into carry position over his shoulder and used the mass rifle to stitch along the middle of the kroath, trying to cut it in half as he had with Delonghi. Gabriel could not see his face through the armor, but he could imagine what it looked like—that crazy grin that went halfway around his face, the teeth bared, the fiercely crewcut hair bristling. The kroath went down. Helm fired two long bursts into it, severing its legs at the knees.
"Walk away from that," he yelled. " Anybody else?"
He was tiring. He couldn't possibly keep it up, and the others had to be running out of charge or ammo. And there were still more kroath coming.
Gabriel was struggling in the crystal again.
Let me out! Let me fight! Where are the weapons?
There are no weapons here. Only information—
He screamed in frustration. Like an echo came the sound of screams and gunfire from farther up, echoing like thunder in the corridors above. We're all going to die, Gabriel thought, and I can't do anything. They're all going to die.
Confusion spread as the kroath blundered more quickly into the great room. Helm cut one more off at the legs, and then that mass rifle's change went out. MacLain went down but took another kroath with him. Helm snatched the axe from over his back and went for the next kroath, ducked the dark plasma blast that went past, and brought the axe down on arm and weapon together. The weapon exploded, throwing Helm backward and taking the kroath's arm off at the shoulder. With a crash of armor Helm went down, and kroath piled on top of him.
No! Gabriel cried. Let me out! Let me help! They'll all—
—and Helm rolled, plunged, and shook them off, clubbing them away, swinging the axe. He dragged himself to his feet again, the armor dented, his helmet half crushed against his face, blood running from it and from his shoulder. His arm hung limp.
With his one good hand, he pulled his axe again and roared, "Anybody else?!?" —and the sound of gunfire echoed and roared in the access corridor.
Suddenly there were no more kroath in the corridor, only a pile of oozing, dissolving bodies and armor. More Marines had come.
A kind of gasping quiet fell as the two groups stood looking at each other in disbelief and joy, but the joy didn't last long.
Enda came to them, casting her gun aside. "You are from Schmetterling?"
"The captain sent us," said one of the Marines. "She didn't want you to get away." He was looking over at Gabriel as he said it. "Maybe that wasn't a problem."
Through the crystal, he gave the man a bemused look. "Without you guys," Gabriel said, "getting away would not have been even slightly on the cards." He looked around at the fallen ones, Lacey, Dirigent and MacLain, their armor and bodies half-eaten away already by the kroath slime.
"But you're supposed to save everything now," said the young lieutenant. "That was the word."
"I'm so glad people tell me these things," Gabriel said. " I just wish I knew how!"
You do know, said the Patterner, as calm as if a major battle had not just taken place in front of her. Look within.
It took a little doing. Suddenly Gabriel found it much easier to hear the rest of this facility. What he could mostly hear at the moment was, They have come back! A terrible sound of rejoicing, a crash of martial music in his mind, guns and trumpets, drums beating.