Nightfall_at_Algemron

They?
The makers. The creators.
Where?
You.
Gabriel would have looked over his shoulder, if he could have moved.
They said to us, "We will come back. We will use you again.. Where once we failed, we will rise up and succeed."
Some kind of reincarnation belief, Gabriel thought, yet the facility was deadly serious about it.
Well, fine, he said silently, but meanwhile there's a space battle going on out there, and my people's ships are being chopped in pieces, and it needs to stop!
There was not even a pause for access time. The enemies' ship defense.
Everything visual around him went away. In his mind, Gabriel found himself looking at something that was like a circuit diagram, but it was about a kilometer across. However, it was not a diagram; it was an equation. He could understand the terms but wasn't sure how they fit together.
He puzzled over it. The symmetry of the equation was strange. I don. 't see what this does, or how it works, Gabriel said. It looks like it makes something out of nothing!
Exactly, replied the Patterner. That is how everything was made at the beginning, out of nothing.
Gabriel knew as much about big bang theory as anyone else, but he had never thought of it in quite those terms before. If he was right, he was looking at some kind of intangible shield technology, and it seemed to have something to do with engines powered by darkmatter reactions, which every Concord and Star Force ship out there had.
Can we make this for our ships? he demanded.
Impossible, the answer came back. Installation requires more reconfiguration and rebuilding than can be managed at this time.
Gabriel felt like swearing, but it wouldn't have helped. It's not fair that they have this advantage as well as numbers! We're going to get slaughtered here!
The Others may be made to lose this advantage, the answer came back.
The imagery filling his mind was suddenly all directed toward one part of the equation. Gabriel realized abruptly that he was being shown its weak spot, the one part of the process of "making something out of nothing" that could feasibly be interfered with. A ship close enough to another one using this screen could just possibly generate the pulse of energy that would strike at this particular weak point and render the screen useless.
How do I get this to them in the middle of a battle ? Gabriel thought in desperation. Or in time for them to do anything with it? There was no way to get the information where it was needed, and people were dying out there.
Implementation does not have to be carried out remotely. Local implementation is possible on a limited basis.
Gabriel gulped. Define limited.
One pulse of the power necessary to disable all such operations in local space can be produced. Time to recharge: eight to the eighth hours.
Gabriel did the first few multiplications in his head and then gave up. Never mind that, he said. Get ready to do it!
Then he paused. What if it doesn 't work? There is no other remedy, came that cool reply.
He swallowed. It's just going to have to do, he thought, but at the same time I can't take the chance that this information might be lost. This could make all the difference in fights yet to come. It might mean the difference between our side's survival and its extinction, but I don't even understand it. How am I supposed to store it, share it.?
The idea came. "Delde Sota!" Gabriel shouted. "Are you still linked to Longshot's comms?" She tapped the remote transmitter at her belt. "Clear and operating."
That'll do it, Gabriel thought. This was a mechalus who had been able to sabotage Delonghi's ship by sliding her mind down into its computers via nothing but comms circuitry. At the time, it had seemed dangerously like magic. Now Gabriel was entirely happy to apply anything, up to and including magic, to the problem before him.
"How are you with figuring out schematics?"
She grinned, one of those slightly feral smiles she produced sometimes when someone asked her a question that was very much to her liking. "Admission: have been known to do such things every now and then."
"Do you think you can link up with me?"
She strode over to him, keeping the gun in her hands, and leaned up against the column of wrapped and woven crystal in which he now stood imprisoned. Her braid slipped in through the interstices and wrapped its finest tendrils around his wrist, sinking into the medchip there as it had so many times before.
"Not just hardware," Gabriel said. "Software."
She looked at him. Just the barest spark of alarm in those eyes, but it was quickly gone. "Semantics," she said. "Rhetorical question: for a mechalus, is there a difference?"
"Are you sure?" he said. "I don't know if this—"
"Exhortation!" Delde Sota interrupted. "Try it and find out."
Gabriel closed his eyes and slipped into the webwork, into the crystal.
The connection, when it came, was overwhelming. Gabriel found himself looking across what seemed thousands of kilometers of space, all glittering with the constructs of thought, down to great depths, up to unguessed-at heights. Delde Sota had been a Grid pilot before she had been a doctor. Gabriel knew that, but he knew it casually. Now he looked down into her mind and saw that she was still a Grid pilot, for she carried huge amounts of the Grid inside her tailored memory, which she had had installed in herself, bit by bit over time. When she had come away from her medical work on Iphus Station, she had finished the last of that customization, feeling that she might need it sometime soon. All those trips back to Corrivale, he thought, ". to do some errands."
One has to do the shopping sometime, the answer came back, and Delde Sota laughed inside.
Gabriel gulped at the vastness within her. All minds were landscapes to some extent—at least that was the paradigm in which he found himself tending to think of them—but Delde Sota's was a landscape in more dimensions than most. It had directions and axes the existence of which he would never have suspected, stretching off through many star systems, encapsulating parts of their Grids down which she had run herself at one time or another. The textures were amazing. He saw the spit of electricity and the hot burn of nuclear particles as she came close to one power source or another, the caress of others' thoughts as she passed them in the Grid. Down the myriad networks she quested, hunting information about one subject or another that interested her. and nearly everything interested Delde Sota. Doctor she might be, but she was also technician, philosopher, and engineer—all necessary talents, since she had been building and rebuilding herself for years. The rebuilding, the redesigning of an existing design to some new and unexpected use was what chiefly delighted her.
What did you have in mind? She asked silently.
This, Gabriel said. He showed her the shield.
She slipped down into that schematic, wore it like a coat, looked at it all over, checked the fit, and then
started to look closely at the fabric. A torrent of imagery flooded over Gabriel, picked up second-hand from her. Whirling virtual shell-structures of atoms that did not yet exist but could if conditions were correct, the probability clouds of their attendant particles even more subjective and uncertain than usual, and other particles, exotic but easily enough produced for short periods if you gave them a chance. Then came a flood of equivalencies between the symbology at which Gabriel had been looking and her own.
A long pause. Even Delde Sota was briefly confused by what she saw. Then suddenly Gabriel felt her suck her breath in, and he felt a great cry of astonishment and hope go up inside her.
Sides balance, she said silently to Gabriel.
Of the equation?
Possibly of the battle as well. Possibly a little imbalance.