Nightfall_at_Algemron

A line of fire from Schmetterling struck the ship.
The great spherical monstrosity cracked open, spilled atmosphere and bodies out into the void, then cracked again, flaming wider, and blew up in a dazzling array.
"It works!" Delde Sola cried and burst out laughing.
Gabriel laughed, too. It works!
"Captain," Gabriel shouted down the comms link, "it worked! It worked!"
"What did you do?" Elinke yelled, and over her shoulder yelled again, "Where the devil are my front batteries, someone's going to have their pay docked in a minute! "
"I can't explain right now," said Gabriel.
"Well, what do I care? Will it last?"
"For these ships, yes," Gabriel said. "They'll never screen again."
"We'll find out in a moment," Elinke muttered. "Here comes another one. Forward batteries, are you up now? That one, there, hit him!"
The torpedoes and the forward energy weapons both let go together. The energy weapons took the big approaching sphere amidships, and the torpedoes followed, hitting slightly off to one side. It exploded brilliantly.
There was a long pause. "You're the devil himself," Elinke Dareyev's voice said. "I've always said so. Are you sure this will last?"
"It's permanent, Captain."
"Good. Then all we have to do is deal with two-to-one odds," she said. Her voice was grimly pleased. "We'll all just have to shoot twice, that's all."
Inside the facility of which Gabriel was now a part, the battle now seemed to have begun happening inside everyone who watched. They were all being drawn in as the power turned its attention away from Gabriel and began to focus outward, as the facility witnessed what it had been placed here for, a great stroke against the enemy that had destroyed its makers so many millions of years before. Through Delde Sota it flowed into them from a thousand viewpoints, for she was in the system Grid and the tactical sub-Grid connecting the Concord vessels. For his own part, Gabriel was struggling for control, unwilling to be forced permanently into this status. Limiting that power too strictly now could mean the end of everything for the Verge, and so Gabriel walked the edge of that glassy razor with care, trying to keep a steady course and not to let emotion tip him over one way or the other.
The fear was still there. He could see, as his friends could see through him, the terrible carnage that the Externals' ships were wreaking—great blasts of energy lancing out, flowers of fire blooming in the night, carving up Concord, Galvinite, and Alitarin ships. Already something was happening. Something was beginning to shift. Ships that had fired again and again at their enemies without result were now getting results—those of them that had survived that long—and were throwing themselves feverishly into the offensive, looking to make up lost time. The biggest Concord ships, which had been cautious not to throw themselves too hastily into battle with the very biggest External ships, now went after them with a vengeance. Even the Lighthouse slowly moved into the center of the battle, its terrible weaponry lancing out and wreaking the same kind of destruction on the Externals that they had been meting out to the Concord fleet. The odds were still bad, but the tone of the fight had changed. People were still dying, Gabriel knew, but at least they were now doing so with the hope that it might make some difference.
They watched for a while, knowing that there was no danger of attack to them at the moment. As the minutes passed, slowly at first, then more quickly, the tide of battle began turning. The Concord ships took the battle to the Externals in earnest, and now the ships that bloomed fire and breathed atmosphere into the vacuum were more often those of the invaders. There was a long hesitation, an uncertain period during which the fighting went on much as before—but then slowly the External ships gathered together and started to make for the outer reaches of the system as if to regroup. The Concord ships pursued them, and even more of the External vessels made starfall as minutes and tens of minutes and an hour and two hours went by. .
The Marines inside the cavern were recouping themselves, dealing with their dead and binding up the wounded. Gabriel looked out of the pillar at where Grawl was working on Helm.
"What a song this will make," Grawl was saying as she bound up his face and eye with pressure tape. Gabriel sucked in breath as he watched her do it, for the eye clearly would never be the same, no matter what bionics could be installed in the ruined socket later. "Great was the slaughter. The kroath fell in
heaps. Then Helm Ragnar's son strode forth with the axe and paid the price for wisdom: an eye—" "The meter will need work," Enda said, "but you begin well."
Gabriel stretched, came up against the resistance of the crystal, and abruptly felt it bend in front of him. He was that crystal now. No need for this, he said silently, and slowly the glasslike substance started to retract, slipping back down into the fibril bed of the master facility.
The Patterner, too, was coming undone from its shackles and came over to Gabriel. Harbinger, it said, your initiation is done.
Gabriel stretched. then felt something odd in his glove. Or rather, something odd that was not in his glove. The stone was gone.
I am the stone now, Gabriel thought. Everything that it had been, directional source, ancient personality, power feed, information storage core, all of that was part of Gabriel now, wound into his DNA, engraved on his genes. I am what it was, he thought, a map. a guidepost. The harbinger. The one who shows the way. And if there were ever children at some point down the line, they would carry the same map in their genes. They would always know the way to wonder.
He glanced idly at Angela.
She looked up at him from an injured Marine whose head she was holding in her lap. Well, who knows? He heard her think. Maybe just once.
Gabriel swallowed.
He turned his attention silently upward and outward. The battle had plainly reached that moment when the enemy says to itself, "This is not fun any more. We aren't winning." The system was almost empty of External ships now, except for the remnants of those that had been destroyed. A few of the great spherical ships still lingered in the outer regions of the system, but one by one they were vanishing into drivespace as the Concord vessels took control of the area, most massing over and around Argolos. The VoidCorp ships that had turned up also took themselves out into the darkness, vanishing into the darkness beyond the farthest fringes of the Algemron system.
"They're going to have some explaining to do about that," Gabriel said softly.
He would be interested in hearing them. Probably they would make the excuse that they had initially been as over-gunned as the Concord ships had been. He would have loved to hear how they explained leaving just as the Externals lost their shields and became vulnerable.
That would keep. He would probably have plenty of time to see their reaction in the Grid news to that. while spending all his time in custody, before the trial and afterward.
Helm came over to him, the dislocated left arm bound against his side at the moment. Delde Sota had done a field relocation but would want to do more work on it later.
"You know." Helm rasped.
Gabriel looked at him quizzically.
Helm gave Gabriel a one-eyed look of amusement. "Aw, it didn't work. I thought we could all just sort of think at you now."
Enda came up beside him. "That is a sure way to give him a headache," she said, "assuming he doesn't have one already."
Gabriel smiled at her somberly. "I ache all over, and my head feels like it might fall off shortly, but there are other things to do first."
"Yeah," Helm said. "I was thinking."