by Диана Дуэйн
"Well, we were hoping to walk around and window-shop a while," Gabriel said, "if it's all right with you." He looked at her intently and tried very hard to have her get the idea that a while spent in his company would be pleasant.
The genuineness of her smile rather surprised him and made him feel guilty. "Certainly," Welsh said, "why shouldn't you? There's some spare time. Come on. I'll show you around the main shopping district. It's not far."
The company got up, said good-bye to their hostess, and then headed out after Welsh. As they went out, Helm nudged Gabriel with one massive elbow and grinned half of one of his face-splitting grins on the side of his face that was away from Angela.
"Pushing your luck a little, aren't you?" he said.
Gabriel looked sideways at Helm, uncertain what he meant.
Helm just chuckled and went after Welsh.
A slight cool edge was coming into the air as the afternoon wore on, and the short walk to the shopping precinct was pleasant. For the first part of it, Gabriel walked with Welsh, chatting about inconsequentia with her and trying to seem fairly casual about it. When they got to the precinct, a large pedestrians-only area arranged on either side of an avenue of tall evergreen trees and dotted with little mini-parks, Gabriel let others take on the business of keeping Welsh busy. Delde Sota immediately moved into this role, with the merest glance at Gabriel, and started looking in store windows.
There were plenty of them, with a considerable spread of imported goods. Gabriel had not seen such a comprehensive shopping area since Diamond Point on Grith. There was also more to the area than just this one avenue. Other smaller streets crisscrossed it at hundred-meter intervals.
As the group scattered around her, looking in the windows of various stores, Welsh called to them, "Don't get lost now!"
Gabriel smiled slightly, knowing that if any of them did, this area would very likely be crawling with police in not much more than a few minutes. Indeed Welsh was starting to look just a little worried, but the others kept coming back to touch base with her, and eventually the worried expression began to fade.
The six of them wandered gently down the shopping precinct, calling each other over to look at something: jewelry, more exploratory or outdoor supplies, and after that came a gourmet foodshop, a data-and-book store.
Gabriel was looking in the window of this last when he felt the tickle again, so hard that he wanted to sneeze, more emphatic than the itch, more specific. He strolled on to look at the next window, that of a wineshop, while trying to work out the source of the sensation. What is it? he said to the inside of his mind. Come on, give me some help here!
Nothing.
With the others a little behind him, he wandered on with his hands in his pockets, passing by the store windows and crossing one of the small streets and looking again, sorrowfully, at the passersby. Even those who were fairly young, barely out of their childhoods, had that uncomfortable, watchful, hard look to their faces. There were a few children being pushed along in hoverprams or being led by the hand, and some of them smiled. But Gabriel looked at those faces, too, and saw the shadows of where that hard look would eventually engrave itself. It was profoundly saddening.
He sighed and looked in the window of the next shop. More clothes. I have enough clothes, he thought, not sharing Delde Sota and Helm's fondness for such things. They were stuck several shops ahead of him, exclaiming over more of the same while Welsh watched. Gabriel smiled slightly. Helm bought all kinds of good planetside wear, but you hardly ever saw him in anything but a smartsuit or armor. Habit is a terrible thing, Gabriel thought.
He glanced toward the end of the window and caught a reflection of someone approaching close, as if to pass between him and the window, then angling away again. Gabriel turned to move out of the way and got a glimpse of a face even more pinched than many he had seen so far today, very tired, very clenched, a face holding itself like a fist. Feeling absently sorry for the man, Gabriel turned his attention away and looked up the street toward where Welsh and the others were continuing on—
—and recognition went right up his spine like a hot wire.
—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 cell: 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, swing
ing 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.
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 a
bout 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.
Take all this information, Gabriel said. Store it in every ship's computer in the fleet that you 're able to reach. If even one survives to bring this home, we may lose this battle, but we'll have a better than even chance of winning the war.
"After that?" she said aloud.
We'll see if we can make this little change in the Externals' ships, Gabriel said, and even things up slightly.
Query: chances of success? Delde Sota asked.
Gabriel shook his head. We 're rolling double or nothing on this one. Do what you need to and hurry. I won't move until you're done.
He was afraid, afraid that the pulse he felt from the "mind" of the installation, considering so calmly, might burn him out in its passing. He was also afraid that using the information in this way, targeting the External ships with the pulse meant to burn out their protective screen, might also tempt them to destroy the facility itself, no matter how much they wanted it. Gabriel knew little or nothing about the psychology of his enemy, except that it was inimical to everything human. He was moving in an information vacuum and was very afraid to move in any direction at all, yet at the same time he didn't dare not move. People were dying.