Two sets of disrupter beams probed around the Winterlance.
Ryba dropped the external energy levels to nil, then pulsed screens.
Nylan scrambled through the mid-level powernet, coolingfeedback, and unsnarling the energy loop from the second fusactor, always more sensitive to field effects.
A third beam switched to the Winterlance as the Deepchill went to chaos.
The captain dropped the nose and most of the screens, jamming all the powerflows into acceleration, and demanded, “Power!”
Nylan rammed the fusactors into emergency overload, nearly one hundred twenty percent of rating on each, letting his nerves burn as he damped the swirls.
The third line of angels began to attack the towers, but the disrupter beams all seemed to remain searching for the Winterlance, bracketing the cruiser on all sides.
Nylan swallowed. With no gravity in the Winterlance, the ship warming rapidly, the ventilation off, and the captain playing spaceobatics to avoid the Rats’ focused ion disassociators, his guts were twisted into knots, his eyes pools of pain, and all he had to operate with were the net and his senses.
“Shields!” Ryba dropped the acceleration to nil.
The fourth line of angel ships, including the heavy cruisers, swept in from below, and dozens of de-energizers licked at the towers, but the disrupters still slashed at the Winterlance.
Nylan reshifted the power flows into overshields, calculated, and recalculated. The Winterlance’s screens were strong enough for perhaps two simultaneous demon beams-once, twice at the outside.
One disrupter slid across the screens, and Nylan moaned as the power burned into his brain, even as he shifted the screen focus to blunt the dull, aching, and chaotic combined power drain and overload.
A sound like splintering glass, shattering static, and pure chaos screeched through the comm bands as the mirror ships’ nexus point collapsed and fundamental chaos backsurged from the disintegrating Rat picket line.
Angel ships scattered, some underjumping blind, others swallowed by the chaos vortex unleashed by the nexus point’s collapse.
Ryba dropped the shields and pulled full acceleration. The fundamental chaos-a white vortex swirling in no directions and all directions-glittering with the focused and reflected energies of the Rationalists’ tower ships-stammed through the Wintenlance, twisting and tumbling the frigate through a dark funnel-into a red-tinged whiteness framed with black order.
The same blackness flooded over the overloaded engineer.
III
NYLAN SHOOK HIS head. He hadn’t expected that he’d be able to shake his head-or that he’d even be alive. Then he tried to access the neuronet, but nothing happened. He concentrated on the power system, and got the mental image of the board. The mental readouts matched the visual console before him, but he had no feeling of being on the net, just the mental picture.
Both status images revealed that the fusactors were dead-almost as if they did not exist.
He frowned.
“Darkness! Look at you …” murmured Ayrlyn.
“What?” asked Nylan.
“Your hair is silver-not old silver, just silver.”
“Enough on hair color! Where are we?” Gerlich’s words growled from the speaker.
“We’re trying to find out!” snapped Ryba. “It takes longer manually.”
Nylan stared at the captain-whose dark brown hair had clearly turned black-a dark jet-black. Jump transits didn’t change hair color-that he knew. He turned toward Ayrlyn, whose brown hair had become a fiery red, not orange-red or mahogany-red, but like living flame.
Were they all dead? Was this some form of afterlife?
“So … where are we?” asked Saryn, her hair still brown, perhaps slightly darker, a shade more … alive.
As he waited for the captain to answer, Nylan glanced at the board before him, where half the displays were either dead or showing meaningless parameters, and then back at the captain. Finally, he shrugged and waited.
“Nowhere I’ve ever seen,” Ryba finally answered. “The nav systems don’t match anything, but we’re practically on top of a planet, and I’ll have the orbit stabilized in a bit.”
The engineer frowned. The odds on underjumping, especially blind and unintentionally, and ending up near a planet, any kind of planet, were infinitesimal.
“Nylan, is there any way to get more power?”
“The fusactors are dead, Captain. I’ll try again.” Nylan concentrated on the fusactors, ignoring the dead net, trying to call up and replicate the feeling of smooth power flows.
For a moment, perhaps several units, some form of power flowed, but Nylan felt as if it were flowing from him, not the fusactors, and the blackness began to rise around him.
He let go of the image. “That’s it, Captain.” He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t do more.
“Might have been enough.” Ryba’s words were grunted.
The engineer returned to study the readouts before him, regretting the slowness of the manual inputs. Since the captain said nothing, Nylan began to use the long-range sensors to gather data on the planet, cataloguing each piece of data as it hit the system. A warm water planet with no electronic emissions; clear day-night rotational pattern; no moons of any size; no light concentrations on the dark side; roughly Heaven-Sybra-standard gravity, assuming that the mass balance was somewhere near norm.
He trained one sensor on the sun and swallowed.
“Stable orbit … I think,” announced Ryba, wiping her forehead with the back of her black shipsuit sleeve. She turned in the couch and frowned. “You were right, Ayrlyn. About the hair color.”
Nylan nodded to himself. Was the spectrum, the visiblespectrum, different? How could it be? The ship’s lights were still the same. Or were they all different?
“Where are we?” asked Saryn. “Does anyone know?”
“A demon-fired long way from anywhere-that’s certain.” Ryba wiped her forehead again, looked back at the screens once more, and then at Nylan. “You were doing something with the sensors, Nylan. What do they show?”
“I’d have to say that we’re not in our universe.”
“Not in our universe? How could we not be in our universe?”
“Would you prefer dead? The afterlife of the demons? Those are your choices. Personally, Captain, I prefer the alternative universe.”
“And what might lead you to this conclusion, Ser Nylan?” Ryba’s voice was chill, the polite voice of disagreement that Nylan hated.
“A number of little things, beginning with the odds of blind underjumping and emerging near a planet. In our universe, that kind of jump would have turned us into dust and energy. The fusactors are both dead, and they shouldn’t be. The indicators show that the firin cells are discharging at half their normal rate, despite twice the emergency load.”
“At least there’s a planet down there.”
“That’s another problem. It’s a water planet, and it’s in what would be a habitable zone-assuming that such a thing existed with a yellow-white star this hot. But it’s on the fringe for most of us.”
“You’re half-Svennish, aren’t you?” snapped Gerlich over the speaker. “Trust a Svenn to pick a hot planet.”
“He didn’t pick it,” pointed out Ryba. “How hot is it?”
“If the sensors are accurate … the sea-level surface is like Jobi, but warmer. Too hot to be comfortable for us, but fine for demons. There are a couple of high-altitude plateaus that would be perfect-especially in the smaller continent, but setting a lander down there would be murder.”