"Should be?"
"Will be?" Sufan blazed his impatience. "For years I have devoted my life to this matter. Trust me, Earl. I know what I'm doing." He stared at the paper in his hand, muttering to the navigator, then said, "Captain, you are off course. The correct path lies fifteen degrees to the left and three upward. There will be a star. Approach it to within fifteen units then take course…"
Dumarest glanced at the girl as the man rattled a stream of figures. She was sitting, tense, her blind eyes gleaming in the subdued lighting. Her fingers, gripping his own, were tight.
"Earl?"
"I'm here, Embira. You know that. You can feel my hand."
"Your hand!" She lifted it to her cheek and held it hard against the warm velvet of her skin. "It's hard to krang you, Earl. The auras are so bright and there are so many of them. Hold me! Never let me go!"
A woman afraid and with good reason. For her normal matter did not exist, it was an obstruction, unseen, known only by touch. Instead there was a mass of lambent glows and, perhaps, shifting colors. Now she sat naked among them, conscious of lethal forces all around, denied even the comfort of the solid appearance of the protective hull. The metal, to her, would be a haze shot with streamers of probing energy, startling, hurting, the cause of fear and terror.
"The left!" she said abruptly. "No, the right, quickly. Quickly. Now up! Up!"
Her voice held confusion, one which grew as the hours dragged past and, beneath his hand, Dumarest could feel her mounting tension.
He said, "The girl must have rest."
Acilus turned, snarling, "Earl, damn you, I warned you not to interfere!"
"This is madness. The instruments are confused and we're practically traveling blind."
"The girl-"
"Is only human and can think only at human speed. She's tired and has no chance to assess what she discovers. We're deep in the Cloud now. Slow down and give her a chance to rest."
"And if I don't?"
"It's my life as well as yours, Captain." Dumarest met the hooded eyes, saw the hands clench into fists as they left the controls. "Maintain control!" he rapped. "Acilus, you fool!"
Embira screamed. "Turn! Turn to the right! Turn!"
Again no danger was visible or registered in the massed instruments but as the ship obeyed the delayed action of the captain, telltales blazed in a ruby glow, the vessel itself seeming to change, to become a profusion of crystalline facets, familiar objects distorted by the energies affecting the sensory apparatus of the brain. A time in which they had only the guide of the girl's voice calling directions.
One in which the air shook to the sudden screaming roar from the engine room, Timus's voice yelling over the intercom.
"The generator! It's going!"
"Cut it!" shouted Dumarest. "Cut it!"
The ship jarred as the order was obeyed, the normal appearance returning as the field died. Slumped in her chair the girl shuddered, her free hand groping, tears streaming down her cheeks.
"The pain," she whispered. "Earl, the pain!"
"It's all right," he soothed. "It's over."
"Earl!"
He pressed her hands, soothing with his presence, his face grim as he looked at the screens. The field was down, they were drifting in the Cloud and, if the generator was ruined, they were as good as dead.
Marek sat in the salon, outwardly calm, only the slight tremor of his hands as he toyed with a deck of cards revealing his inner tension.
"So we gamble, Earl, hoping that we escape danger while we drift." He turned a card and pursed his lips. "The captain is not happy."
"To hell with him."
"You abrogated his command. He would not have cut the generator."
"He forgot what he was doing. He let anger overcome him."
"True, but Rae Acilus is a hard man, Earl, and he will not forget the slight. You shamed him before others. If the opportunity rises I suggest that you kill him before he kills you." He added meaningfully, "There are others who can run the ship."
"Such as?"
"You, perhaps, my friend. And Nonach has some ability." He turned another card. "And I am not without talent."
A possibility and Dumarest considered it. One successful flight would be enough-and no captain was immortal. Others had taken over command before, need replacing trained skill. As long as they could land and walk away from the wreck it would be enough.
But first, the ship had to be repaired.
Pacula looked up from where she sat at the side of the cot as Dumarest looked into Embira's cabin. The girl was asleep, twitching restlessly, one hand clenched, the other groping. He touched it and immediately she quieted.
"She's overstrained," said Pacula accusingly. "What did you do to her in the control room?"
"Nothing."
"But-"
"She was performing her part," he interrupted curtly. "This isn't a picnic, Pacula. And she isn't made of glass to be protected. We need her talent if we hope to survive. How is Usan?"
The woman had suffered another attack and lay now on her cot. Like the girl she was asleep, but her rest was due to drugs and exhaustion. Dumarest stooped over her, touched the prominent veins in her throat, felt the clammy texture of her skin.
Pacula said, "Is she dying?"
"We are all dying."
"Don't play with words, Earl." She was irritable, annoyed at having been taken from her charge. "Will she recover?"
Already she was living on borrowed time, but her will to live dominated the weakness of her body.
Dumarest said, "Drug her. Keep her unconscious. Worry will increase the strain she is under and-"
"If we're all to die she needn't know it." Pacula was blunt. "Is that it, Earl? Your brand of mercy?"
"You have a better?"
She looked into his eyes and saw what they held, the acceptance of the harsh universe in which he lived, one against which she had been protected all her life. Who was she to condemn or judge?
"You think a lot of Usan, Earl. Why? Does she remind you of your grandmother? Your mother?"
"I remember neither."
"She saved your life with her lies. Is that it?" And then, as he made no answer, she said bleakly, "Well, now it's up to you to save hers."
"Not me," he said. "Timus Omilcar."
The engineer was hard at work. Stripped to the waist he had head and shoulders plunged into the exposed interior of the generator. As Dumarest entered the engine room he straightened, rubbing a hand over his face, his fingers leaving thick, black smears.
"Well?"
"It could be worse." Timus stretched, easing his back. "You gave the order just in time. A few more seconds and the entire generator would be rubbish. As it is we're lucky. Two units gone but we saved the rest."
Good news, but the main question had yet to be answered. Dumarest stepped to where wine rested in a rack on the bench, poured a glass, handed it to the engineer. As the man drank he said, "Can it be repaired?"
"Given time, yes. We carry spares. Have we time?"
"We're drifting, but you know that. The girl's asleep, so there could be danger we know nothing about and could do nothing to avoid if we did. As it is space seems clear and we're safe."
"For how long?"
Dumarest shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. An hour. A day. Who can tell?"
Timus finished his wine and reached for the bottle. Dumarest made no objection, the man was fatigued, he would burn the alcohol for fuel.
"A hell of a way to end, Earl. Waiting for something to smash you to a pulp or smear you like a bug on a wall. At least that would be fast. I saw a man once, in a hospital on Jamhar. The sole survivor of a ship which had been caught in a space storm. Their field had collapsed and the vessel wrecked, but he'd been in the hold and was found." He drank half the wine. "He wasn't human, Earl. One arm was like a claw and his head looked like a rotten melon. They kept him alive with machines and ran endless tests. Wild tissue and degenerate cells, they said. The basic protoplasmic pattern distorted by radiation. They should have let him die."