The vatch yowled. Green slitted eyes peered fearfully at him. NOT AGAIN! MONSTER, LET ME GO!
Not unless you do what I say—or I'll tear you apart and short out your innards! Playing with us! Take us back to our ship and our time right now! No. Wait. Let's finish things here properly. Let me see where those Nanite-possessed ones fled to.
The towers that Hantis had pointed out as "fabled Delaron" sprang into view from the grayness that was vatchspace. And then the elegant, slim towers shrank and broadened. The captain blinked. There weren't twenty of them. Just one. This tower looked like the others had—only this looked like it could be built with bricks and mortar. It was impressive but not impossibly tall. And looking in—somehow as if he had X-ray vision, he saw a group of Sprites in an upper chamber. Once again his vision shifted as if he was now seeing into the Sprites, and he saw them as a seething mass of myriad tiny klatha black energy points . . . all but three of those present in the upper chamber. The Nanites were klatha or klatha-using creatures too, and this was apparently what they looked like to a vatch.
Pausert directed a bolt of dark energy, torn from the mass of the great roiling thing that was the vatch, at each of the Nanite-creatures. It absorbed the little sparks of klatha energy that were billions of Nanites, and consumed the bodies in gouts of incandescent heat. He saw the three noninfected ones flee, and then he finished the business with a explosive bolt of raw energy that simply vaporized the now empty upper stories of the tower. That would do as a parting present for the safety of ancient Nartheby, if not Arvin's reputation—since he'd be the one blamed for the destruction in the historical records.
Now take us all back to our ship, and then take the ship where I tell you. Pausert had already decided that if he caught the vatch, he'd have it take them to within a few hours of the Imperial Capital. To Great Patham's Seventh Hell with all this mucking about in Egger Space!
The grayness whirled and surged. Even by the vatch standards of non-distance this place was far off. And dark . . . and then tumbling. Finally, they were back in the Venture.
But not the Venture in the stillness of the void: the Venture on the expanding wild edge of matter. The Venture was being violently flung and rolled as a great tumbling tidal wave of energy and existence picked her up. The ship was on the verge of breaking up, torn between two states and sometimes existing in both. Her engines roared at full throttle, and then cut out and then roared again. Gravity surged in waves that almost made the captain black out as he reached for the drive controls. The engines cut again . . . then free lightnings danced through the ship. Sparks zipped and sizzled. The Venture vibrated like some giant jaw's-harp.
Nothing could survive the front-wave of singularity for long. Even the vatch was being battered and torn, and so were the cables of pure force and the klatha hooks.
Suddenly, they were out of there.
The control panels were alive with flashing lights and the air in the control room was thick with smoke and the sound of damage alarms.
Pausert fought with the controls, realizing as he did so that his grip on the vatch was literally being torn away. The vatch was so desperate to leave that it was willing to part with large pieces of itself in order to do so.
One of the control panels was actually on fire. Pausert just let the vatch go, and focused all his attention on the damaged Venture. Vezzarn had managed to get out of his acceleration couch and grab a fire extinguisher and spray the burning control panel. But the power systems were running on emergency auxiliary now. The lights dimmed and flickered. The Venture's main drive engines stuttered and hiccupped . . . and were still. Unfortunately, one auxiliary lateral rocket still fired—even though the automatic controls had it shut down—and it spun the Venture in a clumsy spiral. The lights cut completely as the captain managed to shut the lateral down with one of the manual override switches.
There was an eerie silence. A spaceship is never completely silent. There is always some machinery running. There is always some vibration, even at the subliminal level. Spacers became inured to the roar of the main drive to the point where they just didn't notice it. But when everything is still, the ship is dying or dead.
The Venture drifted like a derelict hulk. Inertia kept her on the slow spiral that the misfiring lateral had caused. Then the standby batteries cut in, lighting only the emergency glows and the instrument readouts. The air was thick with smoke, burning the captain's eyes—though not as much as the readouts from the instrument panel did.
Pausert knew sadness and despair. His ship was in no state to go anywhere. The old Venture would be lucky if it ever made another planetfall.
But he didn't let any of that show in his voice. "Vezzarn, better check the engine room. Give me a damage assessment as soon as possible. Goth, check the air recycler. Hantis, you and the Leewit start collecting suits, and get yourselves suited up. Then report back here." The captain was already examining the control panels. "A navigation readout would be good, too, if we've got anything still operating that will pick up beacons."
The captain himself had already taken the small atomic powered lamp from the worktable, and started undogging the access hatches to the control panel's electronics boards. The circuitry there was mostly solid-state, but there were various plug-in spares he could try.
"Ow." He burned his hand and sucked his fingers while trying to work out what was going on. The smoke didn't help. He waved it away and continued to examine the boards. He moved one and was rewarded with a shower of sparks. At least there was still power, even if Patham himself didn't know what was shorting out what.
He took a deep breath, coughed, and let klatha guide his hands. He pulled out one of the units. Part of it was melted and Pausert dropped it hastily with a word he hoped the Leewit wasn't near enough to hear. He plugged the replacement unit from the spares compartment into the panel. Luckily it was a J-83 and that was one of the modules the Venture carried in case of emergencies. He was rewarded by a buzzing sound and a red-flickering in the darkened control room. Hastily pulling his head out of the control panel, the captain was relieved to see that the flickering was caused by a bank of telltales, flashing red. The buzzing was stilled by flicking a switch or two, and the telltales at least told him where to start looking. There was life in the boards, and that in itself was reassuring. What wasn't, was the sheer number of faults being registered.
There was a sudden comforting hum, a vibration of machinery somewhere in the deepspace-silence of the Venture. The intercom crackled to life. "Captain, I've got the number two auxiliary running on manual. We can draw power for the air recycler off that, and some lights."
"Well done, Vezzarn. What's the status of the rest of the engine room?"
"Not good, Captain." There was a pause. "We had a burnback. We've lost part of the aft tubes. The main drive . . . I don't know yet, Captain."
It was not what Pausert needed to hear. He studied the telltales, deciding what to do next.
Goth came in. "Got power to the air recycler again. They're working just fine, Captain. We'll at least have this smoke dealt with pretty soon." She went straight to the communicator and dialed the space beacon frequencies.