II
"WHAT ARE YOU going to do when you get back to Heaven? Visit your family?" asked Saryn in a low voice, barely audible above the hiss of the ventilators. As second pilot, she had control of the Winterlance while the captain dozed in the command couch. Saryn's eyes were glazed, her mind half on the neuronet.
"I'll probably think about that when the time comes. Might be a long time," pointed out Nylan. "Headquarters has extended all flight officers' tours another two years." The engineer's thoughts flicked across the power net, only a section of the full neuronet, as he answered.
"Why don't they just say that we're stuck until we drive the demons out?"
"Top angels-excuse me, Cherubim and Seraphim- express their commands more temperately." Nylan cleared his throat. "Where are we headed?"
Saryn expressed a mental shrug through the net. "I've got the coordinates, but the captain didn't say why. We're positioning for an underspace jump, and awaiting further orders."
ALLNET CALL! ALLNET CALL!
As the neuronet alert jabbed through his thoughts, Nylan stiffened and glanced around the bridge of the United Faith Forces' frigate Winterlance.
Ryba-the captain-hit the net so quickly, her thoughts cold and clear across the neuronet, that Nylan wondered if she had ever been asleep.
At times like these, the engineer wondered if he ever really had known the captain. He knew that she drove herself, that she spent hours in high-gee exercise, that she knew and practiced not only unarmed martial combat, but even the antique twin sword exercises of Heaven's Sybran horse nomads-and that the blades on her stateroom wall were razor sharp and had sharpened points as well. Then, she had been raised in the nomad heritage where women fought and commanded-and she did command.
Nylan stifled a yawn and eased fully into the net, catching the last of the on-line feed.
"... line two to be led and coordinated by UFFS Winterlance ... line three to be led by UFFS Stormsweep. Action will commence at 1343 standard . .."
"Shit.. "The contemptuous word that floated unattached through the net came from Saryn, who had just released the conn to Ryba, although Saryn had stayed linked to catch the incoming message.
"Right enough," affirmed the captain, her tone not quite sardonic. "Twelve towers, and only fifty of us, and half are destroyers with barely adequate D-draws."
Saryn stood, wiggling her fingers. Then she tried to massage her neck with her left hand before settling back into her couch and trying to rest while Ryba reoriented the Winterlance prior to setup for the underspace jump prior to the attack.
With a deep breath, Nylan stretched. The engineer could check the files for the whole message, but the captain had it, and he knew enough-more than enough. The demons had a picket line of towers across the transit corridor, with webs into the underspace that would effectively cut the United Faith Alliance in two.
The damned towers that drew power from who knew where and how were almost invulnerable-almost. Except when enough de-energization was concentrated on the nexus points in their energy links, and then the entire line went up into pure energy. Most of the time, though, it was the angel ships that went up in energy.
The towers had to be hard to build, because there were only about fifty known to exist. That still meant enough to quarter the UFA and to disrupt trade and communications totally.
"Engines ... interrogative fusactor status." The captain's inquiry burned into Nylan's thoughts.
The engineer suppressed his annoyance. Ryba could have dropped into the power subnet easily enough; it wasn't as though the Winterlance were anywhere close to jump or combat yet. He slipped deeper into the system and ran through the checks, then pulsed the summary to her.
"Thank you, engines. Power net looks good."
Nylan straightened in the couch and watched as the captain studied the displays-the ones spread across the front of the cockpit, and those in her mind. Her thoughts flicked through the Winterlance's neuronet, making course adjustments, tweaking the power flow from the twin fusactors, and studying, again and again, the icy images of the demon ships of the Rationalists.
"Lots of power there, Ryba," observed the wiry white-blond engineer from his third seat. His unvocalized words flowed through the neuronet to her.
"I wish you two would speak aloud. All those empathetic overtones mess up the net." Ayrlyn, the comm officer, took a deep breath, although her words were also unspoken, flowing through the net with ice-burning overedges.
Empathetic overtones? Just because they occasionally slept together? Nylan glanced sideways to the fourth seat where the brunette sat, her thoughts restricted to the commnet, as she monitored everything from standing wave to demon frequencies.
"Net's faster." Ryba's no-nonsense words snapped across the net with their own burning edges.
Nylan winced and decided to check the power subnet again.
"Ten till jump. Time adjustment will be negative five for sync."
The engineer moistened his lips. Backtime twists out of jumps seemed to give the angel ships an advantage, but the power requirements on the fusactors meant they had to be rebuilt almost every third sortie, and eight units was the max backtime possible for an angel cruiser. The destroyers could go ten, but their underspace mass drag was less. So were their shields.
A negative five meant the force would contain at least one heavy cruiser, with three to five de-energizer draws. That also meant trouble.
"Trouble .. ." As if to confirm Nylan's concerns, Ayrlyn added the single word verbally.
"Weapons ... interrogative D-status."
"De-energizers are ready, Captain." Both Gerlich's voice and "net voice" came across as a smooth deep baritone, smooth as the man himself, unusually so for a full Sybran. Of the ship's officers, half were full-blood Sybran-Ryba, Gerlich, and Mertin-big, broad-shouldered, and, despite their size, most at home in the chill of the high latitudes of cold Sybra. Ayrlyn was mostly Svennish, and Saryn and Nylan were about half and half.
"Interrogative mass distribution."
"Within parameters, Captain." Mertin squeaked, despite his size, both in person and on the net, perhaps because he was barely out of the Institute.
The time clicked by silently as the Winterlance hurled toward her underspace jump point, as the dozens of other angel ships converged on that same jump point.
"Stand by for jump."
"Engines, standing by."
"Comm, standing by ..."
The acknowledgments flicked across the net, sequentially yet instantaneously.
"Jump .. . NOW!"
The Winterlance dropped underspace, with a rush of golden glory, as though on spread wings, that instant of pain/ecstasy enduring forever, yet gone before it had begun ...
... then realspace slammed tight around the cruiser.
The rep screen flared bright with the images of nearly fifty angel ships, arrow-wedged toward the glittering line of light held together by the mirror tower ships of the demons.
Nylan could sense the dark image of a trapped angel transport, an insect struggling futilely in the web of energy, struggling with full drives, with shields, yet unraveling into dust and energy in the instants after the angel force dropped toward the demon mirror line-that impossible energy web that stretched across seemingly empty space to snare any angel ship within light-years, in real or in underspace.
"Full shields. Everything you can get me, Nylan."
"Yes, ser." - "Begin overlap ... now!"
"Full shields in place, Captain." Nylan dropped himself down through the net practically to the individual flux level, to smooth the energy flows, and to develop maximum power for both screens and propulsion fields.
At the same time, he had to fight the feedback created by the overlapped shields of the cruisers flanking the Winter-lance. On the right was the Polarflow, on the left the Deepchill.
The Polar/low's engineer was either rough or new, or both, and the power fluctuations from the ship created unnecessary energy eddies across the entire shared shield, eddies that fed back into the Winterlance's powernet.
"Smooth your fields, three!" snapped Ryba over the command net. Three was the Polarflow, and Nylan nodded.
The worst of the energy fluctuations smoothed, but Nylan shook his head. The other engineer just didn't have the touch, and nothing except experience would give it to him or her. The problem was that the demons wouldn't give that much time, either, before the mirror towers lashed the fluctuations into energy storms whose feedback would rip the Polarflow apart.
The representational screen showed the first line of angel ships, the destroyers, sweeping "down" toward the picket line of light.
"One, close up."
Ryba's commands seemed distant as Nylan, his senses deep in the power subnet, merged the fusactor flows into an eddy-free flow.
"Line two... begin D-sweep at my mark. Five, four, three, two ... MARK!"
The darkness of the ordered shields of the second line deepened as the cruisers accelerated toward the tower ship pickets, a darkness all the more profound for its depth, a depth that radiated the smoothed harmony of merged energies.
A blinding line of light flared through the screens, through Nylan's mind, shivering him to the tips of the nerves in fingertips and toes, and leaving his eyes watering.
When his mind cleared, long before his eyes, he could sense through the net that that blinding line of light from the tower ships had shattered the first line of attacking angel forces, nearly a dozen fast destroyers.
Still, without so much as a flicker in the overlapping screens, the Winterlance, and the second line, dropped its darkness toward the mirror-lights of the demons, and Ryba squared the ship on its tower-shattering course. "De-energizers."
"Charging," came Gerlich's affirmation across the net. The screens of the Rationalists' tower ships flared and merged, creating a shimmering wall that seemed to reflect all electronic signals and visual images back through the Winterlance's neuronet.
Ryba winced as the signals knifed through her skull; Nylan dropped off the top level of the net. So did Ayrlyn. "Activate D-one." The captain's thoughts were cold, even though Nylan knew she trembled in the command couch, even as the combined signals of the angels' fleets and the demons' towers flared back through her mind and her body.
"D-one is activated."
"Activate D-two."
"D-two is activated."
Nylan moistened his dry lips, finally opening his eyes, then easing back onto the neuronet's top level, where his senses slipped across the screens and inputs that the captain juggled as line two began the sweep through the probing disruption lines cast by the demons.
With twelve towers and only fifty angel ships, he didn't expect too much from the de-energizer beams of line two, except that the demons' towers would have to draw on their own power, rather than use laser or solar energy to hold the reflective focusing against the angels' fleet. It often took four lines to even get the reflective shields of the demons to dim.
Nylan watched the representational screen-no visual scans would show the intertwinings of energies and positions that marked the angel-demon conflicts. The energy draw beams converged on the selected nexus point, the two from the Winterlance, two from the Deepchill, and one, of course, from the struggling Polar/low.
"Three! Get that D-beam in position."
There was no response from the Polar/low, but somehow the demons' towers shifted in space, and the D-beams flared into nothingness.
The captain flattened the propulsion fields and slewed the ship sideways at a right angle to the course line, then even before the frigate was reoriented, pulsed the de-energizers twice more on the nexus linch point between the shields of two towers.
Another pale amber de-energizer beam struck the same linch point, then another, and then a fourth.
"Power, Nylan. Power!"
The engineer dropped into the neuronet, and a hundred flashes of energy ripped at him, enough that his whole body burned, as he boosted the fusactors to nearby twenty percent over rated maximum and channeled everything but the power to the ship's screens into the de-energizers.
Two disrupter fields bracketed the Winterlance, and Nylan dropped his senses into the lowest power sublevels, smoothing fields and trying to anticipate the feedback effects.
Somewhere, on the neuronet levels above him, he could sense the implosion as the Polarflow was sucked into over-space chaos.
Ryba dropped the frigate's ambient gravity to near-null while lifting the Winterlance almost on her tail. The demon disrupter brackets faded. Sweat poured from Nylan's forehead and down across his closed eyes as he eased the flux lines into smooth lines of power from each fusactor and merged them. He let the right fusactor rise to one hundred ten percent rated output and the left to one hundred nine percent until just before the hint of electronic chaos began to appear. Then he dropped both to just shy of max.
Even so, the system telltales began to flash amber, like pinpoints of pain through Nylan's body, and he took the ventilation system off-line to compensate, knowing the two dozen marines would start cursing even as the cold air stopped flowing from the ventilator jets.
The flight crew members were used to the loss of ventilators in combat, and were usually too preoccupied to worry, but the backup combat troops weren't. They hated serving as backups, but ever since the Icewind had captured a demon tower, the angel high command had insisted on two squads of marines on each cruiser. Of course, reflected Nylan, no other cruiser had even come close to a tower ship, and the angel scientists had yet to figure out how the damned tower worked, except that it somehow both created chaos perturbations and used them to distort realspace.
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, cooling feedback, 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 back-surged 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-slammed through the Winterlance, 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.