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 visible spectrum, 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 firm 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."
"Trying to live in a place hotter than Jobi would kill most of us-except you and Ayrlyn," responded Gerlich's voice.
Saryn swallowed in the background, but Nylan said nothing.
"It wouldn't be a revel for us." Ayrlyn's brown eyes seemed to flash blue.
Ryba nodded curtly, but not quite so coldly. "Anything else?"
"I think there's some form of life down there, and there shouldn't be, not without some form of moon, or unless we're looking at a planoformed world. But there aren't any electronic emissions."
"Maybe it's a lapsed colony world."
"Could be. Whose? How long has it been isolated?"
"Stop it, please . . ." said Ayrlyn. "If the fusactors are down, can we fix them? If not, what do we do?"
"We die or colonize." Ryba looked coldly back to Nylan. "Atmosphere?"
"Rough analysis indicates low CO, oxygen about twenty-two percent, mostly nitrogen. There's nothing obviously wrong, but I can't rule out toxic or chronic trace elements in the soil or atmosphere."
"Inhabited?"
"The traces I've picked up say so." The engineer shrugged again. "Could be anything, but it's carbon-based, and, if I had to guess, probably some form of humanoid. There are some regular patches that could be fields and some lines that could be roads ..."
"Better than savages, but not much."
"You could be jumping to conclusions," pointed out Ayrlyn.
"I have to go with the odds." The captain glanced back at the readouts. "And we're continuing to lose power."
"This whole world is against the odds."
Ryba turned and called up the visual display of the smaller continent on her console. "Nylan, Saryn, Ayrlyn . . . come here."
"Captain? Gerlich here. What's the drill? The marine force leader wants to know. So does Merlin."
"We're in stable orbit, but we'll have to abandon the ship. We're surveying landing sites. You can commence figuring loads for the landers. Something along the line of configuration C."
"Self-sustaining?" came the weapons officer's voice.
"That's affirmative. Local culture looks primitive, but organized. Roads and fields, and that probably means things like blades, archers, and cavalry or the local equivalent if they have horses or what passes for them. Mass density is standard, and that means metal-working."
"Understood. All four landers appear operational..."
"Fusactors aren't going to work here, Gerlich," added Nylan. "You'll have to modify the configuration for that."
"Fusactors work everywhere."
"Not here, wherever here is."
The captain looked at Nylan. "You sound absolutely certain."
"You can have Gerlich test the survival fusactor, but it won't work."
"Weapons . . . the engineer is probably right, but test the fusactor and let me know."
"Will do, Captain. How much time do we have?"
"Take enough time to do it right, Gerlich. We're operating on stored power. We can't take the tier two firin cells, but try to make room for the fully charged cells left in tier three."
"What tools?"
"All the hand tools, and"-Ryba looked at Nylan-"two sets of laser cutters."
Nylan nodded.
"No energy weapons?" asked Gerlich.
"The heavy-weapons head for one laser. Hand weapons might be useful for a time, but we probably won't have any way to recharge them. All the slug-throwers the marines have. And take all your clothing-especially sweaters or warm things-even if you have to wear it or stuff it into cracks in the landers. And blankets. I can guarantee we won't be coming back for anything."
"We'll get working on it, Captain."
Ryba turned to the bridge crew and gestured to the screen. "Where do we go down? Here's the planet."
The four clustered around the single wide screen.
"Four major continents. The one that looks like a fish- roughly-has an island off it." Ryba glanced at Nylan. "Would we be better off on the island?"
The engineer shook his head. "It's hot; it's so dry that the sensors don't show any moisture, and there are no signs of habitation. It's also pretty rocky."
"What about the big southern continent?"
"Isn't it hot?" asked Saryn. "It's not that far south of the equator."
"Very hot," admitted Nylan.
"You don't seem very positive, Ser Nylan," commented Ryba. "Each unit we sit and talk costs us power, and all you do is say no."
Nylan shrugged. "I'd vote for the second-largest continent. It's got some high mountain plateaus in that western range. It's spring or early summer now, and we can land. There's greenery there, but no signs of habitation-probably too cold for the locals, and it might be helpful not to tramp on anyone's boots."
"It's hundreds and hundreds of kays from any access to oceans or major rivers," pointed out Ayrlyn.
"We're not exactly into seafaring," Nylan said dryly.
"Fine," said the captain. "We land on this mountain plateau. We get a defensible position-maybe. We get snow and ice over our head in the winter, a short growing season, and probably not much access to building materials."
"We also have more time to establish ourselves before the local authorities, or what passes for such, show up," answered Nylan.
"It's insane to try and put a lander into a mountain pasture. It could be just a high-altitude swamp," protested Saryn.
"The odds are against that, and there are two areas where we could land. Each is twice as long as a lander's set-down distance."
"Twice as long in the middle of mountains that could rip a lander into little shreds."
Nylan shrugged. "How long will anyone last if we set down on those hot and flat plains?"
"We don't even know if they have local authorities, or if the locals are intelligent, or if they even look remotely like us," protested Saryn. "This is insane."
"I think you just validated the engineer's suggestion," said Ryba. "There's too much we don't know, and we don't have the energy to shuttle things off the ship. Besides . . ." She left the sentence unfinished, but Nylan knew the unspoken words. Except for removable power supplies, weapons, and tools, the Winterlance would shortly be unusable in any case.
"Trying to hit mountain landing areas? That's crazy."
"You're right," Nylan agreed. "Except that trying to land anywhere else would be even riskier. The landing is high risk, but it makes survival lower risk. Take your choice."
"We're opting for long-term survival," announced the captain. "I'm not interested in merely prolonging existence enough to die of heat exhaustion on a nice flat plain where landing is easy. I'll begin computing the entry paths," the captain announced. "Nylan, would you do a survey of your equipment to see if there's anything else that could be useful planetside?"
The engineer nodded as the captain assigned the responsibilities for cannibalizing the Winterlance.