Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(2)

"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.