Fall of Angels (The Saga of Recluce #6)(3)

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.