L. Modesitt: Fall of Angels

“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 Winterlance . On the right was the Polarflow, on the left the Deepchill .

The Polarflow ’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, eventhough 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 Polarflow.

“Three! Get that D-beam in position.”

There was no response from the Polarflow, 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 nearly twenty percentover 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 overspace 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.