Modesitt,L.E. - Recluce 03 - Fall of Angels

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Fall of Angels

by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.

Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet

Maps by Ellisa Mitchell

Edited by David G. Hartwell

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Tor® Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com

For David Hartwell

Who was willing to look at something different from the beginning

INITIAL CHARACTERS

Crew of the United Faith Forces' frigate WINTERLANCE

RYBA Captain, also a Sybran nomad

NYLAN Chief Engineer, half Sybran

SARYN Second Pilot, half Sybran

AYRLYN Communications Officer, non-Sybran

GERLICH Weapons Officer, Sybran, nonnomad

MERTIN Logistics Officer, Sybran, nonnomad

Marines attached to the WINTERLANCE

FIERRAL Commanding Officer

BERLIS

CESSYA

DENALLE

DESINADA

ELLYSIA

FRELITA

HULDRAN

ISTRIL

JASEEN Also a combat medtech

KADRAN

KYSEEN

LLYSELLE

MRAN

RIENADRE

SELITRA

SHERIZ

SIRET

STENTANA

WEBLYA

WEINDRE

Part I - THE FALL

I

"THERE WERE ANGELS in Heaven in those days, and there were demons, and the demons were the

creators and the creation of chaos...

"In that distant battle between the fires of the demons and the ice lances of the angels, the

very skies twisted in upon themselves, and the angels, who came from cold Heaven, were cast down

and strewn across the stars.

"Those angels, the first and last from far Heaven, when they found the world, knew not where

they were, nor could they see even the stars from whence they had come. And they descended unto

the Roof of the World.

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"There they built the Citadel of the Winds, the tower called Black, with those chained

lightnings yet they had retained, carving unto themselves a high refuge and a reminder of their

past.

"So as they had come, so earlier had come those from the lands and heritage of the demons, and

those were men who believed not that women should wear blades nor speak their minds and thoughts.

"In the time of that first summer came armsmen, inspired by the demons, and there were battles

across the Roof of the World, and blood ...

"Thus continued the conflict between order and chaos, between those who would force order and

those who would not, and between those who followed the blade and those who followed the spirit.

"Of the great ones were the angel Ryba, Nylan of the forge of order and the fires of Heaven,

Saryn of the dark blades of death, and Ayrlyn of the songs. ..."

Book of Ayrlyn

Section I

[Restricted Text]

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

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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

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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

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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.

III

NYLAN SHOOK. HIS head. He hadn't expected that he'd be able to shake his head-or that he'd even be

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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

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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."

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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.

IV

"HAVE YOU DETERMINED the cause of the great perturbation between order and chaos-the one that

shook the world last evening?" asks the white-haired man dressed in the more traditional flowing

white robes.

The younger, but balding, man straightens and looks up from the circular glass in the middle of

the white oak table. "Ser?"

"I asked, Hissl, about the great perturbation. Jissek still lies in a stupor, and my glass

shows that waves flooded the Great North Bay."

"Waves always flood the Great North Bay, honored Terek." Hissl inclines his head to the older

magician, and the summer light that reflects off the roof of the keep of Lornth and through the

window glistens on his bald pate. "I do believe that order fought chaos in the skies, and that

times will be changing."

"A safe prediction," snorts Terek. "The times always change. Tell me something useful."

The man in the white tunic and trousers stands and bows to the older white-clad man. "There are

strangers approaching from the skies."

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"There are always strangers approaching. How do you know they are from the skies?"

"The glass shows a man and a woman. The man has hair colored silver like the stars, and the

woman has flaming red hair, like a fire. They are seated in a tent of iron."

"An old man and a redheaded weakling?"

"The man is young, and the woman is a warrior, and they bring other women warriors."

"How many?" Terek walks to the unglazed window of the lower magicians' tower, where the

shutters tremble against the leather thongs that hold them open. His eyes look out upon the barely

green hilly fields above the river.

"A score."

"I should tremble at a score of women warriors? This is the message of such a great

disturbance?"

Hissl bows again. "You have asked what I have seen, and you mock what I tell you."

"Bah! I will wait until Jissek wakes."

"As you wish. I have warned you of the danger."

Terek shakes his head and turns toward the plank door that squeaks on its rough hinges with

each gust of the spring wind. He does not shut it as he leaves.

Hissl waits until he can no longer hear the sound of boots on the tower stairs. Then he smiles,

recalling the lances of winter that the strangers bear, and the breadth of the women's shoulders.

V

NYLAN WENT THROUGH the manual controls a third time, as well as through the checklist once more.

Then he studied the rough maps and the readouts again. He had one of the two landing beacons, and

his was the one that the other three landers would hone in on-assuming he managed to set down

where he planned, assuming that he could find the correct high plateau in the middle of the right

high mountain range without getting spitted on the surrounding needle-knife peaks. The second

beacon would go down with Ryba-in case he ran into trouble.

"Black two, this is black one. Comm check." Nylan watched his breath steam as he waited for a

reply.

"One, this is two. Clear and solid."

"Good. You're cleared to break orbit."

The engineer took a deep breath. "I'm not quite through the checks. About four units, I'd

guess."

"Let us know."

"Will do."

In the couches behind him were the eight marines assigned to his lander. The craft wasn't

really a lander, but a space cargo/personnel shuttle that could be and had been hastily modified

into a lifting body with stub wings for a single atmospheric entry in emergency situations. Only

one of the four landers carried by the Winterlance was actually designed for normal atmospheric

transits, and it had far less capacity. That was the one Ryba was bringing down with the high-

priority cargo items.

Although Nylan had more experience in atmospheric flight than Saryn or even Ryba, he wasn't

keen about being the lead pilot through an atmosphere he'd never seen, belonging to a planet he

suspected shouldn't exist. Because he was even less keen about dying of starvation or lack of

oxygen in orbit, he continued with the checklist. Still, the business of trying to hit mountain

plateaus bothered him, even if it were the only hope for most of the crew. "Harnesses strapped and

tight?"

"We're tight, ser," responded Fierral from the couch beside him, the blue-eyed squad leader,

who once had been a brunette, but who now had become a fiery redhead as a result of the

Winterlance's strange underjump. "It wouldn't be a good idea to be floating around here anyway,

would it now?"

"No," admitted the engineer. He took another deep breath before flicking through the remainder

of the checklist.

He scanned the screens, then thumbed the comm stud. "Black one, this is two. Breaking orbit

this time."

"We'll be tracking you."

"Thanks." Nylan pulsed the jets, amused as always that it took energy to leave orbit, then

watched the three limited screens as the lander slowly rose, then dropped, although neither

sensation was more than a hint with the gentle movements. He knew those movements would be far

less gentle at the end of the flight.

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The first brush with the solidity of the upper atmosphere was a dragging skid, and enough of a

warming in the lander that Nylan's breath no longer steamed.

The second brush was longer, harder, like a bareback ride across a fall-frozen stubbled field

just before the snows of a Sybran winter began. And the lander warmed more.

Nylan studied the screens, not liking either the temperature readouts or the closures.

"Make sure those harnesses are tight! This is going to be rough."

"Yes, ser."

With the third and last atmospheric contact, the lander bucked, stiffly, and then again, even

more roughly, as the thin whisper of the upper atmosphere slowly built into a screaming shriek.

Whhheeeeeee . . .

The lander was coming in fast... too fast.

Nylan flared the nose, bleeding off speed, but increasing the heat buildup. Then he dropped it

fractionally.

Whheeeeeeeee . . .

The lander bounced, as though it had skidded on something solid in the upper atmosphere, then

dropped as if through a vacuum. Nylan's guts pushed up through his throat, and he could taste bile

and smell his own sweated - out fear.

"Friggin' pilot... not made of durall steel. .."

"Does ... best he can . .. wants ... to live, too ..."

"Don't apologize for an engineer, Desinada ..."

Nylan tried to match geographic landmarks with the screens, but the lander vibrated too much

for him to really see.

The sweat beaded up on his forehead, the result of nonexistent ventilation, nerves, and the

heat bleeding through the barely adequate ablative heat shields, and burned into the corners of

his eyes, as his hands and mind worked to keep the lander level.

The buffeting began to subside, enough that he could see ocean far below and what looked like

the tail of the fish continent ahead.

He checked the distance readouts and the altitude. He'd lost too much height. After studying

the fuel reserves, little enough, he thumbed on the jets and flattened his descent angle.

At the lower speed, though, the effect of the high winds became more pronounced, and the edges

of the stub wings began to flex, almost to chatter. With little enough power, the engineer could

do nothing except hold the lander level, and wish ... He tried to imagine smoothing the airflow

around the lifting body, easing the turbulence, soothing the laminar flow, and it almost seemed as

though he were outside the ship, in a neuronet, a different neuronet, almost like smoothing the

Winterlance's fusactor power flows.

The chattering diminished, and Nylan slowly exhaled.

Another hundred kays passed underneath, and he thumbed off the jets, hoping to be able to save

some of the meager fuel for landing adjustments.

Far beneath him, the screens showed what seemed to be a rocky desert, a boulder-strewn expanse

baked in the sun. Ahead rose the ice-knife peaks that circled the high plateau that was his

planned destination.

He thumbed the jets once more, again imagining smoothing the airflow around the lander.

Surprisingly, the lander climbed slightly, and Nylan permitted himself a slight grin.

The DRI pointed to the right, and the engineer eased the, lander rightward, wincing as the

lifting body lost altitude in the maneuver.

All too soon, the high alpine meadows appeared in the screens as green dots-small green dots,

but the southernmost one grew rapidly into a long dash of green set amid gray rock.

The lander arrived above the target meadow, except the meadow showed gray lumps along the

edges, and a sheer drop-off at the east end that plunged more than a kay down to an evergreen

forest.

From what Nylan could tell, the wind was coming out of the east, and he dropped the lander into

a circling descent that would bring the lifting body onto a final approach into the wind. He hoped

the approach wouldn't be too final, but the drop-off allowed the possibility of remaining airborne

for a bit if the long grassy strip were totally unusable.

As he eased around the descending circular approach, the lander began to buffet. Nylan kept

easing the nose up, trying to kill the lifting body's airspeed to just above stalling before he

hit the edge of the tilted high meadow that seemed so awfully short as he brought the lander over

the ground that seemed to have more rocks than grass or bushes.

He eased the nose up more, letting the trailing edge of the belly scrape the ground, fighting

the craft's tendency to fishtail, almost willing the lifting body to remain stable.

The lander shivered and shuddered, and a grinding scream ripped through Nylan's ears as he

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Modesitt, L.E. - Recluce 03 - Fall of Angels

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