"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."

"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.

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 eased the craft full onto its belly. The impact of full ground contact threw Nylan against the harness straps, and the straps dug deeply into flesh and muscle. The engineer kept compensating as the lander skidded toward the drop-off, slowing, slowing, but still shuddering eastward, and tossing Nylan from side to side in his harness.

With a final shudder, the lander's nose dug into something, and the craft rocked to a halt.

For a long moment, the engineer just sat in the couch. "We're down." Nylan slowly unfastened the safety harness, trying to ignore the spots of tenderness across his body that would probably remind him for days about the roughness of his landing.

"Did you have to be so rough?" asked Fierral. "Any emergency landing that you can walk away from is a good one. We're walking away from this one."

"You may be walking, ser, but the rest of us may have to crawl." The squad leader shook her head, and the short flame-red hair glinted.

"Are you sure he's done?" asked another marine. "We're done." Nylan touched the stud that cracked the hatch. There wasn't any point in waiting. Either the ship's spectrographic analyzers had been right or they hadn't, and there was no way to get back to orbit, and not enough supplies in the ship to do more than starve to death-especially since no one knew where they were and since there were no signs of technology advanced enough to effect a rescue.

The air was chill, almost cold, colder even than northern Sybra in summer, but still refreshing. A scent of evergreen accompanied the chill.

With a deep breath, Nylan stepped to the hatch on the right side of the lander and used the crank to open it the rest of the way, "It smells all right."

"I can't believe you just opened it. Just like that," said Fierral.

"We didn't have any choice. We're not going anywhere. We can breath it, or we can't." Because the lander had come to rest with the right side higher than the left, Nylan had to lower himself to the ground.