"Are you all right, Kimber?"

"I'm fine, Lars."

"What about you, Ross?"

There was no response.

"Kimber, put on a breather and go see if you can help Ross!"

Once again, he sensed the movement behind him as Kimber moved to the cockpit door. Sands and Halley both donned breathers of their own. If the ship was holed, they were losing precious oxygen to the atmosphere.

The shriek got louder as Kimber opened the cockpit door. He took the time to glance over his shoulder.

Aft of the cockpit, the fuselage had been peeled back and loose wires were whipping in the breeze. The compartments immediately aft of the cockpit were in ruin.

"Close the door!" he yelled.

Kimber hesitated. Her white-rimmed eyes gazed at him from over her breather mask. "But I've got tofind Ross!"

"Don't bother," he said. "Ross isn't back there anymore."

Kimber struggled to close the door while Sands turned all of his attention to his flying. In the thirty seconds or so since they had been hit,SparrowHawk had nearly made it to the cloud wall. Miraculously, the prowlers had not fired again. The ship shook violently as a universe of dark clouds closed around them. Despite Sands best efforts to keep it steady,SparrowHawk began a slow roll to the right.

"One of our elevons just carried away," he said to no one in particular. As he watched the few working instruments, he noticed the power levels of both reactors dropping. Whatever chunk had just left the ship had been sufficient to trigger the automatic shutdown circuits. His crippled fusion powered aircraft was about to become a crippled glider.

"That's it!" Halley said from beside him.

He nodded, and then reached for the console between them. A quick flick of the console cover revealed a large red handle. Sands reached inside, gave it a twist, and pulled. There was a quick machine gun sound as explosive bolts fired all over the ship. Suddenly, they were smashed down into their acceleration couches by a hammer blow that made the city catapult seem weak.

Then they were falling free!

Chapter 13: Marooned in Mid Air.

"We're falling!" Kimber screamed.

Even as she said it, the sensation of weightlessness vanished, to be replaced by the normal pull of gravity.

The sudden solidity was an illusion. The cockpit was still falling free -- a fact confirmed by the continuous popping of their eardrums -- but had reached terminal velocity in the thick Saturnian atmosphere.

Unlike the ejection seats used in smaller aircraft,SparrowHawk had been designed to save its crew by ejecting sections of fuselage. Five escape pods encompassed all of the inhabited compartments in the ship. These were detached by explosive bolts and lifted free by powerful rocket motors. Simultaneously, the doomed aircraft's wings were blown away and its uninhabited portions -- cargo bays, fuel tanks, and inert drive reactors -- had begun the long fall to the hydrogen sea. The escape pods stabilized and followed more slowly.

Each pod was designed to automatically deploy a large rescue balloon and begin emitting radio distress calls sixty seconds after ejection. As quickly as gravity returned, Sands tore the maintenance cover from the center console and began pulling electronic cards from their slots. Under existing circumstances, nothing would be more disastrous than to have the pod's rescue aids activated. They would merely serve to draw the pursuing Alliance warcraft directly to them.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Halley's frightened voice demanded over the intercom. The wind noise had subsided considerably, but still made speech difficult.

"I hope I'm interrupting the balloon deploy sequence!"

Halley moved to protest, then shut up as she thought through the consequences. She began taking cards from Sands and stacking them haphazardly around her feet. They finished a full dozen seconds before thesequencer was due to explode the balloon out of its overhead storage container.

"We'll know soon enough," Sands muttered as he eyed the instrument panel chronometer. The long seconds ticked by with no explosion.

Finally, Halley nodded and said, "Okay, genius! How are we going to deploy now that we've wiped out the sequencer?"

Sands reached into the center console, fished around, then pulled two wires free. Their frayed, bare metal ends glinted coppery in the soft gray light filtering through the windscreen.

The breather slurred Halley's words as she asked, "Is that the firing circuit?"

"I'm betting our lives on it," Sands replied with more confidence than he felt.

In truth, his every action since pulling the ejection handle had been one of desperation. Somewhere above them, four rescue pods were drifting through clouds, suspended beneath their 200-meter metalized balloons and screaming loudly for help. On the screens of Micah Bolin's fleet, four blinking red target markers would be glowing like so many fireflies as weapons operators vied to see who would be the first to down the helpless pods. With luck, they would be so intent on their task that no one would notice a fifth pod had dropped completely off their screens.

Kimber demanded to know what was going on. Halley quickly explained what they were doing. Kimber gulped and commented on the heat that was already soaking through the cockpit walls.

"It will get worse," Sands warned. He watched the altimeter, one of the few instruments still working. As he did so, he kept wondering if Dane had felt this way while he waited for the pressure to crush him. The thought preyed on Sands's mind. It was all he could do not to touch the wires together to end their fall.

Seconds turned into tens of seconds, and then into minutes that lasted an eternity. The struggle to keep the stabbing pains from his ears required almost continuous clenching of his jaw muscles. Sweat ran in irritating rivulets down his brow and puddled between his shoulder blades.

"We can't take much more of this, Lars," Halley warned.

"A little longer," he said, watching the outside temperature rise. Finally, he touched the wires together.

There was a brief spark and no response for the space of half a heartbeat. An explosion shattered the silence somewhere inside the cockpit overhead. A moment later, three "Oofs!" signaled the fact that the pod had reached the end of its descent.

The cockpit swung in a sickening motion at the end of a long pendulum, then stabilized with its nose up and the deck canted down at a thirty-degree angle. Beyond the windscreen was hot gloom that nearly blanked out the light from the sun. Somewhere close by, a lightning bolt lit the interior of the cloud and the high-pitched thunder of Saturn reverberated through the compartment.

"Are we safe?" Kimber asked, the terror of the past few minutes still evident in her voice.

"If they spot us, we'll have no warning," Sands replied. "In the meantime, we'll adopt the working hypothesis that we've spoofed them."

"How long can we survive in this hot box?" Halley asked.

"Not long. We've got to get back up to altitude and quickly." Sands unstrapped and clambered out of his seat. The cockpit shifted in response to his movement. "We've stopped our descent, but that won'tlast long. As soon as the hydrogen in the balloon cools off, we will start down again. Time to get the emergency reactor cranked up."

"What's that?" Kimber asked.

"Heat source for the balloon. It contains enough plutonium to keep us aloft for a month. We've got to deploy it manually."

He climbed over the back of his own seat and squeezed past Kimber. He stood in the short aisle that ended at the aft cockpit hatch. His breathing tube was just long enough to reach. He braced his back against the locker that contained their sole environment suit and removed a large access panel on the opposite side of the ship. He passed the panel cover to Halley, who stowed it in his seat. Behind the cover was a maze of closely packed equipment.

Sands traced out a large silver pipe that ran vertically the length of the enclosure. It disappeared into a large box inset into the deck. It took Sands a couple of minutes to pry the box loose and work it out of its resting-place. A moment later, he handed it to Kimber. The box trailed a length of flat tubing that had been carefully folded lengthwise.

"What's this?"

"Emergency reactor and about a kilometer of folded heat pipe. We've got to suspend the reactor below the ship before it can produce any power."

"Why?"

He opened the box and removed a cylinder that bore a faint resemblance to an ancient flashlight. "The engineers who built this thing didn't put any shielding around it. If it starts up, it will pour enough neutrons through this cabin to kill us in seconds. In addition, this tubing is heat sensitive memory plastic. It expands to thirty centimeters once the reactor begins supplying heat. If we kink it during the deploy, we'll be taking a one way trip to the hydrogen sea."

Kimber gulped but said nothing.

"I'm moving the timer to its maximum setting," Sands said, matching actions to words. "I figure we've got about sixty seconds before it goes critical after I punch this stud. Here, hold this!"

Sands gave Kimber the cylinder and turned back to the open equipment rack. A moment later, he inserted his boot and kicked at the thin metal of the lower fuselage. The frangible plate set in the lower skin crumbled into a dozen pieces. Through the hole, Sands could see dark clouds illuminated by intermittent lightning flashes.

"All right, hand the reactor to me and stand by to feed the heat pipe out of the container."

He pressed the stud, causing a red light to begin blinking on top of the cylinder. He then lowered it through the hole, being careful to keep the delicate folded plastic tubing from touching the edges of the hole.

"One minute," Halley announced from the front of the pod while they were still paying out the silver heat pipe. "The reactor just came alive!"

"We're in good shape," Sands said without looking up. His back was beginning to ache from working stooped over. Nevertheless, he continued the steady paying out of the flat silver plastic tubing. "We've got half a kilometer between us and the reactor."Two minutes later, the last of the flat silver tube had disappeared through the hole. Already the plastic was beginning to expand to form a hollow tube through which heated hydrogen would rise into the unseen balloon above. Sands retrieved the maintenance cover from Halley and replaced it.

"How long since the balloon inflated?" he asked when he finally returned to his seat. He was feeling dizzy from the heat and his exertions.

"Going on fifteen minutes," Halley replied.

He let out a deep sigh. "If the Alliance were going to blow us out of the sky, they would have done so by now. Ladies, I think we have fooled them. If we can just get back up to a comfortable altitude, we may live to fight another day!"

Admiral Mikal Blount of the Northern Alliance Navy sat at his control station and quietly fumed at the mistakes that had been made during the approach to Glasgow. His crews had carelessly given away their positions prematurely, and in so doing, had placed the whole operation in jeopardy. It irked Blount that his people had stumbled at such a critical moment. The plan had gone along so well for so long.

It had all started at a secret meeting of high-ranking Alliance naval officers two years earlier. The officers had gathered to discuss the ever-increasing restrictions being imposed on the Navy by the Accretionists on the ruling council. Those original, unfocused complaints had evolved into a plan of action for strengthening the Militarist position.

The first phase had been aimed at embarrassing the Accretionists by proving them wrong on a major policy decision. After some debate, the Militarist conspirators had decided to precipitate the crisis with the geneticists of New Philadelphia. The Accretionists and their leader, Kelt Dalishaar, were opposed to annexation by force, and adding such an important city to the Alliance against their wishes could not help but discredit them.

Blount had had nothing to do with the New Philadelphia phase of the operation. He had been too busy planning the raid on Cloudcroft and the subsequent annexation of Glasgow, his own portions of the great subterfuge.

It had taken months to juggle the duty rosters in Cloudcroft's defense center so that a few key people could provide the strategic blind spot needed for a successful raid. He'd also launched a Saturn-wide search for just the right privateer crew. He required a ship whose captain was desperate enough that he would take the dangerous job, yet sufficiently competent to pull it off. It had seemed fate when Blount located Larson Sands and his people as they licked their wounds aboard Port Gregson.

Sands had proven to be everything Blount could have hoped for. He had made the dangerous flight from the North Temperate Belt cloud wall seem easy. He had paralyzed the Alliance military response and had allowed Blount's own bogus raiders to escape to the north without pursuit. In the Dardenelles, Sands had nearly won free by his own efforts. It had required only a single misdirection from Blount's agents in the Cloudcroft command center to clear a hole for the pirate ship. Afterward, Sands had made straight for the Glasgow Cluster and had thereby unwittingly set up the third and most important phase of the Militarist plan.

Reports from Cloudcroft following the raid spoke of a council mired in recriminations. Even the normally unflappable Kelt Dalishaar had screamed for the raiders' blood. There were those who attributed the First Councilor's mood to the pirates' impromptu abduction of the Titanian trade negotiator. Blount knew Dalishaar well enough to wonder if there was not another reason. In any event, Phase II had been aremarkable success.

When he had taken command of his fleet, Blount had had no reason to believe that Phase III would not go as well. After his forces took Glasgow, he planned to interrogate the captured pirates vigorously, and then dispose of their bodies. It was imperative that he find out whom they had told about their mysterious employer. Anyone implicated would have to be killed. To let them live would seriously jeopardize Blount's own life. If one of those was the Titanian factor's whore of a daughter, too bad for her. Indeed, it might be best if she disappeared in any event. Trouble with Titan would make Kelt Dalishaar's policies even more untenable.

The fleet had approached Glasgow through cloud all around the cities' western littoral. They had planned their approach to keep hidden until they were within striking range. Unfortunately, one of the advancing ships had broken into clear air in sight of a Glasgow patrol craft. After that, everything had gone wrong.

Blount's ultimatum to the Glasgow laird had been cut off practically in mid-sentence and the cursed pirate ship had bolted before the fleet could envelop the city. There had been a running fight in cloud. The pirates had been brazen, but that had not saved them. A prowler missile had ripped them asunder and a few seconds later, escape pods began to sprout throughout the cloud-shrouded region where the battle had taken place. That was when the worst of the mistakes had been made.

Upon seeing the escape pods blossom, Blount had leaned forward to order all vessels to cease fire.

Before he could get the order out, he had watched his prowlers launch a dozen missiles. He had watched in horror as shrapnel shred three rescue balloons and the pods beneath them dropped into the depths. By the time his cease-fire order went out, only a single pod remained aloft.

It had taken nearly a quarter hour to get a ship alongside the surviving pod and another ten minutes to board the fragment. It contained three staterooms and no survivors. The beds showed no sign of having been recently slept in, nor had there been a clue to how many pirates were aboard at the time of the vessel's destruction.

Damn the trigger-happy fools, anyway! Why couldn't they have held their fire? Plenty of time to send the rescue pods into the hydrogen sea once they learned who was aboard them. As it was, he would now have to reconstruct the pirates' stay aboard Glasgow and infer the identities of those with whom they might have shared their secret. He would have to put things right, but the cost would be terrible.

He leaned forward and keyed his intercom. "Commander Wrightson! Tell the pilot to make for the Glasgow landing bay. Make sure they understand we will destroy them if they offer any resistance."

Time to collect the butcher's bill!

It was a dehydrated group that sprawled about the ship fragment that had once beenSparrowHawk 's cockpit. Around them, cool hydrogen-helium carried away the last vestiges of steam bath heat from skin scorched almost beyond endurance. Hours earlier, Sands and the two women had stripped down to a minimum of clothing to combat the heat. Sands was clad in shorts and breather, Halley and Kimber wore even less. Despite the bare female flesh, Sands had lost all interest in the opposite sex. All he really wanted was to sip tepid water and then sleep for a week.

He did neither. He sat up, waited for the inevitable spell of dizziness to pass, then climbed unsteadily to his feet.

"What are you doing?" Kimber's voice croaked from the jumpseat where she lay like one awaiting death."Time for nourishment."

Before moving to the locker where the emergency food was stored, he glanced at the altimeter. They were nearly back to the altitude where they had been shot down. The emergency balloon had climbed steadily for the past three hours and they were still rising. He commented on that fact to Kimber and Halley.

"How high will we go?" Kimber asked.

He shrugged weakly. "We're in the updraft from the zone. So long as the reactor continues working, we should be able to clear the water clouds and reach the haze below the ammonia hydrosulfide clouds."

A very bedraggled Halley Trevanon raised her head and asked, "Any chance we'll be swept into the southern circulation pattern?"

"Could be," he said. "There's a lot of local atmospheric instability around the Glasgow Cyclone."

"What are you two talking about?" Kimber asked.

Sands turned to face her, then smiled wanly. No, he decided, he was not dead yet. He could almost bring himself to appreciate the uncovered beauty sprawled out close beside him, veiled fetchingly by the breather mask.

"The equatorial zone where we are now is composed of two separate convection cells -- the southern and northern. It is possible we will be swept across the boundary as we rise toward the cloud tops. If we reach the southern circulation pattern, we'll be blown toward the South Equatorial Belt where we should be able to find rescue."

"I don't care where we end up," Kimber replied, "so long as we can keep as far from Kelt Dalishaar as possible."

"How long before we break out of cloud?" Halley asked.

"No way to tell," Sands replied. "Possibly by First Dawn tomorrow."

He moved toward the rear of the cockpit. The motion he used was less a walk than a series of dragging steps. He opened the storage locker in which their environment suit was housed. Below it was a smaller locker full of emergency rations. The size of the locker was an indication of the problem they faced.

The rescue balloon and its reactor would keep them aloft for a month, while the air regenerators in the breathers would last at least as long. Their immediate problem was food and water. The emergency food stored in the pod would last a week with rationing, but the water would be gone in only three days. They had already consumed more than half their water ration fighting the heat of the lower atmosphere. They would be able to hold out several days without water, but probably not long enough for the winds to carry them across the vast Equatorial Zone. Should they not reach the southern circulation pattern, the wind would blow them back north when they reached the apex of the convection cell. In that event, it might be impossible to attract rescuers without also attracting the Alliance.

"Dinner," Sands said finally as he handed out bars of emergency rations. The three of them ate listlessly, and then washed the dry bars down with two sips of water each. Afterwards, Sands explained their situation with regard to rations.

Halley frowned. "What are we to do, Lars?""I suppose we'll have to put the beacon back together and hope someone other than an Alliance warcraft responds."