"None obvious, One. They're still being good little boys."

"That could change anytime now. I want the rest of you aboard when we arrive in the bay. If they're going to jump us, that will be their last chance."

"I've already reminded the port captain how much damage a fusion powered aircraft can do inside a city.

I think he was suitably impressed."

"See you in a few minutes. We'll give the freighters time to reach the cloud wall, then get the hell out ourselves."

"Suits me fine," Crandall's electronically generated voice said. "I'm getting the distinct impression thesepeople don't like us."

"Can't say I blame them," Lars replied.

He and Halley gathered up their equipment, and then exited the office. They found the first councilor and his staff gathered in the living room. Dalishaar had taken the opportunity to change out of his robe. He was once again the very essence of a man of power. That worried Sands. Getting caught without one's pants tends to sap self-confidence. Now that Dalishaar had been given time to make himself presentable, no telling what ideas might be going through his head.

"This is what we will do, First Councilor," he said as the waiting Alliance dignitaries got to their feet.

"You, I, and Number Two will take a tube car to the landing bay. The rest of your people will wait here in Government Tower. You will stay in the bay until we have completed our launch. Any sign of interference and we blast our way free. No need to tell you what will happen to you personally if we do that, is there?"

"None at all."

"Let's go then."

Dalishaar led them to the lift, and from there, to the tube station. The three of them squeezed into one of the little cars and were whisked toward the rim of the city. Despite his misgivings, they arrived without incident.

There were two ships on the catapults that accelerated heavier-than-hydrogen craft away from the city.

SparrowHawk was on the portside catapult. It was sealed up and ready for flight save for the starboard hydrogen lock, which was standing open. The black clad form of Ross Crandall stood outside the open port. A larger craft was on the starboard catapult. Sands recognized one of the winged spacecraft used for transit between Saturn and its moons. He ordered Halley to get aboardSparrowHawk , then grabbed Dalishaar by the arm and dragged him across the deck toward the spacecraft.

"You people should have been away by now," he shouted at Kimber as he neared the ship. An old man turned around at the sound of his voice.

"You must be our benefactor," he said. "I am Ganther Bartlett, Miss Crawford's chief negotiator."

"Never mind the introductions. What the hell are you doing here?"

"We've been sabotaged." He hurriedly explained about the damaged reactor.

Sands frowned. "You should have said something. We could have gotten you out on the airships. Now, it is too late. How many of you are there?"

"Eleven."

"What about it, First Councilor, can the Alliance provide a ship?"

"Sorry," Dalishaar said. There was no mistaking the note of triumph in his voice. "None available."

"Get one!" Sands ordered.

"You aren't going to set off your bomb over this," Dalishaar replied confidently. "You might if we thwarted you from leaving. These..." he gestured toward the assembled Titanians "... aren't that important to you. Besides, if you destroy Cloudcroft, you will kill them too."Sands turned to Kimber Crawford. "I'm afraid he's right. I'm sorry I couldn't be of more help."

"Wait a minute!" the old man said. "Surely you have room aboard your ship."

"For eleven people? Hardly."

"How about one person?"

He hesitated, and then said, "That might be possible."

"Take Miss Crawford. Get her away from here."

"I won't leave you, Ganth!"

He turned to Kimber. "You must. Without you, Dalishaar has no leverage at all against your father."

"He's right, Miss Crawford," a man in the uniform of a Titanian spacer said. "Once you are safe, there will be a Titanian fleet on its way to free the rest of us in a matter of hours."

The man Kimber had addressed as Ganth turned back to Sands. "Please take her. You will be amply rewarded."

"I can squeeze her in," Sands replied. Events were moving entirely too fast for his peace of mind. He considered that this might be a ploy by the Alliance to put a spy aboard his ship, and then dismissed the thought out of hand.

"Were I you, Miss Crawford, I would not go with him," Dalishaar said.

"Why not, First Councilor?"

"You know nothing about these people. They may cut your throat as soon as they are out of sight.

Besides, traveling with them isn't safe."

"What he means," Sands said, "is that he will try to blow us out of the sky the moment they deactivate our bomb."

Kimber smiled at Dalishaar. "It's true that I don't know what sort of cutthroats I'm throwing in with, but I do know the ones I'm leaving behind." With that, she turned to Sands. "Shall we get away from here?"

Chapter 8: Maelstrom.

"What the hell isshe doing here?" Halley asked as Lars led Kimber toSparrowHawk 's cockpit.

"It's a long story. Miss Crawford, you take the observer's station. It's going to be a rough ride so make sure you are strapped down." Sands took his own advice. Only a tiny portion of his brain was engaged in the task, however. The rest of him was consumed by his study of the instrument panel. "What's our status, Halley?"

"Who is she? And is it wise to use names?"

"Miss Crawford is the daughter of the Factor of Titan. We are rescuing her from the Alliance. As for names, she'll see our faces sooner or later, so what does it matter?""How do you know she's the factor's daughter?" Halley persisted. She had turned in her seat and was staring unabashedly at Kimber. It was not difficult to imagine the scowl beneath the opaque faceplate of her environment suit.

"If she turns out to be an Alliance spy, then we'll toss her out the hydrogen lock. Now give me that status check, copilot!"

"The ship is ready to launch,Captain !"

Sands disabled his speech synthesizer. He had been running on adrenaline ever since bailing out into a hostile sky. For what he had to say now, he wanted his voice to come through with full overtones.

"Look, you've delivered your message. You don't like having a passenger along. I am sorry I didn't have time to consult you about it. The fact remains that I thought it important to rescue this lady from the Alliance. We can argue about it later... that is, if we evade the trap they have undoubtedly set for us.

Okay by you?"

"Yes, sir." Halley's tone had lost all trace of insubordination. "The powerplant is ready for maximum thrust. All instrumentation is working and all weapons are armed."

"Thank you." Sands turned to his guest. "You'll have to launch without a suit. As soon as we are clear of the city, I will give you the word. When I do, you go to the locker just aft of the cockpit door. You will find a suit in there. Put it on. You will have ninety seconds maximum, so do not dawdle. The whole Alliance Navy is out there somewhere. If we're to escape with our lives, I'm going to have to really fly this beast."

"Maybe they won't attack with me onboard," Kimber said.

"After what we did to them, they would attack if we were transporting Jesus Christ!" Halley responded.

"Now please be quiet. We've a battle to fight."

"Contact the port captain," Sands ordered. "Tell him that we're ready to launch."

She did so. A moment later she reported, "They've passed control to us."

Sands activated the 'All Hands' circuit.

"Look alive back there. If they are going to jump us, this is their last chance. I want a full circumambient sweep as soon as we get clear."

"You'll have it," Crandall's voice said over the intercom.

"Launch in ten seconds."

He watched the red numerals count down on the chronometer display. When they reached 00:00, he keyed the control that triggered the catapult. There was a surge of acceleration and the landing bay was suddenly replaced by the blue-white vastness of Saturn's atmosphere.

Sands rolledSparrowHawk upside down and pulled the nose into a vertical dive. As the ship dove past the bulge of the main city gasbag, he advanced the throttles. The reactors came alive with a surge that drove them toward the depths. He stayed close to the gasbag, hoping his proximity would thwart any fire control computer that might be tracking them. Within seconds, a large cylindrical object grew in the windscreen, and then fell behind as the exterior radiation detectors chattered once and went silent. The black-and-yellow cylinder had been the fusion generator suspended ten kilometers below Cloudcroft.Lars worked furiously to clear his ears as he continued the descent. He held it until he was ten kilometers below the level of the fusion generator. He pulled back on his controller. Their speed was such that even that gentle movement was transformed into a three-gravity turn. As they leveled out, Cloudcroft was falling behind at a rate of 2200 kilometers per hour. The artificial compass showed them heading due south, directly toward the heart of the Dardenelles Cyclone.

"I've got multiple aircraft circling west of the Alliance, Ross Crandall reported. Now that they had dropped well below the cluster's altitude, they could see objects that had been screened by the other cities of the Alliance. The Alliance Navy had spent the time assembling a large force in the blind spot.

Only the fact that most of the Navy was engaged in the annexation of New Philadelphia kept the fleet from being larger.

"We just lost the signal from the detonator," Brent Garvich reported.

"Someone check our stern!"

"Cloudcroft's still there," Halley replied. "They haven't set the frumpin' thing off. They must have neutralized it!"

"In only three minutes? I wonder how they managed that."

Crandall's warning echoed over the intercom. "We've got multiple missiles being launched behind us.

They're from Cloudcroft." Even without his speech synthesizer, he was remarkably calm about it.

Sands glanced tensely at his tactical display, and then relaxed. They were already 100 kilometers south of the city and fleeing at high speed. They would be out of range before the missiles closed on them.

"Those aircraft to the west have stopped circling," Crandall continued. "They're coming after us. I make them six prowlers and two destroyers."

"Keep me apprised of their progress. We'll see what we can do to get to the cloud wall ahead of them."

In front ofSparrowHawk lay the several-hundred-kilometer-tall wall that marked the northernmost reaches of the Dardenelles Cyclone. It was streaked in blues, purples and blacks. The lightning that had been so visible across hundreds of kilometers last night was muted, but still active. The cloud wall had a fluffy texture that warned of massive turbulence inside the storm. Already they were being subjected to a series of bumps. It would get a lot worse before it got better.

From space, the Dardenelles was a tiny white spot intruding into the dark band of the North Temperate Belt. Only Saturn's massive size could make such a thing look small. The storm arose from a localized hot spot deep within the atmosphere. Its energy was small compared to the zonal upwellings, but far more concentrated. The cyclone was powerful enough to maintain its shape against the Coriolus forces that tore apart other features of the Saturnian atmosphere.

"All right, Miss Crawford ... Kimber. You have your ninety seconds. Get into that suit!"

"Yes, sir."

He glanced over his shoulder once to see her scrambling aft to the emergency suit locker. She was back in her seat faster than he would have believed possible. She strapped down, and then expertly snapped her helmet in place with a quick thrust and twist.

"You do that like you were born to it.""I was. Every Titanian learns to put on an environment suit almost before he learns to walk."

"I'm picking up something ahead."

"Where?"

"Just exiting the cloud wall," Halley answered.

"What is it?"

"It looks like four aircraft. I tentatively make them Alliance prowlers."

"How the hell did they get there without us seeing them?"

She shrugged. "Like that squadron to the west, they used the other cities to mask their departure. They must have gone the long way around and come back inside the cloud wall."

"This complicates things," Sands muttered.

He glanced at his screen. Now there were two clusters of red symbols closing on the single green dot at the center. Crimson arrows gave velocity vectors, while blue alphanumerics told ship types and measured time to intercept. He mentally placed his adversaries in three-dimensional space. The craft behind him were still much higher than he was, almost at the altitude of the cities. They were descending in a long slanting dive, hoping to outrun him. The figures said that their efforts would be in vain.

The ships in front were another story. They lay directly across his path, having been vectored there by battle controllers aboard one of the cities. They too were above him, but well within striking distance. He considered his options and decided that his best hope of evasion lay in diving deep.

"Watch your ears again. We're going down!

SparrowHawkstooped and dove for the dense atmosphere of the lower flyway. Sands yawned mightily as the pressure mounted. After more than a minute, he leveled off some 50 kilometers below the cities.

The pressure was now 20 atmospheres and the outside temperature higher than it had been inside Cloudcroft's gasbag. Only the ship's environmental control system kept them from being cooked. The flow noise was deafening.

He glanced at his screen. The blocking force was in a near vertical dive down the face of the cloud wall as they attempted to cut him off. He waited for them to come level, then advanced his throttles to emergency maximum and sentSparrowHawk into a zoom climb.

"Smart move!" Halley said from beside him. "The prowler's never been built that can out climb an air shark."