"As the driven snow," I said. "At least until you've got the stardrive up and running. Let's just hope they can't pull any of the telltales with their own sensor readings."

"These thrusters are pretty noisy, and across a big chunk of the spectrum," he pointed out. "That ought to mask the stardrive, at least at a fifty-klick distance. Okay; I read thirteen more minutes to full green. I'll see if I can shave a couple of minutes off that."

"Good. Do it."

I took my time bringing us in the rest of the way, managing to eat up nearly five of Nicabar's thirteen minutes before we finally settled into our designated slot. I kept two of my displays trained on our companions to either side, wondering which of them would make the first move.

The Najiki freighter took that honor. Even as I ran thrust to the forward maneuvering vents to kill some of our momentum, I saw a large side hatch slide open, and three dark gray starfighters appeared. They paused a moment as if getting their bearings, then grouped into formation and headed straight for us.

I keyed the intercom for all-ship. "This is McKell," I announced. "Everyone get strapped down and find something to hang on to. We've got unfriendly company.

Revs?"

"Still at least six minutes to go," he reported. "Probably closer to seven.

How long till they get here?"

"Depends on how much of a hurry they're in," I told him, watching the fighters closely, hoping even now that it was a false alarm, that they were actually interested in someone else entirely. But they were still coming, and showed no sign that they might suddenly veer off somewhere else. "Keep those thrusters running hot-they get even a hint that we're firing up the stardrive and they'll be all over us."

The words were barely out of my mouth when the Najik made it official.

"Freighter Icarus, this is Utheno Military Command," a calm Najiki voice came over the comm speaker. "You are ordered to shut down your thrusters and prepare to be boarded."

"The thruster noise must be hurting their ears," Nicabar said mildly. "What now?"

"We ignore them," I told him. "That came in broadcast, not narrow beam, and our ID says we're the Stewed Brunswick. It may be they're still not sure about us and are trying to spark a guilty reaction. Anyway, we don't dare shut down the thrusters now."

"You're going to risk drawing fire," he warned.

"Not yet," I said, shifting my attention from the incoming starfighters backto the Tleka cargo hauler. It was a cla.s.sic, time-tested maneuver: a group of gra.s.s-beaters in front noisily and ostentatiously driving the quarry back into the waiting arms of the hunter lurking silently in the bushes. In the bushes, or behind a Tleka cargo hauler, as the case might be.

Except that in this case the hunter was no longer hiding. He was there in full view, his port-side weapons array just coming up around the cargo hauler's dorsal spine: a Najiki pocket destroyer, its zebra-camo striping giving it an almost-delicate look. As warships went, I suppose, it wasn't much to brag about; from where we currently stood, it looked about the size of Paris.

"Watch for them to target ion beams," Ixil's voice warned from behind me.

"Thank you," I said, trying not to sound too sarcastic as I threw a quick glance over my shoulder. He was striding in through the doorway, gazing at my displays, his expression as glacially stolid as ever. The ferrets dug in on his shoulders were betraying all that surface calm, though, twitching to beat the band. "You have anything else in the way of insightful advice to offer?" I added.

"I meant as opposed to lasers or disabler missiles," he said, stepping to the plotting table. "If they're acting on their own against suspected smugglers they won't be as careful to minimize damage as they will if they're doing this at the behest of the Patth."

I was about to inform him that they'd already identified us as the Icarus when they helpfully made the point for me. "Freighter Icarus, this is your final warning," the Najiki voice announced firmly. "Shut down your thrusters or we will open fire."

And that one, unfortunately, had come in tight beam, for our ears and no one else's. Which meant they knew who we were, and all hopeful thoughts of fishing expeditions were gone.

As was anything to be gained by playing innocent. "Hang on," I warned Ixil, bracing myself and throwing power to the thrusters, keying the exhaust to the forward maneuvering vents. Our forward speed dropped precipitously; and with it went our orbital stability. Even as we dropped back behind the incoming fighters, we also began to fall toward the planetary surface five thousand kilometers beneath us.

Unfortunately, "precipitously" was also a sadly relative term. With a fighter or even the enhanced thrust/ma.s.s ratio I'd built into the Stormy Banks, such a maneuver might have caught our opponents at least partly by surprise. But with the flying cement bag that was the Icarus, we didn't behave so much like a leaping jaguar as we did a hippo jumping backward from a dead stop in deep mud.

I could picture the Najik in the fighters and destroyer watching our elephantine escape attempt and laughing themselves silly.

They could laugh all they liked. Their logical a.s.sumption-at least, what I hoped was their logical a.s.sumption-would be that we hadn't started activating our stardrive until they'd sprung their trap, from which a.s.sumption they would further a.s.sume they still had ten to twelve minutes in which to short-circuit that activation and gather us serenely into the hunter's waiting arms. Whatthey hopefully hadn't tumbled to yet was that we were in fact less than four minutes from escape. All I had to do was keep them off us for those four minutes, and we would be home free.

All in all, though, that was a very big if. Especially since the Najik in charge of this operation was apparently not the type to dawdle simply because he had a little time to kill. The starfighters were swinging to match my maneuver even before I'd completed it; and as they closed up ranks again faint green lines erupted from the ion-beam ports beneath their noses and tracked toward us.

I threw power to the Icarus's port-side vents, giving us a sideways yaw, hoping to keep the hypers.p.a.ce cutter array at our bow out of the ion beams. But we turned every bit as ponderously as we braked; and even as I swore helplessly under my breath the beams converged on the cutter array.

And that was that. Clenching my left hand into a fist, I continued the useless maneuvering, waiting for the buildup of localized charge and the subsequent crack of a high-voltage spark that would scramble the array's electronics and make all of Nicabar's minute-shaving so much wasted effort.

The beams momentarily drifted off target as I dropped us farther into Utheno's gravity well, converged again as the Najiki gunners reestablished their aim.

Any minute now and the spark would come; and after this much charge buildup it was likely to be a memorable one. Distantly, I wondered if it might even be strong enough to jump some of the current across the fail-safes and fry my bridge controls in the bargain.

And then I frowned, a brand-new set of warning bells going off in the back of my head. There was something wrong here, something ominously wrong. I knew how ion beams worked-I'd been on the receiving end of them more times than I cared to remember-and these were taking way too long to show their teeth. I keyed the hull-monitor cameras toward the bow and focused in on the cutter array.

And felt the breath catch in my throat. The ion beams were converging on the Icarus, all right, just as the sensor display showed. But in the last meter or so before they reached the array, something completely unexpected was happening.

Instead of maintaining their nice clean collimation, the beams were defocusing madly, the ions scattering wildly to h.e.l.l and gone. Which meant that instead of building up the sort of localized charge that would create a devastating spark, all they were doing was dumping ions into the hull plates, where the charge could cheerfully build up without doing much of anything at all.

"It's the hull," Ixil said suddenly, his voice sounding as awestruck as I felt.

"The radial gravitational field in the hull."

And then, of course, it all clicked into place. Chort's s.p.a.cewalks had shown that the alien gravitational field inside the main hull was too weak to be felt outside the ship, but apparently the effect was strong enough to disrupt a beam of subatomic particles. Either that, or it was something else in the field generator that was flummoxing them.And suddenly we had a chance again. Lunging to my control board, I keyed for more yaw. "McKell?" Nicabar called over the intercom. "What are you doing?"

"The fighters' ion beams aren't catching the cutter array," I called back, shifting my attention over to the destroyer. It was no longer waiting patiently for us to be driven into its arms, but was burning s.p.a.ce in our direction, its own ion beam blazing away even though it was still well out of range. "I suspect the destroyer's beam won't affect it, either; but it almost certainly will be able to punch through the engineering hull and scramble your systems back there.

So I'm turning the Icarus to put the main hull between you and them."

"Which will then leave the engine section open to the fighters," Ixil murmured from the plotting table. "And they're closer than the destroyer."

"But their beams are also weaker than the destroyer's," I reminded him.

"There's an even chance the heavier metal back there will protect us from them. Anyway, we don't have a lot of choices right now. Revs, where's the countdown?"

"One minute twenty," he said. "At the rate that destroyer's closing, it's going to be close."

"Yes," I murmured, slowing our spin as the Icarus's aft end turned to the incoming fighters, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. The fighters probably didn't have the kind of sensor magnification that would let them see just how peculiarly their ion beams were behaving. The destroyer, unfortunately, just as probably did. Sooner or later, the commander would get around to taking a close look at our cutter array and realize that it wasn't just poor aim on his gunners' part that was saving us. If he did, or even if he didn't, at some point he would open up with heavier weaponry rather than risk letting us get away.

Unless someone gave him a reason why that might be a bad idea.

I keyed to the frequency the Najiki orders had come in on. "Najiki Task Force, this is the Icarus," I announced. "I'd be careful with those ion beams if I were you. We have a lot of sensitive electronics aboard, and I'll make you a small wager the Patth will be extremely unhappy if you damage any of them."

"Freighter Icarus, this is Utheno Military Command," the Najiki voice came back.

It didn't sound nearly so calm now as it had earlier. "This is your final warning. You will shut down your thrusters or we will shut them down for you."

"Of course, I'm sure it's occurred to you that anything the Patth are this anxious to get hold of will be equally valuable to anyone else who possesses it," I went on as if he hadn't spoken. "The Najiki Archipelago, for instance.

Your superiors might want to think long and hard about that before you just turn us over to them."

"Freighter Icarus, you will shut down your thrusters," the voice came back. A being with a one-track mind, obviously, and not one to be drawn into a discussion of political matters outside his control.

On the other hand, he hadn't opened up with his lasers yet, either. If he held off another forty seconds, I decided as I keyed off the comm, I could call this one a victory. "Revs?"

"Still on track," he reported. "I'm getting small sparks from thestarfighters'

ion beams, but so far they're confined to the peripheral equipment. What in h.e.l.l's name is keeping the destroyer off the cutter array?"

"I'll tell you later," I said, one eye on the dark stardrive section of my control board and the other on my displays. I was still pulling evasive maneuvers, if that was the right term for the graceless wallowing that was all the Icarus was capable of; but if the destroyer was showing a new caution toward us, the same could not be said of the fighters. They had increased their speed and split up their formation, still playing their ion beams across the engine section but clearly intent on bypa.s.sing that area, driving up along the hull from the rear, and converging on the cutter array from three different directions.

And while they might give their ion beams one last chance once they got there, they wouldn't waste much more time with them before switching over to their lasers and what at that range would be an almost-trivial surgical-quality operation. "Revs?" I barked.

"Thirty seconds," he called.

"We don't have thirty seconds," I snapped back. The fighters were sweeping past the engine section now, keeping close to the hull in case we had some recessed weaponry nodes hidden among the maneuvering vents. "We've got maybe ten."

"Can't do it," he insisted. "Try to stall them off."

I clenched my teeth. "Then hang on."

And jamming my hands across the whole line of control keys, I sent the thruster exhaust blasting out the entire group of maneuvering vents at once.

The Icarus jerked like a horse trying to dash madly off in all directions. But even with that, our reaction wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as that of the three fighters. Caught directly in the multiple blasts of superheated gas, they wobbled outward, their nice neat pacing vectors thrown completely off target.

Then they were out of the gusts, their own maneuvering vents blowing steam as they fought to correct from the outward boosts they'd just been given. I slapped all the vents back off except for the main starboard ones, sending the Icarus into another of its slow-motion turns. One of the fighters' tail fins sc.r.a.ped against our hull as he wasn't quite able to get out of the way in time, and all of them were forced to again correct their vectors. I caught the muted reflection from one of the fighters as the armorplate irised away from its forward laser cl.u.s.ter.

And then, with a similarly muted but far more welcome flicker of light, the stardrive section of my control board lit up. "Up and green," Nicabar shouted.

I didn't answer; my fingers were already jabbing at the activation switches and the preprogrammed course code I'd laid in. There was a noise from the comm-the Najiki commander, no doubt, saying something extremely rude-and then the cutter array did its electronic magic, and the stars vanished from around us. "Well done," Ixil murmured.

He'd spoken too soon. I was just starting to breathe again when the deck under me lurched violently. "Revs?" I snapped.

"Spark damage," he called back. "Half the calibrations have been scrambled. We have to shut down."

"Do it," I said, keying off the controls from my end. The stars reemerged, onlythis time with no planet or nearby sun anywhere in sight. I gave the area a quick scan, but it was pure reflex: Our brief flight had put us in the center of nowhere, light-years from anywhere. For the moment, at least, we were completely safe from any outside trouble.

"Okay, we're closed down," Nicabar reported a minute later.

"Damage?"

"Doesn't look like anything major," he said. "A few popped circuit breakers, probably a tube or two that'll need replacing, but I know we've got spares.

And of course, a lot of recalibrating will have to be done. Time-consuming but relatively straightforward."

"Ixil can help with that," I told him, closing the rest of my board down to standby. No point leaving it active; we weren't going anywhere for a while.

"That can wait," Nicabar said. "You said you'd tell me later how we were shrugging off those ion beams. Well, it's later."

I grimaced. But he was right. It was time I clued the rest of them in on just what it was we were sitting on here. "It is indeed," I acknowledged, keying the intercom for all-ship. "Everyone, get your stuff shut down and then a.s.semble in the dayroom. I've got a little story to tell you."

THEY SAT IN silence, looking slightly sandbagged for the most part, while I gave them the whole thing.

Most of it, anyway. I left out Tera's true ident.i.ty and inside-person status, and the fact that Cameron-Alexander Borodin, rather-had been a secret pa.s.senger for the first part of our trip. I also glossed over the part Tera had played in the various incidents that had had me tied up in mental knots for most of that time. The latter part didn't take much glossing, actually, given that Ixil and I.

were the only ones who'd known about most of them anyway.

I also left Jones's death out of the picture, leaving it as an implied accident.

Confronting a group of suspects with the knowledge that one of them is a killer might be an effective way to spark a guilty reaction, but at the moment my foremost interest was getting the Icarus to Earth, and for that I needed full cooperation from all of them. Time enough to sort out Jones's murder if and when we made it that far.

While the rest were busy looking flabbergasted, Tera was equally busy glaring at me in menacing silence, from which I gathered she thought I should have cleared this grand revelation with her before I let everyone else in on the big secret.

I could sympathize with that att.i.tude; but if I had consulted her she would probably have forbidden me to do so. Then I would have had to go directly against her wishes, which would have left her madder at me than she was already.

To say they were stunned would have been an understatement. To say they weresuspicious and unbelieving, however, would have been right on the money. "You must think we're idiots, McKell," Shawn snorted when I'd finished. "Mysterious alien technology? Oh, come on."

"And with the whole of the Patth race panting down our necks to get at it,"

Everett added, shaking his head. "Really, McKell, you should have had time to come up with something better than this one."

"I expected this reaction," I said, looking over at Ixil. "You have the necessary?"

Silently, he produced the connector tool he'd brought from the mechanics room.

Just as silently, he crossed to the back of the dayroom and removed one of the inner hull plates.

One by one, they went down into the 'tweenhull area to experience the alien gravitational field for themselves. Some took longer than others; but by the time they came up they were all convinced.

They were also, to a man, scared right down to their socks.

"This is crazy," Everett said, hunched over a tall whiskey sour. Alcoholic drinks of one sort or another had somehow been the beverage of choice for each of them as he came out of the 'tweenhull area. "Crazy. This is a job for professionals, not a bunch of loose s.p.a.cers picked off the Meima streets."

"Believe me, I'd like nothing better than to have a squad of EarthGuard Marines on this instead of us," I agreed wholeheartedly. "But they're not here. We are."

"I presume you realize that if the Patth get their hands on us we're dead,"

Nicabar pointed out darkly, peering into his own drink. "Not a chance in the world they'd let us go. Not with what we know about this ship."

"And what do we know about it?" Shawn countered, his fingertips tapping nervously on the table. "Seriously, what do we know? McKell says he thinks it's an alien stardrive. So what makes him the big expert?"

"No, he may be right," Chort said before I could reply. "Early Craean stardrives used a very similar dual-sphere design, with an open resonance chamber as one of them. Though much smaller, of course."

"Yeah, but did they work?" Shawn asked. "I never heard of any design like that."

"Which means it can't possibly have been of any use," Tera murmured. "Not if you never heard of it."

Shawn turned a glare toward her. "Double-sphere designs work just fine,"