"We can still abort and go elsewhere," Max reminded him. "We have sufficient fuel to go anywhere in the Commonwealth."

"Convince me my family's safely off Dorcas and you've got a deal." Pheylan checked his restraints and nodded. "Ready. Give me a countdown."

The minutes passed, and soon it was time. Pheylan braced himself, watching the displays as Max's countdown ran to zero—

He was prepared for the standard jolt that always seemed to accompany mesh-in while riding in a small craft. He was not prepared for the thunderous blast that slammed the fueler back like a toy and threw him hard against his restraints. "Max!" he shouted over the sudden pummeling.

"Under control," Max called back. On the status board a dozen warning lights flashed red; returned to green or amber as Max rerouted systems or shut them down. "A quantum hysteresis in the core caused mesh-in to be eighty point six meters lower into the atmosphere than planned. The turbulence itself is due to conduction resonance with the planetary magnetic field and is normal for this procedure."

"Terrific," Pheylan muttered, getting a grip on his restraints with one hand and keying for a sensor scan of the area with the other. The whole object of this exercise had been to mesh in beneath the Zhirrzh blockade ships. If that hadn't worked, the ride was likely to get a whole lot rougher.

He stiffened. There was one now, above and east of him: the distinctive linked-hexagon configuration of a Zhirrzh ship. "Got one," he snapped.

"I have it," Max confirmed. "Bearing one-one-two by six-four-one, distance four hundred eighty-two kilometers."

Pheylan braced himself. This wasn't going to be fun, but with an enemy ship this close they had no choice. "Drop us," he ordered. "Straight down and in."

"Acknowledged."

For an agonizing heartbeat nothing happened. Pheylan stared at the distant Zhirrzh warship, waiting for the flashes of laser light that would mean he'd been spotted and was under attack. The linked hexagons weren't much more than a bumpy blur at this distance, but he could imagine it rotating lazily around to bring its weapons to bear....

Then, with a jolt that again crushed him against his restraints, the fueler fired a burst directly along their vector, slowing them down and interrupting the rhythm of the resonant turbulence.

And with its forward momentum cut abruptly in half, the fueler plunged down toward the ground six hundred klicks below.

Pheylan swallowed hard. I meant to do that, he reminded himself tautly, his full attention still on the Zhirrzh ship. So far it hadn't reacted, but any surprise at his maneuver wouldn't last long. The fueler had to be hidden behind a thick shield of atmosphere before they recovered and started firing.

The trick being to get to safety under that shield without building up so much downward speed that they couldn't stop at all.

They were starting to get into real atmosphere now, and he could hear the faint friction whine beginning to build up along the outer hull. The Zhirrzh ship still hadn't reacted, and for the first time Pheylan risked taking a look at the displays showing the view beneath them.

It wasn't encouraging. There was a solid floor of clouds below, completely masking the terrain. Worse, straight ahead along their flight path he could see the telltale swirl of a massive tropical hurricane. The weather would be churning down there. "Max, do you know where we are?"

"I have a rough idea," the computer said. "Based on the elapsed time since our last visit, coupled with Dorcas's listed rotational data, I believe us to be approximately nine thousand four hundred kilometers southwest of the mountains where we expect to find the Peacekeeper forces."

Pheylan glanced at the vector-data display, did a quick mental calculation. "We're going to need some more forward momentum," he said.

"Confirmed," Max said. "But the atmosphere above us is still too thin for proper laser protection. I'd prefer to wait until we were no higher than sixty kilometers before leveling into horizontal flight."

Pheylan pursed his lips. Flying this crate like an aircar would burn fuel at a prodigious rate, which would mean dipping into the supply he'd been hoping to deliver to Colonel Holloway. But less fuel was better than no fuel at all, which was what they'd get if he was shot down. "Fine," he said. "But no lower than sixty klicks."

"Yes, Commander."

The screeching from the outer hull was still increasing, and Pheylan could now feel a slight rise in temperature of the air around him. Still the Zhirrzh ship falling rapidly away above him hadn't reacted. Could they have missed seeing him entirely? "Max, can we get any readings on that Zhirrzh ship up there?" he asked.

"He's out of the range of the fueler's passive sensors," Max said. "Shall I try the active sensors?"

Pheylan felt his stomach tighten, remembering how the Zhirrzh ships after the Jutland battle had used the honeycomb escape pods' emergency radio beacons to lock in their lasers. The active sensors used similar electromagnetic wavelengths. "Better not," he said. "No other enemy ships or vehicles out there?"

"None that I can detect."

Pheylan began to breathe a little easier. Maybe—just maybe—they'd gotten away with this.

They reached the sixty-klick mark, and Pheylan began to feel pressure against his chest as Max used the edge-effect airfoils to ease the fueler into more or less horizontal flight. "We've leveled off at fifteen kilometers," Max reported a few minutes later. "What speed shall I maintain?"

Pheylan took a quick look at the displays. The combination of the curving descent plus their original insertion vector had cut the distance to the Peacekeeper mountains to a little over five thousand klicks. A long four and a half hours away if they kept it subsonic; but considering that the fueler hadn't been designed for extended atmospheric flight, going supersonic would probably be begging for trouble. "Keep it below Mach 1, but as close as you can without getting into turbulence problems," he told the computer. "And drop our altitude another five klicks—edge-effect airfoils work better in denser air."

"Acknowledged.

Pheylan spent the first hour watching the external displays, shifting his attention from one to the next, waiting tensely for signs of the pursuit or intercept. He had no idea whether the Zhirrzh presence here was confined to a relatively small beachhead or whether they'd spread out over half the hemisphere by now; but wherever they were, eventually they'd have to show up. The closer he was able to get to the Peacekeeper enclave, the better his chances of getting air or ground support from them.

Assuming, of course, that the Zhirrzh hadn't already destroyed them.

No enemy aircraft showed up during the second hour either, but much of Pheylan's attention during that time was distracted by the necessity of getting the fueler past an impressively long line of thunderstorm cells. Possibly part of the same system that included the hurricane he'd spotted on their way in, the storms lay scattered across his path like nature's own aerial land mines. The fueler could have lifted over them, but with their fuel level already dropping faster than Pheylan liked, he opted instead to let Max thread them between the thunderheads. Fortunately, the computer was up to the task, and they made it with little more than occasional buffeting to mark their passage.

After that the flight settled down into something almost routine. It was becoming clear that the Zhirrzh hadn't overextended themselves there—though, to be fair, Pheylan could remember nothing in the Dorcas catalog that would offer any military incentives for an invader. If they were still confined to the areas the Commonwealth colonists had carved out—and if that blockade ship up there really hadn't spotted him—there was a fair chance he could at least get into communication range of the Peacekeepers before he was spotted.