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

Instead of maintaining their nice clean collimation, the beams were defocusingmadly, the ions scattering wildly to hell and gone. Which meant that insteadof building up the sort of localized charge that would create a devastatingspark, all they were doing was dumping ions into the hull plates, where the chargecould cheerfully build up without doing much of anything at all.

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

"The radial gravitational field in the hull."

And then, of course, it all clicked into place. Chort's spacewalks had shownthat the alien gravitational field inside the main hull was too weak to befelt outside the ship, but apparently the effect was strong enough to disrupt abeam of subatomic particles. Either that, or it was something else in the fieldgenerator that was flummoxing them.

And suddenly we had a chance again. Lunging to my control board, I keyed formore 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 waitingpatientlyfor us to be driven into its arms, but was burning space in our direction, itsown ion beam blazing away even though it was still well out of range. "Isuspectthe destroyer's beam won't affect it, either; but it almost certainly will beable to punch through the engineering hull and scramble your systems backthere.

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 murmuredfrom 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'sgoingto be close."

"Yes," I murmured, slowing our spin as the Icarus's aft end turned to theincoming fighters, feeling sweat breaking out on my forehead. The fightersprobably didn't have the kind of sensor magnification that would let them seejust how peculiarly their ion beams were behaving. The destroyer, unfortunately, just as probably did. Sooner or later, the commander would get around totakinga close look at our cutter array and realize that it wasn't just poor aim onhis gunners' part that was saving us. If he did, or even if he didn't, at somepointhe 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 smallwager the Patth will be extremely unhappy if you damage any of them."

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

It didn't sound nearly so calm now as it had earlier. "This is your finalwarning. 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 thisanxious to get hold of will be equally valuable to anyone else who possessesit," 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 justturn us over to them."

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

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

"Still on track," he reported. "I'm getting small sparks from the starfighters'ion beams, but so far they're confined to the peripheral equipment. What inhell'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 mycontrol board and the other on my displays. I was still pulling evasivemaneuvers, if that was the right term for the graceless wallowing that was allthe Icarus was capable of; but if the destroyer was showing a new cautiontoward us, the same could not be said of the fighters. They had increased their speedand split up their formation, still playing their ion beams across the enginesection but clearly intent on bypassing that area, driving up along the hullfrom the rear, and converging on the cutter array from three differentdirections.

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 theirlasers and what at that range would be an almost-trivial surgical-qualityoperation. "Revs?" I barked.

"Thirty seconds," he called.

"We don't have thirty seconds," I snapped back. The fighters were sweepingpastthe engine section now, keeping close to the hull in case we had some recessedweaponry 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 thethruster 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. Buteven with that, our reaction wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as that of thethree fighters. Caught directly in the multiple blasts of superheated gas, theywobbled outward, their nice neat pacing vectors thrown completely off target.

Then they were out of the gusts, their own maneuvering vents blowing steam asthey fought to correct from the outward boosts they'd just been given. Islappedall the vents back off except for the main starboard ones, sending the Icarusinto another of its slow-motion turns. One of the fighters' tail fins scrapedagainst our hull as he wasn't quite able to get out of the way in time, andall of them were forced to again correct their vectors. I caught the mutedreflection from one of the fighters as the armorplate irised away from itsforward laser cluster.

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

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

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

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

"Do it," I said, keying off the controls from my end. The stars reemerged, only this time with no planet or nearby sun anywhere in sight. I gave the area aquick scan, but it was pure reflex: Our brief flight had put us in the centerof nowhere, light-years from anywhere. For the moment, at least, we werecompletelysafe 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.