"The thruster noise must be hurting their ears," Nicabar said mildly. "Whatnow?"
"We ignore them," I told him. "That came in broadcast, not narrow beam, andour ID says we're the Stewed Brunswick. It may be they're still not sure about usand are trying to spark a guilty reaction. Anyway, we don't dare shut down thethrusters now."
"You're going to risk drawing fire," he warned.
"Not yet," I said, shifting my attention from the incoming starfighters back to the Tleka cargo hauler. It was a classic, time-tested maneuver: a group ofgrass-beaters in front noisily and ostentatiously driving the quarry back intothe 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 fullview, his port-side weapons array just coming up around the cargo hauler'sdorsal spine: a Najiki pocket destroyer, its zebra-camo striping giving it analmost-delicate look. As warships went, I suppose, it wasn't much to bragabout; 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 quickglanceover my shoulder. He was striding in through the doorway, gazing at mydisplays, his expression as glacially stolid as ever. The ferrets dug in on hisshoulders were betraying all that surface calm, though, twitching to beat the band. "Youhave 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 theplotting table. "If they're acting on their own against suspected smugglerstheywon't be as careful to minimize damage as they will if they're doing this atthe behest of the Patth."
I was about to inform him that they'd already identified us as the Icarus whenthey helpfully made the point for me. "Freighter Icarus, this is your finalwarning," the Najiki voice announced firmly. "Shut down your thrusters or wewill open fire."
And that one, unfortunately, had come in tight beam, for our ears and no oneelse's. Which meant they knew who we were, and all hopeful thoughts of fishingexpeditions 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 theforward maneuvering vents. Our forward speed dropped precipitously; and withit went our orbital stability. Even as we dropped back behind the incomingfighters, we also began to fall toward the planetary surface five thousandkilometers beneath us.
Unfortunately, "precipitously" was also a sadly relative term. With a fighteror even the enhanced thrust/mass ratio I'd built into the Stormy Banks, such amaneuver might have caught our opponents at least partly by surprise. But withthe flying cement bag that was the Icarus, we didn't behave so much like aleaping jaguar as we did a hippo jumping backward from a dead stop in deepmud.
I could picture the Najik in the fighters and destroyer watching ourelephantineescape attempt and laughing themselves silly.
They could laugh all they liked. Their logical assumption—at least, what Ihopedwas their logical assumption—would be that we hadn't started activating ourstardrive until they'd sprung their trap, from which assumption they wouldfurther assume they still had ten to twelve minutes in which to short-circuitthat activation and gather us serenely into the hunter's waiting arms. What theyhopefully hadn't tumbled to yet was that we were in fact less than fourminutes from escape. All I had to do was keep them off us for those four minutes, andwe would be home free.
All in all, though, that was a very big if. Especially since the Najik inchargeof this operation was apparently not the type to dawdle simply because he hada little time to kill. The starfighters were swinging to match my maneuver evenbefore I'd completed it; and as they closed up ranks again faint green lineserupted 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, hopingto keep the hyperspace cutter array at our bow out of the ion beams. But weturned every bit as ponderously as we braked; and even as I swore helplesslyunder my breath the beams converged on the cutter array.
And that was that. Clenching my left hand into a fist, I continued the uselessmaneuvering, waiting for the buildup of localized charge and the subsequentcrack of a high-voltage spark that would scramble the array's electronics andmake all of Nicabar's minute-shaving so much wasted effort.
The beams momentarily drifted off target as I dropped us farther into Utheno'sgravity well, converged again as the Najiki gunners reestablished their aim.
Anyminute now and the spark would come; and after this much charge buildup it waslikely to be a memorable one. Distantly, I wondered if it might even be strongenough to jump some of the current across the fail-safes and fry my bridgecontrols in the bargain.
And then I frowned, a brand-new set of warning bells going off in the back ofmyhead. There was something wrong here, something ominously wrong. I knew howion beams worked—I'd been on the receiving end of them more times than I cared toremember—and these were taking way too long to show their teeth. I keyed thehull-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 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.