"Main torch burn, sir! I can't stop it—"

Brughel and his guards grabbed for hold-ons. The torch subsonics were unmistakable, vibrating out from bones and teeth. Slowly, slowly, the acceleration ramped up. Fifty milligees. One hundred. Loose junk floated faster and faster sternward, spinning and bouncing off obstacles. Three hundred milligees. A huge gentle fist pressed Jau back into his chair. One of the guards had been in open space, unable to reach a hold-down. He drifted past now, hefell past, crashing into the aft wall. Five hundred milligees, and still increasing. Jau twisted in his harness and looked back, up, at Brughel and the others. They were pinned aft, trapped by the acceleration that went on and on... .

And then the torch sound faded, and Jau floated up in against his restraints. Brughel was shouting to his guards, gathering them together. Somewhere in the action he had lost his huds. "Status, Mr. Xin!"

Jau stared at his displays. The status board was still a random jumble. He looked out, forward along theHand' s orbit. They had passed through a sunrise. Dim lit, the frozen ocean stretched to the horizon. But that wasn't what mattered. The horizon itself looked subtly different.Not your classicalde-orbit burn, but it will do. Jau licked his lips. "Sir, we'll be in the soup in one or two hundred seconds."

For a moment, horror registered in Brughel's face. "You get us back up, mister."

"Yes, sir." What else was there to say?

Brughel and his goons coasted across the bridge to the aft hatch.

Phuong: "Sir. I have a voice transmission from L1."

"Well, put it on."

It was a woman's voice, Trixia Bonsol. "Greetings to the humans aboardInvisible Hand. This is Lieutenant Victory Lighthill, Accord Intelligence Service. I have taken control of your spacecraft. You will be on the ground shortly. It may be some time before our forces arrive on the scene. Do not, I repeat, do not resist those forces."

Stark, gape-mouth surprise held everyone on the bridge...but Bonsol said nothing more. Brughel recovered first, but his voice wavered. "Phuong. Shut down the L1 link. All the protocol layers."

"Sir. I-I can't. Once up, the interconnect—"

"Yes you can. Get physical. Take a club to the equipment, but get yourselfoffline. "

"Sir. Even without the local zipheads...I think L1 has workarounds."

"I'll take care of that. We're coming down."

The guard by the hatch looked up at Brughel. "It won't open, sir."

"Phuong!"

There was no answer.

Brughel jumped to the wall beside the hatch, began pounding the direct opener. He might as well have been pounding a rock. The Podmaster turned, and Jau saw that the red was gone from his face. He was dead white and his eyes were wild. He had a wire gun in his hand now, and he looked around the bridge as if in search of a target. His gaze locked on Jau. The gun twitched up.

"Sir, I think I've gotten through to one of my pilots." It was an absolute lie, but without his huds, Brughel couldn't know.

"Ah?" The gun muzzle slipped a fraction. "Good. Keep at it, Xin. It's your neck, too."

Jau nodded, turned back to diddle fiercely with the dead controls.

Behind him, the search for the hatch's manual override was frantic and obscene and incompetent...and finally terminated by the chatter of gunfire. Tumbling wires caromed around the bridge. "Bloody hell. That won't do it," Brughel said. There was the sound of a cabinet opening, but Jau kept his head down, doing his best to look desperately busy. "Here. Try this." There was a pause, then a string of ear-numbing detonations.Lordy! Brughel kept that kind of ordnance on a starship's bridge?

Triumphant shouts were faint behind the ringing in his ears. Then Brughel was shouting. "Go! Go! Go!"

Jau turned his head slightly, got a sidelong look at the bridge behind him. The hatch was still closed, but now there was a ragged hole punched in it. Twisted metal and less identifiable junk floated up from it.

And now Jau Xin was all alone on theHand' s bridge. He took a deep breath and tried to make sense of his displays. Ritser Brughel was right about one thing. It was Jau's neck on the line here.

The core power trace was still high. He looked out across the curving horizon. No question now. TheHand was down, consistent with the eighty-thousand-meter altitude on the status board. He heard the rumble of the aux thrusters.Did I get through? If he could orient properly and somehow fire the main torch...But no, they weren't turning in the right direction! The great ship was aligning on their direction of flight, rear end first. To the left and right of the aft view, parts of the starship's outer hull could be seen, angular spidery structures that were meant for the flows of interstellar plasma but never the atmosphere of a planet. Now their edges were glowing. Soft yellows and reds splashed out around them, cascading like glowing ocean spray. The sharpest edges glowed white and sloughed away. But the aux thrusters were still firing, a pattern of tiny bursts. On off. On off. Whoever was running his pilots was making a perverse attempt to keep theHand oriented. Without such precise control, the flow past the ship's irregular hull would send them into a long tumble, a million tonnes of hardware torn apart by forces it had never been designed to face.

The glow across the stern was a spreading sheet of light, clear only in a few places where the shock was not hot enough to vaporize the hull. Jau drifted back into his chair, the acceleration growing gently, inexorably. Four hundred milligees, eight hundred. But this acceleration was not caused by the ship's torch. This was a planetary atmosphere, having its way with them.

And there was another sound. Not the rumble of the aux. It was a rich, growing tone. From its throat to its outer hull, theHand had become a vast organ pipe. The sound fell from chord to chord as the ship rammed deeper, slower. And as the glow of ionization trembled and faded, theHand' s dying song rose in a crescendo—and was gone.

Jau stared out the aft view, at a scene that should have been impossible. The angular hull structures were smoothed and melted by their passage through the heat. But theHand was a million tonnes, and the pilots had kept it precisely oriented in the flow, and most of its great mass had survived.

Nearly a standard gee pressed him against his chair, but this was almost at right angles to the earlier acceleration. This was planetary gravity. TheHand was a kind of aircraft now, a disaster skidding across the sky. They were forty thousand meters up, coming down at a steady hundred meters per second. Jau looked at the pale horizon, the ridges and blocks of ice that swept beneath his view. Some of those were five hundred meters high, ice pressed upward by the slow freezing of the ocean depths. He tapped at his console, got a flicker of attention from one of the pilots, a scrap of further information. They would clear that ridgeline and the three beyond it. Beyond that, near the horizon, the shadows were softer...a deception of distance, or maybe snow piled deep on the jagged ice.

Echoing up through theHand' s corridors, Jau heard the rapid pounding of Brughel's heavy gun. There was shouting, silence, then the pounding again, farther away.Every hatch must be sealed. And Ritser Brughel was punching through every one. In a way, the Podmaster was right; he controlled the physical layer. He could reach the hull optics, knock out the link to L1. He could "disconnect" whatever local zipheads still offended... .

Thirty thousand meters. Dim sunlight reflected off the ice, but there was no sign of artificial lights or towns. They were coming down in the middle of the Spiders' grandest ocean. TheHand was still making better than mach three. The sink rate was still one hundred meters per second. His intuition plus the few hints from the status board told him they would smear across the landscape at more than the speed of sound. Unless—the core power was still rising—if the main torch could be fired once more, and fired at precisely the right instant...a miracle touch might do it. TheHand was so big that its belly and throat might be used as a cushion, shredded across kilometers of crash path, leaving the bridge and the occupied quarters intact. Pham Trinli's silly bragging had included such an adventure.