The Reaches (112 page)

"Sir?" Philips asked. He was a solid sailor, a motorman's mate of 25. He retained his ordinary shipboard duties after he volunteered to load for Stephen, though Mister Gregg's convenience became paramount. "What will happen if we don't . . . What if the Feds do reach Venus, sir?"

"The dock is fully open, Captain," Guillermo said. Desire to get the entire squadron into Venus orbit wouldn't affect Piet's normal—nonemergency—start-up routine.

"They'll orbit," Stephen said with deliberate calm. Philips' first child, a girl, had been born three days before. She and the mother were in Betaport, sure to be the second target of Pleyal's forces if not their first. "They'll demand landing clearance under threat of bombing, and they'll get it. Nobody on Venus is going to have cities ripped open."

"They'll put down soldiers, then?" Philips said.

"Garrisons, yes," Stephen agreed. "Enough to show that they're in charge, but not a fighting army it wouldn't be. Maybe five or ten thousand troops, spread out all over the planet. It won't be pleasant. They'll desecrate churches, putting up their idols. And I'm sure folk in the government will be arrested. But not so very terrible for ordinary people, I shouldn't think."

"I guess with their own soldiers in cities, it'll be safer," Philips suggested hopefully. "They won't blow the roof in with their own people there."

"Prepare for liftoff!" Piet announced, his voice ringing through the
Wrath
's tannoys. The thrusters ran up to full output, their irises still dilated.

Stephen thumped his loader in friendly fashion with his left hand; his right gripped the stanchion against which both men braced themselves. "I don't expect to lose, though, Philips," he shouted over the roar as thruster nozzles shrank down.

Nor did Stephen Gregg expect to survive a defeat himself. But Philips was very naive if he thought President Pleyal would bomb a riotous city any less quickly for the fact a few hundred Federation troops would burn in the corrosive atmosphere with the tens of thousands of Venerian civilians—like Philips' wife and child.

ABOARD THE
WRATH
 

"Holy Jesus Christ our lord and savior," somebody said in a hushed voice. Stephen realized his eyes were closed. He opened them carefully and saw the fleet of the North American Federation.

The
Wrath
was four days out from Venus. The transit series just concluded had been of twenty-seven separate exits from and reentries to the sidereal universe. Each one had hooked a needle through Stephen's soul and drawn another stitch stranglingly tight.

For ten years, transit had been a regular part of Stephen Gregg's existence. Each new experience was exactly like the last. Sometimes his eyes welled tears; always the pain in his skull made his stomach try to turn itself inside out.

Stephen would rather have had his teeth pulled without anesthetic than undergo transit. Dentistry wouldn't take him across interstellar space to where he had a job to do, so transit it was.

He understood why first sight of the enemy had brought the amazed prayer—it really had been a prayer—from Simms, who'd recovered fractionally quicker than Stephen had. The navigator's pride at meeting the enemy across trackless light-years was muted by realization of what they'd caught.

The Federation fleet was awesome. The number of ships, well over a hundred, wasn't unexpected, though seeing them had an emotional impact on even a prepared mind. What Stephen found shocking was the regularity of the Feds' formation.

He rose to his feet. The
Wrath
was under power, a standard 1-g acceleration for comfort's sake. Piet felt or saw the movement at the back of his console and turned. "That was the last transit series for some hours, I think, Stephen," he said. "How do you feel?"

"I'll live," Stephen said. He quirked a smile, knowing that between them "whether I like it or not" was understood to close the sentence. "I don't want to bother you if you . . ." He shrugged and flicked a finger toward the display.

"Nothing until the commander and the rest of the fleet arrives," Piet said. Ninety percent of Simms' screen was given over to alphanumeric data, but a visual sidebar in the lower right corner showed Venerian dispositions. Three more beads winked into sight simultaneously, bringing the total to ten.

"They're doing a good job of holding together," Stephen said, his eyes on the Federation fleet. The Feds were in a tight globe. Most of the ships were large, and some were very large. The vessels in the interior of the formation, like the stone in a peach, didn't have guns to run out when the Venerians appeared. Those would be the stores ships and probably troopers; not fighting vessels, though their size and added numbers couldn't fail to have a morale effect on their opponents.

The outer sphere was of warships, arrayed with fields of fire interlocked like the spines of a bramble bush. There were at least eighty of them, twice as many as the heavy vessels of the Venerian fleet.

"They've got more experience in fleet operations than we do," Piet said simply. "I'm surprised to see how well they're keeping formation, though. Their captains and commander are both smarter and more skillful than I'd thought they would be."

Guillermo turned from his adjacent console. "I have been listening to the talk within the Federation fleet, Captain," he said.

"How are you doing that?" Stephen asked in surprise. Modulated laser was the only practical means of communication between starships, since plasma thrusters acted as omniband radio-frequency transmitters. Unlike radio, laser communicators were tight-beam devices that had to be carefully aimed to be heard even by the intended recipient.

Guillermo made a grating motion with his belly plates, the Molt equivalent of laughter. "Their communication beams reflect from their hulls, Colonel," he said. "I directed the
Wrath
's fine sensors to pick up the reflected light, and her fine computers to analyze and enhance the glimmers. As no doubt an ancestor of mine was taught to do before the Collapse."

There were folk who denied that Molts had real intelligence. They claimed the aliens were merely bundles of genetic memory, operating like machines according to programmed pathways. Those folk—bigots, fools, and very often grasping pinchfarts to whom the profit in trading Molt slaves was all the justification necessary—hadn't worked
with
Molts the way Piet and Stephen had done in the past decade.

The navigator's sidebar now showed nearly forty ships, though there was no way of telling from the schematic how many of them were the fleet's accompanying light vessels—couriers and rescue craft—without combat value.

"What are they saying, Guillermo?" Simms demanded. "Are they going to attack us?"

"The Federation officers are terrified, Navigator Simms," Guillermo said. "They thought it was impossible that we would locate them before they had reached the Solar System."

Stephen chuckled. The prospect of action was doing more for his transit-induced queasiness than the solid deck alone could have managed. "The other guy's always three meters tall," he said. "We need to remember that to the Feds, we're the other guy."

An attention signal chimed through the
Wrath.
An image of Commander Bruckshaw formed on the upper left corner of the main display. Piet touched a control, reversing the images so that the enemy fleet was a miniature and the commander's huge visage looked sternly across the cockpit and from all the flagship's displays slaved to the main screen.

Stephen straightened to parade rest, feet spread and his hands crossed behind his back. Bruckshaw's screen displayed a montage of images from all the vessels linked to his flagship, the
Venus—
probably all the vessels in the fleet at this moment. The view transmitted from the optronics of some of the older ships would be at best a fuzzy blur, but Bruckshaw would be well able to see Stephen if he cared to look. It didn't matter, but the principle of disciplined readiness mattered.

"Gentlemen and sailors of Venus," Bruckshaw said. "This is the day we have prayed for: the day that God may, with His blessing, give the Federation into our hands and free Venus from the threat of tyranny forever."

He gestured. Transmission parameters shrank and stripped the commander's voice, but the
Wrath
's AI swelled it again to more than fullness. Bruckshaw had a good oral style, and to his words' enhanced majesty he added the bedrock of utter sincerity.

"Our foes are numerous, as we knew they would be," Bruckshaw continued. "The formation they keep looks impressive, but a formation doesn't fight battles—men fight battles, and the men with courage and God on their side win those battles! We will take thirty minutes to prepare ourselves. Then we will all attack. Captains, ready your ships for action!"

The shrilling Action Stations alert stepped on the chime closing the transmission over the command channel. A view of the Federation fleet against an alien starscape replaced Commander Bruckshaw's face again.

"Let's get our suits on, Philips," Stephen said. "I'll want you and Hadley each carrying an extra flashgun as well as rifles this time, I think."

ABOARD THE
WRATH
 

Piet Ricimer raised a gauntlet to pat Stephen's, gripping the stanchion behind Piet's console. Then he said, "Prepare for action," in a calm, clear voice through the
Wrath
's PA system.

Piet pressed a key with an index finger, enabling the manual controls. His touch on the yoke was smooth and delicate despite his hard suit. Stephen felt angled thrust send the
Wrath
toward the Federation's defensive globe like a shark easing toward prey.

Stephen's faceshield was raised. Pumps had lowered the
Wrath
's internal air pressure to half Earth normal at sea level before the ventilation system shut down as a preliminary to action, but the crew wouldn't need to switch to their suits' air bottles until the guns began firing.

The worst disadvantage of operations in near vacuum was that ordinary speech required an atmosphere to carry sound. Stephen's helmet, like those of other key personnel—gunner's mates, damage control teams, motormen—was equipped with a modulated infrared intercom, but for many of the
Wrath
's crew the later stages of the battle would be fought in silence save for terrifying shocks ringing through their bootsoles.

Flexible gaiters sealed the cannon barrels to the inner hull so that air didn't escape—quickly—when the gunports opened; the temporary splinter shields erected like transparent booths around each gun position were nominally airtight also. The recoil and backblast of the first plasma discharge would start seams in both protective devices, draining the vessel's atmosphere within the minutes of even a short action.

Aboard the
Wrath
everyone wore his hard suit, Guillermo included. The Molt looked odd because the armor was relatively bulky on his narrow limbs. The officers of Federation vessels wore hard suits, but the most part of even the gunnery crews made do with breathing apparatus and quilted asbestos clothing. Many of those aboard, especially the soldiers embarked for this expedition, would have no protection but sealed compartments and a prayer that no Venerian bolt would puncture their section of the hull.

But the Feds had a very great number of ships. President Pleyal wouldn't notice personnel casualties, particularly among Molt slaves, if his fleet crushed or brushed aside the ships defending Venus this day.

"Starboard guns are prepared to fire," Stampfer said. The master gunner made no pretense of aristocratic coolness. If his crews and equipment weren't perfect on the verge of action—and what human endeavor was perfect?—those around him knew it. At the moment Stampfer sounded angry enough to chew a hole through the
Wrath
's double hull. "Port guns are on twenty-second standby."

The
Wrath
's gunners manned half the plasma cannon at a time. Because of the time gun tubes took to cool before they could be safely reloaded, full crews for all the guns would have been a waste of the space the men and their subsistence required. Besides the savings in volume, by rotating on her long axis the
Wrath
displayed a fresh expanse of hull to an enemy whose return fire might have damaged the surface initially exposed.

Stampfer was at a mobile fire director plugged into jacks on the gun deck, not at the position provided for him here on the bridge. He wanted—needed—to be in position to aim his cannon by eye if the fire-direction optronics failed in action. Stephen had seen Stampfer running from tube to tube in the past, his crews poised to act exactly as their master gunner ordered. If all the ships in the present fleet hit as hard and as accurately as Stampfer's guns had done in those less sophisticated days, the Feds were in for a long day and a short war.

The main display before Piet was a maze of colored jack-straws—the courses, past and calculated, of all vessels in both fleets. Each ship was a different hue, though with over a hundred and fifty individuals to track some variations were extremely slight. Simms' screen was a mass of alphanumeric data, while Guillermo viewed the fleets as beads rather than vectors and had a numeric sidebar.

None of the navigation displays meant a lot to Stephen, but he could see through the transparent blast wall to the gunnery console. Though the position was unmanned, its screen was slaved to the mobile director Stampfer was using on the gun deck.

A spherical Federation warship swelled on the display, rotating slowly around its axis of motion. Stephen had no certain scale to judge by, but the ship's nine full decks implied it was large—probably upward of a 1,000 tonnes' burden.

The Fed vessel's gunports were open and the guns already run out. She carried more than thirty tubes, but as the image grew Stephen saw to his amazement that the weapons on the midline weren't plasma cannon. The Feds had welded projectile weapons on ground carriages to the deck of the hold.