The Reaches (24 page)

"You're in charge," Gregg said. There were no real hills in this landscape. He'd found a hummock of harder rock to sit down on. There was enough rise for his heels to grip and steady his torso against the omnipresent wind. "The meeting won't start until you get there."

A three-meter rivulet of light rippled toward them across the rocks and thin snow. The creature was a transparent red like that of a pomegranate cell. Twice its length from the humans, it dived like an otter into the rock and vanished.

Gregg's trigger finger relaxed slightly. He leaned on his left hand to look behind him, but there was no threat in that direction either.

The
Peaches, Dalriada,
and the prize Ricimer had named the
Halys
were a few hundred meters away. The ships had already gathered drifts in the lee of the prevailing winds. Temporary outbuildings housed the crusher and kiln with which the crews applied hull patches, though neither Venerian vessel was in serious need of refit.

On a less hostile world, men would have built huts for themselves as well. On Sunrise, they slept in the ships.

"What do you think, Stephen?" Ricimer asked. He faced out, toward a horizon as empty as the plain on which he stood. Occasionally a tremble of light marked another of the planet's indigenous life forms.

Gregg shrugged within his hard suit. "You do the thinking, Piet," he said. "I'll back you up."

Ricimer turned abruptly. He staggered before he came to terms with the wind from this attitude. "Don't pretend to be stupid!" he said. "If you think I'm making a mistake, tell me!"

"I'm not stupid, Piet," Gregg said. He was glad he was seated. Contact with the ground calmed him against the atmosphere's volatility. "I don't care. About where we go, about how we hit the Feds. You'll decide, and I'll help you execute whatever you do decide."

A creature of light so richly azure that it was almost material quivered across the snow between the two men and vanished again. Gregg restrained himself from an urge to prod the rippling form with his boot toe.

Ricimer laughed wryly. "So it's up to me and God, is it, Stephen?" He clasped his arms closer to his armored torso. "I hope God is with me. I pray He is."

Gregg said nothing. He had been raised to believe in God and God's will, though without the particular emphasis his friend had received. Now—

He supposed he still believed in them. But he couldn't believe that the smoking bodies Stephen Gregg had left in his wake were any part of the will of God.

"I'm going to go back there and give orders," Ricimer continued. His face nodded behind the visor, though the suit's locked helmet didn't move. "There's a risk that my plan will fail disastrously. Even if it succeeds, some of my men will almost certainly die. Stephen,
you
may die."

"All my ancestors have," Gregg said. "I don't expect to be any different."

He raised his gauntleted hand to watch the ringers clench and unclench. "Piet," he said, "I trust you to do the best job you can. And to do a better job than anybody else could."

Ricimer laughed again, this time with more humor. "Do you, Stephen? Well, I suppose you must, or you wouldn't be here."

He put out a hand to help his friend stand. "Then let's go back to
Peaches,
since until I do my job of laying out the plan, none of the rest of you can do yours."

The command group met on the featherboat rather than the much larger
Dalriada
because of the electronics with which Ricimer had outfitted the vessel he and Gregg owned personally. The planning kernel which coupled to the AI was the most important of these toys at the moment. It converted navigational information into cartographic data and projected the result onto the
Peaches'
viewscreen.

An image of Umber, simplified into a tawny pancake marked with standard symbols, filled the screen now.

There were ten humans—the gentlemen and officers of the expedition—and two Molts packed into the featherboat's bay. John, the Molt captured aboard the
Halys,
had asked and been allowed to join the Venerians.

John's recent knowledge of Umber was an obvious advantage for the raid; Guillermo operated the display with a skill that none of the humans on the expedition could have equaled. Nonetheless, several of the
Dalriada
's gentlemen looked askance at seeing aliens included in the command group.

"There's only one community on this side of Umber," Ricimer said as Guillermo focused the screen onto the upper edge of the pancake. "It's paired with a single community across the Mirror. The planetary surface is entirely desert on both sides, lifeless except for imported species."

From straight on like this, Umber appeared to be a normal planet with a diameter of about 5,000 kilometers. Instead, it was a section from the surface of a spheroid 12,000 klicks in diameter—had the remainder of the planet existed.

Umber's gravitational attraction was normal for the calculated size and density of the complete planet—slightly below that of Venus. There was no mass in realside, mirrorside, or
anywhere
to account for that gravity.

"Umber City is built along the Mirror," Ricimer continued. "The population varies, but there are usually about a thousand persons present."

"Both sides?" asked Wassail, the
Dalriada
's navigator. Gregg had already been impressed by the way Wassail showed interest in new concepts. Dulcie, the
Dalriada
's captain, was competent but as dull as his vessel's artificial intelligence.

"This side only," Ricimer said. "The community on mirrorside is much smaller and ninety percent of the residents are Molts. On realside, up to a third at any given time are human Federation personnel."

"One Venerian's worth six of those Fed pussies any day," Adrien interjected. "We'll go right through them!"

"We aren't here to fight," his brother said sharply. "We're going to take them by surprise, load with chips, and be away before they understand what's happened."

His lips pursed, then flattened into a smile of sorts. "Our task is somewhat complicated by the fact that another vessel attacked a freighter as it was starting to land on Umber two weeks ago."

Ricimer nodded toward John to source the data. "The attempt was unsuccessful—the attacker pursued into the atmosphere, and guns from the fort drove the hostile vessel off. It was sufficient to alarm the entire region, however. Umber sent couriers to neighboring planets and to Earth itself."

"A ship from Venus?" asked Bong. He was a younger son, like Gregg, but from an Ishtar City family.

"It was metal-hulled," Ricimer said. "In all likelihood Germans from United Europe."

He turned to face the screen in order to discourage further questions. "The spaceport is here," he said, pointing at the lower edge of the developed area.

The port area was bounded by four large water tanks on the right. They held reaction mass brought from Rondelet on purpose-built tankers. Artesian wells supplied the town with drinking water, but such local reserves couldn't match the needs of the thrusters arriving at a major port.

The fort, a circle smaller than those of the water tanks, was sited below the lowest rank of dwellings. Below it in turn were the outlines of six starships, ranging from 20 to about 100 tonnes burden.

The ships, typical of the traffic Umber expected at any given time, were a symptom of a problem with the planning kernel. Its precision was a lie.

The kernel assembled data on Umber from the
Halys'
navigational files and from interrogations of two of the Fed crewmen. The third, the Rabbit, hadn't said a word from the time he was captured until Ricimer landed him, as promised, back on Rondelet.

The sum of that information was very slight. The kernel fleshed it out according to stored paradigms, creating streets and individual buildings in patterns which fit the specific data. It was easier for humans to visualize acting in a sketched city than in a shading marked developed area, but that very feeling of knowledge had a dangerous side.

"The fort mounts four heavy guns," Ricimer went on. "They can be aimed and fired from inside the citadel, but there are no turrets or shields for the loading crews."

"Molts," John said.

Ricimer nodded. "The guns will certainly be manned, though two weeks without further trouble is long enough for some of the increased watchfulness to fade away.

"In the center of the community is a park fifty meters by seventy-five," Ricimer continued, "parallel to the Mirror. It's stocked with Terran vegetation, mostly grasses and shrubs. No large trees. The Commandatura faces it."

He tapped the screen. "All the colony's control and communications are centered in the Commandatura, and valuables are frequently stored in the vaults in the basement."

"Chips?" Wassail asked.

"Chips, valuable artifacts," Ricimer agreed. "They're brought across the Mirror here"—he indicated the "eastern" end of town, assuming north was up—"by a sectioned tramway laid through the Mirror. Molts push the cars through from mirrorside and back."

Guillermo murmured to John, who said, "No Molts are allowed to live west of the park. They use Rabbits for house servants." The click he added at the end of the statement was clearly the equivalent of a human spitting.

Piet Ricimer bowed his head, a pause or a silent prayer. "We'll proceed as follows," he resumed. "The
Halys
will land an hour after full darkness. Mr. Gregg will command."

Adrien Ricimer jumped to his feet. "No!" he said. "Let me lead the attack, Piet! I'm your brother!"

Everyone stared at him. No one spoke. Gregg began to smile, though it wasn't a pleasant expression.

"Adrien," Piet Ricimer said through dry lips, "please sit down. You're embarrassing me. You will be my second-in-command for the assault on the Commandatura."

Adrien's face set itself in a rictus. He hunched back into his seat.

"Stephen," Ricimer continued, "you'll have Dole as your bosun—is that satisfactory?"

"Yes."

"As well as John and four men from the
Dalriada.
Captain Dulcie, you will provide Mr. Gregg with four of your most trustworthy people. Do you understand?"

"I'll pick the men, sir," Wassail volunteered. "You'll want trained gunners?"

Ricimer nodded. "Yes, that's a good idea. Now, when the
Halys
has captured the fort . . ."

Stephen Gregg's mind wrapped itself in a crackling reverie that smothered the remainder of his friend's words. He would go over the complete plan at leisure. For now, all Gregg could focus on was the initial attack that might be the end of his involvement in the operation, and in life itself.

The
Halys
lurched into freefall. Dole cursed and reached for the main fuel feed.

"
Don't,
" Gregg snapped, "touch that, Mr. Dole."

The thrusters fired under direction from the artificial intelligence. The vessel yawed violently before she came to balance and resumed a measured descent. John, crewing both sets of attitude controls, didn't move during the commotion.

"Christ's
blood,
sir!" Dole protested. "That's rough as a cob. I could do better than that!"

"We're here to look like Feds landing," Gregg said coolly. "That's what we're going to do"—he gave Dole a tight smile—"if it kills us. That means we let the AI bring us in, as coarse as it is and as crude as the thrusters it controls."

Gregg looked at the Molt on the attitude controls. "Is this how you would have landed if it had been you and your regular captain, John?" he asked.

"Yes," the alien said.

The
Halys'
viewscreen was raster-scanned. Synchronous problems divided the display into horizontal thirds, and the image within those segments was bad to begin with. Nor did it help visuals that a windstorm was blowing dust across Umber City as the raiders came in.

The four men from the
Dalriada
braced themselves against stanchions and tried to keep their cutting bars from flopping. They seemed a solid crew. The three common sailors showed a natural tendency to look to the fourth, a gunner's mate named Stampfer, when orders were given, but they'd showed no signs of deliberately rejecting either Gregg's authority or Dole's.

That was as well for them. Stephen Gregg might not trust himself at piloting a starship, but he could damned well see to it that his orders were obeyed the second time.

The viewscreen's jagged images of sandy soil and the three ships already docked on Umber vanished suddenly in a wash of dust. "Hang on, boys," Gregg said. "Here it comes."

The thrusters slammed up to three-quarter power. Two of the attitude jets fired, controlling the yaw from the thrusters' asymmetry. The corrections were so harsh and violent that it was a moment before Gregg realized that the final shock had been the landing legs grounding.

He let go of the stanchion and flexed life back into his left hand. His right biceps had twinges also, from the way he'd clamped the flashgun against his chest.

He gave a broad grin. "Gentlemen," he said, "I can't begin to tell you how glad I am that's over."

For a moment, none of the crewmen spoke. Then Stampfer broke into a grin of his own and said, "Too fucking right, sir!"

Dole got up from the thruster controls. He nodded toward the hatch. "Shall I?"

Gregg switched off the
Halys'
internal lights. "Just crack it," he ordered. "Enough to check the local conditions. We aren't going anywhere for . . . fifteen minutes, that'll let them go back to sleep in the fort."

Dole swung the hatch far enough to provide a twenty-centimeter opening. The six humans instinctively formed a tight arc, shoulder-to-shoulder, to look out. One of the Dalriadans eased the hatch a little farther outward; Gregg didn't object.

Dust blew in. It created yellow swirls in the glow above instrument telltales. The outside light of the fort was a similar blur, scarcely brighter though it was less than a hundred meters away. Gregg couldn't see the docked ships from this angle, but they'd shown no signs of life from above.