The Reaches (35 page)

Gregg looked at his command: a Molt and five humans, himself included. Four firearms if you counted Guillermo's pistol, and four cutting bars.

None of the personnel in perfect condition, and Gregg able to move only by walking slowly. If he'd been physically able to survive the shock of takeoff, he'd have been in the
Halys
with Piet; but he couldn't.

"Mr. Dole," he said crisply. "You, Lightbody and Jeude position yourselves at the edge of the clearing there."

Between the
Halys'
exhaust on landing and takeoff, and the plasma bolts the Feds had directed at her from orbit, fires had burned an irregular swatch a hundred meters by three hundred into the forest. Large trees spiked up as blackened trunks, but in general you could see across the area. Gregg pointed to the center of one long side.

"Stampfer, Guillermo and I will wait across the clearing," he continued. "That way we'll have any intruders in a cross fire."

Jeude glanced at the party's equipment. "Some cross fire," he muttered.

Gregg smiled tightly. He hefted the heavy rifle Jeude himself had brought back from Umber City. "I'd prefer to have a flashgun, Mr. Jeude," he said. "But if the need arises, I'll endeavor to give a good account of myself with what's available. As shall we all, I'm confident."

The smile disappeared; his face looked human again. "Let's go," he said as he turned.

He heard Dole murmur as the parties separated, "If it's him with a sharp stick and the Feds with plasma guns, Jeude, I know where
my
money lies."

"They're coming!" Stampfer said. He clicked his channel selector across the detents, making sure that the increasing crackle of static blanketed the RF spectrum. "Mr. Gregg, they're coming! I can hear the thrusters!"

"Mr. Dole," Gregg said, speaking loudly on intercom mode, though he knew that wouldn't really help carry his voice over the hash of plasma exhaust. "Don't show yourselves until we're sure this is friendly."

He cut off the helmet radio and looked at Stampfer—Guillermo wasn't going to run out into the middle of the clearing waving his arms. "Us too," he said. "We don't know it's Piet. We don't even know it's a spaceship."

"Aw,
sir,
" the gunner said. The thrusters were a growing rumble rather than just white noise on the radio. "It couldn't be anybody else!"

He craned his neck skyward.

The vessel overflew the clearing at a thousand meters. Its speed was in the high subsonic range. It was a ship's boat. From the hull's metallic glint it was of Terran manufacture.

Perversely, Gregg's first reaction was an urge to smirk knowingly at Stampfer, who had been so sure the news had to be good. Next he wondered what they could do about it . . . and the answer was probably nothing, though he'd see.

"It may be a boat they've captured, like the
Halys,
" Gregg said aloud.

"The larger settlements on Benison usually have a cutter available," Guillermo said. "This craft comes from the direction of Fianna, which is the nearest settlement."

"Or it could be from orbit," said Stampfer, as gloomy now as he had been enthusiastic a moment before. "The Fed warship that drove them away before—Dulcie may not be the only one that came back and waited for something to happen."

The sound of the thruster had died away to a shadow of itself. Now it rose again, the sharper pulses syncopating the dying echoes of the previous pass. The boat was coming back.

"I doubt a warship from the Earth Convoy has been wasting the past week and a half in orbit here, Mr. Stampfer," Gregg snapped. He wasn't so much frightened as completely at a loss for anything to do. The local Feds had noticed Piet's liftoff. They'd sent a cutter to scout the location.

The boat roared over the clearing again, this time within a hundred meters of the ground. It had slowed considerably, but not even Gregg could have hit the vessel in the instant it was visible overhead. A rifle bullet wouldn't have done any damage to a spacegoing hull, but the Feds might be concerned about laser bolts.

If only he hadn't lost the flashgun . . .

"Stampfer and Guillermo," Gregg said. "Go directly across the clearing to Mr. Dole's force and inform him that all of you are to run for the Mirror immediately. Go!"

Neither of them moved. "Hey," said Stampfer. "We can still fight."

"God's blood, you fool, there won't
be
a fight!" Gregg shouted. "They'll come over on the deck and fry us with their exhaust. Go!"

Stampfer looked at the Molt, then back at Gregg.

"His injury won't permit him to run," Guillermo said to the gunner.

"We'll help him," Stampfer said. He forcibly wrapped Gregg's left arm across his shoulders.

"No, there's not enough—" Gregg began, and then it truly was too late. The boat was coming back, very fast and traveling parallel with the clearing's long axis. The pilot wanted to get the maximum effect now that he'd identified the target by the waiting crates.

Did he know what the crates contained? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter. Though the cargo was hugely valuable, none of it was going into the pockets of the boat's crew. They would be far more concerned about their own safety, especially if word of the bloodbath in Umber City had reached Benison by now.

"Let go of me," Gregg said. He had to shout to be heard. "I'll get one shot at least. Guillermo, you shoot too."

Gregg aimed, wondering which side of the clearing the Feds would ignite on their first pass. Either way, it wouldn't be long before they finished the job.

Guillermo took the pistol from his holster. He pointed it vaguely toward the north end of the clearing. His head rotated to stare at Gregg rather than the sight picture.

Was the pilot perhaps a Molt too?

The boat, transonic again, glinted over the rifle sight. Gregg squeezed.

The boat's hull crumpled around an iridescent fireball. The bow section cartwheeled through the sky, shedding sparkling bits of itself as it went. The stern dissolved in what was less a secondary explosion than a gigantic plasma flare involving the vessel's powerplant. The initial thunderclap knocked Gregg and his companions down, but the hissing roar continued for several seconds.

"Metal hulls," said Stampfer, seated with his hands out behind him to prop his torso. "Never trust them. Good ceramic wouldn't have failed that way to a fifty-mike-mike popgun."

The
Peaches
boomed across the clearing, moving too fast to land on this pass. Gregg saw the featherboat bank to return.

"Not bad shooting, though," Stampfer added. "Not bad at all."

Gregg didn't have the strength to sit up just at the moment. He tried to reload the rifle by holding it above his chest, but after fumbling twice to get a cartridge out of its loop, he gave that up too.

"Only the best for Piet's boys," he said, knowing the words were lost in the sound of the featherboat returning to land.

The personnel bridge shocked against the hull of the
Peaches.
The featherboat rocked and chattered as the tube's lip tried to grip the hot ceramic around the roof hatch. A hiss indicated the Betaport staff was purging the bridge even though they didn't have a good seal yet.

"Boy, they're in a hurry for us!" Dole said with a chuckle. "When Customs sent
our
manifest down from orbit, that got some action, didn't it?"

"What do you figure the value is, Captain?" Jeude asked. "All those chips—"

He gestured, careful both because he wore a hard suit in anticipation of landing and because of the featherboat's packed interior. They'd skimped on rations for the return voyage in order to find space for more crated microchips.

"I never
saw
so many, just here. And the
Dalriada,
it's as full as we are for all she's so much bigger."

Ricimer looked at Gregg and raised an eyebrow.

Rather than quote a figure in Venerian consols, Gregg said, "I'd estimate the value of our cargo is in the order of half or two-thirds of the planetary budget, Jeude."

His mouth quirked in something like a smile. It was amusing to be asked to be an accountant again. It was amazing to realize that he
was
still an accountant, a part of him. Humans were like panels of stained glass, each colored segment partitioned from the others by impassable black bars.

"Of course," he added, still an accountant, "the quantity of chips we're bringing is great enough that they'll depress the value of the class on the market if they're all released at the same time."

"They will be," Ricimer said, his eyes on the future beyond the
Peaches'
hatch. "To build more starships for Venus, to give them the best controls and optics as they've already got the best hulls and crews."

He looked at his men. "The best crews God ever gave a captain in His service," he said.

"What'll a personal share be then, Mr. Gregg?" Lightbody asked. His right hand absently stroked his breastplate, beneath which he carried his pocket Bible. "Ah—for a sailor, I mean, is all."

"
If
they let us keep it," Stampfer said. "You know how the gentlemen do—begging your pardon, Mr. Gregg, I don't mean
you.
But it may mean a war, and it may be they don't want that."

"It was a war on fucking Biruta, wasn't it?" Jeude said. "Nobody cared about that but the widows!"

"I cared," Gregg said without emphasis. And at the end, Henry Carstensen cared; though perhaps not for long.

"Well, we all cared," Jeude said, "and all Betaport cared. But the gent—the people in Ishtar City, they let it go by."

He gave Gregg a pleading look. "The governor, she won't give our cargo back, will she, sir?"

Gregg looked at Ricimer, who shrugged. Gregg smiled coldly and said, "No, Jeude, she won't. Her own share's too great, and the value to the planet's industrial capacity is too great. Pleyal's government will threaten, and they'll sue for recovery . . . but they'll have to sue in our courts, and I doubt they can even prove ownership."

Ricimer looked surprised.

Gregg laughed. "You're too innocent to be a merchant, Piet," he said.

He rapped a case with his armored knuckles. "How much of this do you think was properly manifested on Umber—and so subject to Federation taxes and customs? My guess is ten percent. A quarter at the outside. And they'll play hell getting proper documentation on
that.
"

"And our share, Mr. Gregg?" Lightbody repeated.

"Enough to buy a tavern in Betaport," Gregg said. "Enough to buy a third share in a boat like the
Peaches,
if that's what you want to do."

Enough to stay drunk for a month, with the best friends of any man on Venus during that month. Lightbody might not be the one to spend his share that way, but you can't always guess how a man would act until he had the consols in his hands.

"I want to go out with the cap'n again," Dole said. "And you, Mr. Gregg."

Gregg gripped the back of the bosun's hand and squeezed it.

"Open your hatch," a voice crackled on the intercom. The featherboat's ceramic hull didn't form a Faraday cage the way a metal vessel's did, but sulphur compounds baked on during the descent through Venus' atmosphere were conductive enough to diffuse even short-range radio communications. "Captain Ricimer and Mr. Gregg are to proceed to the personnel lock, where an escort is waiting."

"Hey, the royal treatment!" Jeude crowed as he reached for one of the undogging levers. "Not just coming in like the cargo,
we
aren't."

"We" would do just that, enter Betaport when the landing pit cooled enough for machinery to haul the
Peaches
into a storage dock. Jeude thought of his officers as representing all the crew.

In a manner of speaking, he could be right.

Gregg started to lock down his faceshield. Ricimer put out a hand. "I think the tube will be bearable without that," he said. "Not comfortable, but bearable for a short time."

"Sure," Gregg said.

Positive pressure in the personnel bridge rammed a blast of air into the
Peaches
when the hatch unsealed. The influx must have started out cool and pure, but at this end of the tube the hot reek made Gregg sneeze and his eyes water.

The crewmen didn't seem to be affected. Gregg noticed that none of them had bothered to close up, as they could have done.

Ricimer murmured something to Guillermo and climbed into the bridge. He extended a hand that Gregg refused. An upward pull would stress his guts the wrong way.

A crewman pushed from behind, welcome help.

The two men walked along the slightly resilient surface of the personnel bridge. With their faceshields up they could talk without using radio intercom, but at first neither of them spoke.

"I don't suppose they understand," Ricimer said. "Do you think they do, Stephen?"

"That Governor Halys could find her life a lot simpler if she handed a couple of high-ranking scapegoats to the Federation for trial?" Gregg said. "No, I doubt it."

He snorted. "As Stampfer implied, sailors don't think the way gentlemen do. And rulers. But I don't think she'd bother throwing the men to Pleyal as well."

"It'll go on, what we've started," Ricimer said. The sidewalls of the tube had a faint red glow, but there was a white light-source at the distant end. "When they see, when all Venus sees the wealth out there, there'll be no keeping us back from the stars. This time it won't be a single empire that shatters into another Collapse. Man will
have
the stars!"

Gregg would have chuckled, but his throat caught in the harsh atmosphere. "You don't have to preach to me, Piet," he said when he'd hacked his voice clear again.

Ricimer looked at him. "What do you believe in, Stephen?" he asked.

Gregg looked back. He lifted a hand to wipe his eyes and remembered that he wore armored gauntlets. "I believe," he said, "that when I'm—the way I get. That I can hit anything I aim at. Anything."

Ricimer nodded, sad-eyed. "And God?" he asked. "Do you believe in God?"