The Reaches (40 page)

The general commander stared out at his dream for a future in which mankind populated all the universe under God. Even Thomas Hawtry looked muted by the blazing personality of the man beside whom he stood.

"In the name of God, sirs, do your duty!"

The
Porcelain
made nineteen individual transits in the final approach series; that is, she slipped nineteen times in rapid succession from the sidereal universe to another bubble of sponge space and back.

At each transit, as during every transit of the past seven days, my stomach knotted and flapped inside out. I clung to the staple in the attitude-control station, holding a sponge across my open mouth and wishing I were dead. Or perhaps I
was
dead, and this was the Hell to which so many people over the years had consigned me . . .

"Oh, God," I moaned into the sponge. My eyes were shut. "Oh, God, please save me." I hadn't prayed in real earnest since the night I found myself trapped in Melinda's room.

The transit series ended. Only the vibration of the vessel's plasma motors maintaining a normal 1-g acceleration indicated that I wasn't standing on solid ground. I opened my eyes.

A planet, gray beneath a cloud-streaked atmosphere, filled the forward viewscreen. "Most times the Feds've got women on the staff," Jeude was saying as he and his fellows at the console eyed Decades for the first time. "And they aren't all of them
that
hostile."

I released the staple I was holding and rose to my feet. I smiled ruefully at Gregg and said, "I'll get used to it, I suppose."

Gregg's mouth quirked. "For your sake I hope so," he said. "But I haven't, and I've been doing this for some years now."

Besides the ship's officers, the forward compartment was crowded by Hawtry and the nine gentlemen-adventurers who, like him, stood fully equipped with firearms and body armor.

The ceramic chestplates added considerably to the men's bulk and awkwardness. Many of them had personal blazons painted on their armor. Hawtry's own chestplate bore a gryphon, the marking of his house, and on the upper right clamp the oriflamme of the Duneens.

"Now that's navigation!" said Captain—former captain—Macquerie with enthusiasm. "We can orbit without needing to transit again."

It had taken Macquerie a few days to come to terms with his situation, but since then he'd been an asset to the project. Macquerie was too good a sailor not to be pleased with a ship as fine as the
Porcelain
and a commander as famous as Piet Ricimer.

"The
Kinsolving
's nowhere to be seen," said Salomon as he leaned toward the three-dimensional navigation tank. "As usual. The
Mizpah
can keep station, the
cargo
hulk can keep station, more or less. Winter couldn't find his ass with both hands."

"There they are," Ricimer said mildly. He pointed to something in the tank that I couldn't see from where I stood. It probably wouldn't have meant anything to me anyway. "One, maybe two transits out. It's my fault for not making sure the
Kinsolving
's equipment was calibrated to the same standards as the rest of ours."

"If the
Absalom
can keep station," Salomon muttered, "so could the
Kinsolving
—if she had a navigator aboard."

"Enough of this nonsense," said Thomas Hawtry. Several of the gentlemen about him looked as green as I felt, but Hawtry was clearly unaffected by the multiple eversions of transit. "We don't need a third vessel anyway. Lay us alongside the
Mizpah,
Ricimer, so that I can go aboard and take charge."

Guillermo looked up from his console. "The cutter should be launched in the next three minutes," he said to Ricimer in his mechanically perfect speech. "Otherwise we'll need to brake now rather than proceeding directly into planetary orbit."

"You'd best get aft to Hold Two, Mister Hawtry," Ricimer said. If he'd reacted to the gentleman's peremptory tone, there was no sign of it in his voice. "The cutter is standing by with two men to ferry you."

Hawtry grunted. "Come along, men," he ordered as he led his fellows shuffling sternward. Watching the sicker-looking of the gentlemen helped to settle my stomach.

"Sure you don't want to go with them?" Gregg said archly. "When they transfer to the
Mizpah,
there won't be any proper gentlemen aboard. Just spacers."

"I'm a proper gentleman," I snapped. "I just have little interest in weapons and no training whatever with them. If you please, I'll stay close to you and Mister Ricimer and do what you direct me."

"Mister Hawtry?" Ricimer called as the last of Hawtry's contingent were ducking through the hatchway to the central compartment. "Please remember: there'll be no fighting if things go as they should. We'll simply march on the base from opposite directions and summon them to surrender."

Hawtry's response was a muted grunt.

Salomon and Macquerie lowered their heads over the navigation tank and murmured to one another. The Molt Guillermo touched a control. His viewscreen split again: the right half retaining the orb of Decades, three-quarters in sunlight, while the left jumped by logarithmic magnifications down onto the planetary surface.

A fenced rectangle enclosed a mixture of green foliage and soil baked to brick by the exhaust of starships landing. In close-up, the natural vegetation beyond the perimeter had the iridescence of oil on water.

There were two ships with bright metal hulls in the landing area, and a scatter of buildings against the opposite fence. The morning sun slanted across the Federation base. Obvious gun towers threw stark, black shadows from the corners and from the center of both long sides.

I licked my lips. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. The
Porcelain
shuddered like a dog drying itself. Lights on the attitude-control panels pulsed in near unison, balancing the shock. The three sailors looked alert but not concerned.

"That's the cutter with Hawtry aboard casting off," Gregg said. He glanced at the bosun. "How long before we begin atmospheric braking, Dole?" he asked.

Dole, a stocky, dark man with a beard trimmed to three centimeters, pursed his lips as he considered the images on the viewscreen. "About two hours, sir," he said.

Jeude, beside him, nodded agreement. "We could go into orbit quicker," he said, "but it'll take them that long to transfer the fine gentlemen to the
Mizpah
—good riddance to them."

"Watch your tongue, Aaron Jeude," the bosun said.

Jeude's smile flashed toward Gregg, taking in me beside the bigger man as well.

"What do we do, Gregg?" I asked. My voice was colorless because of my effort to conceal my fear of the unfamiliar.

"We wait," Gregg said. "Ten minutes before landing, we'll put our equipment on. And then we'll march a klick through what Macquerie says is swamp, even on the relative highlands where the Feds built their base."

"I don't have any equipment," I said. "If you mean weapons."

"We'll find you something," Gregg said. "Never fear." He spoke quietly, but there was a disconcerting lilt to his tone.

Six sailors under Stampfer, the
Porcelain
's master gunner, bustled around the Long Tom, opening hydraulic valves and locking down the seats attached to the carriage. They were readying the big weapon for action.

"Will there be fighting, then, Gregg?" I asked, sounding even to myself as cool as the sweat trickling down the middle of my back.

"At Decades, I don't know," Gregg said. "Not if they have any sense. But before this voyage is over—yes, Mister Moore. There will be war."

The
Porcelain
's two cargo holds were on the underside of the vessel, bracketed between the pairs of plasma motors fore and aft, and the quartet of similar thrusters amidships. Number Two, the after hold, had been half-emptied when the cutter launched. Now it was filled by a party of twenty men waiting for action, and it stank.

"You bloody toad, Easton!" a sailor said to the man beside him. "That warn't no fart. You've shit yourself!"

My nose agreed. Several of the men had vomited from tension and atmospheric buffeting as the ship descended, and we were all of us pretty ripe after a week on shipboard. I clutched the cutting bar Gregg had handed me from the arms locker and hoped that I wouldn't be the next to spew my guts up.

The
Porcelain
's descent slowed to a near-hover. The rapid pulsing of her motors doubled into a roar. "Surface effect!" Gregg said. "Thrust reflected from the ground. We'll be touching down—"

The big gentleman wore back-and-breast armor—the torso of a hard suit that doubled as protection from vacuum and lethal atmospheres—with the helmet locked in place, though his visor was raised for the moment. In his arms was a flashgun, a cassegrain laser which would pulse the entire wattage of the battery in its stock out through a stubby ceramic barrel. Gregg was shouting, but I needed cues from his mouth to make out the words.

The last word was probably "soon," but it was lost in still greater cacophony. The starship touched its port outrigger, hesitated, and settled fully to the ground with a crash of parts reaching equilibrium with gravity instead of thrust.

I relaxed. "Now what?" I asked.

"We wait a few minutes for the ground to cool," Gregg explained. "There was standing water, so the heat ought to dissipate pretty quickly. Sufficient heat."

It seemed like ten minutes but was probably two before a sailor spun the undogging controls at a nod from Gregg. The hatch, a section of hull the full length of Hold Two, cammed downward to form a ramp. Through the opening rushed wan sunshine and a gush of steam evaporated from the soil by the plasma motors.

It was the first time I'd been on a planet besides Venus.

"Let's go!" boomed Stephen Gregg in the sudden dampening of the hold's echoes. He strode down the ramp, a massive figure in his armor. "Keep close, but form a cordon at the edge of the cleared area."

I tried to stay near Gregg, but a dozen sailors elbowed me aside to exit from the center of the ramp. I realized why when I followed them. Though the hatchway was a full ten meters wide, the starship's plasma motors had raised the ground beneath to oven heat. The center of the ramp, farthest from where the exhaust of stripped ions struck, was the least uncomfortable place to depart the recently-landed vessel.

I stumbled on the lip at the end of the ramp. The surroundings steamed like a suburb of Sheol, and the seared native vegetation gave off a bitter reek.

The foliage beyond the exhaust-burned area was tissue-thin and stiffened with vesicles of gas rather than cellulose. The veins were of saturated color, with reds, blues, and purples predominating. Those hues merged with the general pale yellow of leaf surfaces to create the appearance of gray when viewed from a distance.

I wore a neck scarf. I put it to my mouth and breathed through it. It probably didn't filter any of the sharp poisons from the air, but at least it gave me the illusion that I was doing something useful.

Sailors clumped together at the margin of the ravaged zone instead of spreading out. The forward ramp was lowered also, but men were filtering slowly down it because Hold One was still packed with supplies and equipment.

"Stephen," called the man stepping from the forward ramp. "I'll take the lead, if you'll make sure that no one straggles from the rear of the line."

The speaker wore brilliant, gilded body armor over a tunic with puffed magenta sleeves. The receiver of his repeating rifle was also gold-washed. Because the garb was unfamiliar and the man's face was in shadow, it was by his voice that I identified him as Piet Ricimer.

Gregg broke off in the middle of an order to a pair of grizzled sailors. "Piet, you're not to do this!" he said. "We talked—"

"You talked, Stephen," Ricimer interrupted with the crisp tone of the man who
was
general commander of the expedition. "I said I'd decide when the time came. Shall we proceed?"

Forty-odd men of the
Porcelain
's complement of eighty now milled in the burned-off area. About seventy-five percent of us had firearms. Most of the rest carried cutting bars like mine, but there were two flashguns besides Gregg's own. Flashguns were heavy, unpleasant to shoot because they scattered actinics, and were certain to attract enemy fire. I found it instructive that Stephen Gregg would carry such a weapon.

The sky over the Federation base to the south suddenly rippled with spaced rainbow flashes. Four seconds later, the rumble of plasma cannon discharging shook the swamp about the
Porcelain.
 

A ship that must have been the
Mizpah
dropped out of the sky. The sun-hot blaze of her thrusters was veiled by the ionized glow of their exhaust. Plasma drifted up and back from the vessel like the train of a lady in court dress.

"The stupid
whoreson
!" said Stephen Gregg. "They were to land together with us, not five minutes later!"

Ricimer jumped quickly to the ground and trotted toward Gregg. "Stephen," he said, "you'd best join me in the lead. I think it's more important that we reach the base as quickly as possible than that the whole body arrives together. I'm very much afraid that Blakey is trying to land directly on the objective."

As the
Mizpah
lurched downward at a rate much faster than that of the
Porcelain
before her, a throbbing pulse of yellow light from the ground licked her lower hull. From where I jogged along a step behind Ricimer and Gregg, the starship was barely in sight above the low vegetation, but she must have been fifty or more meters above the ground.

The plume of exhaust dissipated in a shock wave. Seconds later, we could hear a report duller than that of the
Mizpah'
s cannon but equally loud.

Ricimer held a gyro compass in his left hand. "This way," he directed. Twenty meters into the forest, the
Porcelain
was out of sight.

"The bloody whoreson!" Gregg repeated as he jogged along beside his friend and leader.