The Reaches (48 page)

I ducked and swore. Stephen began to laugh rackingly. The cloud of flyers sailed away from the plateau, then dived abruptly toward the jungle.

Stephen untied his kerchief, checked for a clean portion of the fabric, and used that to wipe down the rifle's receiver. "I was the smart-ass who decided if you thought you could make it back, I sure could," he explained. "Nobody's choice but mine—which is why I let Piet make the decisions, mostly."

I stepped to the point from which ripples spread from the rock face. As I'd expected, the basalt had been melted away. Because the rock was already fully oxidized, it splashed into waves like those of metal welded in a vacuum.

The cavity so formed was circular and nearly two meters in diameter. It was sealed by a substance as transparent as air—not glass, for it responded with a soft
thock
when I tapped it with my signet ring.

The creature mummified within was the height and shape of a man, but it was covered with fine scales, and its limbs were jointed in the wrong places. At one time the mummy had been clothed, but only shreds of fabric and fittings remained in a litter around the four-toed feet.

"Piet said it looked from the way the rocks were glazed that ships had landed on the plateau in the past," Stephen remarked. "Landolph, he thought. But after he looked closer at the weather cracking, he decided that it must have been millennia ago."

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"To us?" said Stephen. "Nothing. Because our business is with the Federation; and whoever this fellow was, he wasn't from the Federation."

The
Oriflamme
came out of transit—out of a universe which had no place for man or even for what man thought were natural laws. This series had been of eighteen insertions. The energy differential, the gradient, between the sidereal universe and the bubbles of variant space-time had risen each time.

I stood with one hand on the attitude-control console, the other poised to steady Dole if the bosun slipped out of his seat again. I hadn't eaten in . . . days, I wasn't sure how long. I hadn't kept anything down for longer yet. Every time the
Oriflamme
switched universes, pain as dull as the back of an axe crushed through my skull and nausea tried to empty my stomach.

Dole had nothing to do unless Piet Ricimer ordered him to override the AI—which would be suicide, given the stresses wracking the
Oriflamme
now. Helping the bosun hold his station, however pointless, gave me reason to live.

Stephen Gregg stood with a hand on Lightbody's shoulder and the other on Jeude's. Stephen was smiling, in a manner of speaking. His face was as gray and lifeless as a bust chipped out of concrete, but he was standing nonetheless.

During insertions, the
Oriflamme
's thrusters roared at very nearly their maximum output. Winger, the chief of the motor crew, bent over Guillermo's couch. He spoke about the condition of the sternmost nozzles in tones clipped just this side of panic.

A few festoons of meat cured on Respite still hung from wires stretched across the vessel's open areas. We'd been eating the "birds" in preference to stores loaded on Decades, for fear that the flesh—smoked, for the most part—would spoil. There was no assurance we'd reach another food source any time soon.

Salomon's screen was a mass of numbers, Ricimer's a tapestry of shaded colors occasionally spiking into a saturated primary. The two consoles displayed the same data in different forms, digital and analogue: craft and art side by side, and only God to know if either showed a way out of the morass of crushing energies.

The
Mizpah
in close-up filled Guillermo's screen. The gradients themselves threw our two vessels onto congruent courses: the navigational AIs both attempted with electronic desperation to find solutions that would not exceed the starships' moduli of rupture. The range of possibilities was an increasingly narrow one.

"Stand by for transit," Piet Ricimer croaked. "There will be a sequence of f-f-four insertions."

He paused, breathing hard with the exertion. Guillermo compiled the data in a packet and transferred it to the
Mizpah
by laser.

Winger swore and stumbled aft again to his station. He would have walked into the Long Tom in the center of the compartment if I hadn't tugged him into a safer trajectory.

The
Mizpah
's hull was zebra-striped. The reglazing done on Respite had flaked from the old ship's hull along the lines of maximum stress, leaving streaks of creamy original hull material alternated with broader patches of the black, basalt-based sealant. Leakage of air from the
Mizpah
must be even worse than it was for us, and it was very serious for us.

More pain would come. More pain than anything human could survive and remain human.
Oh God our help in ages past, our hope in years to come . . .
 

"We need to get into suits," Salomon said. He lay at the side console like a cadaver on a slab. "They're in suits already on the
Mizpah.
" The navigator's eyes were on the screen before him, but he didn't appear to be strong enough to touch the keypad at his fingertips.

A sailor sobbed uncontrollably in his hammock. Stephen's eyes turned toward the sound, only his eyes.

"This sequence will commence in one minute forty seconds," Ricimer said. His words clacked as if spoken by a wood-jawed marionette. "The gradients have ceased to rise. We're. We're . . ."

Stephen didn't turn his head to look at Ricimer, but he said, "You're supposed to tell us that we've seen worse, and we'll come through this too, Piet."

Watching Stephen was like watching a corpse speak.

Ricimer coughed. After a moment, I realized that he was laughing. "If we do come through this, Stephen," Ricimer said, "be assured that I will say that the next time."

"Prepare for t-trans—" Salomon said. He couldn't get the final word out before the fact made it redundant.

My head split in bright skyrockets curving to either side. Guillermo's screen, fed by the external optics, became hash as the
Oriflamme
entered a region alien to the very concept of light as the sidereal universe knew it.

Back a heartbeat later, another blow crushing me into a boneless jelly which throbbed with pain. The gasp that started with the initial insertion was tightening my throat and ribs, or I might have tried to scream.

Half the
Mizpah
hung on the right-hand display. A streak of centimeter-thick black ceramic ringed the stern. Where the bow should have been, I saw only a mass as confused as gravel pouring from a hopper.

Transit.
There was a God and He hated mankind with a fury as dense as the heart of a Black Hole. The mills of His wrath ground Jeremy Moore like—

Back, only gravel on Guillermo's screen, dancing with light, and then
nothing
because the
Oriflamme
had cycled into another bubble universe and I wished that I'd been aboard the
Mizpah
because—

The
Oriflamme
crashed into the sidereal universe again and stayed there while I swayed at Dole's station and Stephen Gregg held Jeude's slumping form against the back of his seat. There must have been a fourth insertion and return, but I hadn't felt it. Perhaps I'd blacked out, but I was still standing . . .

"The gradients have dropped to levels normal for intrasystem transits," Ricimer said. He sounded as though he had just been awakened from centuries of sleep. The muscles operating his vocal cords were stiff. "We'll make a further series of seven insertions, and I believe we'll find Landolph's landfall of Pesaltra at the end of them. Gentlemen, we have transited the Breach."

I tried to cheer. I could only manage a gabbling sound. Dole put up a hand to steady me; we clutched one another for a moment.

"We made it," Jeude whispered.

Guillermo's display showed a blank starscape, and there was no pulsing highlight on the main screen to indicate the
Mizpah.
 

The ramp lowered with squealing hesitation, further sign that the stress of transiting the Breach had warped the
Oriflamme
's sturdy hull. Air with the consistency of hot gelatin surged into the hold. I was the only man in the front rank who wasn't wearing body armor. Sweat slicked my palm on the grip of the cutting bar.

"Welcome to the asshole of the universe," muttered a spacer. He spoke for all of us in the assault party.

"Well," said Piet Ricimer as he raised the visor of his helmet. "At least nobody's shooting at us."

Steam still rose from the mudflat that served Pesaltra as a landing field. Nine of the local humans were picking their way toward the
Oriflamme.
Molts—several score and perhaps a hundred of them—stood near the low buildings and the boats drawn up on the shore of the surrounding lagoons. The aliens formed small groups which stared at but didn't approach the vessel.

There were no weapons in sight among the Feds or their slaves.

Finger-length creatures with many legs and no obvious eyes feasted on a blob of protoplasm at the foot of the ramp. They must have risen from burrows deep in the mud, or the thruster exhaust would have broiled them. The creatures were the only example of local animal life that I could see.

"No shooting unless I do," Stephen Gregg said, "and
don't
expect that. Let's go."

He cradled his flashgun and strode forward. Stephen's boots squelched to the ankles when he stepped off the end of the ramp. I sank almost as deep, even though I didn't have the weight of armor and equipment Stephen carried.

The front rank, ten abreast, stamped and sloshed forward. The second rank spread out behind us. The locals wore thigh-length waders of waterproofed fabric. In this heat and saturated humidity, their garments must have been nearly as uncomfortable as our back-and-breast armor.

There were mountains in the western distance, but the Pesaltran terrain here and for kilometers in every direction was of shallow lagoons and mud banks with ribbons and spikes of vegetation. None of the plants were as much as a meter high; many of them sprawled like brush strokes of bright green across the mud.

A bubble burst flatulently in the middle of the nearest channel. I guessed it was the result of bacterial decay, not a larger life-form.

I felt silly holding a cutting bar as a threat against people so obviously crushed by life as the Fed personnel here. How the rest of the assault party must feel with their guns, armor, and bandoliers of ammunition!

Though Stephen Gregg wouldn't care . . . and maybe not the others either. Overwhelming force meant you were ready to overwhelm your enemy. What could possibly be embarrassing about that?

"Ah, sirs?" said one of the locals, a white-haired man with a false eye. "You'd be from the Superintendency of the Outer Ways, I guess?"

He stared at the
Oriflamme
and its heavily-armed crew as if we were monsters belched forth from the quavering earth.

It wasn't practical to carry building materials between stars. The colony's structures were nickel steel processed from local asteroids or concrete fixed with shell lime. Three large barracks housed the Molt labor force; a fourth similar building was subdivided internally for the human staff.

A middle-aged woman stood on the porch with the aid of crutches and leg braces. The door to the room behind her was open. Its furnishings were shoddy extrusions of light metal, neither attractive nor comfortable-looking.

The same could be said for the woman, I thought with a sigh.

Sheet-metal sheds held tools and equipment in obvious disorder. A windowless concrete building looked like a blockhouse, but the sliding door was open, showing the interior to be empty except for a few shimmering bales.

Garbage, including Molt and human excrement, stank in the lagoon at the back of the barracks. The hulls of at least two crashed spaceships and other larger junk had been dragged to the opposite side of the landing site.

Ricimer halted us with a wave of his hand and took another step to make his primacy clear. "I'm Captain Ricimer of the Free State of Venus," he said to the one-eyed man. "We've come through the Breach. We'll expect the full cooperation of everyone here. If we get it, then there'll be no difficulties for yourselves."

The Fed official looked puzzled. The men approaching with him had halted a few paces behind. "No, really," the man said. "I'm Assistant Treasurer Taenia; I'm in charge here. If anyone is. Who are you?"

Dole stepped forward. The butt of his rifle prodded Taenia hard in the stomach. "When Captain Ricimer's present," he said loudly, "nobody else is in charge—and especially not some dog of a Fed! Take your hats off, you lot!"

Only two of the locals wore headgear, a cloth cap on a red-haired man and another fellow with a checked bandanna tied over his scalp. Dole pointed his rifle in the face of the latter. The Fed snatched off the bandanna. He was bald as an egg.

Dole shifted his aim. "No, put that up!" Piet Ricimer snapped, but the second Fed was removing his cap and a third man knelt in the mud with a look of terror on his face.

Taenia straightened up slowly. He blinked, though the lid covering his false eye closed only halfway. "I don't . . ." he said. "I don't . . ."

Ricimer stepped up to the man and took his right hand. "You won't be hurt so long as you and your fellows cooperate fully with us. Are you willing to do that?"

"We'll do anything you say," Taenia said. "Anything at all, of course we will, your excellency!"

Ricimer looked over his shoulder. "Mister Moore," he said. "When we lift off, I'll want to put a transponder in orbit to inform Captains Winter and Blakey of our course should they pass this way. Can you build such a device with what we have on hand?"

I nodded, flushing with silent pleasure. Ricimer had noticed my facility with electronics and was willing to use it. "Yes, yes, of course," I said. "But I suspect I can use local hardware."