by David Drake
"Sorry," Ricimer said as he undid his harness. "I was getting so irregular a backwash from the ground that I shut down sooner than I cared to do."
"Any one you walk away from, sir," Lightbody said cheerfully. He stood and stretched at the rudimentary attitude-control panel. He'd let the AI do the work, wisely and at Ricimer's direction. "Not as though we're going to need these again, anyhow."
"That's not a way I like to think, Mr. Lightbody," Piet said tartly. He latched on his own body armor. The suits were too confining to wear safely while piloting.
The two Molts from Umber went into the Dum's single hold to wake their fellows. Guillermo stepped to the personnel hatch in the cockpit bulkhead and undogged it.
Ricimer glanced at the viewscreen. It was almost useless. If you knew what the terrain of Benison's mirrorside looked like, you could just make out the skeletons of multitrunked trees, burned bare by the exhaust.
Gregg checked the chamber to make sure his rifle was loaded. It was a falling-block weapon. He would have preferred a turn-bolt with more power to cam a bulged or corroded case home. Beggars can't be choosers.
"I'm ready," he said aloud.
Guillermo dragged the hatch inward hard. Hot air surged in; heat waves rippled from the baked soil beyond. K'Jax rose into sight twenty meters away, just beyond the burned area. Both of his bodyguards now carried firearms.
"Any trouble here, K'Jax?" Ricimer called. The relief in his voice was as evident as that which Gregg felt at seeing the situation they had planned on.
A glint in the upper atmosphere indicated Dole was bringing the Dee down right on their heels. The nearest Federation settlement was hundreds of klicks away, so the chance of being disturbed really hadn't been very high. It was only paranoia, Gregg supposed, that had made him so fearful ever since they reached orbit.
"None here," said the Molt leader. "But across the Mirror, the humans came and attacked your ships. One was destroyed, and the other two fled."
49
Benison
"You're all right now, Mr. Gregg," said the black-bearded Federation guard whose chest was a tangle of charred bone. The corpse gripped Gregg with icy hands. "You've passed through the Mirror, sir."
Gregg shouted or screamed, he wasn't sure which. He swung. The butt of the rifle he was carrying struck a tree and spun the weapon out of his hands. The Molt who'd tried to stop Gregg, already five paces from the edge of the Mirror, ducked away from the rifle and Gregg's flailing hands.
"Oh!" Gregg said. "Oh." He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and said, "I'm all right now," before he opened them again.
It was overcast on Benison's realside. Gregg had traveled enough by now that open skies bothered him less than they once had, but the tight gray clouds were a relief after another episode with the Mirror.
The Molt he'd swung at was T'Leen, whom K'Jax had sent with Ricimer and Gregg as a guide. He picked up the rifle, examined it—a smear of russet bark on the stock, but no cracks or serious damage. He gave the weapon back to Gregg.
"I'm sorry," Gregg said. "I don't handle the Mirror well." And I'm getting worse, like a man sensitized to an allergen.
Piet sat on the stump of a tree burned off close to the ground by a plasma bolt. Guillermo stood beside him, ready to grab if his master toppled from what couldn't have been a comfortable seat.
The Mirror took it out of a fellow. Even on Umber where the boundary was shallower, what must it have been like to carry a man the size of Stephen Gregg through in your arms?
Gregg forced himself to walk toward Ricimer. He felt increasingly human with every consciously-directed step. The wound in his lower abdomen was a frozen lump, but that was better than the twist of fiery needles he'd been living with since he awakened during transit.
Piet smiled and started to get up. His face went blank. Guillermo reached down, but Ricimer managed to lurch to his feet unaided. He smiled again, this time with a mixture of relief and triumph.
"There's no sign that the Feds harmed either the Peaches or Dalriada," he said. "After all, we'd dismantled the Halys ourselves before we crossed to mirrorside."
A party of armed Molts appeared from the forest surrounding the blasted area. T'Leen clicked reassuringly to them. K'Jax remained on mirrorside for the moment, greeting and working out power arrangements with the newcomers from Umber.
A plasma bolt had struck the bow of the Halys. It came from a powerful weapon, but the depth of atmosphere between target and the bombarding vessel in orbit dispersed the effect over several square meters. An oxidized crust of thin metal plated the soil around the point of impact. Metal icicles jagged where they'd cooled on lower portions of the hull.
A dozen other bolts had vaporized chunks of forest in the immediate neighborhood. That didn't say a great deal for the Feds' fire direction, though Gregg realized there were severe problems in hitting anything with a packet of charged particles that had to pass through kilometers of atmosphere.
"How did they find us, do you think?" he asked Ricimer.
Piet clambered aboard the Halys. The hatch, open when the bolt hit, had crumpled in on itself like foil held too close to a flame.
He looked back. "Schremp, I suppose," he said. "Or one of his men. I said we were going to Benison to mislead them."
Ricimer grinned. "Without lying, you see. Carstensen must have sent a warship from Rondelet to check out the report."
His grin became bleak. "The next time," he said, "I'll lie."
T'Leen returned to the humans with others of the clan in tow. "Fire came from the sky," he said. "Eight days ago, in the morning. It killed two of our people."
He pointed in the general direction where the Dalriada had been berthed in the forest.
"Were the ships hit?" Ricimer asked.
"No, not then," the Molt said. T'Leen's voice lacked human inflections, but the vocabulary of Trade English was close to the surface of his mind, in contrast to the impression Gregg had of K'Jax.
"The fire came again, nine times," T'Leen went on. "It didn't hit any of us, or the ships. We ran into the Mirror, all but K'Jax and I and S'Tan. The large ship fired guns into the sky."
T'Leen cocked his head to one side, then the other, in a gesture Gregg couldn't read. "We have never seen guns like those used before. If we had guns like those, we would drive the humans off this world."
Gregg mentally translated "human" as "Fed" when members of K'Jax' clan used the word. At moments like this, he was less than certain that the Molts didn't mean exactly what they said.
"The fire from the sky stopped when the large vessel began to shoot," T'Leen said. "The ships took off, the little one and then the large one."
He pointed to the Halys. "This they left. S'Tan would have gone back to bring the clan from mirrorside, but the fire came again. Here."
His chitinous fingertips clicked against the ruined hull. "Then soldiers came on vehicles and aircraft, and we went across the Mirror too," T'Leen said. "There was nothing more here."
"Well," Gregg said. "They got away, at least. Dulcie and the crews did."
He wondered how much of the chill in his guts was physical and how much came from the realization that he might spend the rest of his life on Benison.
"It was my fault," Ricimer said as he examined the vessel's cockpit.
Though the dispersed bolt had opened the Halys as completely as a pathologist does a skull before brain removal, the interior of what remained wasn't in too bad a condition. That was partly because the Venerians themselves had gutted her thoroughly to create the Umber, abandoned on the mirrorside of her namesake.
"The fire that did this," T'Leen said. "And burned the forest. That was from guns like those on your ship?"
Gregg nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Plasma cannon. Probably bigger ones than the Dalriada mounts. Not so well served, though."
"We thought so," said T'Leen. "One day we will have such guns."
Gregg sighed and wiped the stock of his rifle with the palm of his hand. Ho
w many times would he have to run into the Mirror to save himself from Fed hunters?
"A ship in orbit's at a disadvantage in a fight with ground batteries," he said to divert his mind from an icy future. "The Feds didn't get lucky when they sprang their surprise, so they eased off and let our people get away."
He snorted. "I've got a suspicion the Halys will be promoted to a Venerian dreadnought in that Fed captain's report."
"Stephen!" Ricimer said. "Switch your radio on to Channel Three!"
"Huh?" said Gregg. The helmet radio was designed for use by men in vacuum wearing gauntlets. He clicked the dial on the right temple from Channel One, intercom, to Channel Three which the squadron used for general talk-between-ships, then pressed the dial to turn the unit on.
" . . . to Ricimer, we've been attacked by the enemy. We'll remain in orbit for another day. Call us when you return. Dulcie to Ricimer. We've been attacked—"
Gregg switched his radio off. The static-broken voice, a recording that presumably played in segments interspersed with dead air for a reply, was the most welcome sound he'd ever heard.
"Piet!" he said. "We're saved!"
A cold as terrible as that of the Mirror flooded back into his soul. "Except we can't call them," he said. "These helmet intercoms won't punch a signal through the atmosphere. Stripping the commo system out of Dee or Dum and setting it up in working order will take a lot more than a day with the tools and personnel we've got."
"Yes," Ricimer said crisply. He looked down at their Molt guide. "T'Leen," he said, "please recross the Mirror and tell the personnel there to immediately begin bringing the cargo over to this side. First of all, send across all of my crewmen. I'll need their skills for the work."
T'Leen flexed his elbow joints out in his equivalent of a nod. He stepped toward the transition layer.
"What work, Piet?" Gregg asked.
It was possible to travel from mirrorside to realside through normal transits, though it was a brutal voyage that might take years. Dum and Dee would never survive it, but they could capture a larger ship—
Six humans and perhaps a few Molt volunteers. Most of their weapons abandoned on the realside of Umber. Capturing a ship that could journey home from the mirrorside.
Right. And perhaps the angels would come down in all their glory and carry Stephen Gregg to Eryx without need for a ship at all.
"To put the Halys in shape to lift off," Ricimer said.
"What? Piet, we gutted her before we left. She's got three thrusters, no AI, and she's been torn to Hell besides!"
"Yes," Ricimer said. "But if she lifts me to orbit, then I think I can raise our friends with my helmet radio."
Gregg stared at the ruined vessel. They'd cut frame members to remove the thruster. "Piet," he said. "She'll twist, flip over, and come in like a bomb."
Like the Federation cutter he'd brought down on Umber.
Ricimer smiled gently. "If that's God's will, Stephen," he said, "so it shall. But if we give up hope in the Lord's help, then we're already lost."
Gregg opened his mouth. He couldn't think of anything to say, so he turned away quickly before Piet could see his tears of frustration.
50
Benison
The thrusters crashed to life. The Halys yawed nose-down to starboard as her stern came unstuck. The Venerians had removed the starboard stern unit to power the Umber. Ricimer, a suited doll in the open cockpit, seemed to have overcompensated for the imbalance.
"Forward throttle, sir!" Dole screamed. Piet couldn't hear him over the exhaust's crackling roar, and it wasn't as though the deathtrap's pilot didn't know what the problem was.
Besides, Gregg knew instinctively that Dole's advice was wrong. Gregg couldn't pilot a boat in a bathtub himself, but he knew from marksmanship that you were better off carrying through with a plan than to try to reprogram your actions in mid-execution.
You'd probably gotten it right when you had leisure to consider. Your muscles couldn't react quickly enough to follow each flash of ephemeral data. If you kept your swing and squeeze constant, the chances were that the shot and the target would intersect downrange.
If you were as good a shot as Stephen Gregg.
Ricimer was at least as good a pilot as his friend was a gunman.
The Halys continued to lift with her nose low. Her bow drifted to starboard so that as the blasted vessel climbed, she also wheeled slowly.
"You've got her, Piet," Gregg whispered. "You've got her, you do!"
They'd rigged manual controls to the Halys' remaining thrusters, using what remained of the reel of monocrystal line they'd left on mirrorside after the Umber was complete. They couldn't fit her with a collective: they didn't have a test facility in which to check alignments and power delivery, so that a single control could change speed and attitude in a unified fashion. Flying the Halys now was like walking three dogs on separate leashes—through a roomful of cats.
"He's got it!" Stampfer shouted, clapping his big hands together in enthusiasm. "I didn't think—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to. Lightbody read his Bible with his back to the launch. Jeude squatted beside him. His eyes drifted toward the book, but every time they did, he set his mouth firmly and looked away.
Cased microchips stood in neat piles just within the edge of the undamaged forest. The only Molt present was Guillermo. The aliens had shifted the cargo through the Mirror more than an hour before the Venerians finished rerigging the Halys. K'Jax immediately gathered both Clan Deel and the newcomers from Umber and whisked them away.
He claimed he was doing that because the spaceship's liftoff would call Feds to the site. That might well be true, but Gregg suspected K'Jax wanted to absorb the new immigrants beyond human interference. Absorb them, and assert his own dominance.
The Feds had eased K'Jax' difficulties. The cutter's weapon had caught Ch'Kan, last of her people to run for the Mirror and safety.
Gregg's momentary shiver of hatred for K'Jax wasn't fair, wasn't even sane. The clan chief hadn't created the situation from which he was profiting. He was simply a politician handed an opportunity. A single strong clan under a leader with experience of Benison's conditions was to the benefit of all the race . . .
With the exception of one or two of the newcomers who would balk, and who would become examples for the rest.
Gregg stroked the fore-end of his rifle. His feelings were quite insane; but it was just as well that K'Jax, a faithful ally, was nowhere around just now.
The Halys rose slowly. Her nozzles were toed outward, because if they'd been aligned truly parallel Piet would have had insufficient lateral stability. Half the attitude jets had been destroyed or plugged when the plasma bolt hit. Manually-controlled thrusters were as much as one man could hope to handle anyway.
As much or more.
The Halys reached the cloud base and disappeared. The throb of the thrusters faded more slowly.
A patch of cloud glowed for some moments. Lightning licked within the overcast. The charged exhaust had created imbalances that nature sought to rectify.
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."
51
Benison
"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."