The Reaches

by David Drake

  "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.

  52

  Venus

  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?"

  "Not the way you do, Piet," Gregg said flatly. Time was too short to spend it in lies.

  "Yes," Ricimer said. "But almost as much as I believe in God, Stephen, I believe in the stars. And I believe He means mankind to have the stars."

  Gregg laughed and broke into wheezing coughs again. He bent to lessen the strain on his wound.

  His friend put out an arm to steady him. Their armored hands locked. "I believe in you, Piet," Gregg said at last. "That's been enough this far."

  They'd reached the personnel lock set into one panel of the huge cargo doors. Ricimer pushed the latchplate.

  The portal slid sideways. The men waiting for them within the main lock wore hard suits of black ceramic: members of the Governor's Guard. Their visors were down. They weren't armed, but there were six of them.

  "This way, please, gentlemen," said a voice on the intercom. A guard gestured to the inner lock as the other portal sealed again. "Precede us, if you will."

  The guards were anonymous in their armor. They weren't normally stationed in Betaport, but there'd been plenty of time since the Peaches and Dalriada made Venus orbit to send a contingent from the capital.

  Piet Ricimer straightened. "It was really worth it, Stephen," he said. "Please believe that."

  "It was worth it for me," Gregg said. His eyes were still watering from the sulphur in the boarding tube.

  A guard touched the door latch. The portal slid open. Gregg stepped through behind Ricimer.

  Three more guards stood to either side of the lock. Beyond them, Dock Street was full of people: citizens of Betaport, factors from Beta Regio and even farther, and a large contingent of brilliantly-garbed court officials.

  In the midst of the court officials was a small woman. Stephen Gregg could barely make her out because of his tears and the bodies of twelve more of her black-armored guards.

  They were cheering. The whole crowd was cheering, every soul of them.

  Author's Afterword: Drake's Drake

  Truth is something each individual holds within his heart. It differs from person to person, and it can't really be expressed to anyone else.

  Having said that, I try to write fiction about people who behave as closely as possible to the way people do in my internal version of truth. One of the ways I achieve that end is to use historical events as the paradigm for my fiction: if somebody did something, another person at least might act that way under similar circumstances.

  In the present instance, I've built Igniting the Reaches on an armature of events from the early life of Francis Drake (including acts of his contemporaries, particularly the Hawkins brothers and John Oxenham). This isn't biography or even exegesis. Still, I wound up with a better understanding of the period than I had when I started researching it, and I hope I was able to pass some of that feel on to readers.

  My research involved a quantity of secondary sources ranging from biographies to treatises on ship construction by naval architects. These were necessary to give me both an overview and an acquaintance with matters that were too familiar to contemporary writers for them to bother providing explanations.

  The heart of my reading, however, was The Principall Navigations of the English Nation, the 1598 edition, edited by Richard Hakluyt: Hakluyt's Voyages. I've owned the eight-volume set since I was in law school many years ago and have dipped into it on occasion, but this time I had an excuse to read the volumes straight through and take notes. The Voyages provided not only facts but a wonderful evocation of the knowledge and attitudes of their time.

  The authors of the accounts varied from simple sailors to some of the most polished writers of the day (Sir Walter Raleigh, whatever else he may have been, was and remains a model of English prose style). I appreciated the period far better for the careful way two sailors described coconuts—because people back home wouldn't have the faintest idea of what they were talking about. (Another writer's description of what is clearly a West African manatee concludes, "It tasteth like the best Beef"; which also told me something about attitudes.)

  When one views the Age of Discovery from a modern viewpoint, one tends to assume that those involved in the events knew what they were doing. In general, they didn't. It's useful to realize that Raleigh, for example, consistently confused the theatre of his activities on the Orinoco with explorations of the Amazon by Spaniards starting in the latter river's Andean headwaters. Indeed, Drake was practically unique in having a well-considered plan which he attempted to execute. (That didn't keep the wheels from coming off, much as described in this novel.)

  I'll add here a statement that experience has taught me will not be obvious to everyone who reads my fiction: I'm writing about characters who are generally brave and occasionally heroes, but I'm not describing saints. Some of the attitudes and the fashions in which my characters behave are very regrettable.

  I would like to believe that in the distant future, people will be perfect—tolerant, peaceful, nonsexist. Events of the twentieth century do not, unfortunately, suggest to me that we've improved significantly in the four hundred years since the time of the paradigm I've used here.

  Let's work to do better; but we won't solve problems in human behavior if we attempt to ignore the realities of the past and present.

  Dave Drake

 
Chatham County, N.C.

  Through the Breach

  To Allyn Vogel

  Most of my friends are smart, competent,

  and unfailingly helpful to me when

  I need it. Allyn is all those things.

  She is also a gentle and genuinely good person,

  which puts her in a much smaller category.

  BETAPORT, VENUS

  7 Days Before Sailing

  "Mister Jeremy Moore," announced the alien slave as he ushered me into the private chamber of the Blue Rose Tavern. The public bar served as a waiting room and hiring hall for the Venus Asteroid Expedition, while General Commander Piet Ricimer used the back room as an office.

  I'd heard that the aide now with Ricimer, Stephen Gregg, was a conscienceless killer. My first glimpse of the man was both a relief and a disappointment. Gregg was big, true; but he looked empty, no more dangerous than a suit of ceramic armor waiting for someone to put it on. Blond and pale, Gregg could have been handsome if his features were more animated.

  Whereas General Commander Ricimer wasn't . . . pretty, say, the way women enough have found me, but the fire in the man's soul gleamed through every atom of his physical person. Ricimer's glance and quick smile were genuinely friendly, while Gregg's more lingering appraisal was . . .

  Maybe Stephen Gregg wasn't as empty as I'd first thought.

  "Thank you, Guillermo," said Ricimer. "Has Captain Macquerie arrived?"

  "Not yet," the slave replied. "I'll alert you when he does." Guillermo's diction was excellent, though his tongueless mouth clipped the sibilant. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the bustle of the public bar.

  Guillermo was a chitinous biped with a triangular face and a pink sash-of-office worn bandolier fashion over one shoulder. I'd never been so close to a Molt slave before. There weren't many in the Solar System and fewer still on Venus. Their planet of origin was unknown, but their present province was the entire region of space mankind had colonized before the Collapse.