The Reaches

by David Drake

  Another small smile. "Ourselves included."

  Stephen Gregg stood between a pair of stanchions, doing isometric exercises with his arms. He was too big to be comfortable for any length of time on a featherboat, but not even Piet Ricimer had dared suggest Stephen remain on Mocha during the exploratory run.

  "I've set an initial course," Ricimer continued. "The Nathan tested the gradients within the throat of the Breach. I won't disguise the fact that the stresses are severe; but not too severe, I believe, for us to achieve our goal."

  "It was rough as a cob," Jeude muttered, trying to emasculate his fear by articulating it. "The boat nigh shook herself apart. Mister Ricimer, he kept pushing the gradients and she couldn't take it."

  I put a hand on the eyebolt which Jeude held. I didn't quite touch the young sailor's hand, but I hoped the near-contact would provide comfort.

  Part of my mind was amused that I was trying to reassure someone who understood far better than I did the risks we were about to undergo. There were times that the risks couldn't be allowed to matter. At those times, it was a gentleman's duty to be an example.

  "There is one further matter to attend before we proceed," Ricimer continued. "Our flagship has been named the Porcelain. I am taking this moment, as we enter a new phase of our endeavors, to rechristen her Oriflamme. May she symbolize the banner of the Lord which we are carrying through the Breach!"

  He swept off his cap and cried, "In the name of God, gentlemen, let us do our duty!"

  "Hurrah!" Salomon cried, so smoothly that I remembered Ricimer's whispered conversation with his navigator before he began his address. Throughout the flagship the Oriflamme—and aboard the other vessels, men were shouting, "Hurrah!"

  I shouted as well, buoyed by hope and the splendor of the moment. For the first time in my memory, Jeremy Moore was part of a group.

  Ricimer shut off the transmission and slipped into his couch to prepare for transit. Guillermo and Salomon watched from the flanking consoles.

  I let go my grip and thrust myself across the compartment toward Stephen. My control in weightlessness was getting better—at least I didn't push off with all my strength anymore—but it was short of perfect. Stephen caught me by the hand and pulled me down to share a stanchion.

  "You may think you dislike transit now," Stephen said, "but you'll know you do shortly."

  "Yes, well, I was going to suggest that I'd get out and walk instead," I said. "Ah—it occurs to me, Stephen, that the oriflamme is the charge of Councilor Duneen's arms."

  Stephen nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Piet thinks it may take the Councilor's mind off the fact that we've executed one of his chief clients. Not that Hawtry was any loss, not really; but the Councilor might feel that he needed to . . . react."

  "Ah," I said. "It was the general commander's idea?"

  "Prepare for transit!" Salomon warned over the PA system.

  "Oh, yes," Stephen agreed. "Piet thinks ahead."

  I followed Stephen's glance toward the general commander. It struck me that Ricimer was, in his way, just as ruthless as Stephen Gregg.

  IN TRANSIT

  Day 64

  The leg of the attitude-control console nearest me began to quiver with a harmonic as the Oriflamme's thrusters strained. The vessel flip-flopped in and out of transit, again, again. The surface of the leg dulled as tiny cracks spread across the surface, metastasizing with each successive vibration.

  Life was a gray lump that crushed Jeremy Moore against the decking. My vision was monochrome. Images shifted from positive to negative as the Oriflamme left and reentered the sidereal universe, but I was no longer sure which state was which.

  The sequence ended. Bits of ceramic crazed from the leg lay on the deck beneath the attitude controls.

  Salomon got up from his console. His face looked like a skin of latex stretched over an armature of thin wires. "The charts are wrong!" he shouted. "Landolph lied about coming here, or if he did, it's closed since then. There is no Breach!"

  Pink light careted a dot on the starscape above Guillermo's console. Either the Kinsolving or the Mizpah was still in company with the flagship. I didn't care. All that mattered now was the realization that if I was dead, the nausea would be over.

  "I'm going to add one transit to the sequence without changing the constants," Piet Ricimer said from the central couch. Above him, the main screen was a mass of skewed lines. ">From the tendency of the gradients, I believe we're very close to a gap."

  Guillermo's three-fingered hands clicked across his keyboard, transmitting the solution to the accompanying vessel.

  Stephen Gregg was curled into a ball on the deck. He'd started out leaning against the attitude-control console, but lateral acceleration during a previous series of transits had toppled him over. He either hadn't wished or hadn't been able to sit up again.

  The sailors without immediate duties during transit were comatose or praying under their breath. Perhaps I should have been pleased that experienced spacers were affected as badly as I was.

  "The gradients are rising too fast!" Salomon shouted. "The levels are already higher than I've ever seen them, and—"

  Lightbody came off his seat at the attitude-control console. The sailor didn't have a weapon, but his long arms were spread like the claws of an assassin bug. Salomon started to turn, shocked from his panic by the palpable destruction lunging toward his throat.

  Stephen caught Lightbody's ankle and jerked the sailor to the deck. I leaped onto the man's shoulders.

  Lightbody's face was blank. The wild light went out of his eyes, leaving the sailor with a confused expression. "What?" he said. "Wha . . ."

  "Sorry, sir," Salomon muttered. He sat down on his couch again.

  I rolled away. I had to use both hands to lever myself back to a squat and then rise. The jolting action had settled my mind, but my limbs were terribly weak. I could stand upright, so long as I gripped a stanchion as though the Oriflamme was in free fall rather than proceeding under 1-g acceleration.

  Lightbody stood, then helped Stephen up as well. Lightbody returned to his seat. I held out a hand to bring Stephen to his stanchion.

  "Prepare for transit," Piet Ricimer said. He hadn't risen from his couch or looked back during the altercation.

  Light and color. Blankness, blackness, body ripped inside out, soul scraped in a million separate Hells.

  Light and color again.

  "There," said Piet Ricimer. "As I thought, a star . . . and she has a planet. We will name the planet Respite."

  RESPITE

  Day 68

  The plateau on which the Oriflamme and Mizpah rested above the jungle was basalt. The fresh ceramic with which teams resealed the vessels' stress-cracked hulls was black, and the sound of grinders processing the dense rock into raw material for the glazing kilns was nerve-wracking and omnipresent.

  Stephen checked the weld which belayed the glass-fiber line around a vertical toe of basalt near the plateau's rim. He nodded. I let myself drop over the edge.

  The mass of the plateau dulled the bone-jarring sound. My chest muscles relaxed for the first time in the three days since the grinders had started work.

  The basalt had formed hexagonal pillars as it cooled from magma in the depths of the earth. Cycles of upthrust and weathering left this mass as a tower hundreds of meters above the surrounding jungle. As the outermost columns crumbled, they created a giant staircase down into the green canopy.

  Forty meters below the top of the plateau, my boots touched the layer of dirt covering the sloping top of a broken pillar. I released my harness from the line and stepped away, waving Stephen down in turn.

  A pair of arm-long flying creatures paused curiously near Stephen, hovering in the updraft along the plateau's flank. The "birds" were hard-shelled, with four wings and sideways-hung jaws. They were harmless to anything the size of a man and hadn't learned to be wary.

  The forest far below was a choir of varied calls. Mist trailed among the treetops, and
a plume hectares in area rose a few kilometers away like a stationary cloud. I wondered if a hot spring or a lake of boiling mud broke surface there in the jungle.

  Respite's atmosphere had a golden hue. I found I actually liked being under an open sky, unlike most men raised in the tunnels and impervious domes of Venus. It made me tingle with uncertainty, much the way I felt when making my initial approaches to a woman.

  The feeling of peace below the rim was relative. The rock vibrated from the teeth of the grinders, felt if not heard. The terrace was a nesting site for a colony of the flying creatures. Hundreds of them stood at the mouths of burrows excavated in the soil, goggling at us with octuple eyes. They clacked the edges of their front and rear pairs of wings together querulously.

  Opinions of the flyers' taste among our crew ranged from adequate to delicious: Salomon swore he'd never before eaten anything as good as the sausage of smoked lung tissue and organ meat he'd made from the creatures. In any event, the expedition would leave Respite well stocked with food.

  Stephen landed with a grunt. His fingers massaged his opposite shoulders. For this excursion he'd slung a short rifle across his back, rather than the flashgun he favored. "I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm not looking forward to the climb back, ascenders or no. I'm not in shape for this."

  "I'm not looking forward to going back to the noise," I said. I felt the strain in my arms and thigh muscles also, but I thought I'd be physically ready before I was mentally ready to return. "I suppose it's better than falling apart in transit, though."

  Stephen sniffed. "Worried about the Kinsolving?" he said. "Don't be. Winter just didn't have the stomach for this. He's headed back to Venus with the rest of Hawtry's node of vipers. That lot'd make me ashamed to be a gentleman—if I gave a damn myself."

  The hexagonal terrace sloped at 30°, enough to tumble a man over the edge if he lost his footing. Each of the basalt columns was about ten meters wide across the flats. I stepped forward carefully. "With the Decades loot besides," I noted.

  As I passed close to nesting sites, the creatures drew themselves down as far as they could into their burrows. Because the soil was so shallow, their heads remained above the surface but the clicking of the wings was muted.

  "Commander Ricimer," I went on, "thinks they've just missed this landfall and gone on through the Breach. The Kinsolving."

  "Piet likes to think the best of people," Stephen said. He walked over to me without apparent caution. The wind from the forest ruffled our cuffs and tunics upward and bathed us in earthy, alien odors.

  "And you?" I asked without looking at my companion. Something moved across the distant forest, perhaps a shadow. If the motion had been made by a living creature, it was a huge one.

  "Oh, I'd like to, sure," Stephen said, adjusting his rifle's sling.

  "The loot's the reason I'm not angry," Stephen added. "There's enough value aboard the Kinsolving to arouse attention, but not nearly enough to buy Winter's way out of trouble for attacking the colony of a state with whom Venus is at peace. That lot has punished themselves."

  I looked at my companion. "Technically at peace," I said.

  "Politicians are very technical, Jeremy," Stephen said. "Until it's worth the time of somebody in court to cut corners. And the Decades loot won't interest the likes of Councilor Duneen, which is what it'd take to square this one."

  I peered over the edge of the terrace. The next step down was within five meters of the outer lip of the one we were on. A pattern of parallel semicircular waves marked the surface of the step, springing out like ripples in a frozen pond from the side of the column on which we stood.

  Pits weathered into the rock offered toeholds. I turned and swung my legs over.

  "It's a long way down," Stephen warned. "And it's likely to be a longer way back up."

  "I want to check something," I said. "You don't have to come."

  I clambered my own height down the rock face, then pushed off and landed with my knees flexed. Perhaps Stephen could pull me up with our belts paired into a rope, or—

  Stephen slammed down beside me. He'd jumped with the rifle held out so that it didn't batter him in the side when he hit the ground. He grinned at me.

  I shrugged. "It's the pattern here," I said, walking toward the ripples in stone.

  Conical nests built up from the surface indicated that flyers of a different species had colonized this step. These were hand-sized and bright yellow in contrast to the dull colors of the larger creatures. Hundreds of them lifted into the air simultaneously, screeching and emitting sprays of mauve feces over the two of us.

  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."

  IN TRANSIT

  Day 92

  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 analog
ue: 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.