The Reaches

by David Drake

  Salomon shrugged. "It's a sea scorpion," he said. "They live in the lagoons. The head armor fluoresces, so it's used for jewelry this side of the Mirror. That's the only reason anybody lives here—if you call this living!"

  Stephen looked at his arm through the chitin. The shield was nearly transparent, but sunlight gave it a rich luster that was more than a color.

  "Pretty," I said. I liked it. "How big is the whole animal?"

  "Three, four meters," Salomon said. He reached for the jug, then grimaced and withdrew his hand. "I've got a bottle back on the ship," he said. "I was going to celebrate when we transited the Breach, but when the time came, I didn't feel much like it."

  He glared at the surrounding terrain. "We've come through the Breach, we've lost most of the squadron—"

  His head snapped toward Stephen and me. "You know that the Kinsolving and Mizpah aren't going to show up, don't you?" Salomon demanded.

  "Yes," said Stephen evenly. "But we're going to leave a transponder here anyway."

  Salomon shuddered. "And what we've got for it is a mud bank—and a bale of crab shells that wouldn't be worth a three-day voyage, much less what we've gone through!"

  "They'll be trading material," Stephen said. "We'll need food as we go on, and sticking a gun in somebody's face isn't always the best way to bargain."

  I grinned at him. "Though it works," I said.

  "It's not a magic wand, Jeremy," Stephen said. "It depends on the people at either end of the gun, you see."

  Stephen's voice dropped and he rasped the last few syllables quietly. I felt sobered by the results of my quip. I put my hand over his and drew the gunman back to the present.

  "You know," Stephen resumed with a dreamy softness, "Pesaltra is actually a pretty place in its way. Water and land stitched together by the plants, and the mist to soften the lines."

  Salomon knew Stephen well enough to fear him in a killing mood. He nodded with approval that we'd stepped back from an unexpected precipice. "They catch the scorpions in traps, Taenia says," he said. "It's dangerous. Every year they lose a few boats and half a dozen Molts running the trapline."

  "We're not doing it for the shell," Stephen said. He wasn't angry, any more than a storm is angry, but his tone brooked as little argument as a thunderbolt does. "We're not doing it for the wealth, either, though we'll have that by and by."

  In a way, it wasn't Stephen Gregg speaking, but rather Piet Ricimer wearing Stephen's hollow soul. There was fiery power in the words, but they were spoken by someone who knew he had nothing of his own except the Hell of his dreams. "We're doing it for all men, on Venus and Earth and the Rabbits, bringing them a universe they can be men in!"

  Stephen's big frame shuddered. After a moment, in a changed voice, he added, "Not that we'll live to see it. But we'll have the wealth."

  I flexed my hands and found they worked again, though my right arm had twinges. "I'm going to finish down below," I said.

  "Let me take a look," Stephen said. He furled the charging panel and collapsed its support wand so that he could bring the flashgun with him into the wreck.

  Inside the cockpit, we stood on what had been the outer bulkhead. The freighter was a single-hulled vessel, shoddier by far than the hulk we'd abandoned on Mocha. The navigational pedestal stuck out horizontally from the nearly vertical deck. I'd sawn more than three-quarters of the way around its base.

  "You know," said Salomon reflectively from the hatchway, "we might do best to wait for the Osomi ferry to come for the shell. They'll have at least local charts. Though it may be ten months, from what Taenia says, and I'm not sure I'd last four."

  "We'll last if we have to," Stephen said calmly. His fingertips explored the pedestal and ran the edges of my careful cut. He unslung the flashgun and handed it to me. "Though I doubt that's what Piet has in mind."

  "Give me a little room, Jeremy," he said as he gripped the flanges which once held the AI module. Even as Stephen spoke, the huge muscles in his back rippled. The unsawn portion of the base sheared with a sharp crack.

  Stephen had twisted the pedestal rather than simply levering it down with his weight. He set it before me, fractured end forward. "Satisfactory?"

  I wiggled the data module which the Feds hadn't bothered to remove after the crash. They couldn't lift it from the top because the pedestal was warped. The bayonet contacts were corroded, but they released on the third tug and the unit slid out.

  "Lord Jesus Christ," Salomon said in startled hope. "Do you suppose . . ."

  I touched the probes of my testing device to the bank's contacts. Numbers scrolled across the miniature screen. The data couldn't be decoded without a proper AI, and they wouldn't have meant anything to me anyway; but the data were present.

  "I think," I said as I folded the probes back into my testing device, "that we've got a course for Osomi."

  TEMPLETON

  Day 101

  The planet's visible hemisphere was half water, half land covered by green vegetation. A single large moon peeked from beyond the daylit side of the disk.

  "That's not Osomi," Salomon said. He'd pitched his voice to suggest he was willing to be proven wrong.

  "No, that's Templeton," Piet Ricimer agreed with obvious relish. "Mister Moore? Is Jeremy here forward?"

  "Shutting off power in forty-three seconds," Guillermo warned over the tannoys.

  "I'm here," I said as I tried to get to the bow.

  The Oriflamme was at action stations, so we were all wearing hard suits. That made me clumsier than usual after transit. Besides, each crewman took up significantly more room than he would under normal conditions.

  I knocked the attitude controls with my right knee, then my hip bumped Stampfer at the sights mounted on the turntable with the Long Tom. I was in a hurry because for the next few seconds, the thrusters were braking the Oriflamme into orbit. I knew I wouldn't be able to control my movements at all without that semblance of gravity.

  The only thing we'd known about the destination in the salvaged module was that we were headed for a Federation planet—if scrambled data hadn't sent the Oriflamme to the back of beyond. Our five plasma cannon were manned, but the gunports were still sealed. We'd have to lock our helmet visors if the guns were run out.

  I caught the side of the general commander's couch just as the thrusters shut off. An attitude control fired briefly. My legs started to drift out from under me. I managed to clamp them hard against the deck. "Yes, sir?" I said.

  Piet Ricimer turned from adjustments he was making in the external optics. The lower quadrant of the main screen held an expanded view of a settlement of some size on the margins of a lake. It was after nightfall on the ground, but a program in the display turned the faint glimmers which charge-coupled devices drew from the scene into a full schematic.

  "You did better than you knew, Jeremy," Ricimer said. "Templeton is the center for the entire district. This may be exactly where we needed to be."

  I smiled mechanically. I was glad the general commander was pleased, but it didn't seem to me that arriving at a Federation center was good luck.

  "How do you know—" Salomon said from the side couch. He remembered where he was and smoothed the stressed brittleness of his voice. He resumed, "Captain, how do you know it's—any particular place? Our charts don't . . ."

  Templeton's day side flared under the Oriflamme's orbit, though the screen insert continued to show the settlement. The Feds had graded a peninsula for use as a spaceport. Forty-odd ships stood on the lakeshore where they could draw reaction mass directly. The number surprised me, but not all the vessels were necessarily starships.

  "I talked to the personnel on Pesaltra," Ricimer explained. "They weren't a prepossessing lot or they wouldn't have been shipped to such a dead end. But they'd all been at other ports in the past, and they were glad to have somebody to talk to. They weren't navigators, but they knew other things. Taenia was a paymaster on Templeton until his accounts came up short last year."


  Ricimer manipulated his display into a plot of the planet/satellite system. "The district superintendent is on the moon," he continued, nodding to include me. "Rabbits have attacked the Templeton settlement several times, so there's a strong garrison—but the garrison has mutinied twice as well. The superintendent feels safer on the moon, where he's got plasma cannon to protect him. The chips are warehoused there too until the arrival of the ship detailed to carry them to Umber."

  Men in the forward section craned their necks to hear Ricimer's explanation. He noticed them and switched on the vessel's public address system.

  "What about the garrison?" Stephen Gregg asked. His voice was strong and his face had some color. The prospect of action had brought Stephen through in better condition than I'd seen him after most transit sequences.

  "We need air and reaction mass," Ricimer said through the shivering echo of the tannoys. "Our hull was seriously weakened when we crossed the Breach, and the rate of loss will be a problem until we're able to effect dockyard repairs."

  I frowned. Surely we wouldn't see a dockyard until we'd returned to Venus? And that meant a second passage through the Breach . . .

  Salomon noticed my expression. He lifted his eyebrows in the equivalent of a shrug—his shoulders were hidden beneath the rigid ceramic of his suit.

  "We have to land somewhere soon to restock," Ricimer continued, "but we need to gather intelligence and navigational data also. Templeton is the place to do that. We'll go in quietly, get what we need, and leave at once. We won't have to fight."

  "I've plotted a descent to the port," Salomon said. "Will you want to go in on the next orbit or wait, sir?"

  Piet Ricimer's smile swept the nearest of the men who followed him. "I think we'll go in now, Mister Salomon," he said. "I think now."

  * * *

  We'd been down for twenty minutes.

  Trusted sailors watched panoramas of the Oriflamme's surroundings on the upper half of the three bow displays. On the lower half, Guillermo planned liftoff curves while Salomon ran transit solutions. We didn't have another plotted destination, but if necessary the officers could coast the energy gradients between bubble universes until a radical change in values indicated the presence of a star in the sidereal universe.

  Piet Ricimer was considering other ships in port with us. I watched him expand images one at a time, letting the AI program fill in details which were a few pixels of real data. Some of the ships were tugs and orbital ferries, obvious even to my untrained eyes. None of them seemed to be warships.

  Our hull pinged as it continued to cool from the friction of its descent. I unlatched the back-and-breast armor, the last remaining portion of my hard suit. Stripping the ceramic armor had been a ten-minute job for fingers unfamiliar with the process. It would take me longer yet to put the suit back on if I had to.

  Most of us had doffed only the arm and leg pieces. To me armor was crushing, psychologically crushing. I felt as though I was drowning every time I put the suit on.

  Stephen grinned harshly at me. "You'll wish you hadn't done that if we lift under fire in the next ten seconds," he observed.

  Piet Ricimer turned his head. "If that happens," he said, "I'll certainly regret it, Stephen. There don't appear to be plasma cannon protecting the port, but there are at least a dozen multitube lasers on the settlement's perimeter. I suspect they'd do nearly as well against us as they would a Rabbit assault."

  "There's a car coming!" called Fahey, watching the sector northward, toward the port buildings. "Straight to us!"

  Ricimer stood up. All eyes were on him.

  "I think we'll admit them by the cockpit hatch," he said calmly, "since the assault squad's drawn up in the hold. Remember, if we're to succeed, we'll do it without trouble."

  Stephen took a cutting bar from the forward arms locker. "Without noise, at any rate," he said.

  The forward hatch was a chambered airlock; Ricimer cycled the inner and outer valves together. I felt heat from the plasma-cooked ground radiate through the opening in pulses.

  Piet stepped to one side of the hatchway with Guillermo beside him. I hesitated a moment, but Stephen guided me to stand across from the general commander. My body was a screen of sorts for Stephen's threatening bulk.

  The Federation car pulled up before the cockpit stairs. The lightly built vehicle had four open seats and rode on flotation tires; the port area flooded on a regular basis.

  The driver was a Molt wearing a red sash. Two more Molts were in back, and a small man with a high forehead and a gray pencil mustache rode in the forward passenger seat.

  The human got out and straightened his white uniform as if he didn't see us watching him from the ship. A Molt handed him a briefcase. He tucked the case under his arm, took three brisk strides to the steps, and climbed them with a click-whisk sound of his soles on the nonskid surface. The driver remained in the vehicle, but the other Molts followed. The aliens walked with a sway because of their cross-jointed limbs.

  The little man glared from me to Ricimer. Close up, the Fed's uniform was threadbare, and the one and a half blue bars on the collar implied no high rank. "I'm Collector Heimond," he said, "and I want to know why you landed without authorization! I'm the officer in charge, you know!"

  "If you're in charge," Ricimer snapped in return, "then maybe you can tell me why our request for landing instructions was ignored for two orbits! We need to replenish our air tanks after a run from Riel, and I wasn't about to wait till tomorrow noon when some of you dirtside clowns decided to switch on your radios!"

  "Oh!" said Heimond. "Ah. From Riel . . ."

  We hadn't—of course—signaled the port control before braking in, but Federation standards were such that nobody on the ground was going to be sure of that. Even if the radio watch happened to be awake, the set might have failed—again—for lack of proper care.

  Heimond's eyes took in the 17-cm plasma cannon which dominated the Oriflamme's forward section. "Oh!" he said in a brighter tone. He glared at Ricimer, sure this time he held the high ground. "You're the escort, then? Where have you been? She's already left a week ago without you!"

  "She left?" Ricimer said. He sounded puzzled but nonchalant. Maybe he was.

  "Our Lady of Montreal!" Heimond snapped. "The treasure ship! You're the Parliament, aren't you? You should have been here weeks ago!"

  "Yes, that's right, but we were delayed," Ricimer agreed easily. "We'll just catch up with her. You'll have her course plan on file at port control?"

  "Yes, yes," Heimond said, "but I don't see why nobody's able to do anything when it's supposed to be—"

  One of the Molts flanking Heimond said, "This ship isn't made of metal."

  The cockpit stairs were four steps high. I jumped straight to the ground. Though the surface was originally gravel, repeated baths in plasma had pulverized it and glazed the silica. I felt the residual heat from our landing through my bootsoles, but the breeze off the lake was refreshingly cool.

  I got into the vehicle and thumbed the power switch of my cutting bar. "Please wait here quietly," I said to the driver.

  "Or you will kill me?" the driver asked in a rusty voice. His chitin had a dark, almost purple cast in the light above the hatchway. The Molts who'd gone aboard with Heimond were lighter and tinged with olive, complexions rather like Guillermo's.

  "I think my friend aiming a laser from the hatchway will kill you," I said. I didn't bother to look at Stephen. I knew what he would be doing. "I'm here to warn you so that he doesn't have to do that."

  "All right," the Molt said. His belly segments began to rub together in alternate pairs. The sound had three distinct tones, all of them gratingly unpleasant.

  "What are you doing?" I snapped, raising the cutting bar.

  "I am laughing, master," the Molt said. "Collector Heimond will not be pleased."

  My subconscious had been aware of the light of a new star. Distance-muffled thrusters began to whisper from the night sky. Another ship was on its landing a
pproach.

  The Oriflamme's main ramp shrieked and jolted its way open. Stephen swung from the hatch with Piet behind him. Following them, protesting desperately, was Collector Heimond in the arms of Jeude and Lightbody.

  Stephen gestured to the Molt and ordered, "Get aboard the ship for now. We'll release you when we lift."

  "Yes, master," the Molt said. He got out of the vehicle and climbed the stairs. Dole watched from the hatchway with a rifle. The Molt was slowed by spasms of grating laughter.

  Ricimer slid into the driver's seat. "We're going to the port office," he said to me. He had to shout to be heard over the roar of the starship landing. "Heimond's going to find the Montreal's course for us. She took on board six months' accumulation of chips, most of them purpose-built in the factory still working on Vaughan."

  The four others, one of them Stephen in his half armor, clambered into the back. It was really a storage compartment with a pair of jump seats. The car sagged till the frame and axles touched.

  "Let me bring my kit and I can get more than the one course," I said. I lifted my leg out of the car. "I'll dump all the core memory!"

  Stephen's big arm blocked me like an I-beam. "I have your kit, Jeremy," he shouted as Ricimer put the overloaded vehicle in gear. Behind us, the Oriflamme's crewmen were dragging hoses to the lake to top off our reaction mass.

  The incoming ship set down at a slip on the other side of the peninsula, much closer to the buildings on the mainland. Silence crashed over the night, followed by a final burp of plasma.

  "Tell us about the Montreal, Heimond," Ricimer ordered. He drove at the speed of a man jogging. Faster would have been brutal punishment. The surface of the quay was rough, and the weight the car carried had collapsed the springs.

  "Last year President Pleyal ordered that only armed ships could carry more than a hundred kilos of chips," the Fed official said. "We'd never worried about that before. It makes routing much more difficult, you see—and then an escort vessel besides!"

  He sounded shell-shocked. It didn't seem to occur to him that present events proved that Pleyal had been right to worry about treasure shipments even among the Back Worlds.