The Reaches

by David Drake

  When the alarm sounded; Fed prisoners returning the sledge to the 17 Abraxis slacked the drag ropes to see what was happening. The Molts continued to pace forward. Maher, one of the pair on guard this watch, punched a Fed between the shoulder blades with his rifle butt.

  The prisoner yelped. He turned. Maher prodded his face with the gun muzzle. The Feds resumed the duties they'd been set.

  "We don't want to screw up the navigational equipment when we lift this," I said to Guillermo as I tapped the freighter's communications module. "Do you know if any of the hardware or software is common?"

  "No, Jeremy," the Molt said. "I could build it from parts, of course, since one of my ancestors did that a thousand years ago."

  Guillermo's thorax clicked his race's equivalent of laughter. His three-fingered hands played across the navigation console. "What we can do, though, is to bring up the AI and keep it running while we separate the communications module and attempt to run it."

  "Right," I said. Molts were supposed to operate by rote memory while humans displayed true, innovative intelligence. That's what made us superior to them. You bet.

  I bent to check the join between the module and the main console. The speaker snapped, "Presidential—

  I jumped upright, grabbing my cutting bar with both hands to unhook it. The only reason I carried the weapon was I hadn't thought to remove it after we returned from the Hercules.

  "—Vessel Keys to the Kingdom calling ships on St. Lawrence! Do not attempt to lift. You will be boarded by Federation personnel. Any attempt at resistance will cause you both to be destroyed by gunfire. Respond at once! Over."

  The commo screen was blanked by a nacreous overlay: the caller could, but chose not to, broadcast video.

  "Stay in the image!" I said to Guillermo. Venerian ships didn't have Molt crew members.

  The voice had said, " . . . you both . . ." The Feds had made the same mistake as Captain Cinpeda: they'd seen the metal-hulled vessels, but they'd missed the Oriflamme in her gully.

  My fingers clicked over the module's keyboard. It was an excellent unit, far superior to the normal run of commo gear we produced on Venus. I careted a box in the upper left corner of the pearly field for the Oriflamme.

  Piet looked at me, opening his mouth. I ignored him and said, "Freighter David out of Clapperton to Presidential Vessel, we're laid up here replacing a feedline and our consort's commo is screwed up. What the hell's got into you, over?"

  Guillermo stood with his plastron bowed outward. He scratched the grooves between belly plates with a finger from either hand. I'd never seen him do anything of the sort before. The activity looked slightly disgusting—and innocent, like a man picking his nose.

  "Who are you?" demanded the voice from the module. "Who is this speaking? Over!"

  Piet nodded approvingly. At least he thought we looked like the sort of folks you'd find on the bridge of a Federation merchantman . . .

  "This is Captain Jeremy Moore!" I said, tapping my chest with the point of my thumb. "Who are you, boyo? Some bleeding Molt, or just so pig-faced ugly that you're afraid to let us see you? Over!"

  Through the open hatch I saw men staggering aboard the Oriflamme. Sailors' lives involved both danger and hard work, but their normal activities didn't prepare them to run half a klick when the alarm sounded.

  The sledge sat beside the 17 Abraxis, ready to receive the eighth and final thruster nozzle. It had taken an hour, minimum, to transport each previous nozzle, and another hour to fit the tungsten forging into place beneath the Oriflamme.

  Guillermo balanced on one leg and stuck the other in the air. He poked at his crotch. I noticed that he'd dropped his sash onto my cutting bar on the deck, out of the module's camera angle.

  The pearl-tinged static dissolved into the face of a man who'd been handsome some twenty years and twenty kilograms ago. At the moment he was mad enough to chew hull plates, exactly what I'd intended. Angry people lose perspective and miss details.

  "I'll tell you who I am!" he shouted. "I'm Commodore Richard Prothero, officer commanding the Middle Ways, and I'm going to have your guts for garters, boyo! My landing party will be down in twenty minutes. If there's so much as a burp from you, I'll blast a crater so deep it goes right on out the other side of the planet! Do you understand, civilian? Out!"

  Prothero's three quarters of the screen blanked—completely, to the black of dead air rather than a carrier wave's pearly luminescence. Piet nodded again and crooked his index finger to Guillermo and me.

  I didn't imagine that Prothero could intercept the laser link I'd formed between us and the Oriflamme, but we needn't take unnecessary risks. The necessary ones were bad enough.

  * * *

  "You'll need more than your helmet," Stephen said in a voice as if waking from a dream. "Put the rest of your armor on, Jeremy."

  "When we lift, I'll put my suit on," I said. I wondered what I sounded like. Nothing human, I supposed. Very little of me was human when I slipped into this state.

  "The Federation warship orbiting St. Lawrence is an eight-hundred-tonner mounting twenty carriage guns." Piet's voice rang calmly through the tannoy in the ceiling of the forward hold. "We'll be lifting on seven engines, so we won't be as handy as I'd like. In order to return home, we must engage and destroy this enemy. With the Lord's help, my friends, we will destroy them and destroy every enemy of Venus!"

  Twelve of us waited in the hold. Kiley, Loomis, and Lightbody carried flashguns, but Stephen alone held his with the ease of a man drawing on an old glove.

  We'd had time to rig for action, but it would be tight working the big guns with everybody in hard suits. They were probably cheering Piet in the main hull. None of us did. For myself, I didn't feel much of anything, not even fear.

  "They must've landed on Riel just after we left," Maher said. "The Keys must. Pity they weren't another month putting their pumps to rights."

  "We'll lift as soon as the enemy ship is below the horizon," Piet continued, "and our marksmen have dealt with the Federation cutters. The enemy is in a hundred-and-six-minute orbit, so we'll have sufficient time to reach altitude before joining battle."

  Even on seven thrusters? Well, I'd take Piet's word for it. Aloud I said, "Lacaille says that the Keys is falling apart. You've seen the sort, older than your gramps and Fed-maintained as well. We'll give her the last push, is all."

  "Too right, sir!" Kiley said, nodding enthusiastically. He knew I was just cheering them up before we fought a ship with enough guns, men and tonnage to make six of us. All the sailors knew that—and appreciated it, maybe more than they appreciated me standing beside them now. They expected courage of a gentleman, but not empathy.

  Two exhaust flares winked in the sky. I lowered my visor. For the moment, the riflemen and I were present to protect the flashgunners from Feds who managed to get out of the landing vessels. I'd wear my suit when it was that or breathe vacuum; but I wouldn't put on that jointed ceramic coffin before I had to.

  "I'll take the right-hand one," Stephen said in a husky, horrid whisper. He clicked his faceshield down. "Wait for me to shoot. If anyone jumps the gun—if you survive the battle, my friend, you won't survive it long. On my oath as a gentleman."

  "Almighty God," said Piet. "May Thy hand strengthen ours in Thy service today. Amen."

  Lacaille was suited up aboard the Oriflamme. He'd repeated that he wouldn't fight his own people; but he'd asked not to be left on the ground, either.

  We owed him that much. The prisoners locked for the moment in the hold of the 17 Abraxis would identify him quickly enough to survivors of the Federation landing party. Besides, Lacaille was one of us now—whatever he said, wherever he was born.

  "Easy, gentlemen," Stephen said as he lifted his flashgun to his shoulder.

  The Fed boats leveled out from their descent and cruised toward the 17 Abraxis a hundred meters in the air. They were bigger than our cutter, almost the size of featherboats. They didn't act like they saw us. Small-craft
optics are crude, and the Feds weren't expecting to find anything in the shadow of the arroyo.

  The nearer vessel slowed to a crawl while five meters in the air. It began to settle beside the freighter. Its plasma exhaust flared in an oval pattern that swept stones as big as my fist from the ground.

  Stephen fired. His bolt struck the side of the boat's thruster nozzle, close to the white-hot lip. The exhaust already sublimed tungsten from the nozzle's throat and left a black smear on the ground where the metal redeposited.

  The laser pulse heated the point it hit to a fractionally greater degree than the metal casing around it. The nozzle lost cohesion. The side blew toward us in a bubble of green vapor as intense as the plasma that drove it. The crash! of metal exploding was more dazzling than the flash.

  The vessel rolled clockwise on its axis and nosed in almost upside down. The dorsal hatch flew off. Members of the landing party flew out in a confusion of weapons and white tunics.

  The second craft was thirty meters in the air and a hundred meters beyond the first. Our three remaining flashgunners fired in near unison. Two of the bolts glanced from the cutter's hull, leaving deep scars in the metal and puffs of aluminum vapor in the air. The third man aimed better but to even less effect: his flux stabbed toward the nozzle but was smothered in the cloud of ionized exhaust.

  The boat rotated toward us. A port in its blunt bow gaped open. The riflemen beside me volleyed at the little vessel, flecking the hull when they hit.

  Stephen clacked the battery compartment closed and raised his reloaded flashgun. The muzzle of a twin-tube laser thrust from the Feds' gunport. Even pumped by the thruster, it couldn't seriously damage the Oriflamme's hull; but it could kill all of us in the hold, hard suits or no.

  The vessel slid toward us in a shallow dive. Stephen fired.

  The thruster nozzle was only a corona beneath the craft's oncoming bow. A cataclysmic green flash lifted the vessel in what would have been a fatal loop if the pilot hadn't been incredibly good or incredibly lucky. The cutter screamed overhead and skidded along the ground on its belly for two hundred meters beyond the arroyo, strewing fragments of hull behind it.

  The Oriflamme's engines roared. The deck vibrated fiercely, but it would be a moment before thrust rose beyond equilibrium with our mass and we started to lift. Men started for the companionway to the main deck, cheering and clapping one another's shoulders with their gauntleted hands.

  My hard suit waited for me in a corner of the hold. I began to put it on, trying not to get rattled as I performed the unfamiliar, unpleasant task of locking myself into armor. Because Stephen and Lightbody helped me, I was suited up within a minute or two of when the hatch sealed out the buffeting of the atmosphere the Oriflamme was fast leaving.

  ABOVE ST. LAWRENCE

  Day 319

  Oriflamme's guns were run out to starboard. Stampfer was amidships with the fire director, but the Long Tom's six-man crew stood close about their massive gun.

  Gaiters did a halfhearted job of sealing the gun tube to the inner bulkhead. The pleated barriers kept the cabin air pressure high enough to scatter light and even carry sound, but we were breathing bottled air behind lowered faceshields.

  The Keys to the Kingdom hung on Guillermo's display. It wasn't a real-time image. We viewed one frozen aspect of the spherical vessel, and even portions of that had the glossiness of an electronic construct rather than the rough, tarnished surfaces of physical reality.

  There was nothing for scale in the image, but "800 tonnes" meant something to me now as it had not at the start of this voyage. It meant the Keys was significantly larger than Our Lady of Montreal; and unlike the Montreal, she was first and foremost a warship.

  God knew, so was the Oriflamme, and we of her crew were men of war.

  The Keys' bridge, indicated by sensor and antenna concentrations, was in the usual place at the top deck. The generally globular design was flattened on the underside so that the thrusters could be grouped in the same plane.

  Ramps on the deck above the thrusters served for loading and unloading the vessel on the ground. Because the Keys was so large, she was also configured to load in orbit through large rectangular hatches at her horizontal centerline. Her gun decks, indicated by a line of ports that were still closed when our optics drew the image on display, were above and below the central deck.

  About twenty guns, Lacaille had said. They'd be smaller than ours and less efficient; but . . . twenty guns.

  The usual digital information filled Salomon's screen. I glanced at Piet's display and found, to my surprise, that I understood its analogue data to a degree.

  The gray central ball was St. Lawrence. The bead on the slightly elliptical green line circling the planet was the Keys to the Kingdom in orbit, while we were the indigo-to-blue line arcing up the surface. The difference in color indicated relative velocities: the Keys, in her higher orbit, moved slower than we did as we circled toward the Feds from below under power.

  The image on Guillermo's display suddenly shifted into motion, as though a paused recording had been switched back on. We'd come out of the planet's shadow; our sensors were getting direct images of the Keys to the Kingdom again.

  Our approach was from the Keys' underside. Her twenty-four thruster nozzles were arranged four/six/four/six/four. A faint glow still illuminated their heavy-metal casings.

  I put my helmet against Stephen's and said, "Don't they see us?"

  Plasma flooded from the Keys' thrusters. The cloud expanded to hundreds of times the volume of the starship from which it sprang. A moment later, attitude jets spurted lesser quantities of gas which swiftly dissipated. The sphere shuddered and began to rotate so that its main engines weren't exposed to our fire.

  "Now they see us!" Stephen replied. Even thinned by conduction through his helmet and mine, his voice was starkly gleeful.

  The bubble of exhaust separated from the Keys to the Kingdom. It drifted away, cooling and still expanding until it was only a faint shimmer across the starscape. The Fed commander was putting his ship in a posture of defense, because he'd realized that he couldn't escape us. Even on seven thrusters, the Oriflamme had a much higher power-to-mass ratio than the huge Keys did. We could literally run circles around the Feds in the sidereal universe. If they attempted to transit, we would jump with them: two AIs with identical parameters would always pick the same "best" solution.

  And that would be the end of the Keys to the Kingdom. Piet would bring us up beneath the Feds at point-blank range—and Stampfer would blow the Keys' thrusters out, leaving the vessel to drift powerless in interstellar space.

  The need to protect our thrusters was behind Piet's decision to disable the Fed landing boats before we lifted. The Oriflamme's hull could take a considerable battering from heavy guns and still be repaired. Laser bolts or light plasma cannon could destroy our main engines, however. We couldn't risk being encircled by three hostile vessels, even if two of them were small by comparison with the Oriflamme.

  Piet shut off our engines. I grasped a stanchion with my left gauntlet as I started to drift up from the deck. The bead that was the Oriflamme drove silently across the main display on a course that would intersect the Keys to the Kingdom in two minutes, or at most three. The arc marking our past course was now turquoise.

  The carriage of the 17-cm gun crawled slowly sideways, making the deck tremble. The fire director was keeping the muzzle pointed at the target Stampfer had chosen.

  "All weapons bear on the enemy, sir!" the master gunner announced over the radio intercom. Motors in the gun training apparatus crackled across Stampfer's voice, but so long as the main engines were shut down the whole crew could hear him over the helmet radios.

  "Thank you, Mister Stampfer," Piet said in a tone that was so calm he sounded bored. "I trust your aim, but I think we'll close further so that the charges will dissipate less."

  Static roared on the intercom. My hair stood on end from a jolt of static, and the hull beside me r
ocked to a white-hot hammerblow.

  There was enough atmosphere at this altitude to light the tracks of the Keys' plasma bolts across our optical screen. The Feds had salvoed ten guns. Only one round had hit squarely. It was powerful enough to shatter our tough outer hull and craze the inner one in a meter-diameter circle between the gunport and the navigation consoles.

  The Oriflamme rocked with the impact of ions moving at light speed. Attitude jets snorted, returning us to our former alignment. The Long Tom's gear motors tracked and tracked back, holding a calculated point of impact.

  The Keys to the Kingdom filled Guillermo's screen. Our green bead and the chartreuse bead of the Federation vessel were on the verge of contact on the analogue display.

  "Fire as you bear, Mist—" Piet's voice ordered before static and the ringing CRASH! of five heavy guns recoiling blotted out all other sound.

  Two of the directed thermonuclear explosions struck the Keys' upper gun deck, two struck the mid-line deck, and the last ripped a collop out of the lower gun deck in a grazing blow. Eight cargo hatches blew out along the centerline. Our plasma charges expanded the deck's atmosphere explosively, pistoning the Fed vessel open from the inside.

  Bolts that hit the Keys' gun decks ripped huge, glowing ulcers in the hull plating. White-hot metal blew inward, mixed with the residual atmosphere, and burned in secondary pulses. The initial impacts wracked the Keys' internal subdivisions. These follow-up blasts penetrated deep into the vessel, spreading pain and panic among those who'd thought themselves out of immediate danger.

  Attitude jets puffed, rotating the Oriflamme on her axis so that our spine rather than our starboard was presented to our enemy. We'd taken one hit and were likely to take others. Piet was adjusting our aspect so that the Feds couldn't concentrate on the weakened portion of our hull.

  The Long Tom had recoiled two meters on its carriage. Efflux from the plasma bolt had blown the gaiters inward so that a rectangle of hard vacuum surrounded the barrel. A crewman spun the locking mechanism and swung the breechblock open.