The Reaches

by David Drake

  He thrust the bottle toward Sal. "Here," he said. "Go ahead and kill it. Good stuff, huh?"

  Sal shook her head. "I've got paperwork to do even if the Navy assessor doesn't show up soon," she said. "Best you get off to your own people and leave me to it, Lasky."

  Lasky stood up slowly, obviously unwilling to go back to the Moll Dane and a crew of the sort that would work for captains like him. He paused in the airlock. "Maybe I'll see you again in Winnipeg," he said.

  Sal looked at the fat man. Wrapped in red tape, the Moll Dane could very well be on the ground in ten days when Piet Ricimer and his squadron called on Winnipeg.

  "I hope so, Lasky," Sal said. "I really hope you do."

  WINNIPEG, EARTH

  April 6, Year 27

  1257 hours, Venus time

  Stephen stared through the tavern's dingy window toward the twilit city beyond. The drink in his hand was fresh, so he tongued it carefully before he took a sip.

  No drugs, no poisons; just cheap white liquor, served straight and warm. The Fed soldiers were buying. The bartender had offered mixers, but Stephen had waved them away. He doubted the Feds would add a Mickey Finn to his drink so long as he kept putting the liquor down at a rate they'd be sure would have him under the table in a few more hours, but there was no point in increasing their chances.

  "And then he says, 'I don't know why you're complaining, we're on the ground, ain't we?'" Piet said, "like he couldn't see he was standing on the bulkhead because the ship was lying on her side!"

  The Feds laughed heartily. Piet's stories of incompetent Venerian officers were all true, and they made him the life of the party. He never pumped the Feds for information, but his stories bred stories, and Piet listened.

  Stephen Gregg listened too, as he sat halfway down the bar drinking morosely. The liquor wouldn't make him drunk. It just permitted him to view his life through thick windows that blocked the sharper pains and left him with only a dull, murderous ache.

  Pengelley had made a call from the port administration building while the remainder of the gun crew waited with Piet and Stephen in a canvas-covered truck. When the truck dropped them all at a tavern in the heart of the city, a nameless fat civilian was waiting with a briefcase of pre-Collapse microchips.

  The civilian's bodyguard was broader than Stephen and almost as tall. Apart from those two and the bartender, no one else was present. The man who loitered outside the tavern door was obviously a guard.

  The transaction had gone smoothly. The price for the porno cubes was fair, and the chips the civilian offered in payment were of the quality he claimed. There'd been a delay in getting transport back to the field after the deal was complete, though. The Fed soldiers offered to stand drinks; and more drinks; and more, as the slow spring evening shadowed the sky above the city.

  "Freshen your drink, buddy?" the bartender offered. "The sergeant, she's paying." He nodded toward Pengelley.

  "Sure," Stephen said. "I'm legless already, so another slug can't hurt. They'll have to carry me when the truck gets here."

  He and Piet were going to have to make their move when they next went out the back to piss in the alley behind the tavern. The trouble wouldn't be making a break, but rather how they would get from central Winnipeg to the Gallant Sallie kilometers away. There was almost no motor transport in this dismal city. If he and Piet tried to hike up the sole road to the port, the locals—who surely had access to vehicles—would easily relocate them.

  Piet and Stephen were perfectly willing to leave the Feds with the chips as well as the cubes, but if the Feds guessed that, they'd wonder what the pair of Venerians had really been up to.

  If life were simple, then Venus wouldn't have needed a planner like Piet Ricimer. And Piet wouldn't have needed a killer like Stephen Gregg.

  Winnipeg was less a city than a rubbish midden with dwellings on top. The community hadn't been bombed during the Outworld Rebellion a thousand years before. Rather, the walls had been pulled down stone by stone by the starving, desperate population during the ensuing Collapse. Occupation of the site had been continuous, reaching its nadir five hundred years in the past.

  By the time technological civilization returned to the region under the guise of the North American Federation, the bricks, beams, and ashlars of pre-Collapse Winnipeg had been mined for multiple reuse. Now the city's tawdry present squatted on its ruined past.

  Stephen looked down the bar, careful to avoid eye contact with the fat man's bodyguard. The fellow didn't seem smart enough to tie his own shoes, but he might be able to recognize a threat if one glared at him.

  Piet was finishing a complicated story that involved a captain setting down in Betaport instead of Ishtar City, well across the planet, as he'd intended. Stephen waited for the last flourish and laughter, then called, "Hey, Janni! Give me a hand to the jakes. I can't walk by myself."

  "Piet" wasn't an uncommon name, but it was the one Venerian name that had a connection for every Fed.

  Piet looked around. As he did so, Sal, Harrigan, Dole, and three other sailors from the Gallant Sallie walked in the front door. The local who'd been posted outside to prevent interruption lay on the ground, moaning and clutching his groin.

  "There you stupid scuts are!" Sal shouted. "By God, if I hadn't found you in the next five minutes, you could swim back to Venus!"

  "Oh, ma'am, we weren't AWOL," Piet whined, snaking down beside his leg the case of microchips from the bartop.

  The bodyguard stood in front of Sal. He held a meter-long crowbar across his chest. "This is a private party," he grated. "You buggers aren't wanted."

  Stephen, moving before anyone but Piet knew he was going to move, stepped behind the bodyguard and gripped him by the belt and the back of the neck. Pengelley shouted and stumbled out of her chair.

  The bodyguard managed only a startled grunt as Stephen half ran, half threw him into the wall at the end of the bar. The bodyguard went headfirst through the paneling and the two studs he hit on the way. Bits of plaster crumbled from the ceiling at the shock.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Blackbeard cried as he stared at the destruction. The bartender reached beneath the bar. Dole looked at him. The bartender brought his hands back into sight—empty.

  "It's your own damned fault, feeding him booze like that!" Sal snarled at Blackbeard. "Christ's blood, he's not safe to be around sober. Harrigan, get them out of here. We're lifting in an hour."

  The table had tipped when Stephen and the bodyguard went past. The fat civilian remained in his chair, sitting exactly as he had before the violence. He watched the Venerians leave, Piet still holding the microchips; but he said nothing and his hands, like the bartender's, were in plain sight.

  Lightbody was driving a spaceport truck, obviously rented by means of a bribe to the right official. The guns and cutting bars that the rescue party hadn't wanted to display unless necessary were in the cab with him. Nobody came out of the tavern as the vehicle pulled away.

  "Thanks, Sal," Stephen said softly.

  "My pleasure," she replied in a neutral voice. "Much more pleasure than dealing with Dan Lasky this afternoon."

  The truck jounced over potholes in the dirt street. At every corner hung one or more giant portraits of President Pleyal. Some of the pictures had been defaced with paint.

  "Lasky's ship, the Moll Dane," Piet said, speaking over the rattle of the truck's suspension. "Is it a well-found vessel, Captain Blythe?"

  Sal looked at him. Her face was shadowed, but puzzlement was evident in her voice as she said, "Not particularly. Why?"

  "That's good," Piet said. "We don't have the authority to take a Venerian vessel prize when we return here. I certainly don't intend to leave the Moll Dane in the present hands, but I'd hate to destroy a really trim ship."

  He smiled. For a moment, Stephen felt that he might have been looking into a mirror.

  EARTH APPROACHES

  April 16, Year 27

  0120 hours, Venus time

  "Go
d's love, that's a sharp image!" Tom Harrigan said as he hung in the air behind Sal at the navigation console, watching the remote display transmitted from the New Year's Gift. "If I was looking out the hatch, it wouldn't be that clear!"

  The guardship at the orbital window for Winnipeg grew slowly on the screen as the New Year's Gift maneuvered carefully closer to the expectant Feds. The guardship's four cannon were run out, but her crew didn't go through the charade of aiming the guns at yet another intrasystem merchantman with a cargo for Winnipeg.

  The squadron had captured the New Year's Gift at Berryhill on January 1. The vessel was metal and responded to the guardship's hail as the Mary of Vancouver with a cargo of forgings from the Asteroid Belt for Winnipeg. There was nothing about the ship or the situation to rouse the inspectors from their boredom.

  "The imagery from when we scouted Winnipeg is still in the database," Sal explained. "The AI uses that data to sharpen the details we get from the New Year's Gift. Our optronics now are . . . We have as good a system as any ship in the squadron, the Wrath included."

  She touched a control. The display switched from enhanced visuals of the guardship to a scene including both the guardship and the New Year's Gift as the latter approached for inspection. The image of the Venerian vessel was entirely computer-modeled from the Gallant Sallie's database.

  Sal's whole crew hung in the cabin, using the freedom of weightlessness to position themselves so that everybody had a view of the display. They could get to their duty stations within five seconds. Unless and until the New Year's Gift carried out her mission, the rest of the squadron had no duty to perform.

  Piet had divided his vessels between the thirteen that would stay in Earth orbit to prevent the Feds from reinforcing Winnipeg from space, and the twelve ships that would actually land in the port. The Gallant Sallie was in the latter group, but because of her excellent controls, she would land last.

  Piet knew Sal would set down within meters of the planned landing spot—not on top of a ship that had landed a few minutes earlier. Some of the larger freighters might in the confusion come down almost anywhere.

  "Amazing," Harrigan whispered.

  "Cost more than the hull, I shouldn't doubt," said Godden. He'd been assigned to serve as the Gallant Sallie's gunner during the operation. All the ships landing at Winnipeg carried their regular batteries, despite the fact the guns diminished space that could be given over to loot. Even more than the recent voyage to the Reaches, this raid was a military rather than commercial operation.

  "Too right it did," Brantling said. "My cousin's the assistant manager at Torrington's Chandlery. He says because it was Mister Gregg buying, Old Man Torrington did the work at cost. Even then it was more than he'd ever heard being spent on a ship this old."

  Sal looked back at Brantling. She hadn't known the details. Stephen had listed the equipment at invoice price rather than at its much higher fair market value.

  "Keep your fingers crossed," Tom Harrigan said softly.

  The images of the guardship and the New Year's Gift were almost touching as they prepared for external inspection. The two oversized gunports in the Gift's cargo bay swung open on the side opposite the guardship.

  "The scantlings of a tin can like that'll never take the shock of twenty-centimeter guns," Godden muttered disapprovingly. "They'll shake her apart."

  Steam puffed from the attitude jets of the New Year's Gift. The vessel began to rotate slowly on her axis.

  "She doesn't have to survive any longer than it takes to fire two shots," Sal said. She gripped the edge of her keyboard as if it were all that prevented her from dropping over a chasm. "Or even one, if things work out as they ought."

  She touched a control. She'd been tempted to display the view that the guardship's crew would have in their last moments of life: the merchantman turning with a slight wobble on her axis; the meter-square hatches open, nonstandard and puzzling, but not a sign of danger. At the final instant, the devouring flash of a 20-cm plasma charge ripping into the guardship before anyone could send a warning to Earth.

  Instead, Sal returned the image to the Gift-transmitted realtime view of the guardship. Every seam, every rust stain was evident in the enhanced image.

  "Firing without running the guns out . . ." Godden said. The gunner was speaking aloud but to himself. "I know, so the Feds don't see what's coming, but the side-scatter'll blow plates off the hull."

  The central half of the guardship exploded in rainbow coruscance. An instant later another heavy plasma bolt vanished into the swelling chaos created by the first. The extreme bow and stern of the guardship spun away from the glowing gas cloud. There could be no one alive in either section.

  "Prepare for transit," Sal said in a cool, gray voice. Her crew was already taking its stations.

  The Wrath transited into the orbital window under Piet Ricimer's usual flawless navigation. The big warship began braking for reentry at once. If all went well, in a matter of minutes Stephen Gregg would be leading his band against the Fed guns.

  Sal watched the Wrath shrink as the warship dropped away from the New Year's Gift. Her heart shrank with the image.

  WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH

  April 16, Year 27

  0142 hours, Venus time

  Because the Wrath was designed by men who'd done all the jobs on starships in war and peace, the vessel had visual displays in its boarding holds. On merchant ships used for war service, men waiting in the holds in hard suits to attack were as blind as sausages in a can. They had to guess the ship's status from the shocks and bumps: braking thrust, atmospheric turbulence because the guns had been run out; and always at the backs of their minds was the fear that any particular jolt might have been the plasma bolt that would cause the overstressed hull to crumble about them.

  Nobody who'd experienced that blind helplessness thought it was beneficial to men preparing for combat, so the Wrath had a medium-resolution visual display in both of her boarding holds. Stephen Gregg, twenty-five soldiers under Major Cardiff as second in command, and half the men of the B Watch close-combat team could watch flat prairie galloping closer through a veil of exhaust plasma and the friction-heated glare of the warship's rapid descent.

  Piet brought them down out of the east, just above the risen sun. The guardship hadn't flashed the port a warning, so the ground staff wasn't afraid of hostile forces, but the Wrath's display was thunderous and colorful. It was sure to draw eyes in a port where excitement generally meant that a ship had lost control during her landing approach.

  "Bet they're waking the crash crews right now, boys," Stephen shouted over the roaring descent. Sailors laughed and catcalled; soldiers relaxed minusculely in their shells of ceramic or metal.

  By choice, Stephen would have been silent before action, but this time he had the responsibilities of command. Few if any of the soldiers had experienced a combat descent. Most of them thought the Wrath really was about to crash. Hearing the sailors laugh at the thought was the best tonic Colonel Gregg could offer.

  Stephen checked the Fed defenses as their images grew. The gun tower batteries were lowered into their cradles. The guns in the pit were vertical in their equivalent rest position. The tubes were dim blurs at the display's modest resolution because they projected only two meters above the gunhouses, but the long shadows the sun threw from them were clear to a trained eye.

  The port's scarred gray surface filled the screen. The Wrath sailed at a steep angle past a pair of vessels undergoing maintenance on the ground.

  "Get a good grip, boys," Dole bellowed. "Captain Ricimer's the best there is, but inertia's still inertia!"

  All sixteen thrusters cut in at full output, slowing the big vessel to the speed of a dropping feather in the last two hundred meters before she touched down. Despite the warning and the stanchions planted thickly in a hold designed for combat, not cargo operations, half the landsmen crashed to the deck under the braking thrust.

  Dole had wanted to use only sailors
for the operation; but the soldiers had more experience in ground operations, and half a dozen of the landsmen were reasonably expert with the heavy, dangerous flashguns that few sailors cared to use. Life is a trade-off. . . .

  Touchdown was so delicate that Stephen noticed not the contact but the cessation of the thrusters' roaring vibration. The hold was configured for rapid assaults: instead of a single hatch across the entire frontage, worked by a screw jack, the hold had six paired clamshell doors that sprang open under the action of powerful hydraulic rams.

  Ideally they sprang open. This time the lower trio worked properly, but the center door of the upper tier jammed half raised to hang like the sole tooth in a gaffer's mouth. Men in the middle of the assault force lurched right or left, fouling their fellows as they charged into the seething hell beyond.

  The last of the Wrath's exhaust lifted in a superheated doughnut as the hatches opened. A blast of incoming cooler air ripped trash and pebbles from the ground. It slammed the troops and staggered them, even the sailors who knew more or less what to expect. The flashgun tugged in Stephen's grasp, though he was barely conscious of the fact.

  If Stephen Gregg had an article of faith, it was that his weapon would point where he wanted it to point and would fire when it bore on a target, no matter what the universe did to obstruct him. Other men had warmer, brighter gods; but as the veil of plasma lifted and the enemy's gunpit came in sight—this faith would serve. This would serve very well.

  Stephen took three paces forward, breathing bottled air in his sealed hard suit. He couldn't see anything until the roiling air settled, but he knew from the display in the boarding hold and a decade of working with Piet that the Wrath had set down where planned, twenty meters or so from the gate to the gunpit. There were men to Stephen's immediate right and left. Major Cardiff in armor yellow-striped for identification pressed forward on the left flank of the assault force.