The Reaches

by David Drake

Stephen Gregg's mind wrapped itself in a crackling reverie that smothered the remainder of his friend's words. He would go over the complete plan at leisure. For now, all Gregg could focus on was the initial attack that might be the end of his involvement in the operation, and in life itself.

  35

  Umber

  The Halys lurched into freefall. Dole cursed and reached for the main fuel feed.

  "Don't," Gregg snapped, "touch that, Mr. Dole."

  The thrusters fired under direction from the artificial intelligence. The vessel yawed violently before she came to balance and resumed a measured descent. John, crewing both sets of attitude controls, didn't move during the commotion.

  "Christ's blood, sir!" Dole protested. "That's rough as a cob. I could do better than that!"

  "We're here to look like Feds landing," Gregg said coolly. "That's what we're going to do"—he gave Dole a tight smile—"if it kills us. That means we let the AI bring us in, as coarse as it is and as crude as the thrusters it controls."

  Gregg looked at the Molt on the attitude controls. "Is this how you would have landed if it had been you and your regular captain, John?" he asked.

  "Yes," the alien said.

  The Halys' viewscreen was raster-scanned. Synchronous problems divided the display into horizontal thirds, and the image within those segments was bad to begin with. Nor did it help visuals that a windstorm was blowing dust across Umber City as the raiders came in.

  The four men from the Dalriada braced themselves against stanchions and tried to keep their cutting bars from flopping. They seemed a solid crew. The three common sailors showed a natural tendency to look to the fourth, a gunner's mate named Stampfer, when orders were given, but they'd showed no signs of deliberately rejecting either Gregg's authority or Dole's.

  That was as well for them. Stephen Gregg might not trust himself at piloting a starship, but he could damned well see to it that his orders were obeyed the second time.

  The viewscreen's jagged images of sandy soil and the three ships already docked on Umber vanished suddenly in a wash of dust. "Hang on, boys," Gregg said. "Here it comes."

  The thrusters slammed up to three-quarter power. Two of the attitude jets fired, controlling the yaw from the thrusters' asymmetry. The corrections were so harsh and violent that it was a moment before Gregg realized that the final shock had been the landing legs grounding.

  He let go of the stanchion and flexed life back into his left hand. His right biceps had twinges also, from the way he'd clamped the flashgun against his chest.

  He gave a broad grin. "Gentlemen," he said, "I can't begin to tell you how glad I am that's over."

  For a moment, none of the crewmen spoke. Then Stampfer broke into a grin of his own and said, "Too fucking right, sir!"

  Dole got up from the thruster controls. He nodded toward the hatch. "Shall I?"

  Gregg switched off the Halys' internal lights. "Just crack it," he ordered. "Enough to check the local conditions. We aren't going anywhere for . . . fifteen minutes, that'll let them go back to sleep in the fort."

  Dole swung the hatch far enough to provide a twenty-centimeter opening. The six humans instinctively formed a tight arc, shoulder-to-shoulder, to look out. One of the Dalriadans eased the hatch a little farther outward; Gregg didn't object.

  Dust blew in. It created yellow swirls in the glow above instrument telltales. The outside light of the fort was a similar blur, scarcely brighter though it was less than a hundred meters away. Gregg couldn't see the docked ships from this angle, but they'd shown no signs of life from above.

  Dole covered the breech of his rifle with a rag. Even so, the chance of the second round jamming when he tried to reload was considerable. Gregg consciously avoided checking his laser's battery, because he'd get nonconducting grit on the contacts sure as Satan loved sinners.

  Well, even one shot would be too much. If a threat wasn't sufficient, they were going to need a warship's guns; and they didn't have a warship.

  "I'll lead," he said, repeating the plan aloud to fill time, his and his men's, rather than because he thought any of them had forgotten it. "They'll be expecting us to register for tariff . . ."

  * * *

  The door beneath the light was steel and closed. It didn't open when Gregg pushed the latchplate. He pounded the panel with the heel of his left hand. Nothing happened.

  He was terrified, not of death, but of failing so completely that he became a laughingstock for the expedition.

  Dole muttered something to John. The Molt reached past Gregg, rapped the latch sharply to clear it of dust, and slammed the panel with the full weight of his body. Chitin rapped against the metal.

  The door gave. Gregg pushed it violently inward with his left boot, bringing the flashgun up to his shoulder as he did so.

  One of the six Molts in the room beyond had gotten up to deal with the door. He fell flat on the concrete floor when he saw he was looking down a laser's muzzle. The others froze where they sat at the desk they were using as a dining table.

  Gregg jumped into the room so that his crew could follow him. "Who else?" he demanded in a harsh whisper. John chittered something in his own language.

  A seated Molt pointed toward the inner door. He used only half his limb as though fearing that a broader gesture would leave his carapace blasted across the wall behind him. Things like that happened when the man at the trigger of a flashgun was keyed-up enough.

  "One human," John said. "Perhaps asleep." He indicated the ladder through the ceiling. "There's no one in the gun room."

  "Stampfer, check it out," Gregg whispered. "One of you, open the door for me."

  He slid into position. The door panel was thermoplastic foam with a slick surface coating, no real obstacle. It opened outward.

  A Dalriadan touched the handle, well aware that gobs of molten plastic would spray him if the flashgun fired into the panel. He jerked it open as Stampfer and two men clattered up the ladder.

  Gregg pivoted in behind his flashgun. His visor was up, despite the risk to his retinas if he had to fire, but even so he couldn't find a target in a room lighted only by what spilled from the chamber behind him.

  Something blurred. "What? What?" cried a woman's voice.

  Dole found the light switch. A young woman, pig ugly by the standards of anyone who hadn't spent the past month in a male-crewed starship, sat up in a cot that was the only piece of furniture in the room. She looked terrified.

  Gregg let out his breath in a sigh of relief that told him just how tense he had been. "Madam," he said, "you'll have to be tied up, but you will not be harmed in any way. You are a prisoner of the Free State of Venus."

  "What?" she repeated. She tugged at her sheet. It was caught somewhere and tore. The hem covered her collarbones like a stripper's boa, leaving her breasts and navel bare.

  "Tie her, Dole," Gregg said as he turned to leave. "And no problems! We're not animals."

  "Of course not, sir," the bosun said. His voice was so meek that Gregg knew he'd been right to be concerned.

  "While I go call down Piet and the others," Gregg added to himself. "May God be with them."

  36

  Umber

  The Peaches grounded hard; Leon at the control console understood that speed was not only more important than grace, speed was the only important thing.

  Lightbody and Jeude threw the undogging levers, and a big Dalriadan hurled the hatch open with a lift of his shoulders. Dirt which the featherboat had gouged from the park as it landed dribbled through the opening.

  "Follow me!" Piet Ricimer cried. He stepped to the coaming and pushed off in a leap that carried him clear of the plasma-blasted ground. He sprawled onto all fours, jabbing the knuckles of his rifle hand on a bush which exhaust had seared into a knot of spikes. "Follow me!"

  His men were following, squirting from the hatchway like somebody spitting watermelon seeds. He'd stripped the Peaches' interior for the operation, even shipping the bow gun onto the Dalriada. S
ixteen armed men were still a claustrophobically full load for a landing from orbit.

  The Commandatura was a stuccoed two-story building with an arching false front to give the impression of greater height. There were no lights on inside, but windows in neighboring structures began to brighten. There was surprisingly little interest, given that the featherboat had landed squarely in the center of town. The spaceport was close enough that residents must be used to the roar of thrusters at all hours of the day and night.

  The entrance doors were double glass panels in frames of baroque metalwork. Blowing sand had etched the glass into milky translucence.

  Ricimer pushed the door. It didn't give.

  "I got it!" bellowed the torso-armored Dalriadan who'd lifted the hatch. He hit the doors shoulder-first. Glass disintegrated into dangerous shards—

  Terran ceramics! sneered a back part of Ricimer's mind.

  —and the Dalriadan crashed through into a terrazzo lobby. The empty hinges clicked back and forth from the impact. They were intended to open outward.

  A Molt wearing a dingy sash of office, probably a janitor, stepped from a side room, then fled back inside. A Venerian swept his cutting bar through the door and kicked the remnants aside as he and two fellows pursued.

  Ricimer took the stairs to the second floor three at a time. He used his left hand to pull himself even faster by the balustrade. He fought to keep his eyes on the top of the stairs, not the step he was striding for as instinct would draw them. One of his men found the main light switch and brought the building to brilliant life.

  "Somebody watch these rooms!" Ricimer called as he rounded the newel-post on the second floor and started up the black metal stairs to the communications center on the roof.

  Every member of the landing party had been briefed on his job during the assault. Despite that, it was still possible that in the rush of the moment the men told off for cellars, ground-, and second-floor duties were all going to follow their commander to the roof.

  The latch turned but the door at the top of the stair tower resisted. Ricimer put his shoulder against it. He was panting. The panel whipped away from him, pulled by the same strong wind that had held it closed.

  The roof was a thicket of antennas and the guy wires that kept them upright. Lamps around the roof coping, ankle-height on three sides and taller than a man in front, cast a dust-dimmed illumination across the tangle. The antenna leads merged at the three-by-three-meter shed on a back corner of the roof. Ricimer ran to the structure, hopping like a spastic dancer to clear guys crossing his path.

  The Dalriada was coming down, three minutes behind the featherboat, as planned. Gusts of wind compressed the roar of her thrusters into a throbbing pulse.

  "Let me, sir," Leon cried as Ricimer reached for the door.

  Ricimer nodded, knelt, and presented his rifle. The bosun leaned past him and gripped the latch in his left hand while his right held a cutting bar ready to strike. He jerked the door open.

  The man inside the commo shack was asleep in his chair. His right hand trailed to the floor. A bottle had rolled away from him. Wind rattled another bottle, empty, against legs of the console.

  Leon sniffed the fluid in the partial bottle and said, "Phew! I'd sooner drink hydraulic fluid!"

  "Find the emergency channels," Ricimer ordered. "Start broadcasting that everyone should get into their bomb shelters immediately."

  "Do they have bomb shelters, sir?" asked Marek, one of the pair of Dalriadans who had followed Ricimer to the roof as they were supposed to do.

  "If they don't," Ricimer said, "they'll be even more frightened than if they do."

  Leon pulled the radioman from his swivel chair and slung him out of the shack. The fellow still didn't awaken. Ricimer had heard him snore, so he wasn't dead of alcohol poisoning. Not yet, at any rate.

  The lot to the east of the Commandatura was a fenced vehicle store. The building beyond it was two-story, with lines as simple as those of a concrete block. Lights went on behind the bank of curtained windows on the upper floor, but they went off again almost instantly.

  Ricimer frowned. That showed an undesirable degree of alertness on somebody's part.

  The Dalriada shook the city. The vertical glare of her eight small thrusters stood every vertical form in a pool of its own shadow. Moving with the ease of a featherboat, the 70-tonne vessel lowered beside the Peaches, demolishing the remainder of the park. Clods of imported dirt and the stony bedrock beneath pelted the Commandatura's facade and the other buildings nearby.

  The thrusters shut off with a sucked-in hiss, hugely loud in the silence that followed. Guillermo handed Ricimer unasked the portable radio he could use now that plasma exhaust didn't blanket the RF spectrum.

  As Ricimer put the modular unit to his mouth and ear, Leon came out of the commo shack and said, "I put Marek on the horn, sir." He thumbed toward the console. The Dalriadan had arranged three microphones before him on the ledge. He spoke earnestly into all of them at the same time. "What next?"

  Ricimer opened his mouth to speak. Something glimmered on the upper floor of the building across the parking lot. "Watch—" he said.

  At least a dozen rifles volleyed from the other building. Leon pitched forward, blood spraying from his mouth. Something punched Ricimer's right thigh below his body armor; another round slammed high on his left shoulder. The bullet splashed on the ceramic, but its shock threw Ricimer down. Bits of red-hot jacket metal stung his cheek.

  A bullet-severed guy wire howled a sour chord. The antenna it braced fell over.

  Adrien was yammering something on his radio. Ricimer's own unit was the command set. He held the radio above his face as he lay on his back and switched it to the glowing purple override setting.

  "Ricimer to Dulcie!" he called. He wasn't shouting. "Hit the building across the parking lot from us. It's a barracks. Use your cannon to—"

  The Dalriada had landed with her eight 10-cm weapons run out to port and starboard. The crash of the first gun to fire cut Ricimer's orders short.

  The point-blank bolt punched low through the front of the building and blew out all the ground-floor windows. Glass and framing shotgunned in all directions, driven by a rainbow-hued fireball.

  The barracks walls were thermoplastic sheathing on a metal frame. They were beginning to sag outward when a second plasma cannon fired into the upper story.

  The Feds' armory exploded in a numbing blast. Chunks of roof lifted and rained down from a black mushroom cloud. The remainder of the barracks flattened across the immediate neighborhood like a crushed puffball.

  Marek stumbled out of the commo shack. The secondary explosion had wrecked the equipment and torn off three walls, but the Dalriadan seemed unhurt. Lights all over the city went out when the barracks exploded.

  Guillermo examined Leon with a pencil flash. Ricimer glanced over. The bosun wasn't wearing a gorget to lock his helmet and body armor together. A bullet had drilled through the back of Leon's neck and exited where his nose had been until that instant.

  Guillermo switched off the light.

  It must have been instantaneous. All things were with God.

  Ricimer rolled to his knees. He thought he was okay, though a double spasm shook his right thigh as he moved. He rotated the radio's control to its green setting, normal send-and-receive.

  "—basement vault open," Adrien's voice was saying. Did the boy even realize he'd been locked out of the net? "But the real value, the purpose-built chips, they're at the tramhead. Let's go get them now. They're worth ten times the old pre-Collapse run! Answer me, Piet!"

  "Ricimer to Adrien," Piet said. He stood up unaided, but he had to grasp Guillermo's shoulder an instant later when his thigh spasmed again. "Stay where you are. I'm coming down. Break. Ricimer to Dulcie, over."

  "Go ahead, sir," the Dalriada's captain caroled back. "Did you see how we blasted those bastards? Ah, over."

  "Don't release your follow-up party until further orders," Ricimer said. H
e was feeling dizzy. Perhaps that was why Dulcie's delight in the—necessary, and ordered—slaughter struck him so wrong. "Ricimer out."

  He released the sending key and handed the radio back to Guillermo. It would be some minutes before the ground beneath the Dalriada cooled enough for the second sixteen-man team to disembark, but Ricimer didn't want them scattering before he determined how best to deploy them. The expedition had only three handheld radios—his, Adrien's, and the one with Stephen's party in the fort. When the additional crewmen left the Dalriada, they were out of touch except by shouted commands.

  "Come on," Ricimer said to Marek and Guillermo. "There's nothing more for us up here."

  The Dalriadan glanced down at Leon.

  Ricimer was already heading for the stair tower. Their duties were to the living. The dead were in the hands of God.

  37

  Umber

  The Commandatura basement was divided by concrete walls into a larger and a smaller volume. The former was a jumble of general storage, unsorted and in large measure junk. The smaller room was intended as a vault, but the open door couldn't have been closed until some of the boxes piled around it were removed.

  A man in Federation whites cowered against the wall outside the vault. A Dalriadan held a flashlight on him, while another waved a cutting bar close to the prisoner's face. When the Venerian saw Ricimer appear at the foot of the stairs, he triggered the bar. Its whine brought a howl of terror from the captive.

  "Stop that," Ricimer ordered sharply.

  His brother came out of the vault, holding a handful of loose microchips. "See Piet?" he said, waving his booty through a flashlight's beam. "They're old production here, and it'll take forever to load them with the power out. You! Heathen! Tell my brother about the new stock."

  The prisoner had opened his eyes a crack when the cutting bar went off. "Sirs," he whimpered, "the latest production, they're just now being brought across the Mirror. It's only two weeks till the Earth Convoy arrives, so they're being stored in the blockhouse at the head of the tramway."