The Reaches

by David Drake

  "Stephen, help me!" Piet Ricimer called from forward. Even in the present noise and carnage, that voice reached Stephen's directing mind. As he turned, his gauntleted fingers continued to feed cartridges up the loading gate in the rifle's receiver.

  The battle for the forward portion of the gun deck was over. At least a score of bodies and partial bodies littered the deck or were draped over the guns. Most of the casualties were from the Fed crew, but the Venerian sprawled on his back with a hole through his thigh armor was certainly dead by now if the femoral artery had been nicked.

  There were two more bodies in Venerian hard suits at the head of the cabin. The helmet of one had been topped like a soft-boiled egg; brains were leaking out. Piet, holding a cutting bar, stood between the corpses of his companions.

  The situation was easy to read. The control room in the nose of the Holy Office was separated from the gun deck by an airlock passage similar to but much wider than that between the Gallant Sallie's hold and cabin. Piet had headed for the control room with the two nearest men, leaving the rest of the assault force to deal with the crew of the Holy Office. The Venerians had cut through the hinges of the outward-opening hatch and pried it away from the opening.

  A Fed in full armor waited in the passage with a pair of cutting bars. The man was a giant. The surface of his hard suit was silvered to reflect laser beams. Judging by the fresh scars—from bullets and cutting bars both—the plates beneath were exceptionally thick as well.

  The Venerians were expecting an empty passage when they cleared the hatch. The Fed guardian fell on them, hacking with both hands and rightly confident that his armor was proof against their panicked response.

  Piet had dodged back in time—Stephen had never seen his friend completely surprised by any event—but the sailors with him died beneath the paired cutting bars. The giant then backed up and waited for the next assault, knowing that the passage protected his flanks from the numbers that could otherwise be brought against him.

  "Don't bother shooting, Stephen," Piet called without taking his eyes off the giant. "If you block the right-hand bar with your own, I'll block the left and—"

  Stephen closed to two meters and tossed his rifle in the giant's face. As the weapon clanged harmlessly off the helmet, Stephen lunged forward like a missile himself. Their breastplates crashed together. Stephen caught the Fed's armored wrists before the bars could scissor together on his helmet.

  The howling edges pressed toward Stephen's face despite anything he could do. "Christ Jesus bugger you, you Federation whoreson!" he screamed as he butted the Fed's faceplate. He'd always known there were men stronger than he was, but he didn't meet them often.

  This man was strong enough to hand Stephen Gregg his head, literally.

  For a moment, Stephen thought the vibration and screaming refractories came from the giant's bars cutting into his helmet. The Fed threw himself backward, pulling Stephen with him. They smashed into the hatch between the passage and the control room. The cutting bar fell from the giant's right hand.

  Piet Ricimer gripped the Fed's shoulder with his left gauntlet while he drove the tip of his cutting bar into the man's faceplate. The blade suddenly lurched 15 centimeters inward till the tip shrieked on the back of the giant's helmet from the inside. The giant slumped down against the hatch he'd defended as long as life was in him.

  "Stephen, are you all right?" Piet demanded. The bar spun itself clear of bits of bone as he withdrew it. "Did he cut you? Are you all right?"

  "I'm not hurt!" Stephen said. "Why do you think—"

  As he heard himself speak, he realized for the first time that he was on the floor of the passageway, sprawled across the body of the Fed giant. He'd put every bit of his strength into the fight, and the Fed was still stronger.

  "I'm not hurt," Stephen repeated more softly. In a whisper he added, "It's better to have friends than be strong, Piet."

  "Venus forward!" Piet shouted. "Wraths to me now!"

  He took a cutting bar the giant had dropped; the battery of Piet's own must be nearly exhausted from cutting at the airlock, then through the giant's thick faceshield. Piet set the tip of the fresh tool against the 10-by-4-centimeter nickel-steel crossbar that locked the hatch. Leaning his whole weight on the hilt, he worried the cutting bar through in geysers of sparks blazing as the blade flung them into the air.

  Stephen got to his feet and unclipped his own bar. It wasn't his weapon of choice, but the rifle was somewhere beneath the giant's body. The bar might do better than a gun in the confined space anyway.

  The crossbar fell in pieces. The hatch pivoted inward. Stephen crashed into the control room a step behind Piet.

  A Fed sailor threw down her rifle as the armored Venerians burst from the hatchway. An officer struggled up from a console, tangled in the cord of a communications handset while he tried to reach his holstered revolver. He screamed in abject terror as Stephen took two long strides toward him.

  Stephen slashed with a skill he probably couldn't have equaled in practice. The cutting bar's tip skidded across the surface of the Fed's breastplate and severed the pistol belt. It didn't touch the man.

  The holster clunked to the deck. The Fed leaned forward and began blubbering into his hands.

  The bridge crew, six humans and three Molts, made no resistance. The man Stephen had disarmed was the only officer. The Molts were curled into mauve lumps as if preparing to go into suspended animation. Piet, Stephen, and the six men shouldering into the control room behind them looked as out of place as guns among table settings of silver and crystal.

  Piet shoved the Fed officer aside, hastily but without brutality, and seated himself at the command console. The sound of fighting on the gun deck had died away; Fed resistance must have broken suddenly. Piet took his gauntlets off and called up an alphanumeric sidebar on the console's panoramic display. Stephen noticed his friend seemed perfectly comfortable working controls in a hard suit when circumstances demanded it.

  Stephen picked up the rifle on the deck, then took the sailor's ammunition too by breaking the buckle of her belt. He stepped to the control room's starboard airlock and activated the control. While he waited for the hatches to cycle, he watched the panoramic display.

  Until very recently, Federation optronics had been an order of magnitude better than the best available on Venus. That was no longer true at the high end, because Venerian microchip production—and loot—was catching up with the huge pre-Collapse stockpiles the Feds brought back from the Reaches. Nonetheless, the Holy Office's screens gave a crisp, ground-level view of what was happening in Winnipeg's military port.

  The administrative offices and barracks were built into the north wall of the berm. A pole stood before the concrete-pillared entrance, but the flag was a red-and-white tangle on this windless day.

  The gunports of the warships that had joined the Holy Office in firing on the Moll Dane were open but empty at present. Plasma cannon had to cool for several minutes between shots—the interval becoming longer as the bore of the weapon increased. Reloading too quickly risked a detonation of the shell that, because the tritium core wasn't compressed in a programmed sequence, was almost certain to rupture the cannon and kill the crew.

  Federation plasma cannon were large-crystal castings of tungsten, stellite, or other heavy metals, and they almost invariably had to be loaded from the muzzle. Venus built ceramic breechloaders that cooled more quickly, particularly in an atmosphere. Although the fighting aboard the Holy Office seemed to have gone on forever, the minutes that had actually passed weren't long enough for the Feds to reload their pieces.

  In common with most spherical-design vessels, this Fed ship carried the tanks for its reaction mass—water—along the vertical axis. Instead of putting a bolt into the ship's thick hull, Stampfer had aimed the powerful 17-cm gun at the mid-line hatch the Feds had opened as a fighting position. Smoke and sparks erupted from the hatchway, but the water tank took the bolt's main impact. Steam pistoned the i
ncompressible remaining liquid through ruptured seams, then flooded every deck with searing fog.

  Piet lit the Holy Office's thrusters. Exhaust curled in through the airlock. Stephen snapped down the faceshield he didn't remember lifting and stepped to the outer hatchway, searching for targets.

  Another of the Holy Office's big guns fired. When the assault force no longer had Fed crewmen to fight, they'd joined Stampfer in running out the starboard battery. The high entrance doors of the headquarters bunker exploded in a rainbow flash. The shock wave shattered the pillars, which bowed outward and collapsed, dragging the triangular pediment with them.

  Piet's voice snarled from the vessel's PA system, "Abandon ship! This is Captain Ricimer speaking. All men off the vessel now!"

  Crewmen staggered out of the steam wreathing the vessel Stampfer hit first. Stephen aimed at a figure who still carried a weapon. His shot blasted concrete dust ten meters beyond the Fed. This rifle shot 20 centimeters wide to the left at this range, but because of the downward angle Stephen could adjust his aim.

  He reloaded the turn-bolt single-shot and fired again. The Fed skidded facedown on the concrete.

  The Fed warship near the east berm, six hundred meters from the Holy Office, fired a pair of light plasma cannon. One of the bolts struck the stern of the Holy Office. Three 17-cm guns answered it, their crackling discharges ringing at four-second intervals through the fabric of the captured warship. Stampfer must have laid all the guns himself. Common sailors couldn't have hammered the same point with such precision.

  The flash of the first bolt hitting was white and prismatic; superheated hull metal blazed in the atmosphere. The second bolt, striking an instant after the initial fireball had lifted from a basin-sized hole in the hull, spent its energy inside the vessel. Flames—red, orange, and streaked with plumes of white smoke at high pressure—engulfed the warship's second deck level.

  If the Feds had had the time and the inclination to set up their vessel's internal compartmentalization, the third round wouldn't have added anything to the damage the immediately previous bolt had caused. People act hastily in crises. Not all the companionway hatches were dogged shut, and few of the floor-to-ceiling baffles had been raised to prevent an explosion from involving an entire deck.

  Plasma from the third round blew flaming gas and debris into every chamber of the Federation vessel. Gunports flapped outward, spewing black smoke and occasionally parts of Fed crewmen. A ready-use magazine of plasma shells went off on the midline deck. Iridescent flame gouged away the sides of the openings through which it streamed. The vessel settled slightly as white-hot structural members lost strength.

  "Abandon ship!" Piet's voice ordered. "Abandon ship! All Wraths out of the military port now!"

  A fourth running figure. Stephen killed him. It was a Molt and unarmed when the hot fog cleared momentarily about the body an instant after the shot. Stephen stepped back from the hatch to draw another cartridge from the ammo belt.

  He and Piet were the only Venerians still in the control room. The Fed officer and the three Molts—upright now but motionless—stood against the port bulkhead. Stephen glanced through the passageway aft. As far as he could tell, Stampfer and the rest of the assault force had abandoned ship as ordered.

  The thrusters roared at full output, though the flared nozzles spread the ions in a billowing sheet across the ground instead of lifting the Holy Office. Exhaust puffed through the open airlock, blinding Stephen momentarily with its brilliance. He backed another step from the hatch.

  Piet keyed in a complex series of commands, then rose from the console and drew on his gauntlets. The port airlock started to open, forcing two of the Molts to move.

  "Stephen!" Piet said in surprise. "Come on, we've got to get out before the ship lifts. I programmed it to crash into the freighters on the west berm!"

  "And them?" Stephen said, waving to the prisoners who hadn't fled aft with their fellows.

  "Get out!" Piet shouted. "We're going to crash!"

  The three Molts turned and leaped into the sea of radiance, one at a time. Though they jumped as far as they could, they were well within the bath of ions when they hit the ground. The bodies shriveled and burned like figures of straw.

  "I'll follow you, Piet," Stephen said. He dropped the rifle and grabbed the Fed officer around the waist.

  Piet looked momentarily doubtful, but he latched down his visor and jumped from the hatch. The Holy Office shook itself like a dog just risen from the water. The nozzle irises were closing, restricting the flow to boost thrust.

  Stephen, clasping the screaming officer tightly, took three running steps and leaped from the lip of the outer hatch. Exhaust pulsed around him. His boots hit the concrete two meters below. He skidded but kept his footing, thrusting the Fed out as a balance weight. He kept running until he hit the inner face of the berm.

  The Fed's uniform smoldered and his exposed skin was already beginning to blister, but he was alive. For the moment, he was alive.

  Which was the most anyone could say, after all.

  WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH

  April 16, Year 27

  0453 hours, Venus time

  Sal grasped a wrist-thick tree growing between a pair of the concrete slabs covering the berm. She reached down to take Brantling's good hand, his left, while Tom Harrigan pushed the injured sailor from below.

  The berm sloped at 45°, a steeper climb than Brantling could handle at the moment. There was a flight of broad steps fifty meters away, but they were crowded with exhausted men in hard suits carrying their weapons and their casualties. Sal and her flight crew would have risked jostling and worse if they'd tried to leave the military port by that route. The assault force had expended too much physical and emotional energy in its brief fight to be careful now.

  "Thanks, Cap'n Blythe," Brantling muttered as Sal half helped, half dragged him past her to get a grip and then a foothold on the tree. Her breath rasped. Four meters of 1:1 slope didn't seem especially difficult until you tried to climb it when you were wrung-out emotionally.

  Guillermo perched like a gargoyle on the berm's broad top. He took Brantling's hand for what help he could offer.

  The flight crew had been forgotten as soon as the Moll Dane landed. Nobody informed them of what was happening, nobody even thought about Sal and her men aboard the crumpled freighter. The assault preparations had been sudden and ad hoc. Even Sal hadn't thought about what she was supposed to do when and if she survived landing.

  Sal had never before felt so completely abandoned.

  The note of the Holy Office's thrusters changed, sharpened. Sal looked over her shoulder as the vessel lifted minusculely from the concrete. The nozzle irises were tightening down. An armored figure leaped from the cockpit airlock, stumbled in the iridescent hellfire, and trotted out of the exhaust corona. A second, heavier figure followed. The Holy Office began to skitter forward like a chunk of sodium dropped on a still pond.

  "I've got it," Harrigan said, ignoring Sal's offered hand to zigzag leftward instead. His toes had found purchase between two of the facing slabs. Sal got a foot against the tree trunk and flopped belly-down on top of the berm.

  The Holy Office gained speed gradually as it crossed the military port in hops of ten, twenty, fifty meters. Each time the unmanned vessel tilted enough to lose ground effect, the skid on the lower side brushed sparklingly along the concrete. The ship lifted again, tacking slightly toward that contact, and touched on the opposite skid. Sarah Blythe had no false modesty regarding her own piloting skills, but she could never have programmed an artificial intelligence to carry out the maneuver she was watching.

  Harrigan, thinking the same thing, said, "There's somebody at the controls."

  "Captain Ricimer was at the controls, Mister Harrigan," Guillermo responded with quiet pride.

  Three great spherical freighters from the Reaches trade stood three hundred meters apart along the west edge of the port. The Holy Office struck the nearest, an 800
-tonner, a glancing blow low on the starboard side. The shrieking contact continued deafeningly for several seconds. The warship caromed off the larger merchantman and swapped ends twice before it smashed broadside into the 1,200-tonne giant north of the initial target.

  This time the noise was like that of planets colliding. Both the Holy Office and the merchantman had thick hulls, but the kinetic energy of the impact was of astronomical level. The surfaces of nickel-steel plates vaporized and the frame members behind them compressed like putty.

  A plasma motor, its nozzle sealed by the 20 centimeters of tough plating rammed into it, became a fusion bomb. The flash seemed to transfuse solid metal. Remnants of the Holy Office, half the stern to one side and fragments that had been part of the bow to the other, blew back in a ravening white glare. The four upper decks of the exploding freighter lifted as a piece, flattening as they rose.

  A munitions explosion, slighter than the first but cataclysmic nonetheless, gushed red flame from the center of the inferno. The top of the vessel flipped sideways. It struck the ground and carved a trench twenty meters deep through the concrete, then sheared into the remaining freighter.

  The third vessel was pinned between the anvil of the berm and the upper half of the 1,200-tonner, a hammer more massive than the Holy Office had been when complete. Steam and fire engulfed the site. Slabs shook from the berm hundreds of meters away, and a pall of dust lifted from the surface of the port.

  No skill could have planned a result so destructive. "Maybe God does fight for Venus," Sal whispered, though her mind couldn't find much of God in what she had just watched. She'd spent her life carrying cargoes, and shipwreck was the greatest disaster she could imagine.