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Back|Next Contents Igniting the Reaches To Rana Van Name Who first heard about this one when we were all going off to dinner; And who is special. 1 Above Salute Piet Ricimer stood out like an open flame on the crowded, cluttered bridge of theSultan as she orbited Salute. Stephen Gregg was amused by the young officer's flashy dress. Well, Ricimer was no younger than Gregg himself—but Gregg, as a member of a factorial family, was mature in ways that no sailor would ever be. More sophisticated, at any rate. Realizing that sophistication and maturity might not be the same made Gregg frown for a moment until he focused on the discussion again. "I suppose itmight be Salute," mumbled Bivens, the navigator. Gregg had already marked Bivens down as a man who never saw a planetfall he liked—or was sure he could identify. "Look, of course it's Salute!" insisted Captain Choransky, commander of theSultan and the other two ships of the argosy. "It's just this tub's lousy optics that makes it hard to tell." His vehemence made the landfall seem as doubtful as Bivens' concern had done. This was Gregg's first voyage off Venus, much less out of the solar system. He was too young at twenty-two Earth years to worry much about it, but he wondered at the back of his mind whether this lot would be able to find their way home. Besides the officers, three crewmen sat at the workstations controlling the forward band of attitude jets. TheSultan had been stretched by two hull sections after her first decade of service as an intrasystem trader. That had required adding another band of jets. The new controls and the sprawl of conduits feeding them had been placed on the bridge. They made it difficult for a landsman like Gregg to walk there under normal 1-g acceleration without tripping or bruising himself against a hip-high projection. Now, with the flagship floating in orbit, Gregg had even worse problems. The spacers slid easily along. The most reassuring thing about the situation was the expression of utter boredom worn by every one of the crewmen on the control boards. They were experienced, and they saw no reason for concern. "Sir," said Ricimer, "I'll take the cutter down and find us a landing site. This is Salute. I've checked the star plots myself." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Can't be sure of a plot with these optics," Bivens muttered. "Maybe theDove got a better sighting than I could." "I'll take the six men who came with me when I soldThe Judge, " Ricimer said brightly. "I'm pretty sure I've spotted two Southern compounds, and there are scores of Molt cities for sure." Ricimer was a short man, dark where Gregg was fair. Though willing to be critical, Gregg admitted that the spacer was good-looking, with regular features and a waist that nipped in beneath powerful shoulders. Ricimer wore a tunic of naturally red fibers from somewhere outside the solar system, and his large St. Christopher medal hung from a strand of glittering crystals that were more showy than valuable. "Might not even be Molts here if it isn't Salute," Bivens said. "Between the twenty-third and twenty-ninth transits, I think we went off track." Choransky turned, probably as much to get away from his navigator as for a positive purpose, and said, "All right, Ricimer, take the cutter down. But don't lose her, anddon't con me into some needle farm that won't give me a hundred meters of smooth ground. TheSultan 's no featherboat, remember." "Aye-aye, sir!" Ricimer said with another of his brilliant smiles. "I'd like to go down with the boat," Gregg said, as much to his own surprise as anyone else's. That drew the interest of the other men on the bridge, even the common sailors. Piet Ricimer's face went as blank as a bulkhead. Gregg anchored himself firmly to the underside of a workstation with his left hand. "I'm Stephen Gregg," he said. "I'm traveling as supercargo for my uncle, Gregg of Weyston." "I know that," Ricimer said, with no more expression in his voice than his face held. "Ah—Ricimer," Captain Choransky said nervously. "Factor Gregg is quite a major investor in this voyage." "I know that too," Ricimer said. His eyes continued to appraise Gregg. In a tone of challenge, he went on, "Can you handle a boat in an atmosphere, then, Gregg?" Gregg sniffed. "I can't handle a boat anywhere," he said flatly. "But I'm colonel of the Eryx battalion of the militia, and I'm as good a gunman as anybody aboardthis ship." Ricimer's smile spread again. "Yeah," he said, "that might be useful." He reached out his hand to shake Gregg's. When he saw the landsman was afraid to seem awkward in reaching to take it, Ricimer slid closer. He moved as smoothly as a feather in the breeze. Ricimer's grip was firm, but he didn't make the mistake of trying to crush Gregg's hand to prove that he was as strong as the bigger man. "Maybe," Ricimer added over his shoulder as he led Gregg out through the bridge hatch, "we can give you some hands-on with the boat as well." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 2 Above Salute "Tancred!" Ricimer shouted as he slid hand over hand past crewmen in the bay containing the other two sets of attitude-jet controls. "C'mon along.Leon , get Bailey and Dole from the main engine compartment. We're taking the cutter down!" "Bloody well about time!" agreedLeon . He was theSultan 's bosun, a burly, scarred man.Leon picked his way with practiced skill through a jungle of equipment and connectors toward a back passage to the fusion thrusters. "Lightbody and Jeude are already in Cargo Three with the boat," Ricimer said as he plunged headfirst down a ladderway toward the cargo holds. Gregg tried to go "down" feetfirst as he would on a ladder under gravity. The passage, looped with conduits, was too narrow for him to turn when he realized his mistake. Tancred, following Gregg the proper way, was scarcely a boy in age. His face bore a look of bored disgust as he waited for the landsman to kick his way clear of obstacles he couldn't see. Though theSultan wasn't under thrust, scores of machines worked within the vessel's hull to keep her habitable. Echoes in the passage sighed like souls overwhelmed by misery. Three crewmen underLeon were readying the eight-meter cutter when Gregg reached the hold. Tancred dogged the hatch closed, then joined the others with a snorted comment that Gregg chose not to hear. Ricimer was at the arms locker, handing a cutting bar to a wiry spacer. "Here you go, Gregg," Ricimer called. The hold's empty volume blurred and thinned Ricimer's tones. "What do you want to carry?" Gregg looked over the selection. The bridge had a separate arms locker, but the larger cabinet was here in Cargo Three, whose outer hatch provided theSultan 's main access—except, presumably, when the hold was full of cargo. The locker held a dozen breech-loading rifles, each with a bag of ammunition sized to that weapon's chamber. Two of the rifles were repeaters, but those would be even more sensitive to ammo variations than the single-shots. True standardization had ended a millennium before, when hit-and-run attacks during the revolt of the outer colonies wrecked automated factories throughout the human universe. Billions of people died in the Collapse that followed. Humanity had recovered to a degree. Mass production was technically possible again. The horror of complex systems that could be destroyed by a shock—and bring down civilization with them—remained. It was as much a religious attitude as a practical one. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Most of the locker was filled with powered cutting bars, forty or more of them. Venerian ceramic technology made their blades, super-hard teeth laminated in a resilient matrix, deadly even when the powerpack was exhausted and could not vibrate the cutting edge. Apart from their use as weapons, the bars were useful tools when anything from steel to tree trunks had to be cut. There were also three flashguns in the locker. These had stubby barrels of black ceramic, thirty centimeters long and about twenty in diameter, mounted on shoulder stocks. Under the right circumstances, a flashgun's laser bolts were far more effective than shots from a projectile weapon. The flashgun drained its power at each bolt, but the battery in the butt could be replaced with reasonable ease. Under sunny conditions, a parasol accumulator deployed over the gunner's head would recharge the weapon in two or three minutes anyway, making it still handier. But flashguns were heavy, nearly useless in smoke or rain, and dangerous when the barrel cracked in use. The man carrying one was a target for every enemy within range, and side-scatter from the bolt was at best unpleasant to the shooter. They weren't popular weapons despite their undoubted efficiency. Gregg took a flashgun and a bandolier holding six spare batteries from the locker. Piet Ricimer raised an eyebrow. "I don't like to fool with flashguns unless I'm wearing a hard suit," he said. Gregg shrugged, aware that he'd impressed the sailor for the first time. "I don't think we'll run into anything requiring hard suits," he said. "Do you?" Ricimer shrugged in reply. "No, I don't suppose so," he said mildly. Carrying two single-shot rifles, Ricimer nodded the crewman holding another rifle and three cutting bars toward the boat. He followed, side by side with Gregg. "You owned your own ship?" Gregg asked, both from curiosity for the answer and to find a friendly topic. He didn't care to be on prickly terms with anybody else in the narrow confines of a starship. Ricimer smiled at the memory. "The Judge,yes," he said. "Captain Cooper, the man who trained me, willed her to me when he died without kin. Just a little intrasystem trader, but she taught me as much as the captain himself did. I wouldn't have sold her, except that I really wanted to see the stars." Ricimer braked himself on the cutter's hull with an expert flex of his knees, then caught Gregg to prevent him from caroming toward a far corner of the hold. "You'll get the hang of it in no time," he added encouragingly to the landsman. The interior of the boat was tight for eight people. The bench down the axis of the cabin would seat only about five, so the others squatted in the aisles along the bulkheads. Gregg had heard of as many as twenty being crammed into a vessel of similar size. He couldn't imagine how. He had to duck when a sailor took the pair of rifles from Ricimer and swung, poking their barrels toward Gregg's eyes. Ricimer seated himself at the control console in the rear of the cabin. "Make room here for Mr. Gregg," he ordered Leon, who'd taken the end of the bench nearest him. The burly spacer gave Gregg a cold Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html look as he obeyed. "Hatch is tight, sir," Tancred reported from the bow as he checked the dogs. Ricimer keyed the console's radio. "Cutter toSultan 's bridge," he said. "Open Cargo Three. Over." There was no response over the radio, but a jolt transmitted through the hull indicated that something was happening in the hold. The boat's vision screen was on the bulkhead to the left of the controls. Gregg leaned forward for a clearer view. The double hatchway pivoted open like a clam gaping. Vacuum was a nonreflecting darkness between the valves of dull white ceramic. "Hang on, boys," Ricimer said. He touched a control. An attitude jet puffed the cutter out of the hold, on the first stage of its descent to the surface of the planet below. Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 3 Salute "Got a hot spot, sir,"Leon said, shouting over the atmospheric buffeting. He nodded toward the snake of glowing red across the decking forward. The interior of the cutter was unpleasantly warm, and the bitter tinge of things burning out of the bilges made Gregg's eyes water and his throat squeeze closed. "Noted," Ricimer agreed. He fired the pair of small thrusters again, skewing the impulse 10° from a perpendicular through the axis of the bench. The spacers swayed without seeming to notice the change. Tancred grabbed Gregg's bandolier. That was all that prevented the landsman from hurtling into a bulkhead. "Thanks," Gregg muttered in embarrassment. The young spacer sneered. Ricimer leaned over his console. "Sorry," he said. "I needed to yaw us a bit. There's a crack in the outer hull, and if the inner facing gets hot enough, we'll have problems with that too." Gregg nodded. He looked at the hot spot, possibly a duller red than it had been a moment before, and wondered whether atmospheric entry with a perforated hull could be survivable. He decided the answer didn't matter. "Do you have a particular landing site in mind, Ricimer?" he asked, hoping his raw throat wouldn't make his voice break. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Three of them," Ricimer said, glancing toward the vision screen. "But I don't trust theSultan 's optics either. We'll find something here, no worry." The cutter's vision screen gave a torn, grainy view of the landscape racing by beneath. A few cogs of the scanning raster were out of synch with the rest, displacing the center of the image to the right. Ragged green streaks marked the generally arid, rocky terrain. Gregg squinted at the screen. He'd seen a regular pattern, a mosaic of pentagons, across the green floor of one valley. "That's something!" he said. Ricimer nodded approvingly. "There's Molts here, at least. Captain Choransky wants a place where the Southerns have already set up the trade, though." The Molts inhabited scores of planets within what had been human space before the Collapse. Tradition said that men had brought the chitinous humanoids from some unguessed homeworld and used them as laborers. Certainly there was no sign that the Molts had ever developed mechanical transport on their own, let alone star drive. It was easy to think of the Molts as man-sized ants and their cities as mere hives, but they had survived the Collapse on the outworlds far better than humans had. Some planets beyond the solar system still had human populations of a sort: naked savages, "Rabbits" to the spacers, susceptible to diseases hatched among the larger populations of Earth and Venus and virtually useless for the purposes of resurgent civilization. Molt culture was the same as it had been a thousand years ago, and perhaps for ten million years before that; and there was one thing more: A few robot factories had survived the Collapse. They were sited at the farthest edges of human expansion, the colony worlds which had been overwhelmed by disaster so swiftly that the population didn't have time to cannibalize their systems in a desperate bid for survival. To present-day humans, these automated wonders were as mysterious as the processes which had first brought forth life. But the Molts had genetic memory of the robot factories humans had trained them to manage before the Collapse. Whatever the Molts had been to men of the first expansion, equals or slaves, they were assuredly slaves now; and they were very valuable slaves. Gregg checked his flashgun's parasol. Space in the boat was too tight to deploy the solar collector fully, but it appeared to slide smoothly on the extension rod. Two spacers forward were discussing an entertainer in Redport on Titan. From their description of her movements, she must have had snake blood. The thrusters roared, braking hard. "So . . ." said Ricimer. "You're going to be a factor one of these days?" Gregg looked at him. "Probably not," he said. "My brother inherited the hold. He's healthy, and he's got two sons already." He paused, then added, "It's a small place in the Atalanta Plains, you know. Eryx. Nothing to get excited about." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html The edge of Ricimer's mouth quirked. "Easy to say when you've got it," he said, so softly that Gregg had to read the words off the smaller man's lips. The thrusters fired again. Gregg held himself as rigid as a caryatid. He smiled coldly at Tancred beside him. Ricimer stroked a lever down, gimballing the thrusters sternward. The cigar-shaped vessel dropped from orbit with its long axis displayed to the shock of the atmosphere. Now that they'd slowed sufficiently, Ricimer slewed them into normal flight. They were about a thousand meters above the ground. "You know, I'm from a factorial family too," Ricimer said with a challenge in his tone. Gregg raised an eyebrow. "Are you?" he said. "Myself, I've always suspected that my family was really of some no-account in the service of Captain Gregg during the Revolt." His smile was similar to the one he had directed at Tancred a moment before. "My Uncle Benjamin, though," Gregg continued, "that's Gregg of Weyston . . . He swears he's checked the genealogy and I'm wrong. That sort of thing matters a great deal—to Uncle Benjamin." The two young men stared at one another while the cutter shuddered clumsily through the air. Starships' boats could operate in atmospheres, but they weren't optimized for the duty. Piet Ricimer suddenly laughed. He reached over the console and gripped Gregg's hand. "You're all right, Gregg," he said. "And so am I, most of the time." His smile lighted the interior of the vessel. "Though you must be wondering. "And there . . ." Ricimer went on—he hadn't looked toward the vision screen, so he must have caught the blurred glint of metal out of the corner of his eyes—"is what we're looking for." Ricimer cut the thruster and brought the boat around in a slow curve with one hand while the other keyed the radio. "Ricimer toSultan, " he said. "Home on me. We've got what looks like a Molt compound with two Southern Cross ships there already." "And we're all going to be rich!" Leon rumbled from where he squatted beside the bow hatch. He touched the trigger of his cutting bar and brought it to brief, howling life— Just enough to be sure the weapon was as ready as Leon himself was. Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 4 Salute Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html ThePreakness, third and last vessel of Captain Choransky's argosy, spluttered like water boiling to lift a pot lid as she descended onto the gravel scrubland. Her engines cut in and out raggedly instead of holding a balanced thrust the way those of theSultan 's boat had done for Ricimer. Compared to theSultan herself, the littlePreakness was a model of control. Choransky's flagship slid down the gravity slope like a hog learning to skate. Gregg had been so sure theSultan was going to crash that he'd looked around for some sort of cover from the gout of flaming debris. The flagship had cooled enough for the crew to begin opening its hatches. It had finally set down six hundred meters away from the boat, too close for Gregg's comfort during the landing but a long walk for him now. The roaring engines of thePreakness shut off abruptly. The ground shuddered with the weight of the vessel. Bits of rock, kicked up from the soil by the thrusters, clicked and pinged for a few moments on the hulls of the other ships. "Let's go see what Captain Choransky has in mind," Ricimer said, adjusting the sling of the rifle on his shoulder. He sighed and added, "You know, if they'd trust the ships' artificial intelligences, they could land a lot smoother. When theSultan wallowed in, I was ready to run for cover." Gregg chuckled. "There wasn't any," he said. "You're telling me!" Ricimer agreed. He turned to the sailors. Two were still in the boat, while the others huddled unhappily in the vessel's shadow. Venerians weren't used to open skies. Gregg was uncomfortable himself, but his honor as a gentleman—and Piet Ricimer's apparent imperturbability—prevented him from showing his fear. "The rest of you stay here with the boat," Ricimer ordered. "Chances are, the captain'll want us to ferry him closer to the Southern compound. There's no point in doing anything until we know what the plan is." "Aye-aye," Leon muttered for the crew. The bosun was as obviously glad as the remainder of the crew that he didn't have to cross the empty expanse. "And keep a watch," Ricimer added. "Just because we don't see much here—" He gestured. Except for the Venerian ships—the crews of theSultan andDove were unloading ground vehicles—there was nothing between the boat and the horizon except rocky hummocks of brush separated by sparse growths of a plant similar to grass. "—doesn't mean that there isn't something around that thinks we're dinner. Besides, Molts can be dangerous, and you know the Southern Cross government in Buenos Aires doesn't want us to trade on the worlds it claims." "Let them Southerns just try something!" Tancred said. The boy got up and stalked purposefully around to the other side of the boat, from where he could see the rest of the surroundings. Gregg and Ricimer set out for the flagship. The dust of landing had settled, but reaction mass exhausted as plasma had ignited patches of scrub. The fires gave off bitter smoke. "Do you think there's really anything dangerous around here?" Gregg asked curiously. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Ricimer shrugged. "I doubt it," he said. "But I don't know anything about Salute." He stared at the white sky. "If this reallyis Salute." From above, the landscape appeared flat and featureless. The hummocks were three or four meters high, lifted from the ground on the plateaus of dirt which clung to the roots of woody scrub. Sometimes they hid even theSultan 's 300-tonne bulk from the pair on foot. The bushes were brown, leafless, and seemingly as dead as the gravel beneath. Gregg saw no sign of animal life whatever. "How do you think the Southerns are going to react?" Ricimer asked suddenly. Gregg snorted. "They can claim the Administration of Humanity gave them sole rights to this region if they like. The Administration didn't do a damned thing for the Gregg family after the Collapse, when we could've used some help—didn't do a damned thing—" "Don't swear," Ricimer said sharply. "God hears us here also." Gregg grimaced. In a softer tone, he continued, "Nobody but God and Venus helped Venus during the Collapse. The Administration isn't going to tell us where in God's universe we can trade now." Ricimer nodded. He flashed his companion a brief grin to take away the sting of his previous rebuke. Factorial families were notoriously loose about their language; though the same was true of most sailors as well. "But what will the Southernsdo, do you think?" Ricimer asked in a mild voice. "They'll trade with us," Gregg said flatly. He shifted his grip on the flashgun. It was an awkward weapon to carry for any distance. The fat barrel made it muzzle-heavy and difficult to sling. "Just as the colonies of the North American Federation will trade with us when we carry the Molts to them. The people out in the Reaches, they need the trade, whatever politics are back in the solar system." "Anyway," Ricimer said in partial agreement, "the Southerns can't possibly have enough strength here to give us a hard time. We've got almost two hundred men." Choransky's crew had uncrated the three stake-bed trucks carried in theSultan 's forward hold. Two of them were running. As Ricimer and Gregg approached, the smoky rotary engine of the third vibrated into life. Armed crewmen, many of them wearing full or partial body armor, clambered aboard. Captain Choransky stood up in the open cab of the leading vehicle. "There you are, Ricimer!" he called over the head of his driver. "We're off to load our ships. You and Mr. Gregg can come along if you can find room." The truck bed was full of men, and the other two would be packed before the young officers could reach them. Without hesitation, Ricimer gripped a cleat and hauled himself onto the outside of Choransky's vehicle. His boot toes thrust between the stakes which he held with one hand. He reached down with the other hand to help Gregg into a similarly precarious position, just as the truck accelerated away. Gregg wondered what he would have done if Ricimer hadn't extended a hand, certain that his Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html companion wanted to come despite the risk. Gregg didn't worry about his own courage—but he preferred to act deliberately rather than at the spur of the moment. He looked over his shoulder. TheSultan 's other two trucks were right behind them, but theDove 's crew were still setting up the vehicle they'd unloaded. ThePreakness was just opening her single hatch. "Shouldn't we have gotten organized first?" Gregg shouted into Ricimer's ear over the wind noise. Ricimer shrugged, but he was frowning. Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 5 Salute The general rise in the lumpy terrain was imperceptible, but when the trucks jounced onto a crest, Gregg found he could look sharplydown at the ships three kilometers behind him— And, in the other direction, at the compound. Neither of the Southern vessels was as big as the Preakness, the lightest of Choransky's argosy. The installation itself consisted of a pair of orange, prefabricated buildings and a sprawling area set off by metal fencing several meters high. The fence twinkled as it incinerated scraps of vegetation which blew against it. There was no sign of humans. Squat, mauve-colored figures watched the Venerians from inside the fence: Molts, over a hundred of them. Captain Choransky stood up in his seat again, aiming his rifle skyward in one hand. The truck rumbled over the crest, gaining speed as it went. "Here we go, boys!" Choransky bellowed. His shot cracked flatly across the barren distances. A dozen other crewmen fired. Dust puffed just short of the orange buildings, indicating that at least one of the men wasn't aiming at the empty heavens. "What are we doing?" Gregg shouted to Ricimer. "Is this an attack? What's happening?" Ricimer cross-stepped along the stakes and leaned toward the cab. "Captain Choransky!" he said. "We're not at war with the Southern Cross, are we?" The captain turned with a startled expression replacing his glee. "War, boy?" he said. "There's no peace beyond Pluto! Don't you know anything?" Choransky's truck pulled up between the two buildings. Gregg squeezed hard to keep from losing his Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html grip either on the vehicle or the heavy flashgun which inertia tried to drag out of the hand he could spare for it. The second truck almost skidded into theirs in a cloud of stinging grit. The third stopped near the Southern starships. Gregg jumped down, glad to be on firm ground again. The smaller building was a barracks. Sliding doors and no windows marked the larger as a warehouse. Gregg ran toward the warehouse, his flashgun ready. Ricimer was just ahead of him. They were spurred by events, even though neither of them was sure what was going on. Ricimer twisted the latch of the small personnel door in the slider. It wasn't locked. The warehouse lights were on. The interior was almost empty. A man in bright clothing lay facedown on the concrete floor with his hands clasped behind his neck. "I surrender!" he bleated. "I'm not armed! Don't hurt—" Gregg gripped the Southern by the shoulder. "Come on, get up," he said. "Nobody's going to hurt you." "I got one!" cried the spacer who pushed into the warehouse behind Gregg. He waved his cutting bar toward the prisoner. Ricimer used his rifle muzzle to prod the blade aside as he stepped in front of the Venerian. "Our prisoner, I think, sailor," he said. "And take off your cap when you address officers!" The man stumbled backward into the group following him. One of the newcomers was Platt, another member of Choransky's command group. Platt wore a helmet with the faceshield raised. In addition, he carried a revolving pistol belted on over body armor. "Who else is here?" Gregg asked the Southern he held. He spoke in English, the language of trade—and the tongue in which the fellow had begged for mercy. "What's going on?" Platt demanded. Ricimer shushed him curtly. He stood protectively between Gregg and the newcomers, but his face was turned to catch the Southern's answers. "Nobody, nobody!" the prisoner said. "I was in here—all right, I was asleep. I heard a ship landing, I thought it was, so I went out and all the bastards had run away and left me! All of them! Taken the trucks and what was I supposed to do? Defend the compound?" "Why didn't you defend the compound?" Gregg asked. "I mean, all of you. There's the crews of those two ships as well as the staff here." Around them, Platt and a score of other Venerians were poking among bales of trade goods, mostly synthetic fabrics and metal containers. The warehouse was spacious enough to hold twenty times the amount of merchandise present. "Defend?" the Southern sputtered. He was a small man, as dark as Ricimer, with a face that hadn't been prepossessing before a disease had pocked it. "With what, half a dozen rifles? And there wasn't but ten of us all told. The local Molts bring us prisoners and we buy them. We aren't soldiers." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "We should've landed right here in the valley," said Platt, who'd drifted close enough to hear the comment. "Cap'n Choransky was too afraid of taking a plasma charge up the bum while we hovered to do that, though." "And so would you be if you had the sense God gave a goose!" boomed Choransky himself as he strode into the warehouse. "You got a prisoner, Mr. Gregg? Good work. There wasn't anybody in the house." The captain rubbed his cheek with the knuckles of his right hand, in which he held his rifle. "Like a pigsty, that place." "He says his fellows drove off in a panic and left him when they heard the ships landing, sir," Ricimer said. Choransky stepped closer to the prisoner. "Where's the rest of your stock?" he asked. "You can't just come and take—" the Southern began. Choransky punched him, again using his right hand with the rifle. The prisoner sprawled backward on the concrete. His lip bled, and there was a livid mark at the hairline where the fore-end struck him. "We've got pretty much a full load," the Southern said in a flat voice from the floor. He was staring at the toes of his boots. He touched the cut in his lip with his tongue, then continued, "There's a freighter due in a week or so. The ships out there, they don't have transit capability. The freighter, it stays in orbit. We ferry up air, reaction mass, and cargo and bring down the food and trade goods." Choransky nodded. "Maybe we'll use them to ferry the water over and top off our reaction mass. Those ships, they've got pumps to load water themselves?" "Yes," the Southern muttered to his toes. Platt kicked the side of the prisoner's head, not hard. "Say 'sir' when you talk to the captain, dog!" "Yes sir, Captain," the Southern said. "All right," Choransky said as he turned to leave the warehouse. "Platt, get the Molts organized and march them to the ships. Ricimer, you think you're a whiz with thrusters, you see if you can get one of those Southern boats working. I'll tell Baltasar to put an officer and crew from theDove in the other." He strode out the door. Platt followed him, and the rest of the spacers began to drift along in their wake. "Right," said Ricimer. He counted off the six nearest men with pecks of his index finger. "You lot, come along with me and Mr. Gregg. I'm going to show people how to make a ship hover on thrust." He shooed them toward the doorway ahead of him with both arms. The chosen crewmen scowled or didn't, depending on temperament, but no one questioned the order. "You don't mind, do you?" Ricimer murmured to Gregg as they stepped out under an open sky again. "They haven't worked with me before. You won't have to do anything, but I'd like a little extra authority present." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Glad to help," Gregg said. He looked at his left hand. He'd managed to bark the knuckles badly during the wild ride to the compound. "Besides, I wasn't looking forward to those trucks again." Ricimer chuckled. His dark, animated face settled. Without looking at his companion, he said, "What do you think about all this, anyway? The way we're dealing with the Southerns." Gregg glanced around while he framed a reply. Venerians had unlocked the gate in the electrified fence and were herding out the Molts. Some crewmen waved their weapons, but that seemed unnecessary. The Molts were perfectly docile. The wedge-faced humanoids were a little shorter than the human average. Most of them were slightly built, but a few had double the bulk of the norm. Gregg wondered whether that was a sexual distinction or some more esoteric specialization. Viewed up close, many of the Molts bore dark scars on their waxy, purplish exoskeletons. A few were missing arms, and more lacked one or more of the trio of multijointed fingers that formed a normal "hand." "I'm my uncle's agent," Gregg said at last. "And I can tell you, nothing bothers my Uncle Ben if there's profit in it. Which there certainly is here." Ricimer nodded. "I'm second cousin to the Mosterts," he said. One of the crewmen he'd dragooned showed enough initiative to run ahead and find the hatch mechanism of the nearer ship. It sighed open. "Really, now," Ricimer added with a grin to his companion. "Though what I said about a factorial family, there's evidence." Gregg laughed. "All three ships are Alexi Mostert's," Ricimer continued. "In the past, my cousin's made the voyage himself, though he sent Choransky out in charge this time. I'm sure this is how Alexi conducted the business too." They'd reached the Southern Cross vessel. It weighed about 50 tonnes and was metal-hulled, unlike the ships of the Venerian argosy. Metals were cheap and readily available in the asteroids of every planetary system; but ceramic hulls were preferable for vessels which had to traverse the hellish atmosphere of Venus. Besides, the surface of the second planet was metal-poor. Survival after the Collapse had raised ceramic technology to a level higher than had been dreamed of while Venus was part of a functioning intergalactic economy. After a thousand years of refinement, Venerians sneered at the notion metals could ever equal ceramics—though the taunt "glass-boat sailor!" had started fights in many spaceports since Venus returned to space. "Some of you find the water intakes and figure out how to deploy them," Ricimer ordered as he sat at the control console. The interior of the vessel stank with a variety of odors, some of them simply those of a large mass of metal to noses unfamiliar with it. The control cabin could be sealed. The rest of the ship was a single open Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html hold. "What doyou think of what we're doing?" Ricimer said to Gregg. Then, before the landsman could reply, he added in a crisp voice, "All hands watch yourselves. I'm going to light the thrusters." "I think . . ." Gregg murmured as Ricimer engaged the vessel's AI, "that it's bad for business, my friend." Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 6 Near Virginia Choransky and Bivens muttered, their heads close above a CRT packed with data. The navigator grimaced but nodded. Choransky reached for a switch. Ricimer turned from where he stood in the midst of the forward attitude-control boards he now supervised. "All right, gentlemen," he said. "We're about to transit again." He winked at Gregg. Gregg clasped a stanchion. He kept his eyes open, because he'd learned that helped—helped—him control vertigo. There wasn't anything in his stomach but acid, but he'd spewthat, sure as the sun shone somewhere, if he wasn't lucky. TheSultan lurched into transit space—and lurched out again calculated milliseconds later. The starship's location and velocity were modified by the amount she'd accelerated in a spacetime whose constants were radically different from those of the sidereal universe. They dropped in and out of alien universes thirty-eight times by Gregg's count, bootstrapping the length of each jump by the acceleration achieved in the series previous before they returned to the sidereal universe to stay—until the next insertion. The entire sequence took a little more than one sidereal minute. Gregg's stomach echoed the jumps a dozen times over before finally settling again. "There!" cried Captain Choransky, pointing to the blurred starfield that suddenly filled theSultan 's positioning screen. "There, we've got Virginia!" "We've got something," Bivens said morosely. "I'm not sure it's Virginia. These optics . . ." Dole, at one of the attitude workstations, yawned and closed his eyes. Lightbody took out his pocket Bible and began to read, moving his lips. Jeude, at the third workstation, appeared to be comatose. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Two officers came in from aft compartments. They joined Choransky and Bivens at the front of the bridge, squabbling over theSultan 's location and whether or not their consorts were among the flecks of light on the positional display. It was obviously going to be some minutes, perhaps hours, before the next transit. Gregg maneuvered carefully through the cluttered three meters separating him from Ricimer. The landsman was getting better at moving in freefall. He'd learned that his very speed and strength were against him, and that he had to move in tiny, precisely-controlled increments. Ricimer grinned. "These were easy jumps," he said. "Wait till the gradients rise and the thrusters have us bucking fit to spring the frames before we can get into transit space. But you'll get used to it." "Where are we?" Gregg asked, pretending to ignore the spacer's comments. He spoke softly, but the combination of mechanical racket, the keening of the Molts—they didn't like transit any better than Gregg's stomach did—and the increasingly loud argument around the positional display provided privacy from anyone but the trio at the attitude controls. Those men were Ricimer's, body and soul. They were as unlikely to carry tales against him as they were to try to swim home to Venus. "The Virginia system," Ricimer said. "Both the captain and Bivens are pretty fair navigators. We're about a hundred million kilometers out from the planet; three jumps or maybe four." "Why are you sure and they aren't?" the landsman asked. Jeude turned his head toward the officers. He was a young man, fair-haired and angelic in appearance. "Because Mr. Ricimer knows his ass from a hole in the ground, sir," he said to Gregg. "Which that lot"—he nodded forward—"don't." "None of that, Jeude," Ricimer said sharply. His expression softened as he added to Gregg, "I memorized starcharts for some of the likely planetfalls when I applied for a place on this voyage." "But . . . ?" Gregg said. He peered at the flat-screen positional display, placed at an angle across the bridge. It would be blurry even close up. "You can tell fromthat ?" Ricimer shrugged. "Well, you can't expect to have a perfect sighting or a precise attitude," he said. "You have to study. And trust your judgment." "I'd rather trustyour judgment, sir," Jeude said. When he spoke, it was like seeing a dead man come to life. "I think that'll do for me, too," Gregg agreed. "Right, it's Virginia and I don't want any more bloody argument!" Captain Choransky boomed. "We'll do it in four jumps." "I'd do it in three," Ricimer murmured. His voice was too soft for Gregg to hear the words, but the landsman read them in his grin. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 7 Above Virginia "If they don't make up their mind in the next thirty seconds," Ricimer said in Gregg's ear, "we'll lose our reentry window and have to orbit a fourth time." "All right," Choransky said, as though prodded by the comment that he couldn't have heard. "That's got to be the settlement. We're going down." He threw a large switch on his console, engaging not the main thrusters directly but rather the AI which had planned the descent two and a half hours earlier. The thrusters fired in a steady 1-g impulse quite different from the vertiginous throbs required by navigation through transit space. Gregg's legs flexed slightly. It felt good to have weight again. Attitude jets burped, rocking theSultan as they counteracted the first effects of atmospheric buffeting. Lightbody spread his fingers over his control keys. "Keep your hands off those, sailor!" Ricimer said sharply. "When I want you to override the AI, I'll tell you so." Such images as had been available on the positioning display vanished behind curtains of light. The Sultan 's powerplant converted reaction mass, normally water, into plasma accelerated to a sizable fraction of light speed. When the thrusters were being used, as now, to brake the vessel's descent into an atmosphere, she drove down into a bath of the stripped ions she herself had ejected. "Shouldn't we have told theDove and thePreakness we were going down?" Gregg said. He pitched his voice low, not only to prevent the captain from hearing but because he didn't want to interfere with Piet Ricimer's concentration if the young officer was busier than he appeared to Gregg to be. Ricimer pursed his lips. "One could say . . ." he replied. His eyes darted from one of the workstations to the next, checking to be sure his men were alert but not acting where silicon decisions were preferable. " . . . that Baltasar and Roon will see us going down, and that we need to land first anyway because the Sultan is such a pig. But one also could say that . . ." "Communication doesn't hurt," Gregg said, not so much putting words in the spacer's mouth as offering his own opinion. Ricimer nodded. TheSultan began to vibrate unpleasantly. Gregg wasn't sure whether it was his imagination until Ricimer scowled and called out, "Sir, that harmonic is causing trouble with my controls. Can you give me—" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Choransky swore and thumbed a vernier on his console. The increment to the AI's calculated power was minute, but it kept the hull from resonating with sympathetic vibration. Gregg frowned at the three workstations, trying to see anything different about them. "What was wrong with the controls?" he asked after a moment. Ricimer grinned, then mouthed, "Nothing," with the back of his head to the captain and navigator. "She would've shaken to bits in time," he said, amplifying his statement in a scarcely louder voice. "And I don't know howmuch time." He glanced at Choransky, then turned again and added, "He doesn't trust the AI for navigation, when he ought to; but he won't overrule it for something like that, harmonics that a chip can'tfeel so a man's got to." Gregg watched as the display slowly cleared. TheSultan had scrubbed away her orbital velocity. Now she descended under gravity alone, partially balanced by atmospheric braking. The AI cut thruster output, so there was less plasma-generated interference with the optics which fed the screen. Virginia was slightly more prepossessing than Salute had been. The landmass expanding beneath the starship was green and gray-green with vegetation. The planet's main export was cellulose base, useful as a raw material in the solar system albeit not a high-value cargo. The few pre-Collapse sites on Virginia provided a trickle of artifacts which current civilization could not duplicate. There were no caches of microchips on Virginia or automated factories like those which made some planets so valuable. About thirty kilometers of slant distance away, metal glittered in the center of an expanse of lighter green. That was Virginia's unnamed spaceport, from which drones lifted mats of cellulose into orbit for starships to clamp to the outside of their hulls. Gregg squinted at the settlement, trying to bring it into focus. The display vibrated in rainbow colors. Something slammed theSultan. "Plasma bolt!" Gregg shouted in amazement. Captain Choransky disconnected the AI with one hand and chopped thruster output with the other. For an instant, the starship hesitated as gravity fought the inertia of earlier thrust. Gregg's stomach flip-flopped. Ricimer reached past Dole and mashed a control button on his workstation. "Gregg!" he shouted. "Get aft and tell the other two bands to give us side-impulse! Only Jet Two on each bank!" A bell on the navigational console clanged. Red lights were flashing from Dole's workstation. Gregg didn't know what the alarms meant—maybe theSultan was breaking up—and he didn't understand Ricimer's words. He understood that he had to repeat the command to the sailors controlling the other two bands of attitude jets in the next compartment sternward, though. Gregg sprinted through the rear hatch. The starship was nearly in freefall as Choransky tried to drop out of the sights of the Federation gunners. Ricimer wanted to slew the vessel sideways as well, but the impulse from his forward attitude jet was being resisted fiercely by the crewmen at the other two bands Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html who didn't have a clue as to what was happening on the bridge. TheSultan yawed. Gregg jumped over a squat power supply and through the hatch like a practiced gymnast, touching nothing on the way. "Those Federation heathens are shooting at us!" someone bleated behind him. The next compartment was even more crowded than the bridge. The double bank of attitude-control workstations, each with an officer standing in the middle of three seated crewmen, was against the starboard bulkhead. Platt and Martre were on duty. The port side was usually rolled hammocks and a table for off-duty men to do handwork. Now it was stacked with rations for the Molts—fungus-processed carbohydrate bricks that stank almost as bad now as they did when the aliens excreted the residue. Half a dozen men clustered around the crates for want of anywhere better to be. Overhead a tannoy blurted fragments of Choransky's voice. TheSultan 's intercom system worked badly, and the captain was nearly incoherent at the moment anyway. "What's going on?" Platt demanded. Gregg's appearance caught him leaving his station to go to the bridge. "Fire Jet Two, both bands!" Gregg shouted. "Not the others!" "You heard him!" Martre said, pointing to one of his team. Choransky had dropped the men on the central and rear attitude controls into an unexplained crisis when he switched off the artificial intelligence. Martre was delighted to have someone—anyone—tell him what to do. "What inhell is going on?" Platt repeated. TheSultan began to yaw as the attitude jets fought one another. Ricimer came through the hatch behind Gregg and darted for Platt's control set. Platt tried to grab him. Gregg put his right arm around Platt's throat from behind and clamped hard enough to choke off the officer's startled squawk. Platt's team members jumped up from their seats—to get out of the way rather than to interfere. Ricimer slid one control up. Tancred, off duty in the compartment a moment before, sprawled over a workstation in order to drop its slide and that of the third to the bottom of their tracks. Lights flickered. Gregg felt hairs lift on his arms. "Missedus, by the mercy of God," Ricimer said, and there was no blasphemy in his tone. He seated himself properly at the workstation he'd taken over. "But not by much." Bivens stuck his head through the hatch from the bridge. "Stand by for braking!" he warned in a shrill voice. Gregg released Platt. The smaller man turned and croaked, "You whoreson!" He cocked a fist, then took in Gregg's size and the particular smile on the young gentleman's face. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Platt turned away. Leon, who'd popped up from one of the lower compartments, judiciously concealed what looked like a length of high-pressure tubing in his trouser leg. The bosun nodded respectfully to Gregg. The thrusters cut in again with a tremendous roar, slowing the massive starship after her freefall through the line-of-sight range of the Federation guns. The braking effort was an abnormal several Gs, slamming men to the decks and causing some shelves to collapse. Gregg kept his feet with difficulty. On the bridge, the men at the forward attitude controls were bellowing "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in surprisingly good harmony. Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 8 Virginia TheSultan 's long cigar shape lay on its side with the landing legs properly deployed and all three cargo hatches open. The ground beneath the thrusters fizzed and snapped as heat-stressed stones cooled. Gregg hunched in his hard suit and wondered whether he ought to drop the thick visor as well. That would mean using bottled air and seeing out through a slit, but at least it would keep thewind off him. Virginia's breezes slapped harshly against skin used to the weatherless corridors of Venus. TheSultan 's thrusters had ignited pungent fires as she roared in to land, and miniature leaves blew from the scorched trees surrounding the starship. They were hard-shelled, and their tips were as sharp as shards of glass. More by luck than planning, Choransky had brought theSultan down at the edge of a natural clearing. The ground was so thin-soiled that only ankle-high moss grew on it. That was fortunate, because the trees beyond the clearing were thirty or forty meters high, with trunks so thin and closely spaced that they resembled a field of giant wheat. Starships' plasma exhaust could clear landing sites in almost any vegetation, but the blazing, shattered trunks would form an impassable barrier. The debris would have locked the crew and cargo within the Sultan as surely as hard vacuum had during the voyage. A Molt stumbled off the ramp and bumped a guard. "God damn your crinkly soul to Hell!" shouted the spacer as he lashed out with his boot. The chitinous alien tried to back away, but one of its legs flailed spastically. It fell toward the human again. Piet Ricimer grabbed the crewman by the collar and jerked him backward. "You!" Ricimer said. "If I hear you blaspheme that way again, you'll swab out all three holds alone! Do you think God no longer hears us because we're off Venus?" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Sorry, sir," the sailor muttered. Gregg had expected more trouble—and was moving closer in case it occurred. Ricimer's fierce sincerity shocked the man into quiet obedience. Navigator Bivens appeared at the edge of Cargo One. He cupped his hands before his mouth as an amplifier and shouted, "Watch out, boys. There's aircraft coming, the radar says." "Helltake them!" Gregg snarled, meaning life in general. He was glad an instant later that he hadn't spoken loudly enough for his new friend Ricimer to hear. And after all, the spacer was right. They were going to need the Lord's help here in the outer reaches of his universe at least as much as they did among the familiar verities of home. Captain Choransky was on the radio, trying to raise theSultan 's consorts and whoever was in charge of the Federation settlement. Ricimer, Gregg, and about two dozen armed crewmen shepherded the cargo of Molts onto the surface so that the holds could be washed down. So far as the men aboard the starship were concerned, Ricimer's task was the more important. They'd loaded ninety-eight Molts aboard theSultan on Salute, a slight majority of the total, with the rest split between the smaller Venerian ships. Ninety-two had survived thus far, but many of them were on their last legs, and in a confined space they stank like death itself. A single air system served the entire starship. TheSultan 's human complement had been breathing the stench throughout a voyage of seventeen days. Men checked their weapons. Only a few of those guarding the Molts had brought rifles: cutting bars were lighter and more effective, both for use and as threats. More riflemen and another flashgunner in a hard suit appeared at the lip of Cargo One a moment after Bivens called his warning. "Don't shoot unless I tell you to," Ricimer shouted to the men spread in a loose perimeter around the Molts. "Remember we aren't here to fight. We're traders!" "Hopethey remember that," said Jeude as he spun his cutting bar for a test. His tone undercut the words. Gregg thought he heard the faintpop-pop-pop-pop of motors. He glanced at the cloud-streaked sky. The sound didn't have a clear direction. "Which way is the settlement?" he called to Ricimer. Ricimer turned from the Molt he'd helped over the coaming at the bottom of the ramp. The alien was the last to leave theSultan. It was either sick or very old, and the ramp's four-centimeter lip had stopped it like a slab of bedrock. "That way," Ricimer said, pointing across the clearing toward south-southwest based on sun position. "Five klicks, a hair less. Once a ship the size of theSultan commits to landing, you don't maneuver much." Someone hammered within the starship's hull, freeing a stuck latch. One, then five more meter-square hatches swung open along theSultan 's hull. The muzzle of a plasma cannon poked through the nearest opening. Ricimer looked at the Molts, milling slowly in the midst of the crewmen. Some of the aliens were rubbing their torsos with wads of moss they'd plucked. "Move them into the woods," Ricimer ordered. "Now! Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Nobody'd better be in the clearing if the heavy ordnance fires." Gregg focused in the direction of the settlement. The sound of motors was very close, though nothing was visible over the trees at the edge of the clearing. He aimed his flashgun at the expected target and shouted, "Don't fire until Master Ricimer orders!" to prevent anyone from mistaking his intent. TheSultan carried ten plasma cannon, but she was pierced with over forty gunports so that the heavy weapons could be moved to where they were needed. Even in weightlessness, the weapons' mass made them difficult to shift through the strait confines of the vessel. When the crews were working here on the ground, they'd be lucky if scrapes and bruises were the only injuries before the start of the fighting. If there was going to be fighting. Two aircraft crossed the edge of the clearing and banked in opposite directions. They were one- or two-place autogyros, moving at 100 kph or slower. Nobody fired at them, but one of the crewmen screamed, "Federation dog-mothers!" and waved his cutting bar. Leon grabbed the man's arm and growled at him before Ricimer could react. The first aircraft vanished beneath the treetops again. Three more autogyros appeared. One of them settled into the clearing. It bounced twice on the rocky soil but came to a halt within fifteen meters. Its four consorts began to circle the starship slowly at a hundred meters. Choransky, Bivens, and several other officers stamped down the Cargo Three ramp. They were all armed. Martre wore the helmet and torso of a hard suit and carried another flashgun. He nodded as Gregg fell in step to one side of the command group and Ricimer joined on the other. The autogyro's four-bladed support rotor slowed to a halt. The passenger getting out of the tandem seat to the rear was male, but Gregg noticed with distaste that the pilot was a woman. Gregg wasn't a religious zealot, but the way the North American Federation put women in positions of danger—women even served in the crews of Federation starships—would be offensive to any decent man. The autogyro was powered by an air-cooled diesel. Gregg didn't realize how noisy it was until the passenger shouted an order and his pilot shut the clattering motor off. "What do you mean shooting at us?" Captain Choransky shouted while he was still twenty meters from the aircraft. "Look at that!" He pointed over his shoulder in the general direction of theSultan. Through air at such long range, the plasma bolt had only scoured away a patch of yellow-brown corrosion the Venerian atmosphere had left on the starship's white hull. Even such a relatively light weapon could have been fatal if it hit the thrusters during the descent, or if theSultan 's hull was crazed by long vibration. "You have no right to be here!" the Federation envoy said shrilly. "The Administration of Humanity has awarded exploitation of this sector to America!" The envoy was a tall, thin man with a full beard but almost no hair above the line of his ears. He wore a gray tunic over blue trousers, perhaps a uniform, with gaudy decorations on his left breast. His holstered pistol was for show rather than use, and he looked extremely apprehensive of the heavily-armed Venerians. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Brisbane's authority is a farce!" Choransky said. He stopped directly in front of the envoy and stood with his arms akimbo, emphasizing the breadth of his chest. "The Secretary General can'tfart unless President Pleyal tells him to." The envoy swallowed. He met Choransky's glare, but Gregg had the feeling that was to avoid having to admit the presence of the other murderous-looking Venerians surrounding him. The Fed's courage wasn't in doubt. "Whatever President Pleyal may be to you," the envoy said, "he is my head of state. And his orders are that his domains beyond Earth shall have no dealings except with vessels of the North American Federation." Choransky poked the envoy's chest with one powerful finger. "Balls!" he said. "Captain Mostert turned over his whole cargo on Virginia last year. I'mfromCaptain Mostert. Don't you recognize the damned ship?" The Federation envoy made an angry moue with his lips. "Port Commander Finchly, who dealt with your Captain Mostert," he said, "was arrested and carried back to Earth last month to stand trial. His replacement, Port Commander Zaloga, arrived with the orders for his predecessor's arrest." Choransky seized the grip of the cutting bar dangling from his belt. He also wore a slung rifle. The envoy shut his eyes but didn't move. "God grind your stupid bones to meal!" the captain said, his voice low-pitched but sincere. Then he went on in a grating but nearly normal tone, "Look, you tell your Commander Zaloga this. I'm bringing my other ships down, because they stink worse 'n sewers with the Molts we're carrying. And you bastards need Molts!" The envoy's eyelids quivered. "Then we'll come talk to Zaloga, and talk like sensible people. If he's looking for a little something for himself to clear this, well, I guess something can be arranged. But no more shooting!" The envoy nodded, then opened his eyes. "I'll tell the commander," he said, "and I'm sure he'll talk with you himself. But as for your business—" For an instant there was something more than fear and formality in the Fed's voice. "Gentlemen, you know President Pleyal. It's as much as a man's life is worth to cross him." Choransky gripped the envoy by the shoulder, gently enough, and turned the man back toward his autogyro. "Pleyal's a long way away," the Venerian captain said. "I'm here, and believe me, I'm not taking these stinking Molts back to Venus with me." Ricimer stepped in front of the envoy. "Sir," he said. "Without trade your colony will die, and without outside resources the homeworlds—even Earth in her present condition—will die also. No orders that restrict trade can be in keeping with the will of God for mankind to survive." The Federation officer stared as Ricimer moved out of the way again. "Does President Pleyal recognize a god beyond himself?" he asked, half a taunt. He got into the aircraft. "And no shooting!" Choransky repeated in a loud voice as the Fed pilot restarted her motor. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 9 Virginia The roar of the vessels landing made bones quiver. The glare of the thrusters was so intense that Gregg felt the bare backs of his hands prickle. He'd lowered his visor to protect his sight. They'd had to reload the Molts temporarily. With luck, the other ships could manage to avoid theSultan when they landed around the edges of the clearing, but there was no way to safely mark the location of off-loaded cargo among the trees. The aliens moaned as they were forced back aboard the vessel. From theSultan 's open hatchways Gregg, Ricimer, and a score of other crewmen and officers watched their consorts land. Partly because of his filtered vision, partly due to simple unfamiliarity with the fine points of starship construction, it wasn't until the vessels were within fifty meters of the ground that Gregg understood what was wrong. "That's not thePreakness with theDove ,"he bellowed to Ricimer. The spacer couldn't possibly hear him—and had no doubt known the truth within seconds of the time the starships came in sight, making a rare and dangerous simultaneous landing. "That's some Earth ship! She's got a metal hull!" Whatever the vessel was, she landed neatly in the clear area. TheDove came down in an orange fireball fifty meters within the margin of the forest, blasting splinters in every direction. Virginia's vegetation didn't sustain flames very well when it was green. The fire wouldn't be dangerous, but it would smolder and reek for days or longer. Ricimer, his face screened by the rosy filter which pivoted down from inside the brim of his cap, shook his head in disgust at theDove 's awkwardness. The strange vessel was about the 150 tonnes of theDove. The hull was more smoothly curved than that of a Venerian ship, but there were a dozen or more blisters marring the general lines. Some of the blisters were obviously weapons installations. Metal was easier to form into complex shapes than mold-cast ceramics. It was also easier to tack this or that extra installation onto a metal hull later, instead of getting the design right the first time. ThePreakness had started her landing approach. Radio was useless when a starship's thrusters were swamping the RF spectrum with ions. Gregg didn't expect to learn anything until all the vessels were down. A personnel hatch on the newcomer's belly curve opened. The rock beneath still glowed white from the landing, distorting the vessel's appearance with heat waves. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html A man—a very big man—wearing a silver hard suit jumped out of the ship and ran heavily toward the Sultan. He must have heard thePreakness coming in, but he ignored the chance that the Venerian ship would crush his plasma-fried ashes to the rock. Gregg's lips pursed. He risked raising his visor for a moment to be sure. The stranger carried a repeating rifle, as ornately splendid as his metal hard suit. The suit, at least, was functional. It had just protected its wearer across a stretch of stone so hot it was tacky. Gregg knew better than most what it took out of you to run in a hard suit, and how easy it was to trip with your helmet visor down. He strode down to the bottom of the ramp and offered the stranger a hand—a delicate way of warning the fellow of the raised lip. The stranger caught his bootheel anyway and shouted curses in German loud enough to be heard above thePreakness' approach. With his left gauntlet in Gregg's right hand, they clomped into Cargo Three. It wasn't often Gregg met somebody bigger than he himself was. Molts packed themselves tighter against the bulkheads to keep clear. The aliens understood human orders, even without the kicks that normally accompanied the words. Supposedly their mouth parts permitted them to use human speech, but Gregg hadn't heard one do so yet. The ramp/hatchcover began to rise before Gregg and the stranger were fully clear of it, lowering the noise level abruptly. Piet Ricimer was at the control box. The stranger opened his helmet. "So!" he said in Trade English. "I amKapitän, that is Captain Schremp of Drillinghausen. MyAdler has been here in orbit for a week, but the Federation bastards, they even shot at us when we tried to land. And you are?" "TheSultan out of Betaport, Captain Choransky commanding," Ricimer said easily. "I think the captain—" United Europe had not been involved in reopening the stars. Even now, the North American Federation and the Southern Cross were the only regions of Earth which showed a governmental interest in interstellar trade. Private ventures from the Rhine Basin were not uncommon, though. From the rumors, the Germans' approach to trade was rough-and-ready, even by the standards Captain Choransky applied. Choransky appeared at the ladder from the mid-deck. "What in God's name do you think you're playing at, landing at the same time as myDove, you poxy bastard?" he roared at Schremp. "I thought it was better to stay close to one of your ships until I had time to explain," Schremp said without embarrassment. His full beard was blacker than seemed natural for a man whose appearance otherwise was that of a fifty-year-old. "Explain that we are to be allies, yes? If we stay together, the pussies will beglad to deal with us, I'm sure!" He smiled. The expression made Gregg think of the stories about German "trade." Back|Next Contents Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Framed Back|Next Contents 10 Virginia The orange berm of stabilized soil protecting the settlement was in sight, half a kilometer away. A uniformed Fed stood on it to watch the Venerians and Germans approach. He had either binoculars or an electronic magnifier. Piet Ricimer knelt and teased a thorny plant loose from the margin of the grainfield surrounding the Fed settlement. "Stephen?" he said to Gregg. "Do you ever wonder what life was like before the Collapse?" "What?" Gregg said. "Oh, you mean everybody rich with electronics? Well, sometimes." He'd thought he was losing his fear of open spaces. Now that they'd left the dark trunks of the native forest for the cleared area supplying food for the settlement and the vessels that touched on it, he wasn't quite so sure. Well, it wasn't really fear, just discomfort. And God knew that there was plenty of other discomfort, wearing armor and carrying a flashgun and still managing to lead a five-klick march. "No, I meant . . ." Ricimer said. "See this? It's not a native plant, and I doubt the Feds brought it with them in the rediscovery." The other spacers were coming up slowly, but nobody else was within a hundred meters of Ricimer and Gregg. The whole sixty or so in the party probably stretched a klick back into the forest. "A thornbush?" Gregg said in puzzlement. Two more Feds had joined the observer on the berm. One of them carried a megaphone. Despite its greater access to pre-Collapse sites on the outworlds, the North American Federation wasn't overall more technically advanced than Venus. "Not a thornbush," Ricimer said. His finger carefully freed a full yellow bloom from the native foliage concealing it. "A rose." "Stay where you are!" called the Fed with the megaphone. "Don't come any closer or we'll fire!" "Right," said Leon, wheezing with the exertion of keeping up—almost—with the leaders. "And if that was the worst I had to worry about, I'd still die in bed." "What you got, sir?" Tancred asked, squatting down beside Ricimer. "Hey! Artifacts!" The young spacer carried a rifle. He used the barrel of the weapon to sweep back the vegetation. Underneath was half of a shallow porcelain bowl. Varicolored birds sang on a white field. The material had survived its millennium of exposure well enough, but Gregg didn't think it was up to the quality of current Venerian manufacture. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "Nothing valuable, though," Tancred said in disappointment. "You know, when I signed on, I kinda thought I'd, you know, pick up handfuls of chips when we got out-system." "I think they're moving guns up behind the berm," Gregg said. "I can't see over, but there's some sort of commotion back there." Two autogyrospop-popped in slow circles overhead. A line of diesel-powered ground vehicles rounded the edge of the ravelin shielding a gap in the berm. The spacers hadn't bothered to unload the trucks their vessels carried, because the forest was trackless and the tree boles averaged less than a meter and a half apart. Choransky, Schremp, and a dozen men from each party joined the score of spacers who'd clustered around Ricimer and Gregg. As many more straggled along behind. "I heard them shout," Choransky said. "What was it?" "They told us not to come closer, sir," Ricimer said. Schremp snorted. "Why should we want to do that?" he said. "When they're coming to us, and they don't have to walk like dogs." The German leader wore only the torso and helmet from his hard suit. The face beneath his lifted visor was sweaty and bright red with exertion. Gregg eyed the German's armor speculatively. The metal's bright finish—it appeared to be silver-plated, not just highly polished—would reflect energy better than Gregg's suit, and if the core was titanium alloy, it might be lighter as well. The metal couldn't be as effective a heat sink as Venerian ceramic, though, and Gregg was willing to bet his armor's higher hardness against metal's ability to deform under extreme stress instead of shattering. Schremp glanced at Tancred. "Find anything valuable, kid?" he asked. Tancred's face tightened. Before he could speak, Ricimer said, "Just the remains of somebody's garden, from a long time ago." Schremp nodded and turned his attention to the oncoming vehicles that the other spacers were watching. Rather than trucks, the Feds approached in three tracked, open-topped tractors, each towing a flatbed trailer in which forty or so figures rode. Figures, not "men," because half of the personnel were Molts and many of the humans wore coarse, bark-fabric clothing. Though humans survived after a fashion on many outworlds, civilization did not. The men in indigenous dress were Rabbits, feral remnants of the pre-Collapse colonies. The Rabbits and Molts were armed with cutting bars and even manual axes. None of them wore armor. There were half a dozen troops in Fed uniform on each vehicle. Not all of them had firearms, and only two wore head and torso armor. "Huh!" said Jeude, scratching his neck with the edge of his cutting bar. "Those trucks're slower than glass flowing. I could walk as fast as that." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "They haul mats of timber processed at field stations," Ricimer explained. "They don't need to be fast." "They're riding," Gregg guessed aloud, "because they want to show they've got vehicles and we're on foot." "They got plasma guns in the fort," Leon said, eyeing the berm opposite the party of spacers. Metal glinted there without being raised quite high enough to make identification certain. "Them I'm willing to worry about." Gregg spread and raised his flashgun's parasol. The meter-square solar cell swayed awkwardly in the breeze, making the weapon harder to control. He didn't need to deploy the charger for any practical reason. He was carrying six extra batteries, and it was much faster to replace than recharge them in a firefight. The Feds weren't the only ones who could make silent threats, however. Ten meters from the spacers, the tractor-trailers swung broadside and halted. A man wearing a white uniform and a number of medals got out of the cab of the leading tractor. He waited for two more officers, one of them female, and a pair of guards armed with rifles to get off the trailer behind him. With them in tow, he strode toward the spacers. The whole party of Venerians and Germans surged forward across the wheat. "Not so many!" the Fed leader cried, waggling his hand. He wore a pair of pistols completely swallowed by their cross-draw holsters. At careful inspection his uniform, though fancy enough, was frayed at the cuffs and noticeably dingy. Choransky and Schremp muttered to one another for a moment. Choransky looked around. "You lot stay where you are!" he ordered. The two captains, accompanied by Platt and two Germans—as choice a pair of cutthroats as Gregg remembered seeing in his life—met the Feds between the waiting lines. Choransky seized the initiative by blustering, "I want to know who you think you are, shooting at peaceful traders?" "Iam Port Commander Zaloga," the Fed leader blustered back, "and there'll be no trade with illegal interlopers like yourself on this planet or any planet of the North American Federation." "North America is a thousand light-years away," said Captain Schremp in a surprisingly calm voice. "We are here with cargo your people need, slaves from my Venerian fellows there and the highest quality sauces and dairy solids aboard myAdler. Surely you must be tired of eating the bland mush you grow here, not so?" "Your predecessor gave Captain Mostert a want list when he landed on Virginia last year," Choransky put in. "We brought our Molts here at your orders." "My predecessor," Zaloga said, "was arrested for his treasonous dealings with interlopers like your Captain Mostert. You're not here at my orders.My orders are that you leave the planet at once. And as you see—" He pointed toward the settlement. Half a dozen soldiers had lifted a small plasma cannon onto the top of Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html the berm. The crew wore helmets, gauntlets, and padded coveralls against the effects of their own weapon. "—I can enforce those orders!" "Can you?" Schremp said with a sneer in his voice. "Take them," he added flatly. Each of the Germans with him grabbed a Fed officer. Schremp himself caught Zaloga by the throat with his scarred left hand and squeezed hard enough to choke the port commander's protests into a startled bleat. Choransky grasped the rifle of a Fed guard and prevented the man from lowering his weapon. Platt tried to do the same with the remaining guard, but he wasn't strong enough to overpower the fellow. They struggled for a moment. Schremp, holding his repeater in one hand like a huge pistol, socketed the muzzle in the guard's ear and blew his brains out. The Fed's skull sagged sideways like a fruit dropped against concrete. Bits of colloid sprayed the female officer and the German who held her. She began to scream and kick hysterically. "Stephen!" Ricimer shouted. His grip on Gregg's shoulder was as firm as a C-clamp. He pointed toward the plasma cannon with his rifle. He didn't bother to shoot because it was hopelessly out of his range. "Stop them!" The half-armed militia on the trailers were too shocked by the violence to react, but the crew of the plasma gun were traversing their weapon squarely onto what had been the negotiating party. A bolt from that weapon—three or four centimeters in bore—would incinerate both command groups and probably a score of other spacers besides. The gunners might or might not fire— But Piet Ricimer was right. The choice couldn't be left to them. Gregg clashed his visor down and swore as the world blurred amber. The flashgun had a simple, four-post optical sight. He could only wish now that he'd checked the collimation, made sure that the point of aim was aligned with the point of impact, because at five-hundred meters you didn't have to be out by much to miss by a country klick. The parasol swayed, twisting against the stock to which it was connected. One of the Feds on the berm raised his arm. Gregg fired. The air snapped like the string of a powerful crossbow letting go. The line of the bolt was too sudden to see, but it left dazzling purple afterimages despite the filtering visor. Light haloed the plasma cannon. Metal sublimed from the trunnion Gregg hit, flashing outward in a shockwave that ignited as it expanded. The ball of fire threw down the four crewmen on that side and behind the weapon. They lay where they fell. The remaining pair, untouched, vanished behind the berm. Gregg lifted his visor. The air smelled burned. Half the members of the Fed militia had jumped behind the trailers. Those still visible had thrown down their weapons. Gregg's flashgun whined as it started to recharge. The sound cut off when he opened the compartment in the stock and removed the discharged battery. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html He thought he was fine, but his fingers fumbled and dropped the battery. He took a fresh charge from his side pocket and snapped it into the gun. "That was necessary," Piet Ricimer murmured beside him. "Not this, what thesefolk are doing. But what you did, if we were to survive." "Right!" said Captain Choransky. "Now, we're all going to trade like reasonable people. Isn't that right, Zaloga?" Schremp transferred his grip to the port commander's shoulder. Zaloga was white-faced. He didn't attempt to speak, but he nodded agreement. "That was easy, not so?" Schremp said cheerfully. With the visor raised, Gregg could see a haze lift from the crew of the plasma cannon. Blazing metal vapor had ignited their clothing. Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 11 Venus The probe dangling a hundred meters below theSultan recorded the change in wind direction as it dipped into the third and final set of Hadley Cells layering the Venerian atmosphere. Warning bells clanged on the forward attitude-control workstations and, slightly distorted, from the stations in the next compartment. "Oh, put a sock in it," Jeude muttered to his alarm. "Think of it as welcoming us home, Jeude," Piet Ricimer said cheerfully. "This old girl could pretty well con herself into dock from here." TheSultan twisted like a leaping fish when her hull passed through the discontinuity. Gregg felt a vague mushiness through his boots as the vessel continued her descent. Atmospheric density at this level was itself enough to slow a falling object appreciably. The upper reaches of Venus' atmosphere roared from west to east at 450 kph, transferring heat from the sun-facing side of the planet to the cooler dark. Ships had to take wind direction and velocity into account during reentry. But the top layer of sun-heated convection cells bottomed out and reversed course well above the planetary surface. Friction from the high-altitude cells formed an intermediate pattern of contra-rotating winds in the mid-atmosphere, but at much lower velocities. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html When the convection pattern reversed again near the surface, completing the sequence of Hadley Cells, average wind velocity had dropped to 30 kph. That was scarcely a noticeable breeze to a craft which had managed to penetrate the crushing high-altitude violence. "You know, Stephen, we should thank the Lord more often for our atmosphere," Ricimer said. He was smiling, but Gregg knew Ricimer too well to think that anything the spacer said referencing God was a joke. "As a warning of the Hell that awaits those who deny him?" Gregg suggested. "For saving us during the Collapse," Ricimer explained. "All of the settlements on Venus were underground, so raiders didn't have any easy targets. And very few outplanet captains chose to hit us anyway. They knew that defensive vessels couldn't prevent hit-and-run attacks—but that if their ship attacked Venus, the planet herself would fight them. And the planet would win, as often as not, against inexperienced pilots." "People died anyway," Gregg said. "Nine in ten died. Venus colony almost died!" The harsh edge in his voice was a surprise even to him—especially to him. Many factorial families had their own records of the Collapse, and the journals of the Eryx County Greggs were particularly detailed. Stephen Gregg had found that reading about the deaths of your kin and ancestors by starvation, wall fractures, and manufacturing processes which desperation pushed beyond safe limits was not the same as "learning history." Ricimer nodded. There was a tic of wariness though not fear in his expression. "Yes," he said, "the Lord scourged us. It had been easier to import some of our needs. When trade stopped, life almost stopped before we were able to expand food production sufficiently for the population." "The surviving population," Gregg said. His voice was very soft, but it trembled. Piet Ricimer rested his fingertips on the back of Gregg's right hand. "Never again, Stephen," he said quietly. "Trade must never fail. The tyrants who would stop it, President Pleyal and his toadies in Brisbane—the Lord won't let them stop free trade." Gregg laughed and put his arm around the smaller man's shoulders. "And we're the instruments of the Lord?" he said, only half gibing. "Well, I don't usually think of myself that way, Piet." As he spoke, Gregg realized that Piet Ricimerdid usually think of himself as a tool of God. The odd thing from Gregg's viewpoint was that the holy types he'd met before always struck him as sanctimonious prigs, thoroughly unlikable . . . "Prepare for landing," called Captain Choransky, hunched over a CRT loaded with scores of data readouts, each one crucially important in the moments of touchdown. The vessel was coming down nearly empty since her main cargo, nearly 1,000 tonnes of cellulose base, had been unloaded in orbit. The mats had to be armored with a ceramic coating before purpose-built tugs brought them down through an atmosphere which would have consumed them utterly in their unprotected state. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html TheSultan vibrated as the shockwaves from her thrusters echoed from the sides of the landing pit. Choransky chopped the feedlines, starving the thrusters an instant before the artificial intelligence would have done so. TheSultan hit with a ringing impact. Gregg staggered but didn't fall against the workstations around him. "Not really dangerous," Ricimer murmured, to Gregg and to himself. "The lower hull may want some reglazing . . . but after a long voyage, the torquing of so many transits, that'd be a good idea anyway." Vibration continued even with theSultan 's powerplant shut off. A huge dome rolled to cover the landing pit. When the pit's centrifugal pumps had dumped the Venerian atmosphere back into the hell where it belonged and the hull had cooled sufficiently, conveyor belts would haul the vessel into a storage dock. Betaport was a major facility with six landing pits, but the volume of trade she handled required that the pits be cleared as soon as possible. The men at the attitude controls stood up and stretched. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," Jeude said toward a bulkhead. "Get that personnel bridge out here." "Igot my pay," Dole singsonged, "and Iwant somebody to spend it with. I do want that." Lightbody looked at Dole. Ostentatiously, he took his Bible out of the pocket where he'd placed it on landing. He began to read, his lips forming the words as his right index finger traced the line. The bridge console beeped. The CRT, blanked when Choransky shut down, filled with characters. "What?" the captain demanded. "Are we getting hard copy of this?" Bivens squinted at the screen. "This is message traffic from Captain Mostert," he said as he watched the data scroll upward. "I know what it is," Choransky said angrily. He opened a cabinet beneath the CRT and threw a switch with no effect. "Are we getting hard copy of it, that's what I want to know?" The duty of a ship's crewman was to do whatever a superior ordered him to do. It wasn't clear that a gentleman like Gregghad any superior aboard theSultan; but he knew a great deal more about office equipment than anybody else on the ship did, and he didn't care to sit on his hands. Gregg stepped past Choransky, knelt to study the installation for a moment, and reconnected the printer. It began spewing out copy as soon as he switched it on. "There you go," he said to the captain. "Somebody probably got tired of the way it clucked every time the board switched mode." To the best of Gregg's knowledge, the printer hadn't been used at any previous point in the voyage. TheSultan rocked. "About d—" Jeude began. He caught Ricimer's eye. "About time the personnel bridge got here," he finished. The vessel shuddered softly as ground staff evacuated the seal which clamped the enclosed walkway to the starship's hull. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html "That message," Gregg said to Ricimer quietly. "Captain Mostert is summoning Choransky and his top officers to a meeting and party at his house in Ishtar City tomorrow morning. He's going to have potential investors for a larger voyage present. Some of them may be from the Governor's Council." "Are you going?" Ricimer asked. Gregg looked at him. "I suppose Uncle Benjamin will already have a representative chosen," he said. "If he's interested, that is." "I doubt my cousin Alexi would leave you on his doorstep, though," Ricimer said. A hatch sighed open. The air pressure increased minutely. Crewmen—none of them on the bridge—shouted "Yippee!" and "Yee-ha!" "Why are you asking?" Gregg said. "Are you going yourself?" "I'm not sure Alexi really expects me . . ." Ricimer explained. His grin flashed. "Though heis my cousin. I'm pretty sure his servants wouldn't bat an eyelash if I came with the nephew of Factor Benjamin Gregg, though." Gregg began to laugh. He put his arm around Ricimer's shoulders again. "I'll tell you what," he said. "We'll go see my uncle. He's in Ishtar City and I need to report anyway. Then we'll play it by ear, just as we've been doing"—he gestured upward—"out there." Gregg wondered as he spoke whether the reality of high-level politics would be as far from his expectations as the reality of trade in the Reaches had been. Ricimer must have been thinking something similar, because he said, "In Ishtar City, they won't be trying to shoot us, at least." Back|Next Contents Framed Back|Next Contents 12 Venus Ricimer was darkly splendid when he emerged from the men's room outside the Western Rail Station in Ishtar City. The close-coupled spacer wore a tunic and beret of black velvet, set off by a gold sash and band respectively. His trousers were gray, pocketless and closely tailored. They fit into calf-height boots of natural leather, black and highly polished. "I don't see why you had to waste time changing," Gregg said sourly. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Ricimer tucked a small duffel bag into the luggage on the porter's cart, then snugged the tie-down over it. "Why?" he asked. "We're not late, are we?" The traffic of Ishtar City buffeted them without so much as a curse. Pedestrians; battery-powered carts like the one holding their luggage; occasionally a passenger vehicle carrying someone who chose to flaunt his wealth by riding, despite the punitive tax intended as much as a morality measure as it was for traffic control, though traffic control was necessary, especially here in the center of the Old Town. West Station served not only Betaport but the whole complex of hamlets and individual holds in Beta Regio and the plains southwest of Ishtar Terra. The rail links were built before the Collapse, close beneath the surface. During the recovery, Ishtar City grew from the administrative capital of a colony to the heart of a resurgent, independent Venus. Housing and manufacturing expanded both downward and—much later, as ceramic techniques improved and fear of devastating war receded—into domes on the surface. Rail communications across the planet were improved progressively rather than by a single, massive redesign. The traffic they carried continued to enter and leave the growing capital at the near-surface levels, creating conditions that were as crushingly tight as the living quarters of a starship on a long voyage. Gregg had been raised in an outlying hold. He knew that the discomfort he felt in this crowding was making him irritable. "No, it's not the time," he said, stolidly breasting the crowd, though his flesh crept from the repeated jarring on other humans. He knew the way to his uncle's house, so he led; it was as simple as that. "It's getting dressed up as if Uncle Ben was—" He started to say "God Almighty," but remembered his listener in time to twist the words into "—Governor Halys." Ricimer laughed. "You're going to see Uncle Ben, my friend. I will meet Factor Gregg of Weyston—and no, before you say, 'Do you think you'll fool him that you're not the jumped-up sailorI know you are?'—no. But he'll recognize that I'm showing him the respect which is his due . . . from such as me." Gregg grimaced. He was glad Ricimer couldn't see his face. "I never said you were a jumped-up sailor, Piet," he said. "You both humored meand guarded our baggage while I changed, my friend," Ricimer said. "This is important to me. Important to God's plan for mankind, I believe, but certainly to me personally. I appreciate everything you're doing." Many wealthy men, the Mostert brothers among them, now lived in the domed levels of Ishtar City where the ambience was relatively open. Uncle Ben's great wealth was a result of his own trading endeavors, but he had a conservative affection for the Old Town where the rich and powerful had lived when he was growing up. His townhouse was within a half kilometer of West Station. By the time they'd made half that distance through twisting corridors cut by the first permanent human settlements on Venus, Gregg wished he was in armor and lugging his flashgun ten times as far in the forests of Virginia. The trees didn't shove their way into and past pedestrians. "Stephen?" Ricimer said, breaking into Gregg's grim reverie. "Uh?" Gregg said. "Oh, sorry." As he spoke, he realized he was apologizing for thoughts his friend Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html couldn't read and which weren't directed to him specifically, just at cities and those who lived in them in general. "When Captain Schremp spoke to the Federation officials, he referred to our cargo as slaves. Do you remember?" There was a ceramic patch at the next intersection, and the dwellings kitty-corner across it were misaligned. When Gregg was a boy of three, there'd been a landslip that vented a portion of Ishtar City to the outer atmosphere. An error by a tunneling contractor, some believed, but there was too little left at the heart of the catastrophe to be sure. Over a thousand people had died, despite Ishtar City's compartmentalization by corridor and the emergency seals in all dwellings. Uncle Ben had been able to pick up his present townhouse cheap, from heirs who'd been out of town when the disaster occurred. "Schremp!" Gregg said in harsh dismissal. "The Molts aren't even human. Theycan't be slaves." He pursed his lips. "The way the Feds treat the indigs, the Rabbits—maybe they're slaves. But that's nothing to do with us." "Yes, well," Ricimer said. "I suppose you're right, Stephen." Gregg looked back over his shoulder. His friend threw him a smile, but it wasn't a particularly bright one. The facade of Uncle Ben's townhouse was glazed a dull slate-gray. The style and treatment were similar to other gray, dun, and russet buildings on the corridor, but it was unusually clean. The four red-uniformed attendants outside the doorway kept loungers and graffiti-scribblers away from the Factor's door. The attendants straightened when they saw Gregg, suddenly conscious that he'd been on a train for twenty hours from Betaport, striding toward them. One of the men recognized the Factor's nephew and pushed the call button. "Master Stephen Gregg!" he shouted at the intercom. He focused on Ricimer and the luggage, then added, "And companion." There was no external door-switch. The valve itself was round, shaped like a section of a cone through the flats, and a meter-fifty in diameter across the inner face. If the Venerian atmosphere flooded the corridor, its pressure would wedge the door more tightly sealed until emergency crews could deal with the disaster. Burt, a white-haired senior servant wearing street clothes of good quality, bowed to Gregg in the anteroom. Two red-suited underlings waited behind him to take the luggage from the porter. "Sir,the Factor is expecting you and Mr. Ricimer in his office," Hurt said. "Will you change first?" "I don't think that will be necessary," Gregg said grimly. For God's sake! This was Uncle Ben, who up until a few years ago traveled aboard his intrasystem traders on the Earth-Asteroids-Venus triangle to check them out! "Very good, sir," Burt said with another bow. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html Uncle Ben had redone the anteroom mosaics since Gregg had last been to the townhouse. These were supposed to suggest a forest glade on Earth before toxins released during the Revolt finished what fifteen millennia of human fire-setting had begun. Gregg thought of tramping through the woodlands of Virginia. He smiled. Uncle Ben, for all his wealth and success and ability, was in some ways more parochial than the young nephew who until recently hadn't been out of the Atalanta Plains for more than a week at a time. Another liveried servant bowed and stepped away from the open door of the Factor's office. In Old Town, corridors and dwellings were all as close to three meters high as the excavators could cut them. Ceilings were normally lowered to provide storage space or, in poorer housing, to double the number of available compartments. Gregg of Weyston's office was full height, paneled in bleached wood with a barely perceptible grain. The material was natural, rather than something reprocessed from cellulose base. "Good to see you, Stephen," the Factor said. Through a tight smile he added, "I see you've had a hard journey." Gregg glared at his uncle. "I'll change here, Uncle Ben," he said. "For G—forpity' s sake, I could have sent my dress suit by a servant to report to you, if that's what's important." "My brother never saw much reason to dress like a gentleman either, Stephen," the Factor said. "That's perfectly all right—if you're going to bury yourself in the hinterlands with no one save family retainers to see you." Gregg began to laugh. "May I present Mr. Ricimer, Uncle," he said. "An officer of Captain Choransky's company and a cousin of the Mosterts." He paused. "He gave me the same lecture on our way from the rail station." Benjamin Gregg laughed also. He got up and reached over his broad desk to shake first his nephew's hand, then that of Piet Ricimer. Gregg of Weyston was dark where his brother's side of the family, the Greggs of Eryx, were mostly fair, but he was as big as his nephew and had been both strong and active till back problems slowed him down. Even now, the weight he'd gained was under control except for a potbelly that resisted anything short of the girdle he wore on formal occasions. The Factor gestured the younger men to chairs of the same blond wood as the paneling—as uncomfortable as they were obviously expensive—and sat down heavily again himself. "I've seen your report, Stephen," he said with a nod toward the sheaf of printouts on his desk. "It's as careful and precise as the accounts of Eryx always are. I'm impressed, though not surprised." He pursed his lips. "Now," he went on, "what is it that you and Mr. Ricimer feel you need to add in person to the written account you transmitted when you landed at Betaport?" "The Mosterts are giving a matinee this afternoon to launch plans for a larger expedition to the Reaches," Gregg said. "I suppose you've already made arrangements to be represented, but we'd like—I'd like—to be there on your behalf also, with Mr. Ricimer." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html He flicked his eyes to his companion. Ricimer was seated in his chair with the poised, unmoving alertness of a guard dog. The Factor nodded. "And why do you think I should be represented, Stephen?" he asked. The question took Gregg aback. "What?" he blurted. "Why—for the profit, Uncle Ben. You're a merchant, and there are huge profits to be made in out-system trade." The walls of the office were lined with books—hard-copy ledgers, some of them almost five decades old—and with memorabilia from the Factor's years of intrasystem trade. One of Gregg's earliest memories was of his uncle handing him a bit of clear crystal with waxy inclusions and saying that it was a relic of life from the asteroid belt before Earth had even coalesced as a planet. But this was a different Uncle Ben. He lifted his nephew's itemized report. "Yes," he said. "Profit. One hundred twelve percent on my investment on Captain Choransky's voyage." "Possibly a little less," Gregg said in a desire to be precise. "I'm assuming a low valuation for tariff purposes, in the belief that Governor Halys will want to minimize the amount of her investment profits that pass through the Exchequer. I may be wrong." The Factor laughed. "You're not wrong, lad," he said. "If anything, you're overconservative. And in any event, over one hundred percent compares favorably with the thirty-three to thirty-five percent margin I try to run within the system." Gregg nodded, allowing himself a wary smile while he waited for the hook. "Until you factor in risk," Gregg of Weyston added, slapping the report down on his desk. The Factor looked sharply at Ricimer. "Mr. Ricimer," he said crisply. "I can see you're a spaceman. How do you assess the possibility that one or all of Captain Choransky's vessels would have been lost on the voyage just completed?" Ricimer lifted his chin to acknowledge the question. His eyes were bright. "In-system, landings are the most dangerous part of a voyage," he said in a tone as cold and sharp as the blade of a cutting bar. "The risk varies from ship to ship, but say . . . three percent per vessel on the voyage in question because of the greater frequency of landings. Transits—again, that varies, but obviously the greater number of entries increases the possibility of system failure and of being caught in a pattern of rising gradients in which a vessel shakes its hull apart in trying to enter transit space." The spacer tapped his right index finger on his chair arm while his eyes stared at a point beyond the Factor's ear. "I would say," he continued as his eyes locked with those of his questioner, "five percent on a well-found vessel, but I'll admit that theSultan wasn't in the best condition, and I can't claim to have full confidence in the ship-handling abilities of theDove 's officers." Ricimer smiled bleakly. "You'll pardon me for frankness, sir," he said. "I'll pardon you for anything except telling me damned lies, lad," the Factor said, "and there seems little risk of that. But—what about the Federation and the Southern Cross, then? I've had more reports of the voyage than this one, you know." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
