Note: this is missing some ~18 pages in the middle, and formatting is still not great. Page numbering and most misspellings have been fixed.


              THROUGH THE BREACH
         David Drake's acclaimed novel Hammer's
         Slammers is considered one of the classics
         of military science fiction. In his 1994
         novel, Igniting the Reaches, he took us on
         an epic journey to the farthest reaches of
         space where pirates ruled a new age of
         expansion and opportunity. Now, Drake
         returns to that world, a universe of untold
         possibility, wealth, and danger..
    
         Their mission is called the Venus Asteroid
         Expedition, but it has little to do with legiti-
         mate trade. General Commander Piet
         Ricimer and Stephen Gregg are leading an
         armada of four ships from the relatively
         civilized clouds of Venus out beyond the
         orbit of Pluto, deep into the Reaches where
         trade and piracy are one and the same-
         and expedited with a gun.
    
         Their destination is the Mirror, an impene-
         trable membrane covering another universe
         -a universe where all the riches of the
         Federation are held in ports, ripe for plun-
         dering. There is only one place where the
         expedition can cross the Mirror, a weak-
         ened point known as Landolph's Breach. The
         last one to pass through was Landolph
         himself ... over eighty years ago. And most
         of his men never returned...
         But the war with the Federation is raging,
         and the glory of Venus is at hand. Ricimer
         and Gregg are going forward into the
         hands of fate, going to claim the wealth and
         glory that is theirs to take ... going hell-bent
         and full speed ahead through the Breach...

    THROUGH THE BREACH
    
    An Ace Book
    Published by The Berkley Publishing Group
    200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
    
    Copyright (D 1995 by David Drake.
    
    All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
    in any form without permission.
    First Edition: April 1995
    Library of Congress Cataloging Publication Data
    Drake, David.
     Through the breach / David Drake.-Ist ed.
      P. cm.
     ISBN 0-441-00171-8 : $19.95
     1. Title.
    PS3554.RI96T47 1995             94-25744
    813'.54---dc2O                      CIP
    
    Printed in the United States of America
    
    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21


    




                           To Allyn Vogel
    
                     Most of my friends are smart, competent,
                        and unfailingly helpful to me when
                      I need it. Allyn is all those things.
                 She is also a gentle and genuinely good person,
                    which puts her in a much smaller category.
    
  
           BETAPORT, VENUS
    
    7 Days Before Sailing
    
    "Mister Jeremy Moore," announced the alien slave as he
    ushered me into the private chamber of the Blue Rose
    Tavern. The public bar served as a waiting room and
    hiring hall for the Venus Asteroid Expedition, while Gen-
    eral Commander Piet Ricimer used the back room as an
    office.
     I'd heard that the aide now with Ricimer, Stephen
    Gregg, was a conscienceless killer. My first glimpse of
    the man was both a relief and a disappointment. Gregg
    was big, true; but he looked empty, no more dangerous
    than a suit of ceramic armor waiting for someone to put
    it on. Blond and pale, Gregg could have been handsome
    if his features were more animated.
     Whereas General Commander Ricimer wasn't ...
    pretty, say, the way women enough have found me, but
    the fire in the man's soul gleamed through every atom of
    his physical person. Ricimer's glance and quick smile
    were genuinely friendly, while Gregg's more lingering
    appraisal was ...
     Maybe Stephen Gregg wasn't as empty as I'd first
    thought.
     "Thank you, Guillermo," said Ricimer. "Has Captain
    Macquerie arrived?"

     Not yet," the slave replied. "I'll alert you when he
    does." Guillermo's diction was excellent, though his
    tongueless mouth clipped the sibilant. He closed the
    door behind him, shutting out the bustle of the pub-
    lic bar.

     Guillermo was a chitinous biped with a triangular face
    and a pink sash-of-office worn bandolier fashion over one
    shoulder. I'd never been so close to a Molt slave before.
    There weren't many in the Solar System and fewer still
    on Venus. Their planet of origin was unknown, but their
    present province was the entire region of space mankind
    had colonized before the Collapse.
     Molts remained and prospered on worlds from which
    men had vanished. Now, with man's return to the stars, the
    aliens' racial memory made them additionally valuable:
    Molts could operate the pre-Collapse machinery which
    survived on some outworlds.
     "Well, Mister Moore," Ricimer said. "What are your
    qualifications for the Asteroid Expedition?"
     "Well, I've not myself been involved in off-planet trade,
    sir," I said, trying to look earnest and superior, "but I'm a
    gentleman, you see, and thus an asset to any proposal. My
    father-may he continue well-is Moore of Rhadicund.
    Ah-"
     The two spacemen watched me: Ricimer with amuse-
    ment, Gregg with no amusement at all. I didn't understand
    their coolness. I'd thought this was the way to build
    rapport, since Gregg was a gentleman also, member of a
    factorial family, and Ricimer at least claimed the status.
     "Ah . . ." I repeated. Carefully, because the subject could
    easily become a can of worms, I went on, "I've been a
    member of the household of Councilor Duneen--chief
    advisor to the Governor of the Free State of Venus."
     "We know who Councilor Duneen is, Mister Moore,"
    Ricimer said dryly. "We'd probably know of him even if
    he weren't a major backer of the expedition."
     The walls of the room were covered to shoulder height
    in tilework. The color blurred upward from near black at
    floor level to smoky gray shot with wisps of silver. The
    ceiling and upper walls were coated with beige sealant that
    might well date from the tavern's construction.

     The table behind which Ricimer and Gregg sat-they
    hadn't offered me a chair-was probably part of the tayern
    furnishings. The communications console in a back corner
    was brand-new. The ceramic chassis marked the console
    as of Venerian manufacture, since an off-planet unit would
    have been made. of metal or organic resin instead, but its
    electronics were built from chips stockpiled on distant
    worlds where automated factories continued to produce
    even after the human colonies perished.
      Very probably, Piet Ricimer himself had brought those
    chips to Venus on an earlier voyage. Earth, with a popula-
    tion of twenty millions after the Collapse, had returned to
    space earlier than tiny Venus. Now that all planets outside
    the Solar System were claimed by the largest pair of ram-
    shackle Terran states, the North American Federation and
    the Southern Cross, other men traded beyond Pluto only
    with one hand on their guns.
      Piet Ricimer and his cohorts had kept both hands on
    their guns, and they traded very well indeed. Whatever
    the cover story-Venus and the Federation weren't techni-
    cally at war-the present expedition wasn't headed for the
    Asteroid Belt to bring back metals that Venus had learned
    to do without during the Collapse.
      I changed tack. I'd prepared for this interview by trad-
    ing my floridly expensive best suit for clothing of more
    sober cut and material, though I'd have stayed with the
    former's purple silk plush and gold lace if the garments
    had fit my spare frame just a little better. The suit had
    been a gift from a friend whose husband was much more
    portly, and there's a limit to what alterations can accom-
    plish.
      "I believe it's the duty of every man on Venus," I said
    loudly, "to expand our planet's trade beyond the orbit
    of Pluto. We owe this to Venus and to God. The duty
    is particularly upon those like the three of us who are
    members of factorial families."
      I struck the defiant pose of a man ashamed of the
    strength of his principles. I'd polished the expression over
    years of explaining-to women-why honor forbade me
    to accept money from my father, the factor. In truth, the
    little factory of Rhadicund in Beta Regio had been aban-
    doned three generations before, and the family certainly
    hadn't prospered in the governor's court the way my
    grandfather had hoped.

     Piet Ricimer's face stilled. It took me a moment to
    realize how serious a mistake I'd made in falsely claiming
    an opinion which Ricimer felt as strongly as he hoped for
    salvation.
     Stephen Gregg stretched his arm out on the table before
    Ricimer, interposing himself between his friend and a
    problem that the friend needn't deal with. Gregg wasn't
    angry. Perhaps Gregg no longer had the capacity for anger
    or any other human emotion.
     "About the manner of your leaving Councilor Duneen's
    service, Moore," Gregg said. He spoke quietly, his voice
    cat-playful. "A problem with the accounts, was there?"
     I met the bigger man's eyes. What I saw there shocked
    me out of all my poses, my calculations. "My worst
    enemies have never denied that their purse would be safe
    in my keeping," I said flatly. "There was a misunderstand-
    ing about a woman of the household. As a gentleman..."
     My normal attitudes were reasserting themselves. I
    couldn't help it. "I can say no more."
     The Molt's three-fingered hand tapped on the door.
    "Captain Macquerie has arrived, sir."
     "You have no business here, Mister Jeremy Moore,"
    Gregg said. He rose. to his feet. Gregg moved with a
    slight stiffness which suggested that more than his soul
    had been scarred beyond Pluto; but surely his soul as
    well. "There'll be no women where we're going. While
    there may be opportunities for wealth, it won't be what
    one would call easy money."
     "Good luck in your further occupations, Mister Moore,"
    Ricimer said. "Guillermo, please show in Captain Mac-
    querie."
     Ricimer and his aide were no more than my own age,
    27 Earth years. In this moment they seemed to be from a
    different generation.
     "Good day, gentlemen," I said. I bowed and stepped
    quickly from the room as a squat fellow wearing coveralls
    and a striped neckerchief entered. Macquerie moved N~ith
    the gimballed grace of a spacer who expects the deck to
    shift beneath him at any moment.
       I knew that arguing with Ricimer and Gregg wouldn't
    have gained me anything. I knew also that Mister Stephen
    Gregg would literally just as soon kill me as look at me.
    There were more than thirty men in the tavern's public
    room-and one woman, a spacer's wife engaged in a
    low-voiced but obviously acrimonious attempt to drag her
    husband away. The noise of the crowd blurred whenever
    the outer door opened onto Dock Street and its heavy
    traffic.
       I pushed my way to one corner of the bar, my prog-
    ress aided somewhat by the fact I was a gentleman-
    but only somewhat. Betaport was more egalitarian than
    Ishtar City, the capital; and spacers are a rough lot any-
    where.
      The tapster drew beer and took payment with an effi-
    ciency that seemed more fluid than mechanical. His eyes
    were sleepy, but the fashion in which he chalked a tab
    or held out his free hand in a silent demand for scrip
    before he offered the glass showed he was fully aware
    of his surroundings.
       I opened my purse and took out the 10-Mapleleaf coin.
    That left me only twenty Venerian consols to live on for
    the next week, but I'd find a way. Eloise, I supposed. I
    hadn't planned to see her again after the problem with her
    maid, but she'd come around.
    
      "Barman," I said crisply. "I want the unrestricted use
    of your phone, immediately and for the whole of the
    afternoon."
       I rang the coin on the rippling blue translucence of the
    bar's ceramic surface.
       The barman's expression sharpened into focus. He took
    the edges of the coin between the thumb and index fingers
    of his right hand, turning it to view both sides. "Where'd
    you get Fed money?" he demanded.
       "Gambling with an in-system trader on the New Troy
    run," I said truthfully. "Now, if you don't want the Fed's
    coin..."
       That was a bluff-I needed this particular phone for
    what I intended to do.

     The tapster shrugged. He had neither cause nor inten-
    tion to refuse, merely a general distaste for strangers; and
    perhaps for gentlemen as well. He flipped up the gate in
    the bar so that I could slip through to the one-piece phone
    against the wall.
     "It's local net only," the tapster warned. "I'm not con-
    nected to the planetary grid."
     "Local's what I want," I said.
     Very local indeed. The tool kit on my belt looked like a
    merchant's papersafe. I took from it a device of my own
    design and construction.
     The poker game three weeks before had been with
    a merchant/captain and three of his officers, in a sail-
    ors' tavern in Ishtar City. The four spacers were using
    a marked deck. If I'd complained or even tried to leave
    the game, they would have beaten me within an inch of
    my life.
     The would-be sharpers had thought I was wealthy and
    a fool; and were wrong on both counts, They let me win
    for the first two hours. The money I'd lived on since the
    game came from that pump priming. Much of it was in
    Federation coin.
     The captain and his henchmen ran the betting up and
    cold-decked me, their pigeon. I weepingly threw down a
    huge roll of Venerian scrip and staggered out of the tavern.
    I'd left Ishtar City for Betaport before the spacers realized
    that I'd paid them in counterfeit-and except for the top
    bill, very poor counterfeit.
     I attached to the phone module's speaker a contact
    transducer which fed a separate keypad and an earpiece.
    The tapster looked at me and said, "Hey! What d'ye think
    you're doing?"
     "What I paid you for the right to do," I said. I pivoted
    deliberately so that my body blocked the tapster's view of
    what I was typing on the keypad-not that it would have
    meant anything to the fellow.
     On my third attempt at the combination, the plug in
    my ear said in Piet Ricimer's voice, " . . . not just as a
    Venerian patriot, Captain Macquerie. All mankind needs
    you.
       The communications console in the private room was
    patched into the tavem's existing phone line. The com
    mands I sent through the line converted Ricimer's own
    electronics into a listening device. I could have accessed
    the console from anywhere in Betaport, but not as quickly
    as I needed to hear the interview with Macquerie.
    "Look, Captain Ricimer," said an unfamiliar voice that
    must by elimination be Macquerie, "I'm flattered that
    you'd call for me the way you have, but I gave up voy-
    aging to the Reaches when I married the daughter of my
    supplier on Os Sertoes. Long runs are no life for a married
    man. From here on out, I'm shuttling my Bahia between
    Betaport and Buenos Aires."
    "We mean no harm to the Southern Cross," said Stephen
     Gregg. "Your wife's family won't be affected."
    With Macquerie, there was obviously no pretense that
    the expedition had anything to do with asteroids. Os Sertoes
    was little more than a name to me. I vaguely thought that it
    was one of the most distant Southern colonies, uninterest-
    ing and without exports of any particular value.
    "Look," said Macquerie, "you gentlemen've been to the
    Reaches yourself. You don't need me to pilot you-except
    to Os Sertoes, and who'd want to go there? It's stuffed
    right in the neck of the Breach, so the transit gradients
    won't let you go anywhere but back."
    "Captain," said Ricimer, "I wouldn't ask you if I didn't
    believe I needed you. Venus must take her place in the
    greater universe. If most of the wealth of the outworlds
    continues to funnel into the Federation, President Pleyal
    will use it to impose his will on all men. Whether Pleyal
    succeeds or fails, the attempt will lead to a second Col-
    lapse-one from which there'll be no returning. The Lord
    dcan't want that, nor can any man who fears Him."
    A chair scraped. "I'm sorry, gentlemen," Macquerie
    said. His voice was subdued, but firm. Ricimer's enthu-
    siasm had touched but not won the man. "If you really
    need a pilot for the Reaches, well-you can pick one up
    a on Punta Verde or Decades. But not me."
    The door opened at the corner of my eye. The Molt
    standing there stepped aside as noise from the public
    bar boomed through the pickup on my earpiece. Captain
    Macquerie strode past, his face forming into a scowl of
    concern as he left the Blue Rose.
     "No one just yet, Guillermo," called Piet Ricimer, his
    words slightly out of synchrony as they reached my ears
    through different media.
     The door closed.
     "I could bring him along, you know," Gregg said calmly
    in the relative silence.
     "No," said Ricimer. "We won't use force against our
    own citizens, Stephen."
     "Then you'll have to feel your way into the Breach
    without help," Gregg said. "You know we won't find
    a pilot for Os Sertoes at any of the probable stopovers.
    There's not that much trade to the place."
     "Captain Macquerie may change his mind, Stephen,"
    Ricimer replied. "There's still a week before we lift."
     "He won't," snapped Gregg. "He feels guilty, sure; but
    he s not going to give up all he has on a mad risk. And
    if he doesn't-what? The Lord will provide?"
     "Yes, Stephen," said Piet Ricimer. "I rather think He
    will. Though perhaps not for us as individuals, I'll admit."
     In a brighter, apparently careless voice, Ricimer went
    on, "Now, Guillermo has the three bidders for dried rations
    waiting outside. Shall we-"
     I quickly disconnected my listening device and slipped
    from behind the bar, keeping low. If Ricimer-or worse,
    Gregg-saw me through the open door, they might won-
    der why I'd stayed in the tavern after they dismissed me.
     "Hey!" called the barman to my back. "What is it you
    think you're doing, anyway?"
     I only wished I knew the answer myself.

           BETAPORT, VENUS
    
    6 Days Before Sailing
    
    The brimstone smell of Venus's atmosphere clung to the
    starships' ceramic hulls.
     Betaport's storage dock held over a hundred vessels,
    ranging in size from featherboats of under 20 tonnes to
    a bulk freighter of nearly 150. The latter vessel was as
    large as Betaport's domed transfer docks on the surface
    could accommodate for landings and launches.
     Many of the ships were laid up, awaiting parts or con-
    signment to the breakers' yard, but four vessels at one
    end of the cavernous dock bustled with the imminence of
    departure. The cylindrical hulls of two were already on
    roller-equipped cradles so that tractors could drag them
    to the transfer docks.
     I eyed the vessels morosely, knowing there was nothing
    in the sight to help me make up my mind. I'd familiarized
    myself with the vessels' statistics, but I wasn't a spacer
    whose technical expertise could judge the risks of an
    expedition by viewing the ships detailed for it.
     I supposed as much as anything I was forcing myself
    to think about what I intended to do. I rubbed my palms
    together with the fingers splayed and out of contact.
     A lowboy rumbled slowly past. It was carrying cannon
    to the expedition's flagship, the 100-tonne Porcelain. The
    hull of Ricimer's vessel gleamed white, unstained by the
    sulphur compounds which would bake on at first exposure
    to the Venerian atmosphere. She was brand-new, purpose-
    built for distant exploration. Her frames and hull plating
    were of unusual thickness for her burden.
         The four 15-cm plasma cannon on the lowboy were
    heavy guns for a 100-tonne vessel, and the Long Tom
    which pivoted to fire through any of five ports in the
    bow was a still-larger 17-cm weapon. The Porcelain's
    hull could take the shock of the cannons' powerful ther-
    monuclear explosions, but the guns' bulk filled much of
    the ship's internal volume. The most casual observer could
    see that the Porcelain wasn't fitting out for a normal trad-
    ing voyage.
     I ambled along the quay. Pillars of living rock supported
    the ceiling of the storage dock, but the huge volume wasn't
    subdivided by bulkheads. The sounds of men, machinery,
    and the working of the planetary mantle merged as a low-
    frequency hum that buffered me from my surroundings.
     The Absalom 231 was a cargo hulk: a ceramic box with
    a carrying capacity as great as that of the flagship. She
    was already in a transport cradle. Food and drink for
    the expedition filled the vessel's single cavernous hold.
    Lightly and cheaply built, the Absalom 231 could be
    stripped and abandoned when the supplies aboard her
    were exhausted.
     The expedition's personnel complement was set at a
    hundred and eighty men. I wondered how many of them,
    like the hulk, would be used up on the voyage.
     A bowser circled on the quay, heading back to the water
    point. Its huge tank had filled the Porcelain with reaction
    mass. I moved closer to the vessels to avoid the big ground
    vehicle. I walked on.
     The Kinsolving was a sharp-looking vessel of 80 tonnes.
    A combination of sailors and ground crew were loading
    sections of three knocked-down featherboats into her cen-
    tral bay. Though equipped with star drive, a 15-tonne
    featherboat's cramped quarters made it a hellish prison on
    a long voyage. The little vessels were ideal for short-range
    exploration from a central base, and they were far handier
    in an atmosphere than ships of greater size.
     What would it be like to stand on a world other than
    Venus? The open volume of the Betaport storage dock
    made me uncomfortable. What would it be like to walk
    under an open sky?
       Why in God's name was I thinking of doing this?
     The last of the expedition's four vessels was the 80-
    tonne Mizpah, also in a transport cradle. She was much
    older than the Porcelain and the Kinsolving. Clearly-
    even to a layman like me-the Mizpah wasn't in peak
    condition.
     The Mizpah's main lock and boarding ramp amidships
    couldn't be used because of the transport cradle, but her
    personnel hatch forward stood open. On the hatch's inner
    surface, safe from reentry friction and corrosive atmos-
    pheres, were the painted blazons of her co-owners: the
    pearl roundel of Governor Halys, and the bright orange
    banderol-the oriflamme-of Councilor Frederic Duneen.
     The Mizpah wasn't an impressive ship in many ways,
    but she brought with her the overt support of the two
    most important investors on the planet. If nothing else,
    the Mizpah's participation meant the survivors wouldn't
    be hanged as pirates when they returned to Venus.
     If anyone survived. When I eavesdropped on the private
    discussion between Ricimer and Gregg, I'd heard enough
    to frighten off anyone sane.
     Thomas Hawtry-Factor Hawtry of Hawtry-stepped
    from the Mizpah's personnel hatch. Two generations
    before, Hawtry had been a name to reckon with. Thomas,
    active and ambitious to a fault, had mortgaged what
    remained of the estate in an attempt to recoup his
    family's influence by attaching himself to the great of
    the present day.
     He was a man I wanted to meet as little as I did any
    human being on Venus.
     Hawtry was large and floridly handsome, dressed now
    in a tunic of electric blue with silver lame trousers and
    calf-high boots to match the tunic. On his collar was a
    tiny oriflamme to indicate his membership in Councilor
    Duneen's household.
     Hawtry's belt and holster were plated. The pistol was
    for show, but I didn't doubt that it was functional none-
    theless.
     "Moore!" Hawtry cried, framed by the hatch coaming
    two paces away. Hawtry's face was blank for an instant
    as the brain worked behind it. The Factor of Hawtry was
    a thorough politician; though not, in my opinion, subtle
    enough to be a very effective one.
      "Jeremy!" Hawtry decided aloud, reforming his visage
    in a smile. "Say, I haven't had an opportunity to thank you
    for the way you covered me in the little awkwardness with.
    Lady Melinda."
      He stepped close and punched me playfully on the
    shoulder, a pair of ladies' men sharing a risque memory.
    "Could have been ve-ry difficult for me. Say, I told my
    steward to pass you a little something to take the sting
    out. Did he?"
       Lady Melinda was an attractive widow of 29 who lived
    with her brother-Councilor Duneen. Hawtry'd thought to
    use me as his go-between in the lady's seduction. I, on the
    other hand-,
      I would never have claimed I was perfect, but I liked
    women too much to lure one into the clutches of Thomas
    Hawtry. And as it turned out, I liked the Lady Melinda a
    great deal more than was sensible for a destitute member
    of the lesser gentry.
      "Regrettably, I d ' idn't hear from your steward, Thom,",
    I said. No point in missing a target of opportunity. "And
    you know, I'm feeling a bit of a pinch right now. If-?"
    Not much of a target. "Aren't we all, Jeremy, aren't we
    all!" Hawtry boomed. "After I bring my expedition back,
    though, all my friends will live like kings! Say, you know
    about the so-called 'asteroids expedition,' don't you?"
    He waved an arm toward the docked ships. A hydraulic
    pump began to squeal as it shifted the Absalom 231 in its
    cradle.
       "Captain Ricimer's..." I said, hiding my puzzlement.
    "And mine," said Hawtry, tapping himself on the breast
    significantly. "I'm co-leader, though we're keeping it quiet
    for the time being. A very political matter, someone of my
    stature in charge of a voyage like this."
      Hawtry linked his arm familiarly with mine and began
    pacing back along the line of expedition vessels. His
    friendliness wasn't sincere. In the ten months I knew
    Hawtry intimately in the Duneen household, the man had
    never been sincere about anything except his ambition and
    his self-love.
     But neither did Hawtry seem to be dissembling the hatred
    I'd expected. Irritated at his go-between's lack of progress
    and very drunk, Hawtry had forced the Lady Melinda's
    door on a night when her brother was out of the house.
    The racket brought the servants to the scene in numbers.
     I, the gentleman who was sharing the lady's bed that
    night, escaped in the confusion-but my presence hadn't
    gone unremarked. The greater scandal saved Hawtry from
    the consequences of his brutal folly, but I scarcely expected
    the fellow to feel grateful. Apparently Hawtry's embarrass-
    ment was so great that he'd recast the incident completely
    in his own mind.
     "I'm going to take the war to the Federation," Hawtry
    said, speaking loudly to be heard over the noise in the stor-
    age dock. He accompanied the words with broad gestures
    of his free hand. "And it is a war, you know. Nothing less
    than that!"
     A dozen common sailors examined the Porcelain's hull
    and thruster nozzles, shouting comments to one another.
    The men weren't on duty; several of them carried liquor
    bottles in pockets of their loose garments. They might
    simply be spectators. Ricimer's flagship was an unusual
    vessel, and the expedition had been the only subject of
    conversation in Betaport for a standard month.
     "Asteroids!" Hawtry snorted. "The Feds bring their
    microchips and pre-Collapse artifacts into the system in
    powerful convoys, Jeremy ... but I'm going to hit them
    where they aren't prepared for it. They don't defend the
    ports on the other side of the Mirror where the wealth
    is gathered. I'll go through the Breach and take them
    unawares!"
     Hawtry wasn't drunk, and he didn't have a hidden rea-
    son to blurt this secret plan. Because I was a gentleman
    of sorts and an acquaintance, I was someone for Hawtry
    to brag to; it was as simple as that.
     Of course, the proposal was so unlikely that I would
    have discounted it completely if I hadn't heard Ricimer
    and Gregg discussing the same thing.
        "I didn't think it was practical to transit the Breach,"
    I said truthfully. "Landolph got through with only one
    ship of seven, and nobody has succeeded again in the
    past eighty years. It's simpler to voyage the long way,
    even though that's a year and a half either way."
     Interstellar travel involved slipping from the sidereal*
    universe into other bubbles of sponge space where the
    constants for matter and energy differed. Because a vessel
    which crossed a dimensional membrane retained its rela-
    tive motion, acceleration under varied constants translated
    into great changes in speed and distance when the vessel
    returned to the human universe.
     No other bubble universe was habitable or even con-
    tained matter as humans understood the term. The sidereal
    universe itself had partially mitosed during the process of
    creation, however, and it was along that boundary-the
    Mirror-that the most valuable pre-Collapse remains were
    to be found.
     Populations across the Mirror had still been small when
    the Revolt smashed the delicate fabric of civilization.
    Often a colony's death throes weren't massive enough
    to complete the destruction of the automated factories,
    as had happened on the larger outworlds and in the Solar
    System itself.
     For the most part the Mirror was permeable only to
    objects of less than about a hundred kilograms. Three
    generations before, Landolph had found a point at which it
    was possible to transit the Mirror through sponge space.
     Landolph's Breach wasn't of practical value, since ener-
    gy gradients between the bubble universes were higher
    than ships could easily withstand. Perhaps it - had been
    different for navigators of the civilization before the Col-
    lapse.
     "Oh, the Breach," Hawtry said dismissively. "Say, that's
    a matter for sailors. Our Venus lads can do things that
    cowards from Earth never dreamed of. If they were real
    men, they wouldn't kiss the feet of a tyrant like Pleyal!"
     "I see," I said in a neutral voice.
     I supposed there was truth in what Hawtry said. The
    ships of today were more rugged than Landolph's, and
    if half of Captain Ricimer's reputation was founded on
    fact, he was a sailor like no one bom to woman before
    him. But the notion that a snap of the fingers would send
    a squadron through the Breach was-
    Well, Hawtry's reality testing had always been notable
    for its absence. His notion of using the Lady Melinda as
    a shortcut to power, for example. 
      The Porcelain's crew was shifting the first of the plasma
    cannon from the lowboy. A crane lifted the gun tube onto
    a trolley in the hold, but from there on the weapon would
    be manhandled into position.
        The Porcelain's ceramic hull was pierced with more
    than a score of shuttered gunports, but like most vessels
    she carried only one gun for every four or more ports.
    The crew would shift the weapons according to need.
       "They'll get their use soon!" Hawtry said, eyeing the
    guns with smirking enthusiasm. "And when I come back,
    well-it'll be Councilor Hawtry, see if it isn't, Moore. Say,
    there'll be nothing too good for the leader of the Breach
    Expedition!"
       I felt the way I had the night I let the spacers inveigle
    me into the crooked card game, where there was a great
    deal to gain and my life to lose. I said, "I can see that you
    and Captain Ricimer-"
       "Ricimer!" Hawtry snorted. "That man, that artisan's
    son? Surely you don't think that a project of this magnitude
    wouldn't have a gentleman as its real head!"
       "There's Mister Stephen Gregg, of course," I said judi-
    ciously.
       "The younger son of a smallholder in the Atalanta
    Plains!" Hawtry said. "Good God, man! As well have
    you commander of the expedition as that yokel!"
      "I take your point," I said. "Well, I have to get back
    now, Thom. Need to dress for dinner, you see."
    "Yes, say, look me up when I return, Moore," Hawtry
    said. "I'll be expanding my household, and I shouldn't
    wonder that I'd have a place for a clever bugger like
    YOU."
       Hawtry turned and stared at the ships which he claimed
    to command. He stood arms akimbo and with his feet
    spread wide, a bold and possessive posture.
       I walked on quickly, more to escape Hawtry than for
    any need of haste. Dinner was part of Eloise's agenda,
    though dressing was not. Quite the contrary.
    In an odd way, the conversation had helped settle my
    mind. I wasn't a spacer: I couldn't judge the risks of this
    expedition.
      But I could judge men.
    Hawtry was a fool if he thought he could brush aside
    Piet Ricimer. And if Hawtry thought he could ride rough-
    shod over Stephen Gregg, he was a dead man.
    
    BETAPORT, VENUS
  
    The Night Before Sailing
  
       Three sailors guarded the city side of Dock 22. Two of the
    men carried powered cutting bars. The third had stuck for-
    ty centimeters of high-pressure tubing under his belt, and
    a double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall behind
    him.
       On the other side of the airlock, a tubular personnel
    bridge stretched to the Porcelain's hatch. Though Dock
    22 was closed and the interior had been purged, too much
    of the hellish Venerian atmosphere leaked past the domed
    clamshell doors for the dock to be open onto the city
    proper.
      Traffic on Dock Street was sparse at this hour. The
    airlock guards watched me with mild interest. That turned
    to sharp concern when they realized that I was guiding
    directly toward them the drunk I supported. The sailor
    with the length of tubing closed the pocket Bible he'd
    been reading and threw his shoulders back twice to loosen
    the muscles.
      "My name doesn't matter," I said. "But I've an impor-
    tant message for Mister Gregg. I need to see him in per-
    son."
      "Piss off," said one of the sailors. He touched the trig-
    ger of his cutting bar. The ceramic teeth whined a bitter
    sneer.
       "This the Bahia?" mumbled the drunk.
    I held a flask to the lips of the man draped against me.
    "Here you go, my friend," I said reassuringly. "We'll be
    aboard shortly."
 
     "Gotta lift ship the drunk said. He began to cough
    rackingly.
     "I wouldn't mind a sip of that," said one of the guards.
     "Shut up, Pinter," said the man with the tubing. "You
    know better than that."
     He turned his attention to me and my charge. "No one
    boards the Porcelain now, sir," he said. "Why don't you
    and your friend go about your business?"
     "This is our business," I said. "Call Mister Gregg. Tell
    him there's a man here with information necessary to the
    success of the expedition."
     Pinter frowned, leaned forward, and sniffed at the neck
    of the open flask. "Hey, buddy," he said. "What d'ye have
    in that bottle, anyhow?"
     "You wouldn't like the vintage," I said. "Call Mister
    Gregg now. We need to get this gentleman in a bunk as
    soon as possible."
     The sailor who'd initially ordered me away looked
    uncertain. "What's going on, Lightbody?" he asked the
    man with the tubing. "He's a gentleman, isn't he?"
     "All right, Pinter," Lightbody said in sudden decision.
    He gestured to the wired communicator which was built
    into the personnel bridge. "Call him."
     He smiled with a grim sort of humor. "Nobody asks for
    Mister Gregg because they want to waste his time."
    
    Gregg arrived less than two minutes after the summons.

    His blue trousers and blue-gray tunic were old and worn.
    Both garments were of heavy cloth and fitted with many
    pockets.
     Gregg didn't wear a protective suit, though the air that
    puffed out when he opened the lock was hot and stank
    of hellfire. He didn't carry a weapon, either; but Stephen
    Gregg was a weapon.
     Sulphurous gases leaking into the personnel bridge had
    brought tears to Gregg's eyes. He blinked to control them.
    "Mister Jeremy Moore," he said softly. The catch in his
    voice might also have been a result of the corrosive atmos-
    phere.
     I lifted the face of the man I supported so that the light
    fell fully on it. "I'm bringing,Captain Macquerie aboard,"
    I said. "We're together. I, ah, thought it would be wise
    not to trouble the general commander."
       "Where's 'a Bahia?" Macquerie mumbled. "Gotta lift
    tonight. . ."
    "Ali," said Gregg. I couldn't see any change in his
    expression; the three common sailors, who knew Gregg
    better, visibly relaxed. "Yes, that was good of you. Piet's
    resting now. The two of us can get our pilot aboard quietly,
    I think."
      He lifted the shanghaied captain out of my grip. "Piet's
    too good a man for this existence, I- sometimes think. But
    he's got friends."
      Gregg cycled the airlock open. The inner chamber was
    large enough to hold six men in hard suits. He paused.
    "Lightbody? Pinter and Davies, all of you. You did well
    here, but don't report the-arrival-until after we've lifted
    in the morning. Do you understand?"
       "Whatever you say, Mister Gregg," Lightbody replied;
    the other two sailors nodded agreement. The men treated
    Gregg with respect due to affection, but they were also
    quite clearly afraid of him.
       As the airlock's outer door closed behind us, Gregg
    looked over the head of the slumping Macquerie and said,
    "You say you want to come with us, Moore. I'd rather
    pay you. I've got more money than I know what to do
    with, now."
        The inner door undogged and began to open even as
    the outer panel latched. The atmosphere of the personnel
    bridge struck me like the heart of a furnace.
      The bridge was a 3-meter tube of flexible material,
    stiffened by a helix of glass fiber which also acted as a
    light guide. The reinforcement was a green spiral spin-
    ning dizzily outward until the arc of the sagging bridge
    began to rise again. A meter-wide floor provided a flat
    walkway.
       I sneezed violently. My nose began to run. I rubbed it
    angrily with the back of my hand.
      "I'll come, thank you," I said. My voice was already
    hoarse from the harshness of the air. "I'll find my own
    wealth in the Reaches, where you found yours."
     "Oh, you're a smart one, aren't you?" Gregg said harsh-
    ly. "You think you know where we're really going . . and
    perhaps you do, Mister Moore, perhaps you do. But you
    don't know what it is that the Reaches cost. Take the
    money. I'll give you three hundred Mapleleaf dollars for
    this night's work."
     The big man paced himself to walk along the bridge
    beside me. The walkway was barely wide enough for two,
    but Gregg held Macquerie out to the side where the tube's
    bulge provided room.
     "I'm not afraid," I said. I was terribly afraid. The per-
    sonnel bridge quivered sickeningly underfoot, and the air
    that filled it was a foretaste of Hell. "I'm a gentleman of
    Venus. I'll willing to take risks to liberate the outworlds
    from President Pleyal's tyranny!"
     The effect of my words was like triggering a detonator.
    Stephen Gregg turned fast and gripped me by the throat
    with his free left hand. He lifted me and slammed me
    against the side of the bridge.
     "I wasn't much for social graces even before I shipped
    out to the Reaches for the first time," Gregg said softly.,
    "And I never liked worms."
       The wall of the bridge seared my back through the
    clothing. The spiral of reinforcing fiber felt like a hite
    slash against the general scarlet pain.
       Macquerie, somnolent from the drugged liquor, dangled
    limply from Gregg's right arm. "Now," Gregg said in the
    same quiet, terrible voice. "This expedition is important
    to my friend Piet, do you understand? Perhaps to Venus,
    perhaps to mankind, perhaps to God-but certainly to my
    friend."
      I nodded. I wasn't sure I could speak. Gregg wasn't
    deliberately choking me, but the grip required to keep my
    feet above the walkway also cut off most of my air.
      "I don't especially want to kill you right now," Gregg
    continued. "But I certainly feel no need to let you live.
    Why do you insist on coming with us, Mister Moore?"
     "You can let me down now," I croaked.
     The words were an inaudible rasp. Gregg either read my
    lips or took the meaning from my expression. He lowered
    me to the walkway and released me.
    I shrugged my shoulders. I didn't reach up to rub my
    throat. I am a gentleman!
    "I-" I said. I paused, not because I was afraid to go
    on, but because I'd never articulated the reason driving
    me. Not even to myself, in the dead of night.
    "I have a talent for electronics," I continued. I fought
    the need to blink, lest Gregg think I was afraid to meet
    his gaze. "I couldn't work at that, of course. Only arti-
    sans work with their hands. And there was no money; the
    Moores have never really had money."
       "Go on," Gregg said. He wiped the palm of his left hand
    on the breast of his tunic.
    "So I've had to find ways to live," I continued, "and I've
    done so. Mostly women. And the problem with that is that
    when I found a woman I really cared about-there was no
    place the relationship could go except the way they've all
    gone, to bed and then nowhere. Because there's no me!
    Doesn't that make you want to laugh, Mister Gregg?"
       "I'm not judging you, Moore," Gregg said. He shifted
    Macquerie, not for his own comfort but for that of the
    snoring captain. Gregg's effortless strength would have
    been the most striking thing about him, were it not for
    his eyes.
      "I'm twenty-seven," I said. My bitterness surprised me.
    "I want to put myself in a place where I have to play the
    man. I pretended it was the money that was pulling me,
    but that was a lie. A lie for myself."
       "Let's walk on," Gregg said, suiting his action to his
    words. "The air in this tube isn't the worst I've breathed,
    but that's not a reason to hang around out here either."
    I managed a half smile as I fell into step beside the
    bigger man. Now I massaged the bruises on my throat.
    "You don't have to play the man when you're out beyond
    Pluto, Moore," Gregg said reflectively. "You can become a
    beast-or die. Plenty do. But if you're detennined to come,
    I won't stop you."
        He looked over his shoulder at me. His expression could
    be called a smile. "Besides, you might be useful."
     
      The Porcelain's airlock was directly ahead of us. I
    dropped back a step to let Gregg open the hatch.
    I thought about the cold emptiness of Stephen Gregg's
    eyes. I had an idea now what Gregg meant when he spoke
    of what the Reaches cost.
 
    VENUS ORBIT
    
    Day 1
    
    I'd never been weightless before. My stomach was already
    queasy from the shaking the Porcelain took from the 500
    kph winds of the upper Venerian atmosphere. I hadn't
    eaten since early the night before, but I wasn't sure that
    would keep me from spewing yellow bile across the men
    working nonchalantly around me.
     I clung to the tubular railing around the attitude-control
    console. The starship's three navigational consoles were in
    the extreme bow; the heavy plasma cannon was shipped
    in traveling position between the consoles and the attitude
    controls.
     Guillermo was at the right-hand console. Ricimer,
    Hawtry, and the vessel's navigator, Salomon, stood behind
    the Molt, discussing the course.
     "We need to blood the force, blood it," Hawtry said.
    He was the only member of the group speaking loudly
    enough for me to hear.
     Hawtry wore a rubidium-plated revolver and the silver
    brassard which identified him as an officer in the Gover-
    nor's Squadron. He had at least enough naval experience
    to keep his place without clutching desperately at a support
    the way I did.
     A sailor carrying a tool kit slid along the axis of the ship,
    dabbing effortlessly at stanchions for control. "Careful,
    sir!" he warned in a bored voice before he batted my
    legs-which had drifted upward--out of his way.
     Because the sailor balanced his motion by swinging the
    heavy tools, his course didn't change. My feet hit the shell
    locker and rebounded in a wild arc.
    
     Stephen Gregg stood in the center of the three-faced
    attitude-control console. He reached out a long arm over
    Lightbody, reading placidly in one of the bays, caught my
    ankle, and tugged. I released my own grip and thumped
    to the deck beside Gregg.
     Gregg's right boot was thrust under one of three 20-cm
    staples in the deck. I hooked my toes through both of the
    others. My hands hurt from the force with which I'd been
    holding on since liftoff. ,
     "Want to go home now, Moore?" Gregg asked dryly.
     "Would it matter if I did?" I said. The spacer who'd
    pushed past me was working on the Long Tom's traversing
    mechanism. A hydraulic fitting spit tiny iridescent drops
    which would shortly settle and spread over the Porcelain's
    inner bulkheads.
     "Not in the least," said Gregg. His voice was calm, but
    his head turned as he spoke and his gaze rippled across
    everything, everything in his field of view.
     "Then I'm happy where I am," I said. I glanced, then
    stared, at the controls around me. "These are fully
    automated units," I said in surprise. "Is that normal?"
     "It will be," Gregg said, "if Piet has his way-and if
    we start bringing back enough chips from the outworlds
    to make the price more attractive than paying sailors to
    do the work."
     "What we should be doing," I said bitterly, "is setting
    up large-scale microchip production ourselves."
     Gregg looked at me. "Perhaps," he said. "But that's a
    long-term proposition. For now it's cheaper to use the
    stockpiles-and the operating factories, there are some-
    on the outworlds. And it's important that men return to
    the stars, too, Piet thinks."
     In a normal starship installation, there was a three-man
    console for each band of attitude jets-up to six bands
    in a particularly large vessel. The crewmen fired the jets
    on command to change the ship's heading and attitude
    while the main thrusters, plasma motors, supplied power
    for propulsion.
     On the Porcelain, a separate artificial intelligence con-
    trolled the jets. The AI's direction was both faster and
    more subtle than that of even the best-trained crew-but
    spacers are conservative men, those who survive, and they
    tend to confuse purpose-built attitude AIs with attitude
    control through the main navigational unit.
       The latter could be rough because the equipment wasn't
    configured for the purpose. Even so, I believed machine
    control was better nine times out of ten than anything
    humans could manage.
        "You do know something about electronics, then,"
    Gregg said, though he wasn't looking at me when he
    spoke.
    "Do people often lie to you?" I snapped.
    "Not often, no," the bigger man agreed, unperturbed.
    "Usually there's an officer to command each control
    bank," Gregg continued mildly. "Here, I'm just to keep
    the crew from being bothered by-gentlemen who feel a
    need to give orders. Lightbody, Jeude, Dole."
       The sailors looked up as Gregg called their names.
    "Dole's our bosun," Gregg said. "These three have been
    with Piet since before I met him, when he had a little
    intrasystem trader. He put them on the controls because
    they can be trusted not to get in the way of the elec-
    tronics."
      Jeude, a baby-faced man (and he certainly wasn't very
    old to begin with), wore a blue-and-white striped stocking
    cap. He doffed it in an ironic salute.
      "Boys, meet Mister Jeremy Moore," Gregg went on. "I
    think you'll find him a resourceful gentleman."
       "A friend of yours, Mister Gregg?" Jeude asked.
    Gregg snorted. Instead of answering the question, he
    said, "Do you have any friends, Moore?"
       "A few women, I suppose," I said. "Not like he means, no."
    My guts no longer roiled, but they'd knotted themselves
    tightly in my lower abdomen. I focused my eyes on the
    viewscreen above the navigational console. Half the field
    was bright with stars, two of which were circled with
    blue overlays. A three-quarter view of Venus, opalescent
    with the dense, bubbling atmosphere, filled the rest of the
    screen.
    
     "That's a very high resolution unit," I said aloud. "I'm
    amazed at the clarity."
     "Piet doesn't skimp on the tools he needs," Gregg said
    "It's a perfect view of the hell that wraps the world that
    bore us, that's certainly true."
     He paused, staring at the lustrous, lethal surface 
    gas. "Does your family have records from the Collapse,
    Moore?" he asked.
     "No," I said, "no. My grandfather sold the factory nine
    years ago and moved to Ishtar City. If there were any
    records, they were lost then."
     "My family does," Gregg said. "The histories say it was
    the atmosphere that protected Venus during the Revolt, you
    know. Outworld raiders knew that our defenses wouldn't
    stop them, but they couldn't escape our winds. The Hadley
    Cells take control from any unfamiliar pilot and, fling a
    ship as apt as not into the ground. The raiders learned
    hit softer targets that only men protected."
     "Isn't it true, then?" I said, responding to the bitterness
    in Gregg's voice. "That's how I'd already heard it."
     "Oh, the atmosphere saved us from the rebels, that bit
    was true," Gregg said. "But when the histories go 
    'Many died because off-planet trade was disrupted...'
    That's not the same as reading your own ancestors' chron-
    cle of those days. Venus produced twenty percent of her
    own food before'the Collapse. Afterwards, well, the food
    supply couldn't expand that fast, so the population
    dropped. Since the distribution system was disrupted,
    the drop was closer to nine in ten than eight in ten."
     "We're past that now," I said. "That was a thousand
    years ago. A thousand Earth years."
     A third spark in a blue highlight snapped into place
    the star chart. "The Kinsolving," said Dole, ostensibly
    the sailors to either side of him at the console. "And about
    fucking time."
     Lightbody sniffed.
     Piet Ricinier raised a handset and began speaking in
    it, his eyes fixed on a separate navigational tank bent on
    the viewscreen.                I
     "Bet they just now got around to turning on their locator
    beacon," Jeude said. "Though they'll claim it was equip-
    ment failure."
    "Right," said Gregg, his eyes so fixedly on the pearly
    orb of Venus that they drew my gaze with them. "At Eryx,
    that's the family seat, there was a pilot hydroponics farm.
    They figured what the yield would support and drew lots
    for those who could enter the section of the factory where
    the farm was."
      Gregg's face lost all expression."The others . . ." he
    continued. "Some of the others tried to break into the farm
    and get their share of the food. My ancestor's younger
    brother led a team of volunteers that held off the mob
    as long as they could. When they were out of ammuni-
    tion, they checked the door seals and then blew the roof
    of their own tunnel open to the surface. That's what the
    atmosphere of Venus means to me."
      "It was worse on Earth," I said. "When the centralized
    production plants were disrupted,only one person in a
    thousand survived. There were billions of people on Earth
    before the Revolt, but they almost all died."
      Gregg rubbed his face hard with both hands, as if he
    were massaging life back into his features. He looked at
    me and smiled. "As you say, a thousand years," he said.
    "But in all that time,the Greggs of Eryx have always
    named the second son Stephen. In memory of the brother
    who didn't leave descendants."
     "That was the past," I said. "There's enough in the
    future to worry about."
     "You'll get along well with Piet," Gregg said. His voice
    was half-mocking, but only half "You're right, of course.
    I shouldn't think about the past the way I do."
      It occurred to me that Gregg wasn't only referring to
    the early history of Eryx Hold.
      The bisected viewscreen above Ricimer shivered into
    three parts, each the face of a ship's captain: Blakey of
    the Mizpah; Winter of the Kinsolving; and Moschelitz, the
    bovine man who oversaw Absalom 231's six crewmen and
    the automated systems.
      Blakey's features had a glassy, simplified sheen which
    I diagnosed as a result of the Mizpah's transmission being
    static-laden to the point of unintelligibility. The AI control-
    ling the Porcelain's first-rate electronics processed both
    the audio and visual portions of the signal into a false
    clarity. The image of Blakey's black-mustached face was
    in effect the icon of a virtual reality.
     Ricimer raised the handset again. Guillermo switched a
    setting on the control console. The Molt's wrists couldn't
    rotate, but each limb had two more offset joints than a
    human's, permitting the alien the same range of move-
    ment.
     "Gentlemen," Ricimer said. "Fellow venturers. You're
    all brave men, or you wouldn't have joined me, and all
    God-fearing and patriots or I wouldn't have chosen you."
     The general commander's words boomed through the
    tannoy in the ceiling above the attitude-control console;
    muted echoes rustled through the open hatchways to com-
    partments farther aft. No doubt the transmission was being
    piped through the other vessels as well, though I wondered
    whether anybody aboard the Mizpah would be able to
    understand the words over the static.
     "I regret," Ricimer continued, "that I could not tell you
    all our real destination before we lifted off, though I don't"
    suppose many of you-or many of President Pleyal's
    spies-will have thought we were setting out for the
    asteroids. The first stop on our mission to free Venus
    and mankind from Federation tyranny will be Decades."
     "We'll make men out of you there!" Hawtry said in
    guttural glee. The pickup on Ricimer's handset was either
    highly directional or keyed to his voice alone. Not a whis-
    per of Hawtry's words was broadcast.
     "A Fed watering station six days out," Jeude said, whisper-
    ing to me. As an obvious landsman, I was a perfect recipi-
    ent for the sort of information that every specialist loves
    to retail.
     "They wouldn't need a landfall so close if their ship
    were better found," Dole put in. "Fed ships leak like
    sieves."
     On the screen, Captain Winter's lips formed an angry
    protest which I thought contained the word "piracy?"

    This was Ricimer's moment; the equipment Guillermo
    controlled brooked no interruption. Blakey tugged at his
    mustache worriedly-he looked to be a man who would
    worry about the color of his socks in the morning-while
    Moschelitz couldn't have been more stolid in his sleep.
    "Our endeavors, with the help of the Lord," Ricimer
    continued, "will decide the fate of Venus and of man-
    kind." He seemed to grow as he spoke, or-it was as
    if Piet Ricimer were the only spot of color in existence.
    His enthusiasm, his belief, turned everything around him
    gray.
       "We must be resolute," he said. His eyes swept those
    of us watching him in the flagship's bow compartment,
    but the faces on the viewscreen also stiffened. Though his
    back was toward the images, Ricimer was looking straight
    into the camera feeding his transmission.
      "I expect the company of every vessel in the expedition
    to serve God once a day with its prayers," Ricimer said.
    "Love one another: we are few against the might of tyr-
    anny. Preserve your supplies, and make all efforts to keep
    the squadron together throughout the voyage."
       The general commander stared out at his dream for a
    future in which mankind populated all the universe under
    God. Even Thomas Hawtry looked muted by the blazing
    personality of the man beside whom he stood.
  
    ABOVE DECADES
    
    Day 7
    
    The Porcelain made nineteen individual transits in the
    final approach series; that is, she slipped nineteen times
    in rapid succession from the sidereal universe to another
    bubble of sponge space and back.
       At each transit, as during every transit of the past sev-
    en days, my stomach knotted and flapped inside out. I
    clung to the staple in the attitude-control station, holding
    a sponge across my open mouth and wishing I were dead.
    Or perhaps I was dead, and this was the Hell to which so
    many people over the years had consigned me ...
    "Oh, God," I moaned into the sponge. My eyes were
    shut. "Oh, God, please save me." I hadn't prayed in
    real earnest since the night I found myself trapped in
    Melinda's room.
       The transit series ended. Only the vibration of the ves-
    sel's plasma motors maintaining a normal I-g acceleration
    indicated that I wasn't standing on solid ground. I opened
    my eyes.
       A planet, gray beneath a cloud-streaked atmosphere,
    filled the forward viewscreen. "Most times the Feds've
    got women on the staff," Jeude was saying as he and his
    fellows at the console eyed Decades for the first time.
    "And they aren't all of them that hostile."
       I released the staple I was holding and rose to my feet.
    I smiled ruefully at Gregg and said, "I'll get used to it, I
    suppose."
       Gregg's mouth quirked. "For your sake I hope so," he
    said. "But I haven't, and I've been doing this for some
    years now."
    
    Besides the ship's officers, the forward compart
    ment was crowded by Hawtry and the nine gentlemen
    adventurers who, like him, stood fully equipped with
    firearms and body armor.
    The ceramic chestplates added considerably to the
    men's bulk and awkwardness. Many of them had per
    sonal blazons painted on their armor. Hawtry's own
    chestplate bore a gryphon, the marking of his house,
    and on the upper right clamp the oriflamme of the
    Duneens.
    s"Now that's navigation!" said Captain-former cap-
    tain-Macquerie with enthusiasm. "We can orbit without
    needing to transit again."
    It had taken Macquerie a few days to come to terms
    with his situation, but since then he'd been an asset to the
    project. Macquerie was too good a sailor not to be pleased
    with a ship as fine as the Porcelain and a commander as
    famous as Piet Ricimer.
    
    "The Kinsolving's nowhere to be seen," said Salomon
    as he leaned toward the three-dimensional navigation tank.
    "As usual. The Mizpah can keep station, the cargo hulk
    can keep station, more or less. Winter couldn't find his
    ass with both hands."
    "There they are," Ricimer said mildly. He pointed to
    something in the tank that I couldn't see from where I
    stood. It probably wouldn't have meant anything to me
    anyway. "One, maybe two transits out. It's my fault for
    not making sure the Kinsolving's equipment was calibrated
    to the same standards as the rest of ours."
       "If the Absalom can keep station," Salomon muttered,
    "so could the Kinsolving-if she had a navigator aboard."
    
    "Enough of this nonsense," said Thomas Hawtry. Several
    of the gentlemen about him looked as green as I felt, but
    Hawtry was clearly unaffected by the multiple eversions
    of transit. "We don't need a third vessel anyway. Lay us
    alongside the Mizpah, Ricimer, so that I can go aboard
    me and take charge."
    Guillermo looked up from his console. "The cutter
    should be launched in the next three minutes," he said to
    Ricimer in his mechanically perfect speech. "Otherwise
    we'll need to brake now rather than proceeding directly
    into planetary orbit."
     "You'd best get aft to Hold Two, Mister Hawtry,"
    Ricimer said. If he'd reacted to the gentleman's peremp-
    tory tone, there was no sign of it in his voice. "The cutter
    is standing by with two men to ferry you."
     Hawtry grunted. "Come along, men," he ordered as he
    led his fellows shuffling sternward. Watching the sicker-
    looking of the gentlemen helped to settle my stomach.
     "Sure you don't want to go with them?" Gregg said
    archly, "When they transfer to the Mizpah, there won't
    be any proper gentlemen aboard. Just spacers."
     "I'm a proper gentleman," I snapped. "I just have little
    interest in weapons and no training whatever with their use.
    If you please, I'll stay close to you and Mister Ricimer
    and do what you direct me."
     "Mister Hawtry?" Ricimer called as the last of Hawtry's
    contingent were ducking through the hatchway to the ce
    tral compartment. "Please remember: there'll be no fighting
    if things go as they should. We'll simply march on the berg
    from opposite directions and summon them to surrender.
     Hawtry's response was a muted grunt.
     Salomon and Macquerie lowered their heads over the
    navigation tank and murmured to one another. The Molt
    Guillermo touched a control. His viewscreen split again;
    the right half retaining the orb of Decades, three-quarters
    in sunlight, while the left jumped by logarithmic magni-
    fications down onto the planetary surface.
     A fenced rectangle enclosed a mixture of green foliage
    and soil baked to brick by the exhaust of starships.
    In close-up, the natural vegetation beyond the perimeter
    had the iridescence of oil on water.
     There were two ships with bright metal hulls in the
    landing area, and a scatter of buildings against the opposing
    fence. The morning sun slanted across the Federation's flag.
    Obvious gun towers threw stark, black shadows from
    corners and from the center of both long sides.
     I licked my lips. I didn't know what I was sure
    to do. The Porcelain shuddered like a dog drying itself.
    Lights on the attitude-control panels pulsed in near time,
    balancing the shock. The three sailors looked alert but not
    concerned.
      "That's the cutter with Hawtry aboard casting off,"
    Gregg said. He glanced at the bosun. "How long before
    we begin atmospheric braking, Dole?" he asked.
    
        Dole, a stocky, dark man with a beard trimmed to three
    centimeters, pursed his lips as he considered the images
    on the viewscreen. "About two hours, sir," he said.
    Jeude, beside him, nodded agreement. "We could go
    into orbit quicker," he said, "but it'll take them that long to
    transfer the fine gentlemen to the Mizpah-good riddance
    to them."
       "Watch your tongue, Aaron Jeude," the bosun said.
    
    Jeude's smile flashed toward Gregg, taking in me beside
    the bigger man as well.
       "What do we do, Gregg?" I asked. My voice was col-
    orless because of my effort to conceal my fear of the
    unfamiliar.
       "We wait," Gregg said. "Ten minutes before landing,
    we'll put our equipment on. And then we'll march a klick
    through what Macquerie says is swamp, even on the rela-
    tive highlands where the Feds built their base."
      "I don't have any equipment," I said. "If you mean
    weapons."
      "We'll find you something," Gregg said. "Never fear."
    He spoke quietly, but there was a disconcerting lilt to
    his tone.
      Six sailors under Stampfer, the Porcelain's master gun-
    ner, bustled around the Long Tom, opening hydraulic
    valves and locking down the seats attached to the carriage.
    They were readying the big weapon for action.
      "Will there be fighting, then, Gregg?" I asked, sounding
    even to myself as cool as the sweat trickling down the
    middle of my back.
    "At Decades, I don't know," Gregg said. "Not if they
    have any sense. But before this voyage is over-yes, Mis-
    ter Moore. There will be war."
     
      The Porcelain's two cargo holds were on the underside of
    the vessel, bracketed between the pairs of plasma motors
    fore and aft, and the quartet of similar thrusters amidships.
    Number Two, the after hold, had been half-emptied when
    the cutter launched. Now it was filled by a party of twenty
    men waiting for action, and it stank.
     "You bloody toad, Easton!" a sailor said to the man
    beside, him. "That warn't no fart. You've shit yourself!"
     My nose agreed. Several of the men had vomited from
    tension and atmospheric buffeting as the ship descended
    and we were all of us pretty ripe after a week on shipboard.
    I clutched the cutting bar Gregg had handed me from the
    arms locker and hoped that I wouldn't be the next to spew
    my guts up.
     The Porcelain's descent slowed to a near-hover. The
    rapid pulsing of her motors doubled into a roar. "Surface
    effect!" Gregg said. "Thrust reflected from the ground.
    We'll be touching down-"
     The big gentleman wore back-and-breast armor-the
    torso of a hard suit that doubled as protection from vacuum
    and lethal atmospheres-with the helmet locked in plac
    though his visor was raised for the moment. In his arm
    was a flashgun, a cassegrain laser which would pulse the
    entire wattage of the battery in its stock out through a
    stubby ceramic barrel. Gregg was shouting, but I needed
    cues from his mouth to make out the words.
     The last word was probably "soon," but it was drowned
    in still greater cacophony. The starship touched its port
    outrigger, hesitated, and settled fully to the ground with
    a crash of parts reaching equilibrium with gravity instead
    of thrust.
     I relaxed. "Now what?" I asked.
     "We wait a few minutes for the ground to cool," Gregg
    explained. "There was standing water, so the heat ought
    to dissipate pretty quickly. Sufficient heat."
     It seemed like ten minutes but was probably two before
    a sailor spun the undogging controls at a nod from Gregg.
    The hatch, a section of hull the full length of Hold Two,
    cammed downward to form a ramp. Through the opening
    rushed wan sunshine and a gush of steam evaporated from
    the soil by the plasma motors.
     It was the first time I'd been on a planet besides Venus.

    "Let's go!" boomed Stephen Gregg in the sudden damp-
    ening of the hold's echoes. He strode down the ramp,
    a massive figure in his armor."Keep close, but form a
    cordon at the edge of the cleared area."
    I tried to stay near Gregg, but a dozen sailors elbowed
    me aside to exit from the center of the ramp. I realized
    why when I followed them. Though the hatchway was a
    full ten meterswide, the starship's plasma motors had
    raised the ground beneath to oven heat. The center of the
    ramp, farthest from where the exhaust of stripped ions
    struck, was the least uncomfortable place to depart the
    recently-landed vessel.
    I stumbled on the lip at the end of the ramp. The sur-
    roundings steamed like a suburb of Sheol, and the seared
    native vegetation gave off a bitter reek.
      The foliage beyond the exhaust-burned area was tissue
    thin and stiffened with vesicles of gas rather than cellulose.
    The veins were of saturated color, with reds, blues, and pur-
    ples predominating. Those hues merged with the general
    pale yellow of leaf surfaces to create the appearance of
    gray when viewed from a distance.
       I wore a neck scarf. I put it to my mouth and breathed
    through it. It probably didn't filter any of the sharp poisons
    from the air, but at least it gave me the illusion that I was
    doing something useful.
       Sailors clumped together at the margin of the ravaged
    zone instead of spreading out. The forward ramp was low
    ered also, but men were filtering slowly down it because
    Hold One was still packed with supplies and equipment.
    "Stephen," called the man stepping from the forward
    ramp. "I'll take the lead, if you'll make sure that no one
    straggles from the rear of the line."
       The speaker wore brilliant, gilded body armor over a
    tunic with puffed magenta sleeves.The receiver of his
    repeating rifle was also gold-washed.Because the garb
    was unfamiliar and the man's face was in shadow, it was
    by his voice that I identified him as Piet Ricimer.
      Gregg broke off in the middle of an order to a pair of
    grizzled sailors. "Piet, you're not to do this!" he said. "We
    talked-"
    
      "You talked, Stephen," Ricimer interrupted with the
    crisp tone of the man who was general commander of
    the expedition. "I said I'd decide when the time came.
    Shall we proceed?"
      Forty-odd men of the Porcelain's complement of eighty
    now milled in the burned-off area. About seventy-five
    percent of us had firearms. Most of the rest carried cut-
    ting bars like mine, but there were two flashguns besides
    Gregg's own. Flashguns were heavy, unpleasant to shoot
    because they scattered actinics, and were certain to attract
    enemy fire. I found it instructive that Stephen Gregg would
    carry such a weapon.
       The sky over the Federation base to the south suddenly
    rippled with spaced rainbow flashes. Four seconds later
    the rumble of plasma cannon discharging shook the sward
    about the Porcelain.
       A ship that must have been the Mizpah dropped out of
    the sky. The sun-hot blaze of her thrusters was varied
    by the ionized glow of their exhaust. Plasma drifted around
    and back from the vessel like the train of a lady in
    dress.
      "The stupid whoreson!" said Stephen Gregg. "They were
    to land together with us, not five minutes later!"
    Ricimer jumped quickly to the ground and trotted
    toward Gregg. "Stephen," he said, "you'd best keep
    me in the lead. I think it's more important that we
    reach the base as quickly as possible than the
    whole body arrives together. I'm very much worried
    that Blakey is trying to land directly on the
    Federation field."
       As the Mizpah lurched downward at a rate much faster
    than that of the Porcelain before her, a throbbing intense
    yellow light from the ground licked her lower hull.
    where I jogged along a step behind Ricimer and Gregg,
    the starship was barely in sight above the low vegetation,
    but she must have been fifty or more meters altitude above
    ground.
       The plume of exhaust dissipated in a shock wave.
    Seconds later, we could hear a report duller than the
    Mizpah's cannon but equally loud.
    
      Ricimer held a gyro compass in his left hand. "This
    way," he directed. Twenty meters into the forest, the Por-
    celain was out of sight.
       "The bloody whoreson!" Gregg repeated as he jogged
    along beside his friend and leader.
       "How.." I said. My voice was a croaking whisper. I
    couldn't see for sweat between the angry passes I made
    across my eyes with my sopping kerchief.
    " . . . do you stand this?" I finished, concluding on a
    rising note that suggested panic even to me. I deliber-
    ately lowered my voice to add, "You're wearing armor,
    I mean."
       Piet Ricimer squeezed my shoulder. Ricimer's face was
    red, and the sleeves of his gorgeous tunic were as wet as
    my kerchief. "You'll harden to it, Moore," he said. He
    spoke in gasps. "A kilometer isn't far. Once you're used
    to, you know. It."
      "The men won't follow. . ." Gregg said. He was a pace
    ahead of us, setting the trail through the flimsy, clinging
    vegetation. He didn't look back over his shoulder as he
    spoke. "Unless the leaders lead. So we have to."
        "A little to the right, Stephen," Ricimer wheezed. "I think
    we're drifting." Then in near anger he added, "Macquerie
    says the base was set on the firmest ground of the continent.
    What must the rest be like?"
       Each of my boots carried what felt like ten kilos of
    mud. The hilt of the cutting bar had a textured surface,
    but despite that the weapon kept trying to slide out of my

    grip. I was sure that if I had to use the bar, it would squirt
    into the hands of my opponent.
       The assault force straggled behind the three of us. How
    far behind was anybody's guess. About a dozen crewmen,
    laden with weapons and bandoliers of ammunition, slogged
    along immediately in back of me. They were making heavy
    going of it. The mud had stilled their initial chatter, but they
    were obviously determined to keep up or die.
       Three of the spacers were the regular watch from the
    attitude-control consoles. I suspected the others were
    among Ricimer's long-time followers also. With their
    share of the wealth from previous voyages, why in God's
    name were they undergoing this punishment and danger?
     And why had Jeremy Moore made the same choice?
    The day before sailing, Eloise had made it clear that there
    was a permanent place for me. On her terms, of course,
    but they weren't such terrible terms.
     The only thing that kept me up with the leaders was that
    I was with the leaders. I was with two undeniable heroes-
    staggering along, but present.
     "If she'd really crashed," Ricimer said, "we'd have-
    she'd shake the ground. The Mizpah."
     "Fired off all ten guns descending," Gregg muttered.
    There was a streak of blood on his right hand and forearm,
    and his sleeve was ripped. "Means they landed with them
    empty. Feds may be cutting all their throats before we
    come up. Stupid whoresons."
     Then, in a coldly calm voice, he added, "Stop here.
    We've reached it."
     I knelt at the base of a spray of huge, rubbery leaves.
    My knees sank into the muck, but I didn't think I could've
    remained upright without the effort of walking to steady
    me. Ricimer halted with his left hand on Gregg's shoulder-
    blade. Sailors, puffing and blowing as though they were
    coming up after deep dives, spread out to either side of
    the trail we had blazed.
     The native vegetation had been burned away from
    a hundred-meter band surrounding the Federation base.
    Water gleamed in pools and sluggish rivulets across the
    scabrous wasteland. The natural landscape was inhuman
    and oppressive; this defensive barrier was worse.
       The perimeter fence was of loose mesh four meters high.
    Judging from the insulators the fence was electrified.
    It didn't provide visual screening. Trees heavy with citrus
    fruit grew within the enclosure.
     In the center of the fenceline were a gate and a guard
    tower, at present unoccupied. Two men were heading
    toward the tower up a lane through the trees. Both
    were laughing; one carried a bottle. Both strolling
    guards had rifles slung.
       Gregg aimed his flashgun from the concealment of a
    plantainlike growth with blue leaves the size of blankets.
    "Wait, Stephen," Ricimer ordered. He took off his gilt-
    braided beret, wiped his face in the crook of his arm,
    and put the beret on again. "Mister Sahagun!" he called,
    stepping out into the cleared area. "Mister Coos!"
      At the words, I recognized the pair as two of the gentle-
    men who'd transferred to the Mizpah. They'd taken off
    their heavy armor. I'd thought they were Federation sol-
    diers whose bullets might kill me in the next seconds.
      Sahagun groped in startlement for his slung weapon
    before he recognized the speaker. "Ricimer, is that you?"
    he called. "Say, we're supposed to bring you in, but I just
    see that this bloody gate is locked. We'll-"
       Gregg had shifted infinitesimally when Sahagun touched
    his rifle. Now he moved an equally slight amount. His
    flashgun fired, a pulse of light so intense that the native fo-
    liage wilted from the side-scatter. Great leaves sagged away,
    fluttering in the echoes of the laser's miniature thunder.
       I tried to jump to my feet. I slipped and would have
    fallen except that a sailor I didn't know by name caught
    my arm.
       The bolt hit the crossbar where it intersected the left
    gatepost. Metal exploded in radiant fireballs which trailed
    smoke as they arced away. Coos and Sahagun fell flat on
    ground as wet as that through which we'd been tramping.
       "That's all right," Gregg called as he switched the bat-
    tery in his weapon's stock for a fresh one. As with his
    friend and leader, there was no hint of exhaustion in his
    voice now. "We'll open it ourselves."
      "I think," said Piet Ricimer softly, "that we'll wait till
    our whole force has come up before any of us enter the
    base."
      There was nothing menacing in his words or tone, but
    I felt myself shiver.
    "Ah, glad you've made it, Ricirner," said Thomas Hawtry

    as he rose from the porch of the operations building.
    A score of men stood about him. Many of them were
    frightened-looking and dressed in tags of white Federation 
    uniforms. "I've got some very valuable information here,
    very valuable!"
     Hawtry spoke with an enthusiasm that showed he under-
    stood how chancy the next moments were likely to be. Like
    the others of the Mizpah's gentlemen, he'd put aside his
    breastplate and rifle.
     "In a moment, Mister Hawtry," said Piet Ricimer. He
    wiped his face again with his sleeve. "Captain Blakey.
    Present yourself at once!"
     The Mizpah had come down within a hundred and fifty
    meters of the administration buildings and base housing,
    blowing sod and shrubbery out in a shallow crater. The
    multitube laser that slashed the descending vessel from a
    guard tower had shattered a port thruster nozzle.
     Yawing into the start of a tumble, the Mizpah had struck
    hard. The port outrigger fractured, though the vessel's hull:
    appeared undamaged. Our men and Molts from the base
    labor force now surveyed the damage.
     I bubbled with relief at having gotten this far. Clouds
    scudded across the pale sky. It felt odd to know that there
    was no solid roof above, but it didn't bother me the way'
    I'd been warned it might.
     I wondered where I could find a hose to clean my boots...
    I glanced down. My legs. They were covered in mud from
    mid-thigh.
     Blakey broke away from the group beside the Mizpah,
    and trotted toward Ricimer. The Mizpah's plasma cannon
    were still run out through the horizontal bank of gunports.
    To fire paired broadsides into the Federation base as the
    ship descended, Blakey must have rolled the Mizpah on
    her axis, then counter-rolled.
     "There's a treasure right here on Decades," Hawtry said,
    pretending that he didn't realize he was being ignored,
    "and I've located it. The Feds here are too cowardly to
    grab it up themselves!" 
     A freighter was docked at the far edge of the perimeter,
    nearly a kilometer from the administration building.
    The ship had taken much of the Mizpah gunners'attention.
    One blast of charged particles had struck her hull,
    vaporizing a huge hole.- The shock of exploding metal
    dished in the light-metal hull for half its length and set
    fire to the vessel's interior. Dirty smoke billowed from
    the wreck and drifted through the nearby fenceline.
      I couldn't imagine any purpose in shooting at the freight-
    er beyond a general desire to terrorize the defenders. In
    all likelihood, the Feds stationed here wouldn't have
    been aroused to defense except for the sudden blaze of
    cannonfire.

       Blakey whipped off the broad-brimmed hat which he,
    like many experienced Venerian travelers, wore under an
    open sky. "Mister Ricimer," he blurted, "I didn't have any
    choice. It was Mister Hawtry who-"
      "May I remind you that I gave you specific direction
    to land a kilometer north of the Federation compound,
    Captain Blakey?" Ricimer said in a knife-edged voice.
    "No one but the Lord God Almighty takes precedence to
    the orders I give on this expedition!"
      "No sir, no sir," Blakey mumbled, wringing his hat up
    in a tight double roll. The spacer's hair was solidly dark,
    but there was a salting of white hair in his beard and
    mustache.
       "Now, wait a minute, Ricimer," Hawtry said. He
    remained on the porch, ten meters away. The Feder-
    ation personnel about him were easing away, leaving the
    gentlemen exposed like spines of basalt weathered out of
    softer stone.
       "The Mizpah's condition?" Ricimer snapped.
    "We'll jack up the port side to repair the outrigger,"
    Blakey said. He grimaced at his crumpled hat. "Then we'll
    switch the thruster nozzle, we've spares aboard, it's no-"
    "You lost only one thruster?" Ricimer demanded, his
    tongue sharp as the blade of a microtome.
    "Well, maybe shock cooling from the soil took another,"
    Blakey admitted miserably. "We won't know till we get
    her up, but it's no more than three days' work with the
    locals to help."
       I noticed that one of the Federation personnel was a
    petite woman who'd cropped her brunette hair short. She
    nervously watched the byplay among her captors, gripping
    her opposite shoulders with her well-formed hands.
       I wondered if we'd be on Decades longer than thi
    days. Although a great deal could happen in three day
    "Look here, Ricimer! " boomed Hawtry as he stepped
    the porch in a determination to use bluster where camara-
    derie had failed. "The Molts that have escaped from here,
    they loot the ships that crash into the swamps. There
    been hundreds, over the years, and the Molts have
    the treasure cached in one place. That's the real value of
    Decades!"
      Ricimer turned his head to look at Hawtry. I couldn't
    see his eyes, but the six gentlemen stepping from the porch
    to follow lurched to a halt.
     "The real value of Decades, Mister Hawtry," Ricimer
    said in a tone without overt emotion, "was to be the task of
    taking it gave our personnel in discipline and obedience to
    orders."
      Ricimer turned to the men who'd accompanied him
    the flagship. "Dole," he said mildly, "find the communica-
    tions center here and inform the Absalom and Kinsolving
    to land within the perimeter. Oh-and see if you can raise
    Guillermo aboard the Porcelain to tell them that we have
    control of the base."
       "I'll go with him," I volunteered in a light voice.
    I'm good with electronics."
    "Yes," Ricimer said. "Do it."
    Dole didn't move. I started toward the administration
    building as an obvious place to look for the radios. Stephen
    Gregg laid a hand on the top of my shoulder. I was
    looking away from Ricimer and the gentlemen but then
    I stopped and swallowed.
      Ricimer swiveled back to the Mizpah's captain.
    Blakey," he said. "You'll leave repairs to the Mizpah in
    the charge of your navigator. You'll proceed immediately
    to the Porcelain, in company with Mister Hawtry and the
    other gentlemen adventurers who were aboard the Mizpah
    when you decided to ignore my orders."
         "Lord take you for a fool, Ricimer!" Hawtrys voice cracked.
    Do you think I'm going to rot in a swamp when-"
    Gregg locked down his helmet visor with a sharp motion.
    The flashgun's discharge was liable to blind anyone looking at
    it without filters to protect his eyes. Dole snicked the
    bolt of his rifle back far enough to check the load, then
    closed it again. Others of Ricimer's longtime crewmen
    stood braced with ready weapons. A cutting bar whined
    as somebody made sure it was in good order.
       "There'll be no blasphemy in a force under my com-
    mand, Mister Hawtry," Ricimer said. Though his voice
    seemed calm, his face was pale with anger. "This time I
    will overlook it; and we'll hope the Lord, Who is our only
    hope for the success of these endeavors, will overlook it
    as well."
       Hawtry stepped backward, chewing on his lower lip.
    He wasn't a coward, but the muzzle of Gregg's,weapon
    was only two meters from his chest. A bolt at that range
    would spray his torso over hectares of swamp.
       Ricimer's posture eased slightly. He reached into his
    belt pouch, handed Blakey the compass from it, and re-
    sumed. "You will find the Porcelain on a reciprocal of
    this course. Tell Mister Salomon that your party will
    guard the vessel until we're ready to depart. The crew will
    be more comfortable here at the base, I'm sure."
      Hawtry let out a long, shuddering breath. "We'll need
    men to deal with the menial work," he said.
      Ricimer nodded. "If you care to pay sailors extra to act
    as servants," he said, "that's between you and them."
    Hawtry glanced over his shoulder at the accompany-
    ing gentlemen. Without speaking further, the group sidled 0
    away in the direction of the Mizpah and the gear they'd
    left aboard her.
      Gregg opened his visor. His face had no expression.
    Dole plucked at my sleeve. "Let's get along and find
    the radio room, sir," the bosun said. "You know, I thought
    things were going to get interesting for a moment there."
    I tried to smile but couldn't. I supposed I should be
    thankful that I could walk normally.
 
                                DECADES
    
    Day 8
    
      I turned at the console to look out the window of the com-
    mo room. Halfway across the compound, male prisoners
    from the Decades garrison and the damaged freighter were
    unloading spoiled stores from the Absalom 231. With my
    left hand I picked a section from the half orange while my
    right fingers typed code into the numeric keypad.
      "That's it!" said Lavonne. She'd been Officer III (Com-
    munications) Cartier when Decades Station was under,
    Federation control. "You've got the signal, Jeremy!"
      "Thanks to you and this wonderful equipment," I added
    warmly, patting my hand toward Lavonne without quite
    touching her. I pursed my lips as I looked over the console
    display. "Now if only the Mizpah's hardware weren't a
    generation past the time it should've been scrapped . . ."
    The console showed the crew emptying the hulk, from
    the viewpoint of the port-side optical sensors in the Mizpah's J
    hull. Occasionally some of the Venerians and Molts replac- 
    ing the Mizpah's damaged thrusters came in sight at the
    lower edge of the display, oblivious of the fact they were
    being electronically observed. Because the Mizpah's sen-
    sors only updated the image six times a second, the picture
    was grainy and figures moved in jerks.
      Lavonne stripped the fascia from one of the
    sections I'd handed her, using her fingers and the tip of a
    small screwdriver. "Why, we could connect all the tower
    optics with this!" she said in pleased wonder. "Superin-
    tendent Burr keeps worrying that one day the Molts on
    guard will decide to let in the wild tribes from the swamp.
    But someone could watch what's going on in the towers
    from here."
       Several people came up the stairs from the lower level
    of the admin building, talking among themselves. I'd left
    the commo room's door ajar, though I'd made sure the
    panel could be locked if matters with Lavonne proceeded
    faster than I expected.
      "Ah-it's Molts that you're afraid of," I said, "and you
    use Molts for guards?"
      "Well, the ones who've been trained to work for humans
    are trustworthy, I suppose," the woman said defensively.
    "Freshly caught ones used to escape from the holding pens
    while the ships carrying them laid over here." 
       She bent past me to tap the screen where a corner of
    the inner compound was visible past the cargo hulk. Elec-
    trified wire surrounded thatch-roofed wooden racks. If it
    hadn't been for the voices in the hallway, I'd have taken
    up the offer implicit in Lavonne's posture.
      "That was years ago," she added, straightening. "They
    can't get out of the station now that the perimeter's fenced
    too."
      The door opened. Piet Ricimer stepped in, his head
    turned to catch Gregg's voice: "who on Duneen's
    staff was paid to load us with garbage in place of the
    first-quality stores we were charged for."
      I jumped to my feet, knocking my knees on the con-
    sole. Macquerie and Guillermo entered behind Ricimer
    and his aide. I'd learned to recognize Guillermo from the
    yellowish highlights of his chitin and his comparatively 
    narrow face. It was odd to think of the aliens as having
    personalities, though.
      "I've, ah, been connecting the squadron's optics through
    the console, here, Ricimer," I said. "Ah-save for the Por-
    celain; I'd have to be aboard her to set the handshake."
      I was nervous. What I'd done here had been at my own
    whim; and there was the matter of Lavonne, not that things
    there had come to fruition. Birth in a factorial family made
    me the social superior of the general commander, but I
    hadn't needed Hawtry's humiliation to teach me that the
    reality here was something else again.

     Ricimer glanced at the display. "From the Mizpah?"
    said. "I'm delighted, Moore."
     Gregg offered me a bleak grin over the general com-
    mander's shoulder. Lavonne, who'd moved toward a cor-
    ner when the command group entered, eyed the big man
    speculatively. There were things about women that I wou
    never understand.
     "I was surprised to find you aboard after we lifted of
    Ricimer commented. "Stephen explained, though; and I
    can see that you'd be an asset in any case." ,
     "I, ah, regret the inconvenience I've caused," I said and
    nodded to the pilot. I'd tried to avoid Macquerie thus
    during the voyage, but a starship was close confinement
    for all those aboard her. If there was going to be blood
    between us, best it happen under the eyes of Ricimer
    and more particularly Gregg.
     Macquerie smiled wryly. "My own fault not to wonder
    why somebody was buying me drinks, Mister Moore," he
    said. Unlike the others, Macquerie respected me for my
    birth. "Anyway, Captain Ricimer says he'll put me down
    on Os Sertoes with my in-laws."
     A white asterisk pulsed at the upper corner of the screen
    as Macquerie spoke. I noticed it from the corner of my
    eye. The icon might have been there for some while, but
    I didn't have any notion of what it meant.
     I opened my mouth to call a question to Lavonne. But as
    I spoke, Guillermo reached an oddly-jointed arm past me
    and touched a sequence of keys. Captain Blakey, his image
    streaked by static, snarled, "Come in, somebody, isn't
    anybody on watch on this God damned planet?"
     Piet Ricimer put his left hand on my shoulder, guiding
    me out of the way so that he could take over the comm.
    The general commander's grip was like iron. If I hesi-
    tated, he would have flung me across the radio room.
     "I'm here, Captain Blakey," Ricimer said.
     The static thinned visibly with each passing moment. I
    recognized the pattern. Thrusters expelled plasma,
    stripped of part or all of their electron charge. The ions
    radiated across the entire radio frequency spectrum and 
    harmonics as it reabsorbed electrons from the surrounding
    atmosphere. A thruster was firing in the vicinity of the
    Porcelain. 
      "Mister Hawtry's taken the cutter!" Blakey said. "He
    and the others, they're sure they know where Molt treasure
    is and they've gone off to get it. They have a map!"
     "Do you know where-" Ricimer began.
    
    Blakey cut him off. "I don't know where they're going,"
    he blurted. "I wouldn't go, sir, I refused! But they got two
    of the sailors to fly the cutter for them, and now there's
    nobody aboard the ship but me and the other four sailors
    they brought. I tried to stop them, but they wouldn't even
    let me to the radio to warn you, sir."
       "We can't call the cutter while its thruster's operating,"
    Gregg said. "Not that the damned fools would listen to
    us.
      "Outside of the plateau the station's on . . ." Captain
    Macquerie said grimly. "I know, you think it's a swamp, here,
    but it's the only solid ground on the continent. Five klicks
    in any direction from the station, it's soup. It maybe won't
    swallow them, but they'll play hell unclogging their noz-
    zles to lift off again."
      My face grew still as glass; my mind considered the
    capabilities of the console built to the standards of the
    chip-rich North American Federation. The cutter's motor
    created RF hash that would smother normal attempts at
    communication, but that meant the thruster itself was a
    signal generator.
      "The superintendent got the map years ago from an old
    drunk in the maintenance section," Lavonne volunteered.
    "He really believes it, Burr does. But even if it was real,
    it'd be suicide to go so far outside the base."
      I changed displays to a menu, then changed screens
    again. A jagged line drew itself across a display gridded
    with kilometer squares and compass points. "There's a
    range and vector," I said to the room in general. "I don't
    have terrain data to underlay."
      The track quivered into a tight half-circle and stopped.
    The thruster had been shut off. The terminus was a little
    over ten kilometers from the screen's reference point-
    the console itself.
      Ricimer nodded and said crisply to Guillermo, "Alarm?"
    The Molt entered a four-stroke command without both-
    ering to call up a menu. One of Guillermo's ancestors, per-
    haps more than a thousand years before, had been trained
    to use a console of similar design. That experience, geneti-
    cally imbedded, permitted the Molt to use equipment that
    he himself had never seen before. A four-throated horn in
    the roof of the admin building began to whoop Hoo-Hee
    Hoo-Hee!
     So long as men depended on Molts and pre-Collapse
    factories to provide their electronics, there would be no
    advance on the standards of that distant past. I was one
    of the few people---even on Venus-who believed there
    could be improvement on the designs of those bygone
    demigods.
     I reached between Ricimer and Guillermo to key a series
    of commands through the link I had added to the system
    The Kinsolving's siren and the klaxon on the Mizpah added
    their tones to the Fed hooter. Absalom 231 didn't have an
    alarm, or much of anything else.
     Ricimer flashed me a smile of appreciation and amuse-
    ment. Stephen Gregg's mouth quirked slightly also,
    the big gentleman's face was settling into planes of muscle
    over bone, and his eyes-
     I looked away.
     When Ricimer nodded to Guillermo, the Molt sent
    fresh commands into the console. The hooter and klaxon
    shut off, and the Kinsolving's siren began to wind
    down.
     "This is the general commander," Ricimer said. His
    voice boomed from the alarm horns; the tannoys and the
    three Venerian ships should be repeating the words as well.
    "All Porcelains report armed to the cargo hulk. Captain
    Winter, march your Kinsolvings at once to the field.
    Other personnel, guard the station here and await further
    orders."
     Ricimer rose from the console in a smooth motion and
    swept me with him toward the door. Gregg was in the front
    Guillermo and Macquerie bringing up the rear, Lavonne
    gaped at us. Her confusion was no greater than my own.

      "But the Absalom,Captain?" Macquerie said. "Surely..." 
    "The Mizpah can't lift, the Kinsolving with the feath
    erboats aboard won't hold but thirty or forty men," said
    Stephen Gregg in a voice as high and thin as a contrail
    in the stratosphere. His boots crashed on the stair treads.
    "The hulk's half empty. This is a job for troops, not can-
    non. If it's a job for anyone at all."
     "We can't abandon them, Stephen," Piet Ricimer said,
    snatching up his breastplate from the array in the build-
    ing's entrance hall.
    The others, all but the Molt, were grabbing their own
    arms and equipment. I supposed my cutting bar was some
    where in the hardware, but I didn ' t have any recollection of
    putting it in a particular place. Guillerino wore a holstered
    pistol on his pink sash, but the weapon was merely a
    symbol.
      "Can't we, Piet?" Gregg said as he settled the visored
    helmet over his head. "Well, it doesn't matter to me."
    I thought I understood the implications of Gregg's
    words; and if I did, they were as bleak and terrible as
    the big gunman's eyes.
    
      "Stand by!" Piet Ricimer called from the control bench of
    the Absalom 231.
    "Stand by!" Dole shouted through a bullhorn as he stood
    at the hatch in the cockpit/hold bulkhead. The bosun braced
    his boots and his free hand against the hatch coaming. A
    short rifle was slung across his back.
      Most of the eighty-odd spacers aboard the hulk were
    packed into the hold,standing beside or on the pallets
    of stores that hadn't yet been dumped. At least half the
    food we'd loaded at Betaport was moldy or contaminated.
    Fortunately, the warehouses at Decades were stocked in
    quantities to supply fleets of the 500-tonne vessels which
    carried the Federation's cargoes.
      I was crowded into the small crew cabin with about a
    dozen other men. I gripped the frame of the bunk folded
    against the bulkhead behind me. I had to hold the cutting
    bar between my knees, because its belt clip was broken.

     The hulk's thrusters lit at half throttle, three nozzles and
    then all four together. The moment of unbalanced thrust
    made the shoddy vessel lurch into a violent yaw which
    corrected as Ricimer's fingers moved on the controls.
     "If he hadn't shut off the autopilot," Jeude grumbled to
    my right, "the jets'd have switched on about quick enough
    to flip us like a pancake. Which is what we'd all be when
    this pig hit."
     "If he hadn't shut off the autopilot," said Lightbody to,
    my left, "he wouldn't be our Mister Ricimer. He'll get us
    out of this."
     The tone of the final sentence was more pious than
    optimistic.
     The Absalom 231 lifted from its bobbling hover and
    became fully airborne. The roar of the motors with
    the single-hulled vessel deafened me, but flight was much
    smoother than the liftoff had been.
     "Say, sir," Jeude said to me, "wouldn't you like a rifle
    sir? Or maybe a flashgun like your friend Mister Gregg
     "I've never fired a gun," I shouted in reply to the soli-
    tous spacer. Your friend Mister Gregg. Did Gregg and I
    have friends, either one of us?
     "I thought all you gentlemen trained for the militia"
    Lightbody said with a doubtful frown. He held a double-
    barreled shotgun, perhaps the one he'd had when guarding
    access to the Porcelain. Bandoliers of shells in individual
    loops crossed his chest.
     "Well, don't worry about it, Mister Moore," Jeude
    cheerfully, "A bar's really better for a close-in dust-up
    anyway."
     Someone in the hold-most of them, it must be to be
    heard in the cabin-was singing. "is our God, a
    bulwark never failing."
     Macquerie and Guillermo peered from either side of
    Ricimer's shoulders to see the hulk's rudimentary naviga-
    tional display. The Molt had downloaded data from the
    base unit to the Absalom 231 before leaving the comm
    room. I couldn't guess how fast we were traveling as
    hulk wallowed around its long axis. No starship was made
    for atmospheric flight, and this flimsy can less than most.
      Gregg stood behind the general commander, but he
    didn't appear interested in the display. He glanced back,
    his face framed by helmet, and noticed me. Gregg bent
    down and touched the sliding switch on the hilt of my
    cutting bar.
      "That's the power switch," Gregg said, speaking with
    exaggerated lip movements instead of bellowing the words.
    "Click it forward to arm the trigger."
      I laid my thumb on the switch. "Thank you," I said.
    My mouth was dry.
    Gregg shrugged and straightened again.
      "There it is!" Macquerie shouted. "There it is, a penta-
    gon, and there's the cutter!"
    "Stand by!" Dole cried, his amplified voice a dim shad-
    ow as thruster noise doubled by reflection from the ground.
     The men in the hold couldn't hear the bosun's warning, but
    the changed exhaust note was as much notice as veteran
    spacers needed.
      The Absalom 231 lurched, wobbled, and swung an
    unexpected 30' on its vertical axis. Jeude grabbed me
    as centrifugal force threw me forward.
      The hulk hit with a sucking crash. My shoulders banged
    into the bed frame behind me, but I didn't knock my
    head.
      More people than me had trouble with the landing. Two
    of the sailors in the cockpit lost their footing, and the
    clangor of equipment flying in the hold sounded like some-
    one was flinging garbage cans.
      "Move! Move! Move"' Dole shouted. Gregg was at the
    cockpit's external hatch, spinning the manual undogging
    wheel more powerfully than a hydraulic pump could have
    done the job.
      My bar had spun away at the landing. Lightbody
    retrieved the weapon as Jeude hustled me forward with a
    hand on my elbow. "Think that was bad," Jeude remarked,
    "you'll appreciate it when you ride in a hulk with anybody
    else piloting."
      Gregg jumped out the hatch, his shoulders hunched and taut.
    The shoulders meant the flashgun was cradled in both hands. 
    Piet Ricimer followed, wearing a beret and carrying a repeating 
    carbine. "For God and Venus!" he cried. Guillermo leaped clumsily
    next, half-pushed by a sailor named Easton who followed him.
     Lightbody cleared the hatchway, his shotgun at high
    port. The opening was before me. The ground was meters
    below; I couldn't tell precisely how far. The vegetation
    was similar to what we'd seen on the trek from the Por-
    celain to the Federation base, but it seemed lusher. Hull
    leaves waved in the near distance, hiding the figures who
    brushed their supporting trunks.

     I jumped with my eyes closed. A leaf slapped my face
    and tore like wet paper.
     I landed and fell over when my right leg sank to the knee
    in soupy mud. I could see for five meters or so between the
    stems in most directions, though the broad leaves were a
    low ceiling overhead. The trees rose from pads of surf and
    roots. Between the roots, standing water alternated with
    patches of algae as colorful as an oil slick.
     I struggled upright. My left boot was on firmer ground
    than the right, though I couldn't tell the difference visually.
    I saw a group of figures ahead and struggled toward them.
    Jeude hit with a muddy splash and a curse.
     "Easton, what's the line?" Piet Ricimer demanded. A
    pudgy sailor bent over an inertial compass the size of
    his hand.
     The swamp was alive with chirps and whooping, though I
    hadn't noticed anything like the volume of sound near
    the base. I sank into a pool hidden by orange weed float-
    ing in a mat on its surface. Lightbody reached back and
    grabbed me.
     A lid lifted from the ground at Easton's feet. The in-
    side of the lid had a soft, pearly sheen like the 
    membrane of an egg; the hole beyond was covered in
    a similar coating to keep the wet soil from collapsing.
    A Molt in the spiderhole rammed a spear up into Easton's
    abdomen.
     The fat Venerian screamed and dropped the com.
    Gregg shot the Molt at point-blank range with his flashgun.
    The alien's plastron disintegrated in a white glare and
    shock wave that jolted me a step backward. Shards of 
    tin stripped surrounding leaves to the bare veins.
      Easton lurched three steps forward until the spear
    protruding from his belly tripped him. He fell on his
    face, his legs thrashing against the soft dirt.
    Jeude turned and fired. I couldn't see his target, if there
    was one. Screams and shots came from the direction of
    the hulk's rear loading ramp.
      Piet Ricimer picked up the compass, wiped its face on
    his sleeve, and checked a line.
      Gregg slung his flashgun. He hadn't had time to lower
    the filtering visor, so he must have closed his eyes to avoid
    being blinded by his own bolt. Easton carried a rifle. Gregg
    pulled it and the bandolier of ammunition from the body
    which still trembled with a semblance of life.
      "Guillermo," Ricimer ordered coolly as he dropped the
    compass in his purse, "go back to the ship and sound
    recall with the bullhorn. The rest of you, follow me to
    the cutter!"
      He swung the barrel of his carbine forward, pointing
    the way for his rush. Another spiderhole gaped beside
    him. Lightbody and Gregg fired simultaneously, ripping
    the Molt with buckshot and a bullet before the creature
    was halfway into its upward lunge.
      Ricimer vanished beyond a veil of dropping leaves. The
    others were following him. I stumbled forward, terrified of
    being left behind. The only thing I was conscious of was
    Gregg's back, two meters in front of me. Guns fired and
    I heard the whine of a cutting bar, but the foliage baffled
    sound into a directionless ambience.
      I burst out of the trees. A swath of bare soil bubbled
    and stank where the cutter's'motor had cleared it while
    landing.
      The boat itself lay at a skew angle five meters away. A
    human, one of the sailors who'd accompanied the gentle-
    men exiled to the Porcelain, lay beside the vessel. A Molt 
    of olive coloration leaned from the cutter's dorsal hatch,
    pointing a rifle.
      Ricimer shot the Molt and worked the underlever of
    his repeater. Ten more aliens with spears and metal clubs
    rushed us from the opposite side of the clearing. I was the
    man closest to them.
     "Watch it!" somebody shouted. A rifle slammed, but
    none of the Molts went down.
    I swept my bar around in the desperation of a man trying
    to bat away a stinging insect. I tugged at the trigger but the
    blade didn't spin. The ceramic edge clinked on the shaft
    of a mace hammered from the alloy hull of a starship.
    Another Molt thrust a metal-tipped spear at my crotch.
      "The power switch, you whore's cunt!" Stephen Gregg
    bellowed as he butt-stroked the Molt spearman, then thrust
    the blunt muzzle of his rifle into the wedge-shaped skull
    of the alien with the mace. A ruptured cartridge gleamed
    partway out of the rifle's chamber, jamming Gregg's
    weapon until there was time to pick the case out with
    a knifepoint.
      Lightbody fired. Jeude was reloading his rifle; Ricimer
    had dropped to one knee, pumping rounds into Molts who
    were too close to miss.
      I found the power switch and thumbed it violently. My
    index finger still tugged on the trigger. The torque of the
    live blade almost snatched the weapon from my grasp.
    One of the aliens was twice the size of the others. He
    shambled forward with an axe in either hand. Bullets
    smashed two, then three dribbling holes in his chest.
    Gregg clubbed another spearman. He held his rifle by
    one hand on the barrel while he tried to untangle the
    flashgun's sling with the other. The big Molt lunged close
    to Gregg and brought an axe down.
      I stepped forward, focused on what I was doing and
    suddenly oblivious of the chaos around me. My cutting
    bar screamed through the steel axe-helve in a shower of
    sparks.
      Somebody fired so close that the muzzle flash scorched
    my sleeve. I ignored it, continuing the stroke. The blade's
    spin carried it through the Molt's triangular head and into
    the torso. Brownish ichor sprayed from the wound.
      Motion, more Molts beyond the toppling body of the
    giant. I couldn't see out of my left eye. I stepped over the
    Molt thrashing in front of me and cut at the next without
    letting up on the bar's trigger. The Molt tried to club me,
    but I was within the stroke. The shaft, not the studded tip,
    of the club gashed my forehead.
      The Molt's head and club arm fell to one side while the
    remainder of the corpse toppled the other way. I followed
    the cutting bar's edge toward another alien, but that one
    was already flailing, its plastron shattered by a charge of
    buckshot.
      I turned, looking for Molts. They were all down. I
    hacked at the alien giant, tearing a wide gouge down
    his carapace. Nerve trauma sent the creature into another
    series of convulsions.
      Somebody grabbed me from behind. I twisted to bring
    my howling bar back over my head. A hand closed over
    mine. Gregg's thumb switched off the cutting bar.
      "I've got him!" Gregg said. "It's all right, Moore."
    Ricimer wiped my face with a swatch torn from the tail
    of his own red plush tunic. I could see again; I'd been
    blinded by fluids from the Molt I'd cut apart.
      Jeude looked all right. Lightbody was breathing hard.
    He'd opened the breeches of his shotgun, but he hadn't
    inserted the reloads ready between the fingers of his left
    hand. There was a bloody tear in his tunic.
      "Into the cutter, now!" Ricimer ordered as he jogged
    drunkenly toward the small vessel.
      All personnel return to the ship!" crackled an amplified
    voice. Through the bullhorn, Guillermo's mechanically
    precise tones were indistinguishable from the voice of a
    human speaker. "All Porcelains return to the ship!"
      "Piet, watch-" Gregg shouted as Ricimer gripped the
    coaming of the cutter's dorsal hatch with his left hand and
    leaped upward. Ricimer held the repeater like a pistol in
    his right hand, aiming it ahead of him as he swung into
    the hatchway. The wham of the rifleshot within the cabin
    was duller but hugely amplified compared to the blast it
    made in the open air. Ricimer dropped into the vessel.
      "Get him!" Gregg ordered as he bent to pick up the
    rifle dropped by the Molt shot in the cutter.
      I didn't realize I was "him" until Dole and Jeude gripped
    me by opposite arms and half hoisted, half heaved me into
    the cutter's roof hatch. I grabbed the coaming as I went
    over so that at least I didn't hit like a sack of grain.
      Ricimer was in the seat forward. Two Molts and a
    human lay dead in the cabin. The human had been gutted
    like a trout.
     Jeude, Lightbody, and Dole leaped into the cabin in
    quick succession. Three of the attitude jets snarled, rock-
    ing the cutter to starboard. Lightbody sprawled against the
    side of the cabin. His eyes were open but not animated.
    I wondered if the spacer's wound was more serious than
    the surface gash it appeared to be.
     Ricimer glanced over his shoulder as Gregg boarded,
    his breastplate crashing against the coaming. The cutter's
    single plasma motor lighted with a bang and a spray of
    mud in all directions from the hull.
     The vessel hopped forward from the initial pulse, then
    lifted in true flight as Ricimer relit the thruster. The initial
    cough of plasma had cleared mud from the nozzle so that
    the motor could develop full power without exploding
     Stephen Gregg braced his legs wide, leaning outward
    from the dorsal hatch. His rifle's muzzle lifted in a puff
    of white propellant gases. The blast was lost in the roar
    of the thruster.
     Gregg dropped the rifle back into the cabin behind him
    without looking; Dole slapped the grip of his own weapon
    into Gregg's open hand. The big gunman aimed again.
    Jeude reached forward to take Ricimer's repeater and five
    cartridges from a pocket of the bandolier the general com-
    mander wore over his body armor.
     I stood beside Gregg, gripping the coaming with my
    free hand to keep from being flung away by the cutter's
    violent maneuvering. I still held the cutting bar. The ichor
    sliming the blade had dried to a saffron hue.
     Gregg fired. A Molt twisting through shrubbery forty
    meters away toppled on its face.
     The Molt was visible because Ricimer reined the cutter in
    tight circles only five meters above the soggy ground. The
    thruster's plasma exhaust devoured plants directly below
    the nozzle and wilted the foliage of those ten meters to
    either side.
     Ricimer dropped the little vessel almost to the soil. A
    dozen puffs of vapor fountained from the surrounding
    vegetation, some of them forty meters away. The nearer
    plumes were iridescent plasma, the more distant ones
    steam. Piet had set down directly on a spiderhole. The
    exhaust blasted through all the passages connected with
    th initial target. Molts anywhere in that portion of the
    tunnel system were incinerated.
        Gregg shot, using Ricimer's repeater. He shifted as he
    worked the lever action, never taking the butt from his
    shoulder, and fired again.
      The cutter rotated vertiginously as well as porpoising
    up and down. I couldn't see the Molts in the foliage until
    Gregg's bullets slapped them into their death throes, but
    the gunman didn't appear to waste a shot.
      A streak splashed itself on the yellowed ceramic
    hull near where I stood. I gaped at it for a moment before
    I realized a bullet had struck and ricocheted harmlessly.
      The goal that drew Hawtry and his fellows was a stone
    platform less than five meters across. Foliage curtained all
    but the center of the structure. Macquerie must have been
    looking at a radar image to tell that it was a pentagon.
      Ricimer swept the cutter at a walking pace along the
    side away from the Absalom 231, fifty meters distant. He
    was avoiding men from the group in the hold who might
    have fought their way toward the target. Searing exhaust
    wilted enough vegetation to show a doorway in one face
    of the building. A Molt flopped in tetanic convulsions
    nearby, its carapace the deep red of a boiled lobster.
      Ricimer set the cutter down on ground which plasma
    had baked on an earlier pass. He jumped up from the
    controls, shouting, "Dole, radio the hulk and bring the
    men back!"
      Ricimer snatched a rifle the bosun had just reloaded.
    Gregg hoisted his buttocks onto the hatch coaming, swung
    his legs over and dropped, ignoring the steps and hand
    holds formed into the outer hull.
      I tried to follow and instead tumbled sideways. The
    ground was still spongy enough to cushion my landing.
      Thomas Hawtry stepped out of the stone structure, hold-
    ing a rifle. He'd lost his helmet, and a powerful blow had
    crazed the surface of his breastplate.
        
     "We've found the treasure, Ricimer!" Hawtry called
    in attempted triumph. His face was white and his voice
    cracked in mid-sentence. "And an idol that we'll destroy
    in the Lord's name!"
     "You others, keep guard," Ricimer ordered curtly as he
    strode toward the Molt temple. Coos came through the
    doorway behind Hawtry. Ricimer pushed him aside and
    went within.
     Gregg followed Ricimer; I followed Gregg. I walked
    almost without volition, drifting after the leaders as thistle-
    down trails a moving body.
     The temple's floor was set three steps below the ground
    surface. The walls were corbeled inward, enclosing a great-
    er volume than I'd expected from the size of the roof.
     A Venerian battery lamp illuminated the interior. A
    spindle of meteoritic iron, twenty kilos or so in weight,
    rested on a stone pedestal in the center. Microchips-
    sacked, boxed, and loose-were piled in profusion on
    low benches along the walls. A silver starburst marked
    some of the containers, indicating the chips within were
    purpose-built: new production from pre-Collapse factories
    operating under Federation control.
     Six gentlemen stared at us, their saviors. Saha
    clasped his hands together in prayer; Delray's face was
    as pale as ivory. Four were seriously wounded. The three
    missing men must be dead, unless they'd had sense enough
    to stay aboard the Porcelain.
     A Molt in a loose caftan lay face-up on the stone floor.
    I didn't remember having previously seen a Molt wearing
    more than a sash. The alien had been shot at least a dozen
    times. Judging from the smell, someone had then urinated
    on the body.
     Salomon appeared at the door to the temple, holding a
    cutting bar. "I left Macquerie in charge aboard the shipj
    he said. "Say, there is a fortune here!"
     "We'll need stretchers," said Piet Ricimer. His voice
    was colorless.
     "I've got blankets coming," the navigator said. "We can
    use rifles for poles. Any Molts left are keeping out of
    way for now."
    
    DECADES
    
    Day 11
    
    The garrison of Decades Station had mobile floodlights to
    illuminate threatened portions of the perimeter if the wild
    Molts should attack. Two banks of them threw a white
    glare over the Porcelain's gathered crew. I stood at the
    rear of the assembly, feeling dissociated from my body.
     "By the grace of God, we have come this far," Piet
    Ricimer said. He spoke without amplification from the
    flagship's ramp. His clear, vibrant voice carried through
    the soft breeze and the chugging of the prime movers that
    powered the lights. "The coordinates of our next layover
    have been distributed to every captain and navigator. We
    won't have settled facilities there, so be sure to complete
    any maintenance requiring equipment we don't carry."
     The next layover would be Mocha, one of the Breach
    worlds. The Southefns occasionally laid over on Mocha,
    but there was no colony. Mocha's only permanent inhabit-
    ants were a handful of so-called Rabbits: hunter-gatherers
    descended from pre-Collapse settlers. Though remnant
    populations like Mocha's were scattered across the for-
    mer human sphere, none of them had risen to the level of
    barbarism.
     "We've gained a small success," Ricimer said. Stephen
    Gregg was a bulky shadow in the hold behind the general
    commander, out of the light. Dole and other of Ricimer's
    longtime followers stood at the foot of the ramp. Not a
    bodyguard, precisely, but-there.
     "We have also had losses," Ricimer said, "some of them
    unnecessary. Remember that success is with the Lord, but
    that we owe to Him and to our fellows discipline as well
    as courage."
      Federation prisoners listened to the general comman-
    der's address from beyond the pool of light. We'd left
    them unguarded since the day we landed. When we lifted
    off in the morning, the Feds could carry on as they had
    before.
      I wondered if Lavonne was listening. After the hulk
    returned to the base, she'd been very . . . "understanding"
    would be the wrong word; Lavonne hadn't in the least
    understood my desperate need to return to life. But she'd
    done what she could, as much as anyone could who hadn't
    been there, and I thought it had been enough.
    I prayed it had been enough.
      "There'll be one personnel change on the next stage
    of the voyage," Ricimer said. "I'm transferring Mister
    Hawtry to the Absalom-"
      "You'll do what, you little clown?" Thomas Hawtry
    bellowed as he pushed his way onto the loading ramp.
    He'd been standing in the middle of his coterie of gentle-
    men. He stepped forward alone.
      "Mister Hawtry-" Ricimer said. Behind him, Stephen
    Gregg moved into the light, tall and as straight as a
    knifeblade.
      "If you were a gentleman and not a potter's whelp,"
    Hawtry cried, "I'd call you out!"
      I slid forward through the crowd. My hands were
    flexing.
      Gregg stepped in front of the general commander. He
    held a rifle muzzle-down along his right thigh. His face had
    no expression at all. "I'm a gentleman, Mister Hawtry,"
    he said.
      Hawtry stopped, his right foot resting on the ramp.
    Gregg pointed his left index finger at Hawtry. "And take
    your hat off when you address the general commander,"
    Gregg said. His voice had a fluting lightness, terrible to
    hear. "As a mark of respect."
      "Stephen," Ricimer said. He lifted a hand toward
    Gregg's shoulder but didn't touch the bigger man. "I'll
    handle this."
    
     "Mister Hawtry," Gregg said. He didn't shout, but his
    tone pierced the night like an awl. "I won't warn you
    again."
     I reached the front of the assembly. Easy to do, since
    men were edging back and to either side. Ricimer's vet-
    erans formed a tight block in the center.
     Hawtry wasn't a coward, I knew that. Hawtry stared
    at Gregg, and at Ricimer's tense face beyond that of the
    gunman. Hawtry could obey or die. It was as simple as
    that. As well argue with an avalanche as Gregg in this
    mood.
     Hawtry snatched off his cap, an affair of scarlet a,
    gold lacework. He crushed it in his hands. "Your pardon,
    Mister Ricimer," he said. The words rubbed each other
    like gravel tumbling.
     Gregg stepped aside. He looked bored, but there was a
    sheen of sweat on his forehead.
     "There will be no duels during this expedition," Piet
    Ricimer said. His tone was fiery, but his eyes were focused
    on the far distance rather than the assembly before him.
    "We are on the Lord's business, reopening the stars to
    His service. If anyone fights a duel-"
     Ricimer put his hand on Gregg's shoulder and turned
    the bigger man to face him. Gregg was the dull wax of
    a candle, and his friend was a flame.
     "If anyone fights a duel," Ricimer said. "Is that under-
    stood?"
     Gregg dropped to one knee before the general comman-
    der. He rotated his right wrist so that the rifle was behind
    him, pointing harmlessly into the flagship's hold.
      Ricimer lifted him. Gregg stepped back into the shad-
    ows again. "If anyone fights a duel," Ricimer repeated
    but the fierceness was gone from his voice, "then the
    surviving parties will be left at the landfall where the
    offense against the Lord occurred. There will be no excep-
    tions."
     He looked out over us. The assembly gave a collective
    sigh.
     Ricimer knelt down. "Let us pray," he said, tenting his
    hands before him.
        
      Decades Station had barracks to accommodate more tran-
    sients than the whole of the Venerian force. One of the
    blocks was brightly illuminated. In it, spacers with a flute,
    a tambourine, and some kind of plucked string instrument
    were playing to a crowd.
      I sat on the porch of the administration building across
    the way, wondering if any of the Federation women were
    inside with our men.
      Lavonne would be waiting for me in her quarters. I'd
    go to her soon. As soon as I calmed down.
      ". . . could stick them all in the hulk," said a voice
    from the darkness. Footsteps crunched along the path. Two
    sailors were sauntering toward the party. "None of them
    gentlemen's worth a flying fuck."
      "Well, they're not much good for real work," said a
    second voice, which I thought might be Jeude's. "Get into
    a fight, though, they can be something else again."
      "Gregg?" said the first voice. "I give you that."
    "I swear the new fellow, Moore, he's as bad," replied
    might-be-Jeude. The pair were past the porch now, con-
    tinuing up the path. "Straight into a dozen Molts, no armor,
    nothing but a bar."
      "Likes to get close, huh?"
    "He didn't even stop when they were dead!" the sec-
    ond man said, his voice growing fainter with increasing
    distance. "I swear, Dorsey, you never saw anything like
    it in your life."
      My eyes were closed and I was shivering. After a time,
    I'm not sure how long, I stood shakily and began to walk
    toward the station's staff quarters.
    
                  MOCHA
    
    Day 37
    
    The mid-afternoon sun was so wan that stars were already
    out on the western horizon. At night they formed a sky-
    filling haze, too dense to be called constellations. The
    wind that swept across the ankle-high tundra was dank
    and chill.
     "There's one of them," I said. I started to raise my hand
    to point at the Rabbit sidling down the slope a kilometer
    away.
     The native didn't seem to be walking directly toward
    the ships on the shallow valley's floor. His track would
    bring him there nonetheless, as a moth spirals in on a
    flame.
     Piet Ricimer caught my arm before it lifted. "He'll think
    you're trying to shoot him," Ricimer said.
     "Yeah," Macquerie agreed. "No point in putting the
    wind up the little beasts. They can fling stones further
    than you'd believe."
     A pump chuffed as it filled the Kinsolving with reaction
    mass from a Southern well we'd reopened the night before.
    The Southerns had also left a score of low shelters whose
    walls were made of the turf lifted when the interior was
    cut into the soil. The dwellings crawled with lice, so today
    some of our people were building similar huts at a distance
    from the originals.
     "There were a dozen Rabbits in the old Southern camp
    when we landed," Gregg muttered. "Where did they go?
     Macquerie shrugged. "Mostly they sleep in little trees
    without top cover," he said. "Hard to see unless you step
    in one.Anyway, if they're gone, they aren't pilfering
    from us."
    "They can't take enough to harm us seriously," Ricimer
    said. "They're men like us. I won't have them treated as
    animals."
      Macquerie sniffed and said, softly enough to be ignored,
    "Hard to tell the difference, I'd say."
    Ricimer resumed walking toward the top of the slope.
    Distances were deceptively great on Mocha's treeless land
    scape. The surface rippled in shallow valleys separated by
    low ridges. Rare but violent storms cut raw gullies before
    the torrents drained to impermeable rock layers from which
    the vegetation would in time lift the water again.
    "There's nothing on the other side different from here,
    you know," Macquerie said.He was breathing harshly
    by now.
      "I need the exercise," Ricimer said. He paused again and
    looked back. "Was this where Landolph landed, then?" he
    asked.
      Macquerie and the general commander were unarmed.
    Gregg cradled his flashgun; the weight of the weapon and
    its satchel of spare batteries wasn't excessive to a man as
    strong as he was.
      I carried a cutting bar. I'd known to pick one with a
    belt clip this time.
      "Yes,that's right," Macquerie agreed. "Since then,
    nobody touches down on Mocha unless there's a problem
    with the gradients into Os Sertoes. Once or twice a year,
    that can happen."
    The Kinsolving's crew had off-loaded a featherboat and
    were assembling it. Ricimer planned to use the light craft
    to probe the Breach without stressing one of the expedi-
    tion's larger vessels.
    "Three more of them," I said. "Rabbits, I mean." I lifted
    my chin in a quick nod toward mid-slope in the direction
    of the camp.
    The four of us must have passed within a few meters
    of where the natives had appeared. The Rabbits slouched
    along, apparently oblivious of the starships scattered in
    line for half a kilometer across the valley floor. One Rabbit
    wore a belt twisted from the hides of burrowing animals;
    another carried a throwing stick. Mocha's winds limited
    the growth of plants above ground, but the vegetation had
    sizable root systems.
      "Some of them know Trade English," Macquerie said.
    "From before the Collapse?" Gregg asked. I noticed that
    the big man continued to scan the ridgeline above us while
    we others were focused on the Rabbits.
      Macquerie shrugged. "I don't have any idea," he said.
    Piet Ricimer wore a cape of naturally-patterned wool.
    He threw the wings back over his shoulders. The wind
    was behind him now, though it was still cold enough for
    me. "That's why what we're doing is important," Ricimer
    said. "Those people."
      "You're risking your life for the Rabbits?" Macquerie
    said in amazement.
      "For mankind, Captain," Ricimer said. His voice was
    rich, his face exalted. "If man is to survive, as I believe
    the Lord means him to, then we have to settle a thousand
    Earths, a hundred thousand. There'll always be wars and
    disasters. If we're confined to one star, to one planet real-
    ly-when the next Collapse comes, it'll be for all mankind,
    and forever."
      "Earth has returned to the stars," I said. "The Feds and
    the Southerns are out on hundreds of worlds between them.
    They have no right to bar Venus from space-"
      "Nor will they," Gregg said. His voice was as gray and
    hard as an iron casting.
    "-but they're there," I continued. "Mankind is."
      "No," said Ricimer, speaking with the certainty of one
    to whom the truth has been revealed. "What they're doing
    is mining the stars and the past to feed the present whims of
    tyrants. None of the settlements founded by the Federation
    and the Southern Cross is as solid as the colony on Mocha
    was before the Collapse. The destiny of mankind isn't to
    scuttle and starve in a ditch on a hillside!"
      Captain Macquerie cleared his throat doubtfully. "Do
    you want to go on up the hill?" he asked.
    Ricimer laughed. "I suppose we've seen what we needed
    to see here," he said. The power informing his tones Of
    a moment before had vanished, replaced with a light
    cheerfulness. "And had our exercise."
      The distance back to the Porcelain looked farther than
    the ridge-still above them-had seemed from the vessel's
    ramp. "We're not here to found colonies," I said.
      "Ah, we're here to bait the whole of mankind out to the
    stars by bringing back treasure," Ricimer said.
    He strung his laughter across the breeze like quicksilver
    on a glass table. "To break Earth's monopoly, so that there
    won't be another revolt of outworlds against the home
    system, another Collapse..."
      "And quite incidentally, my friends, to make ourselves very 
    wealthy indeed."
    The trio of Rabbits glanced around, their attention drawn
    by the chime of distant laughter.
    
    MOCHA
    
    Day 38
    
      I lounged at the flagship's main display, watching an
    image of the floodlit featherboat transmitted from the
    Kinsolving's optics. A six-man crew had finished fitting
    the featherboat's single thruster. Guillermo was still inside
    the little vessel, setting up the electronics suite. Ricimer
    intended to take the vessel off exploring tomorrow or the
    next day.
      Trench-and-wall barracks had sprouted beside each
    our ships. Plastic sheeting weighted with rocks formed 
    roofs and sealed walls against the wind. The turf-and-stone
    dwellings weren't much roomier than the ships, but they
    were a change after a long transit.
      I was alone aboard the Porcelain. I'd volunteered for
    communications watch, and I hoped to tie the featherboat-
    Ricimer had named it the Nathan-into the remote viewing
    net I'd created. No reason, really. Something to do that
    only Jeremy Moore could do. The audio link was complete
    but the Molt was still enabling the featherboat's external
    optics.
      I had one orange left from the bags of citrus fruit we'd
    loaded on Decades. It'd taste good now, and oranges didn't
    keep forever ...
      Boots scuffed in the amidships section. Somebody - 
    several somebodies, from the sound of it-had entered
    via the loading ramp to the hold.
    Crewmen returning for personal items, I supposed. I was
    bored, but I didn't particularly want to chat with spacers
    who'd never read a book or a circuit diagram.
      The hatch between the midships section and me in the
    bow was closed but not dogged. It opened for Thomas
    Hawtry, followed by Delray and Sahagun. I got up from
    the console.
      "We brought you some cheer, Jeremy," Hawtry said
    as he walked past the 17-cm cannon, locked in traveling
    position on its cradle. He was smiling brightly.
    Sahagun carried a square green bottle without a label.
    Delray held a repeating carbine; uncharacteristic for him
    to be armed, but perhaps they were worried about Rabbits
    in the starlit night.
      Hawtry held out his hand for me to shake. Holding-
    not quite seizing-my hand, Hawtry guided me away from
    the console. Delray stepped between me and the controls.
    The other four surviving gentlemen of Hawtry's coterie
    entered the bow section.
      Hawtry patted the back of my hand with his left finger-
    tips' then released me. "Sorry for the little deception,
    Jeremy," he said. His tone was full and greasy. "Didn't
    want to have an accident with you bumping the alarm
    button, because then something awkward would happen.
    That's it there, isn't it?"
      Hawtry nodded toward the console.
    "Yes," I said. "The red button at the top center."
    Coos wiggled the cage over the large button to make sure
    it was clipped in place. He and Farquhar carried rifles also.
    Levenger and Teague wore holstered pistols like Hawtry's
    own, but those could pass simply as items of dress for a
    gentleman.
      When I came back to the Porcelain from our hike, I'd
    returned my cutting bar to the arms locker in the main hold.
    A bar's really better for a close-in dustup, Jeude had said
    on Decades, but there were seven of them here. 
      "We're here to save the expedition, Jeremy," Hawtry
    said. "And our lives as well, I shouldn't wonder. You've
    seen how that potter's whelp Ricimer hates gentlemen?
    You've been spared the worst of the insults, but that will
    change."
      He lowered himself into the seat I'd vacated. Coos and
    Sahagun stepped to either side so that Hawtry could still
    view me directly.
      "So you're planning to kill the general commander and
    replace him?" I said baldly. I crossed my hands behind
    my back.
     Delray and Teague looked uncomfortable. "Say, now,
    fellow," Hawtry said with a frown. "Nobody spoke of
    killing, not in the least. But if we-the better class of
    men-don't act quickly, Ricimer will abandon us here on
    Mocha. He as good as stated his plans when he put me,
    me, aboard the Absalom. A hulk can't transit the Breach,
    anyone can see that!"
     "Go on, then," I said. My voice was calm. I watched the
    unfolding scene from outside my body, quietly amazed at
    the tableau. "If you're not going to kill General Comman-
    der Ricimer, what?"
     Sabagun glanced at Hawtry and held the bottle forward
    a few centimeters to call attention to it.
     "Say, I'm the real commander of the expedition any-
    way," Hawtry said. He looked away and rubbed the side of
    his nose. "By Councilor Duneen's orders, and I shouldn't
    wonder the governor's directly. If it should be necessary
    to take over, and it is."
     "Thomas, what are you going to do?" I said, with gentle
    emphasis on the final word.
     "A drink so that that psychotic bastard Gregg goes to
    sleep," Hawtry said, rubbing his nose. "That-that's only
    he won't listen to reason, that's obvious."
     Sahagun lifted the green bottle again. The liquor sloshed.
    The container was full, but the wax seal around the stopper
    had been broken. Delray grimaced and turned his back on
    the proceedings.
     "Ricimer, he's not a problem without Gregg," Hawtry
    continued. "We'll put them on the Absalom and a few
    sailors for crew, I suppose. There won't be any problem
    with the men. They'll follow their natural leaders, be glad
    to follow real leaders!"
     "But you want me to give Gregg the bottle," I said
    sounded as though I was checking the cargo manifest.
    "Because he'd wonder if any of you offered it."
     "Well, drink with him, jolly him along," Hawtry said.
    "It won't do you any harm. You'll wake up in the morning
    without even a headache."
     He rubbed his nose again.
     "That Gregg's got a hut of his own," Levenger said in
    a bitter voice. "While the rest of us sleep with common
    sailors!"
     "Gregg doesn't sleep well when he's on the ground,"
    I said. I felt the corners of my mouth lift. Maybe I was
    smiling. "He doesn't want to distress other people. And
    there's the embarrassment, I suppose,"
     Hawtry lifted himself angrily from the seat in which
    he'd been pretending to relax. "Listen, Moore," he said.
    "Either you can do this and things'll go peacefully-or
    I'll personally shoot you outside Gregg's door, and when
    he comes out we'll gun him down. He won't have a chance
    against seven of us."
     Not a proposition I'd care to bet my life on, Thomas, I
    thought. My lips tingled, but I didn't speak aloud.
     "We'll kill you as a traitor, and him because he's too
    damned dangerous to live!" Hawtry said. "So which way
    will it be?"
     "Well, I wouldn't want anyone to think I was a traitor,"
    I said. "But you'll have to wait-"
     Hawtry raised his arm to slap me, then caught himself
    and lowered his hand again. His face was mottled with
    rage. "There'll be no delays, Moore," he said savagely.
    "Not if you know what's good for you."
     "Gregg knows I'm on watch," I explained in a neu-
    tral voice. "If I appear before I've been relieved, he'll be
    suspicious."
     "Oh," said Hawtry. "Oh. How long are you..."
     I looked at the chronometer on the navigation console
    set to ship's time. "Oh," I said, "I think ten minutes should
    do it."
     The midships hatch banged violently open. "No time at
    all, gentlemen," said Stephen Gregg as he stepped through
    behind the muzzle of his flashgun. His helmet's lowered
    visor muffled his voice, but the words were as clear as the
    threat.
    
     Gregg wore body armor. So did Piet Ricimer, who fol-
    lowed with a short-barreled shotgun. Dole and Lightbody
    were behind the commander with cutting bars. Stampfer
    the gunner, carried a heavy single-shot rifle, and Salome
    had a repeater. There were more sailors as well, shoving
    their way into the bow section.
     Hawtry dived for the compartment's exterior hatch 
    airlock. Perhaps he felt that no one would shoot in a room
    so crowded.
     "Steady," Ricimer murmured.
     Hawtry tugged the hatch open. No one tried to stop him.
    Jeude waited in the airlock with his cutting bar ready. He
    twitched the blade forward, severing Hawtry's pistol 
    and enough flesh to fling the gentleman back screaming.
    
     "Take their weapons," Ricimer said calmly.
     "It may interest you gentlemen to know," I said,
    voice rising an octave as my soul flooded back into my
    body, "that there was a channel open to Guillermo in the
    featherboat all the time we were talking. And if there
    hadn't been, I assure you I would have found another
    way to stop you traitors!"
     "It wasn't me!" Coos cried. He was a tall man, willing
    and supercilious at normal times. "It wasn't---"
     Lightbody punched Coos in the stomach with the butt of
    his cutting bar,'doubling him up on the deck. Coos began
    to vomit.
     "I'll expect you to have that cleaned up by end of watch,
    Lightbody," Ricimer said as he uncaged the alarm but-
    ton.
     "Aye." The flagship's siren howled a strident summons.
    "Listen, Moore," snarled Hawtry's voice through
    speakers mounted to either side of the main hatch. A
    light on the Kinsolving two hundred meters away
    focused on the flagship's hold. "I'll personally stand
    outside Gregg's door, and when he comes out we'll
    shoot him down."
     Wind sighed across the valley, bearing away the
    murmur of the gathered spacers. Someone called, "Bastard!"
    in a tone of loud amazement.
    "Ricimer, he's not a problem without Gregg," said
    Hawtry's voice. Guillermo was working the board, mix-
    ing the gentleman's words for greatest effect from the
    recording the Molt had made in the Nathan.
    Hawtry struggled against his bonds in the center of the
    hold. Dole had cinched Hawtry's ankles to a staple. The
    gentleman's wrists were tied in front of him and he was
    gagged besides. Hawtry's six followers stood at the base
    of the ramp-disarmed and discreetly guarded by trusted
    sailors, but not shackled.
      "We'll kill you and him!" said Hawtry's voice. You'd
    have had to hear the original words to realize the speech
    was edited. At that, Guillermo hadn't distorted the thrust
    of the gentleman's harangue.
      Piet Ricimer stepped forward. "Thomas Hawtry," he
    said. "You knew that this expedition could succeed only
    if we all kept our oaths to strive together in brotherhood.
    Your own words convict you of treason to the state, and
    of sacrilege against God."
      Stephen Gregg, a statue in half armor, stood at the oppo-
    site side of the hatch from Ricimer. He hadn't moved
    since Dole and Jeude fastened the prisoner in front of the
    assembly.
      A kerchief was tied behind Hawtry's head. Ricirner
    tugged up the knot so that the gentleman could spit out
    the gag.
      Hawtry shook himself violently. "You have no right to
    try me!" he shouted. "I'm a factor, a factor! I need answer
    to no judge but the Governor's Council."
      Unlike Ricimer's, Hawtry's voice wasn't amplified. He
    sounded thin and desperate to me.
      "Under God and Governor Halys," Ricimer said, "I am
    general commander of this expedition. I and your shipmates
    will judge you, Thomas Hawtry. How do you plead?"
      "It was a joke!" cried Hawtry. He turned from side to
    side in the glare of lights focused on him. "There was no
    plot, just a joke, and that whorechaser Moore knew it!"
    The crowd buzzed, men talking to their closest com-
    panions. Hawtry's coterie stood silent, with gray faces and
    stiff smiles. Gregg's eyes, the only part of the gunman that
    moved, drifted from them to the prisoner and back.
     Contorting his body, Hawtry rubbed his eyes with his
    shoulder. He caught sight of me at the front of the assembly.
    "There he is!" Hawtry shouted, pointing with his bound
    hands. "There's the Judas Jeremy Moore! He lied me into
    these bonds!"
     I climbed the ramp in three crashing strides. The cutting
    bar batted against my legs, threatening to trip me. Hawtry
    straightened as he saw me coming; his eyes grew wary.
    A tiny smile played at the comers of Stephen Gregg's
    mouth.
     "Aye, strike a fettered man, Moore," Hawtry said
    shrilly.
     I pulled the square-faced bottle from the pocket of the
    insulated vest I wore over my tunic. Hawtry's face went
    hard and pale in the spotlights.
     "Here you are, Thomas," I said. A part of my mind noticed
    in surprise that a directional microphone picked up my
    voice and boomed my words out through the loudspeaker
    so that everyone in the crowd could hear. "Here's the bottle
    that you ordered me to drink with Mister Gregg."
     Hawtry's chin lifted. He shuffled his boots, but Dole
    had shackled him straitly.
     I twisted out the glass stopper. "Take a good drink of
    this, Thomas," I said. "And if it only puts you to sleep,
    then I swear I'll defend your life with my own!"
     Hawtry's face suffused with red hatred. He swung his
    bound arms and swatted the container away. It clattered
    twice on the ramp and skidded the rest of the way down
    without breaking. Snowy gray liquor splashed from the
    bottle's throat.
     "Yes," I said as I backed away. I was centered on
    myself again. For a moment I'd been... "I rather thought
    that would be your response."
     I'd watched in my mind as the bar howled in the arm
    of my own puppet figure below. It swung in an arc and
    continued through the spray of blood and the shocked face
    of Thomas Hawtry sailing free of his body.

    Piet Ricimer stepped forward. He took Hawtry's joined
    hands in his own and said, "Thomas, in the name of the
    Lord, won't you repent? There's still-"
      "No!" said Stephen Gregg thunderously as he strode into
    the center of the hatchway. The ceramic armor added bulk
    to the rangy power of his form. "There's been forgiveness
    aplenty. The next time it'll be your life, Piet, and I'll not
    have that."
      Gregg laid his great left hand over Hawtry's wrists and
    lifted them away from Ricimer. Gregg raised Hawtry's
    arms, ignoring the prisoner's attempt to pull free, and
    shouted to the assembly, "Is this man guilty of treason?
    Shall he be marooned here as a traitor?"
      "Yes!" I screamed. Around me I heard, "Aye!" and
    "Guilty!" and "Yes!" A murmur of, "No," a man crying,
    "You have no right!" But those latter were the exceptions
    to a tide of anger tinged with bloodlust. The sailors were
    Betaport men, and in Betaport Piet Ricimer sat just below
    the throne of God.
      "No, you can't do this!" Delray shouted angrily. The
    other gentlemen stood silent, afraid to speak lest Gregg
    turn the mob on them as well.
      Gregg dropped the prisoner's arms. "You didn't want
    to obey the general commander, Hawtry," he said. "Now
    you can rule a whole planet by yourself."
      Officers of the Mizpah and Kinsolving stood in a clump
    at the back of the assembly, muttering and looking con-
    cerned. They knew better than the common sailors how
    much trouble could come from punishing a powerful
    noble. Blakey was Councilor Duneen's man, while
    Captain Winter trimmed his behavior to the prevailing
    winds.
      "You can't do this!" Delray repeated. The wind toyed
    with his voice. Perhaps a third of the assembly could make
    out his words, while the rest heard only faint desperation.
      "The Rabbits will kill him!"
    The other gentlemen moved away as though Delray was
    thrashing in a pool of his own vomit. A sailor behind
    Delray patted a baton of steel tubing against the calluses
    of the opposite palm, but the gentleman took no notice.

    "They'll flay him with sharp stones!" Delray shouted
    "You can't do this!"
      I didn't know Delray well and hadn't liked what I
    knew: the third son of Delray of Sunrise, a huge hold in
    the Aphrodisian Hills. Very rich, very haughty, and el
    younger than his 19 Earth years.
      It struck me that there was a person under Delray's
    callow exterior who might have been worth knowing
    after all.
      "He's right," Gregg said abruptly. The amplified bellow
    of his voice startled me after an interval of straining to hear
    Delray's cries. "Dole, cut his feet loose. Hawtry, we'll
    find a gully out beyond the ships."
      I blinked, shocked by a sudden reality that I'd avoided
    until that moment. It was one thing to eat meat, aother
    to watch the butcher. Dole stepped up the ramp, bar humming.
    
      "No!" said Ricimer, placing the flat of his hand on
    Gregg's breastplate. He directed the bigger man aside.
    Piet's too good a man for this existence, Gregg had said
    the last night on Venus.
      "Give me a ship!" Hawtry blurted. His face was
    white as a bone that dogs were scuffling over. "Give me
    a featherboat, C-cap-commander Ricimer!"
      "Mister Hawtry," Ricimer said, "you cannot con a
    starship, and I will not diminish a force devoted to the
    Lord's work for the sake of a traitor. But the judges
    of your treason was that of the expedition as a whole.
    Therefore the expedition will carry out the sentence."
      Ricimer turned to face the assembly. He didn't blink,
    though the spotlight was full on his face. He pointed at
    the front of the crowd, his arm as straight as a gun
    barrel.
      "Coos, Levenger, Teague," he said, clipping
    syllables like cartridges shucked from a repeater's breech.
    "Farquhar, Sahagun. And Delray. Under the direction of
    Mister Gregg, you will form a firing party to execute the
    sentence of death on the traitor Thomas Hawtry.
    At dawn. Do you understand?"

      None of the gentlemen spoke. Farquhar covered his face
    with his hands.
    Hawtry shuddered as though the first bullet had struck
    him. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened
    them, his expression was calm.
    "This assembly is dismissed," the general commander
    said in a voice without triumph or pity. "And may God
    have mercy on our souls."
    
    
                  MOCHA
    
    Day 39
    
    Mocha's sun laid a track of yellow light from the eastem
    horizon. Ricimer and Hawtry stood at the edge of the
    shallow mere, talking in voices too low to carry twenty
    meters to where the nearest of the other men waited.
     The air was still, for the first time that I could remember
    since we landed here. I shivered anyway.
     A group of sailors commanded by the Porcelain's bosun
    held single-shot rifles. The men were chatting companion-
    ably. Jeude punctuated his comment by raising his left
    hand in the air and wriggling the fingers. He and the
    others laughed.
     About half the expedition's complement had trekked to
    the north end of the valley to watch the execution. The
    remainder stayed with the ships, pretending this was a
    normal day. Occasionally someone might pause and glare
    northward, but there would be nothing to see. The irregu-
    larity of the valley's floor seemed slight, but it was enough
    to swallow a man-height figure in half a kilometer.
     I didn't know why I was here. I rubbed my hands togeth-
    er and wondered if I should have brought gloves.
     The gentlemen of the firing party faced one another in
    a close circle, shoulders together and their heads boiling.
    A spacer cried out, "Pretty little chickens got their feathers
    plucked, didn't they?"
     The remark didn't have to be a gibe directed against
    gentlemen... but it probably was. Delray spun to find
    the speaker. The gentleman remembered his present circumstances
    and subsided in impotent anger.
    
      Stephen Gregg, standing alone as if contemplating the
    sunrise, turned his head. "Roosen?" he called to the spacer
    who'd flung the comment. "I'm glad to know you have
    spirit. I often need a man of spirit to accompany me."
    Roosen shrank into himself. His companions of a
    moment before' edged away from him.
    I chuckled.
    Gregg strolled toward me, holding the flashgun in the
    crook of his left arm. Gregg wore his helmet and a satchel
    of batteries, but he didn't have body armor on for the
    morning's duties.
      The big man nodded toward the mere thirty meters away,
    where Hawtry and the general commander still talked. "So
    you would have protected Mister Hawtry from me if he'd
    been willing to drink from your bottle, Moore?" Gregg
    said in a low, bantering tone.
      Sometimes Ricimer's aide looked like an empty sack.
    Now-there was nothing overtly tense about Gregg, but
    a black power filled his frame and dominated the world
    about him.
      I shrugged. "Thomas isn't the sort for half measures,"
    I said evenly. "Sleep where death would do, for exam-
    ple. Besides... I rather think he resented my--closeness.
    With Councilor Duneen's sister."
      My mouth smiled. "Though to listen to him, he wasn't
    aware of that. Closeness."
      Gregg turned again to face the sunrise. "I was mistaken
    in my opinion of the man I brought aboard in Betaport,
    wasn't I? Just who are you, Moore?"
      I shrugged again. "I'm damned if I know," I said. Then
    I said, "I could use a woman right now. The Lord knows
    I could."
      Ricimer and Hawtry clasped hands, then embraced.
    Ricimer walked back to the company. His face was still.
    The crowd hushed.
      Gregg's visage became cold and remote. "Distribute the
    rifles," he ordered as he strode toward the gentlemen and
    the sailors waiting to equip them for their task.
      Dole muttered a command. He gave a single cartridge
    and a rifle, its action open, to Sahagun. That gentleman
    and the other members of the firing party accepted
    weapons with grimaces.
      "Take your stand!" Gregg ordered. He placed him
    beside and a pace behind the gentlemen. His flashgun
    ready but not presented.
      "I'll give the commands if you please, Mister Gregg
    Thomas Hawtry called in a clear voice. He stood at 
    apparent ease, his limbs free.
      Gregg looked at Ricimer. Ricimer nodded agreem
    "May God and you, my fellows, forgive my sins."
    Hawtry said. "Gentlemen, load your pieces."
      The men of the firing party were mostly experit
    marksmen, but they fumbled the cartridges. Coos dropped
    his. He had to brush grit off the case against his 
    leg. Breeches closed with a variety of clicks and shutting
    sounds.
      Hawtry stood as straight as a sunbeam. His eyes
    open. "Aim!" he said.
      The gentlemen lifted their rifles to their shoulders.
    Farquhar jerked his trigger. The shot slammed out into
    the horizon. Farquhar shouted in surprise at the accidental
    discharge.
      "Fire!" Hawtry cried. The rest of the party fired,
    bullets punched Hawtry's white tunic, and the brim of
    his nose vanished in a splash of blood.
      Hawtry crumpled to his knees, then flopped on his
    face. There was a hole the size of a fist in the front of
    his skull. The surface of the water behind him dimpled as
    if with rain.
      Delray opened the bolt of his rifle to extract the
    case, then flung the weapon itself toward the dead man.
    The rifle landed halfway between him and the corpse to
    bounce spastically on the ground.
      Delray stalked away. The remainder of the firing squad
    stood numbly as Dole's team collected the rifles from them.
      Gregg turned and walked back to me. He looked old
    and gray.
      I'm impressed with the way you handled yourself the
    other night," he said quietly. "And on Decades, as well,
    but courage in a brawl is more common than the ability to
    stay calm in a crisis."
      I hugged myself and shivered. A spacer had tossed a
    tarp over Hawtry's body. Two other men were digging a
    grave nearby.
      Piet Ricimer knelt in prayer, his back to the dead man.
    Brains and bits of bone, splashing the mere in a wide arc.
      "How do you sleep at all, Mister Gregg?" I whispered.
    Gregg sniffed. "You can get used to anything, you
    know," he said. "I suppose that's the worst of it. Even
    the dreams."
      He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me away from
    the past. "Let's go back to the ship," he said. I have a
    bottle. And you may as well call me Stephen, Jeremy."
    
                  MOCHA
    
    Day 51
    
      When the alert signal throbbed on the upper right corner
    of the main screen, I slapped the sidebar control that I'd
    preselected for potential alarm situations. Salomon dumped
    the transit solutions he'd been running at the navigation
    console and echoed all my data on his display.
    A grid of dots and numbers replaced the 360' visual panorama
    I'd been watching for want of anything better
    to do. Presumably some of the Rabbits were female but
    it hadn't come to that yet.
      I didn't understand the new display. A pink highlight
    surrounded one of the dots.
    I held the siren switch down briefly to rouse the men
    sleeping, gambling, or wandering across Mocha's barren
    landscape. A few seconds could be important, and even
    a false alarm would give the day some life it otherwise
    lacked.
      "It's the passive optical display," Salomon explained.
    "An object just dropped into orbit. If it's not a flaw in
    the scanner, something came out of trans-"
    "Nathan to squadron," said Piet Ricimer's voice, flat-
    tened by the program by which the Porcelain's AI took
    the static out of the featherboat's transmission. "Respond,
    squadron. Over."
      I switched the transceiver to voice operation while my
    left hand entered the commands that relayed the conver-
    sation through the loudspeakers-tannoys I'd taken from,
    Federation stores on Decades-on poles outside the tem
    porary shelters. It'd been something to do, and the disor-
    ganized communications among the ships scattered here
    had offended my soul.
     "Go ahead, Commander," I said before I remembered
    that Salomon was on watch this morning. "We're on
    voice."
     Handover procedures were cumbersome and basical-
    ly needless between two parties who knew one another.
    Without visuals-the featherboat's commo was rudimen-
    tary-there was a chance that one speaker's transmission
    would step on the other's, but that wasn't a serious con-
    cern.
     "Moore?" Ricimer said. His words blared through the
    external speakers to the men alerted by the siren. "We've
    got to leave immediately. Get essential stores out of the
    Absalom; we're leaving her. We'll be abandoning the
    Nathan here too, so that frees up space on the Kinsolving
    for the Decades loot. We'll be coming in on the next
    orbit-"
     The featherboat couldn't communicate through her
    thruster's discharged ions.
     "-and I want to lift off within an hour of when we
    land. Is that understood?"
     "We understand, Commander," I said. I rose from the
    console. Officers and senior men would be gathering work
    crews from men more concerned with getting their person-
    al gear back aboard the ships.
     "I'll address the squadron when we reach orbit," Ricimer
    said. The transmission was beginning to break up beyond
    the AI's capacity to restore it. The caret on the main
    screen that was the Nathan had already slipped beneath
    the horizon of the display. "Before we negotiate the
    Breach..."
      His words died in a burst of static.
     "I've got takeoff and initial transit programs loaded,"
    Salomon said to me with a wry smile. Perhaps it was a
    comment on the way the gentleman had hijacked commu-
    nications with the general commander.
     Men were already crashing aboard the Porcelain, shout-
    ing to one another in a skein of tangled conversations. I
    strode for the midships hatch to get through it before the
    crush arrived in the other direction.
      "I'm going to pull the Al from the hulk," I called back to
    the navigator. "It's not worth much, but it's something ...
    and it's the only thing I can do now."
    
                 MOCHA ORBIT
    
    Day 51
    
    Because of the adrenaline rush of the hastened liftoff,
    weightlessness didn't make me as queasy as it had on
    every previous occasion.
      "Men of Venus," Piet Ricimer said, standing before the
    video pickups of the main console.
    The general commander's tone and pose were conscious-
    ly theatrical, but not phony. An unshakable belief in his
    mission was the core of Ricimer's being. "My fellows.
    While I was on Os Sertoes, a Southern colony three
    days transit from here, six Federation warships landed.
    Their admiral announced that they'd arrived to protect the
    Breach from Venetian pirates under the command of the
    notorious Ricimer."
      He allowed himself a smile.
    The interior of the Porcelain looked as if a mob had torn
    through the vessel. Belongings seemed to expand in the
    course of a voyage. Objects were never repacked as tightly
    as they'd been stowed before initial liftoff. Loot, even
    from a near-wasteland like Mocha, added to the bulk, and
    the crew's hurried reboarding would at best have created
    chaos.
      The interior of the Kinsolving, visible on the split screen
    past the set face of Captain Winter, was an even more
    complete image of wreckage. The quality of the Mizpah's
    transmission was so poor that the flagship's AI painted
    the field behind Blakey as a blur of color. On all the
    vessels, items that hadn't been properly stowed before
    liftoff drifted as the ships hung above Mocha.
    
      "The Feds will be patrolling all the landing sites in
    the region, I have no doubt," Ricimer said. I could hear
    the words echoing from tannoys in the compartments
    sternward. On the Kinsolving, sailors listened in the
    background as tense, dim shapes. "We aren't here to
    fight the Federation. We're here to take the wealth on
    which President Pleyal builds his tyranny and turn that
    wealth to the use of all mankind."
    Another small smile. "Ourselves included."
    Stephen Gregg stood between a pair of stanchions, doing
    isometric exercises with his arms. He was too big to be
    comfortable for any length of time on a featherboat, but
    not even Piet Ricimer had dared suggest Stephen remain
    on Mocha during the exploratory run.
    "I've set an initial course," Ricimer continued. "The
    Nathan tested the gradients within the throat of the Breach.
    I won't disguise the fact that the stresses are severe; but
    not too severe, I believe, for us to achieve our goal."
    "It was rough as a cob," Jeude muttered, trying to emas-
    culate his fear by articulating it. "The boat nigh shook
    herself apart. Mister Ricimer, he kept pushing the gradi-
    ents and she couldn't take it."
      I put a hand on the eyebolt which Jeude held. I didn't
    quite touch the young sailor's hand, but I hoped the near-
    contact would provide comfort.
    Part of my mind was amused that I was trying to reassure
    someone who understood far better than I did the risks we
    were about to undergo. There were times that the risks 
    couldn't be allowed to matter. At those times, it was a
    gentleman's duty to be an example.
    "There is one further matter to attend before we pro-
    ceed," Ricimer continued. "Our flagship has been named
    the Porcelain. I am taking this moment, as we enter a
    new phase of our endeavors, to rechristen her Oriflamme.
    May she symbolize the banner of the Lord which we are
    carrying through the Breach!"
    He swept off his cap and cried, "In the name of God,
    gentlemen, let us do our duty!"
      "Hurrah!" Salomon cried, so smoothly that I remem-
    bered Ricimer's whispered conversation with his navigator
    before he began his address. Throughout the flagship-
    the Oriflamme-and aboard the other vessels, men were
    shouting, "Hurrah!"
      I shouted as well, buoyed by hope and the splendor of
    the moment. For the first time in my memory, Jeremy
    Moore was part of a group.
      Ricimer shut off the transmission and slipped into his
    couch to prepare for transit. Guillermo and Salomon
    watched from the flanking consoles.
    I let go my grip and thrust myself across the com-
    partment toward Stephen. My control in weightlessness
    was getting better-at least I didn't push off with all my
    strength anymore-but it was short of perfect. Stephen
    caught me by the hand and pulled me down to share a
    stanchion.
      "You may think you dislike transit now," Stephen said,
    "but you'll know you do shortly."
    "Yes, well, I was going to suggest that I'd get out and
    walk instead," I said. "Ah-it occurs to me, Stephen, that
    the oriflamme is the charge of Councilor Duneen's arms."
    Stephen nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Piet thinks it may
    take the Councilor's mind off the fact that we've executed
    one of his chief clients. Not that Hawtry was any loss, not
    really; but the Councilor might feel that he needed to 
    react."
      "Ali," I said. "It was the general commander's idea?"
    "Prepare for transit!" Salomon warned over the PA sys-
    tem.
    "0h, yes," Stephen agreed. "Piet thinks ahead."
    I followed Stephen's glance toward the general com-
    mander. It struck me that Ricimer was, in his way, just
    as ruthless as Stephen Gregg.
    
                IN TRANSIT
    
    Day 64
    
    The leg of the attitude-control console nearest me began
    to quiver with a harmonic as the Oriflamme's thrusters;
    strained. The vessel flip-flopped in and out of transit
    again, again. The surface of the leg dulled as tiny cracks
    spread across the surface, metastasizing with each succes-
    sive vibration.
     Life was a gray lump that crushed Jeremy Moore against
    the decking. My vision was monochrome. Images shifted
    from positive to negative as the Oriflamme left and
    reentered the sidereal universe, but I was no longer sure
    which state was which,
     The sequence ended. Bits of ceramic crazed from the
    leg lay on the deck beneath the attitude controls.
     Salomon got up from his console. His face looked like
    a skin of latex stretched over an armature of thin wire.
    "The charts are wrong!" he shouted. "Landolph lied about
    coming here, or if he did, it's closed since then. There's
    no Breach!"
     Pink light careted a dot on the starscape displayed on
    Guillermo's console. Either the Kinsolving or the Mizpah
    was still in company with the flagship. I didn't care -
    what mattered now was the realization that if I was dead
    the nausea would be over.
     "I'm going to add one transit to the sequence and am
    changing the constants," Piet Ricimer said from the pilot's
    couch. Above him, the main screen was a mass of silver
    lines. "From the tendency of the gradients, I believe we're
    very close to a gap."
        
    Guillermo's three-fingered hands clicked across his key-
    board, transmitting the solution to the accompanying vessel.
    Stephen Gregg was curled into a ball on the deck. He'd
    started out leaning against the attitude-control console, but
    lateral acceleration during a previous series of transits had 
    toppled him over. He either hadn't wished or hadn't been
    able to sit up again.
      The sailors without immediate duties during transit were
    comatose or praying under their breath. Perhaps I should
    have been pleased that experienced spacers were affected
    as badly as I was.
      "The gradients are rising too fast!" Salomon shouted.
    "The levels are already higher than I've ever seen them,
    and-"
    Lightbody came off his seat at the attitude-control con-
    sole. The sailor didn't have a weapon, but his long arms
    were spread like the claws of an assassin bug. Salomon
    started to turn, shocked from his panic by the palpable
    destruction lunging toward his throat.
      Stephen caught Lightbody's ankle and jerked the sailor
    to the deck. I leaped onto the man's shoulders.
    Lightbody's face was blank. The wild light went out of
    his eyes, leaving the sailor with a confused expression.
      "What?" he said. "Wha...?
      "Sorry, sir," Salomon muttered. He sat down on his
    couch again.
    I rolled away. I had to use both hands to lever myself
    back to a squat and then rise. The jolting action had settled
    my mind, but my limbs were terribly weak. I could stand
    upright, so long as I gripped a stanchion as though the
    Oriflannne was in free fall rather than proceeding under
    1-g acceleration.
      Lightbody stood, then helped Stephen up as well.
    Lightbody returned to his seat. I held out a hand to bring
    Stephen to his stanchion.
      "Prepare for transit," Piet Ricimer said. He hadn't risen 
    from his couch or looked back during the altercation.
    Light and color. Blankness, blackness, body ripped
    inside out, soul scraped in a million separate Hells.
     Light and color again.
     "There," said Piet Ricimer. "As I thought, a star,
    and she has a planet. We will name the planet Respite."


    Day 68
    
    The plateau on which the Oriflamme and Mizpah rested
    above the jungle was basalt. The fresh ceramic with which
    teams resealed the vessels' stress-cracked hulls was black,
    and the sound of grinders processing the dense rock into
    raw material for the glazing kilns was nerve-wracking and
    omnipresent.
     Stephen checked the weld which belayed the glass-fiber
    line around a vertical toe of basalt near the plateau's rim.
    He nodded. I let myself drop over the edge.
     The mass of the plateau dulled the bone-jarring sound.
    My chest muscles relaxed for the first time in the three
    days since the grinders had started work.
     The basalt had formed hexagonal pillars as it cooled
    from magma in the depths of the earth. Cycles of upthrust
    and weathering left this mass as a tower hundreds of meters
    above the surrounding jungle. As the outermost columns
    crumbled, they created a giant staircase down into the
    green canopy.
     Forty meters below the top of the plateau, my boots
    touched the layer of dirt covering the sloping top of a
    broken pillar. I released my harness from the line and
    stepped away, waving Stephen down in turn.
     A pair of arm-long flying creatures paused curiously
    near Stephen, hovering in the updraft along the plateau's
    flank. The "birds" were hard-shelled, with four wings and
    sideways-hung jaws. They were harmless to anything the
    size of a man and hadn't learned to be wary.
      The forest far below was a choir of varied calls. Mist
    trailed among the treetops, and a plume hectares in area
    rose a few kilometers away like a stationary cloud. I won-,
    dered if a hot spring or a lake of boiling mud broke surface
    there in the jungle.
      Respite's atmosphere had a golden hue. I found I actual-
    ly liked being under an open sky, unlike most men raised
    in the tunnels and impervious domes of Venus. It made me
    tingle with uncertainty, much the way I felt when making
    my initial approaches to a woman.
      The feeling of peace below the rim was relative. The
    rock vibrated from the teeth of the grinders, felt if not
    heard. The terrace was a nesting site for a colony of the
    flying creatures. Hundreds of them stood at the mouths of
    buffows excavated in the soil, goggling at us with octuple
    eyes. They clacked the edges of their front and rear pairs
    of wings together querulously.
      Opinions of the flyers' taste among our crew ranged
    from adequate to delicious: Salomon swore he'd never
    before eaten anything as good as the sausage of smoked
    lung tissue and organ meat he'd made from the creatures.
    In any event, the expedition would leave Respite well
    stocked with food.
      Stephen landed with a grunt. His fingers massaged
    opposite shoulders. For this excursion he'd slung a short
    rifle across his back, rather than the flashgun he favored.
    "I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm not looking
    forward to the climb back, ascenders or no. I'm not in
    shape for this."
     "I'm not looking forward to going back to the noise,"
    I said. I felt the strain in my arms and thigh muscles also,
    but I thought I'd be physically ready before I was mentally
    ready to return. "I suppose it's better than falling apart
    in transit, though."
      Stephen sniffed. "Worried about the Kinsolving?"
    he said. "Don't be. Winter just didn't have the stomach for
    this. He's headed back to Venus with the rest of Hawtry's
    node of vipers. That lot'd make me ashamed to be a gentle-
    man-if I gave a damn myself."
      The hexagonal terrace sloped at 30', enough to tumble
    a man over the edge if he lost his footing. Each of 
    the basalt columns was about ten meters wide across the
    flats. I stepped forward carefully. "With the Decades loot
    besides," I noted.
      As I passed close to nesting sites, the creatures drew
    themselves down as far as they could into their burrows.
      Because the soil was so shallow, their heads remained
    above the surface but the clicking of the wings was muted.
      "Commander Ricimer," I went on, "thinks they've just
    missed this landfall and gone on through the Breach. The
    Kinsolving."
      "Piet likes to think the best of people," Stephen said.
    He walked over to me without apparent caution. The wind
    from the forest ruffled our cuffs and tunics upward and
    bathed us in earthy, alien odors.
    "And you?" I asked without looking at my companion.
      Something moved across the distant forest, perhaps a shad-
    ow. If the motion had been made by a living creature, it
    was a huge one.

    "Oh, I'd like to, sure," Stephen said, adjusting his rifle's
    sling. "The loot's the reason I'm not angry," Stephen added.
      "There's enough value aboard the Kinsolving to arouse
    attention, but not nearly enough to buy Winter's way out
    of trouble for attacking the colony of a state with whom
    Venus is at peace. That lot has punished themselves."
    I looked at my companion. "Technically at peace," I
    said.
        "Politicians are very technical, Jeremy," Stephen said.
    "Until it's worth the time of somebody in court to cut
    corners. And the Decades loot won't interest the likes
    of Councilor Duneen, which is what it'd take to square up
    in this one."
     I peered over the edge of the terrace. The next step down
    was within five meters of the outer lip of the one we were
    on, A pattern of parallel semicircular waves marked the
    surface of the step, springing out like ripples in a frozen
    pond from the side of the column on which we stood.
      Pits weathered into the rock offered toeholds. I turned
    and swung my legs over.
    "It's a long way down," Stephen warned. "And it's
    likely to be a longer way back up."
    "I want to check something," I said. "You don't have
    to come."
    I clambered my own height down the rock face, then
    pushed off and landed with my knees flexed. Perhaps
    Stephen could pull me up with our belts paired into a
    rope, or-
      Stephen slammed down beside me. He'd jumped with
    the rifle held out so that it didn't batter him in the side
    when he hit the ground. He grinned at me.
    I shrugged. "It's the pattern here," I said, walking toward
    the ripples in stone.
      Conical nests built up from the surface indicated that
    flyers of a different species had colonized this step. These
    were hand-sized and bright yellow in contrast to the dull
    colors of the larger creatures. Hundreds of them lifted into
    the air simultaneously, screeching and emitting sprays of
    mauve feces over the two of us.
      I ducked and swore. Stephen began to laugh rackingly.
    The cloud of flyers sailed away from the plateau, then
    dived abruptly toward the jungle.
    Stephen untied his kerchief, checked for a clean portion
    of the fabric, and used that to wipe down the rifle's receiver.
    "I was the smart-ass who decided if you thought you
    could make it back, I sure could," he explained. "Nobody's
    choice but mine-which is why I let Piet make the decsions,
    mostly."
      I stepped to the point from which ripples spread fro
    the rock face. As I'd expected, the basalt had been
    melted away. Because the rock was already fully oxi-
    dized, it splashed into waves like those of metal welded
    in a vacuum.
      The cavity so formed was circular and nearly two meters
    in diameter. It was sealed by a substance as transparent as
    air-not glass, for it responded with a soft thock when I
    tapped it with my signet ring.
      The creature mummified within was the height and shape
    of a man, but it was covered with fine scales, and its bones
    were jointed in the wrong places. At one time the mummy
    had been clothed, but only shreds of fabric and fittings
    remained in a litter around the four-toed feet.
     "Piet said it looked from the way the rocks were glazed
    that ships had landed on the plateau in the past," Stephen
    remarked. "Landolph, he thought. But after he looked clos-
    er at the weather cracking, he decided that it must have
    been millennia ago."
     "What does it mean?" I asked.
     "To us?" said Stephen. "Nothing. Because our business
    is with the Federation; and whoever this fellow was, he
    wasn't from the Federation."
    


                     IN TRANSIT
    
    Day 92
    
    The Oriflamme came out of transit-out of a universe
    which had no place for man or even for what man thought
    were natural laws. This series had been of eighteen inser-
    tions. The energy differential, the gradient, between the
    sidereal universe and the bubbles of variant space-time had
    risen each time.
      I stood with one hand on the attitude-control console,
    the other poised to steady Dole if the bosun slipped out of
    his seat again. I hadn't eaten in ... days, I wasn't sure how
    long. I hadn't kept anything down for longer yet. Every
    time the Oriflamme switched universes, pain as dull as
    the back of an axe crushed through my skull and nausea
    tried to empty my stomach.
    Dole had nothing to do unless Piet Ricimer ordered
    him to override the Al-which would be suicide, given
    the stresses wracking the Oriflamme now. Helping the
    bosun hold his station, however pointless, gave me reason
    to live.
    Stephen Gregg stood with a hand on Lightbody's shoul-
    der and the other on Jeude's. Stephen was smiling, in a
    manner of speaking. His face was as gray and lifeless
    as a bust chipped out of concrete, but he was standing
    nonetheless.
      During insertions, the Oriflamme's thrusters roared at
    very nearly their maximum output. Winger, the chief of the
    motor crew, bent over Guillermo's couch. He spoke about
    the condition of the sternmost nozzles in tones clipped Just
    this side of panic.
        
    A few festoons of meat cured on Respite still hung from
    wires stretched across the vessel's open areas. We'd
    been eating the "birds" in preference to stores loaded on
    Decades, for fear that the flesh-smoked, for the most
    part-would spoil. There was no assurance we'd reach
    another food source any time soon.
      Salomon's screen was a mass of numbers, Ricimer's
    a tapestry of shaded colors occasionally spiking into a
    saturated primary. The two consoles displayed the same
    data in different forms, digital and analogue: craft and art
    side by side, and only God to know if either showed a
    way out of the morass of crushing energies.
      The Mizpah in close-up filled Guillermo's screen. The
    gradients themselves threw our two vessels onto congruent
      courses: the navigational Als both attempted with electron-
    ic desperation to find solutions that would not exceed the
    starships' moduli of rupture. The range of possibilities was
    an increasingly narrow one.
    "Stand by for transit," Piet Ricimer croaked. "There
    will be a sequence of ff-four insertions."
    He paused, breathing hard with the exertion. Guillermo
    compiled the data in a packet and transferred it to the
    Mizpah by laser.
      Winger swore and stumbled aft again to his station.
    He would have walked into the Long Tom in the center
    of the compartment if I hadn't tugged him into a safer
    trajectory.
      The Mizpah's hull was zebra-striped. The reglazing done
    on Respite had flaked from the old ship's hull along the
    lines of maximum stress, leaving streaks of creamy original
    hull material alternated with broader patches of the black,
    basalt-based sealant. Leakage of air from the Mizpah must
    be even worse than it was for us, and it was very serious
    for us.
      More pain would come. More pain than anything human
    could survive and remain human. Oh God our help in ages
    past, our hope in years to come. 
      "We need to get into suits," Salomon said. He lay at
    the side console like a cadaver on a slab. "They're in suits
    already on the Mizpah." The navigator's eyes were on the
    screen before him, but he didn't appear to be strong enough
    to touch the keypad at his fingertips.
    A sailor sobbed uncontrollably in his hammock. Steph-
    en's eyes turned toward the sound, only his eyes.
    "This sequence will commence in one minute forty sec-
    onds," Ricimer said. His words clacked as if spoken by
    a wood-jawed marionette. "The gradients have ceased to
    rise. We're. We're."
      Stephen didn't turn his head to look at Ricimer, but he
    said, "You're supposed to tell us that we've seen worse,
    and we'll come through this too, Piet."
    Watching Stephen was like watching a corpse speak.
    Ricimer coughed. After a moment, I realized that he was
    laughing. "If we do come through this, Stephen," Ricimer
    said, "be assured that I will say that the next time."
    "Prepare for t-trans--" Salomon said. He couldn't get
    the final word out before the fact made it redundant.
    My head split in bright skyrockets curving to either side.
    Guillermo's screen, fed by the external optics, became
    hash as the Oriflamme entered a region alien to the very
    concept of light as the sidereal universe knew it.
      Back a heartbeat later, another blow crushing me into
    a boneless jelly which throbbed with pain. The gasp that
    started with the initial insertion was tightening my throat
    and ribs, or I might have tried to scream.
      Half the Mizpah hung on the right-hand display. A streak
    of centimeter-thick black ceramic ringed the stem. Where
    the bow should have been, I saw only a mass as confused
    as gravel pouring from a hopper.
    Transit. There was a God and He hated mankind with
    a fury as dense as the heart of a Black Hole. The mills of
    His wrath ground Jeremy Moore like-
      Back, only gravel on Guillermo's screen, dancing with
    light, and then nothing because the Oriflamme had cycled
    into another bubble universe and I wished that I'd been
    aboard the Mizpah because-
      The Oriflamme crashed into the sidereal universe again
    and stayed there while I swayed at Dole's station and
    Stephen Gregg held Jeude's slumping form against the
    back of his seat. There must have been a fourth insertion
    and return, but I hadn't felt it. Perhaps I'd blacked out,
    but I was still standing 
      "The gradients have dropped to levels normal for
    intrasystem transits," Ricimer said. He sounded as though
    he had just been awakened from centuries of sleep. The
    muscles operating his vocal cords were stiff. "We'll make
    a further series of seven insertions, and I believe we'll
    find Landolph's landfall of Pesaltra at the end of them.
    Gentlemen, we have transited the Breach."
      I tried to cheer. I could only manage a gabbling sound.
    Dole put up a hand to steady me; we clutched one another
    for a moment.
    "We made it," Jeude whispered.
      Guillermo's display showed a blank starscape, and there
    was no pulsing highlight on the main screen to indicate the
    Mizpah.
        
              PESALTRA
    
    Day 94
    
    The ramp lowered with squealing hesitation, further signing
    that the stress of transiting the Breach had warped the
    Oriflamme's sturdy hull. Air with the consistency of heavy
    gelatin surged into the hold. I was the only man in the
    front rank who wasn't wearing body armor. Sweat slicked
    my palm on the grip of the cutting bar.
      "Welcome to the asshole of the universe," muttered a
    spacer. He spoke for all of us in the assault party.
    "Well," said Piet Ricimer as he raised the visor of his
    helmet. "At least nobody's shooting at us."
      Steam still rose from the mudflat that served Pesaltra
    as a landing field. Nine of the local humans were picking
    their way toward the Oriflamme. Molts-several score and
    perhaps a hundred of them-stood near the low buildings
    and the boats drawn up on the shore of the surrounding
    lagoons. The aliens formed small groups which swirled
    but didn't approach the vessel.
    There were no weapons in sight among the Feds or their
    slaves.
      Finger-length creatures with many legs and no obvious
    eyes feasted on a blob of protoplasm at the foot of the
    ramp. They must have risen from burrows deep within the
    mud, or the thruster exhaust would have broiled them.
    The creatures were the only example of local animals
    that I could see.
      "No shooting unless I do," Stephen Gregg said. "I
    don't expect that. Let's go."
      He cradled his flashgun and strode forward. His
    boots squelched to the ankles when he stepped off the
    end of the ramp. I sank almost as deep, even though I
    didn't have the weight of armor and equipment Stephen
    carried.
     The front rank, ten abreast, stamped and sloshed forward.
    The second rank spread out behind us. The locals wore
    thigh-length waders of waterproofed fabric. In this heat
    and saturated humidity, their garments must have been
    nearly as uncomfortable as our back-and-breast armor.
     There were mountains in the western distance, but the
    Pesaltran terrain here and for kilometers in every direction
    was of shallow lagoons and mud banks with ribbons and
    spikes of vegetation. None of the plants were as much as
    a meter high; many of them sprawled like brush strokes of
    bright green across the mud.
     A bubble burst flatulently in the middle of the nearest
    channel. I guessed it was the result of bacterial decay, not
    a larger lifeform.
     I felt silly holding a cutting bar as a threat against people
    so obviously crushed by life as the Fed personnel here.
    How the rest of the assault party must feel with their guns,
    armor, and bandoliers of ammunition!
     Though Stephen Gregg wouldn't care ... and maybe
    not the others either. Overwhelming force meant you were
    ready to overwhelm your enemy. What could possibly be
    embarrassing about that?
     "Ah, sirs?" said one of the locals, a white-haired man
    with a false eye. "You'd be from the Superintendency of
    the Outer Ways, I guess?"
     He stared at the Oriflamme and its heavily-armed crew
    as if we were monsters belched forth from the quavering
    earth.
     It wasn't practical to carry building materials between
    stars. The colony's structures were nickel steel processed
    from local asteroids or concrete fixed with shell lime.
    Three large barracks housed the Molt labor force; a fourth
    similar building was subdivided internally for the human
    staff.
     A middle-aged woman stood on the porch with the aid
    of crutches and leg braces. The door to the room behind
    her was open. Its furnishings were shoddy extrusions of
    light metal, neither attractive nor comfortable-looking.
    The same could be said for the woman, I thought with
    a sigh.
    Sheet-metal sheds held tools and equipment in obvious
    disorder. A windowless concrete building looked like a
    blockhouse', but the sliding door was open, showing the
    interior to be empty except for a few shimmering bales.
      Garbage, including Molt and human excrement, stank
    in the lagoon at the back of the barracks. The hulls of
    at least two crashed spaceships and other larger junk had
    been dragged to the opposite side of the landing site.
    Ricimer halted us with a wave of his band and took
    another step to make his primacy clear. "I'm Captain
    Ricimer of the Free State of Venus," he said to the
    one-eyed man. "We've come through the Breach. We'll
    expect the full cooperation of everyone here. If we get it,
    then there'll be no difficulties for yourselves."
      The Fed official looked puzzled. The men approaching
    with him had halted a few paces behind. "No, really," the
    man said. "I'm Assistant Treasurer Taenia; I'm in charge
    here. If anyone is. Who are you?"
      Dole stepped forward. The butt of his rifle prodded
    Taenia hard in the stomach. "When Captain Ricimer's
    present," he said loudly, "nobody else is in charge-and
    especially not some dog of a Fed! Take your hats off,
    you lot!"
      Only two of the locals wore headgear, a cloth cap on
    a red-haired man and another fellow with a checked ban-
    danna tied over his scalp. Dole pointed his rifle in the face
    of the latter. The Fed snatched off the bandanna. He was
    bald as an egg.
      Dole shifted his aim. "No, put that up!" Piet Ricimer
    snapped, but the second Fed was removing his cap and
    a third man knelt in the mud with a look of terror on
    his face.
      Taenia straightened up slowly. He blinked, though the
    lid covering his false eye closed only halfway. "I don't..."
    he said. "I don't..."
      Ricimer stepped up to the man and took his right hand.
    "You won't be hurt so long as you and your fellows
    cooperate fully with us. Are you willing to do that?"
    "We'll do anything you say," Taenia said. "Anything
    at all, of course we will, your excellency!"
    Ricimer looked over his shoulder. "Mister Moore," he
    said. "When we lift off, I'll want to put a transponder in
    orbit to inform Captains Winter and Blakey of our course
    should they pass this way. Can you build such a device
    with what we have on hand?"
      I nodded, flushing with silent pleasure. Ricimer had
    noticed my facility with electronics and was willing to
    use it. "Yes, yes, of course," I said. "But I suspect I can
    use local hardware."
    Ricimer smiled at me. "I can understand a man being
    interested in a challenge," he said. "Though I'm surprised
    at a man who doesn't find this voyage enough of a chal-
    lenge already."
      Ricimer's face set again; grim, though not angry. There
    was no headquarters building, so he indicated the human
    barracks with a nod of his carbine's muzzle. "Let's pro-
    ceed to the shelter," he said.
      "But why in God's name would you want to come
     here?" blurted the Fed wringing his bandanna between
    his hands.
      "That," remarked Stephen Gregg as we twenty Ven-
    erians swept past the flabbergasted locals, "is a fair ques-
    tion."
    "Well, we don't have anybody to communicate with,"
    Schatz, Pesaltra's radio operator, said defensively to me.
    "They were supposed to send a new set from Osomi with
    the last ferry, but they must've forgot it. Besides, the ferry
    comes every six months or a year, and nobody else comes
    at all. It's not like we've got a lot of landing traffic to
    control."
      Across the double-sized room that served the station's
    administrative needs, Salomon rose from a desk covered
    with unfiled invoices. "What do you mean you don't have
    any charts?" he snarled at Taenia. "You've got to have
    some charts!"
      The floor was covered with tracked-in mud so thick
    that a half-liter liquor bottle was almost submerged in a
    comer. Paper and general trash were mixed with the dirt,
    creating a surface similar to wattle-and-daub. I'd dropped
    a spring fastener when I pulled the back from the non-
    functioning radio. I'd searched the floor vainly for al-
    most a minute, before I realized that the task was vain
    as well as pointless.
     "We're not going anywhere," Taenia said in near echo
    of Schatz's words a moment before. "What do we need
    navigational data for?"
     "If we were going anyplace," Schatz added with a
    variation of meaning, "they wouldn't have stuck us on
    Pesaltra."
     "We'll search the files," Piet Ricimer said calmly. He
    9estured his navigator to the chair at the desk and dragged
    another over to the opposite side. "Sometimes a routing
    slip will give coordinates."
     "But not values," Salomon moaned. He organized a
    thatch of hard copy to begin checking nonetheless.
     "But how do you communicate across the planet?" I said
    to Schatz. The sealed board was still warm when I pulled it
    from the radio, though the Fed claimed it had failed three
    months before. Schatz hadn't bothered to unplug the set-
    which had a dead short in its microcircuitry.
     Venerians stood in the shade of buildings, staring at a
    landscape that seemed only marginally more interesting
    than hard vacuum. The low haze the sun burned off the
    water blurred the horizon. The glimpse I'd gotten through
    the Oriflamme's optics during the landing approach con-
    vinced me that better viewing conditions wouldn't mean
    a better view.
     "There's nobody ..." Schatz said. "I mean, there's just
    us here and the collecting boats, and nobody goes out in
    the boats but the bugs. So we don't need a radio, I'm
    telling you."
     Three Venerians had boarded one of the light-alloy boats
    on the lagoon. It was a broad-beamed craft, blunt-ended and
    about four meters long. A pole rather than oars or a motor.
    propelled the craft. From the raucous struggle the men were
    having, the water was less than knee-deep.
    "Bugs?" I repeated in puzzlement.
    "He means the Molts, Jeremy," Stephen Gregg said
    dryly. "It's a term many of the folk on outworld stations
    use, so that they can pretend they're better than somebody.
    Which these scuts obviously are not."
      I unhooked my cutting bar. The tool's length made it
    clumsy for delicate work, but it would open the module.
    "There's no call to be insulting," Schatz muttered. He
    was afraid to look at Stephen. His hand rose reflexively
    to shield his mouth halfway through the comment.
    "Is he helping you, Jeremy?" Stephen asked.
    I looked up from the incipient operation with a scowl.
    "What?" I snapped, then remembered I owed Stephen, 
    well, owed him the chance to be whatever it was I'd
    become. "Sorry, Stephen. No, he's useless to me."
      "Get a shovel and a broom," Stephen ordered Schatz
    crisply, "and get to work. I expect to see the entire floor
    of this room in one standard hour."
      I triggered my bar and let it settle after the start-up
    torque. I held the electronics module against the blade
    with my left hand, rotating the work piece while holding
    the cutting bar steady.
    "But there's bugs-" Schatz said, raising his voice over
    the keen of the bar's ceramic teeth.
    Stephen's face went as blank as a concrete wall. His
    eyes seemed to sink a little deeper into his skull, and his
    lips parted minusculely.
      Schatz backed a step, backed another-hit the door-
    jamb, and ducked out into the open air.
    I shut off the power switch for safety's sake before I
    hung the bar back on my belt. I parted the sawn casing
    with a quick twist.
      "Useless," Stephen said in a hoarse voice. "But he will
    clean this room."
      "And so's this," I said. "Useless, I mean-fried like
    an egg.
    I dropped the pieces of module back onto the radio's
    chassis and shook my head. "I'm going out to check the
    wrecked ships," I said. "Could be something there will
    help. I doubt this lot is any better at salvage than at any-
    thing else."
     Stephen's eyes focused again. "Yes, well," he said. "I'll
    come with you, Jeremy."
     He gestured me out the door ahead of him. Schatz stood
    halfway along the porch, holding a mattock in one hand
    and arguing with the woman on crutches.
     "To keep from doing something you'll regret, you
    mean," I said over my shoulder to Stephen.
     "Not quite," Stephen said. "But I don't want to do some-
    thing that Piet would regret."
    
    The high scream of my cutting bar ground down into a
    moan as the battery reached the limits of its charge. I
    backed away from the twisted nickel-steel pedestal I'd
    sawn most of the way through. Federation salvagers at
    the time of the crash had removed the navigational Al
    from the pedestal's top.
     I gasped for breath. My gray tunic and the thighs of my
    trousers were black with sweat.
     Stephen looked down into the freighter's cockpit. The
    wreck lay on its side, so a rope ladder now dangled from
    the hatch in the ceiling. The force of the crash had twisted
    the hatchway into a lozenge shape.
     "I repeat," Stephen said. "I could take a shift."
     "I know what I'm doing," I snarled, "and you bloody
    well wouldn't! I haven't put in this much work to have
    somebody saw through the middle of the board."
     I was trembling with fatigue and the heat. I hadn't recov-
    ered from the strains my mind had transmitted to my body
    during the weeks of brutal transit. Maybe I'd never recov-
    er. Maybe-
     "Come on up and have some water," Stephen said mild-
    ly, reaching a hand out to me. "The distillation plant here
    works, at least."
     Stephen's touch settled my flailing mind so that I could
    climb the ladder. As Stephen lifted, the muscles of my
    right forearm twisted in a cramp and pulled my hand into
    a hook. I flopped onto the crumpled hull, cursing undcr
    my breath in frustration.
      Salomon trudged toward us across the seared mud of
    the landing field, holding a curved plate of shimmering
    gray. The object was as large as his chest. Hydraulic fluid
    from the infrequent ships had painted swatches of ground
    with a hard iridescence.
      Stephen's flashgun was equipped with a folding solar
    panel to recharge the weapon when time permitted. He
    had spread the panel as a parasol while I worked in the
    cabin below.
    Stephen had brought a 10-liter waist jug from the Ori-
    flamme when I got my tool kit. The curved glass container
    was cast with a carrying handle and four broad loops for
    harness attachment. I lifted it with care, letting my left
    hand support most of the weight.
    Stephen took my cutting bar and opened the battery
    compartment in its grip. He swapped the discharged bat
    tery for the one in the flashgun's butt. The charging mecha
    nism whined like a peevish mosquito when the flashgun's
    prongs made contact.
    The jug'scontents were flavored with lemon juice,
    enough to cut the deadness of distilled water. Micropores
    in the glass lifted water by osmosis to the outer surface,
    cooling the remaining contents by convection. The drink
    was startlingly refreshing.
    "Thought I'd join you,"Salomon said. He lifted the
    object he held, the headshield of some large creature, to
    Stephen to free his hands.
    The Federation freighter was a flimsy construction built
    mostly of light alloys on this side of the Mirror. It had
    touched down too hard, ramming a thruster nozzle deep
    into the mud as the motors were shutting down. The final
    pulse of plasma blew the vessel into a cartwheel and ripped
    its belly open.
      The crew may have survived with no worse than bruises,
    but the ship itself was a total loss. The hull had crumpled
    into a useful series of steps, though you had to watch the
    places where metal bent beyond its strength had ripped
    jaggedly.
      "There'sno information at all," the navigator com
    plained bitterly. I offered him the heavy jug, but he
    waved it away. "We'll have to coast the gradients
    looking for the next landfall, and there's no guarantee
    that'll have navigational control either. Osomi sounds like
    another cesspool, sure, maybe a bit shallower."
      "If Landolph could do it, Piet can," Stephen,said calmly.
    He tapped the plate of chitin. "What's this?"
      "The values aren't even the same on this side of the
    Mirror!" Salomon said. "The people here live like animals,
    drinking piss they brew for a couple months after the ship
    from Osomi drops off supplies. Then they run out of dry
    fruit and don't even have that!"
       "It's from a local animal, not a Molt, I suppose?" I
    asked. By helping Stephen break the navigator's mood
    out of its tail-chasing cycle of frustration, I found I was
    calming myself. I smiled internally.
      Salomon shrugged. "It's a sea scorpion," he said. "They
    live in the lagoons. The head armor fluoresces, so it's used
    for jewelry this side of the Mirror. That's the only reason
    anybody lives here-if you call this living!"
      Stephen looked at his arm through the chitin. The armor
    was nearly transparent, but sunlight gave it a rich sheen
    that was more than a color.
      "Pretty," I said. I liked it. "How big is the whole ani-
    mal?"
      "Three, four meters," Salomon said. He reached for the
    jug, then grimaced and withdrew his hand. "I've a
    bottle back on the ship," he said. "I was going to drink it
    when we transited the Breach, but when the time came I
    didn't feel much like it."
    He glared at the surrounding terrain. "We've made it
    through the Breach, we've lost most of the squadron."
    His head snapped toward Stephen and me. "You know 
    that the Kinsolving and Mizpah aren't going to come here,
    don't you?" Salomon demanded.
    "Yes," said Stephen evenly. "But we're going to put
    a transponder here anyway."
    Salomon shuddered. "And what we've got for the voyage is
    rank-and a bale of crab shells that wouldn't pay for
    a three-day voyage, much less what we've gone through."
    "They'll be trading material," Stephen said. "We'll need
    food as we go on, and sticking a gun in somebody's face
    isn't always the best way to bargain."
     I grinned at him. "Though it works," I said.
     It's not a magic wand, Jeremy," Stephen said. "It
    depends on the people at either end of the gun, you
    see."
     Stephen's voice dropped and he rasped the last few
    syllables quietly. I felt sobered by the results of my quip.
    I put my hand over his and drew the gunman back to the
    present.
     "You know," Stephen resumed with a dreamy softness,
    "Pesaltra is actually a pretty place in its way. Water and
    land stitched together by the plants, and the mist to soften
    the lines."
     Salomon knew Stephen well enough to fear him in a
    killing mood. He nodded with approval that we'd stepped
    back from an unexpected precipice. "They catch the scor-
    pions in traps, Taenia says," he said. "It's dangerous. Every
    year they lose a few boats and half a dozen Molts running
    the trapline."
     "We're not doing it for the shell," Stephen said. He
    wasn't angry, any more than a storm is angry, but his tone
    brooked as little argument as a thunderbolt does. "We're
    not doing it for the wealth, either, though we'll have that
    by and by."
     In a way, it wasn't Stephen Gregg speaking, but rather
    Piet Ricimer wearing Stephen's hollow soul. There was
    fiery power in the words, but they were spoken by some-
    one who knew he had nothing of his own except the Hell
    of his dreams. "We're doing it for all men, on Venus and
    Earth and the Rabbits, bringing them a universe they can
    be men in!"
     Stephen's big frame shuddered. After a moment, in a
    changed voice, he added, "Not that we'll live to see it.
    But we'll have the wealth."
     I flexed my hands and found they worked again, though
    my right arm had twinges. "I'm going to finish down
    below," I said.
     "Let me take a look," Stephen said. He furled the
    charging panel and collapsed its support wand so that
    
*Missing 18 or so pages here*

    and his face wore a dazed expression. Jeude's buckshot had hit him squarely at the top of the breastbone, but he was still-for the moment-alive.
Which is all any of us can say, I thought as I jumped his legs. My boots skidded on the remains of the man Stephen's bolt had eviscerated. I caught the counter with my free hand and swung myself through the gate. I'd left my cutting bar behind. There was more shooting outside the building.
The room stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Ozone, powder smoke, and cooked meat added their distinctive smells to the pong of fresh-ripped human guts. The woman Ricimer shot was huddled beside the outer door. She'd smeared a trail of blood across the floor to where she lay.
Heimond's car pulled a hard turn as I ran out the front door. Ricimer was driving again. Stephen stood on the passenger seat. He'd slung the flashgun and instead held Piet's repeating carbine.
The man on the roof now lay full length on his back.
I don't know if he'd been killed or had passed out from drink.
1 jumped into the back with Lightbody and Jeude. The car hadn't slowed, and I'm not sure anybody realized I wasn't already on board. Jeude fired again. The flash from the shotgun's muzzle was red and bottle-shaped.
"Shut that popgun down until there's a target in range, you whore's turd!" Stephen snarled in a voice with more hatred than you'd find in a regiment of Inquisitors.
Stephen swayed as the car jounced. I grabbed his belt so that if he fell he wouldn't be thrown out. He poised the butt of the carbine to crush my skull, but his conscious mind overrode reflex at the last moment.
I sucked breaths through my mouth. I was dizzy, and nothing around me seemed real.
The car had a quartet of headlights above the hood, but only the pair in the center worked. They threw a long shadow past a bareheaded man in blue running down the track a hundred meters ahead of us.
  Stephen fired once. The man pitched forward with one arm flung out and the other covering his eyes. We jolted
past the body at the car's best speed, 50 kph or so. There
was no sign of the other Feds who'd escaped from port
control with that one.
"Stephen, sit down!" Piet Ricimer ordered. Gregg
ignored him.
  The boarding ramps of the ship that landed after ours
were down, and the vessel was lighted like a Christmas
star. Molts and humans in blue uniforms stood on the
ramps and at a distance from the vessel; the ground directly
underneath would still be at close to 100'C from the ship's
exhaust.
  A man on the vessel's forward ramp pointed toward
our swaying vehicle and shouted orders through a bull
horn. "The fucking Parliament!" Jeude snarled. "The real
fucking escort, and why she couldn't have showed up
tomor-"
  A uniformed woman ran into our path, waving her arms
over her head. Piet swerved violently. Stephen fired, a
quick stab of yellow flame. The Fed toppled under our
right front wheel.
  We lurched but the wheels were mounted on half-axles
and had a wide track. Stephen flailed, completely off bal-
ance. The car didn't go over. By bracing my leg against
the side of the compartment I kept Stephen from falling
out as well.
  Lightbody cried, "Lord God of hosts!" as he fired toward
the Parliament, and Jeude's shotgun boomed again despite
the fact that I was sprawled half across him as I clung
desperately to Stephen. The car's frame swayed upward
as the heavy front wheel slammed down. The rear wheel
hit the woman's body, and Stephen shot the blue-sashed
Molt who tried to leap over the hood at Ricimer.
  A ship down the line lit her thrusters. A bubble of rain
bow fire lifted and cooled to a ghostly skeleton of itself
before vanishing entirely. The Parliament was a dedicated
warship. I'd seen three rectangular gunports gape open in
succession in my last glimpse of her, but now we were past.
  Stephen got his legs straight and sat down. His carbine's
bolt was open. He opened a pocket of Piet's bandolier
and took out a handful of cartridges. The Parliament's siren howled and a bell on the Molt barracks clanged a twice-a-second tocsin.
A ship tested her thrusters again. This time the vessel
lifted slightly from her berth and settled again ten meters
out in the roadway. She was the Oriflamme. The 20-cm
hoses with which she'd been drawing reaction mass dangled from her open holds.
Glowing exhaust backlit us. I stared stupidly at the spray of dust ahead of our right front wheel. "There's a truck following-" Jeude shouted.
Maybe he meant to say more, but three violent hammer blows shook our vehicle. Stephen pitched forward, the severed tags of his flashgun's sling flapping. A palm-sized asterisk of lead smeared his backplate; the ceramic was cracked in a pattern of radial lines. My face stung, my hands bled where bits of bullet jacket had splashed them, and I still didn't realize the Feds were shooting at us.
I twisted to look back the way we'd come. A slopefronted truck bounced down the road in a huge plume of dust. It was moving twice as fast as we could. Red flame winked from the framework on top of the vehicle. The Feds had welded dozens of rifle barrels together like an array of organ pipes.
Bits of rubber flew off our left rear tire, though it didn't go flat. Because of Rabbit attacks, the garrison of Templeton had a mobile reaction force. It was too mobile for us.
Stephen leaned across the back of his seat and rested his left elbow on my shoulder. It was like having a building fall on me. I had just enough awareness of what was happening to close my eyes. The flashgun drove its dazzling light through the tight-clenched eyelids, shocking the retinas into multiple afterimages when I looked up again.
The laser mechanism keened as it cooled beside my ear. Stephen tilted the weapon and slapped a fresh battery into the butt compartment. The flashgun wasn't going to do any good; even I could see that.
The truck was armored. The metal shutter over the windshield glowed white, but the driver behind it was unharmed.
  Flashgun bolts delivered enormous amounts of energy, but a monopulse laser has virtually no penetration. Even a hit on the driver's periscope might be useless, since properly designed optics would shatter instead of transmitting a dangerous amount of energy.
"Bail out!" I shouted. I squirmed to the side of the compartment. Jeude wasn't moving; Lightbody thumbed a cartridge into the breech of his rifle.
"Jump!" I shouted, but as I poised Lightbody fired again and Stephen leaned forward against the butt of his squat laser.
A bullet hit our right rear wheel and this time the tire did blow. The car fishtailed, flinging me against the seats. The sky ripped in a star-hot flare. Concussion pushed the car's suspension down to the stops, then lifted us off the ground when the pressure wave passed.
The Oriflamme had fired one of her 15-cm broadside guns. The truck was a geyser of flame. Fuel, ammunition, and the metal armor burned when the slug of ions hit the vehicle.
Ricimer crossed his wrists on the yoke, countersteering to bring us straight. The wheel rim dragged a trail of sparks across the gravel.
-Salomon shouldn't have risked running out-" Ricimer cried.
Another of the Oriflamme's cannon recoiled into its gunport behind a raging hell of stripped atomic nuclei.
The facade of the Molt barracks caved in. The interior of the three-story building erupted into flame as everything that could bum ignited simultaneously.
Wreckage spewed outward like the evanescent fabric of a bubble popping. Shattered concrete and viscous flame wrapped port control and the maintenance shop on the barracks' other side.
Ricimer stood on the car's brakes. Because of the blown tire we spun 180' and nearly hopped broadside into the lip of the Oriflamme's stem ramp. Stephen rose in his seat and poised like a statue aiming the flashgun. I tried to raise Jeude one-handed-I'd clung to my electronics kit since the moment I slammed it over the data we'd come to get. Lightbody bent to help me.
Stephen fired. A secondary explosion erupted with red
  Piet grabbed Jeude's legs. He and I and Lightbody lifted
Jeude out. The smooth surface of Jeude's body armor
slipped out of my hand, but Lightbody's arms were spread
beneath the wounded man's torso.
Beneath the torso of the dead man. A bullet had struck
Jeude under the right eye socket and exited through the
back of his neck. Strands of his blond hair were plastered
to the wounds, but his heart no longer pumped blood.
  A thumping shock wave followed several seconds after
Stephen fired. He'd managed to do effective damage with
the flashgun instead of leaving the fight to the thunderous
clamor of plasma cannon.
  We ran up the ramp, carrying Jeude among us. The air
shimmered from the hop that had lifted the Oriflamme
into firing position. Salomon poured full power through
the thrusters. Heat battered me from all sides. I would
have screamed but my lips and eyelids were squeezed
tight against the ions that flayed them like an acid bath.
  I fell down, feeling the shock as the third of our big
guns fired. Acceleration squeezed me to the deck as the
jets hammered at maximum output. I was blind and suf_
focating and at last I did scream but the fire didn't scour
my lungs.
  I thrashed upright. The crewman spraying me with a
hose shut it off when he saw I was choking for breath.
I was wrapped in a soaking blanket. So were the others
who'd staggered aboard with me.
  Dole knelt and held Piet's hands with a look of fear
for his commander on his face. Stephen checked the bore
of his flashgun and Lightbody was trying to unlatch his
body armor. The fifth blanket must cover Jeude, because
it didn't move.
  Our ramp was still rising. Through the crack I could
see waves on the lake fifty meters below, quivering in the
enteric light of a laser aimed at us from the Templeton
defenses. Something hit the hull with a sound more like
a scream than a crash. Our last broadside gun slammed
as the ramp closed against its jamb.
  Piet got to his feet. Dole tried to hold him. Piet pushed
past and staggered toward the companionway to the Oriflamme's working deck. His face was fiery red under the lights of the hold. Stephen walked behind Piet like a giant shadow.
  I stood up. Pain stabbed from my knuckles when I tried
to push off with my free hand. My face was swelling, so
that I seemed to be looking through tubes of flesh. Soon
I wouldn't be able to see at all.
  I stumbled to the companionway, swinging my arm to
clear startled crewmen from my path.
I had to get to the bridge. My partner held the course
we would follow until we won free or died.

INTERSTELLAR SPACE

Day 102

"Sir, please leave the dressing in place," begged Rakoscy, the ship's surgeon. "I can't answer for what will happen to your eyes if you don't keep them covered for the next twenty-four hours at least."
"It's under control, Piet," Stephen said, taking Piet's hands in his own. He pulled them down from Piet's eye bandage with as much gentle force as was necessary. "There's nothing to see anyway. Salomon'll tell us when the data's been analyzed."
Dressings muffled both men's hands into mittens. The visored helmet Stephen wore because of the flashgun's IV glare had protected his face.
Lightbody moaned in a hammock against the crossbulkhead, drugged comatose but not at peace. He'd come through the night better than the rest of us physically, but I was worried about his state of mind.
I hadn't thought of Lightbody and Jeude as being close friends. I don't suppose they were friends in the usual sense, a deeply religious man and an irreverent fellow who talked of little but the women and brawls he'd been involved with between voyages. But they'd been together for many years and much danger.
I could see again. Shots had shrunk the tissues of my face enough for me to look out of my eye sockets, and Rakoscy had left openings in the swaths of medicated dressings that
covered the skin exposed to the plasma exhaust. I felt as
though a crew had been pounding on my body with mauls,
but Rakoscy assured me there'd be no permanent injury.

  It was good to worry about Lightbody's state of mind,
because then I didn't have to consider my own.
Salomon turned his couch and said, "Sir, Guillermo and
I have a course to propose."
  Rakoscy led Piet by the hands to the center console. I
suppose it would have made better sense for Salomon to
use Piet's couch under these circumstances. The same Al
drove all three consoles, but the main screen was capable
of more discriminating display because it had four times
the area of the others.
  Salomon hadn't suggested he take over, much less make
the decision without asking. Logic wasn't the governing
factor here. It rarely is in human affairs.
  Stephen moved nearer to me and hesitated. I'm not sure
whether or not he knew I could see.

  "That seemed close," I said quietly. "Or is it something
I'll get used to after the fiftieth time?"
Stephen gave a minuscule smile. "No," he said, "that
was pretty near-run, all right. If it hadn't been for Salomon
taking the initiative, it would've been a lot too close."
He coughed. "You're all right?"
"Yeah," I said. "I don't have much color vision at the
moment, that's all."
He looked hard at me, but he didn't push for answers
to the real questions. Why had God saved me and taken
Jeude beside me?
If there was a God.
  Piet settled onto his couch and sighed audibly. Fans,
thrusters, and the noise of the ship herself working filled
the Oriflamme with a constant rumble. With time, that
drifted below the consciousness.
There were no human sounds aboard now. The crew
in the forward section had fallen tensely and completely
silent.
  Piet switched on the public address system by feel. "Go
ahead," he said.
  "Trehinga is about six days transit from Templeton,"
Salomon said. "Seven, according to Federation charts, but
I'm sure we can do it in six."
  The navigator had shown himself to be able and quick
thinking. As Stephen said, he'd saved us on Templeton. Salomon ran out the big guns against orders when he heard the landed Parliament identify herself as a presidential vessel-a dedicated warship--over the radio. The Feds we met were a party sent by the Parliament's captain to port control when nobody replied to the radio.
Despite his proven ability, Salomon licked his lips from nervousness as he proposed a solution based on information that the general commander couldn't see. Alone of us aboard the Oriflamme, Salomon was afraid that his responsibilities were beyond him.
"It has dock facilities," he continued. "We've lost two attitude jets, and the upper stem quarter of the hull was crazed by laser fire as we escaped. But there shouldn't be much traffic."
"Trehinga grows grain for the region," Guillermo put in from the opposite console. "There are no pre-Collapse vestiges, and therefore little traffic or defenses."
Salomon nodded, gaining animation as he spoke. "The port's supposed to have a company of human soldiers," he said, "but Mister Gregg says he doubts that." He looked up at Stephen.
Piet nodded agreement. "A few dozen militia, counting Molts with spears and cutting bars," he said. "Unless the Back Worlds are much better staffed than the Reaches in general."
"Of course, Templeton was no joke," Stephen said. The lack of concern in his voice wasn't as reassuring as it might
have been if a less fatalistic man were speaking.
"Templeton was a treasure port," Piet said briskly. "Go on, Mister Salomon. What about the risk of pursuit from Templeton?"
"The bloody Parliament isn't pursuing anybody till they build her a new bow, sir," Stampfer said. "Since me and the boys on Gun Three blew the old one fucking off as we lifted."
The satisfaction in the master gunner's voice was as
obvious as it was deserved.
Piet nodded again in approval. "And there wasn't any
thing docked on Templeton when we arrived that would be
a threat," he said. "Nevertheless, we'll need to take some
precautions if we're going to do extensive repairs."
Piet turned his head-"looked," but of course he couldn't
see-from Salomon to Guillermo and back. "Are we ready
to go, then?" he asked. The infectious enthusiasm of his
tone helped me forget how much I hurt. Piet had been
burned at least as badly.
"The first sequence of the course is loaded," Guillermo
said. Salomon glanced up in surprise, but the Molt knew
Piet Ricimer.
"Then let's go," Piet said. "Gentlemen, prepare for
transit!"

TREHINGA

Day 109

The cutter touched bow-high. Piet cut the motor and we skipped forward on momentum, crashing down on the skids about the boat's own length ahead of its thruster's final pulse. It was a jolting landing compared to Piet's usual, but I understood why he wouldn't take chances with plasma for a while.
Lightbody and Kiley had undogged the dorsal hatch when we dropped below three thousand meters. They and the four other sailors packed beneath the hatch slid it open, but Stephen was first out of the vessel and I managed not to be far behind. I was more mobile than the men in half armor and bandoliers of ammunition.
A featherboat with room for twenty men and a small plasma cannon would have been better for this assault, but that option had gone missing with the Kinsolving. Twelve of us were squeezed into the cutter. Four spacers would cover the pair of grain freighters on the landing field, while we others "captured" the settlement of New Troy: a two-story Commandatura with bay windows and a copper-sheathed front door, and fifty squalid commercial and residential buildings.
The landing field was adobe clay, flat and featureless. Dust puffed under my boots. The sun was near zenith, but the air felt pleasantly cool,
The Oriflamme roared down from orbit above us,
Salomon would be on the ground in three minutes, but
it would be at least five minutes more before anyone left
the ship safely except wearing a full hard suit. The flagship
could dominate the community by her presence and the
threat of her heavy guns, but a quick assault required a
lighter vessel.
  The Commandatura was fifty meters from where we'd
landed. People watched us from its windows and the door
ways of other buildings.
  According to the database I'd copied on Templeton,
Trehinga was fairly well populated, but most of that popu-
lation lived on latifundia placed along the great river sys-
tems of the north continent. New Troy was the planet's
administrative capital and starport, but it was in no sense
a cultural center.
  Still, some of the people watching were women.
A pair of men in white tunics, one of them wearing a
saucer hat with gold braid on the brim, walked out of the
Commandatura. Stephen and I started toward them. Dole
was beside me, carrying a rifle as well as a cutting bar, and
the other sailors fanned out to the sides. Piet ran to join us,
last out of the cutter because he'd been piloting it.
  The Fed officials paused at the base of the three steps
to the Commandatura's front door. They stared at us, all
armed and most of us wearing body armor.
"Raiders!" the older man shouted.
Stephen pointed his flashgun.
"Don't anyone shoot!" Piet cried as he aimed his own
carbine toward the Feds. "And you, wait where you are!"
"Raiders!" the Fed repeated. He turned and took the
four steps in two strides. His companion raised his hands
and closed his eyes. The onlookers of a moment before
vanished, though eyes still peeked from the corners of
windows.
  I ran toward the Commandatura, holding my cutting bar
in both hands to keep it from flailing. The others followed
me as quickly as their equipment allowed.
"You won't be harmed!" Piet said.
The Fed official grabbed the long vertical handhold and
started to pull the door open. Piet fired. His bullet whacked
the door near the transom, jolting the panel out of the Fed's
hand. The Fed ran into the edge of the door instead of
slipping between it and the jamb. The impact knocked
him back down the steps, scattering blood from a pressure
cut over his right eye.
  I ran past the man. He moaned and squeezed his fore-
head with his palms stacked one on the other. I tugged
at the door with my left hand. Piet's bullet had split the
wood of the heavy panel, wedging it tighter against the
jamb. Stephen jerked the door open but I eeled into the
reception area ahead of him.
  There were offices to right and left behind latticework
partitions. Either half held a dozen Molts and a few humans
among the counters and desks. A man in his fifties had
crawled under his desk. The opening faced the front door,
so he was perfectly visible.
  Two rifles lay on the wooden floor of the anteroom. Men
in white Federation military tunics stood in the office to
the left, with the lattice between them and their weapons.
Their hands were raised, but from the looks on their faces
they expected to be killed anyway.
  I started up the central staircase to the second story,
taking the steps two at a time. Behind me Piet ordered,
"Get them all in the left room. Loomis and Baer to guard
them!"
  Heavier boots crashed on the stairs behind me. Stephen
breathed in gasps. Dole whuffed, "Christ's blood!" as his
boot slipped. Armor and equipment slammed down loudly
on the hardwood treads. I could be shot from behind by
accident, I realized, but the thought didn't touch the part
of me that was in control.
  As fast as we'd arrived, the personnel of New Troy had
found time to respond. The folk downstairs reacted by
hiding and dissociating themselves from their weapons,
but that might not be everyone's choice
  To the right of the stair head was an openwork gate of
cast bronze. The workmanship was excellent. The pattern
was based on pentacles, like that of the Molts' own archi-
tecture. The gate was locked. Somebody inside had tried
to draw a curtain for visual privacy, but he/she had torn
the fabric in panic. The room beyond had thick rugs and
a good deal of plush furniture, though I couldn't see any,
people in the glance I spared it.
  The door to the left was thick, ajar, and carried the legend in letters cut from copper sheet-stock GUARDS OF THE REPUBLIC. I rammed it fully open with my shoulder.
The interior was dim because the space was partitioned into smaller rectangular chambers. A man stood at the end of the central hallway, trying to step into his trousers onehanded. He saw me and straightened, aiming his rifle.
I lunged toward him. He flung away the rifle and screamed, "No, don't shoot!" He crossed his arms in front of his face.
"Watch the other doors!" Stephen ordered behind me, the fat muzzle of his flashgun pointed at the Fed soldier. The partition walls didn't reach the high ceiling. Dole, Lightbody, and I kicked open doors.
Two men came out with their hands raised. One of them snarled, "Traitor!" He must have thought we were mutineers from a Back Worlds garrison. Dole knocked the man down with his rifle butt, then gave him a boot in the stomach.
There were ten cubicles in all, each with a bunk, a table, and a freestanding wardrobe. Others had been occupied recently, but the three men who'd surrendered were the only ones present now.
Maher, take them down with the rest," said Piet. He'd waited at the stair head until he was sure there'd been no trouble in the guards' dormitory.
  Piet turned and smashed the gate open with the heel of his right boot. He strode into the room beyond with his carbine slanted across his body-ready for trouble but not expecting it. I was the last man to follow him.
Four Molt servants huddled at the rear comer of the room, out of sight from the doorway. French windows opened onto a balcony overlooking the walled garden behind the Commandatura. A narrow staircase led from the balcony to the garden.
A Molt was pruning Terran roses, apparently oblivious of the commotion going on around him. There was a shed against the back wall, and a small but ornate residential outbuilding at the end of the pathway through the center of the garden. The outbuilding's door closed as I watched.
  "Where's the commander?" Piet said, pointing his left hand imperiously at the cowering Molts. Piet held his carbine muzzle-up in his right hand; the butt rested in the crook of his elbow.
One of the Molts gestured toward a heap of large, embroidered pillows along the sidewall. "Masters," the Molt said, "none of us know where Secretary Duquesne might be."
  Dole groped in the pile of pillows, found something, and jerked a fat man in loose trousers and an open-throated shirt into view. "Wakey, wakey," the bosun said, laying the muzzle of his rifle on the bridge of Secretary Duquesne's nose.
"Please!" Duquesne squealed. "Please!"
"Let him up," Piet said, obviously relaxing. "I don't think he'll be any difficulty."
"Piet, there's somebody in the building behind this," I said, nodding toward the French windows.
The Oriflamme touched down. While the thrusters' roar reflected from the ground, the doubled noise rattling the
window casements made further speech impossible. Piet
gestured first to me, then to Lightbody, and last toward
the outside. stairway. Stephen nodded the ceramic barrel
of his flashgun and stepped to a window from which he
could command the whole back of the garden.
I'd reached the midway landing when Salomon shut off the Oriflamme's motors. The sudden silence released a vise the noise had clamped around my chest. I wasn't aware of the pressure until it stopped.
  "Sir?" said Lightbody. I glanced over my shoulder. "Will there be treasure in there?" He nodded down the path ahead of us.
"In a manner of speaking," I said, because I had a notion as to just who might be housed in the cottage. "Not that'll make us rich, though."
I wondered if Piet had the same suspicions I did and
if so, what he'd meant by sending me to investigate.
	The gardener continued spraying his roses with a sprayer,
designed for a Molt's three-fingered hands. He crooned
in a grating voice as we passed, but it wasn't us he was
left	speaking to.
  The Oriflamme's ramp began to lower with a loud
squeal. The ship was going to need a lot of work. I didn't
believe she could ever be reconditioned to the point she
could pass the Breach a second time.
The curtain on the window to the left of the door fluttered as we approached. I paused to hang the cutting bar from my belt.. though of course, she could be guarded, probably would be guarded. The place had blue trim and white stucco walls, though both were flaking to a degree.
  "Open in the name of the Free State of Venus," I said,
pitching my voice to command rather than threaten.
Nothing happened. I tried the latch. It was locked.
"This is absurd, I muttered.
Lightbody stuck the muzzle of his shotgun into the six
pane window casement and swept the barrel sideways,
shattering half the glass and snatching the curtain aside.
There were two women within. I'd expected only one,
and these were both tough-looking. They wore the white
jackets of the Federation military.
"Open the door, then!" Lightbody said. His face grew
red and his voice sank into a growl. "You whores!"
"We're not armed!" snarled the 40-year-old woman with
light brown hair. The name tag over her left pocket read
VANTINE. She might have been handsome at one time, but
not since the scar drew up the left side of her mouth.
  Lightbody kicked the center panel out of the bottom of
the doorframe. He was furious. "Easy. . ." I warned, but
his bootheel smashed the central crossbrace from the door,
flinging jagged fragments into the room. Vantine jumped
back from the latch when she realized that we were in no
mood to play games.
Lightbody!" I said, but I might as well have been in
Betaport for the effect I had. He half turned, then lunged
against the remnants of the door. The back of his armored
shoulder hit the top panel. It splintered also as Lightbody
spun into the small living room. The furniture-a couch,
two chairs, and an end table-was of local wood with
lacework coverings. The oval area rug was patterned in small pentagons of gray, pink, and white thread.
The two women backed toward the couch, keeping their hands plainly in sight.
I stepped between them and Lightbody. "Where's the person who lives here?" I asked. The cottage had two more rooms, a kitchen and-through a bead curtain-a bedroom.
"We live here," said the second woman, whose black hair was shot with gray. Her name tag read PATTEN and her face was less attractive than Dole's. "Were not billeted with the other soldiers because we're women, can't you see?"
"You're whores!" Lightbody shouted. "Soldiers of Hell, most like! Prancing about as if you was men!"
He swung his shotgun toward Patten. I grabbed it with both hands. He was bigger than me and stronger for his size. He forced me back.
I snatched the cutting bar from my belt. "Lightbody!" I shouted. I thumbed on the power and triggered the bar. "If you won't obey me, then by God you'll obey this!"
I don't think it was the threat that brought Lightbody to his senses so much as having my face pressed into his above the crossways shotgun. He slumped back.
"Sorry, sir," he muttered. He turned his face aside and wiped it with his callused right palm. "It's against God and nature to see women pretending to be men."
I let go of him. I was trembling. The bar shook as much with my finger off the trigger as it had the moment before. "We're not here for that," I said. My voice shivered too.
I turned. The women watched with a mixture of anger and loathing. Patten wore a crucifix around her neck. I jerked it with my left hand, breaking the thin silver chain. "We're not mutineers," I said, "we're from Venus. And we're Christians."
I'd spent more time in the Governor's Palace than I had in a church, and I'd only been to the palace twice.
I slapped the crucifix into Patten's hand. "Keep your idols out of sight, or I won't answer for the consequences."

The bead curtain rattled as I walked into the bedroom. The chance that either Patten or Vantine was the secretary's mistress was less than that of Piet swearing allegiance to President Pleyal.
I opened the large freestanding wardrobe beside the door. The clothes within were gauzy and many-layered, decorated with lace and ribbons. Shades of blue predominated. The bottom of the wardrobe held shoes in ranks; no one was hiding there.
The wood above me thumped. I backed a step and looked up. A flaring cornice ornamented the wardrobe's top. The hollow behind the cornice was about twenty centimeters deep. A blonde woman, gagged and with furious blue eyes, peered over the edge at me.
I tossed my cutting bar onto the bed to free both hands. "Lightbody, watch that pair of yours!" I warned.
I got extra height by hopping onto the wardrobe's bottom shelf, scattering delicate shoes. The woman squirmed completely over the cornice, trusting me to take her. Her weight was no problem.
Her wrists were tied, first behind her back, then to her ankles. Patten and Vantine had been busy in the minutes they'd had since we landed. They'd used filmy stockings for the bonds; not Terran silk, but something at least -as strong. I ripped my bar's ceramic teeth across the fabric with the power off.
The captive pulled the gag out of her mouth when I'd freed her hands. She was in her mid-twenties and far, far too supple and beautiful to be wasted on a pig like Secretary Duquesne ...
Well, that was true of a lot of women, and no few men.
"Thank you, sir," she said as she got to her feet in a motion as smooth as that of smoke rising. "My name is Alicia."
She walked into the living room without looking back at me. I suppose she was used to having men follow her without question.
Alicia's dress was pale orange. The soft fabric fit loosely and had no particular shape of its own. She moved like a puff of flame.
Lightbody faced the two soldiers, holding his shotgun at low port. His eyelids flicked in surprise when he saw Alicia. Patten and Vantine glared at her with molten hatred. My thumb slid the bar's power switch forward.
"Sergeant Vantine here..." Alicia said coldly. She stepped to the soldier's side without coming between Vantine and Lightbody's shotgun, then reached under the tail of Vantine's tunic.
has a gun," Alicia continued. Vantine moved minusculely. I reached over Alicia's shoulder and touched the tip of the bar to Vantine's right ear.
Alicia pulled a small revolver from Vantine's waistband. "I know about it," she went on in the same distant voice, "because the sergeant-"
Her face suddenly broke into planes like those of an ice carving, inhuman and terrible though still beautiful. Alicia backhanded Vantine across the jaw with the butt of the revolver. Vantine staggered.
Alicia hit her again, this time on the forehead. Vantine's head jerked back. There was an oval red splotch above her left eye.
I closed my left hand over Alicia's on the gun. She relaxed with a great shudder, leaning against me and closing her eyes. "Because the sergeant put it into me," Alicia said softly. "And she told me to be a good girl and stay quiet like Ducky wanted, or she'd shovel hot coals there instead."
I dropped the revolver into my pocket. It was surprisingly heavy for something so small. Patten held Vantine by the shoulder and elbow, helping her stay upright. Alicia straightened and stepped to the side. She watched the proceedings regally.
"Strip," I said to the soldiers. Lightbody looked at me oddly, Patten with fear.
"Oh, don't worry about your virtue, ladies, not from me," I said. "You'll strip to make sure you've no more toys hidden. We'll tie your hands with our belts, and then Lightbody'll march you to the Molt pen where you and your friends will stay until we lift."
My voice caught repeatedly on images my mind threw up; Vantine and Patten, and the bound girl between them. Secretary Duquesne had acted quickly to keep his mistress safe when raiders landed. Safe in his terms, safe from other men.
The Fed soldiers only stared at me. I touched Vantine's tunic with the tip of my cutting bar, then triggered it. White fluff spun up from the whine.
"Don't worry about your virtue, ladies," I repeated. My voice quivered like the cutting bar's blade. "But your lives, now, that could very easily be a different matter."

TREHINGA

Day 111

The Federation freighter C*, renamed the Iola after Salomon's mother and for the next few days a Venerian warship, lifted thunderously from New Troy. The freshly-cut gunports in her hold gaped like tooth cavities when the rest of the bare metal hull reflected sunlight. The Iola was 15' nose-down; she rotated slowly around her vertical axis because the thrusters weren't aligned squarely.
"I thought you said automated ships were safer on liftoff than landing?" I said to Piet, moderating my voice as the Iola climbed high enough to muffle her exhaust roar.
Piet quirked a smile at me. "The concept of automation isn't a problem," he said. "Just the cheap execution. Besides, it's safe enough."
"Or you'd be taking her up yourself," Stephen said in a tone of mild reproof. Alicia heard enough in the gunman's voice to look sharply at him. She'd known a lot of men in her 25 standard years, but none like Piet or Stephen Gregg.
She'd known men like me. I didn't doubt that.
The Iola had risen to a dot of brilliant light in the stratosphere. The sound of saws and the rock crusher became loudly audible again, now that the thrusters were gone.
The Federation laser battery that hit us as we escaped from Templeton had crazed several hull laminations as well as taking out two attitude jets. The shock of repeated transits flaked the damaged sheathing off in a five-meter gouge.
The crew was sandblasting the fractured edges just as
a surgeon would debride a wound in flesh before closing
it. When they finished the prep, they'd flux the bounda-
ries and layer on ceramic again. I suspected Piet would
oversee that final process himself. Hawtry was right when
he claimed Piet's father was a craftsman rather than a
gentleman.
Another team removed attitude jets from the second
Federation freighter, the Penobscot. We carried spare jets
in the Oriflamme, but all the original nozzles were badly
worn from the long voyage. Jets from the ships and stores
here would replace our spares.

Dole had muttered to me that he'd rather use burnt
out ceramic than trust Fed metalwork, but Piet seemed	lid
to think the tungsten nozzles would be adequate. Sailors
as a class were conservative: "unfamiliar" was too often
a synonym for "lethal." The general commander of an
expedition through the Breach had to be able to assess
options on the basis of fact, though, not tradition.
Alicia raised a slim hand toward where the Iola had van-
ished. "But where are you sending the ship?" she asked.
It didn't seem to occur to her that anybody might think
she was asking out of more than curiosity. Stephen and I
exchanged glances: mine concerned, his clearly amused.
Piet, with an innocence as complete as I'm sure Alicia's
was, answered, "We're just putting her in orbit with two
guns, Mistress Leeman. The Oriflamme can't lift while
we're working on her hull, and there's the risk that a
Federation warship will arrive while we're disabled."
As he spoke, Piet began walking down Water Street.
New Troy stretched along a broad estuary. It had a sur-
faced road along the water and a parallel road separating
the buildings from the field where starships landed. A
dozen barges were moored to quays behind the grain elevators.
"Warships here?" Alicia said. "Don't worry about that.
I haven't seen one in . . ." She shivered. "Nine months,
I've been here. Earth months. I was born in Montreal."
  There was more to the last statement than information.
I wasn't sure whether she meant it as a challenge or an
admission, though.
"Still, it's better not to run a risk," Piet said mildly. "We'll reship the guns to the Oriflamme in orbit, I think. Since, as Jeremy points out, the C* is worse maintained than I'd thought from viewing her."
He tipped me a nod.
"Dole takes a crew up in the cutter to replace Salomon tomorrow?" Stephen asked.
Piet shook his head. "Guillermo tomorrow, Dole the following day. Stampfer asked for a watch, but I don't trust his shiphandling, even with automated systems."
He glanced at me. "I wouldn't put it so bluntly to Stampfer, you know, Jeremy," he said.
I shrugged. "He's a gunner," I said. "One man can't do everything."
Though maybe Piet could. Being around him gave you
the feeling that he walked on water when nobody was
watching.
The pen for Molts being transshipped was adjacent to the Commandatura. There'd been a dozen aliens behind the strands of electrified razor ribbon when we landed. Neither the C* nor the Penobscot was a dedicated slaver, but both vessels carried a handful of Molts as part of their general cargo.
We'd turned the Molts loose. Half of them still wandered about New Troy, looking bewildered and clustering when we distributed rations from the Fed warehouse. Secretary Duquesne, his seven soldiers, and three of the officials who'd been cheeky enough to sound dangerous had replaced the slaves in the pen.
For the most part, the humans-residents as well as tran-
sients from the barges and two starships-seemed willing to do business on normal terms and otherwise keep out of our way. The local Molts were no problem without human leaders. Stephen, Piet, and a sailor who'd been to the Reaches with them had separately warned me that Molts would fight for human masters, even masters who treated them as badly as the Feds generally did. It was a matter of clan identification among the aliens.
Duquesne trembled with anger as he watched the four of us saunter by the pen. He touched the razor ribbon, 
forgetting that the metal was charged. A blue spark popped
and threw him back. Patten and a male soldier heard the

 secretary bellow and ran to help.
  "Run toward the wire," I ordered Alicia in a low voice.
"Ducky!" she cried.
I let her go two steps and grabbed her roughly around
the neck. "Get back here or you'll be in there with him!"
I shouted as I swung her between me and Piet.
  Stephen faced the pen and raised the flashgun's butt
toward-not quite to-his shoulder in warning. Duquesne
and his henchmen scurried out of sight within the wooden
shed meant to shelter slaves.
  We walked on. "That was a good thought, Jeremy,"
Piet said.
I shrugged. "Maybe it'll help," I said. I didn't suggest
we hang Duquesne and the two women who'd been so
enthusiastic to carry out his orders. Piet wouldn't go along
with the idea, and I've got better things to do than waste
my breath.
  We passed one of the hotels/boardinghouses for human
transients. Men watched from chairs on the lower-level
stoop. Stephen eyed them, shifting slightly the way he
carried the flashgun. The captain of the Penobscot banged
his chair's front legs back down on the deck and threw us
a salute.
  Piet had addressed the population of New Troy the night
we arrived, promising that we would deal fairly with them
as individuals, paying for whatever merchandise or ser

vices we required. Our quarrel was with President Pleyal and his attempt to dictate to all mankind.
  When Piet was done, Stephen added a few words: if
there was trouble, the colony would pay for it. If one of
our men was killed, there would be no colony when we
left. The next visitors would find the bones of the present
inhabitants in the ashes of their buildings.
  There was a line of men--our men-reaching out the
door of the next building, a brothel. There were three girls,
though Dole said the fiftyish madame had turned tricks
as well during the crush the night before.
  The waiting spacers grew silent and looked away. Piet
turned his head in the direction of the river and said to Alicia, "Do the landowners have guards on their estates, Mistress Leeman?"
Alicia sniffed. "They arm trusties to track Molts who run away," she said. "None of the landowners are going to risk their life or property to help the secretary, though."
We were past the brothel. Piet didn't approve of whoring or drunkenness, but he didn't order his crew to remain chaste and sober while on leave. A cynic would say Piet was too smart to give orders he knew would be ignored ... but I'm not sure most of this crew would ignore an order of his, even an order that went so clearly against their view of nature.
Sunset painted clouds in the eastern sky, while veils of heat lightning shimmered behind them. We might have a storm before morning. I doubted the shed in the Molt pen was waterproof.
The combination saloon and general merchandise store next to the brothel was owned by Federation Associates - President Pleyal himself, in his private capacity. The facade sagged, and I could see through the grime of the display windows that the roof leaked badly. The store had twenty meters of frontage, but the shelves within were dingy and almost empty. A Molt clerk stared back at us, as motionless as a display mannequin.
Boards filled the lower three-quarters of the saloon's window frames, leaving only a single row of glass panes for illumination. A drunk lay in the street. Two men arguing in front of the door stepped inside when they saw who we were.
"This is why we have to bring Venus to the stars," Piet said. "New Troy, a thousand New Troys-this can't be allowed to continue as man's face to the universe." "Commander," I said, "it's a frontier. You can't expect polish on a frontier."
Piet stood arms akimbo in the middle of the street. Tracked-on clay covered the plasticized surface. The adobe would be slick as grease in a rainstorm.
Three grain elevators marked the boundary of the human, community of New Troy. Beyond were pentagonal towers the Molt labor force had built for itself. Their upper floors were served by outside staircases. Though constructed from scrap material by slaves, the towers had a neat unity that the human buildings lacked.
"Let's go back," Piet said. He turned up the broad pas-
sage beside the saloon and the nearest elevator. After a
moment, he went on, "It's not a frontier, Jeremy. It's a
dumping ground, a midden. Pleyal is mining the universe
for his personal benefit, not mankind's."
His voice was rising. The louvered shutters of most of
the windows on this side of the saloon were swung back
from unglazed casements. A barge crewman at a table
followed us with his eyes as we passed.
"The only kind of men who'll come to the stars to serve
a tyrant are the trash, or men as grasping and shortsighted
as their master is," Piet said. "The few of a better sort
sink into the mire because they're almost alone. This isn't
a frontier where hardship makes men hard, it's a cesspool
where filth makes men filthy! And it will not change until
the claim of Pleyal to own the universe beyond Pluto is
disproved. At the point of a gun if necessary!"
The fronts of commercial buildings on the starport side
duplicated those on Water Street. The saloon's facade had
one fully-glazed sash window. The bartender was a Molt.
A dozen men sat inside, drinking from 100-ml metal tumblers.
  None of the clientele was from the Oriflamme. Our
men had taken over a saloon at the other end of town by
arrangement between Dole and local businessmen. Nobody
wanted the sort of trouble that could explode when violent
enemies got drunk together.
 One ship won't bring down the North American Federation," Alicia said. This evening she wore a frock of translucent layers. The undermost was patterned with Terran roses which seemed to climb through a dense fog of overlying fabric.
"Our success will bring other ships, Mistress Leeman,"

Piet said. "Raids on the Federation Reaches have already
increased twentyfold in the two years since, since we
He gripped Stephen's right hand, though he continued
to look toward Alicia on his other side.
"-came back with more microchips than had been seen on Venus since the Collapse."
"It's not just the wealth for Venus," Stephen said. "It's the wealth that doesn't go to Earth to help President Pleyal strangle everyone but Pleyal."
There was no line on the starport side of the brothel. A lone Federation spacer glanced at us from the doorway. A pink-shaded lamp inside was lighted. I stepped into a pothole that the sky's afterglow hadn't shown me.
Alicia lifted her chin in a taut nod. "So you'll replace bums with pirates? That's your plan?" She paused. "Bums and whores!"
"We'll break the present system, mistress," Piet said, "because it can't be reformed. With the help of God we'll do that. Then there'll be room for men-from Earth, from Venus, from the Moon colony and Mars, perhaps-to expand in however many ways they find. Rather than as a tyrant demands, in a fashion that will come crashing down when the tyranny does-as it must!-in a second Collapse that would be forever."
The last words were a trumpet call, not a shout. Another man would have blazed them out with anger, but Piet's transfiguring vision was a joyous thing. Though even I'd seen how harsh the execution would be.
"I went to the Reaches to trade," Stephen said in the thin, lilting voice I'd heard him use before. "I wonder what would have happened if we'd been left to trade in peace, hey?"
He laughed. Alicia shut her eyes and missed a step. She squeezed against me instinctively.
"Maybe I'd sleep at night, do you think?" Stephen went
on in the same terrible voice. Piet took his friend's hand
again. 
  The slave pen was unlighted. Figures moved around a lantern at the Water Street end. It was about time for the prisoners to get their rations.
Floodlights gleamed on the Oriflamme. Half a dozen crewmen continued to work on the hull. "If I thought we had time," Piet said, "I'd grind off the repairs we made on Respite and reglaze from the original. I don't think the basalt bonded well, despite the surface crazing."
"There'll be time for that after we've taken the Montreal," Stephen said. "Or it won't matter."
Piet gave a nonchalant shrug. "We'll take her," he said.
"And return home, with the help of God."
He looked at Alicia, smiled, and bowed slightly. "I think
I'll go aboard and see how the repairs are coming," he said.
Mistress Leeman, I've appreciated your company."
"I'll go along with you, Piet," Stephen said.	"Maybe
I'll bunk in the ship tonight."
He gave me a wan smile. The two of them walked in
step toward the Oriflamme, though I'm sure neither was
attempting to match strides. They were as different as an
oyster and its shell; and as much akin.
I opened the wicket into the Commandatura garden for
Alicia.
"Captain Ricimer really believes in what you're doing,"
she said softly. Roses perfumed the air. There were lights
in the far wing of the building, but the garden seemed to
be empty. "But Mister Gregg doesn't."
"I think Stephen believes the same things as Piet does,"
I said. "I just don't think he cares very much."
"He frightens me," she said.
Stephen would never kill anyone by accident, I thought;
Alicia understood too much for that to sound reassuring to her. "He's a good friend to Commander Ricimer," I said, "Not a very good friend to himself, though."
I paused to twist off a rose. Its deep pink glowed like
a diamond's heart with the last of the sunset. I broke the
thorns off sideways with the tip of my thumb, then handed
the flower to Alicia.
  She giggled and put the stem behind her ear. Flying
creatures as big as gulls swooped and climbed over the
river. Their calls were surprisingly musical.
Alicia turned at her cottage's new door-a panel	of
raw wood that Molt workmen had fitted the evening
before. "You're a very gentlemanly pirate, aren't you?"
she said. "You could easily have forced me to-whatever
you chose."
I shrugged. My skin was tingling. I respect you too much for that," I said. I respect myself too much. Again, though I don't lie when I can avoid it, one chooses the particular truth he speaks aloud.
"A girl doesn't always want to be respected quite so much," Alicia said. My arms were around her by the middle of the sentence, and my lips muffled the final word.

Near morning, as I was starting to dress to be gone before dawn, Alicia told me about Secretary Duquesne's personal cache of chips in a pit beneath the floor of the garden shed.

TREHINGA

Day 114

"Here's the whores you wanted, Mister Moore," Lightbody
said in a tone that could have been forged on an anvil. He 
gestured Patten and Vantine into the walled office I'd taken
for this interview. Baer stood behind the women with a
cutting bar.
Because the Federation soldiers wore trousers and had
hired on to fight, Lightbody called them whores, thought of
them as whores. He treated Alicia with the deference due a
lady; and she was a lady, as surely as I was a gentleman,
but the twists of Lightbody's mind disturbed me at a basic
level nonetheless.
The Oriflamme fired a matched pair of attitude jets in
the field outside. The hull repairs were complete. Piet
and Guillermo were doing the final workup. We'd lift by
evening, so it was time for me to act.
"You can take their hands loose, Lightbody," I said. The

 women were filthy. Facilities in the slave pen were limited to a trough, buckets, and mud. Twice so far we'd had rain before dawn, and the yellow adobe clay was everything I'd expected it to be.
Were conditions reversed, Secretary Duquesne would
have us hanged out of hand-unless he directed Patten and
Vantine to torture us to death instead. I didn't think of this
pair as whores. More like vicious dogs, to be trusted only
in their malice.
Lightbody looked doubtful, but he opened the knots
on the women's wrists with the spike of his clasp knife.
He held his shotgun out to the side where the prisoners
couldn't easily grab it. "You'll want us to stay in here
with you then, sir?" he suggested.
I shook my head. "No," I said, "I want to have a friendly
talk in private. Close the door and wait outside."
The two sailors obeyed, but I could tell they didn't think
much of the idea. To reassure them, I laid my cutting bar
on top of the desk I was using, with its grip ready for
my hand.
I'd chosen the office of the Clerk of Customs because
the room was private and it had a large window. I wanted
the light behind me for this interview. The clerk-the older
of the pair who'd come out to the cutter initially-had
decorated the walls with wood carvings. Molt workman-
ship, I supposed. The pieces were intricate, but I didn't
find them attractive.
  The women glared at me with caged fury. Their white
tunics were sallow with dried mud, and their faces weren't
much cleaner.
I waited for the next pair of jets to finish their screaming
test, then said, "You can sit down." I gestured to the chairs
against the wall behind the women.
"What do you want from us?" Vantine demanded in a
voice which broke with anger.
"Help," I said. "For which I'm willing to pay.
They were making it easy for me, though I'd have carried through in any case. I'd seen this pair in action the morning we arrived. No amount of feigned contrition now would have changed the decision I'd made.
  "And if we don't agree, you9re going to threaten us with
that toy?" Patten said, nodding toward my cutting bar. "I
ought to feed it to you!"
"No threat," I said. I picked up the bar and waited a
moment. If Lightbody and Baer heard the blade whine,
they'd burst in on us.
  The Oriflamme fired two more attitude jets. I triggered
the bar and shaved the comer off the desk. I laid the
weapon down again. "This is so that you won't make the mistake of attacking me," I said. "If you did, I'd-"
Another part of my mind started to fog my conscious
intelligence. My voice was husky and very soft.
-cut you into so many pieces that they'd have to fill

 your coffins by weight." I swallowed. "And I don't want that, I want a friendly conversation, that's all."
The part of me that hid behind the red fog, the part that
had been in control at the Molt temple and was almost in
control just a moment before-that part very much wanted
another chance to kill.
The women had straightened as I spoke. Their faces
were expressionless, and the earlier bluster was gone.
"What do you want?" Vantine repeated quietly.
"We'll be lifting for Quincy soon," I said. I was all right
again, though my hands still trembled. "We're hoping to
meet Our Lady of Montreal there." I smiled. "If not there,
then we'll catch her farther on. It depends on how long she
lays over on Fleur de Lys. But before we leave Trehinga,
I'd like to find the treasure stored here."
The women looked at one another cautiously, then back
to me. Patten massaged her right thigh through her dirty
trousers.
"There's no chips, no artifacts here," Vantine said.
She was more afraid of keeping silent than of speaking.
"Trehinga	wasn't settled before the Collapse. There's
nothing but wheat."
"I can't imagine that a man like Secretary Duquesne
doesn't have a private hoard," I said. "I don't know what
sort of favors he's trading to the ships' captains who land
here, but there'll be something. He'll be building up a store
so that when he retires to Earth he has something better
than a Federation pension to support him. Chips are the
most likely, but maybe pre-Collapse artifacts smuggled
from other planets, sure."
"We don't," Vantine said very carefully, "know anything
about that." She watched me the way a rabbit watches a
snake.
Attitude jets-the last pair of the morning, unless Piet
saw a need to retest-fired. The sound wasn't so loud that
I couldn't have talked over it, but the three-second pause
was useful.
"I'd pay you each a hundred Mapleleafs if you showed
me where the cache was," I said. I held up a pair of twelve-sided coins bearing President Pleyal's face toward the women.
The paymaster's safe on the opposite side of the Commandatura contained a fair amount of currency. As Piet had promised, we weren't robbing the businessfolk of Trehinga, but the Federation government was another matter.
The women stared at me. Patten began to laugh. "Are you crazy?" she said. She regained her composure. "Do you think we're crazy? We lead you to Duquesne's personal stash, and then you go off and leave us here? Do you have any idea what he'd do to us then?"
I shrugged. "I've got a notion, yeah," I said. "Open the door, would you please?"
Vantine obeyed. Her companion's laughter was half bravado, but Vantine was clearly terrified. She'd sensed 

not, I think, what was about to happen, but that something was about to happen.
Lightbody raised his shotgun's muzzles when he saw everything was calm. "Baer," I said, "go out and gather as many of our off-duty people as you can in five minutes. Into the garden. And tell the locals to come, too. There'll be some entertainment."
"What are you doing, sir?" Lightbody said as Baer ran down the corridor shouting.
"For the moment," I said, "you and I wait here with the ladies. Then we'll go out to the garden too."
I put my hand on the cutting bar. I was shaking so badly that the blade rattled on the desk and I had to put it down. Patten was silent, and Vantine was as gray as if someone was nailing her wrists to a cross.

There were easily a hundred people in the garden when we came out-me in front, the prisoners behind, and last of all Lightbody with the shotgun. I'd had him tie Patten's right wrist to Vantine's left while we waited. They couldn't escape, but it was important that they not be seen to try.

 "Hey, Mister Moore!" Kiley called from the crowd. "Do they take their clothes off now?"
  I waved with a grin; but the joke made me think of
Jeude, and the grin congealed.
The Molt gardener stood on one leg, rasping the other
one nervously against his carapace as he watched people
brush his precious roses. Because of the thorns, the bushes
weren't likely to be trampled; but sure, some sailor might
clear more room with his cutting bar.
Funny to think of a Molt worrying about Terran roses
on one of the Back Worlds. In those terms, most of life
seemed pretty silly, though. I suppose that's where religion
comes in, for those who can believe in a god.
  I waved my bar ahead of me to make a path. A lot
of those present were locals, as I'd hoped, but they kept
to the edges of the courtyard. The central walkway and
an arc facing the back of the Commandatura were filled
with Venerians. More spectators streamed in through the
wickets beside the building and the larger gate onto Water
Street.
  Baer had done a good job, though I wasn't quite sure
how he'd managed it so quickly. I'd wanted a big enough
gathering that word would spread at once throughout the community, but this was ideal.
  Alicia's jalousies were lowered; she would be watching
from behind them. I'd told her she should at all costs stay
hidden this morning.
"What are we doing?" Vantine asked over the chatter of the crowd.
"Keep moving, whore!" Lightbody snapped. I suspected
he prodded Vantine with the gun as he spoke.
"None of that!" I ordered. "The ladies are helping us."
As I turned my head to speak, I saw that Piet and Stephen
had come out the back of the Commandatura. They were
following us.
The storage shed was padlocked. I sheared the hasp
off in twinkling sparks. A bit remained hanging from the
staple. I flicked it away with the tip of the cutting bar: the
steel would be just below red heat from friction.
  Stephen reached past and slid the door open. He grinned
in a way that was becoming familiar, but he didn't ask any
questions.
  The shed's floor was wooden and raised a few centimeters from the ground. Tools optimized for Molt hands, crates, a coil of fencing, and other impedimenta were stacked around the walls, but the two square meters in the center of the shed were clear.
There'd be a catch hidden somewhere, but I wasn't going to hunt for it. I swept my bar in an arc through the flooring. Nails pinged bitterly within the cloud of sawdust; the head of one bounced from my shin.
I stepped forward, turned, and drew the reverse arc. The crowd outside was pushing for a better view, but Stephen planted himself in the doorway to keep people out of my blade's way. Patten and Vantine watched in dawning awareness.
Stringers gave. The rough circle of floor fell with a crackle under my weight. I kicked the fragments of lumber aside.
A rectangular steel door measuring a meter by eighty centimeters was set in concrete where there should have been bare soil. I gripped my bar with both hands.
"Jeremy?" Piet Ricimer called.
I looked up. Piet handed Stephen the white silk kerchief he'd worn around his neck. "Cover Jeremy's eyes, he said.
Stephen knotted the silk behind my head. I saw through a white haze. The doorplate had no keyhole, but the hinges were external.
"We didn't-" Patten shouted at the top of her voice, but the scream of my bar cutting metal drowned her out.
A rooster tail of white sparks cascaded to either side of the bar's tip, pricking my bare hands and charring trails of smoke from the wood they landed on. A chip of steel flicked my forehead. Momentary pain, gone almost as soon as I jerked my head.
"Step back, Jeremy," Stephen ordered. His arm kept me from stumbling on the wood floor that I'd forgotten.
I was shaking with effort and my tunic was soaked. I'd been holding the cutting bar as though it supported me over a chasm. I pulled the kerchief off so that I could breathe
freely, then mopped my face with it.
  There were three black-edged holes in the silk. I
wouldn't have thought of covering my eyes.
Stephen kicked the door with his bootheel, aiming for
the concealed lock. The plate rang. This wasn't a real safe,
just a protected hiding place. The second time Stephen stamped down, the back of the lid where I'd sheared the hinges sprang up.
  The lid was more than two centimeters thick. Stephen
lifted it by the edges with his fingertips. He tossed it past
me into a corner of the shed.
"We didn't have anything to do with this!" Patten cried.
Vantine hugged herself, shaking as if in a cold wind.
Stephen reached into the opened stash. He came up with
a mesh bag of microchips in one hand and what looked
like the core of a navigational Al in the other.
He walked out into the sunlight. "There's fifty kilos of
chips here!" he shouted to the crowd. There were shouts
of awe and surprise, some of them from the local spectators.

I came out with Stephen. "Lightbody," I called loudly,
"release these women at once."
Patten tried to hit me. I stepped close and embraced
her. I caught a handful of her short hair to keep her from
biting my ear in the moment before I backed clear again.
Lightbody still didn't understand, but Piet held both womens free elbows from behind so that they couldn't move.
I waved the hundred-Mapleleaf coins so that they caught
the sunlight. Vantine was numb. Patten spat at me, but
nobody at any distance could see that. Certainly not the
locals at the back of the crowd.
  "And here's your pay," I said, dropping both coins into
Vantine's breast pocket.
  There was sick horror in Vantine's eyes. I didn't much
like myself, but I'd done what I'd needed to.
  At least the pay was fair. The Sanhedrin had only paid
thirty pieces of silver to finger a victim for crucifixion.
Everybody's aboard, sir," Dole called over the clamor
of men claiming bits of shipboard territory after days of
freedom to move around. "Smetana was sleeping it off
behind Gun One so I didn't see him."
Piet nodded to me. I ran two seconds of feedback through the tannoys as an attention signal, then announced, "Five minutes to liftoff."
I'd told Stephen he should take the right-hand couch since Guillermo was in the Iola, but he'd insisted I sit there instead. At least I could work the commo as well as the Molt could, and it wasn't as though the process of lifting to orbit required a third astrogator.
Piet's screen echoed the settings that Salomon had programmed. Salomon flipped to an alternate value, then flopped back to the original, all the time watching Piet.
"Either," Piet said with a smile. "But yes, the first, I think, given the Iola's present orbit."
The Oriflamme's displays were razor-sharp, though the lower third of my screen was offset a pixel from the remainder ever since we'd come through the Breach. The population of New Troy watched from buildings and the road.
I could have expanded any individual face to fill the entire screen. That probably wouldn't be a good idea. 
Stephen knelt beside my couch. "Have they let Duquesne out of his cage yet?" he asked.
I shook my head. "I don't see any of that lot," I said. I slewed and expanded the slave pen in the field. The prisoners were still there behind razor ribbon. "Maybe the locals are afraid that he'll start shooting and we'll flatten the town."
"Maybe they just don't like the bastard," Stephen replied. He laced his fingers and forced them against the backs of his hands. His face was empty; that of a man you saw sprawled in a gutter. "Lightbody says the pair of women you released stole a boat and headed upriver."
He raised an eyebrow. I shrugged.
Piet leaned toward me. "We've made a preliminary
examination of the database you found, Jeremy," he said. 
I turned away from Stephen. "Was it valuable?" I asked. "I don't see why it was part of Duquesne's stash."
"Valuable, though perhaps not in market terms," Piet
said. "It's a courier chart. It has full navigational data for the Back Worlds and the longer route to the Solar System. The value to us is
He smiled like an angel. "Perhaps our lives."
"Shall I initiate, sir?" Salomon asked sharply.
Piet's attention returned to the business of planning liftoff. "One minute!" I warned over the PA system.
I swung the magnified view on my screen sideways a touch, focusing on the. woman at the wicket beside the Commandatura.
"We couldn't bring her along, you know," Stephen said in a low voice. "Anyone female."
"She didn't ask, did she?" I said. I didn't realize how angry I was until I heard my tone. I started to blank the
display, then instead expanded it further. The discontinuity
fell just at the point of Alicia's chin.
"It wasn't a clever plan, Stephen," I said softly. "I didn't
ask her about anything. She volunteered 	She volunteered everything that she gave me."
Stephen put his hand on my arm. ".Best I get to my
hammock," he said as he rose.
Salomon engaged the Al. Our roaring thrusters drew a
curtain of rainbow fire across the face of a woman I would
never see again.

ABOVE QUINCY

Day 127

Men in hard suits were around us in the forward hold, though our cutter's optics were so grainy they suggested rather than showed the figures. Clanks against our hull were probably restraints closing; chances were the hatch had locked shut since I didn't feel the vibration of the closing mechanism anymore.
"All right, you lot," Lightbody ordered as he lifted him self from the pilot's couch. "Open her up! Ah-"
He remembered I was alone in the back of the cutter "Ah-sir!"
Baer rose from the attitude controls. I'd already freed the undogging wheel by bracing my boots against a thwart and slamming a spoke with the shoulder of my hard suit. I spun the wheel fully open, then let Baer help me slid the hatch back over the dorsal hull.
The two sailors Piet gave me to crew the cutter were solid men, either of them capable of piloting the vessel alone in a pinch. Lightbody wasn't used to thinking of landing party as two sailors and a gentleman, though.
The crew of the Oriflamme was at action stations. I been sent down to the settlement on Quincy to gather information. I could be spared if Our Lady of Montreal appeared while the cutter was on the surface.
I floated out of the cutter's bay. Maher, one of the sailors who'd locked us into the hold, grabbed me with one hand as he hinged up his visor with the other.
"Captain Ricimer's waiting on you forward, sir," said. He aimed me toward the companionway, then shoved me off like a medicine ball. A sailor waiting there absorbed my momentum and redirected me up the tube.
Dole hugged me to him as I drifted into the forward
compartment. He kicked off, carrying us both to the
navigation consoles-skirting the 17-cm plasma cannon
with a neat carom from the ceiling gunport, still for the
moment closed.
I didn't know whether the men were obeying Piet's
orders or if they'd simply decided oft their own that Mister
Moore in free fall was clumsy as a hog on ice. Maybe
the process was demeaning, but it'd halved the time I
would've taken to negotiate the distance on my own.
I gripped Piet's couch to stay in place. I'd expected to
see Stephen, but I realized he would be with the assault
party in the after hold.
Piet's screen and that of Salomon to his left were
filled with navigational data in schematic and digital
form. Guillermo's display showed the world we were
orbiting, Quincy, was ninety percent water, with strings
of small volcanic islands and one modest continent
for the moment on the opposite hemisphere. Ivestown,
the planet's sole settlement, was on the continent's north
coast. Farms nearby provided garden truck and fruit for
starships which stopped over to load reaction mass, but
there was no large-scale agriculture and nothing of interest
in Ivestown save the pair of brothels.
  Piet turned the PA system on to echo my words. He
lifted himself on his left arm to face me directly, since the
hard suit prevented him from twisting his torso in normal
fashion. We'd radioed from Ivestown before lifting off to
return, but face-to-face communication was far better than
depending on RF transmissions through Quincy's active
ionosphere.
  The Montreal hasn't arrived yet," I explained. "Nobody
down there is even expecting her."
I shook my head in renewed wonder. "It's like talking
to a herd of sheep. There's eighteen, twenty humans in
Ivestown, and about all they're interested in is scraping
local algae off the rocks and eating it. It turns their teeth
brown. I suppose there's a drug in it."
"They could be lying," Salomon said. "To keep us here instead of following the Montreal."
"No," I said. "No. Lightbody checked the field. He says there hasn't been a ship landed at Ivestown in weeks. Sure, the Montreal could land anywhere on the planet, but they wouldn't have. And-you'd have to see the people down there. They don't care."
I suppose all four of the colony's women worked in the brothels when a ship was in; maybe some of the men did too. I'd have found coring, a watermelon a more satisfying alternative. Piet couldn't have asked a better proof of Fed colonies being garbage dumps rather than frontiers.
Salomon sighed and relaxed his grip on the arm of his couch. Because the navigator had unlatched his restraints to look at me, his armored body began to rise. "It might be weeks before the Montreal arrives," he said. "We might have to wait for months. Months."
Piet looked toward the screen before him. I don't know
'whether he was actually viewing the course equations dis-
played there or letting his mind expand through a range of
possibilities as vast as the universes themselves.
"We've waited months already," Piet replied. His voice

 was soft, but the PA system's software corrected to boom the words at full audible level from the tannoys in all the compartments.
Salomon looked at me for support. I wanted desperately to be back in a gravity well. My hard suit's rigid presence constricted my mind. We hadn't stayed long enough on the ground for me to take the armor off. I said nothing.
"If we land . . ." Salomon said. The prospect of an indefinite stay in weightless conditions was horrifying to veteran spacers as well as to me, but Salomon still wasn't willing to complete the suggestion. He knew it was a bad one, knew that landing would jeopardize the whole expedition.
"If we land," Piet said with his usual quiet certainty, "then we have to hope that the Montreal sets down without first determining who we are. If instead she transits immediately, we won't be able" The Feds are too sloppy to worry about a ship on the ground," Salomon said. His voice didn't have enough
energy to be argumentative. "Especially on the Back Worlds."
"We've risked a great deal," Piet replied. "Many of our friends have died. Many others as well, and they're also human beings. We aren't going to cut corners now."
He tapped his armored fingertip twice on the audio pickup as a formal attention signal. "Gentlemen," he said,
you may stand down for the moment. Don't take off your hard suits. I regret this, but we have to be ready to open the gunports at a moment's notice."
I nodded within the tight confines of the helmet sealed to my torso armor by a lobster-tail gorget. My eyes were closed. I'd like to have been able to pray for mercy.
"Men," Piet said. "Comrades, friends. With the Lord's help, we'll prevail. But it's up to us to endure."
The tannoys chirped as Piet switched off the PA system.
We would endure.

ABOVE QUINCY

Day 129

I unlatched the waste cassette-the shit pan--of Stephen's hard suit. You can change your own, but you're likely to slosh the contents when you reach beneath your fanny with arms encased in rigid armor.
This cassette leaked anyway. Stephen made a quick snatch with a rag. A few droplets of urine escaped despite that. Because we were in free fall, the drops would spread themselves across the first surface they touched, probably a bulkhead.'
That wouldn't make much difference, because the Oriflamme already stank like a sewer from similar accidents. What bothered me worse was the way my body itched from constant contact with my suit's interior.
"If I ever have a chance to bathe again," I said softly, "all that's left of me is going to melt and run down the drain like the rest of the dirt."
The Oriflamme's crew hung in various postures within the compartment. The only comfortable part of free fall was that any of the surfaces within the vessel could serve as a "floor." Piet lay on his couch, apparently drowsing. Dole was on lookout at the left console. Guillermo's usual position was empty. The Molt had gone into suspended animation and was bundled against the forward bulkhead in a cargo net.
The displays were set for blink comparison. Images
of the stars surrounding the Oriflamme flashed against
images taken at the same point in the previous orbit. The
AI corrected for the vessel's frictional slippage and high-
lighted anomalies for human examination. In two days of waiting, we had the start of a catalog of comets circling Quincy's sun.
Kiley held open the clear bag so that I could add my cassette to the dozen already there. A detail of sailors would open the after hold and steam the day's accumulation, but there were limits to the cleaning you could do in free fall and vacuum.
Stephen slapped an empty cassette into the well of his suit. "You've never been on a slaving voyage, with Molts packed into the holds and all the air cycled through them before it gets to you," he said. "Though we didn't have to stay suited up that time, that's true."
I looked at him. "I didn't know that you'd been a slaver," I said.
Stephen turned his palms up in the equivalent of a shrug. "Back when we were trying to trade with Fed colonies," he said. "The only merchandise they wanted were Molt slaves. Piet wasn't in charge."
He smiled, "Neither was I, for that matter, but it didn't bother me a lot." There would have been as much humor in the snick of a rifle's breech opening. "And that was back when some things did bother me, you know."
"Hey?" said Dole. Piet, who I'd thought was dozing-and maybe he was-snapped upright and expanded by three orders of magnitude a portion of the starfield blinking on his display. Dole was still reaching for the keypad.
The magnified object was a globular starship. We had no way of judging size without scale, but I'd never heard of J
anything under 300 tonnes burden being built on a spherical design. Plasma wreathed the vessel. Her thrusters were firing to bring her into orbit around Quincy.
Piet wound the siren for two seconds. The impellers couldn't reach anything like full volume in that time, but the moan rising toward a howl was clearly different from all the normal sounds of the Oriflamme in free fall.
"General quarters," Piet ordered crisply. "Assault party, remain in the main hull for the moment."
He paused, his armored fingers dancing across his console with tiny clicks. "My friends," Piet added, "I believe
this is the moment we've prepared and suffered for."
  Stephen checked the satchel which held charged batteries to reload his flashgun. I bent and held him steady	with both hands to get a close look at his waste cassette. It was latched properly.
  When the Oriflamme's gunports opened, we'd be in
hard vacuum. That was the wrong time to have the pressure
within somebody's suit blow his waste cassette across the
compartment, leaving a two-by-ten-centimeter hole to void
the rest of his air.
  Lightbody unbound Guillermo and pumped his arms
to break him out of his trance. The Molt was a doubly
grotesque figure in the ceramic armor built for his inhuman limbs.
  Salomon slid into his console as Dole propelled himself
clear. The bosun could land the vessel manually and run
the Al during normal operations, but he lacked the specialized training to match courses with a ship trying to run from us. With a competent navigator like Salomon backing Piet Ricimer at the controls, the Federation vessel didn't have a prayer of escaping either in the sidereal universe or through transit.
  I'd hung a cutting bar from one of my hard suit's waist
level equipment studs. I unclipped it. There was no need
to, but it gave me something to do with my hands. Catching our quarry was only the first part of the business.
"Prepare for power!" Salomon warned. Veteran sailors
had already made sure their boots were anchored on the
deck, "down" as soon as the thrusters fired.
A I -g thrust simulated gravity. I was at an angle, because
my right foot bounced from the deck. Stephen kept me from
falling.
  The Fed vessel's image filled the main screen. That
was another jump in magnification, though I supposed
we were closing with them in real terms. Some of her
plating had been replaced, speckling the spherical hull
with bright squares. Her lower hemisphere was crinkly
with punishment from atmospheric friction and the bath
of plasma exhaust during braking.
  Everyone in our forward compartment stared at the
screen. The men amidships and in the stem cabin could only guess at what was happening, since the navigation staff was too busy to offer a commentary.
Our quarry's hatches would lower like sections of orange peel. There was an inlay of contrasting metal set beside one of them. I couldn't read the lettering, but I made out the figure of a woman with her hand outstretched.
"See the Virgin?" I said to Stephen. "I think she's the Montreal.
"Half the Feds' shipping is our lady of this or that," Stephen said. His voice was that of a machine again. "But if not this time, then another. And we'll be ready."
As Stephen spoke, his hands moved as delicately as butterfly wings across the stock and receiver of his flashgun. He'd folded the trigger guard forward so that he could use the weapon with gauntlets on.
"Unidentified vessel," crackled the tannoys. Piet had set them to repeat outside signals. This must have been from a communications laser since our thrusters and those of our quarry were snarling across the RF spectrum. "Sheer off at once. This is the Presidential vessel Montreal. If you endanger us you'll all be sent to some mud hole for the rest of your life!"
"Gentlemen," Piet ordered, "seal your suits."
He snapped his visor closed. I tried to obey. The cutting bar clacked against my helmet. I'd forgotten I was holding it. I couldn't feel it in my hand because of the gauntlets.
Our commo system switched to vacuum mode instead of depending on atmospheric transmission. Piet's voice, blurred almost beyond understanding, growled through the deckplates and the structure of my hard suit. "Run out the guns."
We dipped lower into orbit around Quincy, losing velocity from atmospheric friction as well as from our main motors. The Oriflamme began to vibrate fiercely. The Montreal's image trailed a shroud of excited atoms.
The gunport in the starboard bulkhead swung inward, U,
glowing with plasma from our own exhaust. The Ori-
flamme's outrushing atmosphere buffeted us and carried
small objects-a glove, a sheet of paper, even a knife with it.
Ambient light vanished because there were no longer enough molecules of gas to scatter it. All illumination became direct, turning armored men into outlines lit by the gunport. When hydraulic rams advanced the muzzle of the Long Tom through the opening, we became a ship of ghosts and softly gleaming highlights.
The image of the Montreal on our main screen took on a slickness that no working starship could have in reality. The tornado of exhaust and roaring atmosphere degraded the data from our optical pickups. The screen's Al enhanced the image in keeping with an electronic ideal, substituting one falsehood for another.
Three gunports slid open along the midline of the Montreal's hull.
Our hard suits didn't have individual laser commo units, though a few of the helmets could be hardwired into the navigational consoles. Radio was useless while the main engines were firing anyway. I touched my helmet to Stephen's and shouted, "Why don't we shoot?"
The muzzles of plasma cannon emerged from the Montreal's gunports, setting up violent eddies in the flow of exhaust back over the globular hull. The guns looked very small, but the lack of scale could be deceiving me. Unlike us, the Federation crew wouldn't have been waiting in hard suits. A handful of gunners must have suited up hastily while the bulk of the personnel aboard prayed the gun compartments would remain sealed from the remainder of the vessel.
"If we disabled them now"-Stephen's voice rang through the clamor shaking our hull-they'd crash and we'd have only a crater for our pains. Of course, they aren't under the same con- The Montreal's guns recoiled into the hull behind streaks of plasma. The Oriflamme grunted, shoved by atmosphere heated from a near miss.
-straints," Stephen concluded.
'Assault party to the aft hold," a voice buzzed. The order could have been a figment of my imagination. Dole
and Stephen were moving, as well as other figures anonymous in their armor.
I'm going to die in this damned hard suit, and I can't even scratch. I started to laugh, glad no one could hear me.
Our four 15-cm cannon amidships were trained to starboard like the Long Tom. Wisps of our thrusters' plasma exhaust wreathed the weapons through the gap between the ports and the guntubes.
Stampfer sat at a flip-down console against the opposite bulkhead. The 15-cm magazines to either side of him
Were locked shut for safety. I wondered how long that
precaution would be followed during the stress of combat. If a bolt hit an open magazine, the Oriflamme's hull might survive. I doubted that any of the crew would, hard suits or no.
I glanced over the gunner's shoulder as we passed. Our Lady of Montreal was centered on the director screen, but several phantoms overlaid the main image. The console was calculating the effect of atmospheric turbulence, our exhaust, and the target's own exhaust. Because a plasma bolt is by definition a charged mass, contrasting charges could affect it more than they would a bullet or other kinetic-energy projectile.
I was halfway down the companionway when a shock jotted my grip loose from the ladder. I fell the rest of the way into the after hold, landing like a ton of old iron on Stephen's shoulders.
I managed to keep a grip on my cutting bar. I had only an instant to feel foolish before the next man fell on top of me.
Stephen helped me up. Armored men staggered into line like trolls. Stephen and I took our places in the front rank, facing the bulkhead that would pivot down into a boarding ramp.
The Oriflamme had dived deep enough into the atmosphere that the interior lighting appeared normal again. I took a chance and raised my visor. Stephen did the same. The air was hot and tasted burned because of traces of thruster exhaust.
"The Montreal doesn't mount heavy guns," Stephen
said. "They won't be able to do us serious damage in
the time they'll have before we land."
His face was quietly composed, and his eyes still looked human. There was nothing to do until the ramp opened, so Stephen's mind hadn't yet reentered the place that it went when he killed.
The man beside us bobbed his face forward to look through his open faceshield. It was Dole. There were twelve of us in the front rank this time, packed so tight that the bosun couldn't turn to face us he normally would while suited up. "Bastards did good to hit us the once," he shouted. "Don't worry about them getting home again, sir."
"Don't discount the Fed gunners," Stephen said calmly. "They may have somebody as good as Stampfer. It only takes one if they have director control."
"I'm not worried," I said. I stood in the body of a man about to charge through a haze of sun-hot plasma toward a ship weighing hundreds of tonnes and crewed by anything up to a thousand enemy personnel. I wasn't a part of that suicidal mission, I was just observing.
The siren sounded, warning that we were about to touch down. Stephen and I linked arms and braced one boot each against the ramp. I felt a sailor in the second rank clasp my shoulder. There were no individual gripping points within the hold, but if we locked ourselves together, I figured the whole assault party would be able to stay upright.
Our rate of descent was much higher than Piet's normal gentle landings because we had to remain parallel with Our Lady of Montreal. She was dropping like a brick, either from panic, general incompetence, or as a calculated attempt by the Fed captain to get an angle from which he could send a bolt into the thruster nozzles on our underside.
Braked momentum slammed down on me at 6 g's. I though we'd hit the surface, but Piet had instead opened the throttles at the last instant. The ground effect of our rebounding exhaust rocked the Oriflanune violently from side to side. Then our extended skids hit the surface.
Everybody in the hold fell down like pieces of a matchstick house. I was under at least two men. Somebody's gauntlet was across my visor. I supposed I should be thankful that he'd forced the visor shut instead of ramming his armored fingers directly into my eyes.
I'd thought we could remain standing no matter how hard we hit. Man proposes, God disposes ...
The men on top of me got up. One of them was Stephen, identifiable because he carried both his flashgun and a rifle. Somebody else tried to step across my body. I pushed him back as I lurched to a squat. I found my cutting bar beside me and stood up with it. I clipped the weapon to an equipment stud again. I should have left it there until it was time to use the blade.
The hatch unsealed. Air charged by our exhaust swirled around the edges of the ramp in a radiant veil. As the lip lowered, I saw Our Lady of Montreal looming like a vast curved wall before us. She was at least fifty meters tall through her vertical axis, and no farther than that from us. The hatches that could open out from the great sphere's base were closed, but I saw unshuttered gun ports on the lower curve.
A 15-cm plasma cannon fired directly overhead. Its brilliance was so dazzling that it rocked me back against the men behind. My faceshield reacted instantly, saving my vision by filtering black everything except the ionized track itself. Even combed by the filter, the bolt was bright enough to turn the massive shock wave five milliseconds later into anticlimax.
A fireball shrouded Our Lady of Montreal. Her own vaporized hull metal had exploded into white flame.
The bubble of light lifted away on the gases expanding it. Our bolt had punched a hole a meter in diameter in the Montreal's lower quarter. The edges of the gap glowed for a moment; then the Oriflamme's second gun blew a similar blazing hole beside the first.
Stampfer was firing our battery with a two-second pause between bolts-time to dissipate the ionized haze which would lessen the effect of an instantly following round.
The Oriflamme rocked at each discharge. The recoil of a
few grams of ions accelerated to light speed was enough
to shake even a starship's hundred tonnes.
The Long Tom fired. Its discharge was heavier than
the midships guns' by an order of magnitude. The Oriflamme's bow shifted a centimeter on the landing outriggers.
The lower quarter of the Federation vessel was a fiery
cavity. The hatch had been blown completely away, but the
mist of burning metal beyond was as palpable as marble.
The end of our ramp was still a meter and a half in the
air. The blast of the main guns had deafened me. I couldn't
even hear my own voice shouting, "God and Venus!" as I
leaped to the ground.
I crashed down on my face. The plasma cannon firing
from the Montreal hit the sailor behind me instead and
blew him to vapor. Bits of his ceramic armor scattered

 like grenade fragments.
I got to my feet. Stephen aimed his flashgun up at a
45' angle. His laser bolt, so bright under most conditions,
was lost in the greater brilliance of the plasma weapons
moments before.
  I stumbled toward the cavity Stampfer's guns had blasted for our entry. It roiled with ionized residues of the cannonfire and the ordinary conflagrations which the bolts had ignited in the compartments beyond. With my visor down, I was breathing from the suit's oxygen bottle.
An explosion above us almost knocked me down again.
Stephen's bolt had punched into the cannon's 5-cm bore,
damaging the nearly spherical array of lasers within the
chambered round. The lasers were meant to implode a
deuterium pellet at the shell's heart and direct the resulting
plasma down a pinhole pathway aligned with the axis of
the gun barrel.
Instead, the cannon's breech ruptured. The blast was
more violent than the one which killed the man behind
me, and I doubted whether Federation armor was as good
as our Venerian ceramic.
The rocky soil beneath the Montreal was glazed by
exhaust and our heavy cannon. The hatch had been
wrenched away, but the lintel was square and a meter
and a half above ground level. Stalactites of nickel-steel plating hung from the lower edge of the wound.
The white glare of the vessel's interior had dulled to a deep red. Fluid dribbling from the ruptured hydraulic lines burned with dark, smoky flames.
I gripped the lower lip of the opening and kicked myself upward. To my amazement, I wobbled into the hold despite thirty kilos of hard suit and weakness from the days we'd spent in free fall.
The vessel's cylindrical core held tanks of reaction mass and liquefied air behind plating as thick as that of the external hull. Shock waves had started a few of the seams, but the structure in general was still solid. Dual companionways to the higher decks were built into the core structure.
The horizontal deck was I -cm steel. Blasts generated by our plasma bolts had hammered the surface downward as much as twenty centimeters between frames. The hold's internal bulkheads were flattened, and the hatches that should have closed the companionways had been blown askew.
Five Federation crewmen in the lower hold were in metal hard suits when our first 15-cm bolt penetrated the hull. The suits remained, crushed and disarticulated. From the top of a thigh guard stuck the remains of a femur burned to charcoal. That bone was the only sign of the people who'd been wearing the suits.
I looked behind me. Several men in armor were trying to clamber up with one hand hampered by weapons. I clasped the nearest man under the right shoulder and heaved. His face was down, so I don't know who he was. He skidded aboard, got to his feet, and clumped toward a companionway.
Half the assault party still straggled between the Oriflamme and the Federation vessel. We'd landed on an expanse of stony desert, well inland of Ivestown. I doubt the Montreal's captain had chosen the site deliberately, but at least we weren't going to fry the colonists and their hundred or so Molt slaves as a byproduct of the fighting.
Stephen, his flashgun slung over the rifle on his left shoulder, heaved himself upward. I grabbed him and brought him the rest of the way. Other sailors were pairing, one to form a stirrup for the foot of the second. A plasma cannon, too light to be one of ours, fired. I saw the reflected flash but not the point of impact.
  A bullet whanged down a companionway and ricocheted
from the deck. I reached the helical stairs ahead of Stephen.
He grabbed my shoulder to stop me, then stuck his flashgun
up the vertical passage. I unclipped my cutting bar and
switched it on.
Stephen fired. Sparks of metal clipped by the laser pulse
spat down the shaft in reply. The bolt wasn't likely to have
hit anybody, but it might clear the companionway for a
few seconds. Stephen clapped me forward. His gauntlet
cracked like gunfire on my backplate. I started up the
steps.
  The hatch to the next deck upward had either been
open or blown open by gouts of plasma belching up the
companionway every time our cannon hammered the hold.
The compartment beyond, once an accommodation area,
was a smoky inferno.
Plastic and fabrics of all sorts burned in the air the fire
sucked from the companionway. The atmosphere of the
sealed deck must have been exhausted within a few minutes
of the moment our cannon flash -ignited everything flammable.
  I could have charged into the blaze, protected by my
hard suit, but there was nothing there for us. The fires
would destroy all life and objects of value before they
burned themselves out. If the Montreal's decks were
pierced by too many conduits and water lines, the blaze
here was likely to involve the whole ship.
  The hatch to the third level was closed. I passed it by
and continued climbing. The gunports were higher on the
hull. We had to silence the Montreal's plasma cannon.
A bare-chested man with a short rifle stuck his head
from the next hatchway, saw me three rungs below him,
and ducked back. A Molt with a cutting bar lunged out
instead. I slashed through his legs between the upper and
lower knee joints. He fell backward in a spray of brown ichor. I crushed his weapon hand against the flooring, then stepped over him into the cargo deck beyond.
The Montreal's fourth deck was stacked with bales and crated goods within woven-wire restraint cages. There were no internal bulkheads. At the end of an aisle between ranks of cargo were three Molts wearing oxygen masks and padded garments of asbestos or glass fiber. They were trying to pivot a light plasma cannon away from the gunport so that it could bear on me.
The man with the rifle leaned over a row of crates and fired. His bullet hit me in the center of the chest and
splashed upward, staggering me. I recovered and charged the Molts at a shambling run.
One of them swung at me with the kind of long forceps the Feds use to load their solid-breech plasma cannon. My bar screamed through the levers in a shower of sparks.
The alien scrambled away. I chopped the back of a Molt's head, then reversed my stroke through the right arm and into the chest of his fellow who was tugging on the gun's tiller.
The surviving Molt flung the handles of his forceps at me. They bounced off my helmet. I cut him in half. My bar's vibration slowed momentarily, then spun up again through a spray of body fluids.
The human stepped around a row of cargo and aimed at me. The butt of Stephen's flashgun crushed his skull from behind.
The cannon that'd exploded was ten meters farther along the curve of the hull. The blast had crushed the stacks of cargo outward in a wide circle. The feet of three Molts and another human were carbonized onto the deck near the gun's swivel, but nothing above the ankles remained of the crewmen.
I couldn't see any other Feds in the jumble of cargo. My whole body was on fire. I lifted my faceshield to take an unconstricted breath.
Stephen slammed my visor back down. He reached past me to tilt the plasma cannon toward the ceiling a meter above our heads.
I turned away. The world went white with a blast that
spreadeagled me on the deck. Stephen was still standing,
I don't know how.
I pushed myself to a crouch, then stood in a fog of swirling metal vapors. The point-blank charge of plasma had blown a two-meter hole into the level above. Fires burned there and among the cargo around us.
Stephen restacked one crate on another beneath the hole. A Molt fell through from the deck above. A bubble of vaporized metal had seared the creature's thorax white.
I wasn't sure I could lift Stephen, so I hopped onto the crates and raised my right foot. Stephen made a step of his hands. His powerful thrust popped me through onto the deck above.
The large compartment was Molt accommodations. I
guessed the aliens were crew rather than cargo. Though
the facilities were spartan, there were hammock hooks and
cages for the Molts' personal belongings. 
  The plasma bolt had blown out half the lights. I couldn't
see more than twenty Molts huddled in space meant to
quarter a hundred.
I reached for Stephen with my left hand. I had to jab
The tip of my bar down like a cane to keep from overbalancing.
Every heartbeat swelled me tighter against the oven of my
armor.
Stephen crashed upward. I staggered toward the single hatch out of the compartment. My vision was so focused that I didn't know whether Stephen was behind or beside me. Molts had squeezed against the internal bulkhead when the deck burst in a fireball near the curve of the hull. They scattered to either side of my advance like chickens running from the axe.
I pushed at the hatch. It didn't move. I raised my bar to cut through. Stephen reached past me and pulled the handle open.
I lurched into a corridor ten meters long. It was full of Fed personnel, human and Molt. A four-barreled cannon on a wheeled carriage faced one companionway; a tripod mounted laser whose separate power pack must weigh fifty kilos was aimed at the open hatch of the other.
An officer wearing gold-chased body armor turned and pointed his gun at me. The weapon had a thick barrel with only a tiny hole in the middle of it, and the stock fitted into a special rest on the breastplate.
I swung my bar at the Fed. He was too far away for me to reach before he fired. A starship hit and spun me around. I bounced onto the floor on my back. My faceshield was unlatched, but the helmet had rotated sideways 20 degrees to cut off part of my vision.
Stephen stepped across my body with his flashgun raised. I threw my left arm across my eyes. Side-scatter from Stephen's bolt glared off the corridor's dingy white walls. A crate of shells for the cannon blew up like so many grenades. Stephen fell over me.
I twisted out from under his legs. The blast had knocked down the nearest Feds as well, though the crew of the laser five meters away at the opposite end of the corridor was trying to swing its weapon onto us. The cable to the power pack wasn't flexible enough for them to change front without repositioning all their equipment.
I jerked off my helmet and flung it at the Feds. The four Molts gripping the power pack's carrying handles continued stolidly to walk it around.
I could see again and I could breathe. The officer's projectile had hit the top of my breastplate at a flat angle. It shattered the plate and tore loose the clamps holding plastron, gorget, and helmet together.
Half my breastplate flopped from the waist latches. Ceramic continued to crumble away in bits from the broken edge, because the shock had completely shattered the plate's internal structure. Breath was a sharp pain. I didn't know whether the chest muscles were bruised or if cracked ribs were ripping my lungs every time I moved.
I walked toward the laser. I would have run, but my backplate clanked behind me like a ceramic cape and caught my heels.
A human sailor with a full mustache and sideburns that swept up to bright chestnut hair gaped at me. He was wearing padded protective gear like that of the gunners on the deck below. He dropped his side of the laser and
sprang toward the companionway batch.
His human officer shot him in the back with her double-barreled pistol. She aimed at me past the power supply. Her head jerked back, and she fired the pistol into the ceiling as her nerves spasmed.
Her body toppled forward. There was a bullet hole over her right eye, and her brains splashed the bulkhead behind her.
I hacked at a Molt. He staggered back, bleeding from the stump of an arm and the deep cut in his carapace.
The nearest Molt wrapped his hard-surfaced arms around me while the others scrambled toward the cross-corridor at the end of the main one. They kept the power pack between me and them. Stephen fired his rifle again, but not in my direction. I cut awkwardly at the Molt's back. My limbs were still in their jointed ceramic cylinders, and the damned backplate dragged at me like an anchor.
The Molt moaned through the breathing holes along his lateral lines. My bar wouldn't bite-the battery was wholly
drained. I screamed in frustration, pounding the Molt with the pommel. He slipped down under the impacts, but his arms wouldn't release. His skull was a mush of fluids and broken chitin, but he wouldn't let go.
Stephen grabbed the Molt's shoulder with his left gauntlet and flung the corpse away from me. I staggered against the jamb of the hatchway. I wanted to get rid of the backplate, but I couldn't turn the studs behind me. I stripped off my right gauntlet instead as Stephen closed the firing contacts of the Federation laser and hosed its throbbing light across the other gun crew.
Stephen's flashgun was a monopulse weapon. This tripod-mounted unit had two separate tubes. It sequenced its output through them in turn to avoid the downrange vapor attenuation that reduced continuous-beam lasers' effectiveness.
The Fed officer who'd shot me was loading another fat cartridge into the breech of his weapon. The beam glanced from his polished breastplate in dazzling highlights, then hit him in the neck and decapitated him.
I flung away my left gauntlet. My hands curled with
pleasure at being free. The backplate latches turned easily.
Two Molts were starting to rise. Their thoraces burst soggily as the beam vaporized soft parts within the chitin shell.
A man in Venerian armor with his chest burned out lay just within the companionway hatch. He was probably the fellow who'd gone on while I helped Stephen into the hold. He held a rifle, and a cutting bar was clipped to his armor.
Exploding ammunition had knocked the multibarrel cannon sideways in the corridor. Stephen concentrated his flux on the breechblocks. The laser's feedline was beginning to smoke. The unit should have been allowed to cool every few seconds between bursts. Stephen was deliberately destroying both the weapons that could endanger a man in a Venerian hard suit.
Shells in the four cannon barrels cooked off in quick succession. Three of the weakened breeches failed, flinging fragments of jagged tool steel across the corridor and shredding two of the Molts who'd been crippled by the initial blast. There had been another human gunner also, but she must have run down the end corridor.
I took the cutting bar from the dead Venerian's waist stud and started up the companionway. My armored boots clanged on the slotted metal treads. I hadn't had time to take off the leg pieces.
The important thing was that my face and chest were free. The weight didn't matter so much, but days of constriction had driven me almost mad.
Or beyond almost.
The companionway was full of smoke from the fire on the lower deck, but because the air wasn't circulating the conditions weren't as bad as I'd thought they would be. I wished I'd thought to detach the oxygen bottle from my suit; but I hadn't, and anyway the projectile that smashed the breastplate had likely damaged the regulator as well.
Shots and screams echoed up the tube. Some of what sounded like human agony probably came from machines. I wondered if other members of the assault party had climbed this high. Movement in hard suits was brutally exhausting and other men hadn't had Stephen to help them forward.
The hatch onto the next deck was closed but not dogged
tight. I could hear people raggedly singing a hymn on the
other side. The leader was a female, and hers was the
only voice that didn't sound terrified. I passed the hatch
by and turned up the final angle of the companionway to
the highest deck.
The hatch was sealed. I tugged at an arm of the central
wheel. They'd locked it from the inside. I paused, thinking 
about the hatches I'd seen on the Montreal's lower decks.
A bullet howled up the companionway. It or a bit of it
dropped at my feet, a silvery gleam, before it rattled its
way back down through the stair treads.
The locks were electrical, activated by a button in the
center on the inner dogging wheel. The powerline ran
through the upper hinge.
I set my bar's tip on the hatch side of the hinge and
squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. I was dizzy from
smoke and fatigue, I'd forgotten that the dead man wouldn't
have slung his bar with the power switch on.
I thumbed the slide and tried again. The blade screamed
angrily and sank into the tough steel. Chips, yellow and
blazing white, spewed from the cut. The severed power
cable shorted through the hatch metal in a brief halo of
blue sparks.
I tugged again on the wheel. This time it spun freely,
three full turns to withdraw the bolts which clamped the
hatch to its jamb. I grasped the vertical handhold, pulled
the hatch toward me, and charged onto the bridge of Our
Lady of Montreal.
I thought they'd be waiting for me, alerted by my bar's
shriek and the inner wheel spinning as I undogged the
hatch. I'd forgotten how much else was going on. There
were six humans and maybe ten Molts in the domed circular chamber. They turned and stared at me as if they'd just 
watched the Red Death take off his mask.
I suppose they were right.
Nearest to me were a pair of humans in white tunics. I
thrust rather than slashing at the face of the woman who held a cutting bar. She staggered backward. The man tried to point his rifle but I grabbed it by the fore-end and twisted the muzzle upward. He shrieked and pulled away, but I held him by the weapon he didn't think to drop. My bar cut spine-deep in his neck, drowning his cry in his own blood.
The bridge instrumentation was a ring of waist-high, double-facing consoles. The three human officers in the center of the ring wore metal helmets and gleaming back-and-breast armor. One of them shouted an order.
Molts sitting at the outer positions lurched toward me from seats configured to their alien torsos. None of them had weapons, though one Molt picked up a portable communicator and threw it at my head.
I chopped a Molt's skull, then backhanded a deep gouge across the belly plates of another. I watched my body in amazement. The animal controlling me moved with the relentless fury of a storm against cliffs.
I still held the rifle like an oar in my left hand. I jolted a Molt back with the butt, then sawed through his ankles with a stroke that buried my bar momentarily in the pelvis of the creature who'd grabbed my forearm. I kicked the Molt free with an armored boot.
A bullet hit the back of the Molt toppling beside the cut-off feet. One of the officers was shooting at me with a handgun. His two fellows had ducked behind the ring of consoles. When he saw me turn toward him, he dropped flat also.
The screen of the nearest console showed a real-time image of the Oriflamme. Our five big plasma cannon had cooled enough to be reloaded and run out, but Stampfer hadn't fired again for fear of hitting those of us aboard the Montreal.
Additional men in ceramic armor trudged across the fused plain toward the Federation vessel. They looked pathetically small compared to the Oriflamme, much less the Montreal.
Molts threw themselves on me from right and left. I twisted my arm to saw the carapace of one with the back of my bar. The Molt's hard thorax jolted against me as a gun fired and an awl of red pain stabbed through my upper abdomen. The Fed soldier with his back to the other hatch had fired his shotgun.
  I punched the Molt holding my right arm with the cutting bar's pommel. I broke the chitin, making the creature move back enough that I could draw the blade down through his right thigh.
Two of the Fed officers rose from behind the console
again. My legs were mired in thrashing Molts whose muscles contracted as they died. I dropped the cutting bar and
brought the butt of the rifle I'd grabbed around to my right
shoulder.
The woman fired her pistol at me from three meters away
and missed. The man who'd shot at me before gripped his
pistol with both hands as he pointed it. I thrust the muzzle
of my rifle in his direction and jerked the trigger.
My bullet blew apart the screen of the console a meter
to the right of him. The woman behind that console gasped
and doubled up, clutching her groin. Instead of shooting
me, the man threw himself under cover again.
I couldn't move my legs. The soldier with the shotgun
closed the breech over a fresh cartridge and raised his
weapon again. My rifle had a tube under the barrel so it
was probably a repeater, but I didn't know how to chamber
a new round. I threw it at the soldier and missed. The man
ducked for an instant anyway.
I squatted on the pile of spasming Molts, trying to find
my cutting bar or some other weapon. The Fed soldier
dropped his shotgun and raised his hands over his head.
  Stephen and Piet Ricimer stepped past me. They still
wore their hard suits, but their visors were raised. Stephen
deliberately fired into the curving outer bulkhead to ricochet 
a bullet behind the ring of consoles. A Molt hiding
there jumped up. A charge of buckshot from Piet's shotgun 
knocked the Molt back with a ragged hole in his
plastron.
  The officer with the handgun raised his head to see
what was happening. The second bullet from Stephen's
revolving-chamber rifle hit the man in the forehead and
spun his helmet into the air in a splash of brains.
The Fed sprang fully upright, his arms flailing. Stephen
shot him again, this time through the upper chest, but when
the man turned and fell we could see his skull had already
been opened like a soft-boiled egg.
  The Montreal's bridge was thick with gunsmoke and
blood. I was beginning to lose color vision, and I didn't
seem to be able to stand up even though the Molts had
finally become shudderingly flaccid.
  "I surrender!" a man screamed from within the ring of
consoles. I remembered that there had been three officers
there when I burst into the compartment. "In the name of
Christ, have mercy!"
  "Stand with your hands raised, then!" Piet ordered with
his shotgun still butted on his shoulder. He stepped aside,
putting his back to a bulkhead rather than the open hatch
way.
  Stephen knelt beside me. His rifle gestured the Fed soldier farther away from the shotgun the man had dropped.
Somebody hammered on the sealed hatch. They'd pay
hell trying to break in like that.
The third Fed officer rose from his hiding place. He
peered from behind the helmet he'd taken off to hold in
front of his face. There was a pistol holstered at his side,
but I'm sure he'd forgotten it was there.
Stephen traded the rifle for his flashgun. He nodded
toward the hatch. "Open it," he said to the captured soldier.
Stephen was ready, just in case whoever was on the other
side came in wearing metal rather than ceramic armor.
"Order your men to stop fighting," Piet said to the captured officer. The Fed was the youngest of the three on
the bridge. He was pudgy, and his hair was so fine and
blond that his pink scalp showed through it. "There's no
need for more deaths."
"How bad are you hit?" Stephen asked, his eyes focused
on the hatch the prisoner was undogging.
Im just tired," I said. "None of this is my blood."
Dole stamped through the hatchway with a cutting bar
and a chrome-plated rifle. The gun's muzzle had been
sheared off at an angle, but I supposed it would still shoot
at the ranges we'd been fighting here.
  The stink of opened bodies was making me dizzy. I had
to get out of the stench, but I was too dizzy to stand.
  "The hell it's not," Stephen said. "Dole, come here and
give me a hand. We need to get him back to Rakoscy."
His gauntleted fingers tore the side of my tunic the rest
of the way open. There were two puckered, purple holes on
the side just below my rib cage. The Molt hadn't shielded
me completely from the shotgun pellets after all.
"Surrender!" the Federation officer called into a microphone flexed to his side of a console. "Captain Alfegor is
dead! Surrender! Surrender! They'll kill us all!"
  Echoes of his voice rumbled up the companionways. I
could still hear shots, though.
"Didn't know where you'd gone to," Stephen said quietly. He reached around my back and under my knees.
Dole knelt to link arms with him. "Had a dozen of them
charge around the back corridor just when I'd drained that
damned laser. Could have been a problem if Piet hadn't
come up the companionway about the same time."
  "I know how you felt," I said; or I tried to, because
about that time the stink of death swelled over the last of
my consciousness in a thick purple fog.

NEW VENUS

Day 140

The planet was uncharted. Piet had located it at a good time. The last day of the run, we'd used personal oxygen bottles because a patch had cracked badly.
I didn't have enough energy to run out with the others as soon as the ramp lowered. I sat in the hold on a pallet of chips, far enough back that the heat still radiating from the glazed soil didn't bother me. The naming ceremony on the side was over, and the crowd of relaxed sailors was breaking up.
At the base of the ramp, ten men under Salomon argued bitterly among themselves about the hoses we'd taken from Our Lady of Montreal to replace the set damaged when we fled Templeton. The Federation equipment was the correct diameter, but both ends of the hoses had male connectors-as did the fittings of our water tanks. We'd have to make couplers to use the hoses. That job could have been done during the long run from Quincy if anybody'd noticed the problem before.
I got up very carefully and walked down the ramp. I'd be in the way if I stayed in the hold. Salomon would have enough problems doing shop work without offloading the treasure first.
The chips had come cheap enough, I suppose. Three dead, only two wounded. The Feds hadn't been equipped to deal with our hard suits. Smetana had lost his leg stupidly-by getting it caught in the mechanism of the Montreal's cargo lift. My wound was pretty stupid too.
The men fell silent as I walked past them. "Good to see
you, Mister Moore," Salomon said formally. I gave him a deliberate nod.
The story'd gotten around. More than the story, the way it usually happens. The men seemed to think I was a hero. I thought-
The soldier's face dissolving in a red spray as I rammed my bar through her teeth and palate, then jerked the blade sideways.
I tried not to think at all, and it didn't help.
Piet, Stephen, and Guillermo were chatting at the lakeside. I joined them. Nearby, men had started laying out the temporary houses they'd live in while we were on New Venus.
"Feeling better, Jeremy?" Stephen asked to welcome my presence.
"I'm all right," I said. "Just tired. You know, the bruises I got from the back of my breastplate when the bullet hit me are worse than the little shot holes."
I waggled my left hand in the direction of where Rakoscy had removed the buckshot. I could move my arms well enough, but it still hurt to twist my torso.
"And if Rakoscy hadn't clamped off the vein those shots punctured," Piet said with a cold smile, "you wouldn't have felt any pain at all from your ribs. I hope the next time you'll remember you have nothing to prove. Nor did you on Quincy."
I shook my head. Shrugging was another thing I had to avoid. "It just happened," I said. "I wasn't trying...
I wasn't human when it happened. I didn't want to say that. "The ground cover doesn't have a root structure to bind turf," I said. I pointed to the men surveying the ground beside the Oriflamme. "How are they going to make houses?"
"Oh," said Piet, "a frame of brush, then a spray glaze to seal and stabilize it. We won't be here but a week at the most."
He looked back at the Oriflamme and frowned. "The patch that failed could have killed us. It was my fault."
"Piet," Stephen said forcefully, "the only way we could've checked the substructure-which is what failed,
not the patch-is to have removed the inner hull in sections. Which would've taken us three months, sitting on the ground beside the Montreal and wondering when the next Fed ship'd pass by and snap us up. I still don't believe that a fifty-millimeter Fed popgun cracked a frame member that way."
"'Well, it was probably the strain of the Breach," Piet said. "I know, I know ... But not only can't we afford mistakes, we can't afford bad luck."
"I'd say our luck had been fine," I said. "At least half the Montreal's cargo was of current production chips, not pre-Collapse stock. There's enough wealth to
The value was incalculable. I would have shrugged. I turned my palms up instead.
"The value is roughly that of the gross domestic product of the Free State of Venus," Stephen said quietly.
I looked at him: the scarred gunman, the consummate killer. It was easy to forget that Stephen Gregg had once been in the service of his uncle, a shipping magnate. I suspected that he'd been good at those duties too.
Piet grinned, his normal bright self again. "I think I'll cast a plaque claiming the world for Governor Halys," he added. "Do it myself, I mean. We can weld it to one of those rocks."
He pointed. Three natives-Rabbits-who certainly hadn't been on the clump of boulders twenty meters away when Piet started speaking took off running in the opposite direction. The two males were nude except for body paint. The female wore a skirt of veins combed from the sword-shaped leaves of a common local plant. Her flaccid breasts flopped almost to her waist.
Piet and Stephen darted to the side so that they could watch the Rabbits past the boulders. Guillermo and I followed slowly. It hurt me to move, and I doubt the Molt saw any reason for haste.
Several of the crewmen noticed the fugitives as well. Kiley shouted and started to run, though he didn't have a prayer of catching them.
"Let them go!" Piet ordered. I was always surprised how loud his voice could be when it had to.
Brush grew down to the lakeshore a little north of where we'd landed. The Rabbits vanished into it.
"I thought I'd seen a village in that direction while we were making our approach," Piet said.
"There are no industrial sites on this world," Guillermo said. If he'd been human, his voice would have sounded surprised. "I examined infrared scans. Even overgrown, the lines of human constructions would show up."
Stephen looked at him. "You do that regularly?" he asked. "Check on IR while we're orbiting9"
"Yes," the Molt said simply.
Piet shrugged. "This world isn't in the chart Jeremy
found for us," he said. "Even though the Federation cartographers had access to pre-Collapse data."
  Stephen was the only one of us who was armed. He'd
unslung his flashgun when the Rabbits appeared, though
he'd kept the muzzle high. Instead of reslinging the weapon, he cradled it in his arms.
"During the Collapse," he said, "colonies pretty much
destroyed themselves. It wasn't Terran attacks, certainly
not here on the Back Worlds. Maybe their ancestors-"
He nodded in the direction the Rabbits had fled.
-came from Templeton or the like as things were
breaking down there. Trying to preserve civilization."
  Piet sighed. "Yes," he said. "That could be. But you
don't preserve civilization by running from chaos."
He glanced back at the ship. Dole headed a crew working on the section damaged by the Montreal's plasma cannon, and Salomon's men had already stretched the hoses to the lake.
  "I think we can be spared to visit the native village,"
he said, smiling again. "They don't appear dangerous.
Stephen shrugged. "If we go," he said, "we'll be
armed."
  He glanced at me, I guess for support. My mind was
lost in the maze of how you preserve civilization by
cutting apart the face of a woman you hadn't even seen
five seconds before.
"The Montreal carried a couple autogyros," Stephen said as we broke out of the path through the brush. "You know, one of those would have made scouting around our landing sites a lot simpler."
The Rabbit village was in sight beneath trees that stood like miniature thunderheads. Up to a dozen separate trunks supported each broad canopy.
"Woof!" said Maher, the last of the six in our party. "'Bout time we got clear of that!" Not only was Maher overweight, he'd decided to wear crossed bandoliers of shotgun shells and to carry a cutting bar. His gear caught at every step along a track worn by naked savages.
"You were going to fly the autogyro, Stephen?" Piet asked mildly. "Or perhaps we should have brought along one of the Federation pilots to do our scouting for us."
The Rabbits lived in a dozen or so rounded domes of wattle-and-daub. There were no windows, and they'd have to crawl on hands and knees to get in through the low doors. I wondered whether they had fire.
Stephen laughed. "Well, they're supposed to be easy to fly," he said. "Not that we had room to stow another pair of socks, the way we're loaded with chips."
Rabbits began to congregate in front of the huts as we approached. There were more of them than I'd expected from the number of dwellings, perhaps two hundred. The adult males carried throwing sticks, shell-tipped spears, and what were probably planting dibbles, though they would serve as weapons.
"Open out," Piet ordered in an even voice. "Don't point a weapon.
We fell into line abreast as we continued to saunter at the pace Piet set toward the village. He and Maher carried shotguns. Loomis had a rifle, Stephen his flashgun, and even Guillermo wore a holstered pistol, though I doubt he'd have been much use with it.
I held a cutting bar in both hands like a baton. Even its modest weight strained my abdomen if it hung from one side or the other.
"Stephen," I said. "Will you teach me to shoot?"
"Yes," he said, the syllable pale with lack of affect.
"We won't need weapons now," Piet said briskly. "Wait here."
He strode ahead of the rest of us with his right hand raised palm-outward. "We are peaceful travelers in your land," he called in Trade English. "We offer you presents and our friendship."
Piet was still ten meters from the Rabbits when they threw themselves to the ground. The men lashed themselves with their own weapons; the women tore their skirts into tufts and tossed them in the air with handfuls of dirt. Small children ran screaming from one adult to another, demanding reassurance which wasn't to be found.
"Wait!" Piet boomed in horror as he sprang forward. "We aren't gods to be worshipped, we're men!"
He forcibly dragged upright a Rabbit who was drawing a barbed spearhead across his forearm. "Stop that! It's blasphemy!"
Stephen pushed his way against Piet's side, though if the Rabbits had turned on us, there wasn't a lot he could have done. I'd have been even more useless, but I stood to Piet's right and grabbed the polished throwing stick that a Rabbit was beating himself across the back with. I wasn't about to try lifting anybody in my present condition, but the Rabbit didn't fight me for the stick. It was a beautifully curved piece. The wood was dense and
had a fine, dark grain.
"Stop!" Piet thundered again.
This time the Rabbits obeyed, though for the most part they huddled on the ground at our feet. The children's shrieks seemed louder now that the adults weren't drowning them out.
An old woman came from a hut, leaning on the arm of a young man. She wore a pectoral and tiara made from strings of colored shells.
The youth supporting her was nude except for a genital cup, like most other males. A middle-aged man walked a step behind and to the right of the woman. He wore a translucent vest of fish or reptile skin. I could see the impressions the scales had left after they were removed.
The ordinary villagers edged back. They crawled until they'd gotten a few meters away, then rose to a crouch. Except for the man in the vest, the villagers looked ill-nourished. That fellow wasn't fat, but he had a solid, husky build. He stepped ahead of the old woman, keeping enough to the side that he didn't block our view of her.
We shook ourselves straight again. I still held the throwing stick. I stuck my cutting bar under the front of my belt to have it out of the way.
The two sailors ostentatiously ported their guns. I'd been too busy to look, but I'd bet they'd been aiming into the crowd and now hoped Piet hadn't seen them. Piet probably had seen them, the way he seemed to see everything going on, but he didn't choose to comment. Could be he thought Loomis and Maher showed better judgment than the rest of us had.
The old woman stretched out both arms and began speaking in a cracked voice. Her words were in no language I'd ever heard before. She paused after each phrase, and the man in the vest thundered what seemed to be the same words. They didn't make any more sense the second time at ten times the volume.
Maher looked at me and frowned. I nodded the throwing stick as a shrug. I didn't know how long this was going to go on either. At least it wasn't an attack.
After ten minutes of stop-and-go harangue, the old
woman started to cough. The youth tried to help her, but
She swatted at him angrily. The man in the vest looked
back in concern.
The woman got control of her paroxysm, though she swayed as she lifted the clicking pectoral off. She handed it to the youth, mumbled an order, and then removed the tiara as well. It had been fastened to her thinning hair with bone pins.
The youth walked to Piet, holding the objects at arm's length. The Rabbit was shivering. His knees bent farther with every step, so that when he'd reached Piet he was almost kneeling.
"We thank you in the name of our governor," Piet said as he took the gifts. "We accept the objects as offered by one ruler to another, not as the homage owed only to God."
He turned his head and hissed, "Loomis? The cloth."
Loomis hastily pulled a bolt of red fabric out of his pack. He'd forgotten-so had I-the gift we'd brought. The cloth came from the Commandatura on Trehinga, but it might well be Terran silk. Stephen had suggested it would be useful for trading to Rabbits and free Molts.
Piet held the bolt out to the youth. The youth turned his head away. The man in the vest snarled an order. The youth took the cloth. He stumbled back from Piet, crying bitterly.
Piet's mouth worked as though he'd been sucking a lemon. "Well," he said. He turned and nodded back the way we'd come. "Well, I think we've done all we can here."
That was true enough. Though I for one wasn't about to bet on what we had done.
The moon was up, so I hadn't bothered to take a light
when I went walking. The satellite was huge, looking
almost the size of Earth from Luna, though it had no
atmosphere and its specific gravity was only slightly
above that of water.
  The four crewmen's lodges were laid out as sides of a
square. A bonfire leaped high in the middle and a fiddler
played dance music. Repairs to the Oriflamme's hull were
complete, or as complete as possible. Liquor acquired on
Trehinga and Templeton competed with slash the motor
crewmen brewed from rations.
  Being able to walk for the past three days had loosened
up my chest muscles. I still got twinges if I turned too
suddenly, and when I woke up in the morning my lower abdomen ached as though I'd been kicked the night	before; but my body was healing fine.
  I was returning to the Oriflamme. I'd continued to bunk
aboard her. The minimal interior illumination hid rather
than revealed the ground beneath the starship, but the
moon was so bright that I noticed the hunching figure
while I was still fifty meters away.
  "Hey!" I shouted. I wasn't carrying a weapon. I ran
toward the figure anyway. Adrenaline made me forget
the shape my body was in as well as damping the pain
that might have reminded me. "Hey!"
  The figure sprang to its feet and sprinted away. When	
it was out of the Oriflamme's shadow I could see that it
was a Rabbit-a female; judging from the skirt.
Piet opened the forward hatch holding a powerful light in his left hand and a double-barreled shotgun by the pistol grip in his right. The light blazed onto the Rabbit and stayed there despite her attempts to dart and twist out of the beam. Furrows dribbling fresh blood striped her back.
The Rabbit finally vanished into the brush. None of the men celebrating at the shelters had taken notice of my shout or the Rabbit.
Running-jogging clumsily-actually felt good to me, though I didn't have any wind left. The short spurt to the ramp left me puffing and blowing.
I knelt beneath the ship where the Rabbit had hidden. She'd dropped or thrown away something as she fled. I doubted it was a bomb-fire was high technology for these savages-but I wasn't taking chances.
Piet flared his lens to wide beam. "Anything?" he asked as he hopped down beside me.
"This," I said, picking up the handle of a giant comb: a carding comb for stripping leaf fibers so they could be woven into cloth. The teeth were long triangles of shell mounted edgewise so that they wouldn't snap when drawn through tough leaves.
The teeth were smeared a finger's breadth deep with blood so fresh it still dripped. Piet switched off the handlight. I crawled carefully from beneath the Oriflamme; it'd be several minutes before I had my night vision back, and I didn't want to knock myself silly on a landing strut.
"Perhaps we should set guards," Piet said. "Of course, we'll be leaving tomorrow. If all goes as planned."
I flung the comb in the direction of the village a kilometer away. There were drops of blood on the glazed soil where the Rabbit had hidden for her ceremony. I sat down on the
ramp. I felt sick. Part of it was probably the exertion.
Piet sat beside me. "You wouldn't have had to go as far as the village to find a woman for your desires," he said. "You could just have waited here."
There was nothing in his tone, and his face-softened by the moonlight-was as calm as that of a statue of Justice. The fact that he'd spoken those words meant the incident had bothered him as much as it did me. Wine let the truth out of some men; but for others it was stress that made them say the things that would otherwise have been
hidden forever in their hearts.
  "I was just walking, Piet," I said quietly. "There's some
of the men gone up to the Rabbit village, I believe; but I
was just working the stitches out of my side."
  He nodded curtly. "It doesn't matter," he said. "That
sort of thing is between you and the Lord."
I got up and raised my face to the moon. "I haven't
lied to anybody since I came aboard the Porcelain, Piet,"
I said. My voice shuddered with anger. With all the things
I'd done, before and especially after I met Piet Ricimer,
to be accused of this-
I thought about what I'd just said, and about the cloak
of moral outrage I'd dressed myself in. I started to laugh.
Some of my chest muscles thought I shouldn't have, but
it was out of their control and mine.
Piet stood with a worried look on his face. Maybe he
thought I'd snapped, gone mad in delayed reaction to 
too many things.
"No," I gasped, "I'm all right. I was just going to say, I
haven't been lying to anybody except maybe myself. And
I'm getting better about that, you see?"
  We sat down again. "Jeremy," he said, "I'm sorry. I
shouldn't have spoken."
I shrugged. I could do that again. "If you hadn't," I said,
you'd have gone the rest of your life thinking that's what
I was doing out there tonight. When I was just going for
a walk."
Fifty meters away in the temporary accommodations,
the fiddler was taking a break. A chorus of sailors filled
in a cappella, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark
never failing. .
They might as easily have swung into The Harlot of
Jerusalem. I started to laugh again. This time my ribs
forestalled me.
"I'm fine," I repeated. I was beginning to wonder,
though, and it wasn't my body that caused me the concern.
"If President Pleyal establishes the rule he wants over
all mankind," Piet said, "his fall will be a collapse worse
than the Collapse. Because we don't have the margin for
survival that men had risen to a thousand years ago. Folk
like these-"
  He waggled a finger northward.
-mistaking men for gods, they'll be all that remains
of humanity. We have to succeed, Jeremy."
"I'll be glad when we lift," I said. I looked at, Piet,
leaning back with his arms braced on the ramp. "Because
you're wrong, you know. It's not gods they think we
are. They're not worshipping, they're trying to placate
demons."
I shuddered, closed my eyes, and opened them again
on the vast, raddled face of the moon. "Which is why," I
went on, "that quite apart from standards of hygiene, the
women here are in no danger from me. I'm not interested
in a woman who thinks she's being raped."
I clasped my hands together to keep them from shaking. "Particularly one who thinks she's being raped by a
minion of Satan."
And if God was Peace, then she would surely be correct.
   
     DUNEEN
    
Day 155
    
My rifle roared, lifting the muzzle in a blast of gray
smoke. I now knew to hold the weapon tight against
me, The first time I'd instinctively kept the buttplate
a finger's breadth out from my shoulder. The rifle had
recoiled separately and fast. Instead of pushing my torso
back, it whacked me a hammerblow.
"Did I hit it?" I asked, peering toward the target-a
meter-square frame of boards twenty meters away. The
aiming point was a circle of black paint. My bullet holes
spread around it in a shotgun pattern against the rough-
sawn yellow wood.
"You hit it," Stephen said. "Reload and hit it again.
Remember you want to be solid, not tense. You're using
a tool."
I cocked the rifle, then thumbed the breech cam open
and extracted the spent cartridge for reloading. "It'd be
easier if all our guns were the same kind, wouldn't it?"
I said. I nodded toward the revolving rifle in the crook of
Stephen's left elbow.
"All machine work instead of craftwork?" Stephen said.
"Where that thinking ends is another Collapse-a system
of automatic factories so complex that a few hit-and-run
attacks bring the whole thing down. Everybody starves or
freezes."
I pulled a cartridge from my belt loop but held it in
my hand instead of loading. "That's superstition," I said,
more forcefully than I usually spoke to Stephen. This was
important to me. "Civilization isn't going to fall because
every gunsmith on Venus bores his rifle barrels to the
same dimensions."
If man was ever really to advance, we had to design
and build our own electronics instead of depending on
the leavings of pre-Collapse civilization. That required
something more structured than individual craftsmen like
Piet's father casting thruster nozzles.
Stephen shrugged. I couldn't tell how much it mattered
to him. "It isn't the individual aspect," he said. "It's the
whole mind-set. On Earth they're setting up assembly lines
again.
"But for now. . ." I said as I slid the loaded round into
the chamber sized to it and not--quite-to that of any
other rifle aboard the Oriflamme, "I'll learn how to use
whatever comes to hand."
During the voyage from New Venus, Stephen had
showed me how to load and strip each of our twenty-
odd varieties of firearm. It gave us both something to
concentrate on between the hideous bouts of transit. This
was the first time I'd fired a rifle.
I thought of the officer on the Montreal's bridge
clutching the hole in her groin as she fell. The first
time I'd practiced with a rifle.
  One of the local herbivores blundered into the clearing.
A peck of fronds was disappearing into its mouth. Spores,
unexpectedly golden~ showered the beast's forequarters
and the air above it.
The creature saw us. The barrel-shaped body froze, but
the jaws continued to masticate food in a fore-and-aft
motion. My shots hadn't alerted the creature to our presence. 
The local animals didn't seem to have any hearing whatever.
  "We have plenty of meat," Stephen said. "Let it go."
The creature turned 270 degrees and crashed away through the
vegetation. I could track its progress for some distance by
the spores rising like a dust cloud.
I glanced down at my rifle. "I wasn't going to shoot it,"
I said.
I meant I wasn't going to try. The board target was considerably larger than the man-sized herbivore. The skill
demonstrated thus far wasn't overwhelmingly high.
"It gets easy to kill," Stephen said. His voice was
slipping out of focus. "Don't let it. Don't ever let that
happen."
  "One more!" I said loudly. I closed the breech with a
distinct cluck, seating the cartridge, and raised the butt to
my shoulder again.
Concentrate on the foresight. The barrel wobbled around
the target, let alone the bull's-eye. Squeeze the trigger,
don't jerk it. My whole right hand tightened.
  I tried to hold the rifle as I had the cutting bar as
we sawed boards for the target, firmly but without the
feeling of desperate control that the firearm brought out. I
wasn't making something happen. I was easing the trigger
back against the rough metal-to-metal contact points of a
mechanism made by a journeyman rather than a master.
 The muzzle blast surprised me the way Stephen said
it was supposed to. Splinters flew from a hole a few
centimeters left of the bull's-eye.
 "Yeah," Stephen said. "You're beginning to get it. In
another day or two, you'll be as good as half the crew."
 He shook his head disgustedly. "They think they can
shoot, but even when they practice, they plink at rocks or
ration cartons. If they miss, they don't have a clue why.
They'll make the same damned mistake the next time, like
enough."
  I extracted the empty case. Powder gases streamed
through the open breech. "What does it take to get as good
as you are, Stephen?" I asked, careful not to meet his eyes.
"Nothing you can learn," he said. He sat down on the
trunk of a fallen tree with bark like diamond scales. "And
it's not something you'd think was worth the price, I
suspect.
  I sat beside him. I couldn't hear the Oriflamme's pumps
anymore. They must have completed filling our water
tanks. "Do you know how long Piet intends to lay over
here?" I asked. "It seems a comfortable place, if you don't
mind muggy."
  I flapped the front of my tunic, sopping from the wet heat.
"The only thing that worries me is the Avoid notation
in the database you found for us," Stephen said. He half cocked his rifle and began to rotate its five-shot cylinder with his fingertips, checking the cartridge heads. The pawl clicked lightly over the star gear. "There's nothing wrong with the air or the biosphere, so why avoid it?"
"There's a hundred charted worlds with that marker,"
I said. "Maybe Pleyal woke up on the wrong side of the
bed the morning the list was handed him."
  "Come on back and we'll clean your weapon," Stephen
said as he rose. "Don't leave that to somebody else to-"
I was staring skyward. Stephen followed my eyes to the
glare of bright exhaust. "God damn it," he said softly. "It's
a starship landing, and it sure isn't from Venus."
We ran through the forest as the Oriflamme's siren sounded.
  The strange vessel drifted down like a dead leaf.
Starships-the starships I'd seen landing-tended to do
so in a controlled crash because the forces being balanced 
were so enormous. This ship must have a remarkably high
power-to-weight ratio, even though its exhaust flames were
the bright blue-white of oxy-hydrogen motors rather than
the familiar flaring iridescence of plasma.
  Dole was leading a party of twenty men from the main
hatch into the forest. "Mister Gregg, do you want to take
over?" the bosun shouted when he saw us. All the men
were armed, but several of them hadn't waited to pull on
their tunics when the alarm sounded.
  "No, go ahead," Stephen ordered as he sprang up the
steps to the cockpit airlock.
  Dole's section would hide in the forest so that we
weren't all bottled in the Oriflamme if shooting started.
It would take anything from ten minutes to half an hour
for the ship to lift. In the meanwhile, the Oriflamme was
a target for anybody in orbit who wanted to bombard us.
  To a degree that worked both ways. The Oriflamme's
gunports were open, though of course our guns couldn't
sweep as wide a zone as could those of an orbiting ves-
sel able to change its attitude. Stampfer was raising the
17-cm gun into firing position. The violent blasphemy he
snarled during the process, only a meter from Piet's couch,
showed how nervous the gunner was.
  Stephen grabbed the flashgun slung from the same hook
as his rolled hammock. I think if he'd had his favored
weapon, he would have stayed with Dole outside, Stephen
took a repeating rifle with him when we left the ship
because the dog-sized local predators hunted in packs of
three or more.
  Piet glanced aside from his console. "They've an-
nounced they're friendly," he said. "And I presume they
are or we'd know it by now, but. . . "
  Because the strangers didn't use plasma motors, they
could communicate by radio even while they were land-
ing. That didn't seem a sufficient trade-off for the greater
power of fusion over chemical energy, but it had its
advantages.
  Stephen donned his helmet as he stepped out the airlock
again. Piet smiled and returned to his plot.
I followed Stephen. I still carried the slung rifle. I'd
picked up my cutting bar also, as much for the way it
focused me as for any good I'd be able to do with it
against a starship.
  The strange vessel was no bigger than a featherboat,
though it was shorter and thicker than the Nathan, say,
had been. It settled only twenty meters from the Ori-
flamme, bow to bow. Its combustion engines were loud
by absolute standards, but they whispered in comparison
to those of a normal starship. Plasma thrusters mixed
low-frequency pulses with the hiss of ions recombining
across and beyond the upper auditory band, creating a
snarl more penetrating and unpleasant than I could have
imagined before I heard it myself.
  The ship's four stubby legs seemed to be integral rather
than extended for landing. Portions of the scaly brown
hull were charred from heat stress during reentry, but
the material didn't look like the ablative coatings I was
familiar with. It looked like tree bark.
  The strange vessel had no visible gunports or hull open-
ings of any kind. I walked toward it; either leading Stephen
or following him, it was hard to say. A spot grew in the
mid-hull. At first I thought a fire smoldered on the coating,
but it was a knot opening as it spun slowly outward.
  The hole froze when it reached man-size. The figure
that stepped out of the ship was humanoid but certainly
not human, though most of its body was covered with a
hooded cape of translucent fabric. It had reptilian limbs
and a face covered with patterned nodules like those of
a lizard's skin. The jaw was undershot, the eyes pivoted
individually, and the hands gripped a stocked weapon with
a ten-liter pressure tank.
  "I'd worry," Stephen murmured, "if they weren't
armed." His voice was in the husky, dissociated mode
in which I knew he didn't worry at all; only planned
whom to kill first.
   The second person out of the ship was a human, though
he wore a flowing cape like that of the guard who pre-
ceded him. Tiny flowers filled the socket of his left eye
like a miniature rock garden, and his right leg beneath the
cape's hem was of dark wood with a golden grain. When
the cape blew close to his body, I could see a handgun of
some sort tucked against the front of his right shoulder.
  "Hello, Gregg," the man said. It was hard to think of
someone with flowers growing from his face as being
human, and the fellow's rusty voice didn't help the impres-
sion. "I thought the ' Feds had killed you on Biruta."
  Two more reptiles, armed as the first had been, got out
of the strange ship. Their capes were a uniform dull gray,
but the human's had underlayers which returned sunlight
in shimmers across the whole optical spectrum.
  "Hello, Cseka," Stephen said. "They tried, but we got
away."
  Cseka glanced beyond us. Piet stood in the cockpit hatch, 
watching. "Ricimer too, eh?" Cseka said. "Well, I didn't get away. They caught me on Biruta and they made me a slave. How 
long's it been, anyway? Standard years, I mean."
"Five years, Captain," Piet said. "Would you come aboard the Oriflamme? Your friends, too, if they care to."
  "Aye, we'll do that," Cseka said. He spoke a few tbroat-
searing words to his guards and- stumped forward. "These are On 
Chay," he said, again in Trade English. "And I'm no longer
a captain, Ricimer, I'm chief adviser to the Council of On
Chay."
  Cseka walked with a stiffness that the false leg didn't
fully explain. I wondered what other injuries the cape
concealed.
"And I'm the worst enemy Pleyal and his bastard Fed-
eration will ever have," Cseka added as he climbed the
cockpit ladder. He spoke quietly, but his voice squealed
like chalk on slate.
The Chay walked with quick, mincing steps, though
there was nothing birdlike about their erect bodies. Their
bulging eyes swept at least 240 degrees even when they faced
front, and they continually rotated their heads to cover the
remaining arc.
  "The mummy on Respite," I murmured to Stephen as
we followed the guards back aboard the Oriflamme.
  "I was thinking that," he said. "And now I really wonder
how long ago he was buried."
  Stephen was still distant from his surroundings. Per-
haps it was mention of Biruta, where Pleyal's men had
treacherously massacred Venerian traders. For reasons of
state, there was still formal peace between the Free State
of Venus and the North American Federation; but because
of Biruta, there was open war beyond Pluto, and survivors
like Piet and Stephen were the shock troops of that war.
Piet and Stephen and Captain, now Chief Adviser,
Cseka.
  The Long Tom was aligned with the bow port-and the
Chay vessel-but not run forward to battery. Stampfer
was still with the gun, but he'd sent his crew aft so that
only he and the navigation officers waited for us in the
bow compartment. Piet had dropped the table which hung          on lines from the ceiling. Men watched through the hatch
and from an arc outside the cockpit.
  "Five years," Cseka said. "You lose track. Five years."
He took the tumbler of cloudy liquor Piet offered him:
slash distilled from algae. This was a bottle we'd brought
from Venus rather than what the motor crews brewed
whenever we landed, but there wasn't a lot of difference.
  "We have, ah, wines and such," Piet said. "Loot, of course."
  Cseka drained his tumbler in three wracking gulps.
Slash proved anywhere from fifty to eighty percent ethanol. 
"A taste of home, by God," he muttered. "The Chay,
they can do anything with plants, but they can't make
slash that's real slash."
  "Perhaps they're too skillful," Stephen said. I don't
know whether he was joking. "Slash doesn't permit subtlety."
  "I was their slave for . . ." Cseka said. He frowned
and refilled his tumbler. "Years. You can't measure it.
Pleyal's slave, bossing gangs of Molt slaves all across
the Back Worlds. The eye, that was from Biruta. They
took my leg off on a place that hasn't any name. Pleyal
doesn't waste medicines on slaves when amputation will do.
  He swallowed another three fingers of slash. Cseka's
eye was fixed on the bottle, but I can't guess what his
mind saw.'
  "And then the Chay raided the plantation I was running
on Rosary." Cseka gave us all a broad, mad grin. The tiny
flowers wobbled in his eye socket as he turned his head.
"I escaped with them. They might have killed me before
they understood. That would have been all right, I'd still
have been free of Pleyal."
  The Chay had a sweetish odor like that of overripe
fruit. I couldn't tell whether it was their breath or their
bodies. They looked silently around the compartment.
One of them reached toward the 17-cm cannon, but his
long-fingered hand withdrew before it quite touched the
gun. Stampfer, squat and glowering, relaxed minusculely.
  "I've been guiding On Chay ever since," Cseka said
"Not leading-the Council leads. But I know the Feds
and I help the Chay fight them. The bastards."
  "We came through the Breach," Piet said, "but we'll
have to return the long way to Venus. We'll carry you
back with us and give you a full share of-"
  "No!" Cseka shouted. His hand closed on the neck
the bottle. I thumbed the power switch of my cutting
bar and opened my left hand to grab the nearest Chay's
weapon before he could-
  Cseka relaxed and beamed his clownface grin at us
again. "No, I'm where I belong," he said. He spoke now
in a cracked lilt. "Killing Feds. Killing all the Feds, every
one of the bastards, every one."
  He poured more slash. Stephen almost hadn't moved,
but "almost" was the amount he'd tucked the flashgun
into his side to have a full stroke when he swept the butt
across the heads of Cseka and the guard nearest him. Piet
had reached across the back of his couch, where a double-
barreled shotgun hung by its sling, and the lever from the
plasma cannon's collimator was in Stampfer's hand.
  "I want you to come back to On Chay with me," Cseka
said, sipping this time instead of tossing the liquor off.
"I told our scouts to look for ceramic-hulled ships, you
know. To report to me at once and not to attack. And here
you appear in this system."
  He seemed to be oblivious of what had almost happened. Perhaps he didn't remember. The Chay hadn't moved, but their facial skin had shifted from green/brown to mauve.
"We appreciate the offer . . ." Piet said. "But-"
"No, it's not out of your way," Cseka said with a dis-
missive wave of his hand. "The fourth planet here."
  "That's a gas giant," Salomon said sharply from his
console.
  "Yes, the second moon out," Cseka agreed. He was all
sweet reason now. The sharpness was gone, but his voice
still sing-songed. "It'll be worth your time. The Chay grow
tubular fullerenes, grow them, any length you want. Kilo
for kilo, they're worth more than new-run chips."
Piet's face grew blankly quiet. He wasn't looking at
anyone. We all waited for him to speak. The Oriflamme
wasn't a democracy.
He smiled dazzlingly. "Yes, all right," he said to Cseka.
"We'll follow you, then?"
Cseka nodded, the flowers bobbing in his eye socket.
"Yes, yes, that's what we'll do," he said. Suddenly, fiercely he added, "I knew there'd be ships from Venus sooner
or later. Between us, we'll kill them all!"
  He turned and slammed out through the open airlock
without further comment. The three guards exchanged
glances, only their eyes moving, before they strutted after
their human leader.
  Stephen relaxed slightly., "Cseka was always a bit of a
hothead," he said in an emotionless voice.
  Piet watched the castaway climb back aboard the vessel
in which he had arrived. "That was a different man, the
one we knew," he said.
  "You trust him, then?" I said. I switched off the cutting
bar and hung it, so that I could work life back into the
hand with which I'd been gripping the weapon.
  "No," said Piet. The port of the Chay vessel began to
rotate closed before the last of the guards hopped through.
"He's obviously insane. But he's different from the man
Stephen and I knew."
  He pushed the button controlling the Oriflamme's siren,
signaling the men aboard for liftoff.
  I dropped my rifle and ammo satchel on the deck. "I'm
going with them," I said. I jumped from the airlock instead
of using the steps. Over my shoulder I called, "We need
to know more about the Chay than we do now!"
  Men piling aboard via the ramp looked in surprise as I
sprinted to the alien vessel. Nobody tried to call me back
from the bridge. Piet and Stephen weren't the sort to waste
their breath.
  "Cseka!" I shouted. "Open up! Let me ride with you!"
The port continued to spin slowly closed. It had shrunk
to the size of my head. I stuck the blade of my unpowered
cutting bar into the opening.
  The port stopped closing. I waited. The Chay vessel's
hull pulsed slowly as I stood beside it with my hand on
the grip of my bar.
  After a minute or so, the knot rotated the other way
again. When the opening was large enough, I climbed aboard.

             ON CHAY
    
Day 156
    
The engines' firing level reduced gradually, as though
someone was shutting down the fuel valves by micro-
adjustments as we settled toward the moon's inhabited
surface. Some thing was, but not a person, unless the
Chay vessel herself had personality as well as life.
One of the reptiles chewed a banana-shaped fruit that
dribbled purple juice down his jaw and the front of his
cape. It seemed to have a narcotic effect. The Chay's
eyes hadn't moved since he began eating; translucent lids
slipped back and forth across them at intervals.
  Cseka lay on his back, staring at the frameless screen
that covered the cabin ceiling. Instead of a real-time scan,
adjusted images swept over the display area at one- or two-
second intervals.
  None of the vessel's crew was anywhere near the con-
trols aft. The ship was landing itself.
  "Are those irrigated lands?" I asked, gesturing toward a
swatch of blue-green on the surface swelling toward us. It
could as easily have been a lake. I wasn't sure whether the
patterns I saw in the colored area were real or an artifact
of the unfamiliar optical apparatus.
"We live on mats of vegetation," Cseka said in a
drugged voice. He didn't look at me when he spoke.
"On Chay has too many earthquakes to live directly
on the ground, The mats slide when the earth shakes,
you see."
  "Life couldn't arise on a planet-'moon'-so unstable," I said, speaking the thought I'd had ever since I connected the Chay with the mummy on Respite. "It must have been colonized from somewhere else. Perhaps in the far past."
"Yeah, that's probably so," Cseka agreed without inter-
est. "There's maybe a hundred Chay worlds. They all call
themselves On Chay. I suppose the Chay had a Collapse
too."
Translucent circles like strings of frog eggs clung to one
another within the mat we were approaching. Elsewhere,
larger circles differed in hue from the neighboring vegeta-
tion. The primary lowered in the sky above us, a turgid
purple mass shot with blues and yellow.
 The controls spoke in a guttural, blurry voice. The two
sober Chay looked around. Cseka roused himself from his
couch and growled toward the controls.
  The engines fired at high output. We accelerated side-
ways, and I fell against a bulkhead. The resilient surface
cushioned me, then formed into a grip for my furious hand.
  "I'm to guide your friends down outside the city," Cseka
grumbled. "I forget the way plasma thrusters tear up every-
thing around."
   The Chay vessel was smaller inside than I'd expected.
The thick hull contained everything necessary for the
starship's operation and the well-being of the crew, but
it didn't leave much internal volume.
  "The Oriflamme is already in orbit?" I asked.
Cseka looked at me as if he were trying to remember
where I'd come from. I hadn't noticed anything odd when
I ate rations prepared for Cseka-none of the food was
meat, according to him, though I'd have sworn otherwise.
Most likely, the castaway's problems had nothing to do
with his present diet.
  "You said we were guiding my friends down," I prodded.
"So they were waiting for us?"
"Yeah, sure," Cseka said with an angry frown. "Look,
we got here, didn't we? Our ships don't process course
equations as fast as the Feds do, maybe, but they don't
come down sideways because a cosmic ray punched the
artificial intelligence at the wrong time."
We'd transited from above Duneen almost as soon as
we reached orbit. A human vessel-even the Oriflamme
with Piet running the boards-would have taken at least
half an hour to calibrate.
  The next transit, from a point so removed that the sys-
tem's sun was only a bright star when it rotated across the
ceiling screen, had taken what I think was the better part
of a day. I was used to transits in quick series, several to
several score insertions in sequence, followed by periods
of an hour or more to recalculate. Chay vessels used a
completely different system.
  The advantage-it minimized the horrible sickness of
transiting through nonsidereal universes-was balanced by
the fact that the Chay didn't continue accelerating during
calibration. We were in free fall all the time we waited for
the brain built into the vessel's hull to prepare for the
next transit. Combustion rockets weren't as fuel-efficient
as plasma thrusters, and the navigational system obviously
didn't cope with small, sudden changes as well as humans'
silicon-based microprocessors did.
  "They were met in orbit," Cseka murmured, settling
back onto his couch. "But they didn't want to land until
we'd arrived. You had."
  The ceiling visuals were more like mural paintings than
the screens I was used to. The mat of vegetation covered
the bow third of the image. There were circular fields of
varying size within the general blue-green mass. Occa-
sional bright, straight lines suggested metalwork. From
what Cseka had told me about Chay culture, I assumed
they were biologically formed as well.
I'd thought the castaway would be babblingly glad of
human company after his years among aliens. Instead,
Cseka remained in his own world throughout the voy-
age. He gave verbal orders to the controls when the ship
demanded them. My questions were answered in mono-
syllables or brief phrases, the way a busy leader snaps at
an importunate underling; responses only in the technical
sense, which in no way attempted to give me the under-
standing I'd requested.
  Despite that, I'd learned a great deal about the Chay to
guide Piet when he dealt with the race. A day's discomfort
was nothing compared to what we'd been through already;
and the risk-
I'd made that decision when I came aboard the Porce-
lain. So had we all.
  The vessel was settling to the west of the mat. As we
neared the ground I realized that resolution of the Chay
optics was amazingly good, more like still photographs
than the scanned images I was used to. The visuals were
real, too, not data cleaned up by an enhancement program.
The surface had all the warts and blemishes of a natural
landscape.
  The soil beneath us was russet, yellow, and gray. There
were dips and outcrops, but no significant hills. Frequent
cracks jagged across the surface, often streaming sulphur-
ous gases. Vegetation outside the large mats was limited
to clumps and rings. None of it was high enough to cast
a shadow from the primary on the eastern horizon.
  "Is it breathable?" I asked as I watched a fumarole just
upwind of where we trembled in a near-hover. "The air."
  "What?" Cseka said. He blinked, then frowned. "Of
course it's breathable. A little high in carbon dioxide,
that's all. These-"
  He plucked the cowl of his cape. It stretched across his
face as a veil.
"-filter it. I'll have some brought to your ship."
He spoke to the vessel's controls again. We resumed
our descent at less than three meters a second.
  "The Chay wear them also," I said. We would land
in a shallow depression hundreds of meters in diameter,
half a Mick from the inhabited vegetation. Atmosphere
vessels-platforms supported by three or more translucent
gas bags-drifted from the city toward the spot.
  "When they're out of their domes, yes," Cseka said.
I squatted against the bulkhead's lower curve, not that
we were going to land hard enough to require my cau-
tion. If the Chay couldn't breathe the atmosphere of On
Chay without artificial aids, there was no question at all
that they were the relicts of a past civilization rather than
autochthons.
The engines roared at higher output and on a distinctly
different note. I recalled how the nozzles had dilated as
the Chay vessel landed on Duneen. The exhaust spread
to reflect from the ground as a cushion against the low-
er hull.
"Do you have a filter for me?" I asked, pitching my
voice to be heard over the engines. How quickly did C02
poisoning become dangerous? Could I run to the Ori-
flamme after she landed?
"Christ's blood," said Cseka. He wiped his good eye
with the back of his hand, then waved toward the guard
whose muscles had frozen while the last of the fruit was
a centimeter from his mouth. "Take his!"
Cseka growled a few additional words to the Chay. The
mobile guards unfastened their fellow's cape by running a
finger down a hidden seam. They pulled the garment away
from him as we landed lightly as thought.
One of them handed the cape to me. I wrapped it around
my shoulders, avoiding the patch of sticky purple juice.
The edges sealed when I pressed them together, though the
fabric felt as slick as the surface of the Oriflamme's hull.
  The Chay's naked body was skeletally thin. The pebbly
frontal skin was light gray-brown, while the sides and back
were a darker shade of the same drab combination. The
color variations of the face and arms were absent.
  The creature wore a net garment similar to a bandeau
across its midriff. A few small objects hung from the
meshes. I couldn't guess what their human analogs
might be.
  One of the Chay spoke. It was the first time I'd heard
one of their voices. The word or words seemed sharper
than those of Cseka speaking the language, but obviously
he managed to communicate.
  The whorled patch of bulkhead spun slowly outward,
opening to a dark sky and the coruscation of the Ori-
flamme's thrusters descending. I smoothed the sides of
my borrowed cape over my nose and mouth, then ducked
through the hatchway as soon as it had opened enough to
pass me.
  The Oriflamme dropped in a wide circle of Chay ves-
ssels, ten or a dozen of them. These ships were constructs,
three to six pods linked by tubes fat enough that a man or
Chay could crawl between them.
  The individual hulls were similar to the one that had
carried me to On Chay. I had a vision of giant pea vines
festooned with starships. I suppose that was pretty close
to the truth.
  The Oriflamme wobbled slightly like a man walking
on stilts, though anyone who'd seen another starship land
would be amazed at how skillfully Piet balanced the thrust
of his eight engines. The Chay escort kept formation around
him like fish schooling rather than individually-controlled
machines. They dropped with less than a quarter of their
jets lighted, further proof of how much less massive they
were than human vessels.

 
I'd used my hand to block the glare of the Oriflamme's
thrusters. When Cseka got out behind me, he'd sealed the
front of his cowl up over his eyes. I tried the same thing.
The fabric blocked the high-energy-UV and blue-por-
tion of the exhaust and dimmed the whole output to com
fortable levels, without degrading the rest of my vision
more than ten or twenty percent. That was about as good
as our helmet visors.
  The dirigibles I'd seen on our vessel's screen sailed
nearer. The supporting gas bags were the size and shape
of the starship hulls, though the walls were thin enough
to be translucent. Eight to ten meters beneath each set of
bags hung a platform, some of which were large enough
to hold several score Chay.
  The bigger dirigibles mounted a plasma cannon at the
bow. The weapons were metal and of small bore, swivel
guns like those Our Lady of Montreal had carried.
  I nudged Cseka. "Where do they get the cannon?" I
shouted over the Oriflamme's hammering roar.
"Trade," he said. "For fullerenes. We've got embassies
from most of the states of Earth here, but the shipments go
through too many hands. That's why we want Venerians.
To set up our own foundries."
  About half the Chay riding the dirigibles wore plain
gray capes like those of Cseka's guards. The remainder
were clad in a variety of other metallic hues. Most of
these were shades of silver, but cinnabar reds and blues as
poisonous as that of copper sulfate were dazzlingly pres-
ent. A few Chay gleamed with the same gold undertones
as Cseka's cape.
A hundred meters up, the Chay vessels increased thrust
and hovered while the Oriflamme dropped out of their cir
cle. Moving in a single flock, the escorts pulsed sideways
through the sky in the direction of the mat of vegetation.
The Oriflamme landed nearby in an explosion of dirt.
Each of the thruster nozzles acted as a shaped charge blast-
ing straight down. The soil was friable, without enough
sand in the mixture to bind it into glass.
I hunched and covered my head with my arms. Cseka
remembered to duck a moment later, but the two guards
who'd followed us out of the ship continued gaping at the
Oriflamme until the dirt cascaded over us. It was like being
caught in a rugby scrum.~
I fell over on my right side. One of the rocks that
bounced off my forearm would have knocked me silly if
it had hit my head instead. Pebbles settled while the wave
of lighter dust traveled outward in an expanding doughnut.
A dirigible nosed toward us through the cloud.
I shook the hem of my cape free of the dirt loading it and
jogged toward the Oriflamme. Cseka shouted something,
but I couldn't understand the words. Maybe he was calling
to the Chay in their own language.
The forward airlock opened as I neared the Oriflamme.
Stephen, identifiable even in a hard suit by his size and
the slung flashgun, swung down the integral steps and
stamped toward me across the glowing crater the plasma
motors blew around the vessel.
He raised his visor when he was clear of the throbbing
boundary. "I'll carry you," he said.
"I hoped you might," I said, but he didn't hear me
because he had to lock his visor down again to draw a
breath.
I stepped into his arms and, like Saint Christopher car-
rying our Lord, Stephen tramped back across the blasted
soil and up the steps into the Oriflamme. The ground had
cooled below the optical range, but radiant heat baked the
sweat from my calves and left arm in the few seconds I
was exposed.
Both valves of the airlock stood open until Stephen set
me down. The forward compartment was closed off from
the rest of the ship. Piet and half a dozen senior members
of the complement waited for us in oxygen masks.
"This is a filter," I said, plucking the hood down from
my eyes. I realized how strange I must look. "How high
is the carbon dioxide?"
  "Five and a half percent," Piet said. The outer door
had closed, so he took his mask cautiously away. "I'm
surprised the Chay breathe Duneen's atmosphere when
their own is so different."
  "They're as alien here as we are," I said. "From what I
could drag out of Cseka-believe me, he's crazy. It's like
his mind was dropped and all the pieces were put together
blind."
  I hawked to clear my throat. My cape's filter mecha-
nism didn't seem to bind the ozone formed by plasma
 exhausted into an oxygen atmosphere. On the main screen,
three dirigibles moved toward the Oriflamme. Cilia on the
platforms' undersides rowed the air. They raised some dust
from the ground, but less than turbines of similar thrust.
"There's a hundred or so Chay worlds," I resumed. "There's no overall direction-they're as likely to fight with each other as trade.".
"How unlike humans," Piet said dryly.
"Some of them do trade with the Feds," I said. "And
it sounds like the Feds have taken control of some Chay
worlds. Most of the Chay, though-like this system, they're
marked 'Avoid' on the pilotry chart because a Fed ship gets
handed its head if it messes with the locals."
One of the dirigibles swung broadside to the Oriflamme;
it hovered with its platform on a level with the cockpit
hatch. The six supporting gas bags loomed above us. Their
total volume was several times that of the starship. Low-
ranking Chay stood near bales of gray capes like those
they themselves wore, waiting for our hatch to open.
  "I didn't see a single piece of metalwork, much less
ceramic, on the ship," I said. I nodded toward the image
of the armed dirigible. "They've got cannon-"
  "Southern Cross work," said Stephen without bothering
to look again at the weapon he'd already assessed. "And
about as dangerous at one end as the other, I'd judge."
  "They can do anything with plants," I said. "They can
sequester lanthanides in fullerene tubes a meter long, Cseka
swears."
  "What good is that?" Stephen asked.
"On Earth, they're starting to use them to replace dam-
aged nerves," I replied. "Cseka wants us to set up a cannon
foundry here. In exchange, they'll provide either biological
products or the plant stocks that make them. He's serious,
but-"
  "Us, to set up a foundry?" said Piet. "Or Venus?"
I nodded with my lips pursed. "Yeah, that's the thing.
I think maybe he means us. We could convince him that
we don't have the expertise ourselves, but--2'
  "Unless he remembers what my father does for a living,"
Piet said with a smile.
  "We can't train this cack-handed lot to cast cannon!"
I snapped. "Any more than I could teach them to build
silicon AIs. Or breathe water! But I don't know how well
Cseka is going to bear anything that doesn't agree with
what he wants to hear."
Piet nodded. "Not a unique problem," he said. "Though
I think we'd better meet with his leaders. Compressed
fullerenes are what give our hulls-"
He tapped Stephen's breastplate affectionately.
-and armor hardness that Terran metallurgists can't
equal. If the Chay are so much better at creating fullerenes
than we are with our sputtering techniques-"
  Piet smiled.
"--then we owe it to Venus to learn what we can."
He fitted the mask back over his face. "Our hosts have
waited long enough," he said. "I'll take a few men and
some gifts to meet with them. And we'll see what we see."
Stephen frowned at "I'll take"; but as I'd noticed before,
he didn't waste his breath in futile argument. "I'm one of
the men," he said.
"And I'm another," I added.
"Yeah, those are food crops," Cseka agreed, peering over
the edge of the platform at the brown and ocher vegetation
twenty meters below. "The inside stems and the leaves
both. You wouldn't know it was the same plant."
  The platform didn't have a guardrail, but Piet seemed
equally nonchalant as he leaned forward to view the fields.
Chay agriculture was labor-intensive: at least a hundred
gray-clad figures stooped over the sinuous crop, pruning
and cultivating. The vines were as big around as my thighs,
but the relatively small leaves looked more like fur than
foliage.
  Stephen and I stayed back a step from the edge. He gri-
maced every time Piet overhung the platform, and his free
hand-the one not on the grip of his flashgun-was poised
to snatch his friend back if a jolt sent him toppling.
However, the dirigible rode as solidly as a rock. The
platform was suspended on hoselike tubes that stretched
and compressed as the gas bags lifted or fell in the breeze.
  The deck undulated only slightly as cilia beneath stroked
us forward.
  We slid between two brown-tinged domes together cov-
ering nearly a hectare. "Workers' housing," Cseka volun-
teered, gesturing with his elbow toward the dome on our
side of the platform. I could see the dim outlines of tiered
buildings under the curving surface. Cseka had spoken
more during the ride from the Oriflamme's landing site a
kilometer away than he did during the day's voyage from
Duneen.
  I carried a flashgun too, but just as a gift to the council.
Our ceramic cassegrain lasers were far superior to the
nearest Terran equivalents, though not many Venerians
cared to use weapons so heavy and unpleasant for the
shooter. I sometimes wondered whether Stephen carried
a flashgun because each round was so effective, or if a
part of him liked the punishment.
A clear dome far larger than those housing the Chay
workers loomed before us. The structures inside looked
like mushrooms with multiple caps one above another on 
    single central shaft. Those near the middle of the enclosure
    had eight or nine layers.
     Our dirigible settled to the ground. Rather, settled onto
    a living surface of hair-fine leaves woven as tightly as car-
    peting. The arched opening in the dome was big enough for
    three or four people to walk abreast. The passage writhed
    like an intestine instead of going straight through to the
    interior.
      Come," said Cseka. "The council will be waiting for
    US"
     He stepped from the platform to the carpet of vegeta-
    tion. Stephen and Piet fell in to either side of the cast-
    away, while the three of us carrying presents-Dole and
    Lightbody with me-followed closely behind. Chay on
    the dirigibles wheezed a fanfare on horns several meters
    long driven by four musicians squeezing bellows simul-
    taneously.
     There wasn't a door at either end of the tunnel, but its
    walls were lined with fine hairs that greatly increased the
    surface area. That and the winding course-the dome's
    wall was only three meters through even here where it was
    thickened, but the passage was a good twenty-served to
    filter the carbon dioxide down to levels the Chay found
    comfortable.
     A crowd of Chay with their cowls thrown back lined
    both sides of the route inside the dome. At least half of
    them wore the colored garments I'd come to associate with
    higher ranks. As we six humans entered the enclosed area,
    the spectators began to stamp their feet in a slow rhythm.
    The flooring was as hard and dense-grained as a nutshell,
    and the dome reverberated.
     We walked along a boulevard a hundred meters wide,
    thronged with stamping Chay. Musicians from the dirig-
    ibles followed us, wheezing on their horns. Additional
    spectators leaned from the upper stories of buildings.
     "Do they have radio, do you suppose?" I said. I was
    speaking mostly to myself at first, but I added loudly
    enough to be heard by the men ahead of me, "Captain
    Cseka, do the Chay have radio?"
      A party in silvery capes marched to meet us. They
played instruments a meter and a half long; bangles on
either end clattered like the beads of an abacus when the
musician plucked his one string. These strings, the bellows
trumpets, and the stamping crowd each kept an individual
rhythm. Only the cacophony aboard Absalom 231 in the
atmosphere of Decades approached the result.
  Cseka turned his head. "Only to talk to human ships,"
he shouted. "We use beans that vibrate the same as others
from the same pod instead."
  He shrugged. "The range is only a few light-seconds
and they aren't faster than light, nothing like that. But
they work."
   The string players reversed course to precede us down
the boulevard. The towers were arranged in three rings of
increasing height. At the center of the enclosure, a low
building sat in a circular court several hundred meters
across.
Near the entrance to the central structure was a cage,
grown rather than woven in a lattice with about a hun-
dred millimeters across openings. The two lines of string
players parted around it. A man-a human being in the
remnants of a Federation uniform--clutched the bars to
hold his torso upright.
  There were-three at least, maybe more-human
corpses in the cage with the living man. One of them
had been dead long enough that the flesh had sloughed
to bare his ribs. The stench of death and rotting waste was
a barrier so real that I stumbled three steps away.
  Piet stopped and touched his hand to Csekas arm.
"What's this?" Piet asked, exaggerating his lip movements
to be understood without bellowing.
"Sometimes we take Feds alive," Cseka said noncha-
lantly. "They're brought here for entertainment."  
His right hand came out from beneath his cape with
the handweapon I'd seen outlined there. Grip, receiver, butt
and barrel were one piece of dark brown, black-grained 
wood. A lanyard growing from the butt quivered back in 
a springy coil which held the pistol out of the way when 
it wasn't in use.                             
  Cseka fired. A snap of steam lifted the gun muzzle. 
    prisoner screamed and arched convulsively. He skidded on
    his back, thrashing across a floor slippery with filth.
     Cseka held his weapon up for us to see. "Darts," he
    said. "They're not fatal, not usually. But they drop a
    fellow quicker than bullets. And they-"
     He aimed again toward the prisoner. The procession
    halted when we did, but the wracking music continued.
     Piet put two fingers under the barrel of the dart gun
    and lifted it away. "Please don't," he said. "The things
    we have to do in war are terrible enough."
     "Nothing could be enough!" Cseka shouted. He raised
    the pistol and brought it down in a slashing stroke at Piet's
    bead. Stephen blocked the blow with his left forearm,
    catching Cseka's wrist numbingly. The pistol flew loose
    and slithered back under the cape.
     Cseka began to giggle. "Nothing could be enough,"
    he repeated. "Some day we'll have them all here, with
    your help."
     He strode around the left side of the cage. We five
    Oriflammes scrambled to catch up, but the Chay in the
    procession resumed marching without missing a step.
     The Chay hadn't reacted to the momentary human con-
    flict. The Fed prisoner lay quiescent. His eyes were open,
    and his chest trembled like that of a dog panting.
     "Our rifles throw fireballs a hundred meters," Cseka
    said, his voice raised only to be heard over the background
    noise. The maniacal rage switched itself off and on in
    an eyeblink. He tapped the barrel of Stephen's flashgun.
    "Within their range, they're better than this."
     "Within their range," Stephen repeated. There was noth-
    ing in his tone to suggest he believed the Chay shoulder
    weapons-they certainly weren't rifled-were really as
    effective as his laser at any range.
     The string players flared to either side of the central
    building. The structure was nearly cylindrical, as if a
    balloon had been inflated in a tube. The walls slanted
    slightly inward and the roof edge was a radiused curve
    instead of square.
     We walked into the building. The single chamber held
    several score Chay in golden capes and at least a dozen
    humans. Like us, the humans wore the gray local gar-
    ment, but their hats were of a number of Terran styles.
    I recognized a pair of Southerns, a large man in a kepi
    with United Europe military insignia, and a pair of women
    from the Independent Coastal Republic. Their state had
    been fighting for thirty years against Pleyal's federated
    remainder of North America.
      There was an open aisle down the center of the room.
    Cseka led us toward the empty dais at the end. The music
    and stamping outside stopped, but the chamber sighed
    with the spectators' breathing. The walls were lighted
    from within, giving the effect of translucence which the
    black exterior belied.
    We halted two paces from the dais, as close as any of
    the spectators stood. A human leaned close to me and said
    in Trade English, "You're from Venus, is it not so? You're
    bringing arms to trade?"
      "We're passing through," I replied; in a whisper
    the questioner had spoken normally. I think he was a
    European. United Europe had no extra-solar colonies, but
    several of its states engaged in trade beyond Pluto.
    He sniffed. "There's nothing they want but arms, can-
    non especially," he said. "Well, there's enough for all."
    The wall behind the dais rotated open like the port in
    the Chay starship. Ten Chay carried through three others
    on a litter whose wooden surface gleamed like polished
    bronze.
       The trio were completely naked and very old. They
    hunched like dogs sitting up. Their skins were nearly
    white. Their three tails twisted together and appeared to
    have fused into one flesh.
      The silver-caped porters lowered the trio to the dais.
    The spectators shouted. The voices of the Chay were
    more or less in unison though of course unintelligible.
      The humans-the man next to me, at least-cried, "Hail,
    the all-powerful council!"
      The trio's mouths opened as one. "Greetings to this
    worshipful assembly," boomed the front wall of the cham-
    ber while the two side walls were snarling something in,
    the language of the Chay themselves. The Trade English
    words seemed synchronized with the lipless mouth of the
    center councilor.
      The room stilled. The walls had been suffused with
    amber light. The floor level was now emerald green,
    and the hue was slipping upward as if by osmosis.
    The councilors focused their independently-rotating eyes
    on us.
      "We have discussed you with Lord Cseka," said the
    center figure. His voice through the front wall was under-
    standable despite the sidewalls' accompanying harsh gut-
    turals. "Your enemies are our enemies. Together we will
    drive the Federation pirates out of existence except as our
    slaves and your slaves."
      The trio paused. The councilors were as thin as mum-
     nues, pebbly skin sunken drumhead-tight over an armature
     of bone. Their ribs fluttered when they breathed.
     Piet lifted his arms forward to call attention to himself
     without advancing into the cleared zone before the dais.
     "All-powerful council!" he said in a voice pitched to be
     heard in a larger arena than this one. "We bring you
     the greetings of Venus and our ruler, Governor Halys.
     We ourselves are but chance travelers, but permit us to
     0ff r a few trifles as a foretaste of the trade the future
     will bring between your people and ours."
       He twisted his head back toward me. "Jere-" he mur-
     mured. I gave him the flashgun before he finished the
     request.
       "A laser with a range of kilometers," Piet called. The
     weapon weighed nearly twenty kilos, as I well knew, but
     he balanced it on the palm of one hand so that he could
     deploy the charging parasol from the butt with the other.
       "In good light, you can fire every three minutes at full
     power!" he added. We weren't providing spare batteries
     as a part of this gift. "Your enemies and ours of the
     Federation have no handweapons so effective."
       A porter took the gift from Piet and set it on the dais
     beside the council. Lightbody held his load out. Piet shook
     his head curtly and gestured to Dole instead.
       Dole handed forward a round bowl a meter in diam-
     eter. Piet raised it overhead and turned it so that all the
     assembly could see Governor Halys' gray pearl charge on
     a field of creamy translucence.
     "As your folk with plants, so ours with ceramics," Piet
     said. "This is merely a symbol of-"
     He flung the bowl down on the floor as hard as he
     could. It bounced back into his hands with the deep,
     throbbing note of a jade gong. The assembly, Chay and
     humans alike, gasped with surprise.
       "-the skill with which our experts, experts whom I
     can encourage to journey here from Venus, cast plasma
     cannon!"
       The sidewalls rumbled phrases in the local tongue,
     though the councilors weren't speaking. Chay spectators
     whispered among themselves. The human ambassadors
     eyed us with speculation and some disquiet.
       "One last thing," Piet said as a porter took away the
     undamaged bowl. He was emphasizing that we were geese
     who would lay golden eggs, a prize for what we would
     bring rather than what we were. "Like the others, this is
     only a symbol of the trade that will start upon our return
     to Venus."
       Piet took from Lightbody the navigational computer
     we'd stripped out of one of the Federation ships captured on
     Trehinga. I'd have reduced the simple unit to components
     for ease of storage, but Piet stopped me for reasons I now
     understood.
       "In order to capture a vessel in transit," Piet said, 
     "your AT must solve the same equations the other vessel's 
     does.
       We of Venus will supply you with electronic artificial
     intelligences that will allow you to track Federation ships
     across the bubble universes instead of being limited to
     attacking those you find grounded or in orbit. There will
     be no safety for the enemies of On Chay and Venus!"
      This time the Chay spectators stamped their feet as the
     translation boomed to them from the sidewalls. It was
     almost a minute after a porter took the-crude-Al that
     the chamber quieted again.
       The walls replied in the councilors' three voices, "Men
     of Venus, our folk are already delivering to your vessel
     phials of drugs, fabrics, and the tubular fullerenes we
     know your folk especially prize. Trade for the future,
     yes ... But we will propose to you other arrangements
     as well. Go now, and tomorrow we will meet with you
     again."
       Piet bowed low. I knelt and tugged Dole and Lightbody
     down with me. The aisle through the assembly had closed,
     but the spectators squeezed aside again to let us pass. The
     Chay were stamping their enthusiasm.
       I was in the lead of our party, walking with the steady
     arrogance that befitted a gentleman of Venus. I'd never
     before in my life wanted so badly to get out of anything
     as I did that drumming council chamber.
     "I wonder if this balloon can go faster than it has so far?"
     Piet said, looking over the fittings of the dirigible 
     carrying us back to the Oriflamme. We were traveling at 
     about 20
     kph, the speed of a man jogging.
       He raised an eyebrow in question as he swept his glance
     over the airship's crew. The dozen Chay present on the
     return journey wore the gray of common laborers. They
     continued to ignore Piet and the rest of us.
       "The big ones with guns," Dole said, answering the
     surface question. "They've got more legs on the bottom
     than these do." He thumped his bootheel on the platform.
     "They might speak English anyway," I said.
     "My thought as well," Piet agreed in a satisfied tone.
     This was no place to discuss our real intentions.
     The primary was past mid-sky, flooding the land with
     soft blue light. On Chay was a warm world for all its
     distance from the sun. The planet it circled was nearly
     a star in its own right, and vulcanism spurred by the gas
     giant's gravity warmed the satellite significantly.
     Another pair of small dirigibles passed ours on their
     way back to the city. Tents of thin sheeting had sprung
     up around the Oriflamme during our absence, and bales
     of unfamiliar material were stacked near the main hatch.
     The council had been as good as its word when it promised
     gifts.
         "They really want to be our friends," I said. Even if 
     the Chay understood English, they weren't going to pick up
     my undertone of concern.
     "On their terms," Stephen said, "they certainly do."
     Men wearing Chay capes moved out of the way so that
     the dirigible could land beside the open forward airlock.
     The ground had cooled, so we didn't have to hop from
     the platform to the ship in reverse of the way we had
     disembarked.
     The first thing I noticed when I stepped down was that
     the ground wasn't still. Microshocks made the surface
     tremble like the deck of a starship under way.
     Dole must have thought the same thing. He nodded to
     the tents crewmen were building from fabric the Chay had
     brought and said, "Even if we get a big one and they come
     down, it's not going to hurt nobody."
       I nodded agreement, then grinned. A seasoned spacer
     adapted to local conditions; the landsman I'd been six
     months ago would have been terrified. On Venus,
     ground shocks might rupture the overburden and let in
     the hell-brewed atmosphere.
     "Guillermo?" Piet called to the Molt who'd been
     directing outside operations during our absence. "Turn
     things over to Dole and join us on the bridge, please."
     The Chay crew paid us no attention. They backed the
     dirigible from the Oriflamme before turning its prow
     toward the city. Again I noticed the delicacy of the
     driving cilia. Mechanical propellors or turbines would
     have scattered the tents our crew had just constructed.
     Salomon waited for us alone in the forward section,
     though as we entered a pair of sailors carried bedrolls
     toward the main hatch while discussing the potential of
     converting Chay foodstocks, into brandy.
     "I've run initial calculations for an empty world twenty
     days from here," the navigator said. "We'll have to refine
     them in orbit, of course."
     "I don't know that it's come to that, exactly," Piet said
      cautiously. I'm sure he would have started the calculations
     himself if Salomon hadn't already done so.
     "Cseka scares the hell out of me," I said. "The Chay
     scare me even worse. They-"
         "They're friendly," Piet said.
       "They're not human," I said. "An earthquake may not
       hurt you, but it isn't your friend. There's nothing I saw
       in there today-"
        I waved in the direction of the city.
       '~-that convinces me they won't decide to eat us
       because, because Stampfer's got red hair."
       "I haven't had a chance to look over the goods they've
       brought us. . ." Stephen said. He took off his helmet and
       knea ed his scalp with his left hand. "But I don't think
       there is much doubt that trade-in techniques, at least,
       given the distance-could be valuable."
       He gave us a humorless grin. "Of course, that's only if
       the Chay decide to let us go. Jeremy's right, there."
       Guillermo had said nothing since he entered behind
       us. He was seated at his usual console. His digits were
       entering what even I recognized as a sequence to lift us
       to orbit.
       Piet laughed briefly. "So you all think we should take
       off as soon as possible," he said. "Even though Chay
       knowledge could give Venus an advantage greater than all
       the chips the Federation brings back from the Reaches?"
       "What we think, Piet," Stephen said, "is that you're in
       charge. We'll follow whatever course you determine."
       "I'm not a tyrant!" Piet snapped. "I'm not President
       Pleyal, 'Do this because it's my whim!'"
       I swallowed and said, "Somebody has to make decisions.
       Here it's you. Besides, you're better at it than the rest 
       of us.
       Not that that matters."
       I grinned at Stephen. His words hadn't been a threat,
       because the big gunman accepted that all the rest of us 
       knew the commander's decision was the law of this 
       expedition.
       As surely as I knew that Stephen would destroy anything
       or anyone who tried to block Piet's decision.
       "Yes," said Piet. He sat down at his console and checked
       a status display. "Air and reaction mass will be at 
       capacity
       within the hour. We'll check the gifts, see what's worth
       taking and what's not, but we'll leave the bales where
       they are for the time being. We don't want to give the
       impression that we're stowing them for departure."
       He looked up at the rest of us and smiled brilliantly.
       "Primary set is in six hours. An hour after that, we'll
       inform the crew to begin loading operations. When they're
       complete-another hour?-we'll close the hatches and
       lift."
       Piet rubbed his forehead. "I didn't," he added as if idly,
       much care for the way our hosts treat their prisoners."
       The Oriflamme shuddered as another shock rippled
       through the soil beneath us.
       The primary was just below the horizon. The sun at zenith
       in the clear sky was only a blue-white star, though it 
       cast a shadow if you looked carefully.
       Three dirigibles rested outside the entrance to the
       domed city, their partially deflated gas bags sagging.
       The airships and their crews were armed, but the Chay
       all wore gray. None of their officers were present, and
       the guards themselves didn't bother to look at me as I
       walked into the dome.
       Half a dozen Chay in orange and pastel blue capes
       preceded me by twenty meters. A group of gray-clad
       laborers followed at a similar distance, chattering among
       themselves. Like me, some of the laborers left their cowls
       up and the veils over their faces even after they entered
       the dome.
       I hadn't done a more pointlessly risky thing since the
       night I went aboard the Porcelain. Though ...
       Boarding the Porcelain hadn't made me a man, perhaps,
       but it had made me a man I like better than the fellow
       who'd lived on Venus until then. I wasn't going to leave
       a human prisoner here to be tortured to death.
       The hard floor of the dome was a contrast to the springy
       surface of the mat on which it rode. The cape hung low
       enough to cover my feet, but I was afraid somebody
       would notice that the sound of my boots differed from
       the clicking the locals made when they walked. I took
       deliberately quick, mincing steps.
       There were hundreds of pedestrians out, but the broad
       boulevard seemed deserted by comparison with what I'd
       seen in the afternoon. Though the dome was clear, it
       darkened the sky into a rich blue that concealed all the 
       stars
       except the sun itself The walls of overhanging apartments
       wicked soft light from within, but even the lower levels
       weren't bright enough to illuminate the street.
       I could see the cage ahead of me. I gripped the cutting
       bar beneath my cape to keep it from swinging and calling
       attention to itself; and because I was afraid.
       I could claim to be looking around; but the Chay would
       want to carry me back to the Oriflamme, and if they did
       that they'd see we were loading the ship to escape. To
       save the others, I'd have to insist on staying overnight
       in the city. What would the Chay do with me when the
       Oriflamme lifted?
         Lord God of hosts, be with Your servant. Though I'd
       been no servant of His; a self-willed fool, and a greater
       fool now because I wouldn't leave an enemy of mine to
       die at the hands of enemies of his.
       I'd slipped away from the Oriflamme without causing
       comment. I told Dole I was going for a walk to calm
       my nerves. I didn't want my shipmates to worry if they
       noticed I was gone.
         It didn't seem likely they would notice, what with the
       work of preparing for departure. I was only in the way.
       There were no guards around the Council Hall or the
       cage in front of it. Occasional Chay strode across the
       court, on their way from one boulevard to another, but
       they didn't linger. Even those in bright garb were hard to
       see. My gray cape would be a shadow among shadows.
       A Chay in silvery fabric walked out of the Council Hall
       carrying a bundle. I paused beside a tower, close against
       the wall. If the fellow had been a moment slower, I'd have
       been crossing to the cage myself. The grip of my bar was
       slick with sweat.
       The Chay thrust his bundle into the cage. He had to
       wiggle it to work it through the mesh. It fell with a
       slapping sound to the floor within. The Chay called
       something obviously derisory in his own language, then
       went back the way he'd come.
       Feeding time at the zoo. The prisoner didn't move. I
       couldn't even be sure which of the still forms within the
       lattice was the living man.
       There wouldn't be a better time. I walked to the cage,
       keeping my steps short. Out of the comer of my eye I
       saw a Chay laborer start across the courtyard. I continued
       forward, my heart in my throat. The Chay disappeared past
       or into a neighboring residential tower.
         I took the cage in my left hand and shook it to test
       the structure. The bars were grown as a unit, not tied
       together where they crossed. They were finger-thick, hard
       and obviously tough; but my bar would go through them
       like light through a window.
         "Ho! Federation dog!" I snarled. I pitched my voice low
       though loud enough for the prisoner to hear. I could still
       brazen out my presence if I had to. "Come close to me
       or it'll be the worse for you!"
         "I don't think he can move, Jeremy," Piet said from
       behind me. "We'll have to carry him."
       I turned, my mouth open and the tip of the bar sliding
       from beneath my cape. Piet was indistinguishable from a
       Chay in his gray cape, but his voice was unmistakable.
       "Yeah, well," I said. I switched my bar on. "I'll drag
       him out, then."
       The blade zinged across the bars. I cut up, across and
       down, then bent to slash through the base of the opening.
       I wondered how the Chay had created the cage to begin
       with, since it didn't appear to have a door anywhere.
       I couldn't believe they'd simply grown it around their
       prisoners.
       Piet caught the section as it started to fall. He held a
       cape to me as I hung my bar. I'd brought an extra garment
       myself, so Piet tossed his spare onto the cage floor to be
       rid of it.
       My boot skidded on the slimy surface. I had to grab the
       frame to keep from falling. One of the prostrate figures
       moaned softly. I raised his torso, tugged the cape around
       him, and lifted him in a packstrap carry.
       The cut section now hung from the hinge of tape Piet
       had wrapped around it. When I ducked out, he taped the
       other side so that our entry wasn't obvious.
     The prisoner was a dead weight, though a modest one.
    It was like carrying an articulated skeleton, more awkward
    than heavy. Piet took the man's other arm and we strode
    back the way we'd come.
     "Do Chay get drunk, do you suppose?" I said.
     "Let's hope so," Piet said. "We're a couple of fools to
    do this."
     The few remaining pedestrians scurried along with their
    heads down. "If the Chay have a curfew . . ." Piet said,
    speaking my thought.
     "The dome wall isn't very thick except where the door
    is," I replied. "I can cut a way out if the gate's closed,
    We can."
     The tunnel was open. A Chay in a violet garment
    entered as we neared it. We passed him in the other
    direction. He called out in his language. We ignored him.
    I walked on my toes to approximate the mincing Chay gait
    until we were around the first bend in the gateway.
     The sunlight outside was as faint as my hope of salvation.
    I drew a great breath through my filter and said, "So far, so
    good."
     The crews of the airships on guard didn't challenge us.
    Some of the Chay were eating beneath their veils. The mat
    of vegetation rolled underfoot, absorbing high-frequency
    ground shocks and smoothing them into gentle swells.
     A tall figure strode toward us from the shadow of a
    translucent brown dome. "I'll carry him, if you like,"
    Stephen offered in a low voice.
     "He's not heavy," Piet said.
     We walked on. Stephen fell into step behind us and a
    little to Piet's left, where he could watch our front as well
    as guarding the rear. This final part of the route was over
    an organic causeway crossing scores of circular fields only
    ten or twenty meters in diameter,
     The ground rumbled. A line of dust lifted in the distance,
    kicked into motion by the quake. The causeway swayed
    gently. Beneath us, plants waved their zebra-striped foliage
    at us.
     "I hadn't expected that the two of you would do this
together," Stephen said in a pale voice. We hadn't spoken
during the trek, but we could see that now there were no
Chay between us and the edge of the mat.
"We weren't, Stephen," Piet said. "Jeremy made a
foolish decision quite independently of me."
"I jumped out of a year's growth when he spoke to me,"
I said.
My voice sounded almost normal. That surprised me.
  I'd just learned that Stephen thought I'd supplanted him
in Piet Ricimer's friendship. I'd known there were a lot 'm
of ways this jaunt could get me killed, but that one hadn't
occurred to me.
  "Tsk," said Stephen. "I don't lose control of myself,
Jeremy."
I stumbled, then stared at him past the sunken form of
the man we carried. "Do you read minds?" I demanded.
"No," said Piet. "But he's very smart."
"And a good shot," Stephen said with a throaty chuckle.
I laughed too. "Well, nobody sane would be doing this,"
I said aloud.
  Though the mat felt like a closely woven carpet to walk
on, it was actually several meters thick. The edge was a
sagging tangle of stems, interlaced and spiky. There were
no steps nor ramp off the island of vegetation; the Chay
never walked on bare soil. The ground beyond bounced
the way tremors shake the chest of a sleeping dog.
  Stephen hopped down ahead of us. "Drop him to me,'
he said, raising his arms. "I'll take him from here."
I looked at Piet. He nodded. "On three," he said. "One,
two, three-"
  Together we tossed the moaning prisoner past the border.
Stephen caught him, pivoting to lessen the shock to the
Fed's weakened frame. The landscape heaved violently.
Stephen dropped to his knees, but he didn't let his charge
touch the ground.
  My cape tore half away on brambles as I clambered
down, baring my legs to the knee. There was no longer
need for concealment, only speed.
Stephen strode onward with the Fed held lengthways
across his shoulders like a yoke. Small shocks were
     incessant now. I had to pause at each pulse to keep from
     falling when the ground shifted height and angle.
     "I should have allowed more time," I muttered. The
     Oriflamme was still out of sight beyond the rim of the
     bowl in which we'd landed.
      "You were there before I was," Piet reminded me.
     "Don't worry," Stephen said, "They aren't going to
     leave without us."
      Piet laughed. "I suppose not," he agreed.
     "I'd thought . . ." I said. "Maybe I'd just put him out
     of his misery. But I couldn't do that,"
     Stephen gave an icy chuckle. "We've brought him this
     far," he said. "We may as well take him the rest of
     the way."
     We reached the lip of the bowl. The center of the
     depression was only twenty meters or so lower than the
     rolling plain around it, but that was still enough to 
     conceal a starship. Sight of the Oriflamme warmed my heart 
     like the smile of a beautiful woman.
     A squeal similar to that of steam escaping from a huge
     boiler sounded behind us. It was more penetrating than a
     siren and so loud that it would be dangerous to humans
     -any closer than we were.
     I turned. Three cannon-armed dirigibles lifted above
     the city.
     "Here," said Stephen, swinging his burden to Piet as
     if the Fed were a bundle of old clothes. "I'll watch the
     rear.
     He locked a separate visor down to protect his eyes. A
     full helmet would have been obvious even under his cowl.
     Stephen parted his cape and threw the wings back over his
     shoulders, clearing his flashgun and the satchel of reloads
     slung on his left side.
     I seized the Fed's right arm. "Run," Piet said, and we
     started running.
     The Oriflamme was three hundred yards ahead of us.
     The ground had been still for a moment. Now On Chay
     shook itself violently. I stumbled but caught myself. The
     prisoners legs swung like a pendulum to trip Piet and
     send him sprawling.
As Piet picked himself up, I glanced over my shoulder.
The Chay dirigibles were a hundred meters high. Stephen
walked sedately twenty meters behind us, watching our
pursuers over his shoulder. The alarm still screamed from
the Chay city.
  Piet and I ran on. We'd taken only three strides when
the bolt from a plasma cannon lit the soil immediately
behind us into the heart of a sun.
The shock wave flung us apart. I smashed into a waist-
high bush that might have been the ancestor of the mat
on which the city was built. It clawed my chest and my
  legs as I tore myself free.
The cannon that had fired was a bright white glow in
the bow of the center dirigible. Stephen swung his own
weapon to his shoulder. A meters-long oval of soil blazed
between him and us where the slug of plasma struck.
  Stephen fired. The bolt from his laser was a needle
of light against retinas already shocked by the plasma
discharge.
  The underside of a gas bag supporting the right-hand
dirigible ruptured in a veil of thin blue flames. The Chay
used hydrogen to support their craft. The fire spread with
the deliberation of a flower opening, licking the sides of
the bags adjacent to the one the bolt had ignited. The craft
sank out of sight. The crew was trying desperately to land
before the conflagration devoured them as well as their
vehicle.
  Piet stumbled forward alone with the prisoner. I grabbed
the Fed's free arm and shouted, "D'ye have a gun?"
"Only a bar!" Piet said. "I didn't want to hurt the Chay,
just free this poor wretch."
  A laser pulse plowed glassy sparkles across the ground'~
ahead of us. The bastards were shooting at us with the
flashgun we'd given them that morning!
Stephen fired. A microsecond following the snap of his
bolt, our world erupted in another plasma discharge.
The shock threw Piet and me sprawling, but this time
the cannoneers were aiming at Stephen. Dirt fused into
shrapnel and blew outward in a fireball which kicked 
Stephen sideways with his cape afire.
     Fifty meters from us, Salomon or Guillermo lit the
    Oriflamme's thrusters momentarily to check the fuel feeds.
    Bright exhaust puffed across the encampment, blowing
    down tents and disturbing the piles of Chay goods we
    were abandoning. Grit sprayed the back of my neck.
     We had no secrets now. Stampfer would be screaming
    curses as he tried to rerig the Long Tom for combat,
    but that would take minutes with the Oriflamme laden
    as heavily as she was now.
     I started toward Stephen. His flashgun had ignited a
    bag of the left-hand dirigible an instant before its plasma
    cannon fired, Blue hydrogen flames, hotter than Hell's
    hinges for all their seeming delicacy, wrapped the mid-line
    gas bag and involved the sides of the bags adjacent to it.
     I'd seen Stephen shoot before. If he hadn't hit the Chay
    gunner, even at five hundred meters, it was because he
    didn't choose to kill even at this juncture.
     The dirigible's crew dumped their remaining lift to
    escape. The platform dipped out of sight, taking with it
    the white glare of the plasma cannon's stellite bore. Only
    the center vehicle was still aloft; its cannon would be too
    hot to reload for some minutes yet.
     Stephen rolled to his feet before I could reach him.
    His fingers inserted a charged battery in the butt of his
    flashgun and snapped the chamber closed over it before
    he tore away the blazing remnants of his cape. The rocky
    soil still glowed from the second plasma discharge, and a
    nearby bush was a torch of crackling orange flames.
     I turned again. Piet was beside me. The Fed had managed
    to lift his torso off the ground. We snatched him up again
    and bolted for the Oriflamme's ramp, dragging the fellow's
    feet. Stephen staggered behind us like a drunk running.
     Twenty men spilled out of the Oriflamme's main hatch.
    Those with rifles banged at the dirigible. Given the range
    and light conditions, I doubt any of them were more
    effective than I would have been.
     "Get aboard!" Piet screamed. Kiley and Loomis each
    took the prisoner in one hand and one of us in the other,
    as if they were loading sacks of grain. "Don't shoot at the
    Chay,they're-"
The sky behind us exploded. A sheet of fire flashed
as bright for a moment as if the primary had risen. I
looked back. Bits of the last dirigible cascaded in a red-
orange shower while hydrogen flames lifted like a curtainIh
rising.
A Chay plasma cannon would cool very slowly because
of its closed breech and the high specific heat of the
metal from which it was cast. The gunners had tried to
reload theirs too soon, and the round cooked off before
it was seated. The thermonuclear explosion shattered the
platform, rupturing all six hydrogen cells simultaneously.
Parts of the fiery debris were the bodies of the dirigible's
crew.
We tumbled together in the forward hold. The ramp
began to rise. Dole was shouting out the names of crewmen
present. I hoped nobody'd gone so far from the hatch that
he was still outside.
The Oriflamme lifted before the hatch sealed. Reflected
exhaust was a saturated aurora crowning the upper seam.
Men of the support party disappeared up the ladderway
in obedience to the bosun's snarled orders. I lay on my
back, too wrung out to move or even rise. Piet bent
over the rescued prisoner, so Piet at least was all right.
Rakoscy ripped away Stephen's smoldering trousers with
a scalpel.
I rolled over, but my stomach heaved and I could barely
lift my face from the deck. Molten rock had burned savage
ulcers into Stephen's calves above the boot tops. Bloody
serum oozed as Rakoscy started to clean the wounds
Stephen rested on one elbow, holding his flashgun muzzle
high so that the hot barrel wouldn't crack from contact
with the cooler deck.
"Christ's blood, I shouldn't have gone back to the city!"
I said. Piet was there to free the prisoner also, but that
didn't change my responsibility. "Now I've made the
Chay enemies for all their soldiers we killed."
"Dole," Piet ordered, "send this man up to the forward
cabin and get some fluids in him. We don't want him to
die on us now."
"We didn't kill anybody, Jeremy," Stephen said. He
    wasn't looking at me. He wasn't looking at anything,
    though his eyes were open.
     "Ferris and Lightbody!" Dole snapped, "You heard the
    captain. And a bath wouldn't hurt him, neither."
     I managed to sit upright. I didn't speak. Maybe
    Stephen hadn't seen the third dirigible explode, hadn't
    seen the Chay bodies trace blazing pinwheels toward the
    ground ...
     "As for what the plasma cannon did. . Stephen
    continued in an emotionless voice. "I'll take responsibility
    for my own actions, Jeremy, but not for what others choose
    to do,"
     "Here, I've got your flashgun, Stephen," Piet said, gently
    lifting the weapon from his friend's hand.
     "I've got enough company in my dreams as it is,"
    Stephen said as our thrusters hammered us toward orbit.

                                NEW ERYX
    
                   Day 177
The portable kiln chuckled heavily on the far side of
the Oriflamme, spraying a smooth coat of glass onto the 
cracks in the hull. The run from On Chay hadn't been 
unusually stressful, but the Oriflamme was no longer the 
vessel that had lifted in maiden glory from Venus.
The constant drizzle didn't affect the kiln, but I already
felt it was going to drive me mad in much less time than
the week Piet said we'd need to refit. "Does it ever stop,
do you think?" I muttered. "The rain, I mean."
"The globe was almost entirely Overcast when we
orbited," Piet said mildly. He smoothed the
closure of a Chay cape. Because of the confusion
loading, we had fifty-odd of the garments aboard. They
turned out to be waterproof. "There's no pilotry data, of
course."
The world he'd named New Eryx-after the factorial
hold of Stephen's family on Venus-was uncharted, at
least as far as the Federation database went. Piet and
  Salomon had extrapolated the star's location by examining
the listed gradients and found a planet that was technically
habitable. Even if it was driving me insane.
"I've never gotten used to a bright sky," Stephen said.
"Too much Venus in my blood, I suppose. I like the
overcast, and I don't mind the rain."
  Lacaille, the prisoner we'd rescued, came by with a file
of sailors who carried the trunk of one of the squat trees
growing here in the dim warmth. They didn't notice the
three of us sitting on a similar log.
  Lacaille had been first officer on a ship in the Earth/Back
Worlds trade, a year and a half's voyage in either direction      for Federation vessels. Now he was talking cheerfully with
men who'd helped kill a hundred like him the day we
boarded Our Lady of MontreaL
"I'm glad we rescued him," I said. "He's a...
"Human being?" Piet suggested. There was a smile in
his voice.
"Whatever," I said. Trees like the one the men with

         Lacaille carried had a starchy pith that could be eaten
or converted to alcohol. Lacaille said identical trees were
common on at least a score of worlds throughout the
region. New Eryx wasn't on Federation charts; but some
body'd been here, and a very long time ago.
"He's fitting in well," Stephen said. "Of course, we
saved his life. You did."
I snorted. "I can't think of a better way to make a man
hate you than to do him a major favor," I said. "Most men.
And damned near all women."
Stephen stood and stretched powerfully. He'd slung a
repeating carbine over his right shoulder with the muzzle
down to keep rain out of the bore. The only animal
life we'd seen on New Eryx---if it was either animate
or alive-was an occasional streamer of gossamer light
which drifted among the trees. It could as easily be 
phosphorescent gas, a will-o'-the-wisp.
"Think I'll go for a walk," Stephen said without looking
back at us. He moved stiffly. The burns on his legs were
far from healed.
"Do you have a transponder?" Piet warned.
"I'll be able to home on the kiln," Stephen called,
already out of sight. "Low frequencies travel forever."
"Because he seems so strong," Piet said very softly,
"it's easy to overlook the degree to which Stephen is in
pain. I wish there was something I could do for him."
 He turned and gave me a wan smile. "Besides pray, of
course. But I wouldn't want him to know that."
"I think," I said carefully, "that Stephen's the bravest
man I'll ever know." Because he gets up in the morning
after every screaming night, and he doesn't put a gun in
    his mouth; but I didn't say that to Piet.
     I cleared my throat. "What'll happen with the Chay, do
    you think?" I said to change the subject.
     "There's enough universe for all of us, Chay and Molts
    and humans," Piet said. "And others we don't know about
    yet. I wouldn't worry about what happened at On Chay, if
    that's what you mean. There'll be worse from both sides
    after we've been in contact longer, but eventually I think
    we'll all pull together like strands in a cable. Separate,
    but in concert."
     "Optimist," I said. Christ! I sounded bitter.
     Piet laughed and put his hand over mine to squeeze
    it. "Oh, I'm not a wide-eyed dreamer, Jeremy," he said.
    "We'll fight the Chay, men will, just as we fight each 
    other. And the Chay fight each other, I shouldn't wonder."
     His tone sobered as he continued, "The real danger isn't
    race or religion, you know. It's the attitude that some men,
    some people-Molts or Chay or men from Earth-have
    to be controlled from above for their own good. One day
    I believe the Lord will help us defeat that idea. And the
    lion will lie down with the lamb, and there will be peace
    among the nations."
     He gave me a smile; half impish, half that of a man
    worn to the edge of his strength, uncertain whether he'll
    be able to take one step more.
     "Until then," Piet said, "it's as well that the Lord has men
    like Stephen on His side. Despite what it costs Stephen, and
    despite what it costs men like you and me."
     The kiln chuckled, and I began to laugh as well. Anyone
    who heard me would have thought I was mad.

          UNCHARTED WORLD
    
    Day 232
    
     We touched the surface of the ice with a slight forward
    way on instead of Piet's normal vertical approach. For this
    landing, he'd programmed a ball switch on his console to
    control the dorsal pairs of attitude jets. He rolled the ball
    upward as his other hand chopped the thrusters.
     The three bands of attitude jets fired a half-second pulse.
    Their balanced lift shifted enough weight off the skids to
    let inertia drag us forward. Steam from the thrusters' last
    spurting exhaust before shutdown hung as eight linked
    columns in the cold air behind us as the Oriflamme ground
    to a halt.
     Salomon unlatched his restraints and turned to face Piet's
    couch. "Sir," he said, "that was brilliant!"
     I swung my feet down to the deck. Men with duties dur-
    ing landing had strapped themselves to their workstations.
    The rest of us were in hammocks on Piet's orders. No
    matter how good the pilot, a landing on an ice field could
    turn into disaster.
     The reaction-mass tanks were almost empty, though.
    Our choice had been to load a nitrogen/chlorine mixture
    from the moon of one of the system's gas giants, or to risk
    the ice. The gases would have given irregular results in the
    plasma motors as well as contaminating the next tank or
    two of water. Nobody had really doubted Piet's ability to
    bring us down safely.
     "Thank you, Mister Salomon," Piet said as he rose from
    his console. "I'm rather pleased with it myself."
     He glanced at the screen, then touched the ramp control.
    At least we don't have to wait for the soil to cool," he
    added.
    The center screen was set for a 360' view of our sur-
    roundings. There was nothing in that panorama but ice
    desert picked out by rare outcrops of rock. Irregular fis-
    sures streaked the surface like the Oriflamme's hull crazing
    magnified. The ice crevices weren't dangerously wide.
     Most of those I could see were filled with refrozen melt-
    water, clearer and more bluish than the ice surrounding.
    "I'll take out a security detail," Stephen said. He clasped
    a cape of some heavy natural fabric around his throat and
    cradled his flashgun. I didn't have warm clothing of my
    own. Maybe two or three of the Chay capes together ...
    "Security from what, Mister Gregg?" Salomon asked in
    surprise.
    "We don't know," Piet said. "We haven't been here
    before."
     I picked up my cutting bar and snatched a pair of capes
    as I followed Stephen aft. Crew members weren't going
    to argue the right of a gentleman to appropriate anything
    that wasn't nailed down. Besides, this wasn't a world that
    even men who'd been cooped up for seven weeks were in
    a hurry to step out onto.
      The ground beneath the Oriflamme collapsed with the
    roar of breaking ice. We canted to port so violently that I
    was flung against the bulkhead. Men shouted. Gear we'd
    unshipped after our safe landing flew about the cabin.
      The vessel rocked to a halt. I'd gotten halfway to my
    feet and now fell down again. The bow was up 15' and
    the deck yawed to port by almost that much. I was afraid
    to move for fear the least shift of weight would send the
    Oriflamme down a further precipice.
    Piet stood and cycled the inner and outer doors 
    simultaneously from his console. "Mister Salomon, Guillermo," 
    he said formally. "Stay at your controls,
    please. I'm going to take a look at our situation from
    outside."
    Stephen and I followed Piet through the cockpit hatch.
    Elsewhere in the ship, men were sorting themselves out.
    Their comments sounded more disgruntled than afraid.
    I was terribly afraid. I'd left the capes somewhere in the
    cabin, but I held my cutting bar in both hands as I jumped
    the two meters from the bottom of the hatch ladder to the
    ground.
     The wind was as cold as I'd expected, but the bright sun-
    light was a surprise. Unless programmed to do otherwise,
    the Oriflamme's screens optimized light levels on exterior
    visuals to Earth daytime. This time the real illumination
    was at least that bright.

           
    The Oriflamme's bow slanted into the air; her stem was
    below the surface of the shattered ice.
    "We're on a tunnel," Stephen said, squatting to peer
    critically at the ground. "We collapsed part of the roof.
    Do you suppose the sunlight melts rivers under the ice
    sheet?"
    "Can we take off again?" I asked. The wind was an
    excuse to shiver.
    "Oh, yes," Piet said confidently. "Though we'll all have
    blisters before we dig her nozzles clear . .

              LORD'S MERCY
    
    Day 233
    
    The sweat that soaked my tunic froze at the folds of the
    garment. The mittens I'd borrowed were too large. We'd
    reeved a rope through the tarp's grommets to serve as
    handles. It cut off circulation in my fingers even though
    there were four of us lifting the hundred-kilo loads of ice
    and scree away from the excavation.
     At least we weren't going to be crushed if we slipped.
    Stampfer headed a crew of ten men, off-loading the broad-
    side guns using sheerlegs and a ramp. If a cannon started
    to roll, it was kitty bar the door.
     We reached the crevice fifty meters from the Oriflamme.
    Maher and Loomis at the front of the makeshift pallet were
    staggering. Dragging the tarp would have been a lot easier,
    but the gritty ice would have worn through the fabric in
    only a trip or two.
     "Stand clear," I ordered. The sailors in front dropped
    their corners. Lightbody and I tried to lift ours to dump
    the load down the crevice. I could barely hold the weight;
    Lightbody had to manage the job for both of us. Next load
    Maher and Loomis would have that duty, but the load after
    that-
     "About time for watch change, isn't it, Mister Moore?"
    Maher asked 'In a husky whisper.
     "One more trip, I muttered. I didn't have any idea
    how long we'd been working. Blood tacked the mittens
    to my blistered palms, and I'd never been so cold in
    my life.
     "Yes, sir!" said Maher.
    We started back to the excavation. I could barely see,
    but the route was clear of major obstacles.
     In the pit, men worked with shovels, levers, and cut-
    ting bars to clear the thruster nozzles. The whole plain
    was patterned with tunnels chewed through the ice by a
    creature several meters in diameter. It had moved back
    and forth like a farmer plowing a square field, each swing
    paralleling without touching the one laid down previously
    in the opposite direction.
     I suppose Piet was right to name the world Lord's
    Mercy. If we'd set down exactly parallel to the tunnel
    pattern, the Oriflamme might have flipped upside down
    when the roof collapsed. On the other hand, if we'd landed
    perpendicular to the tunnels, we might never have known
    they were there.
     The Oriflamme's siren moaned briefly: it was time to
    change watches after all. We were working two hours on,
    two hours off. I didn't dare think about how much longer
    the process would have to go on.
     "I'll take it," I said. The men dropped their comers
    of the emptied tarp; I started to drag it alone toward the
    excavation.
     "Dear God I'm tired," I muttered. I didn't know I was
    speaking aloud.
     "You got a right to be, sir," Lightbody called appre-
    clatively as he and the others slanted away toward the
    hatch.
     The common spacers were each of them stronger than
    me and knew tricks that made their effort more productive
    besides. I was helping, though, despite being by birth a
    gentleman. A year ago I'd have found that unthinkable.
     "We'll take that now, sir," said Kiley, at the head of
    the team from the starboard watch replacing, mine. I gave
    him the tarp. Our replacements looked stolid and ready to
    work, though I knew how little rest you could get in two
    hours on a ship being stripped of heavy fittings.
     I thought of Thomas Hawtry, Would he and his clique
    have been out working beside the sailors if they'd made
    it this far on the voyage?
     Stephen limped up the ramp from the excavation. He
    hadn't been directing the work: Salomon did that. Stephen
    was moving blocks that only one man at a time could
    reach, and nobody else on the Oriflamme could budge.
    I laughed aloud.
      "Eh?" Stephen called.
    "Just thinking," I said. Oh, yes, Hawtry would have
    obeyed any order that Stephen Gregg was on hand to
    enforce.
      Stephen sat down on a stack of crates, loot from Our
    Lady of Montreal; for the moment, surplus weight. I sat
    beside him. "Are you feeling all right?" he asked.
     His flashgun was in a nest of the crates, wrapped in a
    Chay cape to keep blowing ice crystals from forming a
    rime on it. I'd set my cutting bar there too when Salomon
    put me on the transport detail. Stephen wore his bar
    slung. He'd used it in the excavation, so refrozen ice
    caked the blade.
    "I feel like the ship landed straight on top of me," I said.
    I heard Dole snarling orders to the men in the excavation.
    "You look a stage worse than that."
    "I'll be all right," Stephen said. His voice was colorless
    with fatigue. "I'll drink something and go back down in
    a bit. They need me there."
     He glanced at the closed forward airlock. Piet hadn't
    moved from his console since he'd organized the pro-
    cedures. He even relieved himself in a bucket. If the
    Oriflamme started to shift again, it would be Piet's hand
    on the controls-balancing risk to the ship and risk to
    the men outside, where even exhaust from the attitude
    jets could be lethal.
    "They'll need you when the port watch comes back on."
    I said forcefully. "Until then you're off duty."
    I was marginal use to the expedition as a laborer, but=
    I could damned well keep Stephen from burning him-
    self out. Having a real purpose brought me back from
    the slough of exhaustion where I'd been wallowing the
    past hour.
      Stephen shook his head, but he didn't argue. After a
    moment, he removed a canteen from the scarf in which
    he'd wrapped it to his waist cummerbund-fashion. Body
     heat kept it warm. He offered it to me. I took a swig and
     coughed. Slash that strong wasn't going to freeze at the-
     temperatures out here in any case.
       Stephen drank deep. "There's algae all through this
     ice, he said, tapping his toe on the ground. "That's why
     it looks green."
       He offered me the canteen; I waved it away. Kiley's
     men stepped briskly toward the crevice with their first
     tarpaulin of broken ice. They'd be moving slower by the
     end of their watch 
       "There was a lot of rock in some of the loads we
     brought out," I said. "We're not down to the soil, are
     we?"
       Stephen laughed. He was loosening up, either because
     of me or the slash. "Frass," he said. "Worm shit. The
     tunnel was packed solid for a meter or so like a plug.
     If we'd landed just a little more to the side, the skid
     would've been on top of it and we might-"
       Three hundred meters from where we sat, ice broke
     upward as if it were being scored by an invisible plow.
     I jumped to my feet and shouted, "Earthqua-"
       It wasn't an earthquake. The head of a huge worm
     broke surface. The gray body, flattened and unsegmented,
     continued to stream out of the opening until the creature's
     whole forty-meter length writhed over the plain.
       The transport crewmen dropped their tarp to stare. Dig-
     gers climbed from the excavation, summoned by shouts
     and the sound the worm made breaking out. Stephen had
     unwrapped his flashgun, but the worm didn't threaten us.
     It was undulating slightly away from the Oriflamme.
     "I doubt it even has eyes," I said. "Maybe it hit a dike
     of rock that it's going to cross on the surface."
       "All right, all right," Dole hectored. "You've had your
     show, now let's get this bitch ready to lift, shall we?"
       Something dark green and multilegged. climbed out of
     the opening the worm had made. This creature was about
     three meters long. Its mandibles projected another meter.
     Th.ey curved outward and back like calipers so that their
       points met squarely when the jaws closed.
       The predator took one jump toward the worm it had been
    pursuing through the tunnel, then noticed the Oriflamme
    and the men outside her. The beast turned, hunched on
    three of its six pairs of legs, and leaped toward us.
      "Back to the ship"' Dole bellowed. The men of his
    watch turned as ordered and ran for the excavation.
    I unhooked my cutting bar. The main hatch couldn't
    be closed because of ice wedged into the hinge. There'd
    seemed no need to clean it while the excavation was still
    in process...
      A second beast like the first hopped from the tunnel; a
    third member of the pack was directly behind the second.
    The worm wriggled into the distance, perhaps unaware
    that its pursuers had suddenly turned away.
     The leading predator covered ten meters at each hop.
    Because its legs worked in alternate pairs, the creature
    no more than touched the ice before it surged forward in
    another flat arc.
    Stephen's flashgun whacked. The bright sunlight of
    Lord's Mercy dimmed the weapon's normally dazzling
    side-scatter.
      The bolt hit the predator's first thoracic segment and
    shattered the plate in a spray of creamy fluid. The head,
    the size of a man's torso, flipped onto the creature's back.
    It was attached by only a tag of chitin. The enormous
    mandibles scissored open and loudly shut.
    A fourth hard-shelled predator crawled from the tunnel.
    The three living members of the pack hopped toward us,
    ignoring the thrashing corpse of their fellow.
     Either the creatures thought the Oriflamme was prey, or they
    were reacting to us individual humans as interlop-
    ers in their hunting territory. Either way, their intentions
    weren't in doubt.
      Stephen clicked up the wand that supported his laser's
    solar charger, then spread the shimmering film. He hadn't
    brought spare batteries with him this time.
      "I'll draw them away from the hatch," I said. I began
    walking out onto the ice field. I didn't trust the footing
    enough to run.
    
    Stephen set his flashgun on the crates with the panel
    tilted toward the sun. He left it there and strode parallel
    to me, triggering his cutting bar briefly to spin the blades
    clear of ice. The predators angled toward us, one after
    another.
     Ice powdered beneath the creatures every time they
    sprang. The bottoms of their feet were chitin as jagged
    as the throat of a broken bottle. It gave the beasts good
    purchase on any surface soft enough for it to bite.
     A band of single-lensed eyes gleamed from a ridge
    curving along the top and front of each predator's
    headplate. Though the individual eyes didn't move, the
    array gave the creatures vision over three-quarters of the
    arc around them.
     The nearest creature focused on me. Its mandibles swung
    a further 30 degrees open, like a hammer rising from half to 
    full cock. Its deliberately short hop put me exactly ten 
    meters away for the final spring.
     I threw myself forward, holding my bar vertical in
    front of me. The predator slammed me down, but I was
    inside the circuit of its mandibles instead of being pierced

    through both sides when the tips clashed together.
     The knife-edged chitin was thicker than that of a Molt's
    carapace, but my bar's ceramic teeth could have sheared
    hardened steel. The blade screamed as I cut the left mandi-
    ble away. The creature stood above me, ripping my thighs
    with its front pairs of walking legs.
     I held my bar in both hands and cut into the predator's
    head. Side-hinged jawplates cracked and crumbled on the
    howling bar.
     The creature sprang back. White fluid gushed from the
    wound in its head. The creature's abdomen was slender
    and hairy, like that of a robber fly. It twisted around under
    the thorax as the creature went into convulsions.
     Stephen was holding the second predator's mandibles
    away from his chest with both hands. The beast shook him
    violently, trying to break his grip. Stephen had dropped
    his cutting bar. It lay beneath the creature's scrabbling
    back legs.
     I rose and slashed at the base of the right mandible,
    again using both hands. My feet slid out from under me.
    I caught the target in the belly of my blade, but my long
    draw stroke cut into the joint at a flatter angle than I'd
    intended.
     Weakened chitin cracked like a rifle shot. Stephen
    tossed the mandible away. A ribbon of pale muscle flut-
    tered behind it.
     Stephen still had to hold the remaining mandible to
    prevent it from impaling him. I stood and fell down again
    immediately. I was slipping on my own blood and fluids
    from the creatures I'd butchered.
     The last predator poised ten meters from Stephen for
    the leap that would cut him in half. A laser bolt stabbed
    through its open jaws. The flux lit the creature's exploding
    head through translucent flesh and chitin.
     Piet flung down the flashgun. The solar panel that had
    recharged it quivered like a parachute. He raised a cutting
    bar. "Handweapons only!" Piet shouted as he charged the
    wounded predator. Twenty men carrying tools from the
    excavation followed him, slipping on the ice.
     Stephen let the creature throw him free. It poised to leap
    onto him again, predator to the last. Piet sawed three of
    its legs apart in a single swipe. In a few seconds, all the
    left-side legs were broken or sheared. Men hacked with
    clumsy enthusiasm into the creature's thorax.
     I stood up, then fell over again. Hall and Maher ran to
    me. Stephen crawled on all fours behind them.
     "Rakoscy!" Piet shouted. "Rakoscy, get over here!
     "Christ's blood, his legs've been through a fucking
    meat grinder!" Dole cried. "Bring that fucking tarp over
    here' We need to get him into the fucking ship!"
      Mister Moore," somebody said with desperate earnest- 
    ness. "Please let go of your bar. Please. I'm going to take
    it out of your hand."
     The last voice I heard was Stephen's, snarling in a
    terrible singsong, "He'll be all right and I'll kill any
    whoreson who says he won't!"
    
                WEYSTON
    
    Day 249
    
    Piet lifted the cutter's bow so that we wouldn't stall
    even though the thruster feed was barely cracked open.
    The display held a 30* down angle to our axis of flight,
    paralleling the barren ground a thousand meters below.
     "You know. . ." Stephen said, one leg braced against
    the sidewall and his left hand gripping the central bench
    on which the two of us sat. "You're going to feel really
    silly if you have to explain how you got yourself killed
    on a sandhill like this."
     "Tsk, don't call it a sandhill," Piet said cheerfully. "The
    name honors your uncle, remember. Besides, it's not a
    stunt, I saw something when I brought the Oriflamme in."
     "And why shouldn't the officers go on a picnic?" I said.
    My legs were straight out, but I was trying my best not to
    let them take any stress. Though the shins were healing
    well, they hurt as if they were being boiled in oil if I
    moved the wrong way.
     Lightbody's lips moved slowly as he watched the screen
    from the jump seat and separate attitude controls behind
    Piet's couch. I think he was murmuring a prayer. From
    Lightbody, that would be normal behavior rather than a
    comment on the way the cutter wallowed through the air.
    1 doubt it occurred to Lightbody to worry when Piet was
    the pilot.
     "Found him!" Piet said./"Eleven o'clock!" Stephen said,
    pointing. P'There it is!" I said.
     Metallic wreckage was strewn along hundreds of meters
    of sandy waste, though the ship at the end of the trail 
    looked healthy enough. It was a cheaply-constructed freighter 
    of the sort the Feds built in the Back Worlds to handle
    local trade.
      "They came in on automated approach," Piet guessed
    aloud. He boosted thrust and gimballed the nozzle nearly
    vertical. "Hit a tooth of rock, ripped their motors out, and
    there they sit since. Which may be fifty years."
      The cutter dropped like an elevator whose brakes had
    failed. Piet made a tight one-eighty around the crash site,
    killing our momentum so that he didn't have to overfly
    for the horizontal approach normal with a single-engined
    cutter.
      "Not very long," Stephen said. "Light alloys wouldn't
    be so bright if they'd been open to the atmosphere any
    length of time."
      We crossed the trail of torn metal, then blew out a
    doughnut of dust as we touched down within twenty meters of 
    the freighter's side hatch.
    Piet turned his head and smiled slightly. "If I don't keep
    my hand in, Stephen," he said, "I won't be able to do it
    when I have to."
    "You could fly a cutter blindfold on your deathbed,
    Captain," Lightbody said. "Begging your pardon."
     Lightbody squeezed by to undog the hatch. I could have
    done that job if anybody's life had depended on it, but
    none of us still aboard.the Oriflamme needed to prove
    things to our shipmates.
      Weyston's air was thin and sulfurous, unpleasant with-
    out being dangerous. The system was charted but unoc-
    cupied. Federation cartographers hadn't even bothered to
    give the place a name, since there was nothing beyond the
    planet's presence to bring a vessel here.
      We needed to reseal the Oriflamme's hull; this was
    the suitable location closest to Lord's Mercy. We had
    sufficient reaction mass for some while yet-which was a
    good thing, because observation supported the note in the
    pilotry data that the planet had no free water whatever.
      I stood deliberately as Lightbody swung himself onto
    the coaming of the dorsal hatch. "Give you a hand, sir?
    he asked, reaching toward me.
    "I'm not proud," I said. I clasped the spacer's shoulders
    and paused, steeling myself to flex my legs and jump.
     "I've got him, Lightbody," Stephen said. He clasped me
    below the rib cage and lifted me like a mannequin onto the
    cutter's hull.
     I laughed. "All right," I said, "you've convinced me I'm
    bloody useless and a burden to you all. Can we look over
    the wreck, now?"
     Stephen handed Lightbody a rifle and his own flashgun
    as I slid down the curve of the hull to the ground. This
    flight was basically recreation, but there was no place
    on the Back Worlds where we were safe. By now, it
    didnt strike any of us as silly to go armed on a lifeless
    world
     There was movement inside the wreck.
     "Hello the ship!" Piet called. No one responded. I pow-
    ered my cutting bar.
     A man in gray trousers and a blue tunic hopped from the
    hatch. Stephen presented his flashgun. "No!" the stranger
    shouted. "No, you can't shoot me!"
     "We don't have any intention of shooting you, sir,"
    Piet said. He crooked his left index finger to call the man
    closer. The fellow had a sickly look, but he was too plump
    to be ill fed. "Are there any other survivors?"
     "No one, I'm the only one," the Fed said.
     I walked around him at two arms' length. I wouldn't
    have trusted this fellow if he'd said there was a lot of sand
    hereabouts. He'd been relieving himself out the hatch; and
    almost out the hatch.
     "Anybody aboard?" I called, waiting for my eyes to
    adapt to the dim interior. The power plant was dead, and
    with it the cabin lights.
     The chamber stank. Blood and brains splashed the for-
    ward bulkhead above the simple control station.
     I jerked my head back. Piet and Stephen were behind me.
    The castaway squatted beneath the muzzle of Lightbody's
    rifle.
     "His name's McMaster," Stephen said, nodding toward
    the Fed. "He was the engineer. Doesn't seem as happy to
    be rescued as you'd think."
    "Let's check the other side," I said, walking toward the
    freighter's bow. "Is there any cargo?"
    The hatch from the cabin to the rear hold had warped
    in the crash, though there was probably access through
    the ship's ripped underside.
      "Windmills," Stephen said. "They lost the starboard
    thrusters maybe a month ago on a run from Clapperton
    to Bumphrey. This was the nearest place to clear the feed
    line, but the AI wasn't up to the job of landing."
    Piet said, "Two Molts and the human captain were
    killed in the crash. I don't think McMaster is complete-
    ly ...
    Oh, he's crazy," Stephen said. "But he started out a
    snake or I miss my bet."
      The graves were three shallow mounds in the lee of the
    wreck. I prodded with the blade of my cutting bar and
    struck mauve chitin ten centimeters below the surface.
    Stephen dragged the corpse of a Molt out by its arm. The
    creature's plastron was orange and had a spongy look.
      "She hit the bulkhead during the crash," Piet said. "I
    don't think we need disturb the others."
    Together we scooped tawny sand over the corpse again.
    I used my bar, the others their boots. "Decided where the
    next landfall is going to be?" Stephen asked.
      "Clapperton," said Piet. "There's a sizable Fed colony
    there, but Lacaille and the pilotry data agree that only one
    of the major land masses is inhabited. We can fill with
    water and maybe hunt meat besides."
      We had the Molt covered as well as it had been when
    we started. Stephen stepped back from the grave and sur-
    veyed the landscape. "What a hell of place to be buried,"
    he said.
      "It's only the body," Piet said in mild reproof
    We all felt it, though. This was a world with no life of
    its own, that would never have life of its own. Being bur- 
    ied here was like being dumped from the airlock between
    stars.
      Stephen frowned. He stepped to the third mound and
    pulled something from the sand.
    I squinted. "A screwdriver?" I said.
     Stephen held it out to us. "That's what it was made for,"
    he said softly.
     The shaft was stained brown. Sand clung to the dried
    fluid. Not blood, but very possibly the copper-based ichor
    that filled a Molt's circulatory system.
     Stephen wagged the tool delicately in the direction of
    the castaway on the other side of the wreck. "Didn't trust
    there'd be enough food to last till ... whenever, do you
    think?" he said.
     "The crash unhinged him," Piet said.
     Stephen raised an eyebrow. Piet grimaced and said,
    "We can't leave a human being here!"
     Stephen flung the screwdriver far out in the sand. "Then
    let's get back," he said mildly. "Only-let's not name
    this place for Uncle Ben, shall we? He won't know,
    but I do."
    
            CLAPPERTON
    
    Day 290
    
    Air heavy with moisture and rotting vegetation rolled into
    the hold as the ramp lowered. Though we'd landed after
    sunrise so that the glare of our thrusters wouldn't alert
    distant Fed watchers, the thick canopy filtered light to
    a green as deep as that reaching the bottom of a pond.
    Treetops met even over the river-by which we'd entered
    the forest.
    We piled out of the vessel. Our exhaust had burned
    the leaf mold to charcoal traceries which disintegrated
    when a boot touched them. Black ash spurted to mix
    with steam and the gray smoke of tree bark so wet that
    it only smoldered from a bath of plasma.
    There were twenty of us to start, though another crew
    would lay hoses to the river as soon as we were out
    of the way. Six of the men were armed. The rest of
    us carried tools and the net which, once we'd hung it
    properly, would camouflage the Oriflamme's track. Piet
    had nosed us between a pair of giant trees and almost
    completely into the forest, but the starship's stem could
    be seen from an autogyro following the river at canopy
    height.
      "Good Christ!" said Stampfer, pointing his rifle with
    both hands. "What d'ye call that!"
    Piet had taken the Oriflamme straight over the bank at
    a point that the river kinked. Bobbing belly-up in the slight
    current at the bend was a creature twenty meters long. Its
    four short legs stuck up stiffly; the toes were webbed, but
    the forefeet bore cruel claws as well.
    The smooth skin of the creature's back was speckled
    black over several shades of brown, but the original
    white underside now blushed pink. We'd boiled the
    monster as we coasted over it.
       Its head was broad and several meters long. The skull
    floated lower than the creature's distended belly, but I
    could see that the long, conical teeth would interlock when
    the jaws were closed.
    The big predators here live in the water," Lacaille said.
    He gestured with his three-hooked grapnel. He and I were
    one of the two teams who'd climb to anchor the top of
    the net. "That's good that that one's dead. It'll be a month
    before another big one moves into the territory."
    The Federation officer chewed his lower lip. "I didn't
    know they got that big," he said. "They don't around
    North Island base."
    "Let's go, you lazy scuts!" Dole ordered. "Quicker we
    get this hung, the likelier you are to get home and sling
    your neighbor off the top of your wife!"
    Strictly speaking, the bosun was talkin to the men
    dragging the net out of the hold. Everybody knew that
    the likely delay was in getting lift points twenty meters
    up the tree boles, though.
      I waved acknowledgment and walked back to the left
    hand tree of the pair at the Oriflamme's stem. Stampfer
    started with us. Stephen called, "I'll keep an eye on this
    end," and waved the master gunner toward the center of
    the track.
      "Are there many dangerous animals?" I asked Lacaille
    with a nod toward the predator floating in the shallows. A
    The corpse had bloated noticeably since I'd first seen it.
    Unlike McMaster, Lacaille had become a willing ship-
    mate. He was a real ship's officer, not a noble who'd had
    authority but no skill. I think he was glad to serve with
    a company of spacers as good as Piet Ricimer's. There
    wasn't a better crew in the human universe.
       "No big carnivores on land," Lacaille said. "There's
    dangerous animals, sure, and some of the plants are poi-
    son. The garrison burns back the jungle for a hundred
    meters around the base."
     He shrugged. "A soldier got bitten on the foot and had
    his leg swell up till they cut it off. But it could've been a
    thorn instead of a sting. Liquor's killed twenty-odd that I
    know of."
     We'd told both Federation officers that we'd drop them
    with their own people when we could. I don't think that
    affected either Lacaille's helpfulness or McMaster's surly
    silence. People's dispositions were more important than
    their attitudes.
     The tree Lacaille and I were to climb had shaggy but-
    tress roots that spread its diameter at the base to almost
    twenty meters. The three of us walked carefully to the far
    side of the bole where plasma hadn't scoured the hairy
    surface.
     I'd insisted on being one of the climbers, because I
    needed to convince myself that my shins had healed
    properly. Maybe Lacaille had something similar in mind.
    The Chay had certainly handled him worse than the bug
    on Lord's Mercy had done me.
     The Oriflamme didn't carry climbing irons, so Lacaille
    and I wore boots with sharpened hobnails. This tree's
    shaggy bark and the stilt roots of the giant on the other
    side of the Oriflamme ought to make it easy to get to the
    height required.
     "Trade me for a moment," Stephen said. I didn't know
    what he meant till he handed me the flashgun and ed
    the grapnel and coil from my belt. Stephen stepped back
    and swung the hooks on a short length of line.
     The trunk started to branch just above where the top
    of the buttress roots faired into the main trunk. Leaves
    fanned toward the light seeping through the thin canopy
    over the watercourse. The lower limbs were stubby and
    not particularly thick, but they'd support a man's weight.
    Our exhaust had shriveled some of the foliage.
     Stephen loosed the grapnel at the top of its arc. The
    triple hook wobbled upward, stabilized by the line it drew.
    It curved between the trunk and the upraised tip of a limb.
    As the line fell back, it caught on rough bark and looped
    twice around the branch. The hooks swung nervously
    beneath the limb with the last of their momentum. If the
    line started to slip under my weight, the points should lift
    and bite into the wood.
      I returned Stephen's flashgun. I hadn't brought a weap-
    on; my cutting bar would just have been in the way as
    I climbed. The weight of the cassegrain laser felt good.
      Among the forest sounds were a series of shrill screams
    that made me think of something huge, toothy, and far
    more active than the predator now bloating in the river.
      Lacaille started up the line ahead of me. Hey, I thought,
    but I didn't say anything. He ought to be leading, because
    he still had a grapnel to toss to a higher branch.
      I followed the Fed, walking up the top of a buttress
    root like a steep ramp. The 8-mm line was too thin for
    comfortable climbing. Lacaille and I wore gloves with the
    fingers cut off, but my palms hurt like blazes whenever
    I let my weight ride on the line. I used my hands only
    to steady myself. Fine for the first stage, but there were
    another ten meters to go.
      Lacaille got out of my way by stepping to the next limb,
    15* clockwise around the tree bole though only slightly
    higher. He tried to spin his grapnel the way Stephen had.
    The hooks snagged my branch.
    "Hey!" I shouted-more sharply than I'd have done
    if I hadn't still been pissed at Lacaille taking the lead.
    Besides, I was breathing hard from the exertion, and my
    shins prickled as though crabs were dancing on them.
    "Sir!" Lacaille said. "I'm sorry!"
    He slacked his line. Weight pulled the hooks loose for
      Lacaille to haul back to his hand.
    Look," I said, "neither of us is"-I shrugged-"an
    expert. Just toss the damned thing over a branch a couple
    meters up. That's all I want to climb at a time on the
    straight trunk anyway."
      I crossed my legs beneath the branch as I worked my
    own grapnel loose for the next stage. The line had cut a
    powdery russet groove in the bark. Sticky dust gummed
    both the line and my fingers.
      Lacaille tossed his grapnel, this time with a straight
    overarm motion. More our speed. He set his hooks in a
    limb not far above him and scrambled up, panting loudly.
    That was a three-meter gain, a perfectly respectable por-
    tion of the ten we needed.
      I stuck the grapnel's shaft under my belt and shifted
    to the branch Lacaille had just vacated. My line dangled
    behind me like a long tail. I paused to brush sweat out of
    my eyes. I saw movement to the side.
      Three creatures the size of bandy-legged goats peered
    down at me from a limb of an adjacent tree. Two were
    mottled gray; the third was slightly larger. It had a black
    torso and a scarlet ruff that it spread as I stared at it.
    "Holy Jesus!" I shouted. I snatched at my grapnel, the
    closest thing to a weapon I was carrying.
      The trio sprang up the trunk of their tree like giant
    squirrels. They vanished into the canopy in a handful Of
    jumps. Divots ripped from the bark by their hooked claws
    pattered down behind them.
      "Are you all right?" Stephen shouted. "What's hap-
    pened?"
    "We're all right!" I shouted back. I couldn't see the
    forest floor, so Stephen couldn't see us, much less the
    creatures that had startled me. "Local herbivores is all."
      That was more than I knew for certain, but I didn't want
    Stephen to worry.
    "There's something sticky here," Lacaille warned. "I
    think it's from the tree. Sap."
      I peered upward to make certain that Lacaille was out
    of the way before I started to climb. This portion of the
    trunk was covered with a band of some mossy epiphyte.
    Tiny pink florets picked out the dark green foliage.
      Something was pressed against the bark a few degrees
    to Lacaille's left and slightly above him. I doubted that 
    he could see the thing from his angle. It eased toward him.
    "Freeze, Lacaille!" I shouted.
    "What?" he said. "What?" His voice rose an octave on
    the second syllable. He didn't move, though.
      The thing was a dull golden color with blotches of
    brown. It could almost have been a trickle of sap like
    the one Lacaille had noticed, thirty million years short of
    hardening to amber.
      Almost. It had been creeping sideways across the bark's
    corrugations. The creature stopped when Lacaille obeyed
    my order to freeze.
      I drew the grapnel from my belt, then paid the line out
    in four one-meter loops.
    "What's happening, Moore?" Lacaille said. He had his
    voice under control. He was trying to look down at me
    without moving anything but his eyes.
    "Not yet," I whispered. Lacaille couldn't hear me. I was
    speaking to calm myself.
      I lofted the grapnel with an underhand toss. It sailed as
    intended through empty air past the creature.
    The thing struck like a trap snapping. Its head clanged
    against the grapnel's slowly rotating hooks and flung them
    outward-with the creature attached.
      "Watch out below!" I screamed. The snakelike thing
    streamed past me, dragged by the weight of steel where
    it had expected flesh. I let go of the line.
    The creature was a good ten meters long, but nowhere
    thicker than my calf. Tiny hooked legs, hundreds of them,
    waggled from its underside.
      I heard the ensemble crash into the ground. A cutting
    bar whined. The blades whanged momentarily on metal,
    probably the grapnel's shaft.
    "What was it?" Lacaille demanded. "Can I move now?
    What was it?"
      "It was a snake," I said. "I think it was a snake."
    I wiped my eyes again. "Stephen?" I called. "Tell them
    to hitch the hawser to Lacaille's line where it is, will you?
    We've gone as high in this tree as I want to go."
    "Roger," Stephen said, his voice attenuated by distance
    and the way the foliage absorbed sound.
    I looked at Lacaille. "Yeah, it's all right now," I said.
    "I hope to God it's all right."
    I stepped away from the 2-cm hawser so that Dole and
    his crew could begin lifting the camouflage net. Lacaille
    knelt beside the creature a few meters out from the cone
    of roots. The snake had slid the last stage of its trip to
    Stephen's cutting bar.
      Stephen looked from the creature to me. "Don't touch
    the damned thing unless you want to get clawed by those
    feet," he said. "I think it's dead, but it has a difference 
    of opinion."
     I squatted beside Lacaille. The creature's skull was
    almost a meter long. Stephen had cut it crosswise, then
    severed the back half from the long body-which was
    still twitching, as Stephen had implied.
     "I should've taken a bar with me," I said. "I was crazy
    not to."
     "This worked pretty well," Stephen said. "I don't see
    how you could improve on the results."
     He tilted up the front of the creature's skull on his bar.
    A bony tongue protruded a handbreadth from the circular
    mouth. The tongue's tip had broken off on the grapnel.
    The sides of the hollow shaft were barbed and slotted.
    The tongue was designed to rip deep through the flesh
    of the creatures it struck, then to suck them dry.
     "Wonder if it injects digestive fluids?" Stephen mused
    aloud.

 Lacaille stood, then doubled up and began to vomit.
     "Get him back to the ship," Stephen suggested quietly.
    "Guillermo can find some slash if you can't."
     "I can find something," I said. "Come on, Lacaille. I
    need a drink, and out here is no damned place for anybody
    who feels as queasy as I do right now."
     "I'm all right," Lacaille muttered as he cautiously
    straightened. He wiped his mouth with the back of his
    hand before he turned to face me.
     "Any one you walk away from, hey?" he said with an
    embarrassed smile. "I suppose I can walk."
     He could. We could. Dole's men were raising one end
    of the net by the hawser Lacaille and I had drawn into the
    branches on Lacaille's grapnel line. We'd wired a pulley
    to the limb as well. It wasn't strictly necessary, but it 
    made the lift a lot easier for the men below.
     I was only half kidding about needing a drink. Since
    the snake stalked us, I'd trembled while we continued to
    work high in the tree. Seeing the creature close up made
    the fear worse.
     We stepped over the rolled net. The bosun was arguing
    precedence with Salomon, whose men were laying hoses
    to the river. Both men paused and nodded to us. Piet,
    examining the tree that would anchor the other end of
    the camouflage, waved cheerfully.
     "You saved my life," Lacaille said in a low voice.
     "That fellow might have decided I looked juicier," I
    said. "He wasn't anybody's friend."
     We had to pick our way carefully across the burned
    patch surrounding the Oriflamme. Dense roots withstood
    the gush of plasma and lurked within the ash, ready to
    turn an ankle or worse.
     "Look," Lacaille said. He stopped and waited for me to
    meet his eyes. "I won't fight my own people."
     "Nobody asked you to," I said. "Christ's blood, d'ye
    think we can't do our own fighting?"
     Lacaille grimaced and shook his head in frustration.
    "Look," he said. "McMaster? You should have left him
    where he was."
     "You're not the first to think that," I said slowly. I
    glanced around. I didn't know where McMaster was. I
    couldn't find him outside nor among the party shifting
    gear in the hold ten meters from where Lacaille and I
    stood. "Piet's ... soft-hearted, though."
     "Tonight," Lacaille said. "When shortwave propaga-
    tion's good, McMaster's going to signal the North Island
    base on the backup commo suite aft."
     Salomon's men joined Dole's on the 2-cm hawser. It
    would be easier to slide the hoses under the hem of the
    camouflage net than to lift the roll, so the teams were
    combining to do the jobs in sequence.
     "He told you?" I asked without emphasis.
     "McMaster brags about things that nobody would
    admit!" Lacaille said. "Not just this, terrible things! He's
    a terrible man."
     Piet walked toward us, probably wondering what we
    were discussing.
     "Yeah, I can believe that," I said. It wasn't surprising
    that a man who'd been swimming for years in the filthy
    slough of President Pleyal's colonies would be unable to 
    recognize that Lacaille might have feelings of gratitude
    toward those who'd saved his life. Far more surprising
    that Lacaille's personal decency had survived.
    "Ah. . ." I added. "Don't say anything to Piet, though.
    All right?"
    Lacaille nodded in relief. "You'll tell Mister Gregg?"
    he asked.
    "Stephen's got enough on his conscience as it is," I said,
    putting on a bright smile to greet Piet. "I'll see that this
    one's handled."
      We sat at trestle tables sawn from the local wood with
    cutting bars. The boards' surface was just as rough as
    you'd imagine. The afternoon's downpour had driven the
    ash into the clay substrate in a butter-slick amalgam. We'd
    spread cover sheets over us, but the rare chinks of evening
    sky we could see were clear.
      "You know..." said Dole with a mouth full of tree-
    hopper, maybe one of the trio that'd startled me. It had
    peeked down at the commotion, this time where Stephen
    could see it. "That fellow out in the lake might not have
    steaked out so bad."
    "Not for me, thanks," I said, thinking about the mon-
    ster's teeth. At the other table they were eating a ragout 
    of the local "snake." I didn't even look in that direction.
    Precooked, even," Piet said with a grin. He looked as
    relaxed as I'd seen him in a long while. We'd have known
    by now if a Fed on Clapperton's far side had chanced to
    notice us sliding into the forest. "Well, we had other things
    on our mind."
    Winger, the chief motor mechanic, said, "I don't like
    the way the main engine nozzles are getting, sir. We've
    switched out the spares aboard, and they're getting pretty
    worn themself."
      "Umm," Salomon said. "They wouldn't pass a bottomry
    inspection at Betaport, but I don't think we need to worry
    as yet
      An animal screamed in the near distance. It was probably
    harmless-and the "snake" couldn't have made a sound if
    it had wanted to-but my shoulders shrank together every
    time I heard the thing.
    The local equivalent of insects swarmed around the
    hooded lights we'd spiked to tree boles to show us our din-
    ner. The creatures were four-legged. They varied in size
    from midges to globs with bodies the size of a baseball
    and wingspans to match. They didn't attack us because of
    our unfamiliar biochemistry, but I frequently felt a crunch
    of chitin as I chewed my meat.
      "The nearest place that'd stock thruster nozzles is Riel,"
    Lacaille volunteered without looking up from his meal.
    But the port gets a lot of traffic, and it's defended."
    "Real defenses?" Dole asked, glancing over at Lacaille.
    "Or a couple guns and nobody manning them?"
    "I'd sure rather have warehouse stock than cannibalize
    a ship," Winger said. "It's a bitch of a job unscrewing
    burned-in nozzles without cracking them."
      The little receiver in my tunic pocket squawked, "Call-
    ing North Island Command! Calling North Island Com-
    mand! This is-"
    Everyone in hearing jumped up. The opposite bench
    tilted and thumped the ground. Lacaille's mouth opened
    in horror.
      What in the name of Christ is that?" Stephen asked
    softly. He wasn't looking at me. His eyes roved the forest,
    and the flashgun was cradled in his arms.
    It's all right!" I said. "Sit down, everybody. It's all
    right."
    "Yes, sit down," Piet decided aloud. He bent to help
    raise the fallen bench, holding his carbine at the balance
    so that the muzzle pointed straight up. He'd jacked a round
    into the chamber, and it would take a moment to clear the
    weapon safely.
      He sat again and looked at me. "What is all right?"
    "-Venusian pirate ship full of treasure," my pocket
    crackled. I took the receiver out so that everyone could see
    it. "Plot this signal and home on it. I don't have the 
    coordi-
    nates, but it's somewhere in the opposite hemisphere from
    the base. Calling-"
    I switched the unit off. Dole said, "McMaster!" and
    stood up again.
    "Don't!" I said.
     Dole stepped over the bench, unhooking his cutting
    bar.
     "Sit down, Mister Dole," Piet said, his voice ringing
    like a drop forge.
     The bosun's face scrunched up, but he obeyed.
     "And the rest of you," Piet said, waving to the men at the
    other table and the far end of ours. They'd noticed the com-
    motion, though they couldn't tell what was going on.
     "I fiddled the backup transmitter," I said in a voice
    that the immediate circle could hear. "No matter what
    the dial reads, it's transmitting a quarter-watt UHF. He
    could be heard farther away if he stood in the hatch and
    shouted."
     Stephen made a sound. I thought he was choking. It
    was the start of a laugh. His guffaws bellowed out into
    the night, arousing screamers in the trees around us. After
    a moment, Stephen got the sound under control, but he
    still quivered with suppressed paroxysms.
     "We still have to do something about the situation,
    though," Piet said softly.
     "No," I said. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a
    shadow slip from the main hatch and vanish into the
    forest. "The situation has just taken care of itself.'
     A smile of sorts played with Piet's mouth. 'Yes," he
    said. "I see what you mean. He doesn't want to be aboard
    the target his friends are going to blast."
     He turned his head. "Mister Dole," he said crisply, 
    "we'll have the net down at first light. The voyage isn't
    over, and we may need it another time. I expect to lift
    fifteen minutes after you start the task."
     "Aye aye, sir!" the bosun said.
     "I suppose it'll be weeks before another big gulper takes
    over this stretch of the river," Lacaille said.
     "Maybe not so long," Stephen said. He got up and
    stretched the big muscles of his shoulders. "And anyway,
    I'm sure there are more snakes and suchlike folk than the
    one you and Jeremy met."
     He chuckled again. The sound was as bleak as the ice
    of Lord's Mercy.

               ABOVE RIEL
    
    Day 311
    
    Guillermo's screen showed the world we circled in a
    ninety-four-minute orbit. The central display was a frozen
    schematic of Corpus Christi, Riel's spaceport, based on
    pilotry data, Lacaille's recollections, and images recorded
    during the Oriflamme's first pass overhead.
     "There are fourteen vessels in port that probably have
    thruster nozzles of the correct size," Piet said, sitting on
    the edge of his couch. Thirty of us were crowded into
    the forward compartment, and his words echoed on the
    tannoys to the remainder of the crew. "Besides those,
    there's a number of smaller vessels on the ground and
    a very large freighter in orbit."
     "Freighter or not. . ." Kiley murmured, "anything that
    weighs two kilotonnes gets my respect."
     "Two of the ships are water buffalos without transit
    capability," Piet continued. "We'll have to carry our prize
    off to an uninhabited system to strip it, so they're out.
    Likewise, a number of the ships are probably unservice-
    able, though we don't know which ones for sure. Finally,
    there's a Federation warship in port, the Yellowknife."
     There was a low murmur from the men. Somebody said,
    "Shit," in a quiet but distinct voice.
     "Yes," Piet said. "That complicates matters, but two of
    our nozzles have cracked. Maybe they just got knocked
    around when we tipped on Lord's Mercy, but it's equally
    possible that the other six are about to fail the same way.
    This will be risky, but we have no options."
      Hey, sir," Stampfer said. "We'll fucking handle it. You
    just tell us what to do."
    That wasn't bravado. Stampfer and everybody else
    in the Oriflamme's crew believed that Captain Ricimer
    would bring us all home somehow. Emotionally, I
    believed that myself Intellectually, I knew that if I
    hadn't stumbled as I ran toward the Montreal, the Fed
    plasma bolt would have killed me instead of the man a
    step behind.
      "For ease of drawing reaction mass," Piet said, "the
    port is in the bend of a river, the Sangre Christi. It's a
    swampy area and unhealthy, since Terran mosquitoes and
    mosquito-borne diseases have colonized the planet along
    with humans."
      Men glanced at one another in puzzlement. Malaria
    didn't seem a serious risk compared to the others we'd
    be chancing on a raid like this.
      A slight smile played across Piet's mouth. "As a result,"
    he explained, "the governor and officers of the garrison
    and ships in port stay in houses on the bluffs overlooking
    the river."
      His index finger swept an arc across the display. "That
    should slow down any response to our actions."
    Piet sobered. "I'll take the cutter down at twilight, that's
    at midnight ship's time, with fourteen men aboard," he
    said. "A party of six will secure the Commandatura and
    port control-they're together."
      "I'll take care of that," Stephen said.
    Piet's grin flickered again. "Yes," he said. "I hoped you
    would."
    He looked at me. "There are four gunpits with laser
    arrays. The fire control system and the town's general
    communications both need to be disabled. You can handle
    that, Jeremy?"
    Sure," I said. The task was a little more complicated
    than it might have sounded to a layman. You have to
    identify the critical parts in order to cut off their pow-
    er, blow them up, whatever. But I shouldn't have any
    difficulty.
      "Or Guillermo could," Stephen said, scratching the side
    of his neck and looking at nothing in particular.
    "I'll do it!" I said.
     "I'll need Guillermo for the other phase of the opera-
    tion," Piet said. "I don't expect any trouble about landing
    a cutter without authorization, but I personally can't go
    around asking which of the ships ready to lift have thruster
    nozzles in good condition. Guillermo can speak to Molt
    laborers and identify a suitable prize without arousing
    suspicion."
     He glanced down at the navigator in the couch to his
    left. "Mister Salomon, you'll command the Oriflamme in
    my absence. We'll rendezvous, the Oriflamme and my
    prize, at St. Lawrence. I don't believe there's any reason
    to proceed there in company."
     Salomon nodded. Men were tugging their beards, rub-
    bing palms together-a score of individual tricks for deal-
    ing with tension. I kept clearing my throat, trying not to
    make a noise that would disturb the others.
     "All right," said Piet. "Stephen, you and I will get
    together and decide on personnel. When we've done that,
    then we'll go over tactics. I'd like the rest of you to
    vacate the compartment for a time, please, so that we can
    organize the raid."
     His eyes met mine. "Not the people already told off for
    the mission, of course."
     Crewmen drifted toward the passageway aft. Dole and
    Stampfer waited grimly. They obviously weren't about to
    leave unless they got a direct personal order to do so. I
    doubted Piet would push the point. You want your most
    aggressive men on a project like this.
     I shoved off carefully and caught the stanchion to which
    Stephen was anchored. "Didn't want me along?" I said
    very softly.
     Stephen shrugged. He didn't look at me. "I don't much
    want Piet risking his neck by leading this one," he said in
    a similar voice. "But there wasn't a prayer he'd listen if
    I said that."                                 
     He gave me a broad smile. "I'm responsible for you,
    Jeremy," he said in a bantering tone. "I brought you
    aboard.
     "Then remember I'm a member of this crew," I said.
    And a gentleman of Venus!"

    The compartment had cleared except for the officers
    and two petty officers. "Stephen?" Piet called. "Jeremy?"
    "Oh, I won't forget that, Jeremy," Stephen said. He
    directed himself with an index finger toward the consoles
    at the bow. "Nor, I think, will our enemies, hey?"
    
                      RIEL
    
       Day 312
    
       Our outer hull pinged as it slowly cooled. The pilot's
       screen was coarse-grained and only hinted at our sur-

 
       roundings. Besides, with fourteen men packed onto a
       cutter, there were too many heads and torsos in the way
       for me to see more than an occasional corner.
       "Hell," said Winger. "With all the chips we're carrying,
       it'd be easier to buy the engine hardware."
       "This'll be easy enough," Stephen replied in his chilling
       singsong. "It always has been in the past. Dead easy."
       No one spoke for a moment. Our harsh breathing
       sounded like static on a radio tuned to open air.
       "All right," Piet said decisively. "Commandatura team
       and Guillermo first, we others wait five minutes. I don't
       want anyone to notice just how full this cutter is."
       Dole and Lightbody undogged the hatch, though the
       bosun would go with Piet to capture the ship that
       Guillermo picked. Fourteen men weren't many to oper-
       ate a starship of a hundred tonnes or more, so Piet had
       picked the most efficient members of the Oriflamme's
       crew.
       Stephen was the first out, jumping lightly to the ground.
       Under ordinary circumstances, Stephen seemed a little
       clumsy. Now, and at previous times like this, he moved
       with a dancer's grace.
       "Hand me the crate," he ordered bleakly. Lightbody
       and I, seated on the hatch coaming, swung the chest of
       weapons into Stephen's waiting hands. He didn't appear
       JL to notice weight that had made the pair of us grunt.
       I hadn't missed anything for being unable to see the
       vision screen. Piet had brought us down at the north end
       of the field, some distance from the river. The cutter was
       tucked in between a freighter that was either deadlined
       or abandoned-several of her hull plates were missing-
       and a water buffalo, a tanker that hauled air and reaction
       mass to orbiting vessels too large or ill-found to land
       normally.
         Neither of our neighbors was lighted. There was no
       likelihood of anybody noticing that the cutter's sheen was
       that of hard-used ceramic, not metal.
         We hopped down from the hatch. Guillermo was the
       last out. A Molt who disembarked from a Fed vessel
       ahead of humans would be whipped to death for his
       presumption.
         Guillermo skulked away from us, heading toward a
       large freighter in the second row back from the river. A
       gang of Molt laborers was carrying cargo aboard from
       high-wheeled hand trucks.
       "Take it easy, stay together, and ignore the other people
       out on the streets tonight," Stephen said. His eyes passed
       over us, but they didn't appear to light anywhere. "If we
       do our jobs, there won't be a bit of excitement. That's 
       the way we want it."
       A dead man wouldn't have spoken with less emotion.
         We set off toward the Commandatura, three short blocks
       beyond the inland side of the field. Kiley and Lightbody
       carried the packing crate. We wore a mix of garments
       picked up on Federation planets, exactly like the crews of
       ships in Back Worlds' trade. None of the men or Molts on
       errands about nearby vessels gave us more than a passing
       glance.
         The port was fenced off from the town of Corpus
       Christi. The pivoting gate was open, and the Molts in
       the guard shack were eating some stringy form of rations.
       Nearby was a gunpit. The multitube laser there was also
       crewed by Molts.
       The street cutting the chord of the riverbend was paved.
       We sprinted to avoid a truck whose howling turbogenera-
       tor powered hub-center electric motors in all six wheels.
    A Molt drove the vehicle, but he was obviously under the
    direction of the man on the seat beside him. The human
    waved a bottle out his side window and jeered us.
     "Wait a little, buddy," Kiley said. He was breathing
    hard because of the load of weapons. "Just you wait.
     The street leading directly to the Commandatura was
    paved also and lighted. Stephen, walking with the stiff-
    legged gait of a big dog on unfamiliar territory, led us
    down one of the parallel alleys instead.
     Buildings in this part of Corpus Christi were wooden
    and raised a meter above the ground on stilts. Individual
    structures had porches, but they weren't connected into
    a continuous boardwalk between adjacent buildings. We
    walked in the street itself, one more group among the
    sailors and garrison personnel.
     If the town had a sewer system, it'd backed up during
    some recent high water. Enough light came from the signs
    and screened windows of the taverns for us to avoid large
    chunks of rubbish. Vehicular traffic disposed of most of
    the waste by grinding it into the mud in a fetid, gooey
    mass. The air was hot and still, and insects whined.
     A flung chair tore through the screen of a building we'd
    passed. Inside, a shot thumped. My right hand reached for
    the cutting bar that I didn't have.
     "Keep moving!" Stephen ordered without raising his
    voice.
     "Yellowknife! Yellowknife!" men shouted in unison
    above a rumble of generalized rage. Crewmen from the
    warship were fighting with port personnel, nothing for us
    to worry about.
     My right hand clenched and unclenched in sweaty des-
    peration. Bells rang. A van tore past, towing a trailer with
    barred sides and top. We walked on.
     The Commandatura was a two-story masonry building
    with an arching facade that added another half story. It
    stood on a low mound, but floodwater had risen a meter
    up the stonework at some point in the past. A double
    staircase led to the lighted front door on the second story.
    CONSTABULARY was painted in large letters on the wall
    above the street-level entrance on the side.
    There were twenty steps from the street to the Com-
    mandatura's front door. Originally there'd been a park in
    front of the building, but it was full of rubbish now. The
    governor and folk of quality wouldn't spend enough time
    here to make the effort of beautifying it worthwhile.
    The door was unlocked. Stephen entered. I gestured
    Kiley and Lightbody in ahead of me, then helped them
    snatch open the lid of the crate of weapons. The feel of
    my cutting bar was like a drink of water in a desert.
    No one was at the counter on the left side of the
    anteroom. The plaque on the door to the right read COM-
    MUNICATIONS. A hallway ran past that room toward the
    back of the building. The door beside the commo room
    was steel with the stenciled legend KEEP LOCKED AT ALL
    TIMES. Other doors were wooden panels, some of them
    ajar.
    Stephen signaled Kiley and Maher to watch the hall,
    then tapped his own chest before pointing to the commo
    room. Lightbody gripped the door handle and rotated it
    minusculely to be sure that it wasn't locked.
    He nodded. The rest of us poised. Stephen lunged in
    behind the opening door.
      No one was inside the windowless room. The atmos-
    phere was stifling and at least 10' C above the muggy
    heat outside. The air-conditioning vents in the floor and
    ceiling were silent; banks of electronics clicked and mut-
    tered among themselves.
      "I've got it," I whispered, stepping to the box that
    controlled the building's own alarm system.
    "Just because you can breathe the muck here," Loomis
    said in genuine indignation, "that's no cause to let your
    air-handling system go like this. What kind of people are
    these?"
      On Venus, as surely as in interstellar space, a break-
    down in the air system meant the end of life. Loomis'
    father supervised a public works crew in Betaport, but I
    think we all felt a degree of the same outrage.
    "Lightbody, watch Jeremy's back," Stephen said. "The
    rest of you come along. There's somebody supposed to be
    on duty, and they may not have gone far."
     The job centered me so completely that I wasn't con-
    scious of setting the cutting bar down to open my tool
    kit. After I disconnected the alarms, I went to work on
    the port's defenses.
     A vehicle clanging its alarm bell pulled up beside the
    building. My hand moved for the cutting bar as I looked
    at Lightbody in the hallway.
     He nodded and stepped out of my angle of vision. I
    heard the front door open, then close. Lightbody was back.
    "It's all right, sir," he whispered. "It's the Black Maria
    bringing a load of drunks to the lockup down below."
     I went back to work. A fire director in the southern
    gunpit controlled the four laser batteries. I couldn't touch
    the director itself, but its data came from the port radar
    and optical sensors. I switched them off, then used the tip
    of my bar to cut the power cable to their console. Sparks
    snapped angrily between strands of wire and the chassis,
    but the tool's ceramic blades insulated me.
     1 heard steps in the hallway. "It's Kiley," Lightbody
    said.
      There's four guys in the lounge," Kiley said as he
    joined Lightbody in the hall. "We're tying them up. Mister
    Gregg didn't want you to worry, sir."
     I nodded. I'd found the circuitry powering Corpus
    Christi's landline telephones. I could shut the system
    down, but I wasn't sure I wanted to. If the phones
    went out, people all over the community would run
    around looking for the cause of the problem. Some of
    them would come here.
     The steel door clanked. Somebody had rested his hand
    against the other side as he worked the lock. I moved
    to the commo room doorway with my cutting bar; Kiley
    and Lightbody flattened themselves on either side of the
    steel door.
     The panel swung inward. A Fed in a gray tunic and CON-
    STABULARY brassards on both arms stepped through. He
    had a cut on his forehead and an angry look on his face.
     Hey!" he snarled. "If you fuckers can't get the air-
    conditioning fixed, we're going to have somebody croak
    in the cells down there!"
    He glared at us momentarily. Concrete steps led down
    behind him to a room full of echoing metal and alcoholic
    vomit. I grabbed his throat in my left hand and jerked
    him forward. Lightbody clubbed the Fed behind the ear
    as Kiley pulled the door closed.
      I let the Fed fall as a dead weight. I drew a deep breath.
    Lightbody took the man's wrist and pulled him into the
    commo room.
    "I think he's still alive, sir," Lightbody said. He poised
    the buttplate of his carbine over the man's temple. "Do
    you want me to ...
    "Yes, tie him," I said. I was pretty sure that wouldn't
    have been Lightbody's first suggestion, Lightbody
    shrugged and undid the Fed's belt for the purpose.
      "Here's the others coming," Kiley murmured.
    "Come on," I heard Stephen's muffled voice say. "We'll
    head back to the cutter."
    I went to the console and dumped the phones after all.
    The more confusion, the better ...
      "Wouldn't it be better to go to the new ship?" Loomis
    asked.
    "Only if we knew which it was," Stephen replied in a
    tone so emotionless that I shivered.
    I opened the unit's front access plate. There were three
    circuit cards behind it. I pulled them.
    Stephen stuck his head'into the commo room. "Trou-
    ble?" he said, glancing at the unconscious Fed.
    "No sir, not so's you'd mention it," Lightbody said.
    The unlocked stairwell door swung open. Stephen
    turned. Loomis tried to point his shotgun but the
    steel panel banged closed again, knocking the gun bar-
    rel up.
    "Grubbies!" shrieked a voice attenuated by the armored
    door.
    "Outside!" I shouted as I zipped my kit closed over a
    jumbled handful of tools.
    Stephen pushed the door open and fired his flashgun
    down the stairs one-handed. Metal in the cells below
    vaporized, then burned in a white flash. Stephen clanged
    the door shut again.
    We bolted out the front of the Commandatura, carry-
    ing our weapons openly. Lightbody jumped aside to let
    me lead.
      The van towing the cage was pulled up to the side door.
    Nobody was inside the vehicle, but the diesel engine was
    running. A Fed ran out the constabulary door. Kiley fired,
    knocking the man's legs out from under him with a charge
    of buckshot in the thighs.
      The constabulary door banged against its jamb and
    bounced a few centimeters open. Stephen's laser spiked
    at a nearly reciprocal angle to that of his first bolt. Men
    screamed as more burning metal sprayed.
      I'd never seen controls laid out like those of the van.
    The steering wheel was in the center of the front com-
    partment. There were hand controls to either side of the
    wheel, but no foot pedals.
    "I'll drive, sir!" Loomis cried, handing me his shotgun.
    I slid across the bench seat as the others piled in.
    Loomis twisted the left handgrip and let a return spring
    slide it to the dash panel, then pulled the right grip out
    to its stop. The diesel lugged momentarily before it
    roared, chirping the tires. We pulled away from the
    Commandatura. The door of the trailer for prisoners wasn't
    latched. It swung open and shut, ringing loudly each time.
    Loomis turned us and headed up the paved street direct-
    ly toward the gate. The trailer oscillated from side to side.
    It swiped a stand of pickled produce, hurling brine and
    glass shards across the front of the nearest building, then
    swung the other way and hit a cursing pedestrian who'd
    managed to dodge the careening van.
      A siren sounded from the spaceport. It can't have had
    anything to do with us, there wasn't time. Stephen reached
    past Loomis from the other side and flicked a dash control.
    Our bell began to clang.
      Three Molts were swinging a gate of heavy steel tubing
    across the port entrance. Their officer, a human wearing
    a gray tunic, saw our van coming. He waved his rifle to 
    halt us.
    The four Molts who crewed the port-defense laser were
    watching the commotion among the ships on the field. The
    siren came from the Yellowknife. All the Fed warship's
    external lights were on, flooding her surroundings with
    white glare.
    Loomis steered for the narrowing gap between the gate
    and its concrete post. The Molts continued to trudge for-
    ward. The officer threw his rifle to his shoulder and aimed.
    Stephen's flashgun stabbed. The Fed's chest exploded.
    Our left fender scraped the gatepost. My door screeched
    back in an accordion pleat. The right-side wheels rode
    over the bottom bar of the gate. The second and third bars
    bent down but the sturdy framework as a whole didnt
    flatten.
      The van tilted sideways to 45', then flipped over onto
    its roof in sparks and shrieking.
    I was in the backseat, tangled with Tuching and Kiley.
    Lightbody had wound up in front. Stephen was kicking
    open the door on his side and Loomis lay halfway through
    the shattered windshield. The van's wheels spun above
    us till Lightbody had the presence of mind to rotate a
    handgrip and disengage the transmission.
    One of the Molts lay pinned between the pavement and
    the twisted gate. He moaned in gasping sobs that pulsed
    across his entire body.
    The gatepost had stripped off the sliding door in back
    before we went over. I crawled out. The gunpit crew were
    running to their multitube laser.
      The leading Molt wore a white sash-of-office. Stephen
    shot him. The bolt hit the right edge of the alien's cara-
    pace, spinning the corpse sideways in a blast of steam to
    trip another member of the gun crew. Stephen bent and
    snatched the carbine which Lightbody had thrust through
    the window as he started to wriggle from the van.
    I still held Loomis' shotgun. I raised it, aiming for the
    Molt climbing into the seat on the left side of the gun
    carriage.
      My target was ten meters away. Stephen had taught me
    that a shotgun wasn't an area weapon: it had to be aimed
    to be effective. The Molt's mauve plastron wobbled, but
    not too much, over the trough between the side-by-side
    barrels. The charge of shot would kick the gunner out of
    his seat, his chest shattered in a splash of brown ichor. All
    I had to do was pull the trigger.
     I couldn't pull the trigger. I couldn't kill anything this
    way, in the dispassion that distance brought. Not even
    though the laser's six-tube circular array depressed and
    traversed toward me at the Molt's direction.
     Stephen shot the gunner in the head. The Molt went into
    spastic motion as if he was trying to swim but his limbs
    belonged to four different individuals.
     Another Molt jumped into the right-hand seat. Stephen
    worked the bolt of his rifle without taking the butt from his
    shoulder and blew the back off the second gunner's trian-
    gular skull also. The last member of the crew disentangled
    himself from his dead leader, stood, and immediately fell
    flailing.
     "Come on!" Stephen shouted. He set the carbine on the
    pavement beside him and braced his hands against the
    van's quarterpanel. "We'll tilt this back on its wheels!"
     I handed the shotgun to Lightbody and ran toward the
    gunpit. Loomis pulled himself the rest of the way through
    the windshield and rested on all fours in front of the
    van. His palms left bloody prints on the concrete, but
    if he could move, he was in better condition than I'd
    feared.
     A 300-tonne freighter midway in the second row fluffed
    her thrusters. The plume of bright plasma wobbled toward
    the town as it cooled, borne on the evening breeze from
    the river. The engine test would go unremarked by Feds
    in the port area in the present confusion, but for us it
    identified the vessel Piet and his men had captured.
     The dead Molts had fallen from the gun's turntable.
    I sat in the left seat and checked the control layout:
    heel-and-toe pedals for elevation and traverse, a keyboard
    for the square 20-cm display tilted up from between my
    knees.
     The laser hummed in readiness beside me. The tubes
    were pumped by a fusion bottle at the back of the pit.
    One such unit could have driven all four guns, but the
    Fed planners had gone to the extra expense of running

 each
    laser array off a dedicated power source.
    If there'd been a common power plant, I could probably
    have shut it down from the Commandatura. At the time
    that would have seemed like a good idea, but I'd have
    regretted it now.
      Gunports fell open along the Yellowknife's centerline,
    black rectangles against the gleaming metal hull. The
    muzzle of a plasma cannon slid out. The gunners began
    to slew their weapon to bear on the captured freighter.
    Loomis knelt with his hands pressed to his face. Stephen
    and the other three crew members rocked the van sideways,
    then pulled it back and gathered their strength for a final
    push. Either they'd unhitched the trailer, or the crash had
    broken its tongue.
      My targeting screen set a square green frame over the
    bow of the Yellowknife. I keyed a 1 mil/second clock-
    wise traverse into the turntable control. A hydraulic motor
    whined beneath me.
      The van rolled onto its right side in a crunch of glass,
    then up on its wheels again as my friends shouted their
    triumph. The motor was still snorting. The diesel must
    have been a two-stroke or it would have seized by now
    for being run upside down.
      The manual firing switch was a red handle mounted on
    the gun carriage itself, rather than part of the keyboard.
    I threw it home against a strong spring, then locked it in
    place with the sliding bolt.
      Flux hundreds of times more concentrated than that of
    Stephen's flashgun pulsed from the six barrels in turn as
    the array slowly rotated its fury along the Yellowknife's
    hull. I jumped from the gun carriage and ran to the van as
    Stephen tossed Loomis into the back. He piled in besidle
    Lightbody in the driver's seat.
      Metal curled from the Yellowknife in dazzling w1lite
    streamers. The pulses hammering the hull would make
    her interior ring like a bell.
    The laser array was a defense against the organic ves-
    sels of the Chay. No hostile human ship would dare
    land with its thrusters exposed to the port's fire, but
    the Yellowknife was too solidly constructed for the flux
    to penetrate her broadside.
     The line of blazing metal slid a handbreadth beneath
    the open gunports instead of through them. I'd aimed too
    hastily or the Fed gunners hadn't properly bore-sighted
    their weapon.
     We accelerated toward the captured freighter. A wheel
    was. badly out of alignment. The studded tire screamed
    against its fender, throwing sparks out behind us. Another
    ship lit its thrusters to the north edge of the field.
     The Yellowknife fired a plasma cannon. The intense
    rainbow flash shadowed my bones through the flesh of
    my hand. The laser array erupted in white fire. The fusion
    plant continued to discharge in a blue corona from the
    fused power cable.
     Part of the slug of charged particles missed the gun
    mechanism and blew out the walls of a building across
    the street. The wooden roof collapsed on the wreckage
    and began to bum.
     A cutter-our cutter-lifted from the edge of the field.
    It sailed toward the Yellowknife at the speed of a man
    running. Loomis screamed in terror as he realized the
    vessel was in an arc only five meters high at the point
    it would intersect our track.
     Stephen grabbed the steering wheel with his left hand
    and spun it clockwise. The van skidded in a right-hand
    turn. The rubbing tire blew and we fishtailed.
     The cutter passed ahead of us in the iridescent glare of
    its thruster. Its skids touched the concrete and bounced the
    vessel up again. A human figure leaped from the dorsal
    batch, tumbling like a rag doll.
     Riflemen in the Yellowknife's open hatch shot vainly
    at the oncoming cutter. The siren continued to scream.
    A plasma cannon fired, but the weapon didn't bear on
    anything: the bolt punished the sky with a flood of rav-
    ening ions,
     Stephen thrust his flashgun into the backseat. I grabbed
    it. He opened his door and hung out, gripping the frame
    with his huge left hand as Lightbody fought to brake
    the van.
     Stephen straightened, jerking Piet off the pavement and
    into the van with us by the belt of his trousers. A wisp of
    exhaust had singed Piet's tunic as he bailed out.
    The cutter slanted into the bow of the Yellowknife. The
    light ceramic hull shattered like the shell of an egg flung
    to the ground, but the Federation warship rocked back
    on its landing skids from the impact. Steam gushed from
    gunports and a started seam, enveloping the Yellowknife's
    stem.
    "A feedline broke!" Tuching, an engine crewman,
    shouted.
    Lightbody steered toward the captured freighter again.
    He had to struggle with the shredded tire and Piet squirming
    to sit up on Stephen's lap beside him.
    The wreckage of the cutter fell back from the Yellow-
    knife. The warship's bow was dished in and blackened;
    smoky flames shot from an open gunport.
      A green-white flash lifted the Yellowknife's stern cen-
    timeters off the ground. The CRACK! of the explosion
    was lightning-sharp and as loud as the end of the world.
    The van spun a three-sixty, either from the shock wave or
    because Lightbody twitched convulsively in surprise.
    We straightened and wobbled the last hundred meters
    to the freighter waiting for us with the main hatch open.
    "Not a feedline," Piet said in rich satisfaction. "An 
    injector came adrift and they tried to run their auxiliary 
    power plant without cooling. They'll play hell getting that 
    ship in shape to chase us!"
      I suppose Guillermo was at the controls of the captured
    vessel, for she started to lift while Piet and the rest of us
    were still in the entry hold.
     If the three remaining laser batteries had human crews, 
    they might have shot us out of the sky. Molts  dont
    assume in a crisis that anything moving was an enemy.
    Therefore we survived.

             ST. LAWRENCE
    
    Day 319
    
    We watched the double line of prisoners dragging the
    thruster nozzle on a sledge from the captured freighter,
    the 17Abraxis, to the gully where Salomon had landed the
    Oriflamme. The Molts-there were thirty-one of them-
    chanted a tuneless, rhythmic phrase.
     Two of the freighter's human crew had been wounded
    during the capture. The remaining ten were silent, but they
    at least gave the impression of putting their weight against
    the ropes. Lightbody and Loomis, watching with shotguns,
    wouldn't have killed a captured Fed for slacking; but at
    least in Lightbody's case, that's because Piet had given
    strict orders about how to treat the prisoners.
     Lightbody's perfect universe would contain no living
    idolators; Jeude's death had made him even less tolerant
    than he was at the start of the voyage. The Fed captives
    were wise not to try his forbearance.
     "Rakoscy says the communications officer is going to
    pull through," Piet remarked. I was worried about that."
     "That Fed worried me about other things than him tak-
    ing a bullet through the chest," I said. I wasn't angry-
    or frightened, now. Neither had I forgotten driving across
    the spaceport under fire because the commo officer of 17
    Abraxis had gotten off an alarm message before Dole shot
    him out of his console.
     The gully contained vegetation and a little standing
    water, and the defilade location saved the Oriflamme from
    exhaust battering when Piet brought our prize in close by.
    Though the air was only warm, the sun was a huge red
    curtain on the eastern sky. That sight wouldn't change
    until the stellar corona engulfed St. Lawrence: the planet
    had stopped rotating on its axis millions of years before.
    "He was doing his job," Stephen said mildly. "Pretty
    good at it, too. There aren't so many men like that around
    that I'd want to lose one more."
    "Fortunately," Piet added with a smile, "the staff of
    the Yellowknife hadn't plotted the vessels on the ground
    at Corpus Christi, so they didn't have any idea which ship
    was under attack."
    We were in the permanent shade of four stone pillars,
    the fossilized thighbones of a creature that must in life
    have weighed twenty tonnes if not twice that. The bones
    had weathered out of the softer matrix rock, but they too
    were beginning to crumble away from the top.
      I turned my head to gaze at the tower of black stone.
    "Hard to imagine anything so big roaming this place," I
    said. Vegetation now grew only in low points like the
    arroyo, and we hadn't found any animal larger than a
    fingernail.
      "A long time ago," Stephen said with emphasis. "Who
    knows? Maybe they developed space travel and emigrated
    ten million years back."
    "Put your backs in it, you cocksucking whoresons,"
    came the faint fury of Winger's voice from the underside
    of 17 Abraxis, "or as Christ is my witness, you'll still be
    here when your fucking beards are down to your knees!"
    Piet frowned at the blasphemy (obscenity didn't bother
    him), but the men were far enough away that he must have
    decided he could overlook it. The job of removing thrust-
    er nozzles-without dockyard tools-after they'd been
    torqued into place by use was just as difficult as Winger
    had grumbled it would be when we were on Clapperton.
    "They've got seven," Stephen said quietly. "This last
    one and we're out of here."
      "If we don't take spares," I said, deliberately turning
    my head toward the Oriflamme to avoid Piet's eyes.
    He glared at me anyway. "The prisoners can get back to
    Riel on four out of twelve thrusters," he said. "They can't
    get back on two. We aren't going to leave forty-three men
    here on the chance that somebody will come by before
    they all starve."
     Twelve humans and thirty-one Molts. All of them "men"
    to Piet, and you'd best remember it when you spoke in his
    hearing.
     "You could manage on two, Piet," Stephen said with a
    grin. "I'll bet you could take her home on one, though I
    guess we'd have to gut the hull to get her out of the gravity
    well to begin with."
     I knew Stephen was joking to take the sting out of Piet's
    rebuke to me. I'd promised Winger that I'd try to get him
    a spare nozzle, though.
     Piet chuckled and squeezed my hand. "All things are
    possible with the Lord, Stephen," he said, "but I wouldn't
    care to put him to that test. And, Jeremy-"
     He sobered.
     "-I appreciate what you've tried to do. I know the
    motor crew is concerned about the wear we'll get from
    tungsten, and they have a right to be. But if these nozzles
    don't last us, we'll find further replacements along the
    way. We won't leave men to die."
     I nodded. I looked up at the femur of a creature more
    ancient than mankind and just possibly more ancient than
    Earth. Black stone, waiting for the sun to devour it.
     A tiny, intense spark shone in the sky where the thigh
    pointed. I jumped to my feet.
     "There's a-"
     "Incoming vessel!" Piet bellowed as he rose from a
    seated position to a dead run in a single fluid motion.
    "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! If she crashes, it could be
    anywhere!"
     Stephen and I followed at our best speed, but Piet was
    aboard the Oriflamme while we were still meters from the
    cockpit steps.
    
    "This is close enough," Stephen ordered, dropping into a
    squat a hundred meters from the strange vessel's starboard
    side. "This swale doesn't look like much, but it'll deflect
    their exhaust if they try to fry us. Can't imagine anything
    else we need to worry about, but don't get cocky."
    Piet and the rest of us knelt beside him. Stephen, com-
    mander of his county's militia before he ever set foot on
    a starship, was giving the orders for the moment.
    Dole's ten men were still jogging to where they'd have
    an angle on the stranger's bow. Fifty-tonne freighters built
    like this one on the Back Worlds weren't likely to have
    hatches both port and starboard, but we weren't taking
    the risk.
      Stampfer was half a kilometer behind us, aligning the
    4-cm plasma weapon 17 Abraxis carried for use against
    Chay raiders. The Oriflamme's guns were useless while
    she was in the gully. Salomon, Winger, and the bulk of
    the crew weren't going to be ready her to lift for an hour
    or more despite desperate measures.
    "You'd think," I said, "that they'd have signaled they
    were coming in."
    Stephen shrugged. "Maybe they don't have commo," he
    said. "The Feds'd leave the air tanks off to save money if
    they could get away with it."
    "Southerns, sir," Lightbody said unexpectedly-
    Stephen and I looked at him; Piet grinned and continued
    to watch the strange vessel. "This one's Southern Cross
    construction, sir," Lightbody amplified. "Not Fed. The
    pairs of thrusters are too far apart for Feds."
    The vessel's hatch clanged twice as those inside jerked
    it sideways by hand rather than hydraulic pressure. Six
    figures got out. They jumped as far as they could to clear
    the patch of thruster-heated ground.
    One of the newcomers was a woman; common enough
    for a Terran crew, though I heard Lightbody growl. None
    of the strangers was armed, and their assorted clothing was
    entirely civilian.
      Piet got up and strode to meet them.
    "Guide a little left, Piet," Stephen said as he trotted to
    Piet's right side. Stephen's left index finger indicated a
    30' angle. I moved over to give Piet room but he ignored
    the direction.
    "Piet," Stephen said calmly, "Stampfer will have that
    plasma cannon trained on the open hatchway. I trust
    Stampfer, but I don't much trust junk he crabbed
    out of a Federation freighter. I'd really rather you
    didn't take the chance of something unlikely happen-
    ing."
     From the tone of Stephen's voice, he could have been
    asking where to place a piece of furniture.
     Piet clicked his tongue, but he bore to the left as 
    directed.
    "Where would you be without me to fuss over, Stephen?"
    he murmured.
     Possible answers to that falsely light question rang
    through my head like hammerblows.
     "Sirs?" the leader of the newcomers asked. "Are you
    from the North American Federation?"
     He spoke Trade English with a distinct Southern accent,
    A good dozen additional people, including a few more
    women, climbed from the vessel behind him. They moved
    with greater circumspection than the initial party.
     The ten of us spread slightly as we bore down on the
    strangers. We weren't being deliberately threatening, but a
    group of grim, armed men must have looked as dangerous
    as an avalanche.
     "We are not," Piet said in a proud, ringing voice. "We
    are citizens of the Free State of Venus."
     "Oh, thank God!" cried the woman at the leader's side.
    She knelt and kissed a crucifix folded in both her hands.
     I grabbed Lightbody by the front collar and jerked him
    around to face me. "No!" I shouted.
     I held the spacer till the light eased back into his eyes
    and he began to breathe normally again. "Sorry, sir," he
    muttered, bobbing his head in contrition.
     Everyone was staring at us. I flushed and lowered the
    cutting bar in my right hand. Lightbody hadn't done any-
    thing overt.
     I think Piet understood. I know Stephen did, because
    he gave me a slow smile and said, "If you ever change
    sides, friend, I'm not going to let you get in arm's length
    alive. Hey?"
     In context, that was high praise.
     The newcomer's leader embraced Piet. "Sir," he said,
    "I am Nicolas Rodrigo and these are my people, twenty
    of us."
     I eyed the group quickly. If there were only twenty, then
    they were all in plain sight by now. There were no Molts
    in the group, surprisingly.
     "Until forty days ago, we maintained the colony on
    Santos," Rodrigo said. "Then two Federation warships,
    the Yellowknife and Keys to the Kingdom, arrived under
    a beast named Prothero. He-"
     The woman had risen again. At Prothero's name, she
    spat. Our eyes meshed, then slid sideways. Quite an attrac-
    tive little thing in a plump, dark-haired fashion. Young; 18
    or 20 at the outside, as compared with Rodrigo's 35 or so.
     "-told us that the Southern Cross had been placed
    under President Pleyal's protection, and that he was taking
    control of Santos on behalf of the Federation. He-"
     "What do you have aboard your ship?" Stephen inter-
    jected abruptly.
     "What?" Rodrigo said. "Nothing, only food. Ah-we
    took back the Hercules, this ship, on Corpus Christi.
    There was confusion when a freighter crashed into the
    Yellowknife."
     Kiley chuckled. "I wonder if them poor bastards'll ever
    figure out quite what happened," he said.
     "Come along back to our ships, then," Piet said. "We'll
    be more comfortable there, and I don't want my men I've
    left there to be concerned."
     The bosun's party was moving toward us, slowed by
    their weight of weapons and, for a few of them, armor.
    "Mister Dole?" Piet called. "Set five of your men to secure
    the ship, if you will."
     Stampfer must have realized the situation was peaceful;
    he tilted the muzzle of the light cannon up like an excla-
    mation point above the hasty barricade of crates across
    the hold of 17 Abraxis. Maybe the gesture helped the
    others relax.
     Me, I was still trembling in reaction to a few minutes
    before, when I stopped Lightbody from blowing a pretty
    woman's head off.
    
    "Prothero put his own men on Santos as overseers,"
    Rodrigo explained, drinking a thimble glass of slash cut
    three to one with water. "The plantations are worked by
    Molts, of course. We don't-we didn't export, we just sup-
    plied convoys in the Back Worlds trade stopping over."
      The Southerns mixed freely with the Oriflamme's crew.
    A joint party had -gone back to the Hercules, for supplies
    including Santos wine. The Federation prisoners watched
    sullenly as they resumed hauling heavy thruster nozzles.
      Piet, Stephen, Lacaille, and I sat with the Southern
    leaders at a trestle table on the shaded side of the gully.
    Rodrigo's wife, Carmen, was at his side across the table,
    occasionally eyeing me as she raised the glass to her lips.
    She wasn't actually drinking.
      "I know Prothero," Lacaille said. "I don't know any- 
    body who likes or trusts him, but he's ... Able enough.
    In his way."
    The Southerns watched the Fed castaway sidelong,

 
    uncertain about his status. I guess we all were uncertain,
         Lacaille himself included.
         "The Hercules was on Santos when the Federation
         ships arrived," Rodrigo continued. "Captain Cinpeda
         commanded."
         A short, dark Southern nodded. He'd drunk his slash
         neat. His eyes never left the carafe I'd deliberately
         slid out of his reach.
         "Prothero filled the Hercules with food and put his
         own crew aboard," Rodrigo said. "It was no more than
         piracy. But how could we fight with no warships of our
         own?"
         Stephen's lips smiled; his eyes did not. Ships don't
         fight, men do. And Rodrigo wasn't that sort of man.
         "Prothero took us with him on the Yellowknife," Rodrigo
         said. "The Keys to the Kingdom was his flagship, but she
         heeded repairs. He left her on Santos while he went 
         ahead to Riel."
         "She's a great, cranky tub of eight hundred tonnes, the
         Keys," Lacaille said. "I'm not surprised she broke down.
         Her water pumps again?"
           Cinpeda nodded to Lacaille with respect.
         "They can't be depopulating all the Southern colonies,"
         I said. "Can they?"
         "I think," Carmen Rodrigo said with her eyes lowered,
         "that the decision was Commander Prothero's. I believe
         his intentions toward me were ... not proper. Though he
         already has a mistress!"
         "Prothero's always operated as though the Middle Ways
         were his own kingdom," Lacaille said. "I doubt he was
         acting completely on orders."
         "We took our chance when the emergency siren
         sounded," Rodrigo said. "We thought it was a Chay raid.
         The prize crew had left the Hercules, so we went aboard
         and lifted as soon as the computer gave us a course."
         "To home," Carmen said. "We're going back to Rio.
         Better Pleyal a continent away than Prothero in the next
         cabin."
         There was an edge in her tone that I thought I under-'
         stood. Carmen Rodrigo might or might not be a virtuous
         wife; I had my doubts. But she certainly intended to 
         make any decisions of that sort on her own.
         "Why this course, to St. Lawrence?" Piet asked sud-
         denly. "It's a week's transit in the wrong direction if 
         you intend to return to the Solar System."
         "Reaction mass," Cinpeda grunted. "I wonder, master,
         could you. .
           He extended his tiny glass. I filled it from the 
         carafe. "Ali, thank you, thank you indeed, master," the 
         Southern captain said. He shuddered as he tossed the 
         shot down, but his eyes gained a focus that had been 
         missing a moment before.
         "Reaction mass," Cinpeda repeated. "Prothero's crew,
         they'd refilled the air tanks when they landed on Riel, 
         but they hadn't hooked up to the water yet. Food we had, 
         air we had, but there wasn't water for ten days under 
         power."
         "There is water here, isn't there?" Rodrigo asked in 
         sudden concern as he gazed around him. The planet must 
         have looked like a desert from orbit, and the slight 
         greenery of this arroyo wasn't much more inviting.
         "We've bored a well," Piet said. "You can draw from
         it, now that we've topped off."
         "If you were trying to escape," Stephen asked, "why
         did you land by us-and without- signaling?"
     "Fucking collimator's out," Cinpeda said with a scowl.
    "On the laser communicator. Fucking thing drifts. And the
    VHF transmitter, it's been wonky since they installed it."
     He looked as though he was going to ask for another
    drink. I shook my head minutely.
     "We thought you'd done the same thing we did,"
    Rodrigo said, answering the first part of the question.
    "Come here to get away from Prothero. We knew other
    ships escaped when we did."
     "Didn't even notice this one before we landed," Cinpeda
    said with a nod toward the Oriflamme. "What is it-don't
    you reflect radar?"
     I shrugged. Ceramic hulls did reflect radar, but not as
    strongly as a similar expanse of metal. The Oriflamme was
    an outcrop in the gully to a radar operator unless the fellow
    was actively looking for a Venerian ship here.
     "And there was no reason to come to this place," Car-
    mien added, "except to avoid being on Riel. So we thought
    you might be from the Southern Cross too, until we saw
    your guns."
     "Does your vessel carry guns?" Stephen said. There was
    no challenge in his tone, only the certainty of a man who
    will be answered.
     "A small cannon," Rodrigo said. "For the Chay, and
    perhaps not much use against them. We can't defend
    ourselves against you, sirs."
     Piet stood up with a nod. "Nor do you need to," he said.
    "We have our own needs and can be of little help to you,
    but we certainly won't hinder."
     "How long will you remain on this planet?" Carmen
    asked without looking-pointedly without looking-at
    me.
     "No longer than it takes to mount two more thruster
    nozzles, madam," Piet said with a wry grin. "Which is
    some hours longer than I wish it would be, now that
    you've arrived."
     "Are we so terrible?" Carmen said in surprise.
     "The people who may follow you are," I explained
    gently. "The Feds know how much reaction mass they
    left on your ship, and they've got the same pilotry data
    as you do to pick the possible landfalls."
    "But we'll deal with them, if it comes to that," Stephen
    said, hefting his flashgun. His eyes had no life and no
    color, and his voice was as dry as the wind.
    No Federation force would be half so terrible as we
    ourselves were.
      "Piet?" I said as I stood up. "The Abraxis has a first-rate
    commo suite. If you'll let Guillermo help me, I can swap
    it into the Hercules in less time than it takes Winger to
    fit the nozzles."
    "That leaves the Abraxis without. . ." Piet said. He
    smiled. "Ali. One ship or the other."
    "And the choice to the men with the guns," Stephen
    said. He was smiling also, though his expression and Piet's
    had little in common. "As usual."
    "Yes," Piet said. "Go ahead."
    "Guillermo!" I shouted as I ran for the forward hatch
    and my tool kit. "We've got a job!"
    The Oriflamme's siren shut off as Guillermo and I clam-
    bered aboard the 17 Abraxis. Piet had held the switch
    down for thirty seconds to call the crew aboard. Me
    were scattered from here to the Hercules. Hell, some had
    probably wandered off in the other direction for reasons
    best known to themselves.
      When the alarm sounded, Fed prisoners returning the
    sledge to the 17 Abraxis slacked the drag ropes to see what
    was happening. The Molts continued to pace forward.
    Maher, one of the pair on guard this watch, punched a
    Fed between the shoulder blades with his rifle butt.
    The prisoner yelped. He turned. Maher prodded his face
    with the gun muzzle. The Feds resumed the duties they'd
    been set.
    "We don't want to screw up the navigational equipment
    when we lift this," I said to Guillermo as I tapped the
    freighter's communications module. "Do you know if any
    of the hardware or software is common?"
      "No, Jeremy," the Molt said. "I could build it from
    parts, of course, since one of my ancestors did that a
    thousand years ago."
      Guillermo's thorax clicked his race's equivalent of
    laughter. His three-fingered hands played across the
    navigation console. "What we can do, though, is to
    bring up the AI and keep it running while we separate
    the communications module and attempt to run it."
     "Right," I said. Molts were supposed to operate by
    rote memory while humans displayed true, innovative
    intelligence. That's what made us superior to them. You
    bet.
     I bent to check the join between the module and the
    main console. The speaker snapped, "Presidential-
     I jumped upright, grabbing my cutting bar with both
    hands to unhook it. The only reason I carried the weapon
    was I hadn't thought to remove it after we returned from
    the Hercules.
     "-Vessel Keys to the Kingdom calling ships on St.
    Lawrence! Do not attempt to lift. You will be boarded
    by Federation personnel. Any attempt at resistance will
    cause you both to be destroyed by gunfire. Respond at
    once! Over."
     The commo screen was blanked by a nacreous overlay:
    the caller could, but chose not to, broadcast video.
     "Stay in the image!" I said to Guillermo. Venerian ships
    didn't have Molt crew members.
     The voice had said, ". . . you both. . ." The Feds had
    made the same mistake as Captain Cinpeda: they'd seen
    the metal-hulled vessels, but they'd missed the Oriflamme
    in her gully.
     My fingers clicked over the module's keyboard. It was
    an excellent unit, far superior to the normal run of commo
    gear we produced on Venus. I careted a box in the upper
    left corner of the pearly field for the Oriflamme.
      Piet looked at me, opening his mouth. I ignored him and
    said, Freighter David out of Clapperton to Presidential
    Vessel, we're laid up here replacing a feedline and our
    consort's commo is screwed up. What the hell's got into
    you, over?"
     Guillermo stood with his plastron bowed outward. He
    scratched the grooves between belly plates with a finger
    from either hand. I'd never seen him do anything of the
    sort before. The activity looked slightly disgusting-and
    innocent, like a man picking his nose.,
    "Who are you?" demanded the voice from the module.
    "Who is this speaking? Over!"
      Piet nodded approvingly. At least he thought we looked
    like the sort of folks you'd find on the bridge of a Feder-
    ation merchantman ...
    "This is Captain Jeremy Moore!" I said, tapping my
    chest with the point of my thumb. "Who are you, boyo?
    Some bleeding Molt, or just so pig-faced ugly that you're
    afraid to let us see you? Over!"
    Through the open hatch I saw men staggering aboard
    the Oriflamme. Sailors' lives involved both danger and
    hard work, but their normal activities didn't prepare them
    to run half a klick when the alarm sounded.
    The sledge sat beside the 17 Abraxis, ready to receive
    the eighth and final thruster nozzle. It had taken an hour,
    minimum, to transport each previous nozzle, and another
    hour to fit the tungsten forging into place beneath the
    Oriflamme.
      Guillermo balanced on one leg and stuck the other in the
    air. He poked at his crotch. I noticed that he'd dropped his
    sash onto my cutting bar on the deck, out of the module's
    camera angle.
      The pearl-tinged static dissolved into the face of a man
    who'd been handsome, some twenty years and twenty
    kilograms ago. At the moment he was mad enough to
    chew hull plates, exactly what I'd intended. Angry people
    lose perspective and miss details.
    "I'll tell you who I am!" he shouted. "I'm Commodore
    Richard Prothero, officer commanding the Middle Ways,
    and I'm going to have your guts for garters, boyo! My
    landing party will be down in twenty minutes. If there's
    so much as a burp from you, I'll blast a crater so deep
    it goes right on out the other side of the planet! Do you
    understand, civilian? Out!"
    Prothero's three quarters of the screen blanked com-
    pletely, to the black of dead air rather than a carrier 
    wave's pearly luminescence. Piet nodded again and crooked 
    his index finger to Guillermo and me.
      I didn't imagine that Prothero could intercept the laser
    link I'd formed between us and the Oriflamme, but we
    needn't take unnecessary risks. The necessary ones were
    bad enough.
    "You'll need more than your helmet," Stephen said in a
    voice as if waking from a dream. "Put the rest of your
    armor on, Jeremy."
    "When we lift, I'll put my suit on," I said. I wondered
    what I sounded like. Nothing human, I supposed. Very
    little of me was human when I slipped into this state.
    "The Federation warship orbiting St. Lawrence is an
    eight-hundred-tonner mounting twenty carriage guns."
      Piet's voice rang calmly through the tannoy in the ceiling
    of the forward hold. "We'll be lifting on seven engines, so
    we won't be as handy as I'd like. In order to return home,
    we must engage and destroy this enemy. With the Lord's
    help, my friends, we will destroy them and destroy every
    enemy of Venus!"
    Twelve of us waited in the hold. Kiley, Loomis, and
    Lightbody carried flashguns, but Stephen alone held his
    with the ease of a man drawing on an old glove.
    We'd had time to rig for action, but it would be tight
    working the big guns with everybody in hard suits. They
    were probably cheering Piet in the main hull. None of
    us did. For myself, I didn't feel much of anything, not
    even fear.
    "They must've landed on Riel just after we left," Maher
    said. "The Keys must. Pity they weren't another month
    putting their pumps to rights."
    "We'll lift as soon as the enemy ship is below the
    horizon," Piet continued, "and our marksmen have dealt
    with the Federation cutters. The enemy is in a hundred-
    and-six-minute orbit, so we'll have sufficient time to reach
    altitude before joining battle."
    Even on seven thrusters? Well, I'd take Piet's word for
    it. Aloud I said, "Lacaille says that the Keys is falling
    apart. You've seen the sort, older than your gramps and
    Fed-maintained as well. We'll give her the last push,
    is all."
    "Too right, sir!" Kiley said, nodding enthusiastically.
    He knew I was just cheering them up before we fought a
    ship with enough guns, men and tonnage to make six of
    us. All the sailors knew that-and appreciated it, maybe
    more than they appreciated me standing beside them now.
    They expected courage of a gentleman, but not empathy.
      Two exhaust flares winked in the sky. I lowered my
    visor. For the moment, the riflemen and I were present to
    protect the flashgunners from Feds who managed to get
    out of the landing vessels. I'd wear my suit when it was
    that or breathe vacuum; but I wouldn't put on that jointed
    ceramic coffin before I had to.
    "I'll take the right-hand one," Stephen said in a husky,
    horrid whisper. He clicked his faceshield down. "Wait for
    me to shoot. If anyone jumps the gun-if you survive the
    battle, my friend, you won't survive it long. On my oath
    as a gentleman."
    Almighty God," said Piet. "May Thy hand strengthen
    ours in Thy service today. Amen."
    Lacaille was suited up aboard the Oriflamme. He'd
    repeated that he wouldn't fight his own people; but he'd
    asked not to be left on the ground, either.
    We owed him that much. The prisoners locked for the
    moment in the hold of the 17 Abraxis would identify him
    quickly enough to survivors of the Federation landing
    party. Besides, Lacaille,was one of us now-whatever
    he said, wherever he was born.
    "Easy, gentlemen," Stephen said as he lifted his flashgun
    to his shoulder.
      The Fed boats leveled out from their descent and cruised
    toward the 17 Abraxis a hundred meters in the air. They
    were bigger than our cutter, almost the size of featherboats.
    They didn't act like they saw us. Small-craft optics are
    crude, and the Feds weren't expecting to find anything in
    the shadow of the arroyo.
      The nearer vessel slowed to a crawl while five meters
    in the air. It began to settle beside the freighter. Its 
    plasma exhaust flared in an oval pattern that swept stones as 
    big as my fist from the ground.
        Stephen fired. His bolt struck the side of the boat's
    thruster nozzle, close to the white-hot lip. The exhaust
    already sublimed tungsten from the nozzle's throat and
    left a black smear on the ground where the metal redepos-
    ited.
     The laser pulse heated the point it hit to a fractionally
    greater degree than the metal casing around it. The noz-
    zle lost cohesion. The side blew toward us in a bubble
    of green vapor as intense as the plasma that drove it.
    The rash of metal exploding was more dazzling than
    the flash.
     The vessel rolled clockwise on its axis and nosed in
    almost upside down. The dorsal hatch flew off. Members
    of the landing party flew out in a confusion of weapons
    and white tunics.
     The second craft was thirty meters in the air and a
    hundred meters beyond the first. Our three remaining
    flashgunners fired in near unison. Two of the bolts glanced
    from the cutter's hull, leaving deep scars in the metal and
    puffs of aluminum vapor in the air. The third man aimed
    better but to even less effect: his flux stabbed toward
    the nozzle but was smothered in the cloud of ionized
    exhaust.
     The boat rotated toward us. A port in its blunt bow
    gaped open. The riflemen beside me volleyed at the little
    vessel, flecking the hull when they hit.
     Stephen clacked the battery compartment closed and
    raised his reloaded flashgun. The muzzle of a twin-tube
    laser thrust from the Feds' gunport. Even pumped by the
    thruster, it couldn't seriously damage the Oriflamme's
    hull; but it could kill all of us in the hold, hard suits 
    or no.
     The vessel slid toward us in a shallow dive. Stephen
    fired.
     The thruster nozzle was only a corona beneath the
    craft s oncoming bow. A cataclysmic green flash lifted
    the vessel in what would have been a fatal loop if the
    pilot hadn't been incredibly good or incredibly lucky. The
    cutter screamed overhead and skidded along the ground
    on its belly for two hundred meters beyond the arroyo,
    strewing fragments of hull behind it.
      The Oriflamme's engines roared. The deck vibrated
    fiercely, but it would be a moment before thrust rose
    beyond equilibrium with our mass and we started to lift.
      Men started for the companionway to the main deck,
    cheering and clapping one another's shoulders with their
    gauntleted hands.
    My hard suit waited for me in a corner of the hold.
    I began to put it on, trying not to get rattled as I per-
    formed the unfamiliar, unpleasant task of locking myself
    into armor. Because Stephen and Lightbody helped me, I
    was suited up within a minute or two of when the hatch
    sealed out the buffeting of the atmosphere the Oriflamme
    was fast leaving.
    
         ABOVE ST. LAWRENCE
    
    Day 319
    
    Oriflamme's guns were run out to starboard. Stampfer
    was amidships with the fire director, but the Long Tom's
    six-man crew stood close about their massive gun.
     Gaiters did a halfhearted job of sealing the gun tube
    to the inner bulkhead. The pleated barriers kept the cabin
    air pressure high enough to scatter light and even carry
    sound, but we were breathing bottled air behind lowered
    faceshields.
     The Keys to the Kingdom hung on Guillermo's display.
    It wasn't a real-time image. We viewed one frozen aspect
    of the spherical vessel, and even portions of that had the
    glossiness of an electronic construct rather than the rough,
    tarnished surfaces of physical reality.
     There was nothing for scale in the image, but "800
    tonnes" meant something to me now as it had not at
    the start of this voyage. It meant the Keys was signifi-
    cantly larger than Our Lady of Montreal; and unlike the
    Montreal, she was first and foremost a warship.
     God knew, so was the Oriflamme, and we of her crew
    were men of war.
     The Keys' bridge, indicated by sensor and antenna con-
    centrations, was in the usual place at the top deck. The
    generally globular design was flattened on the underside
    so that the thrusters could be grouped in the same plane.
     Ramps on the deck above the thrusters served for load-
    ing and unloading the vessel on the ground. Because the
    Keys was so large, she was also configured to load in
    orbit through large rectangular hatches at her horizontal
    centerline. Her gun decks, indicated by a line of ports
    that were still closed when our optics drew the image on
    display, were above and below the central deck.
      About twenty guns Lacaille had said. They'd be smal-
    ler than ours and less efficient; but ... twenty guns.
    The usual digital information filled Salomon's screen.
    I glanced at Piet's display and found, to my surprise, that
    I understood its analogue data to a degree.
      The gray central ball was St. Lawrence. The bead on
    the slightly elliptical green line circling the planet was
    the Keys to the Kingdom in orbit, while we were the
    indigo-to-blue line arcing up the surface. The difference in
    color indicated relative velocities: the Keys, in her higher
    orbit, moved slower than we did as we circled toward the
    Feds from below under power.
      The image on Guillermo's display suddenly shifted into
    motion, as though a paused recording had been switched
    back on. We'd come out of the planet's shadow; our
    sensors were getting direct images of the Keys to the
    Kingdom again.
      Our approach was from the Keys'underside. Her twenty-
    four thruster nozzles were arranged four/six/four/six/four.
    A faint glow still illuminated their heavy-metal casings.
    I put my helmet against Stephen's and said, "Don't they
    see us?"
      Plasma flooded from the Keys' thrusters. The cloud
    expanded to hundreds of times the volume of the starship
    from which it sprang. A moment later, attitude jets spurted
    lesser quantities of gas which swiftly dissipated. The sphere
    shuddered and began to rotate so that its main engines
    weren't exposed to our fire.
    "Now they see us!" Stephen replied. Even thinned by
    conduction through his helmet and mine, his voice was
    starkly gleeful.
      The bubble of exhaust separated from the Keys to the
    Kingdom. It drifted away, cooling and still expanding
    until it was only a faint shimmer across the starscape.
    The Fed commander was putting his ship in a posture of
    defense, because he'd realized that he couldn't escape us.
     Even on seven thrusters, the Oriflamme had a much
    higher power-to-mass ratio than the huge Keys did. We
    could literally run circles around the Feds in the sidereal
    universe. If they attempted to transit, we would jump with
    them: two AIs with identical parameters would always
    pick the same "best" solution.
     And that would be the end of the Keys to the Kingdom.
    Piet would bring us up beneath the Feds at point-blank
    range-and Stampfer would blow the Keys' thrusters out, 
    leaving the vessel to drift powerless in interstellar space.
     The need to protect our thrusters was behind Piet's
    decision to disable the Fed landing boats before we lifted.
    The Oriflamme's hull could take a considerable battering
    from heavy guns and still be repaired. Laser bolts or light
    plasma cannon could destroy our main engines, however.
    We couldn't risk being encircled by three hostile vessels,
    even if two of them were small by comparison with the
    Oriflamme.
     Piet shut off our engines. I grasped a stanchion with
    my left gauntlet as I started to drift up from the deck.
    The bead that was the Oriflamme drove silently across
    the main display on a course that would intersect the Keys
    to the Kingdom in two minutes, or at most three. The arc
    marking our past course was now turquoise.
     The carriage of the 17-cm gun crawled slowly side-
    ways, making the deck tremble. The fire director was
    keeping the muzzle pointed at the target Stampfer had
    chosen.
     "All weapons bear on the enemy, sir!" the master gun-
    ner announced over the radio intercom. Motors in the gun
    training apparatus crackled across Stampfer's voice, but so
    long as the main engines were shut down the whole crew
    could hear him over the helmet radios.
     "Thank you, Mister Stampfer," Piet said in a tone that
    was so calm he sounded bored. "I trust your aim, but I
    think we'll close further so that the charges will dissi-
    pate less."
     Static roared on the intercom. My hair stood on end
    from a jolt of static, and the hull beside me rocked to a
    white-hot hammerblow.
      There was enough atmosphere at this altitude to light
    the tracks of the Keys' plasma bolts across our optical
    screen. The Feds had salvoed ten guns. Only one round
    had hit squarely. It was powerful enough to shatter our
    tough outer hull and craze the inner one in a meter-
    diameter circle between the gunport and the navigation
    consoles.
      The Oriflamme rocked with the impact of ions moving
    at light speed. Attitude jets snorted, returning us to our
    former alignment. The Long Tom's gear motors tracked
    and tracked back, holding a calculated point of impact.
    The Keys to the Kingdom filled Guillermo's screen.
    Our green bead and the chartreuse bead of the Feder-,
    ation vessel were on the verge of contact on the analogue
    display.
    "Fire as you bear, Mist-" Piet's voice ordered before
    static and the ringing CRASH! of five heavy guns recoiling
    blotted out all other sound.
    Two of the directed thermonuclear explosions struck
    the Keys' upper gun deck, two struck the mid-line deck,
    and the last ripped a collop out of the lower gun deck
    in a grazing blow. Eight cargo hatches blew out along
    the centerline. Our plasma charges expanded the deck's
    atmosphere explosively, pistoning the Fed vessel open
    from the inside.
      Bolts that hit the Keys' gun decks ripped huge, glowing
    ulcers in the hull plating. White-hot metal blew inward,
    mixed with the residual atmosphere, and burned in sec-
    ondary pulses. The initial impacts wracked the Keys' inter-
    nal subdivisions. These follow-up blasts penetrated deep
    into the vessel, spreading pain and panic among those
    who'd thought themselves out of immediate danger.

 
    Attitude jets puffed, rotating the Oriflamme on her axis
    so that our spine rather than our starboard was presented to
    our enemy. We'd taken one hit and were likely to take oth-
    ers. Piet was adjusting our aspect so that the Feds couldn't
    concentrate on one portion of our hull.
     The Long Tom had recoiled two meters on its carriage.
    Efflux from the plasma bolt had blown the gaiters inward 
    so that a rectangle of hard vacuum surrounded the barrel.
    A crewman spun the locking mechanism and swung the
    breechblock open.
     The thermonuclear explosion had heated the gun's
    ceramic bore to a throbbing white glow. In the absence
    of an atmosphere, cooling had to be by radiation rather
    than convection, but even so an open tube would return to
    safe temperature much sooner than closed-breech weapons
    of the sort the Feds used. A few wisps of plasma twinkled
    within the bore like forlorn will-o'-the-wisps.
     I caught a momentary glimpse of a sunlit object through
    the gunport: the Keys to the Kingdom. In astronomical
    terms, we and our enemies were almost touching, but the
    human reality was that kilometers separated our vessels.
    The Fed warship was a glint, not a shape.
     A four-man damage-control team covered the crazed
    portion of our hull with a flexible patch. The men moved
    smoothly, despite weightlessness and their hard suits. Glue
    kept the patch in place, though positive internal air pres-
    sure would be a more important factor when we really
    needed it. The refractory fabric didn't provide structural
    strength, but it would block the influx of friction-heated
    atmosphere during a fast reentry.
     Our thrusters roared for twenty seconds to kick us into
    a diverging orbit. The Federation vessel rotated slowly on
    inline cargo hatches in Guillermo's screen. All the Keys' 
    midsection cargo hatches were gone.
     Additional gunports swung to bear on us. I expected the
    Feds to fire, but for now they held their peace. Prothero
    realized that we could reload faster than his gunners dared
    to. If the Feds fired their ready guns now, they would have
    no response if we closed to point-blank range and raked
    them again.
     A figure anonymous in his hard suit came from the
    midships compartment and pushed by me with as little 
    concern as if I'd been the stanchion I held. I thought it
    was someone bringing Piet a message that couldn't be
    trusted to the intercom. Instead the man stooped to view
    the bore of the Long Tom.
     The ceramic was yellow-orange at the breech end. Its
    color faded through red to a gray at the muzzle which only
    wriggled slightly to indicate it was still radiating heat.
     I saw the man's face as he rose: Stampfer, personally
    checking the condition of his guns rather than trusting the
    assessment to men he had trained.
     "Sir," he said over the intercom, "the broadside guns
    are ready any time you want them. The big boy here
    forward, he'll be another three minutes, I'm sorry but
    there it fucking is."
     "Thank you, Mister Stampfer," Piet said. I watched his
    hands engage a preset program on his console. He still
    sounded like he was checking the dinner menu. "We'll hit
    them with four, I think. Load your guns."
     Stampfer swooped through the internal hatch in a sin-
    gle movement, touching nothing in the crowded forward
    compartment. Our attitude jets burped; I locked my left
    leg to keep from swinging around the stanchion. The
    main thrusters fired another short, hammering pulse. The
    curve our course had drawn across that of the Keys to the
    Kingdom began to reconverge.
     Stampfer was a lucky man to have a job to do. The
    cutting bar trembled vainly in my gauntleted hand.
     The Federation vessel grew on Guillermo's screen.
    Black rectangles where the hatches were missing crossed
    her mid-line like a belt. Apart from that, her appearance
    was identical to that of the ship we'd first engaged: the
    damage we'd done, like the guns that had fired on us, was
    turned away.
      We were already closer than we'd been when the
    loosed her opening broadside. This time she held her fire.
    "Come on," somebody muttered over the intercom.
    "Come on, come-"
     Guillermo's left hand depressed a switch, cutting off
    general access to the net. His six digits moved together,
    reconnecting certain channels-Stampfer, Winger, Dole;
    the navigation consoles. I could have done that ...
     "It would make our job easier if Commodore Prothero
    was stupid as well as the brute I'm told he is," Piet
    announced calmly, "but we'll work with the material the
    Lord has given us. Mister Stampfer, we'll roll at two
    degrees per second. Fire when you bear."
    Thump of the jets, the torque of my armored body trying
    to retain its attitude as my grip on the stanchion forces it
    instead to the ship's rotation .
    Chaos. The 15-cm guns firing amidships and-so sud-
    den it seemed to be a part of the broadside-the smashing
    impacts of two, maybe three Federation bolts.
    Residual air within the Oriflamme's hull fluoresced a
    momentary pink. The normal interior lights went out; the
    constant tremble of pumps and drive motors through the
    ship's fabric stilled.
    The navigation consoles were still lighted. Salomon
    lifted himself in his couch to look back. Piet did not.
    His armored fingers touched switches in a precise series,
    looking for the pattern that would restore control.
    The Oriflamme's axial rotation continued, modified by
    the recoil of our broadside guns and the hits the Feds
    had scored. What size guns did the Keys mount: 10-cm?
    Perhaps bigger; that last impact rang through our hull as if
    the Oriflamme had been dropped ten meters to the ground.
    The attitude jets fired, then fired again in a different
    sequence. Piet damped first the planned component of
    our rotation, then brought the plasma-induced yaw under
    control.
      Red emergency lights came on. Because there wasn't
    enough atmosphere to diffuse their illumination normally,
    they merely marked points on the inner hull.
    A man bowled forward from amidships: Stampfer again.
    He snatched a spherical shell from Long Tom's ready
    magazine and settled it into the weapon's breech, using
    his fingertips rather than the alignment tool shaped like a
    long-handled cookie-cutter.
     The Keys to the Kingdom was turning slowly on at
    least two axes. Our broadside had struck in a concentrated
    pattern on the huge vessel's lower gun deck and the deck
    immediately below that. Three of the bolts had burned a
    single glowing crater that could have passed a featherboat
    sideways. The fourth was a close satellite to the merged
    trio. Vapor spurted from it, indicating that we'd holed
    either an air or a water tank.
    A crewman swung the Long Tom's breech shut and
    turned the locking wheel. Bracing themselves against the
    steps cut into the deck for the purpose, the men ran their
    weapon out. Emergency power wasn't sufficient to oper-
    ate the hydraulics, but Stampfer's crew knew its job.
    The master gunner himself crouched beside the individ-
    ual gunsight set into the Long Tom's trunnion. He had to
    edge sideways as his men shifted the gun to battery. The
    fire director must have gone out. At least one of the Fed
    bolts hit us amidships. We might have lost a gun or even
    all the broadside guns.
      A team ran cable sternward from a manhole in the deck
    behind me. The auxiliary power unit was amidships, in the
    bulkhead between our fore and aft cargo holds. These men
    were tapping one of the main thrusters for power.
    "Steady, Captain!" Stampfer's voice demanded. He
    sounded like he was trying to pull a planet out of its
    orbit. Up to now, he'd been speaking on a net limited
    to his gunners. "Stead-"
      The Long Tom flashed its horrid rainbow glare as it
    recoiled into the compartment. There was no air to com-
    press, but the massive cannon drove back with a crushing
    psychic ambience.
    The 17-cm bolt pierced the blurred crater the triplet of
    broadside guns had melted in the Federation vessel's hull.

 
    Because the Keys was slowly rotating, the angle of the
    impact was different. More important, this bolt released
    all its energy within the spherical hull instead of on the
    exterior plating.
      Silvery vapor geysered from the Keys' lower gun deck:
    metal heated to gas. It slammed outward at a velocity
    that chemical explosives couldn't have imparted. In the
    shock wave tumbled shredded bulkheads, dismounted can-
    non, and the bodies of personnel stationed on the deck our
    guns had ravaged.
      Our internal lights came on; I felt vibration through the
    stanchion I held as the great pumps begin to tremble again.
    Stampfer moved amidships, toward his broadside guns.
    The Long Tom's bore was a cylinder of hellish white,
    breech to muzzle.
    "Holy Jesus preserve us," Salomon said. I looked around.
    The digital information on his screen meant nothing to me,
    but I could understand the third track rising from the
    planetary surface on Piet's display.
    Guillermo split his optical screen, setting the Keys'
    image to the right. On the left half was the Hercules,
    rising to higher orbit to join the battle.
    The freighter's hatch was open. The 5-cm plasma can- 
    non we'd left the Southerns was mounted on a swivel in
    the center of the hatchway. Our optics and the software
    enhancing them were so good that I could make out at
    least a dozen armored figures within the freighter's hold.
      The Southern refugees didn't have hard suits. The
    Hercules was crewed by survivors from the Keys' landing
    party, and perhaps by prisoners released from 17 Abraxis
    as well.
      The two Federation ships were the jaws of a nutcracker,
    and the Oriflamme was their nut. One hit, even by the
    swivel gun, on our thrusters and we would no longer
    be able to maneuver with the Keys to the Kingdom. One
    hit...
    "Piet," Stephen said, "bring us in tight to the Keys. I'll
    take a party aboard and we'll clear her."
    "Prothero's holding his fire," Piet replied. I didn't know
    whether Guillermo had included me in the command chan-
    nel, or if the whole crew was hearing the debate. "He'll
    salvo into our hold if we come within boarding distance.
    That's what he wants!"
    I couldn't command, I couldn't even talk. I trembled in
    my hard suit. There was a red haze over my vision and
    I wanted to kill someone, I wanted to kill more than I'd
    ever before in my life wanted anything ...
    Jesus Christ will you bring us close?" Stephen
    shouted. "Will you have those whoresons peck us to
    death and no answer? Bring us close, damn you, bring
    us close!"
     It wasn't anger in his tone. It was white fluorescent
    rage, and I knew because the same need surged through
    me, ruling me, would I never swing my arm and see faces
    dissolve in blood again?
    "We! Piet shouted.
      The Hercules was on an intersecting but not parallel
    path to the paired orbits of the Keys and the Oriflamme.
    Cinpeda had told us-and would tell anybody at gun-
    point-that the reticle of the Hercules' laser communica-
    tor wasn't aligned properly. The Federation crew had to
    make a close approach to the Keys in order to coordinate
    their AI knew that. Until the Keys to the Kingdom fired all
    her loaded guns into the Hercules, it didn't occur to me hat
    Commodore Prothero knew nothing of the sort.
    The freighter burst into a ball of opalescent vapor. Her
    own thrusters ruptured, adding their ionized fur to the
    directed jolts of the Federation cannon. The Hercules'
    light-alloy hull couldn't contain or even slow the cata-
    clysm.
      "All personnel except those with immediate gunnery or
    engineering tasks, assemble in the holds," Piet ordered in a
    voice as thin as a child's. "Starboard watch to the forward
    hold, port watch aft. Over."
    I followed Stephen toward the compartment bulkhead.
    Because we hadn't yet loaded the 17 Abraxis' cutter to
    replace the one we'd lost on Riel, there was room in both
    holds for boarding parties.
    I noticed that the Long Tom's crew was headed aft with
    us. They'd apparently interpreted "immediate tasks" to
    mean tasks more immediate than the six to eight minutes
    the 17-cm gun would take to cool for the next shot.
      The midships compartment looked like the remains o
    a lobster dinner. Fragments of flesh and ceramic armor
    floated in the air. Much of the blood had spread across
    the bulkheads in viscous blotches. Sufficient droplets,
    wobbling as they tried to remain spherical, still floated
    in the compartment to paint the suits of us coming from
    the bow.
      The bolt had entered through Number Two gunport at
    a severe angle, taking an oval bite from the coaming. The
    main charge had struck Number Three gun, vaporizing the
    left side of the carriage, much of the gun tube behind the
    second reinforce, and parts of-
     Three men, maybe five. It was hard to say. There
    were so many body parts drifting in the compartment,
    rebounding from the bulkheads in slow curves, that my
    first reaction was that everyone amidships was dead.
     Rakoscy was working on an armless man in a trans-
    parent cocoon meant as emergency shelter if the ship
    lost its atmosphere. The bubble was a tight fit for two
    men wearing most of their hard suits. Another crewman,
    anonymous in his armor, stood over the cocoon to illumi-
    nate Rakoscy's work with a handlight. There wasn't room
    for an aide within the distended fabric.
     It didn't look to me as if the victim had a prayer. I
    don't suppose Rakoscy could afford to let himself think
    that way, though.
     The forward hold was crowded. Stephen pushed to the
    front. A Fed bolt had struck near the cross-bulkhead. It
    hadn't penetrated, but the upper aft corner of the hatch was
    fractured in a conchoidal pattern. I wondered if Winger
    would be able to bring the APU back on line ...
     Dole, his helmet marked with three fluorescent bars,
    stood beside the hatch controls. Lightbody and Maher
    were at the arms locker beside the bosun. They gave us
    room as they recognized Stephen, Stephen and me.
     "I'll take the line, Mister Dole," Stephen announced,
    reaching for the magnetic grapnel in the bosun's left hand.
    "Gentlemen to the front."
     "Yessir," Dole said, giving up the grapnel. "If you'd
    really rather."
     Lightbody hooked the line onto one of Stephen's equip-
    ment studs. The grapnel had permanent magnets on its
    gripping surface, but unless something went wrong, its
    electromagnets would be powered through the line itself.
     There was also a suction device to grip nonferrous
    surfaces. From the way the Keys to the Kingdom had
    resisted our plasma bolts, there was no doubt that her
    hull was steel, and thick steel besides.
     "I'm next," I said to Lightbody. There was movement in
    the hold, men entering and shifting position. My eyes were
    focused on the back of Stephen's helmet, and I wasn't
    seeing even that.
      "Sir, will you take a rifle?" a voice said.
    The intercom worked with only the usual amount of
    static. Neither we nor the Feds were burning thrusters.
    Occasionally an attitude jet fired. For the most part, being
    weightless in a windowless hold had the feeling of being
    motionless.
      Someone jogged my left hand. Maher was looking at
    me, offering a falling-block rifle. The side lever was delib-
    erately oversized so that it was easier for a man wearing
    gauntlets to work.
    "What?" I said. I shook my head. I wasn't sure he could
    see me behind the reflection from my faceplate. "No, no.
    I have to get closer to do any good."
    I blinked, trying to remember things. "You can give
    me another bar," I said. "Hang it on my suit opposite
    the line."
      I felt clicks against my hard suit. The suit wasn't trap-
    ping me this time. My mind was in a much straiter prison
    than that of my ceramic armor.
      "Prepare to board," a voice ordered. Salomon or Guil-
    lermo, I couldn't tell which; not Piet.
    Dole turned the control wheel and stepped out of my
    range of sight as he moved to take his own place on the
    boarding line. Six of our attitude jets fired together in
    a ten-second pulse, braking the Oriflamme's momentum
    with perfect delicacy.
    The hatch unlocked and began to lower. The fractured
    corner in front of me flaked off in a slow-motion snow-
    storm. Shards glittered as their complex surfaces caught
    the sunlight.
      The Keys to the Kingdom hung twenty meters away,
    filling the sky.
    The Oriflamme wasn't aligned on quite the same hori-
    zontal axis as the Federation vessel. I was staring straight
    into the Keys' upper gun deck, but men at the rear of our
    aft hold would enter through the Feds' centerline if they 
    boarded directly.
      The hatch cammed itself down with gear-driven cer-
    tainty. Stephen gathered himself to jump. One of our
    plasma bolts had ripped the Keys' hull open between
    two gunports. The compartment beyond was dark, save
    for the glint of armored shadows.
     Fed gunners thrust main battery guns from the ports to
    either side of the large hole. The muzzles glowed red;
    their breeches must be yellow-white. The Fed gunners
    had taken the desperate chance of reloading their weapons
    while the barrels still shimmered with the heat of previous
    discharges; taken the chance and succeeded.
     The bore of the gun trained on me looked large enough
    to swallow a man whole, as the plasma it gouted would
    surely do.
     White light with overtones of green and purple blazed
    through every opening in the Keys' gun deck. The shell
    in the gun aimed at me had cooked off before it could be
    triggered in proper sequence. The deuterium pellet fused
    into helium and a gush of misdirected energy, blowing
    the cannon's stellite breech across its crew and the Fed
    personnel nearby.
     The second cannon fired normally. The bolt hit the
    forward edge of our hatch. Dense ceramic shattered in
    fragments ranging in size from dust motes to glassy
    spearpoints a meter long. One of the latter gutted the
    man to my right.
     I felt the shock through my boots; a film of grit and ions
    slapped my armor. Stephen leaped. I leaped behind him.
     If the Fed gunners had waited another second or two,
    their plasma bolt would have loosed its devastation in the
    packed hold instead of shattering the ramp as it lowered.
    The slug of ions would have killed a dozen of us, may-
    be more. That wouldn't have slowed the survivors, nor
    the men still climbing into the hold to join the board-
    ing party.
     Stephen sailed forward, his body as rigid as a statue. I
    twisted slowly around the line clockwise. In one sense it
    didn't matter, since the Keys wasn't under way. We'd be
    operating without any formal up or down. I couldn't judge
    where I was going to land, though.
     A group of Feds wrestled a multibarreled weapon on
    the Keys' open cargo deck to bear. The human leader was
    in metal armor. His five Molt crewmen wore transparent
    helmets and suits of shiny fabric stiffened at intervals by
    metal rings.
    A jet of plasma from one of our midships ports struck
    the gun carriage. The bolt was small by the standards of
    the broadside guns firing moments before, but it and the
    Feds' own munitions blew the weapon and crew apart.
    I'd forgotten about the swivel gun Stampfer took from
    17 Abraxis. Stampfer hadn't forgotten.
    Stephen bent as he approached the Keys to the King-
    dom. He held the grapnel forward in his left hand. His
    arm compressed, taking the shock.
    My left boot struck flat on the hull; my right speared
    through the crater our guns had torn. Swaths of rust and
    recrystallized steel vapor overlaid the Keys' plating. The
    light was too flat to wake colors, but reflection gave the
    surfaces different textures.
    I hooked my right foreleg into the hole and unlatched
    myself from the line. A crewman in metal armor loomed
    from the darkness within the Fed vessel and fired a shot-
    gun into my chest.
      My breastplate survived the shock. The crashing impact
    blew me back out of the hole. My leg lost its grip, and my
    flailing arms touched nothing.
    Piet Ricimer caught my right wrist in his left hand.
    He fired his carbine into the hole. The Fed shotgunner
    was pirouetting from his weapon's recoil. His breastplate
    sparked as the rifle bullet dimpled it. The Fed continued to
    spin slowly, but the shotgun drifted out of his hands and a
    smoky trail of blood froze in the vacuum around him.
    I grabbed the rim of the opening and jerked myself
    aboard the Keys to the Kingdom again. Icicles of refrozen
    steel broke off in my grip.
    The Fed constructors had used light alloys for most of
    the internal subdivisions. Our fire and the exploding can-
    non had blown them to tatters, leaving the gun deck open
    except for throughshafts and a pair of parallel hull-metal
    bulkheads that supported the upper decks when the vessel
    was on the ground.
      Scores of bodies drifted in light that flickered through
    the hull openings. Most of the corpses were Molts. Their
    flexible suits were no protection against plasma or against
    the fragments of bulkhead, weapons, and bodies which the
    blasts turned into shrapnel.
     Figures moved twenty meters from us, near a compan-
    ionway shaft. A bolt from Stephen's flashgun sent one
    corpse toward the far hull, shedding limbs.
     That corpse was a Molt. Rifle fire winked, puncturing
    two other Molts whom the laser had lighted. A last Molt 
    and an armored human vanished back into the shaft.
     Men sailed toward the companionway from behind me.
    I headed for the freight elevator near the Keys' vertical
    axis. My initial jump was too high. I had to dab along
    the deck's scarred ceiling to redirect myself. There were
    no points for gracefulness today.
     The circular shaft was of hull metal, but the outer
    doors were alloy. Blasts had bowed them into the shaft,
    springing the juncture between the leaves wide enough
    that I could probably have crawled through it as is.
     I thrust my bar into the opening to cut outward and
    down. The blade almost bound, but I jerked it back across
    to complete the cut, doubling the size of the gap.
     It was the first action I'd taken since I'd run from the
    17 Abraxis to the Oriflamme.
     I didn't know where the elevator cage was. If it was
    below me, the bulged doors would keep it from rising. If
    not-I'd take my chances on being able to carve through
    the cage floor before it crushed me into those same jag-
    ged doors.
     I was thinking very clearly. I wasn't sane, but that's a
    different question; and the situation wasn't sane either.
     The dim ambience of the elevator shaft helped me
    when my eyes adapted to it. Actually, the light may not
    have been that dim. Although my faceshield filtered the
    quick succession of plasma bolts, they'd leached the visual
    purple from my retinas.
     I rose three decks, using my left gauntlet on one of the
    elevator cables to control my speed and guide me. The
    sills and paired shaft doors told me where I was. I was
    pretty sure that the bridge was a deck or two higher yet,
    but this was as far as the cargo elevator went.
    Holding the upper rim of the shaft opening, I cut an
    ellipse from the panel's inner sheathing. The pieces drifted
    away from the bar's last contact, tumbling across the shaft.
    There was no gravity to make them fall.
    I should have brought a light ... but I didn't have a
    hand for it, and I couldn't hold it in my teeth with the
    helmet on. The present illumination was good enough,
    because I knew what I was looking for.
    The shaft doors were locked closed by pins under spring
    pressure. Electromagnets raised the pins when the cage
    and safeties were in the proper position. If the power was
    off-as it seemed to be now-the doors could be unlocked
    as I did, by pulling the mechanism out from the back.
    I could have cut through the doors, but that would
    have warned the Feds on the other side that I was com-
    ing.
      I wedged the side of a boot into the door seam, then
    forced the fingers of my left gauntlet in and levered the
    valves in opposite directions. Faces looked up in terror
    as I sailed into what had been a circular lounge giving
    access to individual suites against the hull.
    This deck had atmosphere before it flooded past me
    and down the elevator shaft. Most of the personnel I saw
    as the light faded to the flatness of direct illumination
    wore suits, but their helmets were open. Hands groped
    to slam faceshields closed, instead of swinging weapons
    toward me.
      A team of twenty Molts was hauling a carriage gun
    across the lounge on four drag ropes. The 10-cm cannon
    was no less massive for being weightless. It slid on with
    the certainty of a falling boulder when the crewmen
    dropped their harness.
      I let the impetus of my leap from the shaft take me
    into the crowd of aliens trying to close their helmets. I
    swung my cutting bar with no aim but to hit something,
    anything.
      Ripping the Molts' fabric suits was good enough for
    my purposes. The limbs and gouts of fluid sweeping
    past me on the last of the deck's atmosphere were a
    bonus.
     A rifle fired, its yellow powderflash huge for expand-
    ing in near vacuum. I was through the Molts within my
    immediate reach. I pushed off from the plasma cannon
    traveling relentlessly past me.
     I couldn't have executed so complex a weightless
    maneuver if I'd practiced for weeks. Chance or murderer's
    luck took me on a vector to the Fed trying to lever another
    shell into his rifle's chamber as my bar jerked and sparked
    through the neck of his armor.
     I spun and pushed myself toward the next large con-
    centration of the enemy, the group fronting the compan-
    ionway hatches. Some of the humans were screaming
    behind their faceshields. God knows I gave them reason
    to scream.
     I grabbed a woman with my left gauntlet. She pounded
    the side of her riflebutt on my helmet, then tried to short-
    grip the weapon to shoot me. Her mass anchored my
    sweeping right-hand cut through her fellows.
     The stiffeners in Molt suits were under tension. When
    my blade sheared a ring, the severed ends sprang apart
    and dragged the rip in the fabric wider. A bad design for
    combat ...
     I cut the line of a backpack laser and a corona of high-
    amperage blue sparks shorted through the metal armor
    of the man holding it. The Fed's body should have been
    insulated from the outer shell, but his liner had worn or
    frayed. The suit stiffened as his flesh burned, raising the
    internal pressure to several times normal.
     I was shaking the woman in my left hand, but I didn't
    have time to finish her until I'd taken care of the laser and
    by then she was limp within her articulated armor. She'd
    lost her rifle; a bullet hole starred her faceshield.
     Someone aiming at me, someone shooting at random;
    her own bullet, triggered at the wrong instant. I held her
    close as I scanned for living targets.
     The 10-cm cannon continued its course into the par-
    tition bulkhead surrounding the lounge. This deck was
    given over to suites for powerful passengers and the Keys'
    command staff. Nonetheless, the hull was pierced with
    gunports and a few plasma cannon were placed here for
    emergencies. I'd interrupted a crew shifting an unfired
    weapon across the lounge to a compartment from which
    it bore on the Oriflamme.
     The cannon's stellite muzzle hit the flimsy bulkhead at
    a skew angle and ground another meter forward, driven by
    the inertia of tonnes of metal in the gun and its carriage.
    The wall split at the point of impact and buckled inward
    across all four edges.
     The door popped open like the cork from an over-
    charged bottle. The suite had still been under normal air
    pressure. Two Molts and a female servant spurted into
    the lounge. The servant tried to scream and she shouldn't
    have, though it didn't make more than a minute's dif-
    ference since neither she nor the Molts had breathing
    apparatus.
     The suite's main occupant was a plump woman of fifty,
    wearing a glittering array of jewelry and light-scattering
    fabrics cut too tight for her build. A transparent emergency
    bubble protected her. She stared transfixed at the cloud of
    lung tissue protruding from her servant's mouth.
     Feds edged toward me around the right-hand curve of
    the lounge. There were half a dozen armored humans and
    as many Molts in the group. I flung away the corpse to
    drive me toward them.
     The Feds hadn't identified me in the carnage and tricky
    illumination, but they noticed the movement. Muzzle
    flashes and the sparks of ricocheting projectiles bright-
    ened the lounge. The corpse spun as several rounds hit her,
    and the bullet that punched through my left shoulderguard
    flipped me ass over teacup.
     My left shoulder was cold. Some of that would be the
    sealant oozing from between the armor's laminae to close
    the hole. I tried to wriggle my fingers. I couldn't tell if
    they moved.
     My figure somersaulted five meters from the Feds. The
    Molts were less awkward in their flexible pressure suits,
    but only a few of them carried firearms. The humans
    aimed for another volley, and I couldn't do a damned
    thing but spin since I wasn't touching anything I could
    push off from.
    I hurled my cutting bar at the Fed in a parcel-gilt hard
    suit pointing a rifle at me. A flashgun pulse flickered
    through his faceshield and ruptured his skull within. The
    bolt might have reflected harmlessly if it had struck his
    metal armor.
      I unhooked the spare bar from my waist. Feds turned,
    flailing and throwing equipment in order to get behind the
    central shaft again.
      Piet floated in the companionway hatch. His knees
    clasped the coaming to steady him against his car-
    bine's recoil. He stripped a fresh clip into the maga-
    zine. Stephen's reloaded flashgun exploded a Molt who
    came on with a cutting bar when his human officers
    fled.
    I tried to brake myself against the ceiling with my left
    hand. The arm moved, but not properly. My field of
    view spread into a line of infinite length and no height
    or width.
      Consuming fire shrank to no more than normal pain.
    Stephen caught my elbow and pulled me to his side. He'd
    wedged a boot into the plumbing beneath an ornamental
    wall fountain.
      Piet had backed within the companionway. I heard him
    on the intercom, calling, "Oriflammes to Deck Eight! Ori-
    flammes to Deck Eight! We hold the stairhead, but they'll
    regroup in a moment!"
      Each deck of the Keys to the Kingdom was a Faraday
    cage. The metal construction acted as a barrier impene-
    trable to radio propagation. If any Venerians happened to
    be in the companionway shaft-also a metal enclosure-
    they could hear Piet's summons. Perhaps they'd even be
    able to answer it; though not, I thought, in time to make
    a difference.
    "Christ's blood, Jeremy," Stephen said in a tone of
    laughing wonder. "Did you do all this yourself?"
    My vision had wobbled in and out of focus since I tried
    to use my left arm. Until Stephen spoke, I hadn't really
    looked at anything. The lounge was-
      The lounge was very like what I'd passed through in
    the Oriflamme's midships compartment a lifetime ago.
    The bodies floating here were whole, or nearly whole.
    The head, arm, and torso-with-legs of a Molt had floated
    back together in a monstrous juxtaposition.
    There may have been twenty corpses. It was impossible
    to be sure. I didn't remember killing that many.
    "I suppose," I said.
    There was so much blood. I dragged the back of my
    right gauntlet across my visor. Again, I suppose. I didn't
    remember doing that before either, though I must have.
    The ceramic dragged fresh furrows across the brown-red
    haze that dimmed my sight. I needed a wiping rag.
      "Well, it's time to do some more," Stephen said. He
    aimed his flashgun toward a barricade of mattresses float-
    ing around the right-hand curve of the central column.
    "That's mine," I said and launched myself toward the
    Feds.
      They were coming from both directions this time. Three
    Molts wearing breastplates and carrying rifles swept out
    from the left. The flashgun lit the walls behind me as I
    slid blade-first toward the bedding from nearby suites.
    Out of the corner of my eye I caught Piet's figure diving
    across the lounge. To get an angle from which to shoot,
    I supposed, but I had enough to occupy me.
    The Feds had stacked three mattresses like a layer cake
    on end. The spun-cellulose filling wouldn't stop a bullet,
    but we couldn't see through it and it would absorb the
    bolt of a monopulse laser like Stephen's without any fuss
    or bother.
      I ripped the mattresses and the pair of Molts pushing
    them with a deliberately shallow stroke. The bedding
    didn't affect my cutting blade, but it would've bound my
    arm if I'd let it.
    The Molts sprang away. One of them was trying to hold
    the segments of his plastron together; the other didn't have
    arms below the second joint.
    Two human officers in hard suits, and a gunner wearing
    quilted asbestos with an air helmet, followed the Molts.
    They'd been poised for attack over or around their bar-
    ricade. I came through the middle of it with a backhand
    stroke and a cloud of severed fiber.
     The gunner shot at me and missed, though the muzzle

 blast
    punched the side of my helmet. I stabbed him where
    his collarbone met the breastbone, then cut toward the
    officer on my right. She got her rifle up to block me.
    My edge showered sparks from where the barrel mated
    with the receiver.
     The second officer put the muzzle of his rifle to my
    head. Everything was white light because Piet fired the
    carriage gun wedged into the bulkhead nearby.
     This deck was sealed except for the shafts in the center.
    If the 10-cm cannon had been fired perpendicularly into
    the hull at this range, it would have blown a hole in the
    plating; but the Keys' hull was thick, and the gun's muzzle
    was caught at an acute angle to the curve.
     The slug of ions glanced around the inner surface of
    the hull: expanding, dissipating, and vaporizing everything
    in its immediate path into a dense, silvery shock wave.
    None of the internal bulkheads survived. Those closest to
    the muzzle became a gaseous secondary projectile which
    flattened partitions farther away.
     The cannon wasn't clamped into deck mountings. It
    recoiled freely against the thrust of ions accelerated to
    light speed, tumbling muzzle over breach to meet the
    shock wave plasma-driven in the opposite direction.
     The barrel finally came to rest not far from where Piet
    had fired the gun. Bits of the carriage still tumbled in
    complex trajectories. Dents from the tonnes of stellite
    pocked the hull plating.
     Stephen had dodged back into the armored compan-
    ionway. He lost his flashgun and the satchels of spare
    batteries he'd worn, but otherwise he was uninjured.
     Piet survived because he was as far as possible from
    the ricocheting course of the plasma slug. The shock wave
    tumbled him, but the Oriflamme's gunners had taken a
    worse battering and survived-most of them-when a
    similar bolt pierced our hull.
     And I survived. I was out of the direct line of the plasma
    and swathed in mattresses besides. Everything went white;
    then I was drifting free on a deck from which all the
    internal lighting had been scoured. A Venerian focused a
    miniflood on me. Piet Ricimer caught me by the ankle and
    pulled me with him back to the companionway. I hadn't
    even lost my cutting bar.
      I can't imagine the Lord wanted me to survive after

 
    what I'd done, but I survived.
    Maybe some Feds in full hard suits were still alive.
    Bulkheads, furniture, weapons, and bodies-all the matter
    that had existed on Deck Eight was still there in the form
    of tumbled debris that could conceal a regiment. If there
    were any survivors, they were too stunned to call attention
    to themselves.
      There were six of us now. Stephen led the way up the
    helical stairs, holding a cutting bar of Federation manu-
    facture. Strip lights in the shaft still functioned. The 
    sharp shadows they threw without a scattering atmosphere 
    acted as disruptive camouflage.
      A fireball burped into the shaft from a lower deck, then
    vanished as suddenly. Fighting was still going on below.
    The companionway opened into a circular room on
    the bridge deck. There were four shafts in all. A bullet
    ricocheted up one, hit the domed ceiling, and fell back
    down another as a shimmer of silver.
      Two inward-opening hatches on opposite sides of the
    antechamber gave onto the bridge proper. Against the
    bulkhead were lockers and, at the cardinal points between
    the hatches, communications consoles with meter-square
    displays.
      A sailor pulled open a locker. Emergency stores spilled
    out: first-aid kits, emergency bubbles, flares.
    Dole tried a hatch. It was locked from the other side.
    The left half of the bosun's armor was dull black, as
    though the surfaces had been sprayed with soot.
    "Jeremy, can you get us through-" Stephen said, bobb-
    ing his helmet toward the hatch.

                    
    "Yes," I said, kneeling. The bulkhead was of hull metal,
    not duraluminum, but it couldn't be solid and still contain
    the necessary conduits.
    Wait," said Piet. He stepped to a console and toggled
    it live. The screen brightened with a two-level panorama
    of the circular bridge. Inside-
      Four heavily-armed figures sexless in plated armor;
    five human sailors without weapons, armor, or breathing
    apparatus; three Molts, also unprotected and seated at
    navigation consoles; and a startlingly beautiful blonde
    woman in a sweep of fabric patterned like snakeskin,
    with jeweled combs in her hair.
     Piet pressed his faceplate to the console's input micro-
    phone. "Commodore Prothero!" he said, shouting to be
    heard through the jury-rigged vocal pathway. "We're seal-
    ing this deck. Put down your weapons and surrender.
    There's no need for more people to die."
     With time I could have linked the console to our inter-
    com channel. There wasn't time; and besides, I couldn't
    see very well. I tried to wipe my visor again, but neither
    of my hands moved.
     Dole and two other spacers were closing the compan-
    ionway shafts. The hatches were supposed to rotate out
    of the deck, but long disuse had warped them into their
    housings. The bosun cursed and hammered the lip of a
    panel with his bootheel to free it.
     Prothero would be the squat figure in gilded armor.
    Impervious to laser flux, but Stephen didn't have his
    flashgun any more. Prothero and his three henchmen
    spoke among themselves.
     They must have been using external speakers instead of
    radio. We couldn't hear them through the bulkhead, but
    the blonde screamed and one of the unprotected spacers
    launched himself at Prothero when he heard the plan.
     Prothero clubbed the man aside with a steel forearm.
    "Get us through!" Piet shouted.
     1 drew the tip of my bar down the bulkhead, cutting
    a centimeter deep. The sparkling metal roostertail was
    heated yellow but unable to oxidize in a vacuum.
     Two more Fed spacers grappled with their officers. One
    of Prothero's henchmen blew them clear of his fellows
    with shotgun blasts, and Prothero himself pulled open the
    hatch beside me.
     I rose, thrusting. Prothero fired a weapon with a needle
    bore and a detachable magazine for cartridges the size of
    bananas. The flechette struck the blade of my cutting bar.
    Bar and projectile disintegrated in a white-hot osmium/ce-
    ramic spray.
     I smashed the bar's grip into Prothero's faceshield.
    Red and saffron muzzle flashes shocked the corners of
    my vision. I could hear the shots as muffled drumbeats
    while the atmosphere flooded from the bridge to the open
    antechamber.
     I couldn't hold Prothero with my left hand, but I wrapped
    my legs around his waist and I kept hitting him, even after
    the faceshield collapsed and the mist of blood dissipated
    and nothing was moving but my gauntlet, pumping up and
    down like the blade of a metronome. They say after that
    I tried to inflate an emergency bubble around one of the
    Fed spacers. I couldn't manage that, because my left arm
    didn't work and anyway, it was too late.
     I don't remember that. I don't remember anything but
    the red mist.
                  LIMBO
    
    A Place Out of Time
    
    I lay at the edge of existence, and the demons wheeled
    above my soul.
     "The controls weren't damaged," said the first demon.
    "Guillermo's interviewing the surviving Molts for a sup-
    port crew. When he's done, I'll set her down on St.
    Lawrence."
     "Rakoscy's on his way over. Stampfer's setting up an
    infirmary for him on Deck Two," said the second demon.
    "They're dumping cargo into space to make room." Then
    he said, "So much blood."
     "What we did was necessary!" said the first demon in
    a voice like trumpets. "If we're to stop tyrants like Pleyal
    and butchers like his Commodore Prothero, then there was
    no choice. When the Oriflamme gets home, she'll bring
    freedom a step closer for the whole universe."
      We're not home yet," said the second demon, though
    He didn't sound as if he cared.
     "We'll get back," said the first demon. "It's a long run,
    another ninety days or more. But there's nothing between
    here and Betaport to fear, save the will of God."
     "I figured we'd seal the prisoners on Deck Six once
    we've swept it for weapons," the second demon said. "I
    suppose I ought to go take charge, but I'm so tired."
     "Dole has it under control," said the first demon. I felt
    his shadow pass over me. "I wish Rakoscy would get here.
    I'm afraid to take his suit off myself."
     "There's enough treasure on the Oriflamme," said the
    second demon, "to run the Federation government for a
    decade. Governor Halys will never give it up ... but when
    she doesn't, there'll be all-out war between Venus and the
    Federation."
      "It will be as the Lord wills," said the first demon.
    My mind drifted from limbo to absolute blackness.
    Sinking into the embracing dark, I knew that I'd been
    listening to Piet and Stephen on the bridge of the ship
    we'd captured. They were no more demons than I was.
    And no less.
    The black turned red as blood.
    
           BETAPORT, VENUS
    
    122 Days After Landing
    
    "Ah, Cedric," said Councilor Duneen. "Let me introduce
    you to Jeremy Moore. Moore of Rhadicund. Jeremy, this
    is Factor Read, a businessman who understands the value
    of a strong navy."
     I shook hands with a man younger than me. His eyes
    never stopped moving. They flicked over the withered arm
    strapped to my side, then back to my face without even a
    pause. Read's grip was firm.
     "Jeremy will be marrying my sister Melinda this fall,
    as you may have heard," Duneen continued. "I've found
    him a townhouse near ours in the capital."
     "The Moore who. . ." Read said, nodding toward the
    Oriflamme in her storage berth. Though he was shouting,
    I had to watch his lips to be sure of the words. None of
    the heavy machinery was operating today, but the big dock
    rang with laughter and hawkers' calls.
     "Yes, as it happens," I said. I've seen snakes with more
    warmth in their eyes than Read had, but if reports were
    true he was the richest man in the Ishtar Highlands. The
    sort of fellow I'd need to cultivate in my new position as
    aide to Councilor Duneen, but for now ...
     "Councilor," I said, "Factor Read? Pardon me if you
    would, because I see some shipmates."
     Duneen clapped me on the shoulder. "You can do any-
    thing you like here, my boy. You're the stars here today!"
     It was the politic thing for the Councilor to say, since he
    didn't want a row in front of Read and Read's entourage.
    I had the feeling that he meant it, though.
     There were as many folk around Piet and Stephen as
    there were with Read and Duneen, but some of those
    pressing for contact with the General Commander were
    magnates themselves. Mere money couldn't earn the sort
    of fawning adulation Piet had now.
    Though he had the money as well, of course. The
    lowliest member of the Oriflamme's crew had enough
    wealth to amaze, for example, a Betaport ship-chandler
    in a comfortable way of business.
      Folk made way for me. Some of them recognized me-
    "Factor Moore," with a nod; broad, smiling, "Jeremy,
    good to see you again!"-and some did not, only knew
    what they saw on my face, but they all made way.
      I came up behind a man named Brush. He controlled
    his niece's estate until she married; an event he was
    determined should not be before its time. A court toady,
    not as young as he wished he was, who pitched schemes
    to the unwary. "You know, Gregg," he said to Stephen,
    "a friend of mine has a business opportunity that might
    be the sort of thing that you want -now that, you know,
    you're back."
    Stephen looked past Brush to me, then back to the
    courtier. "Well, Brush," he said in a bantering voice. "It's
    like this. I'm young, I'm rich, I'm well born. I can do
    absolutely anything that I want to do. So that means-"
    He smiled. Brush stepped back, then bounced forward
    from my chest like a steel ball shuttling between electro-
    magnets.
    -that the thing I've been doing is what I really want."
    Brush vanished into the crowd. I touched Stephen's
    arm. I've never heard anything more stark than his words
    of a moment before.
      Piet waved himself clear with both hands and a broad
    grin, turning to us. He was dressed in a suit of crimson silk
    slashed with a natural fiber from Mantichore. It looked
    like copper or shimmering gold depending on the angle
    of the light.
    Piet touched the miniature oriflamme on my collar.
    "Well enough for now," he said with a grin, "but Duneen
    will be wearing your colors before long, Jeremy."
      "The Councilor could do worse," Stephen said in the
    light tone that made strangers think he was joking.
    "Jeremy has a way of finding routes through unfamiliar
    systems."
     I've heard Stephen's jokes, and they're not the sort of
    thing that others smile at.
     There was a stir at the entrance to the storage dock.
    Governor Halys was entering with over a hundred courti-
    ers and attendants. Her spot in the assemblage was marked
    by six members of the Governor's Guard in black hard
    suits, though the governor herself was hidden.
     "Won't be long now," Piet said. For a moment we three
    were in a reverie, walled off by memories from the voices
    clamoring around us, at us.
     "Hard to believe the ship made it home," said Stephen.
    "Or that we did either, of course."
     I followed his eyes to the Oriflamme and for the first
    time saw her as she'd become on our voyage. Her bow and
    stem were twisted onto slightly different axes. I remem-
    bered Winger complaining about thruster alignment.
     We hadn't replaced the forward ramp. The hull was
    daubed with a dozen muddy colors, remnants of refur-
    bishing with the materials available on as many worlds.
    We'd had to recoat completely on St. Lawrence after the
    battle, but the russet sand hadn't bonded well to some of
    the earlier patches. On Tres Palmas we'd taken much of
    the stern down to the frames and tried again.
     The Oriflamme leaked. Air through the hull, water from
    two of the reaction-mass tanks. All the living spaces were
    damp during the last three weeks of the voyage. Winger
    was afraid to run the nozzles from 17 Abraxis on more
    than eighty percent thrust, but they were better than the
    replacements we found on Fowler, so we switched them
    back again for the last leg.
     I think Piet must have had the same revelation. "To
    God, all things are possible," he said. "But some aren't-"
     He squeezed us by opposite shoulders.
     "-as probable as others, I agree."
     The Governor's entourage paused while Councilor Du-
    neen and other high dignitaries joined it. When the court
    resumed its progress, attendants began herding a group
    of bizarrely-dressed, worried-lookin sailors aboard the
    Oriflamme. Money hadn't given them either taste or con-
    fidence in a setting like this one.
    "I think it's unfair that a mob of scruffs should be given
    places and I be refused!" said a slender, perfectly-dressed
    woman, as straight as a rifle barrel and as gray.
    I moved and Stephen grabbed me because he knew what
    I knew, and what the other sixty-odd survivors knew; and
    what nobody else in the universe would ever know.
    "They were good enough to accompany me through
    the Breach, madame," Piet said. "They will accompany
    me now."
      He didn't shout, but he spoke in a tone that cut this
    clamor as it had that of so many battles. Everyone for
    twenty meters heard, and the woman melted away from
    his eyes.
    Piet laughed. "Stephen, Jeremy," he said. "I need to
    take my place, I suppose. See you soon."
    He arrowed through the mob, heading for the Gover-
    nor's Guard.
    Stephen said, "Piet believes that God is aiding us to
    do His will. I don't know what God's will is. But I don't
    suppose what I know matters."
    He looked at me and added, "I thought we might see
    your fiance here, Jeremy."
    I shrugged with adrenaline nervousness and smiled.
    "No," I said, "no. I asked Melinda not to come. I don't
    want to connect her-in my mind. With this. I'd as soon
    the Councilor weren't here, but he had to be, of course."
    I smiled again. The lip muscles didn't work any better
    the second time. I gripped Stephen's shoulder. "Stephen,
    listen," I said. "It happened, it can't ever not have hap-
    pened now. But it's over. We can go on!"
      "I'm glad it's over for you, Jeremy," Stephen said.
    He plucked gently at my sleeve, filling the fabric he'd
    crumpled when he kept me from breaking a woman's
    neck with my one good hand. "I was afraid for a time
    that you were one of those it wouldn't be over for."
    He smiled. "I'm responsible for you, you know."
    I blinked so that I wouldn't cry. "Let's get aboard," I
    said loudly, turning toward the ship.
      The crowd cheered as it parted to let us board the
    Oriflamme. There in a few minutes we would watch the
    governor's investiture of a potter's whelp from Bahama
    District as Factor Ricimer of Porcelain.
    


    
     David Drakes many previous books in-
    clude Surface Action, Birds of Prey, and
    the Northworld series-not to overlook
    his collaborations with Janet Morris and
    S. M.' Stirling, his contributions to the
    Thieves' World' universe, and to The Fleet
    and Battlestation series. He is probably
    best known for his novel Hammer's Slam-
    mers, one of the classics of military
    science fiction, and the acclaimed 1994
    novel, Igniting the Reaches.
     Widely praised for his knowledge and
    understanding of military operations,
    Drake is a veteran of the only indepen-
    dent armored regiment assigned to Viet-
    nam. Equally at home in fantasy or
    science fiction, an enthusiastic student of
    ancient history and classical literature,
    David Drake is one of today's most popu-
    lar and versatile writers. He lives in North
    Carolina, where he walks his dogs and
    feeds sunflower seeds to the birds.
    
                       Jacket design by DAVID S. RHEINHARDT
                         Jacket painting by BRUCE JENSEN
                                Copyright OP 1995
    
                              AN ACE SCIENCE FICTION
                                 AND FANTASY BOOK
                           The Berkley Publishing Group
                                200 Madison Avenue
                                New York, NY 10016
                                       4/95
                                     
    

    




                  NEWCASTLE REGION LIBRARY
    
                   3 2300 00329181 8
                     L.f LA v i LA U I U &V
    
       "One of the most gifted users of military raw material at work
              today in science fiction. "
                   -Chicago Sun-Times
    
             "One of those rare authors who seem capable of switching
            from one mode of writing to another, hard science to near
         future political thriller to high fantasy with a smooth meshing
                                    of gears."
                            -Science Fiction Chronicle
    
                             Praise for David Drake's
                              Igniting the Reaches:
  'A cleverly set up, Poul Anderson-style reprise of the early Elizabethan
          period, when 'tradd and 'piracy' were synonymous...
          Enormously entertaining!"
                                   -Detroit News
      "Drake uses military language fluently to create vivid combat scenes."
                                -Publishers Weekly
    "Hard-hitting adventure ... a tale that will appeal to fans of military SF."
                                 -Library Journal
    
                                5 19 9 5 >
    
                  9 780441 001712
    
                   ISBN 0-441-001?1-8
    


