Ricimer overrode the AI, holding the
Peaches
in a staggering hover. The
Tolliver,
500 tonnes burden and owned by the government of Venus, was spherical rather than cigar-shaped. Her dome stood as high as the canopy beyond the area her thrusters had shattered. The 300-tonne
Grandcamp
was a good kilometer away, while gaps in the jungle between the big ships probably marked the
Rose
and
Hawkwood.
At least none of the bigger ships had crashed. That wasn't a given in the case of the
Tolliver,
eighty years old and at least twenty years past her most recent rebuild. The big vessel was intended to be serviced in orbit, but the state of her hull was such that she leaked air faster than it could be ferried up to her by boat.
The
Tolliver
's size and armament were valuable additions, though. The fact that the ancient vessel came from Governor Halys made it a claim of official support—
As well as a difficult gift to refuse.
"We're going in," Ricimer said curtly as he reduced power and swiveled the main thrusters. Leon and Dole, operating without orders from their captain, pumped the nose high with the attitude jets.
The
Peaches
lurched, balanced, and settled down on trees smashed to matchsticks when the
Tolliver
landed a hundred meters away. An instant before touchdown, the featherboat was wobbling like a top about to fall over, but the landing was as soft as a kiss.
"Nice work, Cap'n," Lightbody grunted.
"Only the best for my boys," Ricimer said with satisfaction.
The viewscreen provided a panorama of the
Peaches'
surroundings, though not a particularly crisp one. Heavily-armed men disembarked from the flagship. One man, apparently closer than he cared to have been when the featherboat landed, hurled a fruit or seedpod at the
Peaches.
Gregg heard a soggy impact on the hull.
Leon and Bailey undogged the main hatch topside. The
Peaches
had a forward hatch as well, but that was little more than a gunport for the light plasma cannon.
Gregg frowned. "Shouldn't we let her cool?" he asked—aloud but carefully avoiding eye contact with the vessel's more experienced personnel.
"Aw, just watch what you grab hold of, sir," Tancred explained. "Featherboats like this, we braked on thrust, not friction pretty much."
"Will you pass the arms out as each man disembarks, Stephen?" Ricimer said. "You're the tallest, you see."
And also the most likely to grab a handgrip that would sear him down to the bone, Gregg thought. Having a gentleman dispensing the weapons was good form, but the only reason arms were segregated aboard the
Peaches
was to keep them from flying about the cabin during violent maneuvers.
Ricimer took another look at what was going on outside. A truckload of men seemed about ready to pull out, and additional crewmen were boarding two other vehicles.
"Leon, bring a rifle for me, will you?" Ricimer said sharply. He moved from the control console to the hatch and out in three lithe jumps. The viewscreen elongated the figure of the young officer bounding swiftly toward the flagship.
"He'll sort them out," Tancred said.
"Anybody who'd ship aboard a chamber pot like the
Tolliver,
" Leon muttered, "hasn't got enough brains to keep his scalp inflated. And the
Grandcamp
isn't much better."
Gregg took his place beside the locker in the center of the ship. As each crewman hopped from the edge of the storage cabinet beneath the hatch—there was a ladder, but nobody used it—to the featherboat's outer hull, Gregg handed up a weapon.
Tancred took a rifle; there were cutting bars for the remainder of the crewmen. Besides his bar and the second rifle, Leon carried the torso and helmet of the captain's hard suit. He reached down from the hull to help Gregg.
Gregg wore his faceplate raised, but the chin bar still reduced his downward vision. He jumped into a mass of vegetation that smoldered and stank but was thankfully too wet to burn. The remainder of the crew had followed their captain, but the bosun solicitously waited for Gregg.
"I'm all right!" Gregg snapped.
"It's the flashgun and you wearing armor, sir," Leon said. He scuffed his feet in the mat of leaves, bark, and splintered wood. "That's a bad load in muck like this."
"Sorry," Gregg said sincerely. He knew that he'd spoken more sharply than he should have, because he
hadn't
been sure he was all right.
Piet Ricimer was having a discussion with Mostert and a group of other officers beside the leading truck. They had to speak loudly to be heard over the air-cooled rotary engine. The need to shout may have affected tempers as well. Platt, who'd been aboard the
Sultan,
hung out of the vehicle's cab with an angry expression on his face.
"But we can reconnoiter with the
Peaches,
" Ricimer protested. "This isn't a planet we know anything about except its coordinates—"
"
And
the fact it's full of Molts, which is what the hell we're here for, Ricimer!" Platt snarled. Gregg suspected that Platt thought he rather than Ricimer should have been given a ship to command, though the officers hadn't gotten along particularly well during the previous voyage either.
"I just don't think we should jump in without investigating," Ricimer said. "There's no sign of Southerns here and—"
"Calm down, both of you," Alexi Mostert said in obvious irritation. His helmet and breastplate were gilded and engraved, and he carried a pistol as well as a repeating rifle. Sweat ran down the furrow between his thick eyebrows and dripped from his nose.
"We're not looking for Southerns, we're looking for Molts!" said Cseka of the
Desire.
"Only the ones of us who've got balls," Platt added.
Gregg put his big left hand on Ricimer's shoulder. "I've got balls, Mr. Platt," he said in a deliberate voice that was loud enough to rattle glass. "And I think it's a good idea to know what we're doing before we do it."
Actually, a quick in-and-out raid seemed reasonable to Gregg. He'd have backed Ricimer in the argument if his friend said he thought they'd landed in a desert.
"Look, buddy!" Platt shouted. "You just sit back here on your butt if you want to. I don't have a rich daddy to feed my family if I'm too chicken to earn a living."
Captain Mostert stepped onto the running board of the cab and thrust, not shook, his fist under Platt's nose and moustache. "That's enough!" he said.
Platt jerked back, his face twitching nervously.
Mostert turned to look at the remainder of the officers around him. "This group goes now," he said. "Three trucks. Quile's sending fifty men from the
Grandcamp,
so we'll take the Molts from both sides. Surprise is more important than poking around."
He jumped down from the running board and glowered at Ricimer. "We
know
where the bloody city is, man," he added harshly.
Gregg still had a hand on his friend's shoulder. He felt Ricimer stiffen; much as Gregg himself had done when Platt suggested he was a coward.
The lead truck accelerated away, spewing bits of vegetation from its six driven wheels. The forest's multiple canopies starved the undergrowth of light, opening broad avenues among the boles of the giant trees. The other two truckloads of men followed. There were several officers besides Platt in the force, but it wasn't clear to Gregg who was in charge.
Piet Ricimer clasped his hand over Gregg's on his shoulder and turned around slowly.
"Come on, come on!" Mostert shouted. "Let's get the rest of these trucks set up."
"I wonder how surprised these Molts are going to be," Ricimer murmured to Gregg, "when they've heard six starships land within a klick of their city?"
The jungle drank sound, but the clearing itself was bedlam.
The loudest portion of the racket came from the
Tolliver
's pumps, refilling the old ship's air tanks. There was plenty of other noise as well. Piet Ricimer supervised a team probing for groundwater between the
Peaches
and the flagship. The rotary drill screamed through the friable stone of the forest floor. Nearby, crewmen argued as they loaded three more trucks to follow the lead element of Molt-hunters.
Gregg was only twenty meters from the featherboat. Even so, it wasn't till he turned idly and noticed Dole waving from the hatch that he heard the man shouting. "Sir! Get the captain! Platt, he's stepped on his dick for sure!"
Gregg opened his mouth to ask a question—but realized that whatever the details were, Ricimer needed to hear them worse than he did. He lumbered toward the drilling crew, feeling like a bowling ball with the burden of his weapon and armor.
Gregg felt out of place, both in the lush greenery surrounding the landing site and, at a human level, while watching knowledgeable sailors refit the vessels for the next hop. If he'd been among the crews off to snatch Molts for the ships' holds, Gregg would have a person of importance: better equipped and more skillful than the men around him, as well as being a leader by virtue of birth. He had no place in the argosy's peacetime occupations.
Rather than join the raiders on the second set of trucks, Piet Ricimer had pointedly taken charge of the drilling. The equipment was carried in the flagship's capacious holds, but Ricimer operated it with his own crew. A cable snaking from one of the
Tolliver
's external outlets powered the auger's electric motors.
The ceramic bits had reached the subsurface water levels. The tailings, crumbly laterite somewhere between rock and soil, lay in a russet pile at the end of the drill's ejection pipe a few meters away. The crew—including Ricimer himself, Gregg was surprised to see—now manhandled sections of twenty centimeter hose to connect the well with the
Tolliver
's reaction-mass tanks.
It struck Gregg that he could have stood radio watch, freeing Dole to help with the drilling, or he could have laid down his weapon for the moment and carried sections of hose. Because he was a gentleman, no one had suggested that . . . and the thought hadn't crossed
his
mind until now.
"Piet!" he called. "Dole's got something on the radio. There's been trouble with the raid."
Other operators than Dole had caught an emergency signal. As Gregg spoke, one of the ships distant in the forest honked its klaxon. The siren on top of the
Tolliver
's dome began to wind up, setting nerves on edge and making it even more difficult to hear speech in the clearing below.
The raiding party had blown a gap in the tangle of trunks which the flagship knocked down on landing. Ricimer looked up at the curtain of foliage overhanging that, the only route by which the vehicles could return to the ships. Not so much as a leaf twitched in the still, humid air.
"Stephen," Ricimer said, "can you get four more rifles from the
Tolliver
? If I send one of the men, they'll be refused." He looked back from the jungle and made eye contact. "And I need to get the
Peaches
ready."
"Yes," Gregg said. He set off for the flagship's ramp at something between a long stride and a jog. The sweat soaking his tunic and scalp was suddenly cold, and his muscles trembled with the adrenaline rush.
"Bailey and Jeude, go along to carry," he heard Ricimer call behind him. "But
don't
get in his way. The rest of you, come on!"
Gregg had never been aboard the
Tolliver
before, but the men milling at the central pillar of the lower hold drew him to the arms locker. Incandescent bulbs in the ceiling left the rest of the enormous room dim by comparison with the daylight flooding through the open hatch behind Gregg. The air smelled sour, reeking with decades of abuse.
The
Tolliver
carried a crew of a hundred and sixty on this voyage. About half the men had joined the initial raiding party, but scores waited uncertainly about the arms locker and the trucks being assembled in the clearing.
Captain Mostert was neither place. He must have climbed six decks to the bridge when the alarm sounded.
Two sailors were handing out cutting bars under the observation of an officer Gregg didn't know by name. "You there!" Gregg said to one of the sailors. "I'm Gregg of Eryx and I need four rifles now!"
"But—" the sailor said.
"There aren't any rifles left, sir," said the other attendant, the man Gregg hadn't addressed.
"There may be some unassigned firearms still on the bridge, Mr. Gregg," the overseeing officer put in.
"May there indeed!" Gregg exploded. "Who in hell do you think I am, my man?"
He wasn't angry, but the soup of hormones in his blood gave his voice a trembling violence that counterfeited towering rage. Gregg was a big man in any case, the tallest in the hold. With the bulk of his helmet and body armor, he looked like a troll.
He looked at the men around him. The nearest started back from the gentleman's glare.
"You!" Gregg said, pointing to a man with a repeater. His eyes were beginning to adapt to the interior lights. "You—" another rifleman. "Y—" and the third man was holding out his breechloader to Gregg before the demand fully crossed his lips. Jeude and Bailey collected the weapons and bandoliers of sized ammunition without orders.
None of the other crewmen present held firearms.
Gregg focused on the officer. "You, you've got a rifle too. Quick, man!"
The man clutched the repeating carbine slung over his shoulder. "But I own this!" he protested.
"God strike you dead!" Gregg roared, raising the massive flashgun in his right hand as though he intended to preempt the deity. "We've got a battle to fight, man! Go up to the bridge if you need a gun!"
Jeude stepped to the officer's side and silently lifted the weapon by its sling. The man opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"Oh, for
God's
sake!" he blurted. He ducked so that Gregg's two subordinates could remove both the carbine and the belt of cartridges looped in groups of five to match magazine capacity.