The Reaches (20 page)

"It was necessary because I went beyond Pluto," Gregg said. He didn't shout, but the way his voice trembled would have frightened anyone who didn't trust Gregg's control. "So I'm not going to do that again."

"I can't force you, Stephen," Ricimer said. "But I want you to know that I don't think of you as merely an investor or even as a friend. Your abilities may be necessary to our success."

"You know, Piet," Gregg said, "I don't care if you think I'm a coward. I suppose I am. . . . But what I'm afraid of is me."

"Stephen, you're not a coward," Ricimer said. He tried to take Gregg's right hand in his, but the bigger man jerked it away.

"I don't hate killing," Gregg shouted. "I like it, Piet. I'm good at it, and I really like it! The only problem is, that makes me hate myself."

"Stephen—" Ricimer said, then twisted away. He clenched his fists, opened them again, and pressed his fingertips against the wall of living rock. "The Lord won't let His purpose fail," he whispered.

Ricimer turned around again. He gave Gregg a genuine smile, though tears glittered in the corners of his eyes. "You'll be taking that troubleshooting job your uncle offered you?" he asked.

Gregg nodded. "We haven't discussed it formally," he said. "Probably, yes."

He hugged the smaller man to him. "Look, Piet," he said. "If you needed me . . . But you don't. There's plenty of gunmen out there."

Ricimer squeezed Gregg's shoulder as they broke apart. "There's plenty of gunmen out there," he repeated without agreement.

An outcry from the street redoubled when the men within the tavern took it up. Feet and furniture shuffled.

Gregg opened the office door. The sailors were already gone. The gentlemen from the back room were crowding toward the street in turn, accompanied by their servants. The bartender himself rubbed his hands on his apron as if thinking of leaving himself.

"Marvin?" Ricimer asked.

"The
Hawkwood
's
landed, Mr. Ricimer," the bartender blurted. "They're bringing the crew through the airlocks right now, what there's left of them."

"The
Hawkwood
?" Gregg said in amazement.

"Yessir," Marvin agreed with a furious nod. "But the crew, they're in terrible shape! The port warden says they loaded two hundred men on Biruta and there's not but fifteen alive!"

Guillermo followed as Ricimer and Gregg pushed out onto Dock Street. Ricimer's status as a local hero cleared them a path through the gathering mob. The gentlemen who'd attended the meeting had to fight their way to the front with the help of their servants.

The airlock serving Dock Three, directly across the corridor from the tavern, rumbled open. A whiff of sulphurous fumes from the outer atmosphere dissipated across the crowd. Port personnel carrying stretchers, some of them fashioned from tarpaulin-wrapped rifles, filled the lock's interior.

"Alexi!" Siddons Mostert cried as he knelt beside his supine brother. An ambulance clanged in the near distance, trying to make its way through the people filling the corridor. "Ricimer and I thought that avenging you was all we could offer your memory!"

Alexi Mostert lurched upright on his stretcher. He looked like a carving of hollow-cheeked Death. His skin had a grayish sheen, and all his teeth had fallen out. "Ricimer?" he croaked. "That traitor!"

Ricimer stood beside Siddons Mostert. It was only when Ricimer jerked at the accusation that Alexi's wild eyes actually focused on him.

"Traitor!" Alexi repeated. He tried to point at Ricimer, but the effort was too great and he fell back again.

Spectators looked from the
Hawkwood
's hideously wasted survivors to the man Mostert was accusing—and edged away. Ricimer drew himself up stiffly.

Gregg had lagged a step behind Ricimer. Now he moved to his friend's side.

"What's this?" Factor Wiley demanded. "Traitor?"

"He abandoned us," Alexi Mostert said, closing his eyes to concentrate his energy on his words. "Half our thrusters were shot out before we could transit. We had only a week's food for as many people as we'd taken aboard, and only half the thrusters to carry us. He—"

Mostert opened his eyes. This time he managed to point a finger bony as a chicken's claw at Piet Ricimer. "He ran off and left us to starve!"

"No!" Stephen Gregg shouted. "No! That's not what happened!"

The crowd surged as the ambulance finally arrived. Men who'd heard Mostert bellowed the accusation to those farther back. Soon the corridor thundered with inarticulate rage.

Gregg shouted himself hoarse, though he couldn't hear his own voice over the general din. When he thought to look around for his friend, he saw no sign of either Piet Ricimer or his Molt attendant.

"Mr. Gregg, gentlemen," said the servant in fawn livery. He bowed Gregg into the Mostert brothers' drawing room, then closed the door behind the visitor.

"Very good to see you again, Mr. Gregg," Siddons Mostert said with a shade too much enthusiasm. He rose from the couch and extended his hand.

"And that in spades from me, Gregg," said his brother. "But I won't get up just this moment, if it's all the same with you."

A month of food and medical care had made a considerable improvement in Alexi Mostert. If Gregg hadn't seen the survivors as they were carried into Betaport, though, he would have said the shipowner was on the point of death. Alexi sat in a wheelchair with a robe over his legs. His hands and face had filled out, but there was a degree of stiffness to all his motions.

"I'm glad to see you looking so well, sir," Gregg said as he leaned over to shake Alexi's hand. "And I appreciate you both giving me this audience. I know you must be very busy."

The drawing room was spacious but furnished in a deliberately sparse fashion. Room was the ultimate luxury on Venus, where habitable volume had to be armored against elements as violent as those of any human-occupied world.

As if to underscore that fact, the room's sole decoration was the mural on the long wall facing the door. In reds and grays and oranges, a storm ripped over the sculptured basalt of the Venerian surface. In the background, a curve overlaid by yellow-brown swirls of sulphuric acid might have been either the Betaport dome which protected the Mosterts' townhouse—or the whim of an atmosphere dense enough to cut with a knife.

"Pour yourself a drink and sit down, lad," Alexi said. He gestured toward the glasses, bottles, and carafe of water on the serving table along the short wall to his left.

Gregg nodded and stepped toward the table. When his back was turned, Alexi continued, "I was planning to call on you, you know, as soon as I got my pins under me properly. I'm told that you were the fellow who saved my life by bringing down that Fed drone."

"Saved the lives of everyone who was saved," Siddons said primly. "
And
saved the cargo loaded on the
Hawkwood,
which is quite a nice amount."

He cleared his throat. "Ah, the share-out on the cargo isn't quite complete yet," he added. "But if your uncle is concerned about the delay, I'm sure . . . ?"

Gregg turned to his hosts holding a shot of greenish-gray liquor in one hand and a water chaser in the other. He sipped the liquor, then water. "Uncle Benjamin trusts you implicitly, gentlemen," he said. "We await the accounting with interest, but you needn't hurry such a complex matter on our part."

Every factory on Venus distilled its own version of algal liquor, slash, according to recipes handed down since before the Collapse. The Mosterts' sideboard contained wines and liquors imported from Earth at heavy expense, but it was slash that Stephen Gregg grew up with. This version was all right, though it hadn't the resinous aftertaste of Eryx slash that made outsiders wince.

"We were actually wondering whether it was business or pleasure that brought you to us tonight, Gregg," Alexi said carefully. "You're welcome for either reason, of course, shipmate."

There was a glass of whiskey on the arm of his wheelchair. The level didn't change noticeably when he lifted it to his lips and set it down again.

Gregg barked out a laugh. "Oh, business," he said, "indeed business. I thought I'd relax at Eryx for a time, you know, when we got back. But that didn't work very well."

"Your brother's the factor, I believe?" Siddons said.

Gregg nodded and looked at the shot glass. It was empty. "Dead soldier," he said.

He flipped the glass into a waste container across the room. Neither the glass nor the ceramic basket broke, but they rang in different keys for some seconds.

Gregg giggled. "Sorry," he apologized. "I shouldn't have done that." He rotated on his heel and poured slash into a fresh tumbler. With his back to his hosts he continued, "My brother August was very kind, but I could tell he wasn't, well, comfortable around me."

His arm lifted and his head jerked back. He put down the shot glass, refilled it, and faced the Mosterts again.

"He'd talked to my doctors, August had," Gregg said, "and they—well, you know about doctors, Admiral. I shouldn't have told them about the dreams. They don't understand. You know that."

Gregg smiled. The smile slowly softened. His eyes were focused on the mural rather than the two seated men.

"Ah . . ." Siddons said. "This is Gregg of Weyston's business that you've come to us with, Mr. Gregg?"

"No," said Gregg. "No." He gave an exaggerated shake of his head. "This is my own business."

He looked at Alexi Mostert with absolutely no expression in his eyes. "You've been getting a better perspective on what happened at Biruta, have you, Admiral? Than you had right when you docked, I mean."

"I hope nothing I may have said when I was delirious, Mr. Gregg . . ." Alexi said. The fingers of his right hand opened and closed on the whiskey glass. " . . . could have been construed as an insult directed toward you. To be honest, I don't recall anything from docking until I awakened in hospital three days later."

"It wasn't until my brother read the report compiled for Governor Halys that the details of that very confused business became clear, Mr. Gregg," Siddons said.

"Nobody insulted me, Admiral," Gregg said. "Besides, I wouldn't kill anybody just because of words. Not anymore."

He giggled. "My brother didn't like it when I said it was
fun
to kill people. He thought I was making a bad joke."

Siddons got up from the couch, then sat again before he'd reached a full standing position. "The compilation of accounts from all the survivors—including those of the
Peaches,
of course—created a degree of understanding that, ah, individuals didn't have while lost in their personal problems."

"You understand that, don't you, shipmate?" Alexi said. "It was Hell. Hell. There's no other word for it."

Gregg tossed off his shot. "I understand Hell," he said. He smiled again.

"I suspect I owe my cousin an apology," Alexi said heavily, looking at his glass. "During the whole trip home, all I could see in my mind was the featherboat running off instead of staying to help us."

"He knows now that you loaded reaction mass and came back," Siddons put in with a forced grin. "It was all a very tragic time."

"Ricimer's a friend of yours, I believe, Mr. Gregg?" Alexi said.

"Best friend I've ever had," Gregg agreed nonchalantly. "I wonder if he has the dreams, do you think, Admiral?"

He hurled the shot glass into the waste container. Both glasses and the container rang together. "Sorry, I didn't mean to do that."

Gregg turned to the serving table. "I don't think an apology really does much good," he said as he tilted the decanter of slash. "Do you, gentlemen?"

"You're here on Mr. Ricimer's behalf, is that it?" Siddons said.

Gregg glanced over his shoulder and grinned. "Nope," he said.

He looked down, raised the glass to his lips, and poured again before he faced around. "I'm here on my own. Piet, he's trying to put together an expedition still. He's having trouble even buying a featherboat, though."

"I believe one of my secretaries made problems about my cousin buying the remaining share in the
Peaches
" Alexi said. "I'll put that right immediately."

"A lot of people won't touch Piet because of the trouble when the
Hawkwood
landed, you know," Gregg said. He hadn't drunk any of the chaser since his first sip on pouring it. "Stories travel better than corrections do. You know how it is."

He threw back his head and emptied the shot glass.

"I'm not responsible for anything that happened while I was delirious!" Alexi Mostert shouted from his wheelchair.

"We're all responsible for everything we do, Admiral," Gregg said through his smile. "D'ye sometimes dream about things you haven't done yet? I do."

He looked at Siddons. "You don't have the dreams, do you, Master Siddons? You're lucky, but you're missing some interesting things, too. You know, a man's head can be there and then
poof!
gone, not an eyeblink between them. Right beside you, a man's head is just
gone.
"

Alexi's glass fell onto the floor of polished stone. Both brothers jumped. Gregg chuckled and returned to the serving table.

"What do you think might be a fair recompense for the inconvenience I've caused my cousin, Mr. Gregg?" Alexi Mostert said hoarsely.

"Well, it occurs to me that a simple commercial proposition might turn out to everybody's benefit," Gregg said toward the wall.

He swung around. "For his expedition, Piet wanted a featherboat, which he could provide himself, and a bigger ship. If Mostert Trading provided an eighty tonner, with crew and all expenses—why, that'd prove the stories about Piet betraying you on Biruta were false. Wouldn't it, Admiral?"

Siddons leaned forward on the couch. He took a memorandum book from his waist pouch. "What share-out do you propose?" he asked.

"For the vessels," said Gregg, "equal shares. Officers and crewmen sharing from a single pool, with full shares for those who—"

Gregg's unfocused eyes made his grin even more horrible.

"—don't make it back."