The Reaches (79 page)

The featherboat cast off from the dock. It continued to hang alongside while the Molt pilot waited for a reentry window. A few stars were bright enough for Sal to see them through the dock's walls.

"All I know," Sal said, a trifle more crisply than before, "is that there's money to be made hauling manufactures out to Lilymead and glazing earths back. That's the trade the
Gallant Sallie
's going to carry so long as the embargo's lifted and nothing better offers."

The featherboat's thruster flared. Its iridescent brilliance was brighter than the sun until the vessel dropped well within the ball of the planet.

"I'll tell you though, Tom," Sarah Blythe said in an appraising tone. "If that lot comes back again, see to it that I'm awake and the whole crew is on alert. I'm not sure what they've got in mind is trade."

Sal watched through a magnifier as her fingers fed new coils through the narrow slots of an electric drill's stator. She'd cut and teased out the shorted coils on the previous watch while waiting for the lighter to return; now she was rewiring the unit. When she was done, the drill would work again—and as an activity, it beat recomputing the course back to Venus for the umpteenth time.

Rickalds, on watch at the navigation console, straightened up sharply and said, "Captain, the lighter's on course. They're not two minutes out, I swear,"

"Haven't they heard of radio?" Sal snapped as she struck the repair tools and pieces of drill down in a canvas bag. Otherwise the bits would drift into all corners of the ship while she was away from the task. "See if you can raise port control and see why they didn't warn us!"

"Port watch to the dock to load cargo!" Harrigan called, his voice echoing in the hold and up the passageway to the cabin. Tom must have noticed the lighter's braking flare through the cellulose walls. The lighter wasn't scheduled to return for another twenty minutes; based on past experience with the Lilymead personnel, Sal hadn't
expected
them for an hour at best.

"Captain, it's two ships, I think," Rickalds said. He squinted at the holographic display instead of trying to sharpen the view electronically. Rickalds was alert and a willing worker, but he was ill at ease with any tool more complex than a pry bar.

"I've got the controls, Rickalds," Sal said, pushing the spacer from the console. "Airley," she said to the senior man of the starboard watch, "stand by to take over here."

The
Gallant Sallie
's optronics were original to the vessel and thus older than Sal herself. As built they hadn't been as clear as one might wish, and it took a practiced hand to bring the best out of their aged chips now.

Sal focused, raised the magnification, and rolled a ball switch with her hand to correct for drift as the console's electronics were unable to do. "Damn their fool souls to
Hell,
" she snarled.

"Sir?" said Airley.

"Take over!" she said as she left the console and propelled herself down the passageway in a pair of reflexively precise motions. Two vessels were approaching. The lighter was five hundred meters out, still braking with its thruster to match velocities. The featherboat that had brought Beck in the morning had arrived again also, and it was already coupled to the temporary dock.

Harrigan was organizing his eight cargo handlers in the hold, nearly empty now that the rest of the outbound freight had been shifted to the temporary dock. Sal brought herself up on a stanchion and said, "Tom, keep the men aboard and ready the ship to lift. I'm going to see why Beck's here again. If I don't like his reasons, we're out of here!"

She pushed off, using the hatch coaming to correct and brake her motion. "Sal?" Harrigan called to her back. "If we leave, we miss the return cargo."

"Bugger the return cargo!" Sal said.

If the
Gallant Sallie
cut and ran, Sarah Blythe would spend the voyage home worrying about what she'd say to the noteholder, Ishtar Chandlery. She might even have to decide whether it'd be worse to lose the ship than to call on a noble named Samuel Trafficant and . . . beg his kindness. For the moment, though, her concerns were much more immediate.

The
Gallant Sallie
's arms locker was strapped to the rear cabin bulkhead. Sal wondered if she should have paused long enough to open the locker and take one of the six rifles or the shotgun inside. At least she should have grabbed one of the powered cutting bars that spacers used for tools or weapons as circumstances dictated. She hadn't thought of that till she noticed how lonely the empty dock seemed.

Sal used the crate of turbine spares to halt her. Its mass didn't visibly move when it stopped her 55 kilograms.

The featherboat's hatch, a two-meter-by-one-meter section of the upper hull, lifted as soon as the dock's attachment lips were clamped around the coaming. Atmosphere from the featherboat filled the access tube. The valve started to open inward, toward Sal.

A dozen figures from the featherboat entered the tube. They were armed. Three of them—Beck and two other of the morning's visitors—wore the white uniforms of Federation officials. Six of the others were Molts, their purplish exoskeletons unclothed save for one draped in a pink sash-of-office.

The other three invaders were human also, but they were garbed in clothing cast off by Federation colonists. These last were obviously Rabbits, the human remnants of Lilymead's pre-Collapse population; sunken to savagery, and now slaves of the Federation like the Molts beside them.

"Harrigan, close the hatch!" Sal shouted in a cold, clear voice. She propelled herself toward the access tube. The valve had sprung open when the featherboat equalized pressure, but perhaps she could jam it—

A Molt caught her wrist with three chitinous fingers. Sal twisted. The Molt wasn't as strong as she was, but he raised the cutting bar in his free hand. The surfaces of his triangular face were expressionless.

"I've got this one, bug!" shouted a pudgy human with customs service in tarnished braid on the collar of his uniform. He socketed the muzzle of a revolver in Sal's left ear.

"Don't you move, bitch, or I'll paint your brains all over the walls!" the Fed added, his face centimeters from hers. His breath stank of fear and unfamiliar spices.

Sal heard shots and a cry of pain from the
Gallant Sallie
's hatch. Beck, wearing a tunic with gold epaulets and holding a rifle awkwardly, crossed the dock with the aid of two Molts.

The lighter was disgorging more armed Feds up a second access tube to join the force from the featherboat. The two Fed vessels were much of a size, but the lighter had greater internal capacity because it didn't need the equipment and hull strength for interstellar travel. There seemed to have been forty or fifty personnel, mostly Molts and Rabbits, packed into the lighter's hold.

"We are here under a valid contract, approved by the Bureau of Out-System Trade in Montreal!" Sal said. "You'll answer to President Pleyal for this piracy!"

"Shut up!" cried the Fed officer. "We've got orders, and by Mary and the Saints, we've got the power!"

He forced his revolver harder against Sal's ear. The two of them rotated slowly. Sal could now see the backs of the attackers entering the
Gallant Sallie.
A gunshot lighted the hold red. Cutting bars whined. There were several more shots in quick succession, but this time the muzzle flashes were obscured.

A Molt drifted from the hatchway. The creature's head had been dished in. The edges of the wound dripped brown ichor.

The Fed holding Sal gaped. There was a hollow
thoonk.
His face bulged and something sprayed Sal, half blinding her. A bullet had taken the officer in the back of the skull and exited beneath his left eye. The projectile went on out through the wall of the temporary dock, leaving a black void in the center of a 20-centimeter bulge stressed to white opacity.

Sal wiped her eyes. The corpse was floating away from her. She twisted the revolver out of fingers that had clamped when the Fed's brain was destroyed.

The
Gallant Sallie
had a sprinkler system, nozzles in the hold fed directly from the tank of reaction mass behind the midships bulkhead. Somebody opened the valve briefly. An opaque cloud of water vapor filled the hold and gushed from the hatch. It was doubly blinding in the low-pressure atmosphere.

Federation personnel retreated gasping through the gray mass. They collided with the reinforcements continuing to arrive from the lighter. Beck reappeared, shouting an unintelligible order. A woman in Federation uniform bumped him into a somersault as she pushed past.

Another bullet came through the wall of the dock from outside, from vacuum. This round smashed the thigh of a Molt with an impact that spun the creature's legs above its head.

Orbit around Lilymead brought the
Gallant Sallie
's port side to the sun again. So illuminated, the vessel's ceramic hull was clearly visible through the dulling medium of the cellulose walls. Everybody in the dock could see a gunport open and the muzzle of one of the 10-cm guns appear.

Sal knew that the cannon couldn't be safely fired before the ship cleared for action; the gun probably wasn't even loaded. The Federation groundlings didn't know that, and the blobs of blood and ichor floating about them had drained their morale anyway. As a mob, they broke and forced their way up the tubes to the vessels that had brought them.

Tom Harrigan appeared in the hatchway, veiled in dissipating water vapor. His forehead was gashed and the pry bar in his right fist was bloody. Nedderington paused beside the mate, fired a shotgun at the backs of the fleeing Feds, and recoiled into the hold.

Sal crouched against the side of the dock, holding herself steady by expert, tiny motions. Brantling, still wearing his pressure suit and helmet, stood in the cabin airlock with a rifle. He fired again, this time killing a Rabbit about to reenter the featherboat. Panicked Feds pressed the corpse aboard with them.

Beck, unable to control his body's spinning, drifted close to Sal. She aimed the revolver at him and tried to fire it. The trigger wouldn't move: the ill-maintained weapon was rusted solid. The Fed leader screamed in terror. Sal grabbed Beck by the collar and used the revolver to clout him twice above the ear. Beck's eyeballs rolled up in their sockets.

The lighter pulled away with a blast of its thruster. The dock jerked before main force broke the seal. The lighter's hatch was open, and there were still people trying to board through it.

The dock's inner door closed. The last of the air in the tube puffed the bodies into hard vacuum, their limbs flailing momentarily.

The featherboat separated also. The Fed pilots were terrified by the plasma cannon, whose blast at this range could turn either vessel into a fireball more gaseous than solid. No one was in the featherboat's access tube, but a uniformed human and two Molts were trapped in the dock as the valve closed,

"Sal, are you all right?" Tom Harrigan said. He launched himself to his captain's side across the blood-spattered dock.

Sal straightened, using Beck's mass to control her motion. The Fed leader was coming around. The other Fed survivors stared at Sal and the weapons in the hands of the Venerians joining her in the dock.

"Cooney, give me a hand with the captain!" Harrigan ordered, taking Sal's silence for proof she'd been incapacitated. "Leave these other bastards here to see how well they breathe vacuum!"

"No!" Sal said. "Bring them aboard. And fast—I want to be out of this system in five minutes!"

Harrigan took her arm anyway. He pushed off the wall of the dock, guiding her as if she was a landsman who couldn't navigate in weightlessness. "I say leave them, Sal," he repeated. "They killed Josselyn, and there's a couple more might not make it home."

"No, don't leave me!" Beck pleaded, trailing behind Sal like a heavy dufflebag. "I'm the Fiscal of Lilymead, the President's representative. I'm an important man!"

They entered the hold. Obedient to Sal's orders, her crewmen had policed up all the Fed survivors and were following with them. She thrust the revolver down the throat of her tunic and caught a stanchion.

"You lying bastard!" Harrigan snarled in Beck's face. "If you're Pleyal's representative, why didn't you honor the safe conduct Pleyal gave us?"

Sal kicked forward, up the passageway and into the cabin. Josselyn floated in midair with his throat cut. Bealzy was trying to stuff a loop of intestine back through the bullet wound in Kokalas' abdomen.

"We had orders from Montreal," Beck whimpered behind her. He patted the pocket of his uniform blouse. Paper crackled. "I'm carrying them right here with me. We're to confiscate all Venerian vessels which arrive, regardless of their safe conducts. President Pleyal needs them to help equip the fleet he's gathering to end the Venus rebellion for once and fox all!"

"Rebellion?" Harrigan said, too amazed at the term for the impact of the whole statement to register. "Why, we're not rebels, we're citizens of the Free State of Venus!"

Sal thrust the Fiscal of Lilymead into a net that still held a day's supply of rations for the crew.

"Stay here, don't move, and you'll live even though you don't deserve to," she ordered savagely. To Harrigan she added, "And I mean it, Tom, I want him to stay alive all the way back. There's a lot of people on Venus who need to hear his story!"

Sal strapped herself to the navigation console. While the hard-used electronics moaned to life, she dabbed absently at the grit on her face.

The main hatch clanged shut. Crewmen called to one another as they seated the manual dogs and completed the other familiar business of liftoff.

The holographic display settled to a creamy saffron, picked out by a few strobing points where a circuit misfired. Very shortly the ready prompt would come up and Sal could initiate the first transit sequence.

She glanced at her hands. What she'd wiped from her face was bits of the skull of the Fed who'd been holding her in the dock. The chips were tacky with a slime of fresh pink brains.