The Reaches (49 page)

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 challenge 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 proceed 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 Venerians swept past the flabbergasted locals, "is a fair question."

"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 corner. 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 nonfunctioning radio. I'd searched the floor vainly for almost 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 gestured 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 convinced 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 doorjamb, 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 anything 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 something 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 AI 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 recovered from the strains my mind had transmitted to my body during the weeks of brutal transit. Maybe I'd never recover. Maybe—

"Come on up and have some water," Stephen said mildly, 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 under 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
Oriflamme
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 battery for the one in the flashgun's butt. The charging mechanism whined like a peevish mosquito when the flashgun's prongs made contact.

The jug's contents 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's no information at all," the navigator complained 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 ferry from Osomi drops off supplies. Then they run out of dried 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 mind 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 shield was nearly transparent, but sunlight gave it a rich luster that was more than a color.

"Pretty," I said. I liked it. "How big is the whole animal?"

"Three, four meters," Salomon said. He reached for the jug, then grimaced and withdrew his hand. "I've got a bottle back on the ship," he said. "I was going to celebrate 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 come 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 show up, don't you?" Salomon demanded.

"Yes," said Stephen evenly. "But we're going to leave a transponder here anyway."

Salomon shuddered. "And what we've got for it is a mud bank—and a bale of crab shells that wouldn't be worth 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 scorpions 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 someone 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 he could bring the flashgun with him into the wreck.

Inside the cockpit, we stood on what had been the outer bulkhead. The freighter was a single-hulled vessel, shoddier by far than the hulk we'd abandoned on Mocha. The navigational pedestal stuck out horizontally from the nearly vertical deck. I'd sawn more than three-quarters of the way around its base.

"You know," said Salomon reflectively from the hatchway, "we might do best to wait for the Osomi ferry to come for the shell. They'll have at least local charts. Though it may be ten months, from what Taenia says, and I'm not sure I'd last four."

"We'll last if we have to," Stephen said calmly. His fingertips explored the pedestal and ran the edges of my careful cut. He unslung the flashgun and handed it to me. "Though I doubt that's what Piet has in mind."

"Give me a little room, Jeremy," he said as he gripped the flanges which once held the AI module. Even as Stephen spoke, the huge muscles in his back rippled. The unsawn portion of the base sheared with a sharp crack.

Stephen had twisted the pedestal rather than simply levering it down with his weight. He set it before me, fractured end forward. "Satisfactory?"

I wiggled the data module which the Feds hadn't bothered to remove after the crash. They couldn't lift it from the top because the pedestal was warped. The bayonet contacts were corroded, but they released on the third tug and the unit slid out.