The Reaches

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 orbiting?'

'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 go 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 of 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.'