The Reaches

cartridge, and raised the butt to my shoulder again.

Concentrate on the foresight. The barrel wobbled around the target, let alone the bull's-eye. Squeeze the trigger, don't jerk it. My whole right hand tightened.

I tried to hold the rifle as I had the cutting bar as we sawed boards for the target, firmly but without the feeling of desperate control that the firearm brought out. I wasn't making something happen. I was easing the trigger back against the rough metal-to-metal contact points of a mechanism made by a journeyman rather than a master.

The muzzle blast surprised me the way Stephen said it was supposed to. Splinters flew from a hole a few centimeters left of the bull's-eye.

'Yeah,' Stephen said. 'You're beginning to get it. In another day or two, you'll be as good as half the crew.'

He shook his head disgustedly. 'They think they can shoot, but even when they practice, they plink at rocks or ration cartons. If they miss, they don't have a clue why. They'll make the same damned mistake the next time, like enough.'

I extracted the empty case. Powder gases streamed through the open breech. 'What does it take to get as good as you are, Stephen?' I asked, careful not to meet his eyes.

'Nothing you can learn,' he said. He sat down on the trunk of a fallen tree with bark like diamond scales. 'And it's not something you'd think was worth the price, I suspect.'

I sat beside him. I couldn't hear the Oriflamme's pumps anymore. They must have completed filling our water tanks. 'Do you know how long Piet intends to lay over here?' I asked. 'It seems a comfortable place, if you don't mind muggy.'

I flapped the front of my tunic, sopping from the wet heat.

'The only thing that worries me is the Avoid notation in the database you found for us,' Stephen said. He half cocked his rifle and began to rotate its five-shot cylinder with his fingertips, checking the cartridge heads. The pawl clicked lightly over the star gear. 'There's nothing wrong with the air or the biosphere, so why avoid it?'

'There's a hundred charted worlds with that marker,' I said. 'Maybe Pleyal woke up on the wrong side of the bed the morning the list was handed him.'

'Come on back and we'll clean your weapon,' Stephen said as he rose. 'Don't leave that to somebody else to-'

I was staring skyward. Stephen followed my eyes to the glare of bright exhaust. 'God damn it,' he said softly. 'It's a starship landing, and it sure isn't from Venus.'

We ran through the forest as the Oriflamme's siren sounded.

The strange vessel drifted down like a dead leaf. Starships-the starships I'd seen landing-tended to do so in a controlled crash because the forces being balanced were so enormous. This ship must have a remarkably high power-to-weight ratio, even though its exhaust flames were the bright blue-white of oxy-hydrogen motors rather than the familiar flaring iridescence of plasma.

Dole was leading a party of twenty men from the main hatch into the forest. 'Mister Gregg, do you want to take over?' the bosun shouted when he saw us. All the men were armed, but several of them hadn't waited to pull on their tunics when the alarm sounded.

'No, go ahead,' Stephen ordered as he sprang up the steps to the cockpit airlock.

Dole's section would hide in the forest so that we weren't all bottled in the Oriflamme if shooting started. It would take anything from ten minutes to half an hour for the ship to lift. In the meanwhile, the Oriflamme was a target for anybody in orbit who wanted to bombard us.

To a degree that worked both ways. The Oriflamme's gunports were open, though of course our guns couldn't sweep as wide a zone as could those of an orbiting vessel able to change its attitude. Stampfer was raising the 17-cm gun into firing position. The violent blasphemy he snarled during the process, only a meter from Piet's couch, showed how nervous the gunner was.

Stephen grabbed the flashgun slung from the same hook as his rolled hammock. I think if he'd had his favored weapon, he would have stayed with Dole outside. Stephen took a repeating rifle with him when we left the ship because the dog-sized local predators hunted in packs of three or more.

Piet glanced aside from his console. 'They've announced they're friendly,' he said. 'And I presume they are or we'd know it by now, but. .'

Because the strangers didn't use plasma motors, they could communicate by radio even while they were landing. That didn't seem a sufficient trade-off for the greater power of fusion over chemical energy, but it had its advantages.

Stephen donned his helmet as he stepped out the airlock again. Piet smiled and returned to his plot.

I followed Stephen. I still carried the slung rifle. I'd picked up my cutting bar also, as much for the way it focused me as for any good I'd be able to do with it against a starship.

The strange vessel was no bigger than a featherboat, though it was shorter and thicker than the Nathan, say, had been. It settled only twenty meters from the Oriflamme, bow to bow. Its combustion engines were loud by absolute standards, but they whispered in comparison to those of a normal starship. Plasma thrusters mixed low-frequency pulses with the hiss of ions recombining across and beyond the upper auditory band, creating a snarl more penetrating and unpleasant than I could have imagined before I heard it myself.

The ship's four stubby legs seemed to be integral rather than extended for landing. Portions of the scaly brown hull were charred from heat stress during reentry, but the material didn't look like the ablative coatings I was familiar with. It looked like tree bark.

The strange vessel had no visible gunports or hull openings of any kind. I walked toward it; either leading Stephen or following him, it was hard to say. A spot grew in the mid-hull. At first I thought a fire smoldered on the coating, but it was a knot opening as it spun slowly outward.

The hole froze when it reached man-size. The figure that stepped out of the ship was humanoid but certainly not human, though most of its body was covered with a hooded cape of translucent fabric. It had reptilian limbs and a face covered with patterned nodules like those of a lizard's skin. The jaw was undershot, the eyes pivoted individually, and the hands gripped a stocked weapon with a ten-liter pressure tank.

'I'd worry,' Stephen murmured, 'if they weren't armed.' His voice was in the husky, dissociated mode in which I knew he didn't worry at all; only planned whom to kill first.

The second person out of the ship was a human, though he wore a flowing cape like that of the guard who preceded him. Tiny flowers filled the socket of his left eye like a miniature rock garden, and his right leg beneath the cape's hem was of dark wood with a golden grain. When the cape blew close to his body, I could see a handgun of some sort tucked against the front of his right shoulder.

'Hello, Gregg,' the man said. It was hard to think of someone with flowers growing from his face as being human, and the fellow's rusty voice didn't help the impression. 'I thought the Feds had killed you on Biruta.'

Two more reptiles, armed as the first had been, got out of the strange ship. Their capes were a uniform dull gray, but the human's had underlayers which returned sunlight in shimmers across the whole optical spectrum.

'Hello, Cseka,' Stephen said. 'They tried, but we got away.'

Cseka glanced beyond us. Piet stood in the cockpit hatch. 'Ricimer too, eh?' Cseka said. 'Well, I didn't get away. They caught me on Biruta and they made me a slave. How long's it been, anyway? Standard years, I mean.'

'Five years, Captain,' Piet said. 'Would you come aboard the Oriflamme? Your friends, too, if they care to.'

'Aye, we'll do that,' Cseka said. He spoke a few throaty words to his guards and stumped forward. 'These are the Chay,' he said, again in Trade English. 'And I'm no longer a captain, Ricimer, I'm chief adviser to the Council of On Chay.'

Cseka walked with a stiffness that the false leg didn't fully explain. I wondered what other injuries the cape concealed.

'And I'm the worst enemy Pleyal and his bastard Federation will ever have,' Cseka added as he climbed the cockpit ladder. He spoke quietly, but his voice squealed like chalk on slate.