The Reaches

nose and mouth, then ducked through the hatchway as soon as it had opened enough to pass me.

The Oriflamme dropped in a wide circle of Chay vessels, ten or a dozen of them. These ships were constructs, three to six pods linked by tubes fat enough that a man or Chay could crawl between them.

The individual hulls were similar to the one that had carried me to On Chay. I had a vision of giant pea vines festooned with starships. I suppose that was pretty close to the truth.

The Oriflamme wobbled slightly like a man walking on stilts, though anyone who'd seen another starship land would be amazed at how skillfully Piet balanced the thrust of his eight engines. The Chay escort kept formation around him like fish schooling rather than individually-controlled machines. They dropped with less than a quarter of their jets lighted, further proof of how much less massive they were than human vessels.

I'd used my hand to block the glare of the Oriflamme's thrusters. When Cseka got out behind me, he'd sealed the front of his cowl up over his eyes. I tried the same thing. The fabric blocked the high-energy-UV and blue-portion of the exhaust and dimmed the whole output to comfortable levels, without degrading the rest of my vision more than ten or twenty percent. That was about as good as our helmet visors.

The dirigibles I'd seen on our vessel's screen sailed nearer. The supporting gas bags were the size and shape of the starship hulls, though the walls were thin enough to be translucent. Eight to ten meters beneath each set of bags hung a platform, some of which were large enough to hold several score Chay.

The bigger dirigibles mounted a plasma cannon at the bow. The weapons were metal and of small bore, swivel guns like those Our Lady of Montreal had carried.

I nudged Cseka. 'Where do they get the cannon?' I shouted over the Oriflamme's hammering roar.

'Trade,' he said. 'For fullerenes. We've got embassies from most of the states of Earth here, but the shipments go through too many hands. That's why we want Venerians. To set up our own foundries.'

About half the Chay riding the dirigibles wore plain gray capes like those of Cseka's guards. The remainder were clad in a variety of other metallic hues. Most of these were shades of silver, but cinnabar reds and blues as poisonous as that of copper sulfate were dazzlingly present. A few Chay gleamed with the same gold undertones as Cseka's cape.

A hundred meters up, the Chay vessels increased thrust and hovered while the Oriflamme dropped out of their circle. Moving in a single flock, the escorts pulsed sideways through the sky in the direction of the mat of vegetation.

The Oriflamme landed nearby in an explosion of dirt. Each of the thruster nozzles acted as a shaped charge blasting straight down. The soil was friable, without enough sand in the mixture to bind it into glass.

I hunched and covered my head with my arms. Cseka remembered to duck a moment later, but the two guards who'd followed us out of the ship continued gaping at the Oriflamme until the dirt cascaded over us. It was like being caught in a rugby scrum.

I fell over on my right side. One of the rocks that bounced off my forearm would have knocked me silly if it had hit my head instead. Pebbles settled while the wave of lighter dust traveled outward in an expanding doughnut. A dirigible nosed toward us through the cloud.

I shook the hem of my cape free of the dirt loading it and jogged toward the Oriflamme. Cseka shouted something, but I couldn't understand the words. Maybe he was calling to the Chay in their own language.

The forward airlock opened as I neared the Oriflamme. Stephen, identifiable even in a hard suit by his size and the slung flashgun, swung down the integral steps and stamped toward me across the glowing crater the plasma motors blew around the vessel.

He raised his visor when he was clear of the throbbing boundary. 'I'll carry you,' he said.

'I hoped you might,' I said, but he didn't hear me because he had to lock his visor down again to draw a breath.

I stepped into his arms and, like Saint Christopher carrying our Lord, Stephen tramped back across the blasted soil and up the steps into the Oriflamme. The ground had cooled below the optical range, but radiant heat baked the sweat from my calves and left arm in the few seconds I was exposed.

Both valves of the airlock stood open until Stephen set me down. The forward compartment was closed off from the rest of the ship. Piet and half a dozen senior members of the complement waited for us in oxygen masks.

'This is a filter,' I said, plucking the hood down from my eyes. I realized how strange I must look. 'How high is the carbon dioxide?'

'Five and a half percent,' Piet said. The outer door had closed, so he took his mask cautiously away. 'I'm surprised the Chay breathe Duneen's atmosphere when their own is so different.'

'They're as alien here as we are,' I said. 'From what I could drag out of Cseka-believe me, he's crazy. It's like his mind was dropped and all the pieces were put together blind.'

I hawked to clear my throat. My cape's filter mechanism didn't seem to bind the ozone formed by plasma exhausted into an oxygen atmosphere. On the main screen, three dirigibles moved toward the Oriflamme. Cilia on the platforms' undersides rowed the air. They raised some dust from the ground, but less than turbines of similar thrust.

'There's a hundred or so Chay worlds,' I resumed. 'There's no overall direction-they're as likely to fight with each other as trade.'

'How unlike humans,' Piet said dryly.

'Some of them do trade with the Feds,' I said. 'And it sounds like the Feds have taken control of some Chay worlds. Most of the Chay, though-like this system, they're marked 'Avoid' on the pilotry chart because a Fed ship gets handed its head if it messes with the locals.'

One of the dirigibles swung broadside to the Oriflamme; it hovered with its platform on a level with the cockpit hatch. The six supporting gas bags loomed above us. Their total volume was several times that of the starship. Low-ranking Chay stood near bales of gray capes like those they themselves wore, waiting for our hatch to open.

'I didn't see a single piece of metalwork, much less ceramic, on the ship,' I said. I nodded toward the image of the armed dirigible. 'They've got cannon-'

'Southern Cross work,' said Stephen without bothering to look again at the weapon he'd already assessed. 'And about as dangerous at one end as the other, I'd judge.'

'They can do anything with plants,' I said. 'They can sequester lanthanides in fullerene tubes a meter long, Cseka swears.'

'What good is that?' Stephen asked.

'On Earth, they're starting to use them to replace damaged nerves,' I replied. 'Cseka wants us to set up a cannon foundry here. In exchange, they'll provide either biological products or the plant stocks that make them. He's serious, but-'

'Us, to set up a foundry?' said Piet. 'Or Venus?'

I nodded with my lips pursed. 'Yeah, that's the thing. I think maybe he means us. We could convince him that we don't have the expertise ourselves, but-'

'Unless he remembers what my father does for a living,' Piet said with a smile.

'We can't train this cack-handed lot to cast cannon!' I snapped. 'Any more than I could teach them to build silicon AIs. Or breathe water! But I don't know how well Cseka is going to hear anything that doesn't agree with what he wants to hear.'

Piet nodded. 'Not a unique problem,' he said. 'Though I think we'd better meet with his leaders. Compressed fullerenes are what give our hulls-'

He tapped Stephen's breastplate affectionately.

'— and armor hardness that Terran metallurgists can't equal. If the Chay are so much better at creating fullerenes than we are with our sputtering techniques-'