The Reaches

My targeting screen set a square green frame over the bow of the Yellowknife. I keyed a 1 mil/second clockwise traverse into the turntable control. A hydraulic motor whined beneath me.

The van rolled onto its right side in a crunch of glass, then up on its wheels again as my friends shouted their triumph. The motor was still snorting. The diesel must have been a two-stroke or it would have seized by now for being run upside down.

The manual firing switch was a red handle mounted on the gun carriage itself, rather than part of the keyboard. I threw it home against a strong spring, then locked it in place with the sliding bolt.

Flux hundreds of times more concentrated than that of Stephen's flashgun pulsed from the six barrels in turn as the array slowly rotated its fury along the Yellowknife's hull. I jumped from the gun carriage and ran to the van as Stephen tossed Loomis into the back. He piled in beside Lightbody in the driver's seat.

Metal curled from the Yellowknife in dazzling white streamers. The pulses hammering the hull would make her interior ring like a bell.

The laser array was a defense against the organic vessels of the Chay. No hostile human ship would dare land with its thrusters exposed to the port's fire, but the Yellowknife was too solidly constructed for the flux to penetrate her broadside.

The line of blazing metal slid a handbreadth beneath the open gunports instead of through them. I'd aimed too hastily or the Fed gunners hadn't properly bore-sighted their weapon.

We accelerated toward the captured freighter. A wheel was badly out of alignment. The studded tire screamed against its fender, throwing sparks out behind us. Another ship lit its thrusters to the north edge of the field.

The Yellowknife fired a plasma cannon. The intense rainbow flash shadowed my bones through the flesh of my hand. The laser array erupted in white fire. The fusion plant continued to discharge in a blue corona from the fused power cable.

Part of the slug of charged particles missed the gun mechanism and blew out the walls of a building across the street. The wooden roof collapsed on the wreckage and began to burn.

A cutter-our cutter-lifted from the edge of the field. It sailed toward the Yellowknife at the speed of a man running. Loomis screamed in terror as he realized the vessel was in an arc only five meters high at the point it would intersect our track.

Stephen grabbed the steering wheel with his left hand and spun it clockwise. The van skidded in a right-hand turn. The rubbing tire blew and we fishtailed.

The cutter passed ahead of us in the iridescent glare of its thruster. Its skids touched the concrete and bounced the vessel up again. A human figure leaped from the dorsal hatch, tumbling like a rag doll.

Riflemen in the Yellowknife's open hatch shot vainly at the oncoming cutter. The siren continued to scream. A plasma cannon fired, but the weapon didn't bear on anything: the bolt punished the sky with a flood of ravening ions.

Stephen thrust his flashgun into the backseat. I grabbed it. He opened his door and hung out, gripping the frame with his huge left hand as Lightbody fought to brake the van.

Stephen straightened, jerking Piet off the pavement and into the van with us by the belt of his trousers. A wisp of exhaust had singed Piet's tunic as he bailed out.

The cutter slanted into the bow of the Yellowknife. The light ceramic hull shattered like the shell of an egg flung to the ground, but the Federation warship rocked back on its landing skids from the impact. Steam gushed from gunports and a started seam, enveloping the Yellowknife's stern.

'A feedline broke!' Tuching, an engine crewman, shouted.

Lightbody steered toward the captured freighter again. He had to struggle with the shredded tire and Piet squirming to sit up on Stephen's lap beside him.

The wreckage of the cutter fell back from the Yellowknife. The warship's bow was dished in and blackened; smoky flames shot from an open gunport.

A green-white flash lifted the Yellowknife's stern centimeters off the ground. The CRACK! of the explosion was lightning-sharp and as loud as the end of the world. The van spun a three-sixty, either from the shock wave or because Lightbody twitched convulsively in surprise.

We straightened and wobbled the last hundred meters to the freighter waiting for us with the main hatch open. 'Not a feedline,' Piet said in rich satisfaction. 'An injector came adrift and they tried to run their auxiliary power plant without cooling. They'll play hell getting that ship in shape to chase us!'

I suppose Guillermo was at the controls of the captured vessel, for she started to lift while Piet and the rest of us were still in the entry hold.

If the three remaining laser batteries had human crews, they might have shot us out of the sky. Molts didn't assume in a crisis that anything moving was an enemy.

Therefore we survived.

ST. LAWRENCE

Day 319

We watched the double line of prisoners dragging the thruster nozzle on a sledge from the captured freighter, the 17 Abraxis, to the gully where Salomon had landed the Oriflamme. The Molts-there were thirty-one of them-chanted a tuneless, rhythmic phrase.

Two of the freighter's human crew had been wounded during the capture. The remaining ten were silent, but they at least gave the impression of putting their weight against the ropes. Lightbody and Loomis, watching with shotguns, wouldn't have killed a captured Fed for slacking; but at least in Lightbody's case, that's because Piet had given strict orders about how to treat the prisoners.

Lightbody's perfect universe would contain no living idolaters; Jeude's death had made him even less tolerant than he was at the start of the voyage. The Fed captives were wise not to try his forbearance.

'Rakoscy says the communications officer is going to pull through,' Piet remarked. 'I was worried about that.'

'That Fed worried me about other things than him taking a bullet through the chest,' I said. I wasn't angry-or frightened, now. Neither had I forgotten driving across the spaceport under fire because the commo officer of 17 Abraxis had gotten off an alarm message before Dole shot him out of his console.

The gully contained vegetation and a little standing water, and the defilade location saved the Oriflamme from exhaust battering when Piet brought our prize in close by. Though the air was only warm, the sun was a huge red curtain on the eastern sky. That sight wouldn't change until the stellar corona engulfed St. Lawrence: the planet had stopped rotating on its axis millions of years before.

'He was doing his job,' Stephen said mildly. 'Pretty good at it, too. There aren't so many men like that around that I'd want to lose one more.'

'Fortunately,' Piet added with a smile, 'the staff of the Yellowknife hadn't plotted the vessels on the ground at Corpus Christi, so they didn't have any idea which ship was under attack.'

We were in the permanent shade of four stone pillars, the fossilized thighbones of a creature that must in life have weighed twenty tonnes if not twice that. The bones had weathered out of the softer matrix rock, but they too were beginning to crumble away from the top.

I turned my head to gaze at the tower of black stone. 'Hard to imagine anything so big roaming this place,' I said. Vegetation now grew only in low points like the arroyo, and we hadn't found any animal larger than a fingernail.

'A long time ago,' Stephen said with emphasis. 'Who knows? Maybe they developed space travel and emigrated ten million years back.'

'Put your backs in it, you cocksucking whoresons,' came the faint fury of Winger's voice from the underside of 17 Abraxis, 'or as Christ is my witness, you'll still be here when your fucking beards are down to your knees!'

Piet frowned at the blasphemy (obscenity didn't bother him), but the men were far enough away that he