The Reaches

one of us now-whatever he said, wherever he was born.

'Easy, gentlemen,' Stephen said as he lifted his flashgun to his shoulder.

The Fed boats leveled out from their descent and cruised toward the 17 Abraxis a hundred meters in the air. They were bigger than our cutter, almost the size of featherboats. They didn't act like they saw us. Small-craft optics are crude, and the Feds weren't expecting to find anything in the shadow of the arroyo.

The nearer vessel slowed to a crawl while five meters in the air. It began to settle beside the freighter. Its plasma exhaust flared in an oval pattern that swept stones as big as my fist from the ground.

Stephen fired. His bolt struck the side of the boat's thruster nozzle, close to the white-hot lip. The exhaust already sublimed tungsten from the nozzle's throat and left a black smear on the ground where the metal redeposited.

The laser pulse heated the point it hit to a fractionally greater degree than the metal casing around it. The nozzle lost cohesion. The side blew toward us in a bubble of green vapor as intense as the plasma that drove it. The crash! of metal exploding was more dazzling than the flash.

The vessel rolled clockwise on its axis and nosed in almost upside down. The dorsal hatch flew off. Members of the landing party flew out in a confusion of weapons and white tunics.

The second craft was thirty meters in the air and a hundred meters beyond the first. Our three remaining flashgunners fired in near unison. Two of the bolts glanced from the cutter's hull, leaving deep scars in the metal and puffs of aluminum vapor in the air. The third man aimed better but to even less effect: his flux stabbed toward the nozzle but was smothered in the cloud of ionized exhaust.

The boat rotated toward us. A port in its blunt bow gaped open. The riflemen beside me volleyed at the little vessel, flecking the hull when they hit.

Stephen clacked the battery compartment closed and raised his reloaded flashgun. The muzzle of a twin-tube laser thrust from the Feds' gunport. Even pumped by the thruster, it couldn't seriously damage the Oriflamme's hull; but it could kill all of us in the hold, hard suits or no.

The vessel slid toward us in a shallow dive. Stephen fired.

The thruster nozzle was only a corona beneath the craft's oncoming bow. A cataclysmic green flash lifted the vessel in what would have been a fatal loop if the pilot hadn't been incredibly good or incredibly lucky. The cutter screamed overhead and skidded along the ground on its belly for two hundred meters beyond the arroyo, strewing fragments of hull behind it.

The Oriflamme's engines roared. The deck vibrated fiercely, but it would be a moment before thrust rose beyond equilibrium with our mass and we started to lift. Men started for the companionway to the main deck, cheering and clapping one another's shoulders with their gauntleted hands.

My hard suit waited for me in a corner of the hold. I began to put it on, trying not to get rattled as I performed the unfamiliar, unpleasant task of locking myself into armor. Because Stephen and Lightbody helped me, I was suited up within a minute or two of when the hatch sealed out the buffeting of the atmosphere the Oriflamme was fast leaving.

ABOVE ST. LAWRENCE

Day 319

Oriflamme's guns were run out to starboard. Stampfer was amidships with the fire director, but the Long Tom's six-man crew stood close about their massive gun.

Gaiters did a halfhearted job of sealing the gun tube to the inner bulkhead. The pleated barriers kept the cabin air pressure high enough to scatter light and even carry sound, but we were breathing bottled air behind lowered faceshields.

The Keys to the Kingdom hung on Guillermo's display. It wasn't a real-time image. We viewed one frozen aspect of the spherical vessel, and even portions of that had the glossiness of an electronic construct rather than the rough, tarnished surfaces of physical reality.

There was nothing for scale in the image, but '800 tonnes' meant something to me now as it had not at the start of this voyage. It meant the Keys was significantly larger than Our Lady of Montreal; and unlike the Montreal, she was first and foremost a warship.

God knew, so was the Oriflamme, and we of her crew were men of war.

The Keys' bridge, indicated by sensor and antenna concentrations, was in the usual place at the top deck. The generally globular design was flattened on the underside so that the thrusters could be grouped in the same plane.

Ramps on the deck above the thrusters served for loading and unloading the vessel on the ground. Because the Keys was so large, she was also configured to load in orbit through large rectangular hatches at her horizontal centerline. Her gun decks, indicated by a line of ports that were still closed when our optics drew the image on display, were above and below the central deck.

About twenty guns, Lacaille had said. They'd be smaller than ours and less efficient; but. . twenty guns.

The usual digital information filled Salomon's screen. I glanced at Piet's display and found, to my surprise, that I understood its analogue data to a degree.

The gray central ball was St. Lawrence. The bead on the slightly elliptical green line circling the planet was the Keys to the Kingdom in orbit, while we were the indigo-to-blue line arcing up the surface. The difference in color indicated relative velocities: the Keys, in her higher orbit, moved slower than we did as we circled toward the Feds from below under power.

The image on Guillermo's display suddenly shifted into motion, as though a paused recording had been switched back on. We'd come out of the planet's shadow; our sensors were getting direct images of the Keys to the Kingdom again.

Our approach was from the Keys' underside. Her twenty-four thruster nozzles were arranged four/six/four/six/four. A faint glow still illuminated their heavy-metal casings.

I put my helmet against Stephen's and said, 'Don't they see us?'

Plasma flooded from the Keys' thrusters. The cloud expanded to hundreds of times the volume of the starship from which it sprang. A moment later, attitude jets spurted lesser quantities of gas which swiftly dissipated. The sphere shuddered and began to rotate so that its main engines weren't exposed to our fire.

'Now they see us!' Stephen replied. Even thinned by conduction through his helmet and mine, his voice was starkly gleeful.

The bubble of exhaust separated from the Keys to the Kingdom. It drifted away, cooling and still expanding until it was only a faint shimmer across the starscape. The Fed commander was putting his ship in a posture of defense, because he'd realized that he couldn't escape us. Even on seven thrusters, the Oriflamme had a much higher power-to-mass ratio than the huge Keys did. We could literally run circles around the Feds in the sidereal universe. If they attempted to transit, we would jump with them: two AIs with identical parameters would always pick the same 'best' solution.

And that would be the end of the Keys to the Kingdom. Piet would bring us up beneath the Feds at point-blank range-and Stampfer would blow the Keys' thrusters out, leaving the vessel to drift powerless in interstellar space.

The need to protect our thrusters was behind Piet's decision to disable the Fed landing boats before we lifted. The Oriflamme's hull could take a considerable battering from heavy guns and still be repaired. Laser bolts or light plasma cannon could destroy our main engines, however. We couldn't risk being encircled by three hostile vessels, even if two of them were small by comparison with the Oriflamme.

Piet shut off our engines. I grasped a stanchion with my left gauntlet as I started to drift up from the deck. The bead that was the Oriflamme drove silently across the main display on a course that would intersect the Keys to the Kingdom in two minutes, or at most three. The arc marking our past course was now turquoise.

The carriage of the 17-cm gun crawled slowly sideways, making the deck tremble. The fire director was