The Reaches

task he'd just been set. Brantling never failed to use Sal's title with due deference, because he believed it irritated the mate to hear her called 'Captain.'

He was wrong. Tom Harrigan couldn't understand Sal's refusing his hand nor her insistence on sailing as captain in lieu of her father; but he had neither jealousy nor anger toward her. He'd been ship's boy when Marcus Blythe brought his two-year-old infant aboard the Gallant Sallie for the first time.

Sal seated herself at the navigation console and hooked a tie-down across her lap to keep her there. 'What can I do for you, Master Beck?' she asked.

The Gallant Sallie was a freighter of standard Venerian design with a nominal burden of 150 tonnes. She had a main hold aft; it could be pressurized, but the large outer hatch was single-panel, not an airlock. The cabin forward served as crew quarters and control room. There were stanchions to help people direct themselves in weightlessness, but the light screen around the toilet in deference to the captain's sex was the only bulkhead within the compartment. There was an airlock near the navigation console in the nose. Hatches at either end of the two-meter-long passageway between the hold and cabin (through the air and water tanks amidships) turned it into an airlock as well.

The visiting landsmen hovered awkwardly in the cabin, stared at by the off-duty crew members. In weightless conditions, all the compartment's volume was usable; but by the same token, gravity didn't organize the space in an expected fashion. One of the Feds started noticeably when he realized his ear was less than a finger's breadth from the feet of a spacer floating in his sleeping net.

Beck looked around before replying. His eyes lingered on the four 10-cm plasma cannon, dominating the cabin by their mass despite being draped with netted gear at present. Beck still held the liquor bottle. It couldn't be used in orbit without a pressure vessel, which Sal pointedly didn't offer. She'd decided that whatever these folk were about, she wanted no part of it.

'I'm sorry for your engine trouble, Captain,' Beck said. There was little distinction between the sexes in Fed service, but a female captain on a Venerian ship was unusual enough to arouse interest. 'Are you sure you wouldn't like to land and see if our crews couldn't put it to right? You know how clever some Molts can be, almost as if they were human.'

'We'll manage,' Sal said curtly. 'We've got plenty of reaction mass for the return trip. In Ishtar City the people who installed the system can troubleshoot it.'

She didn't like Molts; the chitinous aliens made her skin crawl. There weren't many on Venus, but the North American Federation used Molts as slaves to do much of the labor on their starships and the colonies those ships served. Because Molts had genetic memory, they could operate the machinery remaining across the Reaches where mankind had abandoned it after the Rebellion and the Collapse of civilization a thousand years before.

No denying the Molts' value, but-they stank; the food they ate stank; and so far as Sal was concerned, the Federation that depended on Molt abilities stank also.

'As you please,' Beck said with a shrug. He grabbed a bundle of dehydrated food to keep from drifting away. 'You know,' he added as if it were a new thought, 'I see that you've got plasma guns. Our port defenses could do with some improvement. Would you-'

'Not interested,' Sal said loudly, awakening two of the crewmen who were still asleep. Brantling, who'd pulled an elastic pressure suit over his coveralls, paused beside the airlock without donning his air helmet.

'We could offer a good price,' said the powder-burned Fed. She sounded calm, but the cabin wasn't warm enough to have beaded her forehead with sweat.

'Not interested,' Sal repeated sharply. She rose from her seat in obvious dismissal. 'You know the old saying: 'There's no law beyond Pluto.' Without the great guns, we'd be prey for any skulking pirate we chanced across.'

And for any Federation customs vessel; which she didn't say and didn't need to say. The Gallant Sallie was a merchant ship, not a raider; but only a fool would put herself and her crew at the mercy of Federation officials who had been bloodied so often and so badly by the raiding captains of Venus.

'Well, we're only here to offer you the hospitality of Lilymead,' Beck said. 'Now that the embargo for Near Space is lifted, we hope to trade with you and your compatriots often.'

He offered the bottle of liquor again. Sal took it. It was some sort of local brew, perhaps of native vegetation. The contents were bright yellow and moved as sluggishly as heavy oil.

'Thank you, Master Beck,' Sal replied. 'I certainly hope we will.' The profits were too good to pass up, but she didn't know if she'd touch down the next time either. Too much about the conditions on Lilymead made her uneasy.

Harrigan came up the passage from the hold. 'Tom,' Sal said, 'help our visitors back to their vessel. I'll bring up the rear.'

With the loading done, the starboard watch was returning to the cabin behind Harrigan. The mate didn't bother to send his men back into the hold ahead of the visitors, as Sal had meant he should. The passage was a tight fit for people passing in opposite directions, even when they all were experienced spacers. Sal heard curses. One of her Venerians responded to a bump by kicking a Fed hard down the passage into the woman ahead.

The lighter had already cast off. As Sal entered the dock, she saw the little vessel's thruster fire. The bulkhead's translucence blurred the rainbow haze of plasma exhaust. Lilymead hung overhead, its visible continent a squamous green as distinctly different from that of Terran vegetation as it was from the ruddy yellow cloudscape of Venus.

Tom Harrigan was a tall, rawboned man, bald at age 35 save for a fringe of red hair. He glared as the visitors closed the hatch of their featherboat behind them. 'If I never see another Federation toady,' he said, 'it'll be too soon.'

Sal glanced at her mate without expression. She was a short, stocky blonde, 24 years old. Earth years, because the folk living beneath the crust and equally opaque atmosphere of Venus had never measured time by Venus years or the yearlong days of the second planet. 'I expect to turn around for Lilymead again as soon as I can get another cargo from home,' she said mildly. 'There's a good profit on glazing earths.'

'Glazing earths!' Harrigan said. 'The real profit's in microchips from the Reaches, and President Pleyal claims all those for himself. Why, the only reason the Feds even opened their Near Space colonies to us is that Captain Ricimer's raids made Pleyal be a little more reasonable about trade!'

The featherboat cast off from the dock. It continued to hang alongside while the Molt pilot waited for a reentry window. A few stars were bright enough for Sal to see them through the dock's walls.

'All I know,' Sal said, a trifle more crisply than before, 'is that there's money to be made hauling manufactures out to Lilymead and glazing earths back. That's the trade the Gallant Sallie's going to carry so long as the embargo's lifted and nothing better offers.'

The featherboat's thruster flared. Its iridescent brilliance was brighter than the sun until the vessel dropped well within the ball of the planet.

'I'll tell you though, Tom,' Sarah Blythe said in an appraising tone. 'If that lot comes back again, see to it that I'm awake and the whole crew is on alert. I'm not sure what they've got in mind is trade.'

ABOVE LILYMEAD

June 1, Year 26

1515 hours, Venus time

Sal watched through a magnifier as her fingers fed new coils through the narrow slots of an electric drill's stator. She'd cut and teased out the shorted coils on the previous watch while waiting for the lighter to return; now she was rewiring the unit. When she was done, the drill would work again-and as an activity, it beat recomputing the course back to Venus for the umpteenth time.

Rickalds, on watch at the navigation console, straightened up sharply and said, 'Captain, the lighter's on course. They're not two minutes out, I swear,'

'Haven't they heard of radio?' Sal snapped as she struck the repair tools and pieces of drill down in a canvas bag. Otherwise the bits would drift into all corners of the ship while she was away from the task. 'See if you can raise port control and see why they didn't warn us!'

'Port watch to the dock to load cargo!' Harrigan called, his voice echoing in the hold and up the passageway to the cabin. Tom must have noticed the lighter's braking flare through the cellulose walls. The lighter wasn't