The Reaches

Ricimer hadn't chewed Wohlman out for his bad landing, but the captain was by his own action isolated in a dangerous spot. So, of course, were his men. Sal figured they had a right to be surly, but they didn't need to take it out on her.

'I said-' she said, rising in the open cab. Yellow-gray foliage quivered at the corner of her eye. She reached for her revolver. Stephen stepped out, cradling the flashgun he favored.

'Stephen!' Sal cried. 'Ah, Mister Gregg.'

'Stephen,' he said with a smile. He reached into the cab and spun the large wing nut securing the wheel to the steering column. 'I don't want this to wander away,' he said, pulling the wheel off one-handed. The trucks didn't have starter locks, but there were other basic security arrangements.

Stephen looked up at the three sullen crewmen. He smiled again, a very different expression from the one with which he greeted Sal.

'I wanted to see the forest,' she said as she jumped from the truck.

'We've got a party of Molts,' Stephen said. He handed her the steering wheel so that he was free to use the flashgun. 'You can see them and the forest. And me.'

The guard post was a long shed with roof and walls-rolled up, since it wasn't raining-of plastic sheeting, hung on a frame of local wood. The post was only twenty meters from the edge of the oval the Sandringham's exhaust had cleared, but the vegetation had sprung back to hide the path completely.

Fifty or so troops stood nearby. They wore half armor and had their weapons ready, but they didn't appear nervous. Three more landsmen, technicians rather than line soldiers, sat at a humming console beneath the shed. They looked up from their screens, nodded to Stephen-one looked at Sal with speculation-and went back to their duties.

'We can pick up a Molt's footfalls a thousand meters out,' Stephen explained in a quiet voice. 'Closer in we can vector on airborne noise as well, though-'

He grinned. She didn't remember having seen Stephen so. . relaxed wasn't the word, but perhaps cheerful.

'— if they come hand over hand through the tree branches, there could be a problem before we sort things out.'

Stephen was genuinely glad to see her.

Captain Casson and two of his officers squatted with Guillermo at the tree line, facing four of the local Molts. The locals' exoskeletons were cloudy gray. The color looked sickly to a human, but the soft sheen of wax over the chitin indicated the creatures were in good health. Three-kilo ingots of aluminum and rust-streaked iron were stacked on a pallet behind Casson.

'There's twenty more of them in the forest,' Stephen said. 'They've got bows with arrows nearly two meters long. I wouldn't think that was practical. According to what the Feds who've landed here report-the survivors report-the Molts know what they're doing well enough.'

One of the four Molts visible was easily twice the size of his fellows and weighed at least 150 kilos. The giant held a mace with a triangular stone head, the only weapon visible among the delegation.

'The big one's the chief?' Sal said.

'The chief's companion,' Stephen said. 'Just a tool, really. I wouldn't want to meet him hand to hand. Though I don't suppose he'd like that either.'

His tone was soft. Sal expected his lips to twist into the terrible grin she'd seen there before, but instead Stephen gave the Molt bodyguard a wry but honest smile. 'I wonder if they're friends, he and his chief,' he said.

Casson handed an ingot to a Molt. The Molt scraped a chitinous fingertip across the soft aluminum, then passed the ingot to one of his fellows.

Trees rose like giant bristles from the margin of the savannah. Instead of rounded surfaces, the trunks were sharply triangular in cross section as if their growth had been crystalline rather than organic. Limbs spiked out in clusters of three. The boles and branches were gray. The foliage that flared like a pattern of giant fans a hundred meters in the air was a yellow similar to that of the ground cover.

'You slapped Lieutenant Pringle,' Sal said in a voice no one but the pair of them could have heard. 'Instead of. .'

Stephen snorted. He wasn't looking at her. 'I have better things to do than break my knuckles,' he said in a tone as thin as a knifeblade. 'Shooting him. . shooting him would have been murder. You have to have control.'

His face was frozen, horrible. 'Control is what sets human beings apart from the beasts, you know.'

The Molt tribesmen were now examining an iron ingot. Three of them were, that is. The giant's lidless eyes were fixed on Stephen. Just watching.

'Stephen,' Sal said. 'If there wasn't a war, what would you do?'

In a bleak voice Stephen said, 'If I had no purpose in life, you mean? Well, I don't think I need to worry about that. There'll never be a time that men exist and there's no war.'

'There's more to you than that!' Sal said. Casson looked back with a scowl. She hadn't meant to shout.

She tugged Stephen a few steps down the path to where the vegetation screened them. Soldiers watched sidelong, but none of them were willing to look directly at Stephen at this moment.

'Listen to me!' Sal said in an angry whisper. 'You're still human. Just as human as the ones who haven't faced what you've faced. You've got a soul!'

When the muscles of Stephen's cheeks relaxed, he looked like a wholly different person. 'You know, Sal,' he said liltingly. It was the first time he'd called her 'Sal.' 'Late at night, I believe in God. A just God would put a person who'd done the things I've done in Hell.'

Sal wanted to look away from his eyes, but she forced herself to meet them.

'And that's just what He's done,' said Stephen Gregg.

CASTALIA

December 18, Year 26

1704 hours, Venus time

Sunrise on Castalia sent streaks of purple and violet streaming out of the clouds on the eastern horizon. Flying creatures mounted in vast spirals from communal burrows in the savannah. The scales on their wings caught light in jeweled splendor as they rose.

Already most of the captains of the twenty vessels on the ground stood with specialists in the flagship's ample port-side boarding hold. Wohlman, red-faced and puffing with exertion, was jogging the last hundred meters to the open hatch.

Stephen had never known Piet to miss consulting his officers on matters of general importance. Neither did he recall a time when Piet failed to make the final decision himself, whatever the sense of the assembly.

'Please, you aren't going to leave me here, are you?' whimpered Bowersock, the captain of the local-area freighter that a squadron featherboat had captured above Arles. 'The bugs here are cannibals; they eat men.'

'Shut up, you!' Dole said. He jerked up on the prisoner's hands, tied behind his back.

Piet, Guillermo, and a technician knelt on the pair of cargo pallets that formed a low dais for the council of war. They were making adjustments to the hologram projector that the Molt would operate while Piet spoke.

'It's no more cannibalism for a Molt to eat you, Bowersock,' Stephen said quietly, 'than it is for me to eat a crayfish. But if you keep your mouth shut like the bosun says, you'll probably be released in your own ship.'

'That slopbucket's not worth us taking, that's for sure, Mister Gregg,' Dole agreed with a nod.

Bowersock was present as window dressing. Though he was the titular captain of the prize, he didn't know the landing codes for Arles or the other planets among which his vessel shuttled. Bowersock left that and everything else involved in running the ship to the three Molts of his crew.

One of the Molts spoke Trade English. She'd been more than happy to give the Venerians the information they needed-after Guillermo assured her that she wouldn't be left on Castalia either. Bowersock was right about one thing: the local tribes were cannibals. Very likely they were also willing to eat humans they happened to catch.

Sal Blythe sat cross-legged on one of the pistons that raised and lowered the hatch/ramp. She smiled at