The Reaches

reports he'd seen almost continuous action for the past ten years. Cardiff bowed to Stephen. 'Under your overall command, of course, sir,' he said.

Stephen looked at Piet and raised an eyebrow in interrogation.

Piet shrugged. 'I wouldn't think of interfering with your choice of troops for the operation, Stephen,' he said.

'I'd be glad to have you, Major,' Stephen said, returning Cardiff's bow. What was it about men that made them crave chances to die?

Sal Blythe dropped her feet firmly to the deck. 'The Gallant Sallie has a full-length hatch,' she said over the buzz of general conversation starting to pick up again. 'I'll take the assault force down with her.'

There was dead silence.

'Thank you for the offer, Captain,' Piet said. 'I'd like to discuss the matter with your co-owner before I make a decision, though.'

'I am the vessel's captain, with full authority to determine her usage!' Sal said. 'Under your overall command, of course, sir.'

'Stephen?' Piet said.

Stephen Gregg shook his head in amusement, not denial. He chuckled. The world, the universe, was all mad. 'Piet, I don't have anything to tell you about how to deploy ships. Nobody in this room does.'

Piet nodded crisply. 'Captain Blythe, I have full confidence in your piloting skills. The Gallant Sallie is a perfectly suitable choice for the mission.'

He bowed to the assembly. 'Gentlemen, thank you for your attention and advice. The council is dismissed for now. I expect to summon you in the near future to discuss specific assignments.'

Piet waited two beats and added, 'Will the three officers directly involved in the assault please join me in my cabin for a moment now?'

Talk and the tramp of boots on the hold's hard deck raised a screen of noise. Kotzwinkle threw a glance over his shoulder as he accompanied Casson out the hatchway, but the old captain himself walked stiff-backed in anger.

Sal and Major Cardiff were making their way forward. Stephen leaned close to Piet's ear and said, 'Are you learning to delegate?'

'About not taking the Gallant Sallie in myself, you mean?' Piet said with an elfin smile. 'Well, I'm an able pilot, Stephen; but I can't very well pilot the freighter and the barge both, can I?'

APPROACHING SAVOY PORT, ARLES

January 1, Year 27

1027 hours, Venus time

Federation vessels tended to land fast and hard. Their thrusters and attitude jets weren't in condition to make the sort of perfectly balanced set-downs a Venus skipper strove for. That was especially true of the shoddy, locally built ships that carried the Feds' cargoes within the Reaches.

'There's no danger,' Sal warned, 'but stand by for a rough ride!' She signaled Brantling, in the hold wearing a hard suit, by turning the light above his hatch control panel from red to green. After Brantling started the hatch cycle, he'd step into the passage between hold and cabin.

The Gallant Sallie's crew had rigged a pair of loudspeakers in the cabin's back corners. Without amplification, the desperately nervous infantry couldn't have heard Sal's reassurance from the navigation console because of the thrusters and atmospheric hammering.

There were twenty-eight troops in their armor, clinging to heavy fiberglass ropes rigged as temporary stanchions. The interior of the cabin had been gutted to hold the men. The normal stores, gear, and plasma cannon had been transferred to the Mount Ida along with most of Sal's crew.

This one was neck or nothing.

To look like local traffic, Sal had to drop the Gallant Sallie faster through the dawn than she wanted to do. The slamming deceleration that would come two hundred meters up would flatten the troops, ropes or no. There was always the possibility that somebody would flail his armored fist through the attitude controls for all that Harrigan and his men could do to stop it.

'There's no danger!' Sal repeated. The Gallant Sallie bobbled like a float in a waterjet as the cargo hatch started to open.

The hatch had to be raised during approach so that the barge could exit the instant the Gallant Sallie touched ground. Sal, Tom Harrigan, and Captain Ricimer himself had viewed the ship, discussed stresses, and designed a thruster program for the AI. They'd made sure the maneuver wouldn't either tear off the hatch in the airstream or flip the ship into the ground upside down.

Stephen had then brought up something that none of the spacers would have thought of: when the hatch opened, the infantry would think the ship was about to come apart.

The troops were all brave men, volunteers for the expedition and picked volunteers to be in this forlorn hope under Major Cardiff; but they were landsmen, and the courage to charge a battery of plasma cannon doesn't necessarily prevent panic at the idea of dropping kilometers after a ceramic ball shatters around you. If the men weren't kept informed, there could be a wild-eyed berserk in the cabin at a delicate time.

Thus the prebriefings, the loudspeakers, and the reassurance. Eventually everything breaks, and it isn't as easy to calculate the stresses on a mind as on a hinge joint.

'We're nearing the ground!' Sal said. 'There'll be heavy braking in a moment, but we'll set down gently!'

There were no other ships near the gun tower. Half a dozen vessels-probably scrapped hulls-were clustered in the northeast corner some distance away.

Over the years, several Federation freighters had come down east of the berm and the stabilized soil of the port reservation. Only the upper curves of their hulls were now visible, like whales broaching from the bog. The crew of the gun tower wouldn't like seeing a ship wobble down so close to them, wreathed in the flaring brilliance of her exhaust, but neither would they be surprised.

The Commandatura was three stories high, the tallest building in Savoy. The vertical tubes of the four big guns on its roof gleamed in the dawn like stellite smokestacks.

Full-bore thrust roared from the Gallant Sallie's nozzles. The soldiers remained standing for a moment, braced against one another and the bulkheads as well gripping the cables. Exhaust reflected from the approaching ground caught the hatch like an open flap and jerked the ship violently around its bow-to- stern axis. Everybody went down in a clatter of weapons and ceramic armor.

The Gallant Sallie's outriggers touched raggedly. Her thrust had pitted the ground into dimpled mounds. 'We're-' Sal shouted.

Rickalds (who'd fallen also; anybody standing would have fallen) was opening the outer cabin hatch. Armored soldiers got to their feet, aware that they'd reached the ground and now everything was up to them.

The Gallant Sallie lurched, her port outrigger coming a handsbreadth off the ground as the blast of a thruster from within her hold lifted her. The barge was away, a blaze of iridescence crosshatched on Sal's screen to save the eyes of the viewer.

Go with God, Stephen.

SAVOY, ARLES

January 1, Year 27

1031 hours, Venus time

The barge wasn't a handy craft, but its full-span dorsal hatch could be removed-had been removed before they shipped the little vessel aboard the Gallant Sallie-and both sides flopped down to ease unloading on the ground.

Stephen crouched slightly against the buffeting airstream at the starboard front of the cargo compartment, watching the Commandatura loom over the bow. He'd lowered his helmet visor, and he carried the flashgun beneath the compartment's lip. The wind catching the broad muzzle would try to snatch the weapon out of his hands.

Stephen could have fired his flashgun through the turbulence if he'd had to; fired and hit his target, as he'd