The Reaches

Give thanks for a small blessing, Probert.'

The boarding bridge uncoupled from one edge to the other with a peevish squeal. Its asymmetrical pressure started a minute axial rotation in the Gallant Sallie.

Sal opened an access port in her console and reengaged the full electronics suite. Every stain on the guardship's plating sprang alive on the screen. An associated recorder was storing the images for later use. Though the Feds had made a production of searching the Gallant Sallie for external sensor packs, they hadn't bothered to consider that the vessel's normal electronics might be an order of magnitude better than what they expected of her type. Stephen's improvements to the Gallant Sallie had required a dockyard rebuild, not just a blister welded to the hull.

'Gallant Sallie requests permission to brake for Winnipeg landing,' Sal said into the modulated laser directed at the guardship's communications antenna. 'Over.'

'Get your filthy scow out of our sky, stinkballers!' the Fed on commo duty replied.

Sal engaged the timing sequence on her AI. In the interval before the Gallant Sallie reached the reentry window, Sal looked over the back of her couch toward the men on the attitude controls. 'Remember, we're going in manually so that we look the way the Feds expect us to. That means you guys need to make a few mistakes too. I know perfectly well we could between us set down as neatly as the new hardware could do it, but that's not what's called for today.'

Piet laughed heartily. The AI gave a pleasant bong. Sal lit the eight thrusters, then ran the throttles forward to sixty percent power. The guardship vanished from the viewscreen. Earth, blue and cold-looking to eyes accustomed to the roiling earth tones of Venus, rotated slowly beneath them.

Atmosphere began to jar against the Gallant Sallie's underside. Their exhaust streamed around them in the turbulence. Sal set the screen to discount the veiling and distortion of the plasma englobing the vessel. The planet sharpened in chilly majesty again.

'These guns we're delivering, Captain Ricimer?' Sal said, speaking carefully against the apparent weight of deceleration. 'They're flawed, aren't they? They'd burst if the Feds fired them.'

'Oh, I assure you, Captain,' Piet said, 'these are first-quality fifteen-centimeter guns. Nicholas Quintel may be a better merchant than patriot, but not even my father ever faulted the workmanship of the Quintel foundry. They have to be perfect. The Feds will certainly ultrasound the tubes, and they may well test-fire them before acceptance.'

'Then we really are aiding the Feds?' Tom Harrigan asked, squatting with his back to the hatch and holding a stanchion. 'This wasn't a trick?'

Stephen looked at him. 'Don't worry, Mister Harrigan,' he said. 'We'll be paying another visit to Winnipeg before the Feds have a chance to mount or transship these guns. All they're doing is renting warehouse decorations for the next few days.'

Beneath the neutral tone of Stephen's words was an edge as stark as honed glass.

WINNIPEG, EARTH

April 6, Year 27

0623 hours, Venus time

The Gallant Sallie's plates pinged and clicked as they cooled nearby. The sky at local noon was a pale blue across which clouds moved at high altitude. In ten years, Stephen Gregg had learned to stand under open skies without cringing, but it wasn't a natural condition to him or to anyone raised in low corridors bored through the bedrock of Venus.

Piet, as though he were reading his friend's mind, said, 'We're struggling so that men can live on worlds where they don't have to wear armor to go outside. . but for myself, home is a room cut in the stone.'

He gave Stephen his electric smile. 'Or a ship's cabin, of course.'

The civil port of Winnipeg didn't have a berm. The city whose houses grew like fungus on the ruins of the pre-Collapse foundations was several klicks to the west at the confluence of two rivers. Presumably the locals felt the distance was adequate protection.

There were seventy-odd ships in the civil port. Two of them were quite large, thousand-tonners in the regular trade to the Reaches. Piet eyed the monsters, far on the other side of the spacious field. 'They're being refitted,' he said. 'The motors have been pulled from both of them.'

'The gun towers are dangerous,' Stephen said, standing with his hands in his pockets like a slovenly yokel from Venus viewing a real port for the first time. He didn't point or even nod toward the defenses. 'The guns are on disappearing carriages. I'll give any odds that when the mounts are fully raised, they can bear on all parts of this field.'

The military installations were north of the civil port. A concrete-faced berm enclosed a slightly trapezoidal field of a square kilometer. Towers mounting heavy plasma cannon, at least 20 cm in bore, stood at both south corners where they commanded the civil field as well.

Within the berm, glimpsed during the Gallant Sallie's descent and recorded with crystalline precision for detailed planning, were six ships. Four were of the older spherical style; the domes of their upper decks were visible over the berm. The other two were new purpose-built warships that copied cylindrical Venerian design. A sphere is a more efficient way to enclose space, but the round-nosed cylinders were handier and could focus their guns on a point in a fashion the older vessels couldn't match.

'The gunpit is new,' Piet said. 'The civil port didn't have any defenses of its own at the last information we had.'

The Gallant Sallie's crew left Piet and Stephen alone on the starboard side of the vessel, standing twenty meters away to be clear of the surface recently heated by the exhaust. Ground personnel hadn't yet arrived to carry the cargo to one of the warehouses lining the south side of the port; in fact, there was no sign of customs officials. Winnipeg was fairly busy, but no ships had landed within the two hours before the Gallant Sallie. The delay in processing was as likely to be inefficiency as a deliberate insult to Venerians.

'Hey, you two!' Tom Harrigan bellowed. The mate gestured peremptorily from the main hatchway to Piet and Stephen. 'Back here now!'

'A good actor,' Stephen said as he started back to the Gallant Sallie. Deference or even Captain Blythe's direct interest would imply he and Piet weren't common sailors.

'It might be he's jealous,' Piet suggested mildly.

'He. .' Stephen said. He went on, 'I really don't think he is. He doesn't understand; but then, neither do I.'

'Captain needs you forward, sirs,' Harrigan said as the two men sauntered up the ramp. He eyed them the way a child might view his first butterfly: something wondrous and strange, alien to his previous conceptions.

'I believe you're right,' Piet murmured as he tramped through the passage behind his friend.

'There's a problem,' Sal said crisply before Piet was wholly into the cabin. 'The Moll Dane out of Ishtar City's on the ground here with a cargo like ours.'

She looked grim and determined. Other crewmen held their tongues as they watched. 'Which doesn't surprise me, since Dan Lasky's the owner and captain and he's wormshit.'

Sal tapped the communications handset with her fingertip. 'He's just called and said he'll be over for a visit, bringing a bottle. I told him not till we'd been through customs, but I can't just tell him to bugger himself or it'll look odd.'

She made a moue of distaste. 'Since we're both running guns to President Pleyal, you know.'

'And he'd recognize Piet,' Stephen said. 'Well, we needed to talk to the troops at the gunpit in the middle of the field anyway.'

Sal's eyes narrowed slightly. 'Is that safe?' she asked.

Each man's personal gear was in a short duffel bag tied crossways to the end of a hammock netting: head end for the starboard watch, at the foot for the member of the port watch who shared the berth during alternate periods. Stephen opened his and removed a small parcel wrapped in burlap.

'It's safe if we're trading contraband with them,' Stephen said. He tossed the package on the palm of his hand before dropping it into one of the bellows pockets on his tunic.

'That was Stephen's idea,' Piet said affectionately. 'He's the businessman of the partnership, you see.'