'I do see,' said Sal to the men's backs as they left the cabin more quickly than they'd come.
The Fed position was the better part of a kilometer away. Stephen felt naked outside the ship. There was nothing abnormal about a pair of sailors scuttling away from a vessel in port, but
A three-wheeled scooter pulled away from the port administration buildings south of the field. The vehicle carried two white-jacketed humans and a Molt driver.
'Customs is finally recognizing the
Because the field was so large, the vessels scattered across it looked as sparse as rocks on a Zen sand sculpture. A spherical 400-tonne merchantman took off from the port's left margin. Stephen felt first the tremble through his bootsoles as the thrusters ran up on static test. A plume of exhaust drifted eastward. Stephen's nose wrinkled with the familiar bite of ozone, though this far downwind the concentration was too slight to be dangerous.
The motors were an audible rumble at first, but when the ship managed to stagger its own height above the ground the blast became oppressively loud. Stephen kept his face turned down and away in what by now was a reflex to avoid damage to his sight. Piet bent their course to the other side of a freighter that showed no sign of life. The hull shadowed them until the rising vessel had reached a good thousand meters and her thruster nozzles no longer outglared the sun.
'There's a number of the ships here armed,' Piet said, shouting over the roar of the liftoff. 'I don't see that as a risk while we're making our landing approaches-the guns won't be run out, and firing up through the dorsal ports is difficult in a gravity well. But they may engage our ships after they've landed.'
'You mean the latecomers may get to see some action too?' Stephen said. 'I'd begun to think there was a rule that only the folks on your ship got to do any fighting.'
'Captain Lasky would have recognized you too, Stephen,' Piet said as if apropos nothing. 'You're a more famous man on Venus than you might think.'
'I'd trade fame for a night's sleep,' Stephen said, marveling to hear himself speak the words. Not that the statement was news to Piet, or to others who'd shared the strait confines of a starship with Mister Stephen Gregg and his nightmares. He swallowed and went on, 'They're watching us from the wicket. I'm going to wave.'
At some time in the past year, the Winnipeg port authorities had installed two 20-cm plasma cannon on separate armored barbettes in the center of the civil field. To protect the gun position from starship plasma, they'd dug a pit several meters deep. The spoil was heaped in a berm that the Feds had faced with concrete to limit exhaust erosion.
The only entrance to the gunpit was through a steel gate with firing ports and a guard kiosk. The guard, a human, began talking into a handset when the Venerians approached within a hundred meters. One of the ports was initially bright from sunlight behind it, but it darkened like the other three a moment later. None of the watching Feds poked a gun out.
Stephen took the package from his pocket and made a quick gesture in the air with it. The guards wouldn't know what the contents were, but the display was communication enough: this pair of spacers had come to trade.
The gate was three meters wide. It squealed painfully outward, pivoting from the end opposite the kiosk, until there was barely room for a man to slip through the gap. 'Come on, Christ's blood!' a woman snarled. 'You want some prick in the control tower to report you?'
The gate was 1-cm steel plating on a frame of steel tubes. It was heavy and awkward to move by hand without rollers or frictionless bearings, but it wouldn't stop anything more energetic than a rifle bullet. A flashgun bolt would spall fragments from the back like a grenade going off, and a strong man with a cutting bar could slice through in a straight cut, plate and framework both.
The barbette bases were three meters below the original ground surface; even at 90° elevation, the muzzles of the powerful plasma cannon were protected by the berm around the gunpit. So long as the guns were operable, no hostile ship could safely land at Port Winnipeg. A single 20-cm bolt would do so much damage to thruster nozzles that even the largest vessel would lose control and crash.
Rather than stairs, a slope of earth stabilized with plasticizer ran from the gate to the barbette level. Eight humans and four Molts-the Molts had pushed the gate open; now they pulled it closed again-waited on the ramp head for the Venerians.
'What do you have?' asked the woman who'd ordered Piet and Stephen into the enclosure. She was young and plain. Her hair swirled to the right to conceal the fact she'd lost the lobe of that ear. The epaulets of her gray- blue jacket held gold stars crossed with a double line, but Stephen had never bothered to learn Federation rank insignia. Her name tag read Pengelley.
'What are you paying with?' he replied.
'You lot are from Venus,' said a black-bearded Fed holding a single-shot rifle. Six humans and two Molts carried firearms, though the guns didn't look modern or particularly well maintained.
'So are the cannon they're unloading from our ship,' Piet said, nodding in the direction of the
The doors to the gunhouses were open. Molts in the hatchways watched the proceedings at the gate. The turret armor was at least 15 centimeters thick, proof against penetration by anything except a heavy plasma charge at short range.
'We've got money, if that's what you mean,' Pengelley said.
Stephen sniffed. 'Mapleleafs? Right, we're going to try to pass Mapleleaf dollars in Ishtar City, the way they're beating the war drums there!'
'We figured,' Piet said, 'this being a port for the Reaches' trade, that a crate or two of microchips might have dropped out on the ground while a ship was being unloaded.'
'Let's see what you've got to trade, stinkballers,' the black-bearded man demanded.
Stephen looked at the fellow, smiled, and pulled the first of six 50-mm cubes from his packet. He handed it to Blackbeard.
'Our goods aren't for women,' Piet told Pengelley with a smirk.
'What the hell's this?' Blackbeard said in irritation. He held the cube by the tips of all ten fingers, peering into its gray opacity.
'Warm it in your palms,' another Fed soldier said. 'I've heard of these.'
Blackbeard scowled at his fellow, but he did as the man suggested. The gray suddenly cleared as the crystalline pattern of the cube's outer layer shifted to match polarity with the surface beneath.
'Mary, Mother of God!' Blackbeard said.
As well as being an idolator who worshipped saints' statues, President Pleyal was a sanctimonious prig. Under his rule, licentiousness and bawdiness were rigidly suppressed. Objects like these-cubes in which figures engaged in sexual acrobatics as layers changed state-were therefore worth their weight in microchips in the North American Federation.
'Pass it around, soldier,' Piet said smugly. 'Your pals want a look too.'
Pengelley took the cube from Blackbeard. She watched for a moment, then closed her palms over it. 'All right,' she said. 'What's your offer?'
'Three thousand consols apiece,' Stephen said. 'You pay in chips at the rate of a hundred and thirty consols per K2B, other chips valued in relation to that baseline.'
'If you pay thirty thousand up front,' Piet added, 'you get the other six that we bring from the ship after we're paid. Deal?'
'That's a dirt poor price on K2Bs!' Blackbeard snapped.
'So?' Piet sneered. 'Did you buy them out of Federation stores? Is that where you got your chips?'
'You can move these for five thousand apiece here in Winnipeg,' Stephen said, removing the sample from Pengelley's hand after the slightest resistance. 'Take them to West Montreal and the sky's the limit. Now, do you want to deal?'
Blackbeard clicked the safety of his rifle off, then on again. Stephen grinned at him. Blackbeard grimaced and looked down.
