The Reaches

Pengelley had made a call from the port administration building while the remainder of the gun crew waited with Piet and Stephen in a canvas-covered truck. When the truck dropped them all at a tavern in the heart of the city, a nameless fat civilian was waiting with a briefcase of pre-Collapse microchips.

The civilian's bodyguard was broader than Stephen and almost as tall. Apart from those two and the bartender, no one else was present. The man who loitered outside the tavern door was obviously a guard.

The transaction had gone smoothly. The price for the porno cubes was fair, and the chips the civilian offered in payment were of the quality he claimed. There'd been a delay in getting transport back to the field after the deal was complete, though. The Fed soldiers offered to stand drinks; and more drinks; and more, as the slow spring evening shadowed the sky above the city.

'Freshen your drink, buddy?' the bartender offered. 'The sergeant, she's paying.' He nodded toward Pengelley.

'Sure,' Stephen said. 'I'm legless already, so another slug can't hurt. They'll have to carry me when the truck gets here.'

He and Piet were going to have to make their move when they next went out the back to piss in the alley behind the tavern. The trouble wouldn't be making a break, but rather how they would get from central Winnipeg to the Gallant Sallie kilometers away. There was almost no motor transport in this dismal city. If he and Piet tried to hike up the sole road to the port, the locals-who surely had access to vehicles-would easily relocate them.

Piet and Stephen were perfectly willing to leave the Feds with the chips as well as the cubes, but if the Feds guessed that, they'd wonder what the pair of Venerians had really been up to.

If life were simple, then Venus wouldn't have needed a planner like Piet Ricimer. And Piet wouldn't have needed a killer like Stephen Gregg.

Winnipeg was less a city than a rubbish midden with dwellings on top. The community hadn't been bombed during the Outworld Rebellion a thousand years before. Rather, the walls had been pulled down stone by stone by the starving, desperate population during the ensuing Collapse. Occupation of the site had been continuous, reaching its nadir five hundred years in the past.

By the time technological civilization returned to the region under the guise of the North American Federation, the bricks, beams, and ashlars of pre-Collapse Winnipeg had been mined for multiple reuse. Now the city's tawdry present squatted on its ruined past.

Stephen looked down the bar, careful to avoid eye contact with the fat man's bodyguard. The fellow didn't seem smart enough to tie his own shoes, but he might be able to recognize a threat if one glared at him.

Piet was finishing a complicated story that involved a captain setting down in Betaport instead of Ishtar City, well across the planet, as he'd intended. Stephen waited for the last flourish and laughter, then called, 'Hey, Janni! Give me a hand to the jakes. I can't walk by myself.'

'Piet' wasn't an uncommon name, but it was the one Venerian name that had a connection for every Fed.

Piet looked around. As he did so, Sal, Harrigan, Dole, and three other sailors from the Gallant Sallie walked in the front door. The local who'd been posted outside to prevent interruption lay on the ground, moaning and clutching his groin.

'There you stupid scuts are!' Sal shouted. 'By God, if I hadn't found you in the next five minutes, you could swim back to Venus!'

'Oh, ma'am, we weren't AWOL,' Piet whined, snaking down beside his leg the case of microchips from the bartop.

The bodyguard stood in front of Sal. He held a meter-long crowbar across his chest. 'This is a private party,' he grated. 'You buggers aren't wanted.'

Stephen, moving before anyone but Piet knew he was going to move, stepped behind the bodyguard and gripped him by the belt and the back of the neck. Pengelley shouted and stumbled out of her chair.

The bodyguard managed only a startled grunt as Stephen half ran, half threw him into the wall at the end of the bar. The bodyguard went headfirst through the paneling and the two studs he hit on the way. Bits of plaster crumbled from the ceiling at the shock.

'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!' Blackbeard cried as he stared at the destruction. The bartender reached beneath the bar. Dole looked at him. The bartender brought his hands back into sight-empty.

'It's your own damned fault, feeding him booze like that!' Sal snarled at Blackbeard. 'Christ's blood, he's not safe to be around sober. Harrigan, get them out of here. We're lifting in an hour.'

The table had tipped when Stephen and the bodyguard went past. The fat civilian remained in his chair, sitting exactly as he had before the violence. He watched the Venerians leave, Piet still holding the microchips; but he said nothing and his hands, like the bartender's, were in plain sight.

Lightbody was driving a spaceport truck, obviously rented by means of a bribe to the right official. The guns and cutting bars that the rescue party hadn't wanted to display unless necessary were in the cab with him. Nobody came out of the tavern as the vehicle pulled away.

'Thanks, Sal,' Stephen said softly.

'My pleasure,' she replied in a neutral voice. 'Much more pleasure than dealing with Dan Lasky this afternoon.'

The truck jounced over potholes in the dirt street. At every corner hung one or more giant portraits of President Pleyal. Some of the pictures had been defaced with paint.

'Lasky's ship, the Moll Dane,' Piet said, speaking over the rattle of the truck's suspension. 'Is it a well-found vessel, Captain Blythe?'

Sal looked at him. Her face was shadowed, but puzzlement was evident in her voice as she said, 'Not particularly. Why?'

'That's good,' Piet said. 'We don't have the authority to take a Venerian vessel prize when we return here. I certainly don't intend to leave the Moll Dane in the present hands, but I'd hate to destroy a really trim ship.'

He smiled. For a moment, Stephen felt that he might have been looking into a mirror.

EARTH APPROACHES

April 16, Year 27

0120 hours, Venus time

'God's love, that's a sharp image!' Tom Harrigan said as he hung in the air behind Sal at the navigation console, watching the remote display transmitted from the New Year's Gift. 'If I was looking out the hatch, it wouldn't be that clear!'

The guardship at the orbital window for Winnipeg grew slowly on the screen as the New Year's Gift maneuvered carefully closer to the expectant Feds. The guardship's four cannon were run out, but her crew didn't go through the charade of aiming the guns at yet another intrasystem merchantman with a cargo for Winnipeg.

The squadron had captured the New Year's Gift at Berryhill on January 1. The vessel was metal and responded to the guardship's hail as the Mary of Vancouver with a cargo of forgings from the Asteroid Belt for Winnipeg. There was nothing about the ship or the situation to rouse the inspectors from their boredom.

'The imagery from when we scouted Winnipeg is still in the database,' Sal explained. 'The AI uses that data to sharpen the details we get from the New Year's Gift. Our optronics now are. . We have as good a system as any ship in the squadron, the Wrath included.'

She touched a control. The display switched from enhanced visuals of the guardship to a scene including both the guardship and the New Year's Gift as the latter approached for inspection. The image of the Venerian vessel was entirely computer-modeled from the Gallant Sallie's database.

Sal's whole crew hung in the cabin, using the freedom of weightlessness to position themselves so that everybody had a view of the display. They could get to their duty stations within five seconds. Unless and until the New Year's Gift carried out her mission, the rest of the squadron had no duty to perform.