The Reaches

Piet keyed in a complex series of commands, then rose from the console and drew on his gauntlets. The port airlock started to open, forcing two of the Molts to move.

'Stephen!' Piet said in surprise. 'Come on, we've got to get out before the ship lifts. I programmed it to crash into the freighters on the west berm!'

'And them?' Stephen said, waving to the prisoners who hadn't fled aft with their fellows.

'Get out!' Piet shouted. 'We're going to crash!'

The three Molts turned and leaped into the sea of radiance, one at a time. Though they jumped as far as they could, they were well within the bath of ions when they hit the ground. The bodies shriveled and burned like figures of straw.

'I'll follow you, Piet,' Stephen said. He dropped the rifle and grabbed the Fed officer around the waist.

Piet looked momentarily doubtful, but he latched down his visor and jumped from the hatch. The Holy Office shook itself like a dog just risen from the water. The nozzle irises were closing, restricting the flow to boost thrust.

Stephen, clasping the screaming officer tightly, took three running steps and leaped from the lip of the outer hatch. Exhaust pulsed around him. His boots hit the concrete two meters below. He skidded but kept his footing, thrusting the Fed out as a balance weight. He kept running until he hit the inner face of the berm.

The Fed's uniform smoldered and his exposed skin was already beginning to blister, but he was alive. For the moment, he was alive.

Which was the most anyone could say, after all.

WINNIPEG SPACEPORT, EARTH

April 16, Year 27

0453 hours, Venus time

Sal grasped a wrist-thick tree growing between a pair of the concrete slabs covering the berm. She reached down to take Brantling's good hand, his left, while Tom Harrigan pushed the injured sailor from below.

The berm sloped at 45°, a steeper climb than Brantling could handle at the moment. There was a flight of broad steps fifty meters away, but they were crowded with exhausted men in hard suits carrying their weapons and their casualties. Sal and her flight crew would have risked jostling and worse if they'd tried to leave the military port by that route. The assault force had expended too much physical and emotional energy in its brief fight to be careful now.

'Thanks, Cap'n Blythe,' Brantling muttered as Sal half helped, half dragged him past her to get a grip and then a foothold on the tree. Her breath rasped. Four meters of 1:1 slope didn't seem especially difficult until you tried to climb it when you were wrung-out emotionally.

Guillermo perched like a gargoyle on the berm's broad top. He took Brantling's hand for what help he could offer.

The flight crew had been forgotten as soon as the Moll Dane landed. Nobody informed them of what was happening, nobody even thought about Sal and her men aboard the crumpled freighter. The assault preparations had been sudden and ad hoc. Even Sal hadn't thought about what she was supposed to do when and if she survived landing.

Sal had never before felt so completely abandoned.

The note of the Holy Office's thrusters changed, sharpened. Sal looked over her shoulder as the vessel lifted minusculely from the concrete. The nozzle irises were tightening down. An armored figure leaped from the cockpit airlock, stumbled in the iridescent hellfire, and trotted out of the exhaust corona. A second, heavier figure followed. The Holy Office began to skitter forward like a chunk of sodium dropped on a still pond.

'I've got it,' Harrigan said, ignoring Sal's offered hand to zigzag leftward instead. His toes had found purchase between two of the facing slabs. Sal got a foot against the tree trunk and flopped belly-down on top of the berm.

The Holy Office gained speed gradually as it crossed the military port in hops of ten, twenty, fifty meters. Each time the unmanned vessel tilted enough to lose ground effect, the skid on the lower side brushed sparklingly along the concrete. The ship lifted again, tacking slightly toward that contact, and touched on the opposite skid. Sarah Blythe had no false modesty regarding her own piloting skills, but she could never have programmed an artificial intelligence to carry out the maneuver she was watching.

Harrigan, thinking the same thing, said, 'There's somebody at the controls.'

'Captain Ricimer was at the controls, Mister Harrigan,' Guillermo responded with quiet pride.

Three great spherical freighters from the Reaches trade stood three hundred meters apart along the west edge of the port. The Holy Office struck the nearest, an 800-tonner, a glancing blow low on the starboard side. The shrieking contact continued deafeningly for several seconds. The warship caromed off the larger merchantman and swapped ends twice before it smashed broadside into the 1,200-tonne giant north of the initial target.

This time the noise was like that of planets colliding. Both the Holy Office and the merchantman had thick hulls, but the kinetic energy of the impact was of astronomical level. The surfaces of nickel-steel plates vaporized and the frame members behind them compressed like putty.

A plasma motor, its nozzle sealed by the 20 centimeters of tough plating rammed into it, became a fusion bomb. The flash seemed to transfuse solid metal. Remnants of the Holy Office, half the stern to one side and fragments that had been part of the bow to the other, blew back in a ravening white glare. The four upper decks of the exploding freighter lifted as a piece, flattening as they rose.

A munitions explosion, slighter than the first but cataclysmic nonetheless, gushed red flame from the center of the inferno. The top of the vessel flipped sideways. It struck the ground and carved a trench twenty meters deep through the concrete, then sheared into the remaining freighter.

The third vessel was pinned between the anvil of the berm and the upper half of the 1,200-tonner, a hammer more massive than the Holy Office had been when complete. Steam and fire engulfed the site. Slabs shook from the berm hundreds of meters away, and a pall of dust lifted from the surface of the port.

No skill could have planned a result so destructive. 'Maybe God does fight for Venus,' Sal whispered, though her mind couldn't find much of God in what she had just watched. She'd spent her life carrying cargoes, and shipwreck was the greatest disaster she could imagine.

Below Sal, two men in hard suits staggered toward the stairway. The gilded armor, now scoured and defaced by the plasma bath, was Piet Ricimer's.

Piet kept his right gauntlet against the berm to guide him where he didn't trust his eyes. His left hand gripped the right gauntlet of the bigger man, who held what looked like a bundle of smoking fabric.

Stephen was still alive, but at this moment Sal had only intellect left to be glad of the fact. The earthshaking thumps of further destruction blurred even that.

'That'll teach them not to mess with Venus, won't it, Mister Harrigan?' Brantling crowed. 'We fed them the sharp end this time!'

'Aye, by God we did,' Tom Harrigan said in guttural triumph. 'We've singed President Pleyal's beard, we have!'

Across the port, three ships that could have supplied a large colony for a year blazed in devouring glory.

ISHTAR CITY, VENUS

June 6, Year 27

0331 hours, Venus time

Sal opened the door with exaggerated care, stepped into the front room of the apartment she shared with her father, and closed the door on her fingers. 'Christ's bleeding wounds!' she shouted before she remembered she was trying not to disturb Marcus.

Marcus Blythe lurched upright on the divan where he'd been dozing. 'Sal?' he called. He turned up the table lamp from a vague glow to full brightness.

'Sorry, Dad,' Sal said. 'I didn't mean to. .'