The Reaches

featherboat dropped into the canopy with its bow pitched up 20°, advancing at barely a fast walk. An arrow clanged against the underside.

Shadows and the faceshield's tint came dangerously close to blinding Gregg. He saw movement over the Peaches' bow, three Molts on a platform anchored where a pair of branches crossed between trunks. A catwalk of vine-lashed poles led into the green curtain to either side.

One Molt was cocking a shoulder-stocked weapon with a vertical throwing arm. Another fired his similar weapon at the featherboat's bow, not the men above the hatch. A crewman's rifle spoke.

Gregg squeezed off. The carapace of the Molt cocking his launcher exploded. The blast of vaporized flesh threw both his/her companions off the platform.

The Peaches nudged into a tree bole and crushed it over, tugging out the distant roots. The catwalk separated and fell away. Gregg saw poles flying from another walkway, unguessed until the moment of collapse. All his men were shooting, and he thought he heard muffled gunfire from the ground.

The laser was the wrong weapon for a close-quarter firefight like this. He couldn't see well enough with the visor down to react. 'Give me a rif-' he shouted as he fed a fresh battery into the flashgun's stock.

The plasma cannon fired. The shockwave threw Gregg backward. If the Peaches hadn't bucked at the same time, he might have fallen flat. The directed thermonuclear explosion bored a cone of radiant hell hundreds of meters through the mid-canopy. Foliage to either side of the path withered and died.

Gregg saw a Molt plunging toward the ground like a flung torch. The aliens wore no clothing, but the creature's entire body had been ignited by the discharge.

Ricimer guided the featherboat along the ionized track. Molt constructions showed vividly where the leaves were burned away.

Gregg saw an alien clinging to the poles of a catwalk whose farther end had vanished. Instead of shooting the Molt he saw, he aimed at the high crotch where the poles were still attached. The flash of his bolt illuminated a pair of Molts crouching in the darkness. They hurtled to either side, while their fellow dropped in the tangle of his poles.

The featherboat nosed to starboard. Ricimer needed to encircle the site in order to free the raiders pinned down below. He or Dole had corrected the attitude to lower the bow. A gnarled, wrist-thick branch struck Gregg hard enough on the head to make his eyes water despite the helmet.

At least a dozen Molts fired a simultaneous volley. All the missiles were aimed at the gunmen this time. An arrow struck just in front of the hatch coaming and glanced upward into Gregg's chest. The impact stabbed daggers through his ribs.

A crewman screamed behind him. A pair of Molts reloaded on a catwalk only twenty meters ahead of the Peaches. The bow would throw them down in a moment. Gregg fired anyway and saw the bodies cartwheel away, one of them headless.

He flipped up his visor and turned. 'A rifle!' he shouted. 'Give me a-'

Leon was trying to keep Bailey from climbing out of the hatch. An arrow had plunged into Bailey's right eye and down, pinning his face to his left shoulder. The crewman gobbled bloody froth. His remaining eye was wild.

Tancred bellowed wordlessly as tears streamed down his cheeks. He didn't appear to be physically injured. He worked the bolt of his repeater and pulled the trigger, but the weapon's magazine was empty.

'Get down, all of you!' Gregg ordered. He dropped his flashgun and gripped the repeater at the balance. Tancred resisted momentarily. Gregg punched the boy in the pit of the stomach. He crumpled. Gregg snatched the bandolier and broke the strap free with the violence of his tug.

Bailey suddenly collapsed. Leon straightened and brought up his breechloader. Molt projectiles crossed in the air between Gregg and the bosun. 'Get down!' Gregg repeated as he thumbed cartridges into the integral magazine.

The Peaches rocked into a series of tree trunks in quick succession. One splintered at the point of impact. The other trees pulled out of the thin soil and tilted crazily, half-supported by vines and branches interlocking with those of their neighbors. As the featherboat passed over the tangle, her superheated exhaust devoured those impediments and sent the trunks crashing the remainder of the way to the ground.

A Molt aimed his weapon down at the hatch. Gregg shot the creature through the body. Recoil brought a sharp reminder of the injured ribs. He chambered the next round, rotated to his left where motion shimmered in the corner of his eye, and smashed the triangular skull of an alien seventy meters away.

Leon fired. A projectile grazed the back of Gregg's helmet, making his vision blur.

'God rot your bones in Hell!' Gregg screamed in the bosun's face. 'Get down and load for me! I've got armor!'

As he spoke, he fired the last round in his magazine. A Molt dropped his weapon to one side of a catwalk and fell to the other. He managed to grasp a guy rope of braided vine and cling there for the instant's notice Gregg had to give anything that wasn't immediately lethal.

He dropped the repeater. Tancred offered him a loaded rifle, stock-first, from the featherboat's bay. Leon ducked down as ordered. Either the words or the sense or the naked fury in Stephen Gregg's face had penetrated the bosun's consciousness.

With his visor up, Gregg felt like a god. He could see everything, and he couldn't miss. The Peaches was unstable at low speed even without grinding her hull into huge trees, which themselves weighed tonnes. It didn't matter. Gregg and the gunsights and each Molt were one until the flash/shock signaled the need to seek another alien target.

Two more arrows hit Gregg-on the right side and in the back, squarely over the smear where he'd been struck while boarding the featherboat. He was aware of the impacts the way he saw the black and green of vegetation-facts, but unimportant when only the mauve smudges of Molt bodies mattered.

He didn't bother to look down when he'd emptied a rifle, just dropped it and opened his hand to take the fresh weapon a crewman would slap there. The carbine from the Tolliver's officer had a five-round magazine and was dead accurate. Gregg used it to shoot the eye out of a Molt warrior at least a hundred meters away.

A corner of Gregg's mind noted two trucks glimpsed where the Peaches had cleared a sight line to the ground. Men huddled beneath the vehicles and behind nearby trees. A few of them waved. Molt projectiles stood out from the thin panels of the truck bodies like quills on a porcupine, and from sprawled men as well.

The featherboat yawed uneasily as Ricimer brought her bow onto a new heading. Gregg hadn't fired for-he didn't know how long. There weren't any targets, though occasionally he glimpsed an empty platform or catwalk.

The Peaches nosed onto the track her thrusters had cleared on the way to the ambush site. Over the bow Gregg saw the trucks again, all three of them, retreating toward the ships. They jounced over the buttress roots of trees at the best speed they were capable of. He realized he couldn't hear anything, not even the roaring thrusters, though he felt the vibration through his feet and the hatch coaming against which he braced his belly.

The clearing the Tolliver had blasted was a bright splotch without the shadow- dappling of the jungle beyond. The flagship had run out several of her big plasma cannon. Men rose from hasty barricades to greet the returning trucks.

'That's okay, sir,' said a voice close to Gregg's ear. 'We'll take over now.'

A wet cloth dabbed at his forehead. He wasn't wearing his helmet anymore.

'Jesus God! What happened to his head?'

'Arrow must've hit right over the visor. Jesus!'

The last thing Gregg saw was the worried face of Piet Ricimer, framed by the hatch opening above him.

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