The Reaches

Cellular life had not arisen here, nor was it likely to arise. The primary raised tides in Sunrise's rocky core and swamped the moon's surface every few years with magma or volcanically-melted water which refroze as soon as the tremors paused.

The planet-sized moon was a useful staging point in the patterns of transit space connecting the Reaches with the worlds of the Mirror, where the sidereal universe doubled itself in close detail. There would be a Federation outpost on Sunrise-

Except for storms that battered the moon's atmosphere with a violence equal to the surges in the crust itself. Landing a large vessel on Sunrise would have been nearly suicidal for pilots who had not trained in the roiling hell of Venus.

For that matter, the Tolliver's landing had been a close brush with disaster and the Grandcamp was still in orbit. Captain Kershaw's cutter ferried him down to attend the conference in person.

There hadn't been any choice about landing the flagship. Quite apart from the need to replenish the Tolliver's air supply, her disintegrating hull required repairs that could best be performed on the ground. Ricimer had hinted to Gregg that nothing that could be done outside a major dockyard was going to help the big vessel significantly, though.

'I say we head straight for home,' said Fedders of the Rose. 'We've got our profit and a dozen times over, what with the shell from Jewelhouse. The amount of risk we face if we try to move the last hundred Molts isn't worth it. And I'm talking about strain to the ships, irregardless of the Feds.'

'We can't make a straight run for Venus,' Kershaw protested. 'I can't, at least. The gradients between transit universes are rising, and I tell you frankly-the Grandcamp isn't going to take the strain.'

The buzz of crews overglazing the Tolliver provided a constant background to the discussion. Portable kilns crawled across the hull in regular bands, spraying vaporized rock onto the crumbling ceramic plates. The process returned the flagship to proper airtightness so long as she remained at rest. The stress of takeoff, followed by the repeated hammering of transit, would craze the surface anew.

'It's not the gradients-' said Fedders.

'The gradients are rising,' Ricimer interjected quickly. 'They're twenty percent above what the sailing directions we loaded on Jewelhouse indicate is normal.'

'All right, they are,' Fedders snapped, 'but the real problem is the Grandcamp's AI not making the insertions properly. And the Federation's Earth Convoy is due in the region any day now.'

'That's enough squabbling about causes,' Admiral Mostert said forcefully. 'The situation is what's important. And the situation is that the Tolliver can't make a straight run home either. We're going to have to land on Biruta to refit and take on reaction mass.'

Kelly of the Hawkwood muttered a curse. 'Right,' he said to his hands. They were clenched, knuckles to knuckles, on the opalglass conference table before him. 'And what do we do if the Earth Convoy's waiting there for us? Pray they won't have heard how we traded on Jewelhouse?'

'And Bowman,' Stephen Gregg murmured from his chair against the bulkhead behind Ricimer-Captain Ricimer-at the table. The aged flagship had few virtues, but the scale of her accommodations, including a full conference room as part of the admiral's suite, was one of them. 'And Guelph. We didn't actually blow up any buildings either of those places, but the locals did business with us because forty plasma guns were trained on them.'

A particularly strong gust of wind ripped across the surface of Sunrise. The Tolliver rocked and settled again. A similar blast when Gregg and Ricimer trekked from the Peaches to the flagship had skidded them thirty meters across a terrain of rock crevices filled with ice.

'I don't suppose there'd be another uncharted stopover we could use instead of Biruta, would there?' Fedders suggested plaintively. 'I mean. .'

Everyone in the conference room, the six captains and their chief aides and navigators, knew what Fedders meant. They also knew that Sunrise had been discovered only because of the Peaches' one-in-a-million piece of luck. Ricimer cast widely ahead of the remainder of the argosy, confident that he could rendezvous without constantly comparing positions the way the other navigators had to do.

The voyage thus far had been a stunning success. The Venerians loaded pre-Collapse artifacts from two Federation colonies, and on Jewelhouse they'd gained half a tonne of the shells that made the planet famous. The material came from deepwater snails which fluoresced vividly to stun prey in the black depths of the ocean trench they inhabited. Kilo for kilo, the shell was as valuable as purpose-designed microchips from factories operating across the Mirror.

When the voyage began, Mostert's men were willing to take risks for the chance of becoming wealthy. Now they were wealthy, all the officers in this room. . if only they could get home with their takings. There was no longer a carrot to balance the stick of danger; and that stick was more and more a spiked club as the condition of the older vessels degraded from brutal use.

'We should be ahead of the Earth Convoy,' Mostert said. His heavy face was without visible emotion, but the precise way his hands rested on the conference table suggested the control he exerted to retain that impassivity. 'We'll load, repair, and be gone in a few days. We can offer the authorities on Biruta a fair price for using their graving docks. They need Molt labor as badly as the other colonies.'

'There's only one place to land a starship on Biruta,' Fedders said with his eyes on a ceiling molding. 'That's Island Able. And they'll have defenses there, the Feds will. .'

A starship which committed to land on Biruta had no options if batteries at the port opened fire. The seas that wrapped the remainder of the planet would swallow any vessel which tried to avoid plasma bolts that would otherwise rip her belly out.

'They won't know we're from Venus,' said Mostert. 'I'll go in first with the guns ready for as soon as we're down.'

He looked at his cousin. 'Ricimer,' he said. 'You can bring your featherboat in at the same time the Tolliver lands, can't you?'

'Yes,' Ricimer said softly. 'We could do that. It'll confuse the garrison.'

Mostert nodded. 'If we give them enough to think about, they won't act. So that's what we'll do.'

He looked around the conference table. 'No further questions, then?' he said with a deliberate lack of subtlety.

No one spoke for a moment. The Venerians had accessed the data banks in the Jewelhouse Commandatura while they held the Fed governor and his wife under guard. The information there suggested that the annual Earth Convoy was due anytime within a standard week of the present. .

'If there isn't any choice,' Piet Ricimer said in the grim silence, 'then-may the Lord shelter us in our necessity.'

Gregg remembered the terror in the eyes of the wife of the Jewelhouse governor. He wondered if the Lord saw any reason to shelter the men in this room. . including Stephen Gregg, who was of their number whether or not he approved of every action his company took.

20

Biruta

Biruta's atmosphere was notably calm. That, with the planet's location at the nearer edge (through transit space) of the Reaches and the huge expanse of water to provide reaction mass, made Biruta an ideal way station for starships staggering out from the solar system.

The Peaches had to come in at the worst part of the flagship's turbulence. She bucked and pitched like lint above an air vent. Ricimer and the men on the attitude jets, Leon and Lightbody this time, kept the featherboat on a reasonably even keel.

Jeude and Tancred in their hard suits hunched over the plasma cannon forward. They'd opened the gunport