The Reaches

one or two-three was stretching it, literally-persons alive so long as the air supply and CO₂ scrubbers held out.

One of the two humans in the bubble was a Rabbit. The remaining crewman was a Molt. Alone of the three, the Molt didn't flinch when the laser's fat muzzle prodded toward the bubble.

Dole scrambled in behind Gregg. 'The captain's coming,' he said. 'Leave the hatch open.'

The speaker on the vessel's control panel was useless without air to carry the sounds to the boarding party. Piet must have used radio or intercom to alert the crewman while he was still out on the hull.

The cabin of the captured ship was small. It was partitioned off from the cargo spaces with no direct internal communication. The Venerian featherboat was cramped and simple, but this ship had the crudity of a concrete slab.

A third armored figure slid through the hatchway, carrying a rough coil over his shoulder: Dole's lifeline, which Ricimer had unhooked from the Peaches before he launched himself toward the captive. Dole reached out and drew the hatch closed.

When the dogs were seated but the air system had only begun repressurizing the cabin, Piet Ricimer opened his visor. 'Gentlemen,' he announced in a voice made tinny by the rarefied atmosphere, 'when you've answered my questions, I'll set you down on the surface of Rondelet where your friends can rescue you. But you will answer my questions.'

Another man would have added a curse or a threat, Gregg thought. Piet Ricimer did neither.

Though with the flashgun aimed at the captives from point-blank range, threatening words wouldn't have added a lot.

33

Sunrise

'The meeting's in ten minutes,' said Piet Ricimer, wobbling as a long gust typical of Sunrise stuttered to a lull. Though the two men were within arm's length of one another, he used the intercom in order to be heard. 'Time we were getting back.'

'You're in charge,' Gregg said. There were no real hills in this landscape. He'd found a hummock of harder rock to sit down on. There was enough rise for his heels to grip and steady his torso against the omnipresent wind. 'The meeting won't start until you get there.'

A three-meter rivulet of light rippled toward them across the rocks and thin snow. The creature was a transparent red like that of a pomegranate cell. Twice its length from the humans, it dived like an otter into the rock and vanished.

Gregg's trigger finger relaxed slightly. He leaned on his left hand to look behind him, but there was no threat in that direction either.

The Peaches, Dalriada, and the prize Ricimer had named the Halys were a few hundred meters away. The ships had already gathered drifts in the lee of the prevailing winds. Temporary outbuildings housed the crusher and kiln with which the crews applied hull patches, though neither Venerian vessel was in serious need of refit.

On a less hostile world, men would have built huts for themselves as well. On Sunrise, they slept in the ships.

'What do you think, Stephen?' Ricimer asked. He faced out, toward a horizon as empty as the plain on which he stood. Occasionally a tremble of light marked another of the planet's indigenous life forms.

Gregg shrugged within his hard suit. 'You do the thinking, Piet,' he said. 'I'll back you up.'

Ricimer turned abruptly. He staggered before he came to terms with the wind from this attitude. 'Don't pretend to be stupid!' he said. 'If you think I'm making a mistake, tell me!'

'I'm not stupid, Piet,' Gregg said. He was glad he was seated. Contact with the ground calmed him against the atmosphere's volatility. 'I don't care. About where we go, about how we hit the Feds. You'll decide, and I'll help you execute whatever you do decide.'

A creature of light so richly azure that it was almost material quivered across the snow between the two men and vanished again. Gregg restrained himself from an urge to prod the rippling form with his boot toe.

Ricimer laughed wryly. 'So it's up to me and God, is it, Stephen?' He clasped his arms closer to his armored torso. 'I hope God is with me. I pray He is.'

Gregg said nothing. He had been raised to believe in God and God's will, though without the particular emphasis his friend had received. Now-

He supposed he still believed in them. But he couldn't believe that the smoking bodies Stephen Gregg had left in his wake were any part of the will of God.

'I'm going to go back there and give orders,' Ricimer continued. His face nodded behind the visor, though the suit's locked helmet didn't move. 'There's a risk that my plan will fail disastrously. Even if it succeeds, some of my men will almost certainly die. Stephen, you may die.'

'All my ancestors have,' Gregg said. 'I don't expect to be any different.'

He raised his gauntleted hand to watch the ringers clench and unclench. 'Piet,' he said, 'I trust you to do the best job you can. And to do a better job than anybody else could.'

Ricimer laughed again, this time with more humor. 'Do you, Stephen? Well, I suppose you must, or you wouldn't be here.'

He put out a hand to help his friend stand. 'Then let's go back to Peaches, since until I do my job of laying out the plan, none of the rest of you can do yours.'

34

Sunrise

The command group met on the featherboat rather than the much larger Dalriada because of the electronics with which Ricimer had outfitted the vessel he and Gregg owned personally. The planning kernel which coupled to the AI was the most important of these toys at the moment. It converted navigational information into cartographic data and projected the result onto the Peaches' viewscreen.

An image of Umber, simplified into a tawny pancake marked with standard symbols, filled the screen now.

There were ten humans-the gentlemen and officers of the expedition-and two Molts packed into the featherboat's bay. John, the Molt captured aboard the Halys, had asked and been allowed to join the Venerians.

John's recent knowledge of Umber was an obvious advantage for the raid; Guillermo operated the display with a skill that none of the humans on the expedition could have equaled. Nonetheless, several of the Dalriada's gentlemen looked askance at seeing aliens included in the command group.

'There's only one community on this side of Umber,' Ricimer said as Guillermo focused the screen onto the upper edge of the pancake. 'It's paired with a single community across the Mirror. The planetary surface is entirely desert on both sides, lifeless except for imported species.'

From straight on like this, Umber appeared to be a normal planet with a diameter of about 5,000 kilometers. Instead, it was a section from the surface of a spheroid 12,000 klicks in diameter-had the remainder of the planet existed.

Umber's gravitational attraction was normal for the calculated size and density of the complete planet-slightly below that of Venus. There was no mass in realside, mirrorside, or anywhere to account for that gravity.

'Umber City is built along the Mirror,' Ricimer continued. 'The population varies, but there are usually about a