The Reaches

Umber

'Not a thing!' Jeude snarled as he stamped into the secretary's residence. 'Not a damned thing.'

'There's food,' said Stampfer, closing the outer door behind himself and his partner in searching the nearer warehouse. The gunner sucked on a hard-cored fruit so lush that juice dripped into his beard. With his free hand, he pulled another fruit from his bulging pocket. He offered it to Ricimer, Gregg, and the Fed captive promiscuously. 'Want one?'

Gregg shook his head at Stampfer and said to Jeude, 'Maybe Dole and Coye had better luck.'

'It's not up to date,' Elkinghorn said miserably from the outpost's central computer. 'I know it shows twelve cases of Class A chips here, but as God is my witness, they've all been trucked across. All of them.'

She squeezed her forehead with her right hand, then resumed advancing the manifest with the light pen in her left, master, hand. She was trembling badly.

Ricimer had refused to give the prisoner more liquor. She'd been drinking herself comatose in irritation at being left behind, 'in charge', while the rest of the outpost's complement crossed to Umber City for the celebration. The laser bolt had shocked her sober, but she wasn't happy about the fact.

'That other warehouse, Dole's looking, but it's not going to do a bit of good,' Jeude replied. 'Supplies, machinery-trade goods for other colonies on the mirrorside, that's all there is.'

Stampfer dropped his pit on the coarse rug. He began eating the fruit in his left hand.

Lightbody came in the door, carrying his cutting bar in his hand. 'I got through the sidewall of the barracks,' he announced, 'but it wasn't any good. You torched her right and proper, sir.'

He nodded to Gregg. 'Fully involved. Zip, I cut through the wall, and boom, the roof lifts off because air got to the inside that had about smothered itself out.'

Gregg shrugged sheepishly. 'I thought she might have a gun inside,' he said.

'There's no guns here,' the prisoner said. 'There's nothing but Christ-bitten desert here, so what's to shoot?'

Anger raised her blood pressure. She dropped the light pen and pressed both hands to her temples. 'Oh, God, I need a drink so bad,' she groaned.

Ricimer stood. 'Tie her,' he said to Lightbody. At the tramhead, the Venerians had found a coil of rope woven somewhere on mirrorside. The Molt laborers said they used it to bind bulky loads onto the cars. 'And give her a drink, if there is one.'

Jeude shrugged and took a bottle out of his sabretache.

The door opened and banged closed again. Dole and Coye came into the office with a drift of sand despite the near airlock.

'It's all outgoing stuff, sir,' the bosun said, echoing Jeude of a moment before. 'There's not a chip in the settlement.'

He noticed the office console and pointed his breechloader at it. 'Besides whatever's in that unit, I guess.'

Ricimer looked at his men. Greg winced mentally to see his friend's haggard face. While the rest of them simply tried not to scream during the slow suffocation of the Umber's approach, Piet brought the jerry-built vessel down softly by the standards of a manual landing on a proper ship.

'We've gotten here too late to find the chips I'd hoped,' he said quietly. 'Over the past week, the stockpile was taken across the Mirror in anticipation of the Earth Convoy's arrival.'

He licked his lips, chapped by sand blown on the dry wind. 'The chips haven't vanished. With the celebration going on, officials of Umber City and the convoy won't have had time to complete loading the ships. They may not even have started yet.'

Ricimer's voice grew louder, stronger. Gregg grinned coldly to see gray tension vanish from his friend's face and his eyes brighten again.

'To get the chips, we would have to cross the Mirror again,' he said. 'To return to Umber City. You all know the risks. You all know-'

His voice would have filled a room of ten times the volume of this office.

'— that I failed before, that many of our f-friends and loved ones were killed because of my miscalculation. The risks are even greater now, because the convoy and all its personnel will be in Umber City.'

'Hey, it's not that dangerous,' Jeude protested. 'The Feds won't be expecting us this direction, right?'

Ricimer's head rotated like a lathe turret. 'They didn't expect us before,' he said harshly to Jeude. 'That didn't prevent them from reacting effectively.'

He scanned his assembled men. 'Guillermo tells me the labor force here will help us, run the trams the way they do for their masters. He's organizing that now. In exchange, we will take every slave off this planet. We can't return them to their home planets, but they'll be able to live free on Benison with K'Jax.'

'Gonna be tight. .' Dole muttered. Catching himself, he added quickly, 'Not that we're not used to it. No problem.'

Free with K'Jax, Gregg thought. He was willing to grant that Molts were 'human,' whatever that meant. He hadn't seen anything to suggest they were saints, though; or that K'Jax would be considered a particularly benevolent leader of any race.

'I won't order you men to go to Umber City again with me,' Ricimer went on fiercely. 'I won't think the less of anyone who wants to stay. But I'm going across, and with the help of God I hope this time to succeed.'

Stampfer dropped the second fruit pit on the floor. 'I haven't come all this way to go home poor,' he said.

Yeah/Sure/Count me in from the remainder of the crew.

Gregg said nothing. He was smiling slightly, and his eyes were light-years distant.

'Stephen?' Piet Ricimer said.

Gregg shook himself to wakefulness. 'If the Earth Convoy's in, then so is Administrator Carstensen,' he said in a trembling, gentle voice. 'I'd like to meet him and discuss Biruta. For a time.'

Coye, who hadn't been around Stephen Gregg as long as some of the others, swore softly and turned away from the expression on the young gentleman's face.

44

Umber

The tramcars were constructed of wire netting on light metal frames. Each car's weight and that of the Molt pushing it had to be subtracted from the potential payload.

Gregg eyed a car dubiously. 'A motor wouldn't weigh as much as a, a person,' he said. 'If you've got tracks through the Mirror, then they'll guide the car whether or not there's somebody behind it pushing.'

'Motors will not work in the Mirror,' said the Molt leader. Her name was Ch'Kan.

'Electric motors?' Ricimer asked.

'Diesel, electric-even flywheels,' Ch'Kan said. 'None of them work in the Mirror.'

She clicked her mandibles to indicate some emotion or other. 'We work in the Mirror. Until we die.'

The tracks ran from the warehouses to the lambent surface of the Mirror. The rails were solid and spiked deep into the surface of Umber for as far as the eye could follow them. Beyond the transition zone, the rails were laid with short gaps between ends. They weren't attached because there was no ground within the Mirror, merely a level which objects could not penetrate.

The Molts said that sometimes cars tilted off the rails. The slave pushing the vehicle could usually find his way to one end of the tramway or the other by following the tracks.

If he or she abandoned the load within the Mirror, the Federation supervisors whipped the creature to death for sabotage.

Ricimer clambered into a tramcar. It creaked under his weight.