the transition layer.
Ricimer stepped past Gregg to peer at the labor party trudging up from Umber City. 'They'll be here in a few minutes,' he said.
Gregg smiled tightly. He indicated the female prisoner with the toe of his boot. 'Gag that one,' he said to Dole. 'Or she'll try to warn the next batch. And I don't want to kill her.'
Piet Ricimer squeezed his friend's shoulder again.
45
Umber
The Umber tramway had thirty-four cars. There'd been thirty-five when the Venerians arrived, but Gregg had bent the trucks of the one that carried him when he kicked his way free. He didn't remember anything so violent occurring, but his right leg ached as though a piano'd fallen on it.
The Molts were starting a second round trip to mirrorside. Because there was only a single trackway, none of the cars could return until all had gone across. The blockhouse was nearly emptied; five bound and gagged Federation guards lay out of sight within it.
Lightbody had draped a tarpaulin over the corpse. Gregg hadn't killed anybody since that one. The sudden dissolution of the man's chest had merged with the soul-freezing trip through the Mirror in a shadowland that Gregg would revisit only when he dreamed.
The front of the blockhouse was pierced by four loopholes, though there were only two wall guns. Ricimer watched Umber City from one of the clear openings while he responded to radio traffic with a throat mike and plug earphone.
Gregg remained at the right rear corner of the structure. Ricimer looked back over his shoulder at his friend with a wan smile and tapped the earphone. 'The watch officer on the
Gregg tried to grin. The result was more of a tic, and his eyes returned to the street beyond immediately. 'That's Carstensen's flagship?' he said.
'Yeah. I told him I had the same problem, but once the porters left here, there wasn't a thing I could do about how fast they marched.'
The fireworks had ended. Snatches of music drifted up when the breeze was right. The captured guards said there was always a banquet when the convoy arrived: a sit-down meal in the Commandatura for the brass, and an open-air orgy in the park for common sailors and the journeymen of the community's service industries.
Both sites had suffered during the previous raid. If anything, that would increase the sense of celebratory relief.
Gregg heard the ringing sound of a distant engine. A green, then a red and a green light wobbled into the sky beyond the rooftops.
'They're coming!' Gregg called. 'One of the ships just launched an autogyro.'
Four of the Venerian enlisted men were with Piet inside the blockhouse, crewing the 1-kaygees. Jeude squatted behind one of the shrinking stacks of boxes. Like Gregg, he wore a white jumper stripped from a prisoner. He kept out of sight because the guards with the two remaining labor gangs might nonetheless realize that he wasn't one of their number.
An autogyro wasn't a threat. One of the watch officers was sending a scout to track down the missing cargo. No problem.
Ricimer murmured to the gun crews, then handed the communications set to Dole. He strode back to Gregg and eyed the situation himself.
'Jeude,' Gregg said. 'Stand up-don't look like you're hiding. If he lands, we'll pick him up just like the guards. No shooting.'
He looked at Piet. 'Right?'
'Right. .' Ricimer said with an appraising frown. 'That would be the best result we can hope for.'
The appearance of things at the tramhead shouldn't arouse much concern. The raiders had been sending excess Molt laborers back to mirrorside to load the ships under Guillermo's direction. Ch'Kan acted as straw boss here. If shooting started, Guillermo could be better spared than any of the Venerians-though Gregg wouldn't have minded the presence of K'Jax and a few of his warriors.
Piet looked over the remaining cargo and pursed his lips. 'We shouldn't get greedy and stay too long,' he said.
'We'll be all right for a while yet,' Gregg said.
Gregg's mouth spoke for him. His mind was in a disconnected state between the future and past, unable to touch the present.
His eyes tracked the path of the autogyro, visible only as running lights angling toward the blockhouse at fifty meters altitude. Its engine and the hiss of its slotted rotor were occasionally audible. There was no place to fly on Umber, but the ships of the Earth Convoy were equipped for worlds like Rondelet and Biruta, where solid ground was scattered in patches of a few hectares each.
In Gregg's mind, humans and Molts exploded in the sight picture of his flashgun. Every one a unique individual up to the instant of the bolt: the snarling guard here, the woman beneath the fort trying to shoot him; a dozen, a score, perhaps a hundred others.
All of them identical carrion after Stephen Gregg's light-swift touch.
More to come when the present impinged again.
Ricimer touched the back of his friend's hand. 'Why don't you go into the blockhouse, Stephen?' he suggested. 'We shouldn't have more than two humans visible.'
'I'll handle it,' Gregg said. He watched as the autogyro turned parallel to the Mirror and approached the tramhead from the west. 'I'm dressed for it.'
He plucked at the commandeered tunic with his free hand. He held the flashgun close to the ceiling of the blockhouse so that it couldn't be seen from above.
Ricimer nodded and moved back.
The Federation aircraft zoomed overhead, its engine singing. The sweet, stomach-turning odor of diesel exhaust wafted down.
The Molts hefted cases, pretending they were about to carry them to the spaceport. The last of the tramcars had disappeared into the Mirror some minutes before, so the crew had no real work. A few of them looked up.
Jeude waved. Gregg raised his free hand, ostensibly to shade his eyes from the floodlights but actually to hide his face. Two faces peered down from the autogyro's in-line cockpits.
'Fooled them that time, Mr. Gregg!' Jeude called.
'So far,' Gregg said to the men within the blockhouse, 'so good.'
His expression changed. 'They're coming back,' he added. 'I think they're going to land.'
The note of the diesel changed as the pilot coarsened the prop pitch. He was bringing the autogyro down, very low and slow, between the rear of the blockhouse and the Mirror.
They couldn't land there because of the tracks. .
The autogyro swept by with its fixed landing gear barely skimming the pavement. The fuselage was robin's- egg blue, and the rotor turning slowly on its mast was painted yellow with red maple leaves near the tips. Both the pilot and the observer wore goggles, but there was no mistaking the shock on their faces when they saw the number of humans, standing and lying bound, within the blockhouse.
The diesel belched a ring of black smoke as the pilot brought it to full power. He banked hard, swinging the nose toward the city. The observer craned his head back over the autogyro's tail as he held a microphone to his lips.
'We're fucked!' Dole shouted from the blockhouse radio. 'They've spotted-'
The fuselage faded to gray, but reflection from the pavement still lighted the rotor blades a rich yellow- orange. The flashgun was tight against Gregg's shoulder. Though the autogyro was turning away from him, it
