The Reaches

identified the target by the waiting crates.

Did he know what the crates contained? Probably not, but it wouldn't matter. Though the cargo was hugely valuable, none of it was going into the pockets of the boat's crew. They would be far more concerned about their own safety, especially if word of the bloodbath in Umber City had reached Benison by now.

'Let go of me,' Gregg said. He had to shout to be heard. 'I'll get one shot at least. Guillermo, you shoot too.'

Gregg aimed, wondering which side of the clearing the Feds would ignite on their first pass. Either way, it wouldn't be long before they finished the job.

Guillermo took the pistol from his holster. He pointed it vaguely toward the north end of the clearing. His head rotated to stare at Gregg rather than the sight picture.

Was the pilot perhaps a Molt too?

The boat, transonic again, glinted over the rifle sight. Gregg squeezed.

The boat's hull crumpled around an iridescent fireball. The bow section cartwheeled through the sky, shedding sparkling bits of itself as it went. The stern dissolved in what was less a secondary explosion than a gigantic plasma flare involving the vessel's powerplant. The initial thunderclap knocked Gregg and his companions down, but the hissing roar continued for several seconds.

'Metal hulls,' said Stampfer, seated with his hands out behind him to prop his torso. 'Never trust them. Good ceramic wouldn't have failed that way to a fifty-mike-mike popgun.'

The Peaches boomed across the clearing, moving too fast to land on this pass. Gregg saw the featherboat bank to return.

'Not bad shooting, though,' Stampfer added. 'Not bad at all.'

Gregg didn't have the strength to sit up just at the moment. He tried to reload the rifle by holding it above his chest, but after fumbling twice to get a cartridge out of its loop, he gave that up too.

'Only the best for Piet's boys,' he said, knowing the words were lost in the sound of the featherboat returning to land.

52

Venus

The personnel bridge shocked against the hull of the Peaches. The featherboat rocked and chattered as the tube's lip tried to grip the hot ceramic around the roof hatch. A hiss indicated the Betaport staff was purging the bridge even though they didn't have a good seal yet.

'Boy, they're in a hurry for us!' Dole said with a chuckle. 'When Customs sent our manifest down from orbit, that got some action, didn't it?'

'What do you figure the value is, Captain?' Jeude asked. 'All those chips-'

He gestured, careful both because he wore a hard suit in anticipation of landing and because of the featherboat's packed interior. They'd skimped on rations for the return voyage in order to find space for more crated microchips.

'I never saw so many, just here. And the Dalriada, it's as full as we are for all she's so much bigger.'

Ricimer looked at Gregg and raised an eyebrow.

Rather than quote a figure in Venerian consols, Gregg said, 'I'd estimate the value of our cargo is in the order of half or two-thirds of the planetary budget, Jeude.'

His mouth quirked in something like a smile. It was amusing to be asked to be an accountant again. It was amazing to realize that he was still an accountant, a part of him. Humans were like panels of stained glass, each colored segment partitioned from the others by impassable black bars.

'Of course,' he added, still an accountant, 'the quantity of chips we're bringing is great enough that they'll depress the value of the class on the market if they're all released at the same time.'

'They will be,' Ricimer said, his eyes on the future beyond the Peaches' hatch. 'To build more starships for Venus, to give them the best controls and optics as they've already got the best hulls and crews.'

He looked at his men. 'The best crews God ever gave a captain in His service,' he said.

'What'll a personal share be then, Mr. Gregg?' Lightbody asked. His right hand absently stroked his breastplate, beneath which he carried his pocket Bible. 'Ah-for a sailor, I mean, is all.'

'If they let us keep it,' Stampfer said. 'You know how the gentlemen do-begging your pardon, Mr. Gregg, I don't mean you. But it may mean a war, and it may be they don't want that.'

'It was a war on fucking Biruta, wasn't it?' Jeude said. 'Nobody cared about that but the widows!'

'I cared,' Gregg said without emphasis. And at the end, Henry Carstensen cared; though perhaps not for long.

'Well, we all cared,' Jeude said, 'and all Betaport cared. But the gent-the people in Ishtar City, they let it go by.'

He gave Gregg a pleading look. 'The governor, she won't give our cargo back, will she, sir?'

Gregg looked at Ricimer, who shrugged. Gregg smiled coldly and said, 'No, Jeude, she won't. Her own share's too great, and the value to the planet's industrial capacity is too great. Pleyal's government will threaten, and they'll sue for recovery. . but they'll have to sue in our courts, and I doubt they can even prove ownership.'

Ricimer looked surprised.

Gregg laughed. 'You're too innocent to be a merchant, Piet,' he said.

He rapped a case with his armored knuckles. 'How much of this do you think was properly manifested on Umber-and so subject to Federation taxes and customs? My guess is ten percent. A quarter at the outside. And they'll play hell getting proper documentation on that.'

'And our share, Mr. Gregg?' Lightbody repeated.

'Enough to buy a tavern in Betaport,' Gregg said. 'Enough to buy a third share in a boat like the Peaches, if that's what you want to do.'

Enough to stay drunk for a month, with the best friends of any man on Venus during that month. Lightbody might not be the one to spend his share that way, but you can't always guess how a man would act until he had the consols in his hands.

'I want to go out with the cap'n again,' Dole said. 'And you, Mr. Gregg.'

Gregg gripped the back of the bosun's hand and squeezed it.

'Open your hatch,' a voice crackled on the intercom. The featherboat's ceramic hull didn't form a Faraday cage the way a metal vessel's did, but sulphur compounds baked on during the descent through Venus' atmosphere were conductive enough to diffuse even short-range radio communications. 'Captain Ricimer and Mr. Gregg are to proceed to the personnel lock, where an escort is waiting.'

'Hey, the royal treatment!' Jeude crowed as he reached for one of the undogging levers. 'Not just coming in like the cargo, we aren't.'

'We' would do just that, enter Betaport when the landing pit cooled enough for machinery to haul the Peaches into a storage dock. Jeude thought of his officers as representing all the crew.

In a manner of speaking, he could be right.

Gregg started to lock down his faceshield. Ricimer put out a hand. 'I think the tube will be bearable without that,' he said. 'Not comfortable, but bearable for a short time.'

'Sure,' Gregg said.

Positive pressure in the personnel bridge rammed a blast of air into the Peaches when the hatch unsealed. The influx must have started out cool and pure, but at this end of the tube the hot reek made Gregg sneeze and his eyes water.

The crewmen didn't seem to be affected. Gregg noticed that none of them had bothered to close up, as they could have done.