The Reaches

Contorting his body, Hawtry rubbed his eyes with his shoulder. He caught sight of me at the front of the assembly. 'There he is!' Hawtry shouted, pointing with his bound hands. 'There's the Judas Jeremy Moore! He lied me into these bonds!'

I climbed the ramp in three crashing strides. The cutting bar batted against my legs, threatening to trip me. Hawtry straightened as he saw me coming; his eyes grew wary.

A tiny smile played at the corners of Stephen Gregg's mouth.

'Aye, strike a fettered man, Moore,' Hawtry said shrilly.

I pulled the square-faced bottle from the pocket of the insulated vest I wore over my tunic. Hawtry's face was hard and pale in the spotlights.

'Here you are, Thomas,' I said. A part of my mind noted in surprise that a directional microphone picked up my voice and boomed my words out through the loudspeakers so that everyone in the crowd could hear. 'Here's the bottle that you ordered me to drink with Mister Gregg.'

Hawtry's chin lifted. He shuffled his boots, but Dole had shackled him straitly.

I twisted out the glass stopper. 'Take a good drink of this, Thomas,' I said. 'And if it only puts you to sleep, then I swear I'll defend your life with my own!'

Hawtry's face suffused with red hatred. He swung his bound arms and swatted the container away. It clanked twice on the ramp and skidded the rest of the way down without breaking. Snowy gray liquor splashed from the bottle's throat.

'Yes,' I said as I backed away. I was centered within myself again. For a moment I'd been. . 'I rather thought that would be your response.'

I'd watched in my mind as the bar howled in the hands of my own puppet figure below. It swung in an arc that continued through the spray of blood and the shocked face of Thomas Hawtry sailing free of his body.

Piet Ricimer stepped forward. He took Hawtry's joined hands in his own and said, 'Thomas, in the name of the Lord, won't you repent? There's still-'

'No!' said Stephen Gregg thunderously as he strode into the center of the hatchway. The ceramic armor added bulk to the rangy power of his form. 'There's been forgiveness aplenty. The next time it'll be your life, Piet, and I'll not have that.'

Gregg laid his great left hand over Hawtry's wrists and lifted them away from Ricimer. Gregg raised Hawtry's arms, ignoring the prisoner's attempt to pull free, and shouted to the assembly, 'Is this man guilty of treason? Shall he be marooned here as a traitor?'

'Yes!' I screamed. Around me I heard, 'Aye!' and 'Guilty!' and 'Yes!' A murmur of, 'No,' a man crying, 'You have no right!' But those latter were the exceptions to a tide of anger tinged with bloodlust. The sailors were Betaport men, and in Betaport Piet Ricimer sat just below the throne of God.

'No, you can't do this!' Delray shouted angrily. The other gentlemen stood silent, afraid to speak lest Gregg turn the mob on them as well.

Gregg dropped the prisoner's arms. 'You didn't want to obey the general commander, Hawtry,' he said. 'Now you can rule a whole planet by yourself.'

Officers of the Mizpah and Kinsolving stood in a clump at the back of the assembly, muttering and looking concerned. They knew better than the common sailors how much trouble could come from punishing a powerful noble. Blakey was Councilor Duneen's man, while Captain Winter trimmed his behavior to the prevailing winds.

'You can't do this!' Delray repeated. The wind toyed with his voice. Perhaps a third of the assembly could make out his words, while the rest heard only faint desperation. 'The Rabbits will kill him!'

The other gentlemen moved away as though Delray was thrashing in a pool of his own vomit. A sailor behind Delray patted a baton of steel tubing against the calluses of the opposite palm, but the gentleman took no notice.

'They'll flay him with sharp stones!' Delray shouted. 'You can't do this!'

I didn't know Delray well and hadn't liked what I did know: the third son of Delray of Sunrise, a huge hold in the Aphrodisian Hills. Very rich, very haughty, and even younger than his 19 Earth years.

It struck me that there was a person under Delray's callow exterior who might have been worth knowing after all.

'He's right,' Gregg said abruptly. The amplified boom of his voice startled me after an interval of straining to hear Delray's cries. 'Dole, cut his feet loose. Hawtry, we'll find a gully out beyond the ships.'

I blinked, shocked by a sudden reality that I'd avoided until that moment. It was one thing to eat meat, another to watch the butcher. Dole stepped up the ramp, his bar humming.

'No!' said Ricimer, placing the flat of his hand on Gregg's breastplate. He directed the bigger man back. Piet's too good a man for this existence, Gregg had said the last night on Venus.

'Give me a ship!' Hawtry blurted. His face was as white as a bone that dogs were scuffling over. 'Give me a featherboat, C-cap-commander Ricimer!'

'Mister Hawtry,' Ricimer said, 'you cannot pilot a starship, and I will not diminish a force devoted to the Lord's work for the sake of a traitor. But the judgment on your treason was that of the expedition as a whole. Therefore the expedition will carry out the necessary sentence.'

Ricimer turned to face the assembly. He didn't squint, though the spotlight was full on his face. He pointed to the front of the crowd, his arm as straight as a gun barrel.

'Coos, Levenger, Teague,' he said, clipping out syllables like cartridges shucked from a repeater's magazine. 'Farquhar, Sahagun. And Delray. Under the direction of Mister Gregg, you will form a firing party to execute sentence of death on the traitor Thomas Hawtry. Tomorrow at dawn. Do you understand?'

None of the gentlemen spoke. Farquhar covered his face with his hands.

Hawtry shuddered as though the first bullet had struck him. He closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them, his expression was calm.

'This assembly is dismissed,' the general commander said in a voice without triumph or pity. 'And may God have mercy on our souls.'

MOCHA

Day 39

Mocha's sun laid a track of yellow light from the eastern horizon. Ricimer and Hawtry stood at the edge of the shallow mere, talking in voices too low to carry twenty meters to where the nearest of the other men waited.

The air was still, for the first time that I could remember since we landed here. I shivered anyway.

A group of sailors commanded by the Porcelain's bosun held single-shot rifles. The men were chatting companionably. Jeude punctuated his comment by raising his left hand in the air and wriggling the fingers. He and the others laughed.

About half the expedition's complement had trekked to the north end of the valley to watch the execution. The remainder stayed with the ships, pretending this was a normal day. Occasionally someone might pause and glance northward, but there would be nothing to see. The irregularity of the valley's floor seemed slight, but it was enough to swallow a man-height figure in half a kilometer.

I didn't know why I was here. I rubbed my hands together and wondered if I should have brought gloves.

The gentlemen of the firing party faced one another in a close circle, shoulders together and their heads bowed. A spacer cried out, 'Pretty little chickens got their feathers plucked, didn't they?'

The remark didn't have to be a gibe directed against the gentlemen. . but it probably was. Delray spun to identify the speaker. The gentleman remembered his present place and subsided in impotent anger.

Stephen Gregg, standing alone as if contemplating the sunrise, turned his head. 'Roosen?' he called to the spacer who'd flung the comment. 'I'm glad to know you have spirit. I often need a man of spirit to accompany me.'

Roosen shrank into himself. His companions of a moment before edged away from him.

I chuckled.

Gregg strolled toward me, holding the flashgun in the crook of his left arm. Gregg wore his helmet and a satchel of batteries, but he didn't have body armor on for the morning's duties.