The Reaches

The big man nodded toward the mere thirty meters away, where Hawtry and the general commander still talked. 'So you would have protected Mister Hawtry from me if he'd been willing to drink from your bottle, Moore?' Gregg said in a low, bantering tone.

Sometimes Ricimer's aide looked like an empty sack. Now-there was nothing overtly tense about Gregg, but a black power filled his frame and dominated the world about him.

I shrugged. 'Thomas isn't the sort for half measures,' I said evenly. 'Sleep where death would do, for example. Besides. . I rather think he resented my-closeness. With Councilor Duneen's sister.'

My mouth smiled. 'Though to listen to him, he wasn't aware of that. Closeness.'

Gregg turned again to face the sunrise. 'I was mistaken in my opinion of the man I brought aboard in Betaport, wasn't I? Just who are you, Moore?'

I shrugged again. 'I'm damned if I know,' I said. Then I said, 'I could use a woman right now. The Lord knows I could.'

Ricimer and Hawtry clasped hands, then embraced. Ricimer walked back to the company. His face was still. The crowd hushed.

Gregg's visage became cold and remote. 'Distribute the rifles,' he ordered as he strode toward the gentlemen and the sailors waiting to equip them for their task.

Dole muttered a command. He gave a single cartridge and a rifle, its action open, to Sahagun. That gentleman and the other members of the firing party accepted the weapons with grimaces.

'Take your stand!' Gregg ordered. He placed himself beside and a pace behind the gentlemen. His flashgun was ready but not presented.

'I'll give the commands if you please, Mister Gregg,' Thomas Hawtry called in a clear voice. He stood at apparent ease, his limbs free.

Gregg looked at Ricimer. Ricimer nodded agreement.

'May God and you, my fellows, forgive my sins!' Hawtry said. 'Gentlemen, load your pieces.'

The men of the firing party were mostly experienced marksmen, but they fumbled the cartridges. Coos dropped his. He had to brush grit off the case against his trouser leg. Breeches closed with a variety of clicks and shucking sounds.

Hawtry stood as straight as a sunbeam. His eyes were open. 'Aim!' he said.

The gentlemen lifted their rifles to their shoulders. Farquhar jerked his trigger. The shot slammed out toward the horizon. Farquhar shouted in surprise at the accidental discharge.

'Fire!' Hawtry cried. The rest of the party fired. Two bullets punched Hawtry's white tunic, and the bridge of his nose vanished in a splash of blood.

Hawtry crumpled to his knees, then flopped onto his face. There was a hole the size of a fist in the back of his skull. The surface of the water behind him danced as if with rain.

Delray opened the bolt of his rifle to extract the spent case, then flung the weapon itself toward the mere. The rifle landed halfway between him and the corpse twitching spastically on the ground.

Delray stalked away. The remainder of the firing party stood numbly as Dole's team collected the rifles.

Gregg turned and walked back to me. He looked drawn and gray.

'I'm impressed with the way you handled yourself the other night,' he said quietly. 'And on Decades, of course; but courage in a brawl is more common than the ability to stay calm in a crisis.'

I hugged myself and shivered. A spacer had tossed a tarp over Hawtry's body. Two other men were digging a grave nearby.

Piet Ricimer knelt in prayer, his back to the dead man.

Brains and bits of bone, splashing the mere in a wide arc.

'How do you sleep at all, Mister Gregg?' I whispered.

Gregg sniffed. 'You can get used to anything, you know,' he said. 'I suppose that's the worst of it. Even the dreams.'

He put a hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the past. 'Let's go back to the ship,' he said. 'I have a bottle. And you may as well call me Stephen, Jeremy.'

MOCHA

Day 51

When the alert signal throbbed on the upper right corner of the main screen, I slapped the sidebar control that I'd preselected for potential alarm situations. Salomon dumped the transit solutions he'd been running at the navigation console and echoed all my data on his display.

A grid of dots and numbers replaced the 360° visual panorama I'd been watching for want of anything better to do. Presumably some of the Rabbits were female, but it hadn't come to that yet.

I didn't understand the new display. A pink highlight surrounded one of the dots.

I held the siren switch down briefly to rouse the men sleeping, gambling, or wandering across Mocha's barren landscape. A few seconds could be important, and even a false alarm would give the day some life it otherwise lacked.

'It's the passive optical display,' Salomon explained. 'An object just dropped into orbit. If it's not a flaw in the scanner, something came out of trans-'

'Nathan to squadron,' said Piet Ricimer's voice, flattened by the program by which the Porcelain's AI took the static out of the featherboat's transmission. 'Respond, squadron. Over.'

I switched the transceiver to voice operation while my left hand entered the commands that relayed the conversation through the loudspeakers-tannoys I'd taken from Federation stores on Decades-on poles outside the temporary shelters. It'd been something to do, and the disorganized communications among the ships scattered here had offended my soul.

'Go ahead, Commander,' I said before I remembered that Salomon was on watch this morning. 'We're on voice.'

Handover procedures were cumbersome and basically needless between two parties who knew one another. Without visuals-the featherboat's commo was rudimentary-there was a chance that one speaker's transmission would step on the other's, but that wasn't a serious concern.

'Moore?' Ricimer said. His words blared through the external speakers to the men alerted by the siren. 'We've got to leave immediately. Get essential stores out of the Absalom; we're leaving her. We'll be abandoning the Nathan here too, so that frees up space on the Kinsolving for the Decades loot. We'll be coming in on the next orbit-'

The featherboat couldn't communicate through her thruster's discharged ions.

'— and I want to lift off within an hour of when we land. Is that understood?'

'We understand, Commander,' I said. I rose from the console. Officers and senior men would be gathering work crews from men more concerned with getting their personal gear back aboard the ships.

'I'll address the squadron when we reach orbit,' Ricimer said. The transmission was beginning to break up beyond the AI's capacity to restore it. The caret on the main screen that was the Nathan had already slipped beneath the horizon of the display. 'Before we negotiate the Breach. .'

His words died in a burst of static.

'I've got takeoff and initial transit programs loaded,' Salomon said to me with a wry smile. Perhaps it was a comment on the way the gentleman had hijacked communications with the general commander.

Men were already crashing aboard the Porcelain, shouting to one another in a skein of tangled conversations. I strode for the midships hatch to get through it before the crush arrived in the other direction.

'I'm going to pull the AI from the hulk,' I called back to the navigator. 'It's not worth much, but it's something. . and it's the only thing I can do now.'

MOCHA ORBIT

Day 51

Because of the adrenaline rush of the hastened liftoff, weightlessness didn't make me as queasy as it had on every previous occasion.