The Reaches

Lightbody stood, then helped Stephen up as well. Lightbody returned to his seat. I held out a hand to bring Stephen to his stanchion.

'Prepare for transit,' Piet Ricimer said. He hadn't risen from his couch or looked back during the altercation.

Light and color. Blankness, blackness, body ripped inside out, soul scraped in a million separate Hells.

Light and color again.

'There,' said Piet Ricimer. 'As I thought, a star. . and she has a planet. We will name the planet Respite.'

RESPITE

Day 68

The plateau on which the Oriflamme and Mizpah rested above the jungle was basalt. The fresh ceramic with which teams resealed the vessels' stress-cracked hulls was black, and the sound of grinders processing the dense rock into raw material for the glazing kilns was nerve- wracking and omnipresent.

Stephen checked the weld which belayed the glass-fiber line around a vertical toe of basalt near the plateau's rim. He nodded. I let myself drop over the edge.

The mass of the plateau dulled the bone-jarring sound. My chest muscles relaxed for the first time in the three days since the grinders had started work.

The basalt had formed hexagonal pillars as it cooled from magma in the depths of the earth. Cycles of upthrust and weathering left this mass as a tower hundreds of meters above the surrounding jungle. As the outermost columns crumbled, they created a giant staircase down into the green canopy.

Forty meters below the top of the plateau, my boots touched the layer of dirt covering the sloping top of a broken pillar. I released my harness from the line and stepped away, waving Stephen down in turn.

A pair of arm-long flying creatures paused curiously near Stephen, hovering in the updraft along the plateau's flank. The 'birds' were hard-shelled, with four wings and sideways-hung jaws. They were harmless to anything the size of a man and hadn't learned to be wary.

The forest far below was a choir of varied calls. Mist trailed among the treetops, and a plume hectares in area rose a few kilometers away like a stationary cloud. I wondered if a hot spring or a lake of boiling mud broke surface there in the jungle.

Respite's atmosphere had a golden hue. I found I actually liked being under an open sky, unlike most men raised in the tunnels and impervious domes of Venus. It made me tingle with uncertainty, much the way I felt when making my initial approaches to a woman.

The feeling of peace below the rim was relative. The rock vibrated from the teeth of the grinders, felt if not heard. The terrace was a nesting site for a colony of the flying creatures. Hundreds of them stood at the mouths of burrows excavated in the soil, goggling at us with octuple eyes. They clacked the edges of their front and rear pairs of wings together querulously.

Opinions of the flyers' taste among our crew ranged from adequate to delicious: Salomon swore he'd never before eaten anything as good as the sausage of smoked lung tissue and organ meat he'd made from the creatures. In any event, the expedition would leave Respite well stocked with food.

Stephen landed with a grunt. His fingers massaged his opposite shoulders. For this excursion he'd slung a short rifle across his back, rather than the flashgun he favored. 'I don't know about you,' he said, 'but I'm not looking forward to the climb back, ascenders or no. I'm not in shape for this.'

'I'm not looking forward to going back to the noise,' I said. I felt the strain in my arms and thigh muscles also, but I thought I'd be physically ready before I was mentally ready to return. 'I suppose it's better than falling apart in transit, though.'

Stephen sniffed. 'Worried about the Kinsolving?' he said. 'Don't be. Winter just didn't have the stomach for this. He's headed back to Venus with the rest of Hawtry's node of vipers. That lot'd make me ashamed to be a gentleman-if I gave a damn myself.'

The hexagonal terrace sloped at 30°, enough to tumble a man over the edge if he lost his footing. Each of the basalt columns was about ten meters wide across the flats. I stepped forward carefully. 'With the Decades loot besides,' I noted.

As I passed close to nesting sites, the creatures drew themselves down as far as they could into their burrows. Because the soil was so shallow, their heads remained above the surface but the clicking of the wings was muted.

'Commander Ricimer,' I went on, 'thinks they've just missed this landfall and gone on through the Breach. The Kinsolving.'

'Piet likes to think the best of people,' Stephen said. He walked over to me without apparent caution. The wind from the forest ruffled our cuffs and tunics upward and bathed us in earthy, alien odors.

'And you?' I asked without looking at my companion. Something moved across the distant forest, perhaps a shadow. If the motion had been made by a living creature, it was a huge one.

'Oh, I'd like to, sure,' Stephen said, adjusting his rifle's sling.

'The loot's the reason I'm not angry,' Stephen added. 'There's enough value aboard the Kinsolving to arouse attention, but not nearly enough to buy Winter's way out of trouble for attacking the colony of a state with whom Venus is at peace. That lot has punished themselves.'

I looked at my companion. 'Technically at peace,' I said.

'Politicians are very technical, Jeremy,' Stephen said. 'Until it's worth the time of somebody in court to cut corners. And the Decades loot won't interest the likes of Councilor Duneen, which is what it'd take to square this one.'

I peered over the edge of the terrace. The next step down was within five meters of the outer lip of the one we were on. A pattern of parallel semicircular waves marked the surface of the step, springing out like ripples in a frozen pond from the side of the column on which we stood.

Pits weathered into the rock offered toeholds. I turned and swung my legs over.

'It's a long way down,' Stephen warned. 'And it's likely to be a longer way back up.'

'I want to check something,' I said. 'You don't have to come.'

I clambered my own height down the rock face, then pushed off and landed with my knees flexed. Perhaps Stephen could pull me up with our belts paired into a rope, or-

Stephen slammed down beside me. He'd jumped with the rifle held out so that it didn't batter him in the side when he hit the ground. He grinned at me.

I shrugged. 'It's the pattern here,' I said, walking toward the ripples in stone.

Conical nests built up from the surface indicated that flyers of a different species had colonized this step. These were hand-sized and bright yellow in contrast to the dull colors of the larger creatures. Hundreds of them lifted into the air simultaneously, screeching and emitting sprays of mauve feces over the two of us.

I ducked and swore. Stephen began to laugh rackingly. The cloud of flyers sailed away from the plateau, then dived abruptly toward the jungle.

Stephen untied his kerchief, checked for a clean portion of the fabric, and used that to wipe down the rifle's receiver. 'I was the smart-ass who decided if you thought you could make it back, I sure could,' he explained. 'Nobody's choice but mine-which is why I let Piet make the decisions, mostly.'

I stepped to the point from which ripples spread from the rock face. As I'd expected, the basalt had been melted away. Because the rock was already fully oxidized, it splashed into waves like those of metal welded in a vacuum.

The cavity so formed was circular and nearly two meters in diameter. It was sealed by a substance as transparent as air-not glass, for it responded with a soft thock when I tapped it with my signet ring.

The creature mummified within was the height and shape of a man, but it was covered with fine scales, and its limbs were jointed in the wrong places. At one time the mummy had been clothed, but only shreds of fabric and fittings remained in a litter around the four-toed feet.

'Piet said it looked from the way the rocks were glazed that ships had landed on the plateau in the past,' Stephen remarked. 'Landolph, he thought. But after he looked closer at the weather cracking, he decided that it