The Reaches

go.'

He cradled his flashgun and strode forward. Stephen's boots squelched to the ankles when he stepped off the end of the ramp. I sank almost as deep, even though I didn't have the weight of armor and equipment Stephen carried.

The front rank, ten abreast, stamped and sloshed forward. The second rank spread out behind us. The locals wore thigh-length waders of waterproofed fabric. In this heat and saturated humidity, their garments must have been nearly as uncomfortable as our back-and-breast armor.

There were mountains in the western distance, but the Pesaltran terrain here and for kilometers in every direction was of shallow lagoons and mud banks with ribbons and spikes of vegetation. None of the plants were as much as a meter high; many of them sprawled like brush strokes of bright green across the mud.

A bubble burst flatulently in the middle of the nearest channel. I guessed it was the result of bacterial decay, not a larger life-form.

I felt silly holding a cutting bar as a threat against people so obviously crushed by life as the Fed personnel here. How the rest of the assault party must feel with their guns, armor, and bandoliers of ammunition!

Though Stephen Gregg wouldn't care. . and maybe not the others either. Overwhelming force meant you were ready to overwhelm your enemy. What could possibly be embarrassing about that?

'Ah, sirs?' said one of the locals, a white-haired man with a false eye. 'You'd be from the Superintendency of the Outer Ways, I guess?'

He stared at the Oriflamme and its heavily-armed crew as if we were monsters belched forth from the quavering earth.

It wasn't practical to carry building materials between stars. The colony's structures were nickel steel processed from local asteroids or concrete fixed with shell lime. Three large barracks housed the Molt labor force; a fourth similar building was subdivided internally for the human staff.

A middle-aged woman stood on the porch with the aid of crutches and leg braces. The door to the room behind her was open. Its furnishings were shoddy extrusions of light metal, neither attractive nor comfortable- looking.

The same could be said for the woman, I thought with a sigh.

Sheet-metal sheds held tools and equipment in obvious disorder. A windowless concrete building looked like a blockhouse, but the sliding door was open, showing the interior to be empty except for a few shimmering bales.

Garbage, including Molt and human excrement, stank in the lagoon at the back of the barracks. The hulls of at least two crashed spaceships and other larger junk had been dragged to the opposite side of the landing site.

Ricimer halted us with a wave of his hand and took another step to make his primacy clear. 'I'm Captain Ricimer of the Free State of Venus,' he said to the one-eyed man. 'We've come through the Breach. We'll expect the full cooperation of everyone here. If we get it, then there'll be no difficulties for yourselves.'

The Fed official looked puzzled. The men approaching with him had halted a few paces behind. 'No, really,' the man said. 'I'm Assistant Treasurer Taenia; I'm in charge here. If anyone is. Who are you?'

Dole stepped forward. The butt of his rifle prodded Taenia hard in the stomach. 'When Captain Ricimer's present,' he said loudly, 'nobody else is in charge-and especially not some dog of a Fed! Take your hats off, you lot!'

Only two of the locals wore headgear, a cloth cap on a red-haired man and another fellow with a checked bandanna tied over his scalp. Dole pointed his rifle in the face of the latter. The Fed snatched off the bandanna. He was bald as an egg.

Dole shifted his aim. 'No, put that up!' Piet Ricimer snapped, but the second Fed was removing his cap and a third man knelt in the mud with a look of terror on his face.

Taenia straightened up slowly. He blinked, though the lid covering his false eye closed only halfway. 'I don't. .' he said. 'I don't. .'

Ricimer stepped up to the man and took his right hand. 'You won't be hurt so long as you and your fellows cooperate fully with us. Are you willing to do that?'

'We'll do anything you say,' Taenia said. 'Anything at all, of course we will, your excellency!'

Ricimer looked over his shoulder. 'Mister Moore,' he said. 'When we lift off, I'll want to put a transponder in orbit to inform Captains Winter and Blakey of our course should they pass this way. Can you build such a device with what we have on hand?'

I nodded, flushing with silent pleasure. Ricimer had noticed my facility with electronics and was willing to use it. 'Yes, yes, of course,' I said. 'But I suspect I can use local hardware.'

Ricimer smiled at me. 'I can understand a man being interested in a challenge,' he said. 'Though I'm surprised at a man who doesn't find this voyage enough of a challenge already.'

Ricimer's face set again; grim, though not angry. There was no headquarters building, so he indicated the human barracks with a nod of his carbine's muzzle. 'Let's proceed to the shelter,' he said.

'But why in God's name would you want to come here!' blurted the Fed wringing his bandanna between his hands.

'That,' remarked Stephen Gregg as we twenty Venerians swept past the flabbergasted locals, 'is a fair question.'

* * *

'Well, we don't have anybody to communicate with,' Schatz, Pesaltra's radio operator, said defensively to me. 'They were supposed to send a new set from Osomi with the last ferry, but they must've forgot it. Besides, the ferry comes every six months or a year, and nobody else comes at all. It's not like we've got a lot of landing traffic to control.'

Across the double-sized room that served the station's administrative needs, Salomon rose from a desk covered with unfiled invoices. 'What do you mean you don't have any charts?' he snarled at Taenia. 'You've got to have some charts!'

The floor was covered with tracked-in mud so thick that a half-liter liquor bottle was almost submerged in a corner. Paper and general trash were mixed with the dirt, creating a surface similar to wattle-and-daub. I'd dropped a spring fastener when I pulled the back from the nonfunctioning radio. I'd searched the floor vainly for almost a minute, before I realized that the task was vain as well as pointless.

'We're not going anywhere,' Taenia said in near echo of Schatz's words a moment before. 'What do we need navigational data for?'

'If we were going anyplace,' Schatz added with a variation of meaning, 'they wouldn't have stuck us on Pesaltra.'

'We'll search the files,' Piet Ricimer said calmly. He gestured his navigator to the chair at the desk and dragged another over to the opposite side. 'Sometimes a routing slip will give coordinates.'

'But not values,' Salomon moaned. He organized a thatch of hard copy to begin checking nonetheless.

'But how do you communicate across the planet?' I said to Schatz. The sealed board was still warm when I pulled it from the radio, though the Fed claimed it had failed three months before. Schatz hadn't bothered to unplug the set-which had a dead short in its microcircuitry.

Venerians stood in the shade of buildings, staring at a landscape that seemed only marginally more interesting than hard vacuum. The low haze the sun burned off the water blurred the horizon. The glimpse I'd gotten through the Oriflamme's optics during the landing approach convinced me that better viewing conditions wouldn't mean a better view.

'There's nobody. .' Schatz said. 'I mean, there's just us here and the collecting boats, and nobody goes out in the boats but the bugs. So we don't need a radio, I'm telling you.'

Three Venerians had boarded one of the light-alloy boats on the lagoon. It was a broad-beamed craft, blunt- ended and about four meters long. A pole rather than oars or a motor propelled the craft. From the raucous struggle the men were having, the water was less than knee-deep.

'Bugs?' I repeated in puzzlement.

'He means the Molts, Jeremy,' Stephen Gregg said dryly. 'It's a term many of the folk on outworld stations use, so that they can pretend they're better than somebody. Which these scuts obviously are not.'