The Reaches

Salomon knew Stephen well enough to fear him in a killing mood. He nodded with approval that we'd stepped back from an unexpected precipice. 'They catch the scorpions in traps, Taenia says,' he said. 'It's dangerous. Every year they lose a few boats and half a dozen Molts running the trapline.'

'We're not doing it for the shell,' Stephen said. He wasn't angry, any more than a storm is angry, but his tone brooked as little argument as a thunderbolt does. 'We're not doing it for the wealth, either, though we'll have that by and by.'

In a way, it wasn't Stephen Gregg speaking, but rather Piet Ricimer wearing Stephen's hollow soul. There was fiery power in the words, but they were spoken by someone who knew he had nothing of his own except the Hell of his dreams. 'We're doing it for all men, on Venus and Earth and the Rabbits, bringing them a universe they can be men in!'

Stephen's big frame shuddered. After a moment, in a changed voice, he added, 'Not that we'll live to see it. But we'll have the wealth.'

I flexed my hands and found they worked again, though my right arm had twinges. 'I'm going to finish down below,' I said.

'Let me take a look,' Stephen said. He furled the charging panel and collapsed its support wand so that he could bring the flashgun with him into the wreck.

Inside the cockpit, we stood on what had been the outer bulkhead. The freighter was a single-hulled vessel, shoddier by far than the hulk we'd abandoned on Mocha. The navigational pedestal stuck out horizontally from the nearly vertical deck. I'd sawn more than three-quarters of the way around its base.

'You know,' said Salomon reflectively from the hatchway, 'we might do best to wait for the Osomi ferry to come for the shell. They'll have at least local charts. Though it may be ten months, from what Taenia says, and I'm not sure I'd last four.'

'We'll last if we have to,' Stephen said calmly. His fingertips explored the pedestal and ran the edges of my careful cut. He unslung the flashgun and handed it to me. 'Though I doubt that's what Piet has in mind.'

'Give me a little room, Jeremy,' he said as he gripped the flanges which once held the AI module. Even as Stephen spoke, the huge muscles in his back rippled. The unsawn portion of the base sheared with a sharp crack.

Stephen had twisted the pedestal rather than simply levering it down with his weight. He set it before me, fractured end forward. 'Satisfactory?'

I wiggled the data module which the Feds hadn't bothered to remove after the crash. They couldn't lift it from the top because the pedestal was warped. The bayonet contacts were corroded, but they released on the third tug and the unit slid out.

'Lord Jesus Christ,' Salomon said in startled hope. 'Do you suppose. .'

I touched the probes of my testing device to the bank's contacts. Numbers scrolled across the miniature screen. The data couldn't be decoded without a proper AI, and they wouldn't have meant anything to me anyway; but the data were present.

'I think,' I said as I folded the probes back into my testing device, 'that we've got a course for Osomi.'

TEMPLETON

Day 101

The planet's visible hemisphere was half water, half land covered by green vegetation. A single large moon peeked from beyond the daylit side of the disk.

'That's not Osomi,' Salomon said. He'd pitched his voice to suggest he was willing to be proven wrong.

'No, that's Templeton,' Piet Ricimer agreed with obvious relish. 'Mister Moore? Is Jeremy here forward?'

'Shutting off power in forty-three seconds,' Guillermo warned over the tannoys.

'I'm here,' I said as I tried to get to the bow.

The Oriflamme was at action stations, so we were all wearing hard suits. That made me clumsier than usual after transit. Besides, each crewman took up significantly more room than he would under normal conditions.

I knocked the attitude controls with my right knee, then my hip bumped Stampfer at the sights mounted on the turntable with the Long Tom. I was in a hurry because for the next few seconds, the thrusters were braking the Oriflamme into orbit. I knew I wouldn't be able to control my movements at all without that semblance of gravity.

The only thing we'd known about the destination in the salvaged module was that we were headed for a Federation planet-if scrambled data hadn't sent the Oriflamme to the back of beyond. Our five plasma cannon were manned, but the gunports were still sealed. We'd have to lock our helmet visors if the guns were run out.

I caught the side of the general commander's couch just as the thrusters shut off. An attitude control fired briefly. My legs started to drift out from under me. I managed to clamp them hard against the deck. 'Yes, sir?' I said.

Piet Ricimer turned from adjustments he was making in the external optics. The lower quadrant of the main screen held an expanded view of a settlement of some size on the margins of a lake. It was after nightfall on the ground, but a program in the display turned the faint glimmers which charge-coupled devices drew from the scene into a full schematic.

'You did better than you knew, Jeremy,' Ricimer said. 'Templeton is the center for the entire district. This may be exactly where we needed to be.'

I smiled mechanically. I was glad the general commander was pleased, but it didn't seem to me that arriving at a Federation center was good luck.

'How do you know-' Salomon said from the side couch. He remembered where he was and smoothed the stressed brittleness of his voice. He resumed, 'Captain, how do you know it's-any particular place? Our charts don't. .'

Templeton's day side flared under the Oriflamme's orbit, though the screen insert continued to show the settlement. The Feds had graded a peninsula for use as a spaceport. Forty-odd ships stood on the lakeshore where they could draw reaction mass directly. The number surprised me, but not all the vessels were necessarily starships.

'I talked to the personnel on Pesaltra,' Ricimer explained. 'They weren't a prepossessing lot or they wouldn't have been shipped to such a dead end. But they'd all been at other ports in the past, and they were glad to have somebody to talk to. They weren't navigators, but they knew other things. Taenia was a paymaster on Templeton until his accounts came up short last year.'

Ricimer manipulated his display into a plot of the planet/satellite system. 'The district superintendent is on the moon,' he continued, nodding to include me. 'Rabbits have attacked the Templeton settlement several times, so there's a strong garrison-but the garrison has mutinied twice as well. The superintendent feels safer on the moon, where he's got plasma cannon to protect him. The chips are warehoused there too until the arrival of the ship detailed to carry them to Umber.'

Men in the forward section craned their necks to hear Ricimer's explanation. He noticed them and switched on the vessel's public address system.

'What about the garrison?' Stephen Gregg asked. His voice was strong and his face had some color. The prospect of action had brought Stephen through in better condition than I'd seen him after most transit sequences.

'We need air and reaction mass,' Ricimer said through the shivering echo of the tannoys. 'Our hull was seriously weakened when we crossed the Breach, and the rate of loss will be a problem until we're able to effect dockyard repairs.'

I frowned. Surely we wouldn't see a dockyard until we'd returned to Venus? And that meant a second passage through the Breach. .

Salomon noticed my expression. He lifted his eyebrows in the equivalent of a shrug-his shoulders were hidden beneath the rigid ceramic of his suit.

'We have to land somewhere soon to restock,' Ricimer continued, 'but we need to gather intelligence and navigational data also. Templeton is the place to do that. We'll go in quietly, get what we need, and leave at once. We won't have to fight.'