The Reaches

mainland. Silence crashed over the night, followed by a final burp of plasma.

'Tell us about the Montreal, Heimond,' Ricimer ordered. He drove at the speed of a man jogging. Faster would have been brutal punishment. The surface of the quay was rough, and the weight the car carried had collapsed the springs.

'Last year President Pleyal ordered that only armed ships could carry more than a hundred kilos of chips,' the Fed official said. 'We'd never worried about that before. It makes routing much more difficult, you see-and then an escort vessel besides!'

He sounded shell-shocked. It didn't seem to occur to him that present events proved that Pleyal had been right to worry about treasure shipments even among the Back Worlds.

Some of the ships we passed had exterior lights on. Occasional human sailors watched our car out of boredom. Most of the crews were Molts who continued shambling along at whatever task had been set them. If I hadn't heard the driver laugh, I might have thought the aliens were unemotional automata.

'How many guns does the Montreal carry?' Ricimer asked calmly. His eyes flicked in short arcs that covered everything to our front; the men behind him would be watching the rear. Despite the rough road, Piet's hands made only minuscule corrections on the steering yoke.

'How would I know?' Heimond snapped. 'It's none of my business, and it's a damned waste of capacity if you ask me!'

He drew in a breath that ended with a sob. I looked back at Heimond as we passed a ship whose thruster nozzles were being replaced under a bank of floodlights. The port official's cheeks glistened with tears. He was looking straight ahead, but I didn't think he was really seeing anything.

'Our Lady of Montreal is rated at five hundred tonnes,' Heimond said softly. 'I think she has about a dozen guns. I don't think they're very big, but I don't know for sure. I don't know even if you kill me!'

A wave of dry heat washed us. The ship that landed after ours had baked the ground we were crossing. She was a largish vessel, several hundred tonnes. Her exterior lights were on, but she hadn't opened her hatches yet.

'We're not going to kill anybody, Mister Heimond,' Piet Ricimer said. 'You're going to get us the information we need, and then we'll leave peacefully. Don't worry at all.'

Port control was a one-story, five-by-twenty-meter building of rough-cast concrete at the head of the peninsula. A man sat on a corner of the roof with his legs crossed and his back to an antenna tower, playing an ocarina. He ignored us as we pulled up in front.

'Here,' Stephen said in a husky voice, handing my electronics kit forward. Stephen's face was still, his soul withdrawn behind walls of preparation that armored him from humanity. He took Heimond's collar in his free hand.

The control building, a line of repair shops, and a three-story barracks that stank of Molt excrement separated the peninsula from the rest of Templeton City, though there was no fenced reservation. The dives fronting the port were brilliantly illuminated.

I could see at least a dozen lighted compounds on the hills overlooking the main part of the city. That's where the wealthy would live.

Woven-wire screens instead of glass covered the front windows of the port control building. Lights were on above the doorway and within. A Molt stood behind the counter that ran the length of the anteroom.

Stephen pushed Heimond ahead of him into the building; the rest of us followed as we could. I was clumsy. My kit and the cutting bar in my other hand split my mind with competing reflexes.

'Don't do anything, Pierrot!' Heimond called desperately to the Molt. 'Don't!'

Only the Molt's eyes had moved since the car pulled up anyway. The creature looked as placid as a tree.

'The data bank is in back?' Ricimer said, striding toward the gate in the counter.

A truck returning from the city with a leave party drove past port control. The diesel engine was unmuffled. The sudden Blat!Blat!Blat! as the vehicle came around the corner of the building spun us all.

Heimond cried out in fear. A drunken Fed flung a bottle. It bounced off the screen and shattered in front of the building. Lightbody raised his carbine to his shoulder.

'No!' Ricimer shouted. Stephen lifted the carbine's muzzle toward the ceiling.

'Let's get into the back,' Stephen ordered. He gestured the Molt to join us.

Heimond found the switch for the lights in the rear of the building. The data bank stood in the center of a bullpen. There were six screen-and-keyboard positions on either side, with long benches for Molt clerks. The human staff had three separate desks and a private office in the back, but I didn't care about those.

I sat on a bench and opened my kit beside me. The bank had both plug and induction ports. I preferred the hard connection. The plug was one of the three varieties standard before the Collapse.

Jeude bent to look into my kit. 'What-' he said.

'No!' ordered Piet, placing his left hand under the young sailor's chin and lifting him away from me. I appreciated the thought, but Jeude wouldn't have bothered me. I lose all track of my surroundings when I'm working on something complex.

I attached the partner to the data port and matched parameters. The five-by-five-by-ten-centimeter box hummed as it started to copy all the information within the Fed data bank.

The job would have taken a man months or years. I'd designed the partner to emulate the internal data transfer operations of whatever unit I attached it to. It was an extremely simple piece of hardware-but as with the larva of an insect, that simplicity made it wonderfully efficient at its single task of swallowing.

The partner couldn't do anything with data except absorb it. Sorting the glut of information would be an enormous job, but one the Oriflamme's AI could handle with the same ease that it processed transit calculations.

Plasma motors coughed, shaking the ground and casting rainbow flickers through the bullpen's grimy side windows. Heimond sat at a desk with his head in his hands. Stephen and Piet interrogated him, pulling out responses with the relentless efficiency of a mill grinding corn. I couldn't hear either side of the conversation.

The partner clucked. A pathway query replaced the activity graph on the little screen. So far as I could tell, neither supplemental cache was terribly important. One held the operating system, while the other was probably either backup files or mere ash and trash. I cued the second option, though maybe we ought to-

I rose, drawing the others' eyes. The thruster snarled again, raggedly. Some ship was testing its propulsion system.

'I think I've got everything important,' I said. I'd been hunched over the partner for long enough to become stiff, though it hadn't seemed more than a minute or two. 'This is-'

A Fed in a blue uniform with a gold fourragere from the left shoulder strode through the door from the anteroom. 'Hey!' he shouted. Jeude shot him in the chest, knocking him back against the jamb.

There were half a dozen other Feds in the anteroom. They wore flat caps with PARLIAMENT in gold letters above the brim. One of them grabbed at his holstered pistol. Stephen shot him with the flashgun from less than five meters away.

The laser sent dazzling reflections from the room's brightwork as it heated the air into a thunderclap. The Fed's chest exploded in a gout of steam and blood, knocking down the men to either side of him.

I keyed shutdown instructions into the partner's miniature pad. If I disconnected the unit mechanically first, the surge might cost us the data we'd risked our lives for.

I glanced over my shoulder. Jeude fired the other barrel of his shotgun at a woman running for the outside door. He missed low and chewed a palm-sized hole in the counter instead. Ricimer hit the running woman. She slammed full tilt against the window screen and bounced back onto the floor. A pair of Fed sailors made it out the door despite Lightbody's shot and two more rounds from the commander's carbine.

The partner chirped to me. I jerked it free and slammed the lid of the kit down over it. 'I'm coming!' I shouted, because by now I was the last Venerian left in the building.

Heimond was hiding under his desk and the Molt clerk stood like a grotesque statue in one corner. The first Fed victim sat upright in the doorway. His legs were splayed and his face wore a dazed expression. Jeude's buckshot had hit him squarely at the top of the breastbone, but he was still-for the moment-alive.