The Reaches

Which is all any of us can say, I thought as I jumped his legs. My boots skidded on the remains of the man Stephen's bolt had eviscerated. I caught the counter with my free hand and swung myself through the gate. I'd left my cutting bar behind. There was more shooting outside the building.

The room stank worse than a slaughterhouse. Ozone, powder smoke, and cooked meat added their distinctive smells to the pong of fresh-ripped human guts. The woman Ricimer shot was huddled beside the outer door. She'd smeared a trail of blood across the floor to where she lay.

Heimond's car pulled a hard turn as I ran out the front door. Ricimer was driving again. Stephen stood on the passenger seat. He'd slung the flashgun and instead held Piet's repeating carbine.

The man on the roof now lay full length on his back. I don't know if he'd been killed or had passed out from drink.

I jumped into the back with Lightbody and Jeude. The car hadn't slowed, and I'm not sure anybody realized I wasn't already on board. Jeude fired again. The flash from the shotgun's muzzle was red and bottle-shaped.

'Shut that popgun down until there's a target in range, you whore's turd!' Stephen snarled in a voice with more hatred than you'd find in a regiment of Inquisitors.

Stephen swayed as the car jounced. I grabbed his belt so that if he fell he wouldn't be thrown out. He poised the butt of the carbine to crush my skull, but his conscious mind overrode reflex at the last moment.

I sucked breaths through my mouth. I was dizzy, and nothing around me seemed real.

The car had a quartet of headlights above the hood, but only the pair in the center worked. They threw a long shadow past a bareheaded man in blue running down the track a hundred meters ahead of us.

Stephen fired once. The man pitched forward with one arm flung out and the other covering his eyes. We jolted past the body at the car's best speed, 50 kph or so. There was no sign of the other Feds who'd escaped from port control with that one.

'Stephen, sit down!' Piet Ricimer ordered. Gregg ignored him.

The boarding ramps of the ship that landed after ours were down, and the vessel was lighted like a Christmas star. Molts and humans in blue uniforms stood on the ramps and at a distance from the vessel: the ground directly underneath would still be at close to 100 °C from the ship's exhaust.

A man on the vessel's forward ramp pointed toward our swaying vehicle and shouted orders through a bullhorn. 'The fucking Parliament!' Jeude snarled. 'The real fucking escort, and why she couldn't have showed up tomor-'

A uniformed woman ran into our path, waving her arms over her head. Piet swerved violently. Stephen fired, a quick stab of yellow flame. The Fed toppled under our right front wheel.

We lurched but the wheels were mounted on half-axles and had a wide track. Stephen flailed, completely off balance. The car didn't go over. By bracing my leg against the side of the compartment I kept Stephen from falling out as well.

Lightbody cried, 'Lord God of hosts!' as he fired toward the Parliament, and Jeude's shotgun boomed again despite the fact that I was sprawled half across him as I clung desperately to Stephen. The car's frame swayed upward as the heavy front wheel slammed down. The rear wheel hit the woman's body, and Stephen shot the blue-sashed Molt who tried to leap over the hood at Ricimer.

A ship down the line lit her thrusters. A bubble of rainbow fire lifted and cooled to a ghostly skeleton of itself before vanishing entirely. The Parliament was a dedicated warship. I'd seen three rectangular gunports gape open in succession in my last glimpse of her, but now we were past.

Stephen got his legs straight and sat down. His carbine's bolt was open. He opened a pocket of Piet's bandolier and took out a handful of cartridges. The Parliament's siren howled and a bell on the Molt barracks clanged a twice-a-second tocsin.

A ship tested her thrusters again. This time the vessel lifted slightly from her berth and settled again ten meters out in the roadway. She was the Oriflamme. The 20-cm hoses with which she'd been drawing reaction mass dangled from her open holds.

Glowing exhaust backlit us. I stared stupidly at the spray of dust ahead of our right front wheel. 'There's a truck following-' Jeude shouted.

Maybe he meant to say more, but three violent hammer blows shook our vehicle. Stephen pitched forward, the severed tags of his flashgun's sling flapping. A palm-sized asterisk of lead smeared his backplate; the ceramic was cracked in a pattern of radial lines. My face stung, my hands bled where bits of bullet jacket had splashed them, and I still didn't realize the Feds were shooting at us.

I twisted to look back the way we'd come. A slope-fronted truck bounced down the road in a huge plume of dust. It was moving twice as fast as we could. Red flame winked from the framework on top of the vehicle. The Feds had welded dozens of rifle barrels together like an array of organ pipes.

Bits of rubber flew off our left rear tire, though it didn't go flat. Because of Rabbit attacks, the garrison of Templeton had a mobile reaction force. It was too mobile for us.

Stephen leaned across the back of his seat and rested his left elbow on my shoulder. It was like having a building fall on me. I had just enough awareness of what was happening to close my eyes. The flashgun drove its dazzling light through the tight-clenched eyelids, shocking the retinas into multiple afterimages when I looked up again.

The laser mechanism keened as it cooled beside my ear. Stephen tilted the weapon and slapped a fresh battery into the butt compartment. The flashgun wasn't going to do any good; even I could see that.

The truck was armored. The metal shutter over the windshield glowed white, but the driver behind it was unharmed. Flashgun bolts delivered enormous amounts of energy, but a monopulse laser has virtually no penetration. Even a hit on the driver's periscope might be useless, since properly designed optics would shatter instead of transmitting a dangerous amount of energy.

'Bail out!' I shouted. I squirmed to the side of the compartment. Jeude wasn't moving; Lightbody thumbed a cartridge into the breech of his rifle.

'Jump!' I shouted, but as I poised Lightbody fired again and Stephen leaned forward against the butt of his squat laser.

A bullet hit our right rear wheel and this time the tire did blow. The car fishtailed, flinging me against the seats. The sky ripped in a star-hot flare. Concussion pushed the car's suspension down to the stops, then lifted us off the ground when the pressure wave passed.

The Oriflamme had fired one of her 15-cm broadside guns. The truck was a geyser of flame. Fuel, ammunition, and the metal armor burned when the slug of ions hit the vehicle.

Ricimer crossed his wrists on the yoke, countersteering to bring us straight. The wheel rim dragged a trail of sparks across the gravel.

'Salomon shouldn't have risked running out-' Ricimer cried.

Another of the Oriflamme's cannon recoiled into its gunport behind a raging hell of stripped atomic nuclei.

The facade of the Molt barracks caved in. The interior of the three-story building erupted into flame as everything that could burn ignited simultaneously.

Wreckage spewed outward like the evanescent fabric of a bubble popping. Shattered concrete and viscous flame wrapped port control and the maintenance shop on the barracks' other side.

Ricimer stood on the car's brakes. Because of the blown tire we spun 180° and nearly hopped broadside into the lip of the Oriflamme's stern ramp. Stephen rose in his seat and poised like a statue aiming the flashgun. I tried to raise Jeude one-handed-I'd clung to my electronics kit since the moment I slammed it over the data we'd come to get. Lightbody bent to help me.

Stephen fired. A secondary explosion erupted with red flame.

Piet grabbed Jeude's legs. He and I and Lightbody lifted Jeude out. The smooth surface of Jeude's body armor slipped out of my hand, but Lightbody's arms were spread beneath the wounded man's torso.

Beneath the torso of the dead man. A bullet had struck Jeude under the right eye socket and exited through the back of his neck. Strands of his blond hair were plastered to the wounds, but his heart no longer pumped blood.

A thumping shock wave followed several seconds after Stephen fired. He'd managed to do effective damage with the flashgun instead of leaving the fight to the thunderous clamor of plasma cannon.

We ran up the ramp, carrying Jeude among us. The air shimmered from the hop that had lifted the