The Reaches

Humanity had recovered to a degree. Mass production was technically possible again. The horror of complex systems that could be destroyed by a shock-and bring down civilization with them-remained. It was as much a religious attitude as a practical one.

Most of the locker was filled with powered cutting bars, forty or more of them. Venerian ceramic technology made their blades, super-hard teeth laminated in a resilient matrix, deadly even when the powerpack was exhausted and could not vibrate the cutting edge. Apart from their use as weapons, the bars were useful tools when anything from steel to tree trunks had to be cut.

There were also three flashguns in the locker. These had stubby barrels of black ceramic, thirty centimeters long and about twenty in diameter, mounted on shoulder stocks.

Under the right circumstances, a flashgun's laser bolts were far more effective than shots from a projectile weapon. The flashgun drained its power at each bolt, but the battery in the butt could be replaced with reasonable ease. Under sunny conditions, a parasol accumulator deployed over the gunner's head would recharge the weapon in two or three minutes anyway, making it still handier.

But flashguns were heavy, nearly useless in smoke or rain, and dangerous when the barrel cracked in use. The man carrying one was a target for every enemy within range, and side-scatter from the bolt was at best unpleasant to the shooter. They weren't popular weapons despite their undoubted efficiency.

Gregg took a flashgun and a bandolier holding six spare batteries from the locker.

Piet Ricimer raised an eyebrow. 'I don't like to fool with flashguns unless I'm wearing a hard suit,' he said.

Gregg shrugged, aware that he'd impressed the sailor for the first time. 'I don't think we'll run into anything requiring hard suits,' he said. 'Do you?'

Ricimer shrugged in reply. 'No, I don't suppose so,' he said mildly.

Carrying two single-shot rifles, Ricimer nodded the crewman holding another rifle and three cutting bars toward the boat. He followed, side by side with Gregg.

'You owned your own ship?' Gregg asked, both from curiosity for the answer and to find a friendly topic. He didn't care to be on prickly terms with anybody else in the narrow confines of a starship.

Ricimer smiled at the memory. 'The Judge, yes,' he said. 'Captain Cooper, the man who trained me, willed her to me when he died without kin. Just a little intrasystem trader, but she taught me as much as the captain himself did. I wouldn't have sold her, except that I really wanted to see the stars.'

Ricimer braked himself on the cutter's hull with an expert flex of his knees, then caught Gregg to prevent him from caroming toward a far corner of the hold. 'You'll get the hang of it in no time,' he added encouragingly to the landsman.

The interior of the boat was tight for eight people. The bench down the axis of the cabin would seat only about five, so the others squatted in the aisles along the bulkheads.

Gregg had heard of as many as twenty being crammed into a vessel of similar size. He couldn't imagine how. He had to duck when a sailor took the pair of rifles from Ricimer and swung, poking their barrels toward Gregg's eyes.

Ricimer seated himself at the control console in the rear of the cabin. 'Make room here for Mr. Gregg,' he ordered Leon, who'd taken the end of the bench nearest him. The burly spacer gave Gregg a cold look as he obeyed.

'Hatch is tight, sir,' Tancred reported from the bow as he checked the dogs.

Ricimer keyed the console's radio. 'Cutter to Sultan's bridge,' he said. 'Open Cargo Three. Over.'

There was no response over the radio, but a jolt transmitted through the hull indicated that something was happening in the hold. The boat's vision screen was on the bulkhead to the left of the controls. Gregg leaned forward for a clearer view. The double hatchway pivoted open like a clam gaping. Vacuum was a nonreflecting darkness between the valves of dull white ceramic.

'Hang on, boys,' Ricimer said. He touched a control. An attitude jet puffed the cutter out of the hold, on the first stage of its descent to the surface of the planet below.

3

Salute

'Got a hot spot, sir,' Leon said, shouting over the atmospheric buffeting. He nodded toward the snake of glowing red across the decking forward. The interior of the cutter was unpleasantly warm, and the bitter tinge of things burning out of the bilges made Gregg's eyes water and his throat squeeze closed.

'Noted,' Ricimer agreed. He fired the pair of small thrusters again, skewing the impulse 10° from a perpendicular through the axis of the bench.

The spacers swayed without seeming to notice the change. Tancred grabbed Gregg's bandolier. That was all that prevented the landsman from hurtling into a bulkhead.

'Thanks,' Gregg muttered in embarrassment.

The young spacer sneered.

Ricimer leaned over his console. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I needed to yaw us a bit. There's a crack in the outer hull, and if the inner facing gets hot enough, we'll have problems with that too.'

Gregg nodded. He looked at the hot spot, possibly a duller red than it had been a moment before, and wondered whether atmospheric entry with a perforated hull could be survivable. He decided the answer didn't matter.

'Do you have a particular landing site in mind, Ricimer?' he asked, hoping his raw throat wouldn't make his voice break.

'Three of them,' Ricimer said, glancing toward the vision screen. 'But I don't trust the Sultan's optics either. We'll find something here, no worry.'

The cutter's vision screen gave a torn, grainy view of the landscape racing by beneath. A few cogs of the scanning raster were out of synch with the rest, displacing the center of the image to the right. Ragged green streaks marked the generally arid, rocky terrain.

Gregg squinted at the screen. He'd seen a regular pattern, a mosaic of pentagons, across the green floor of one valley. 'That's something!' he said.

Ricimer nodded approvingly. 'There's Molts here, at least. Captain Choransky wants a place where the Southerns have already set up the trade, though.'

The Molts inhabited scores of planets within what had been human space before the Collapse. Tradition said that men had brought the chitinous humanoids from some unguessed homeworld and used them as laborers. Certainly there was no sign that the Molts had ever developed mechanical transport on their own, let alone star drive.

It was easy to think of the Molts as man-sized ants and their cities as mere hives, but they had survived the Collapse on the outworlds far better than humans had. Some planets beyond the solar system still had human populations of a sort: naked savages, 'Rabbits' to the spacers, susceptible to diseases hatched among the larger populations of Earth and Venus and virtually useless for the purposes of resurgent civilization.

Molt culture was the same as it had been a thousand years ago, and perhaps for ten million years before that; and there was one thing more:

A few robot factories had survived the Collapse. They were sited at the farthest edges of human expansion, the colony worlds which had been overwhelmed by disaster so swiftly that the population didn't have time to cannibalize their systems in a desperate bid for survival. To present-day humans, these automated wonders were as mysterious as the processes which had first brought forth life.

But the Molts had genetic memory of the robot factories humans had trained them to manage before the Collapse. Whatever the Molts had been to men of the first expansion, equals or slaves, they were assuredly slaves now; and they were very valuable slaves.

Gregg checked his flashgun's parasol. Space in the boat was too tight to deploy the solar collector fully, but it appeared to slide smoothly on the extension rod.