The Reaches (31 page)

Not so very long ago, Gregg thought, you and I were in the business of supplying crews just like this one. But times change, and men change . . . and maybe occasionally they change for the better. 

Coye came out of the Mirror. Stampfer's cart followed on the heels of the Molt pushing Coye. Dole's expression was one of blinking awareness, but he still stood in the car while a Molt looked on from behind.

"Dole!" Gregg called. "Come watch this guy. Tie him or something."

"You're going to be fine," he added to the prisoner. "Just don't play any games. Because I'll smash your skull all over the stones if you do."

Gregg didn't speak loudly. He knew he was very close to the edge. If he'd shouted the threat, it might have triggered his arm to move, swinging the laser's heavy butt. And anyway, he didn't need to shout to be believable.

Dole and the Molt who'd pushed him took the white-faced prisoner and began to secure him with pieces of rope from the coil they'd brought. Under Guillermo's direction, Molts were loading the empty tramcars. They concentrated on the smaller cases stenciled as new-run chips.

Ricimer patted Gregg on the back as he strode past. "I'm going to see what else is in here," he explained. "Keep a watch on that gang coming, though they don't seem in much of a hurry."

Gregg peered around the back corner of the blockhouse. "Coye," he called. "Stampfer. Keep down, will you? Behind the stacks of cases or inside the building."

It didn't much matter whether Feds saw Guillermo and the Molts reloading the cars—no one was likely to pay enough attention to note that the chips were going in the wrong direction. Too many armed humans around the blockhouse could be more of a problem.

The ground on which the blockhouse stood was slightly higher than that of Umber City and the spaceport beyond, though the slope would have been imperceptible on a surface less flat than the present one. Because the city was so full of transients, illuminated windows marked the roads though there was no streetlighting as such.

The floodlit Commandatura stood out in white glory. The park and the street between it and the building were hidden behind intervening structures. Tricolored bunting and the Federation's maple leaf emblem hung between the windows of the second floor.

Besides the fireworks at the park, occasional shots whacked the air. That could mean either "happy shooting" toward the starless sky or the quarrels of drunken sailors getting out of hand. Whichever, it was useful cover if there was trouble with the party nearing the blockhouse.

The guard walked beside her charges, near the front but generally hidden by the line of alien bodies. Glimpses showed Gregg that she had reddish hair, no cap, and carried a weapon slung muzzle-down over her right shoulder.

"Sir," Dole said tensely. "This guy's—"

"Not now," Gregg whispered. Only the right side of his face projected beyond the corner of the blockhouse. His flashgun, muzzle-up, was withdrawn to his side so that the oncoming party wouldn't see it.

"There's a radio back there," Ricimer said as he came from the front of the building, "but the loopholes are both covered by box—"

He continued to speak for a moment. Gregg's mind turned the words into background buzz. It was no more than the hiss of the breeze and the sting of sand on his neck.

The oncoming Molts reached the line of bollards. Guillermo trilled to them in their own language. The remainder of the co-opted aliens continued to load cars. Now that all the Venerians had crossed on the single track, the Molts could begin taking chips over to mirrorside.

"Blauer?" the Fed guard called. Besides the slung carbine, she carried a quirt in her right hand. She slapped the shaft against her left palm. "Hey! Blauer!"

The Molts nearest to her flattened to the pavement. Gregg stepped around the corner and leveled his flashgun. "Don't," he said in a high, distant voice.

The woman blinked, held by the laser's sight line like a beetle pinned to a board. She dropped the quirt, then shrugged carefully to let the carbine sling slide off her shoulder without her hands coming anywhere near the weapon.

"Now come forward," Gregg ordered quietly. He nodded to Stampfer, poising behind a loaded tramcar. Stampfer ran out to pick up the carbine while Lightbody and Coye secured the new prisoner.

She didn't speak, but her eyes glared hatred at everything her gaze touched.

"Jesus!" Gregg said, letting his breath out for the first time in too long. The air stank of cooked filth, the effluvium of the torso shot into the previous guard. His hands were shaking and he almost gagged.

Molts were widening the narrow aisle into the blockhouse. Piet put a comforting hand on Gregg's arm. "I want to clear the loopholes inside," he said. "We may need them before we're done."

"Right," Gregg said. He looked down at the receiver of his flashgun. The present locked into focus again.

"Right," he repeated. "I can't believe they blocked those wall guns off. You'd think the Feds would've learned a lesson from our first raid, wouldn't you?"

"They learned they didn't have to be afraid of raiders," Ricimer said with a slight grin. "Not every lesson is the right lesson."

"There's more coming, sir," Stampfer called from the shelter to which he'd returned. "Molts, anyhow."

"We'll handle them the same way," Ricimer replied. "Maybe we won't have any real problems with this."

"Captain!" Jeude called from inside the blockhouse. "There's somebody on the radio, wondering where his cargo is."

"I'll handle it," Ricimer said, brushing past a Molt coming out of the building with a case of chips.

"Look at this, Mr. Gregg," Dole murmured, holding up their first captive's rifle. "Don't it look like it's . . . ?"

"It sure does . . ." Gregg agreed. He handed his flashgun to Dole and took the richly-carved pump gun. The chance of there being another rifle so much like Captain Schremp's wasn't high enough to consider.

The blond captive lay on his side, with his ankles and wrists tied together behind his back. Gregg knelt beside him, waggled the ornate weapon in his face, and then touched the muzzle to the prisoner's knee.

"Tell me exactly how you got this rifle," he said. His finger took up the slack on the trigger. He hadn't checked to be sure there was a round in the chamber, but they'd learn that quickly enough when the hammer fell.

"I bought it!" the Fed screamed. "From the flagship's purser! I swear to God I bought it!"

Gregg eased off the trigger very slightly. He tapped again with the muzzle. "All right," he said. "Where did the purser get it?"

"Oh, God, I just wanted a rifle," the blond man moaned. He squeezed his eyes shut, but he couldn't escape the caress of the weapon. It would blow his leg off at this range. "I don't know, I just asked around when the convoy landed. They all do a little business on the side, you know how it is, and I had a few chips saved back. Oh God oh God."

"Blauer, you make me want to puke," sneered the female prisoner unexpectedly. She turned her head from her fellow to Gregg. "You want to know where it came from? From a pirate like you!"

"Go on," Gregg said. He raised the repeater's muzzle and handed the weapon back to Dole. Threatening the woman would be counterproductive; and anyway, she had balls.

"We caught them on Rondelet," she said. "They were attacking a mansion when we came out of transit. We smashed their ship from orbit and they all surrendered. Were they friends of yours?"

Piet joined the tableau. He didn't interrupt.

"Not really," Gregg said. By habit, he checked the flashgun Dole returned to him. "What happened then?"

"Then we hanged them all," the woman said. "
After
we'd convinced them to talk. Too bad they weren't friends!"

Gregg stood up. "Well," he said mildly to Ricimer. "We know what Schremp did after he left us. I can't say I'm sorry he's gone."

Ricimer nodded. "We can get to one of the wall guns now," he said. "It's a one-kilogram. There's only a few shells for it."

Molts pushed laden tramcars into the Mirror one after the other. They moved at a measured, almost mechanical pace, a skill learned to prevent them from running up on each other's heels in the hellish void beyond the transition layer.

Ricimer stepped past Gregg to peer at the labor party trudging up from Umber City. "They'll be here in a few minutes," he said.

Gregg smiled tightly. He indicated the female prisoner with the toe of his boot. "Gag that one," he said to Dole. "Or she'll try to warn the next batch. And I don't want to kill her."

Piet Ricimer squeezed his friend's shoulder again.

The Umber tramway had thirty-four cars. There'd been thirty-five when the Venerians arrived, but Gregg had bent the trucks of the one that carried him when he kicked his way free. He didn't remember anything so violent occurring, but his right leg ached as though a piano'd fallen on it.

The Molts were starting a second round trip to mirrorside. Because there was only a single trackway, none of the cars could return until all had gone across. The blockhouse was nearly emptied; five bound and gagged Federation guards lay out of sight within it.

Lightbody had draped a tarpaulin over the corpse. Gregg hadn't killed anybody since that one. The sudden dissolution of the man's chest had merged with the soul-freezing trip through the Mirror in a shadowland that Gregg would revisit only when he dreamed.

The front of the blockhouse was pierced by four loopholes, though there were only two wall guns. Ricimer watched Umber City from one of the clear openings while he responded to radio traffic with a throat mike and plug earphone.

Gregg remained at the right rear corner of the structure. Ricimer looked back over his shoulder at his friend with a wan smile and tapped the earphone. "The watch officer on the
Triple Tiara
's getting pretty insistent about where his cargo is," he said. "He doesn't get to join the party until it's delivered."

Gregg tried to grin. The result was more of a tic, and his eyes returned to the street beyond immediately. "That's Carstensen's flagship?" he said.

"Yeah. I told him I had the same problem, but once the porters left here, there wasn't a thing I could do about how fast they marched."

The fireworks had ended. Snatches of music drifted up when the breeze was right. The captured guards said there was always a banquet when the convoy arrived: a sit-down meal in the Commandatura for the brass, and an open-air orgy in the park for common sailors and the journeymen of the community's service industries.

Both sites had suffered during the previous raid. If anything, that would increase the sense of celebratory relief.

Gregg heard the ringing sound of a distant engine. A green, then a red and a green light wobbled into the sky beyond the rooftops.

"They're coming!" Gregg called. "One of the ships just launched an autogyro."

Four of the Venerian enlisted men were with Piet inside the blockhouse, crewing the 1-kaygees. Jeude squatted behind one of the shrinking stacks of boxes. Like Gregg, he wore a white jumper stripped from a prisoner. He kept out of sight because the guards with the two remaining labor gangs might nonetheless realize that he wasn't one of their number.

An autogyro wasn't a threat. One of the watch officers was sending a scout to track down the missing cargo. No problem.

Ricimer murmured to the gun crews, then handed the communications set to Dole. He strode back to Gregg and eyed the situation himself.

"Jeude," Gregg said. "Stand up—don't look like you're hiding. If he lands, we'll pick him up just like the guards. No shooting."

He looked at Piet. "Right?"

"Right . . ." Ricimer said with an appraising frown. "That would be the best result we can hope for."

The appearance of things at the tramhead shouldn't arouse much concern. The raiders had been sending excess Molt laborers back to mirrorside to load the ships under Guillermo's direction. Ch'Kan acted as straw boss here. If shooting started, Guillermo could be better spared than any of the Venerians—though Gregg wouldn't have minded the presence of K'Jax and a few of his warriors.

Piet looked over the remaining cargo and pursed his lips. "We shouldn't get greedy and stay too long," he said.

"We'll be all right for a while yet," Gregg said.

Gregg's mouth spoke for him. His mind was in a disconnected state between the future and past, unable to touch the present.

His eyes tracked the path of the autogyro, visible only as running lights angling toward the blockhouse at fifty meters altitude. Its engine and the hiss of its slotted rotor were occasionally audible. There was no place to fly on Umber, but the ships of the Earth Convoy were equipped for worlds like Rondelet and Biruta, where solid ground was scattered in patches of a few hectares each.

In Gregg's mind, humans and Molts exploded in the sight picture of his flashgun. Every one a unique individual up to the instant of the bolt: the snarling guard here, the woman beneath the fort trying to shoot him; a dozen, a score, perhaps a hundred others.

All of them identical carrion after Stephen Gregg's light-swift touch.

More to come when the present impinged again.
Lord God of hosts, deliver me.
 

Ricimer touched the back of his friend's hand. "Why don't you go into the blockhouse, Stephen?" he suggested. "We shouldn't have more than two humans visible."

"I'll handle it," Gregg said. He watched as the autogyro turned parallel to the Mirror and approached the tramhead from the west. "I'm dressed for it."

He plucked at the commandeered tunic with his free hand. He held the flashgun close to the ceiling of the blockhouse so that it couldn't be seen from above.

Ricimer nodded and moved back.

The Federation aircraft zoomed overhead, its engine singing. The sweet, stomach-turning odor of diesel exhaust wafted down.

The Molts hefted cases, pretending they were about to carry them to the spaceport. The last of the tramcars had disappeared into the Mirror some minutes before, so the crew had no real work. A few of them looked up.