The Reaches (32 page)

Jeude waved. Gregg raised his free hand, ostensibly to shade his eyes from the floodlights but actually to hide his face. Two faces peered down from the autogyro's in-line cockpits.

"Fooled them that time, Mr. Gregg!" Jeude called.

"So far," Gregg said to the men within the blockhouse, "so good."

His expression changed. "They're coming back," he added. "I think they're going to land."

The note of the diesel changed as the pilot coarsened the prop pitch. He was bringing the autogyro down, very low and slow, between the rear of the blockhouse and the Mirror.

They couldn't land there because of the tracks . . .

The autogyro swept by with its fixed landing gear barely skimming the pavement. The fuselage was robin's-egg blue, and the rotor turning slowly on its mast was painted yellow with red maple leaves near the tips. Both the pilot and the observer wore goggles, but there was no mistaking the shock on their faces when they saw the number of humans, standing and lying bound, within the blockhouse.

The diesel belched a ring of black smoke as the pilot brought it to full power. He banked hard, swinging the nose toward the city. The observer craned his head back over the autogyro's tail as he held a microphone to his lips.

"We're fucked!" Dole shouted from the blockhouse radio. "They've spotted—"

The fuselage faded to gray, but reflection from the pavement still lighted the rotor blades a rich yellow-orange. The flashgun was tight against Gregg's shoulder. Though the autogyro was turning away from him, it wasn't quite a zero-deflection shot yet. He swung through the tail surfaces and continued the graceful motion even after his trigger finger stroked with the sights centered between the forward cockpit and the glittering dial of the prop.

All he'd wanted to do was to bring the aircraft down, to punch his laser through the thin plastic hull and smash the engine block. The fuel tank was directly behind the diesel. It ruptured, hurling a ball of blazing kerosene over hundreds of square meters of the nearest buildings.

The pilot and observer were the two largest pieces of debris from the explosion. They were burning as they fell, but impact with the ground would have been instantly fatal even if they'd survived the blast.

"Now we'd better leave," Gregg said as he reloaded.

"Not yet!" Ricimer said crisply.

He clicked off the interior light, then pointed to the blond prisoner wearing ground-personnel flashes. "You! How do we turn out these area lights?" Though Ricimer was inside the blockhouse, the toss of his head adequately indicated the four pole-mounted floodlights bathing the site.

"There's no switch!" the Fed bleated. "It's got a sensor, it goes on and off with sunlight!"

The Commandatura darkened suddenly as a Federation official had the same idea and executed it with dispatch.

Jeude stood up. He still carried the repeating carbine he'd liberated from a Venerian officer on Punta Verde. He shot out the first bulb, worked the bolt, and missed the second. The reflector whanged as the bullet pierced its rim.

Jeude finished the job with the remaining three cartridges in his magazine. The blockhouse and its surroundings weren't in the dark, but now the illumination came from the burning buildings fifty meters beyond the bollards.

"Why don't we go back now, Piet?" Gregg asked in much the voice that he'd have offered a cup of coffee. He had four charged batteries remaining, plus the one in the laser. His fingertip ticked over the corner of each in the satchel. He didn't touch the battery contacts, because the sweat on his skin would minusculy corrode them.

The siren on the Commandatura began to sound.

"Because if we go back now . . ." Ricimer said. His voice seemed calm rather than controlled, and he spoke no louder than he needed to for Jeude and the wall gun crews all to hear him. " . . . we meet the empty cars returning from mirrorside. We have to wait until they've all come through."

"Christ's blood!" Dole said as he realized how long
that
would take.

Ricimer turned on the bosun like an avenging angel. "Mr. Dole!" he said. "I suggest that you remember that the next words we speak may be those we have on our lips when we go to meet our God. Do you understand?"

Dole swallowed and fell to his knees. He pressed his palms together, but his face was still lifted toward his captain with a look of supplication.

Ricimer shook himself and bent to lift Dole to his feet. "He'll understand," Ricimer muttered. "As He'll understand the fear that causes me to lose my temper."

A bullet, fired from somewhere within the town, slapped the front of the blockhouse. Gregg didn't hear the shot, and he couldn't spot the muzzle flash through the glare of burning buildings either. The nearest portion of the street was lighted by the houses and scattered pools of kerosene, but beyond that the pavement was curtained in darkness.

"Madam Ch'Kan," Ricimer called to the Molt leader. "Get your people to cover. There's room for most of you in the blockhouse without affecting our ability to fight. Jeude—if you stay there to the side, you won't be as well covered when it comes time to run for the tramline."

Jeude shook his head. "Those loopholes, they're nothing but bull's-eyes. I'll take my chances here, thank'ee kindly."

He patted the waist-high breastwork of boxed microchips which hadn't been carried back to mirrorside yet.

The Molt leader chittered to her fellows. Four of them lay behind crates the way Jeude had. The rest—there were about twenty on this side of the Mirror—shuffled quickly into the blockhouse and knelt, beneath the level of the loopholes.

Another bullet sang past nearby. The sound ended abruptly as the projectile vanished into the Mirror.
At least they didn't have to worry about ricochets from behind.
 

Lightbody flinched instinctively. Stampfer muttered a curse, and the frozen stillness of the other crewmen showed that they too were affected by the unseen snipers.

All of the Federation guards had carried firearms. Piet Ricimer chose a captured weapon, a long-barreled breechloader, and the owner's cross-belts with about fifty tapered cartridges in the loops. He carried the gear over to Jeude, deliberately sauntering. Gregg chuckled.

Crewmen watched Ricimer through the loopholes in the side of the blockhouse. He set the rifle beside Jeude and said loudly, "Here. I don't like to trust repeaters not to jam."

Fed soldiers volleyed. There were six or eight of them, sited on a three-story rooftop some two hundred meters away. This time a breeze parted the curtain of flame enough for Gregg to see the nervous yellow winking of muzzle flashes. The structure beneath them was dark, but Gregg knew where it must be.

"Gunners!" he shouted as he locked down his visor. "
Here
's your aiming point!"

The flashgun jolted in his hands. Smoke may have scattered the coherent light somewhat, but not to a great enough degree to prevent the bolt's impact from shattering the concrete roof coping.

White-hot lime in the cement hadn't faded below yellow when Jeude fired toward it with his carbine. Stampfer, professionally quick and angry with himself for feeling windy a moment before, was almost as fast. The 1-kg shell burst with a bright flash that hurled a Fed soldier backward.

The
whop!
of the bursting charge echoed the muzzle blast of the short-barreled wall gun. Dole, firing the other weapon of the pair a moment later, put his round a meter or two low. The aiming error was a useful one, because the shell went off within the building and set the contents of a room on fire.

Gregg stepped back into the blockhouse as he changed batteries in his laser. The breechblocks of the wall guns clanged as the gunners cammed them open, then closed again after the loaders dropped in fresh rounds. Propellant residues from the shell casings smelled like hot wax.

An empty cart emerged from the transition layer. The Molt pushing it took three steps forward, numbed by the Mirror, before he noticed the battle going on around him. He gaped.

Ch'Kan shouted to the laborer. He broke into a multijointed trot, pushing the car to the end of the branch. There it was out of the way of later comers like the one already entering realside.

A bullet struck one of the metal bollards and howled horribly away. None of the Venerians seemed to notice. The wall guns banged.

Piet and Jeude aimed out over their breastwork. The crewman fired as fast as he could work his carbine's bolt, then picked up the powerful single-shot. Ricimer watched as much as he aimed, but after a moment he fired. Gregg saw shards of glass fly into the street from a window eighty meters away.

Gregg raised his visor to scan for a worthy target. He had only four charges left, and the flashgun was too valuable a weapon to empty with indiscriminate firing. He thought of taking one of the captured rifles, but instinct told him not to put the laser down.

Movement beyond the smoke. 
 

Something was coming around the corner where the street leading to the tramhead kinked and hid whatever preparations went on beyond it. The flashgun came up. Gregg closed his eyes over the sight picture and fired.

Actinics from the bolt pulsed orange through the skin of Gregg's eyelids. The blockhouse shuddered behind a puff of dust and smoke. The Feds had brought up a landing array from one of the ships, three 4-cm barrels on a single wheeled carriage. The shells were comparable to those thrown by the wall guns in the blockhouse.

Only one tube fired before Gregg's laser stabbed into the open magazine attached to the trail of the array's carriage.

The blast was red and went on for a considerable while, like a man coughing to clear phlegm. Some shells burst like grenades against walls and rooftops where the initial explosion hurled them. The bodies of the crew, Molts and humans both, lay around the ruined weapon. Burning scraps of clothes and shell spacer lighted them.

The Fed round hit the door in the center of the blockhouse facade and sprang it. The hinges and the staple of the closure bar held, but acrid smoke from the shellburst oozed around the edges of the armored panel. The inner face of the door bulged, and the center of the dent glowed faintly.

The wall guns were silent. Dole swung his out of the way to fire through the loophole with a rifle while Coye used the other opening to the left of the door. Stampfer and Lightbody took turns at the loophole on their side, but the gunner had left his 1-kg in position. He'd saved a shell back for special need, where Dole had fired off the entire stock of ammunition.

Tramcars continued to reappear from the Mirror. Ch'Kan called directions to each blinking laborer who followed a car.

Occasionally the newcomer stumbled away when his faculties warmed enough to realize what was going on around him. One Molt even plunged back into the Mirror in a blind panic that must have ended only when he starved in the interdimensional maze. Ch'Kan herself pushed abandoned cars out of the way or simply toppled them off the rails.

Molts in the blockhouse reloaded rifles for the Venerians to fire through the loopholes. Gregg saw two of the aliens, solemn as judges, using their delicate "fingers" to work loose a cartridge case that had ruptured instead of extracting from the hot breech of a repeater.

Gregg slung his flashgun. Its barrel was shimmering. If he'd laid the weapon down on the cold stone, the ceramic might have shattered. The Molts had left Schremp's rifle beside Gregg by chance or intent. He took it and let his cold killer's soul search for movement.

A bullet sparked through the wire sides of a cart being pushed toward the line of those stored on Gregg's side of the blockhouse. A second bullet shattered the head of the Molt pushing the cart. Her body continued to pace forward.

Gregg spotted the shooter at a ground-floor window of a nearby building whose roof was ablaze. He aimed through the post-and-ring sight, squeezed into the third muzzle flash, and felt the concrete explode beside his left ear as the Fed soldier fired at the glint of Schremp's silvered receiver.

Grit and bullet fragments slapped Gregg's head sideways. His helmet twisted and flew off. He knelt and patted his face with his left hand. His cheek felt cold and his hand came away sticky.

"This is the last!" Ch'Kan called in the high, carrying treble to which Molt voices rose at high amplitudes.

Piet Ricimer turned from where he crouched behind the row of crates. The breech of his rifle was open and streaming gray powder gases. "Ch'Kan!" he ordered. "Start your people through. Fast! We're safe when we're into the Mirror!"

"They're coming!" Stampfer warned.

Gregg looked toward the city. He didn't have binocular vision, but he only needed one eye for the sights. Shadows approached through the smoke, moving with the doll-like jerkiness of men in hard suits.

Stampfer's wall gun banged. A figure fell back in a red flash. Gregg pumped his rifle's action, aimed low, and fired. Maybe the Feds were wearing only head and torso armor rather than complete suits. Flexible joints might not stop a bullet at this range, and a hammerblow on a knee could drop a man even if the projectile didn't penetrate.

The target fell. The man or woman fell, but that didn't matter, wouldn't matter until the dreams came. Gregg pumped the slide again, very smooth, and dropped another Fed. Schremp had bought a first-rate
weapon,
if only he hadn't turned it into a sighting point for every hostile in the world.

The sniper who'd almost nailed Gregg from the window didn't fire again. Close only counts in horseshoes . . .

Half the attackers were down; the others crowded close to the buildings instead of advancing. The Molts who'd brought the carts through had mostly returned to the Mirror, though nearly a dozen alien bodies lay or thrashed on the pavement. There hadn't been much cover for them, and they'd been silhouetted against the Mirror for Feds who wanted soft targets. Molts in the blockhouse poised to leave under Ch'Kan's fluting direction.

Gregg shot at a Fed and spun him, though for a moment the target didn't seem willing to go down. The pump gun shucked out the empty case, but there wasn't quite enough resistance as the breech slapped home again. It hadn't picked up a fresh round because the tubular magazine was empty. Gregg reached down for the shoulder belt that came with the rifle, slung with pockets each holding five rounds.