The Reaches (86 page)

There was a dead man in the kitchen, decapitated by a cutting bar. Wisps of his white beard, sawn by the same stroke, drifted in the air. There was blood over everything.

The living room beyond was a tangle of bedding and overturned furniture that several soldiers were searching with their cutting bars. The farm had obviously taken in refugees from New Windsor; maybe relatives, maybe not.

A whining bar slashed a cushion to fuzz. The stroke continued toward Sal's head. She ducked. It looked like simple vandalism to her, but perhaps the soldiers knew what they were doing.

She started up the stairs to get away from the troops' enthusiasm. A plasma thruster blatted unexpectedly. A cutter hopped the wall at low level and landed in the courtyard. Reinforcements sent because of her report, she supposed. There was room for a good pilot to land without hurting anybody on the ground, but he'd better have been good.

A woman screamed in the room at the top of the stairs. The door was ajar. Sal flung it open with her left hand. The panel bounced back from Lieutenant Pringle's shoulder. He stepped aside so that Sal could enter.

She'd tried to draw her revolver. She only managed to get the holster flap unbuttoned before she saw that there was no danger.

Two soldiers held the fully clothed woman they'd dragged from piled bedding in which she'd tried to conceal herself. The captive was about Sal's age, swarthy and terrified. "Not a treasure in chips," Pringle said cheerfully, "but she should provide some entertainment."

The woman's dress was a shiny orange synthetic fabric. One of the soldiers tried to rip it at the neckline and only managed to jerk the captive's head forward. She continued to scream.

"Let her go!" Sal said. She looked at Pringle. "Make them let her go at once!"

The second soldier put his free hand beside his comrade's. They pulled in opposite directions. The dress tore all the way down the front. The bandeau beneath was so loose that one of the woman's full breasts flopped out.

"You needn't watch," Pringle said coolly. "They shot at us, so they ought to know what to expect."

One soldier caught both the woman's wrists in one hand. He flung her backward onto the bed when his partner kicked her legs from beneath her.

"Stop that!" Sal said. Pringle stepped in front of her. She backed and drew the revolver.

"Listen, you whore!" Pringle shouted. "If you don't want to find yourself spread-eagled beside her, you'd better—"

He moved forward. Sal couldn't shoot him in cold blood.

"Tom!" she screamed. She raised the revolver's muzzle and fired three shots into the ceiling as fast as she could pull the trigger. The blasts were deafening in the enclosure. Bits of shattered lath from the ceiling exploded across the room. One of the bullets bounced back from the roof slates and buried itself in the window ledge.

The two soldiers jumped up from their captive. Pringle grabbed Sal's wrist. He punched her in the jaw with his free hand. "Stupid whore!" he shouted.

Sal's world went white and buzzing. She sagged until Pringle let go of her wrist; then she fell to the floor. She could hear voices, but they were ten decibels weaker than they'd been a moment before.

Stephen Gregg stepped into the bedroom. He held his flashgun to his shoulder. Pringle dropped the revolver he'd twisted from Sal's grip.

More men followed Stephen, too many for the available space. "I gave orders against rape," said Piet Ricimer as he knelt beside Sal. "Mister Dole, all three of these men are to be confined in close arrest. I'll try them later this evening."

"Sir, I . . ." Pringle said. "We . . ."

Ricimer put an arm under Sal's shoulders. "Can you move?" he asked.

She could hear normally. When she raised her torso with Ricimer's help, her eyes focused again also. "I'm all right," she said, hating the wobble in her voice.

Stephen said, "Dole? Hold this." He handed his heavy flashgun to the bosun.

"Look!" Pringle said. "This is—"

Stephen slapped him with his open hand. The sound was as loud as a revolver shot. Pringle flew across the room, hit the far wall, and fell onto the bed from which the Fed woman had just risen.

Pringle's cheek was a mass of blood where his teeth had cut him from the inside. His lower jaw hung loose.

Stephen's face was as white as old bone. He took the flashgun back from Dole without looking away from the bleeding officer.

The thousands of soldiers and sailors were too many for Commandatura Square in the center of New Windsor, so Piet had decided to use the gate arch of a Molt pen for the gibbet. Stephen stood at Piet's side, looking out at the expressions of the assembled men: some angry, some worried, some obviously drunk. All of them grim, as grim as the task itself.

"We'll make our landfall in the Reaches at Castalia," Piet said quietly. At the other gate support, Pringle was kneeling in prayer with the flagship's chaplain. "It's a Molt world, but the Molts are organized in small bands of migratory hunters, very unusual for them. They're too sparsely settled and too dangerous for the Feds to make slaving expeditions there. I'm not worried about us being discovered, though we'll keep a guardship in orbit at all times."

Dole and a detail of armed sailors guarded the two men taken with Pringle. One of the soldiers had a greenish pallor and looked as though he might faint.

"Rather than directly to Arles?" Stephen said. He didn't really care where they went next. The future was a gray blur, punctuated by flashes of screaming red.

"I'd like to have a base to reconnoiter before we hit Arles," Piet explained. "Besides, it'll be a long voyage. We have to expect it to take twenty days since there's so many ships to keep together, and we certainly won't make it in less than fifteen. The soldiers won't have much stomach left after so many transits."

"The soldiers won't be alone," Stephen said with a wan smile. He could no more learn to be comfortable when his whole body seemed to turn inside out during transit than he could have learned to be comfortable with a sunburn. The experience was simply one to be borne for however long was necessary.

Pringle stood up. His face was pale but composed. Dole looked at Piet. Piet nodded, and the crowd gave a collective sigh.

"Several of the warehouses here are full of the metal ingots the Feds use for trade with the Molts," Piet murmured. He was talking about the future to avoid thinking about the immediate present. "We'll carry a sufficiency of them to buy peace with the Castalian tribes for the short time we'll be staying."

Dole tossed a rope with an ordinary slipknot in the end over the crossbar of the gate. Two of his squad were fitting a canvas hood over Pringle's head. They walked the officer over to Dole. The bosun snugged the loop around Pringle's neck and handed the free end of the rope to the soldiers convicted of attempted rape—and sentenced to execute judgment on the officer who'd egged them on.

Piet took the bullhorn from Guillermo, who stood on his other side. "Men of my command," he said. "Soldiers of God."

He paused. The ships in the spaceport beyond reflected faint echoes of his words.

"We are here to defeat the tyrant Pleyal who sets himself up as a rival to God," Piet said. His voice had the full, rich tone he used to lead assemblies in prayer. "If we act like beasts, then our Lord, in Whose sole help we trust, will desert us and leave us to die like beasts of the field."

The breath of the crowd soughed like a low, sad breeze. Sal Blythe was there somewhere. Stephen couldn't make out her face, and he didn't really want to. Not here, not now.

"I would rather undergo any torture myself than to permit that to happen by my own inaction!" Piet shouted. He threw down the bullhorn and said crisply to the pair of soldiers, "Carry out your duties."

The soldiers pulled on the rope, grunting to lift Pringle hand over hand. Dole hadn't bothered to hang a pulley, so the crossbar's friction was added to the weight of the man gurgling under the hood. A sailor in the front rank of the assembly fell on his face before his neighbors could grab him.

One of the executioners wept as he staggered forward, trying to haul briskly. Both of them had their backs to the man they were strangling. Pringle's legs kicked out wildly. His arms were tied behind his back to prevent him from climbing up the noose.

Dole judged height and distance, shrugged, and tied the rope off to the support beside Piet, Stephen, and Guillermo. "All right," the bosun said gruffly to the executioners. "You two have done your job. Go put something on your hands before the rope burns get infected."

Pringle thrashed. His body spun on the single strand like a fly caught by a jumping spider. Occasionally he was able to draw enough breath to make the hood flutter.

"For
Christ's
sake!" Stephen said. "Doesn't he have any friends? Are they going to leave him to choke for the next five minutes?"

"If he had any friends, Stephen," Piet said in a voice as gray as a millstone, "they'd be afraid of what you might do if they ended this."

"
Christ,
" said Stephen Gregg. The word was as close to a prayer as he'd spoken since he first voyaged to the Reaches.

He stepped forward, caught the hanging man's leg at the knee, and jerked down with all his strength.

Pringle's neck popped like a twig breaking, severing the spinal cord and finishing him without further pain.

The truck Sal had borrowed from the
Wrath
was more of a powered bed frame with an open cab. It lurched as one or more of the six driven wheels dropped into a hole concealed by vegetation matted by earlier traffic. The jolts weren't dangerous; the truck was designed to carry heavy loads under much worse conditions. If a starship had bounced around that way, though, it would be on the verge of crashing or disintegration. Sal's jaw had been set and her knuckles white within a minute of when she started driving toward the
Sandringham
and the guarded trading station on the edge of the forest beside the vessel.

The savannah's yellowish vegetation grew in flat stems forming coils up to two meters off the ground. The mass looked like a tangle of razor ribbon but the stems weren't any stronger than grass blades. A vehicle crushed them down, and a man could force his way through without a machete or cutting bar if he had to.

Four similar trucks were parked in the clearing that plasma had seared to the red soil when the starship landed. Sal still couldn't see the guard post. She stopped beside the
Sandringham
and shut off her loudly ringing ceramic diesel so that she could hear. Three sailors who'd watched Sal approach from the starship's hatch said nothing.

"Is Mister Gregg here?" Sal called. "Stephen!"

Captain Wohlman had landed the
Sandringham
on the edge of the forest, almost a klick from the site the general commander designated and several hundred meters from the nearest of the squadron's other vessels. Wohlman wasn't exceptionally skillful even during his intervals of sobriety, and the
Sandringham'
s electronics were in a class with those of the
Gallant Sallie
before her refit.

Piet Ricimer had made virtue of necessity by establishing the
Sandringham
as the contact point with the local Molts. The trading post protected the outlying vessel and made it clear to the aliens that they weren't to approach the rest of the squadron.

Ricimer hadn't chewed Wohlman out for his bad landing, but the captain was by his own action isolated in a dangerous spot. So, of course, were his men. Sal figured they had a right to be surly, but they didn't need to take it out on her.

"I said—" she said, rising in the open cab. Yellow-gray foliage quivered at the corner of her eye. She reached for her revolver. Stephen stepped out, cradling the flashgun he favored.

"Stephen!" Sal cried. "Ah, Mister Gregg."

"Stephen," he said with a smile. He reached into the cab and spun the large wing nut securing the wheel to the steering column. "I don't want this to wander away," he said, pulling the wheel off one-handed. The trucks didn't have starter locks, but there were other basic security arrangements.

Stephen looked up at the three sullen crewmen. He smiled again, a very different expression from the one with which he greeted Sal.

"I wanted to see the forest," she said as she jumped from the truck.

"We've got a party of Molts," Stephen said. He handed her the steering wheel so that he was free to use the flashgun. "You can see them and the forest. And me."

The guard post was a long shed with roof and walls—rolled up, since it wasn't raining—of plastic sheeting, hung on a frame of local wood. The post was only twenty meters from the edge of the oval the
Sandringham
's exhaust had cleared, but the vegetation had sprung back to hide the path completely.

Fifty or so troops stood nearby. They wore half armor and had their weapons ready, but they didn't appear nervous. Three more landsmen, technicians rather than line soldiers, sat at a humming console beneath the shed. They looked up from their screens, nodded to Stephen—one looked at Sal with speculation—and went back to their duties.

"We can pick up a Molt's footfalls a thousand meters out," Stephen explained in a quiet voice. "Closer in we can vector on airborne noise as well, though—"

He grinned. She didn't remember having seen Stephen so . . . relaxed wasn't the word, but perhaps cheerful.

"—if they come hand over hand through the tree branches, there could be a problem before we sort things out."

Stephen was genuinely glad to see her.

Captain Casson and two of his officers squatted with Guillermo at the tree line, facing four of the local Molts. The locals' exoskeletons were cloudy gray. The color looked sickly to a human, but the soft sheen of wax over the chitin indicated the creatures were in good health. Three-kilo ingots of aluminum and rust-streaked iron were stacked on a pallet behind Casson.