The Reaches (94 page)

"Don't bloody fear, sir," Stampfer said in a low rumble. He was a squat troll of a man. Instead of a firearm or a cutting bar, the gunner carried a meter-long trunnion adjustment wrench. He was quite capable of using it on anyone jostling him as he laid a plasma cannon.

"Wish I was going with you, Mister Gregg," Dole said. "But I suppose there'll be another time, won't there?"

Stephen nodded. "There always is," he said.
If you live;
but Stephen didn't have to warn the bosun about danger. It was amazing that Dole had survived after following Captain Ricimer and Mister Gregg so long.

The gun had staggered past as the officers talked. "Well, carry on and don't be greedy," Stephen said to Dole and Stampfer. "These soldiers aren't any more use on a ship than I am, so don't grudge them and me a chance to pretend we're good for something."

He pushed into the brush again. "Let's see what Major Seibel's about, Vanderdrekkan. We're certainly not needed here."

Sarah Blythe's new hard suit fitted so well that in weightless conditions she sometimes forgot she had it on. The extra thirty kilos of mass were still there. She strained her shoulder when she caught a stanchion to halt behind Piet Ricimer's console.

The
Wrath
was under combat regulations: all personnel in armor, and internal pressure low to limit air loss during gunnery. A gunner's mate shrieked in a voice made pale by the thin air, "Mister Stampfer's going to
cry
when he comes back if you fucking whoresons don't train your guns better on the next firing pass! I could piss out a port and hurt the Feds worse!"

Piet wore all but the gauntlets of a gilded hard suit. He was talking into a handset against his left cheek while his right hand manipulated a display filled with numbers. After a decent interval, Sal said, "Captain Blythe reporting as ordered, General Commander!"

"At the very least, Captain Holmberg," Piet said, "your ship may draw a bolt that would otherwise have damaged a useful element of the squadron. Take your place in the rotation, or expect to answer for your cowardice as soon as we're on the ground. Out!"

Piet turned to Sal. The
Wrath
had five navigational consoles—the pair to starboard separated from the other three by a splinterproof bulkhead of clear glass. Guillermo was in the seat beside Piet, and a Betaport navigator Sal recognized but couldn't name was at the remaining console of the main triad.

"Holmberg thinks that because the
Zephyr
's popguns won't do any damage from orbit, he ought to keep her out of the bombardment chain," Piet said. "He doesn't appreciate that the sheer number of ships involved affects Fed morale."

"Holmberg owns the
Zephyr,
" Sal said. She hoped she was offering the statement as information rather than seeming to take the part of an Ishtar City man she knew well enough to detest.

"His heirs will own the
Zephyr
if he plays the coward with me," Piet said in a voice as emotionless as the one Stephen used when he discussed similar things.

Piet wiped his face with a bandanna, said, "Sorry," and then went on. "First, how did the landing go?"

He manipulated the keyboard with his right index finger without bothering to look at it. The numbers vanished like a coin spinning and were replaced by an image of Berryhill. Sal wasn't sure whether the vast turquoise globe was a realtime view or summoned from memory.

"No problems, sir," Sal said. The
Queen of Sheba
had come down too close to the river's edge and flooded her boarding holds when the hatches opened, but Captain Gruen had redeemed himself by rocking the transport free with his attitude jets before lighting his thrusters. Nothing Piet had to learn about officially. "The ground forces were proceeding ahead of schedule when I lifted for orbit."

Piet grinned tightly. "Stephen and I discussed the possibility that the river delta would be defended," he said. "I'm glad it wasn't."

The
Wrath
had just completed a firing pass when Sal came aboard in obedience to the general commander's summons. All the squadron's armed vessels—the four transports had been stripped of guns for the landing—were in a gigantic rotation that took them dipping one at a time into the atmosphere above St. Mary's Port. The Venerian bombardment wasn't likely to damage the defenses, but it was all the ships could safely do to support the ground force.

Under Piet's control, the display focused down in a series of x10 steps. After the last jump, an image of St. Mary's Port filled the holographic screen.

There were six gun positions sited around the large rhomboidal field. The tower holding the four heaviest guns was ten meters high, commanding much of the surrounding countryside.

The city south of the port area had originally been protected against marauding Rabbits by a ditch and berm. As the Federation colony grew, danger from the savage remnants of pre-Collapse society receded. Buildings now spilled beyond the berm to the south and west. The holographic image was sharp enough that Sal could see that alleys and the highway south, crossing the St. Mary's River, were barricaded against the expected Venerian assault.

Piet rolled the ball switch controlling the display's scale and focus and clicked up the scale. As the center of the image area slid upward, the port reservation expanded to fill the screen.

"This is what concerns me," Piet said, "and why I called you here."

There were nearly a hundred ships on the vast field, most of them Reaches-built trash with flimsy hulls and too few thrusters for their mass. Half a dozen had the presence of solider vessels, though these weren't of any great size either.

At the time the image was recorded, probably during a firing pass before nightfall, a pair of cylindrical 200-tonne ships were testing their thrusters. Wisps of iridescence glimmered downwind of the hulls, obvious to a spacer's eye.

Piet increased the scale once more. Guns projected from the side ports of both vessels; ten total on one ship, twelve on the other. The tubes were a motley collection with evident variation in size between adjacent gunports.

"They can't hope to engage the squadron with a pair of merchant ships mounting whatever guns they had in inventory," Sal said. "So they're planning to use them on Stephen as mobile batteries. On the ground forces."

"Stampfer will give a good account of himself," Piet said, "but there's dead ground between where the gun is sited and the outskirts of the city. The Feds will drop into the swale as soon as the first bolt hits them."

Piet's mouth pursed as though he were sucking a lemon. "I thought of taking the
Wrath
in close where our fire could be significant," he said, "but the port defenses are well handled. The risk would be too high."

Piet's smile was cold. "Too high to a ship and crew which Venus will need in the real struggle which is coming soon. I intend instead to send down a pair of armed cutters to occupy the attention of the Fed warships until our troops can get into the town. Are you willing to pilot one of those cutters, Captain Blythe?"

"Yes, sir," Sal said.

She would have agreed to step into space in her underwear if Piet said it would help Stephen. The analytical part of her mind suggested that the one course was about as likely to be survivable as the other.

Dawn winked on the fuselage and rotating wing of the autogyro in Stephen Gregg's sight picture. The Fed scouts flew over the southern edge of St. Mary's Port at a thousand meters altitude, high enough that they were safe from rifle fire from the Venerian ground troops for whom they were searching.

Stephen let his flashgun swing, tracking the glitter long enough to fall into a rhythm with his target. He didn't feel, he never felt, the gentle increase in the pressure the pad of his index finger was exerting on the trigger. The
whack
of the bolt and the blindness as his faceshield instantly darkened to save his retinas came as the usual surprise.

The six soldiers with flashguns in his lead company fired the moment after Stephen did, aiming at the second of the Federation's airborne scouts. Stephen's protective visor would take nearly a minute to fade to clear again. He flipped it up to survey the effectiveness of the laser pulses.

Stephen had hit the engine compartment of the autogyro he aimed at. The bolt had no penetration, even against an aircraft's light-alloy sheeting, but its enormous flux density converted the target surface into a plasma with a shattering acoustic pulse radiating from the back of the panel.

Steam blasted as the shock ripped away radiator hoses as well as the spark plug wires of the in-line engine. The two-seat autogyro staggered and curved downward, supported by the continuing self-rotation of its wing.

The Fed autogyros Stephen had seen in the past used radial engines. He'd expected his bolt to rupture and ignite a fuel tank ahead of the cockpit. This result would do.

The first hundred Venerian troops moved out of the scrub and into the sorghum fields with a shout, though none of them was really running. The march, much of it uphill, had been brutal, and men so heavily laden with weapons and armor wouldn't have been able to run far even if they'd been fresh.

With the reflex of long practice, Stephen's fingers switched the battery in the butt of his weapon for a fresh one while his eyes scanned to find additional targets. Rifles flashed from the darkened fronts of buildings on the outskirts of St. Mary's Port, but small-arms projectiles were no danger at this range. The Feds rarely used flashguns, though they might have crew-served lasers in their defenses.

Stephen thought for a moment the second autogyro had escaped the volley his men had directed at it. The city was a good kilometer away, and slant distance to the aircraft was still farther; a long shot even for a marksman whose bolt didn't deviate from line of sight.

The autogyro was diving away northward. The pilot probably intended to land in the spaceport, out of the battle, but there was no reason to take chances. Stephen aligned the craft with the fat muzzle of his cassegrain laser. He had an almost zero-deflection shot, just a matter of taking account of the target's rapid descent. . . .

Before Stephen pulled the trigger, the advancing half of the autogyro's wing lifted vertical and flew away from the rest of the vehicle. A bolt had hit the wing near its rotor, and the stress of the dive had snapped the structure at the point of damage.

Tumbling over and over, the autogyro plunged five hundred meters into St. Mary's Port. A deep red fireball rose above the buildings three seconds before the thump of the fuel explosion.

"Let's go," Stephen muttered to his staff as he swung into a jog. His side throbbed when his left boot came down and his breastplate slapped against the bruise. Vanderdrekkan ran alongside him, trying to continue a conversation over the portable radio.

The sorghum was waist-high, completely hiding the ground beneath its broad, dark leaves. The furrows were perpendicular to the Venerians' advance, and you couldn't guess how you were going to step from one stride to the next.

The acreage was cultivated as a single expanse by Molts, to feed themselves and the other slaves of the region. There were no fences or hedgerows, but irrigation canals rising slightly above the tilth ran at fifty-meter intervals down the length of the field. Stephen had ordered the flashgunners—the other flashgunners—to crouch behind the northernmost canal mound to support the assault wave.

Midway across the field, six naked men with guns and bows rose from behind the nearest canal. They aimed at the backs of soldiers who'd just passed them without noticing the lurking enemies.

Stephen was still twenty meters behind the skirmish line proper. He fired at a figure by instinct, closing his eyes at the instant of trigger release. The bolt's intensity would leave purple afterimages drifting across his retinas despite his eyelid's shielding, but waiting to put his visor down first meant a soldier's life.

The attackers were Rabbits, remnants of Berryhill's pre-Collapse society. The Feds treated the savages they found on recolonized planets as vermin or slaves—and Molts made far better slaves. That obviously hadn't kept the government here from hiring or cajoling Rabbits to fight for them.

Die for them. The laser bolt caught a Rabbit in the small of the back. His shotgun fired skyward as his torso exploded in a mist of blood. Soldiers ahead of Stephen turned at the flash and muzzle blast.

An arrow struck a Venerian in the center of the chest, shattering on his ceramic cuirass. The Rabbit archer hadn't allowed for body armor. A charge of shotgun pellets ripped the leg of another soldier, but he stayed upright long enough to shoot his attacker three times in the chest with a pump carbine. Another Rabbit missed a rifleshot from two meters away because instead of aiming he waved his weapon wildly in the direction of his target before jerking the trigger.

All six Rabbits were down before Stephen could aim the repeater Lewis slapped into his hand in exchange for the flashgun. A mercenary from the Coastal Republic was finishing a wounded ambusher by holding his face in the canal with a cleated boot. The Rabbit's long hair and beard were as red as the blood on the soldier's left sleeve, torn by a bullet that had ricocheted from his titanium breastplate.

Powder smoke, ozone from the laser discharge, and the stink of opened body cavities hung in the air. Beverly picked up a satchel of batteries with a look of fascinated horror. A bullet fired by another member of the assault force had cut the strap without—quite—piercing Beverly's neck.

Vanderdrekkan had drawn but not fired one of his pair of long-barreled revolvers. "Three wounded, none of them seriously, sir," Vanderdrekkan said. "Holtsinger may not be able to accompany the rest of the force."

The Venerian with the shotgun wound looked up and snarled, "I can still fucking march anywhere a European pansy can!" Another soldier had cut Holtsinger's trousers open and was applying a field dressing.