The Reaches

45

Umber

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.

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.