David Drake - The Reaches

"Glad to help," Gregg said. He looked at his left hand. He'd managed to bark the knuckles badly during the wild ride to the compound. "Besides, I wasn't looking forward to those trucks again."

Ricimer chuckled. His dark, animated face settled. Without looking at his companion, he said, "What do you think about all this, anyway? The way we're dealing with the Southerns."

Gregg glanced around while he framed a reply. Venerians had unlocked the gate in the electrified fence and were herding out the Molts. Some crewmen waved their weapons, but that seemed unnecessary. The Molts were perfectly docile.

The wedge-faced humanoids were a little shorter than the human average. Most of them were slightly built, but a few had double the bulk of the norm. Gregg wondered whether that was a sexual distinction or some more esoteric specialization.

Viewed up close, many of the Molts bore dark scars on their waxy, purplish exoskeletons. A few were missing arms, and more lacked one or more of the trio of multijointed fingers that formed a normal "hand."

"I'm my uncle's agent," Gregg said at last. "And I can tell you, nothing bothers my Uncle Ben if there's profit in it. Which there certainly is here."

Ricimer nodded. "I'm second cousin to the Mosterts," he said.

One of the crewmen he'd dragooned showed enough initiative to run ahead and find the hatch mechanism of the nearer ship. It sighed open.

"Really, now," Ricimer added with a grin to his companion. "Though what I said about a factorial family, there's evidence."

Gregg laughed.

"All three ships are Alexi Mostert's," Ricimer continued. "In the past, my cousin's made the voyage himself, though he sent Choransky out in charge this time. I'm sure this is how Alexi conducted the business too."

They'd reached the Southern Cross vessel. It weighed about 50 tonnes and was metal-hulled, unlike the ships of the Venerian argosy. Metals were cheap and readily available in the asteroids of every planetary system; but ceramic hulls were preferable for vessels which had to traverse the hellish atmosphere of Venus. Besides, the surface of the second planet was metal-poor.

Survival after the Collapse had raised ceramic technology to a level higher than had been dreamed of while Venus was part of a functioning intergalactic economy. After a thousand years of refinement, Venerians sneered at the notion metals could ever equal ceramics-though the taunt "glass-boat sailor!" had started fights in many spaceports since Venus returned to space.

"Some of you find the water intakes and figure out how to deploy them," Ricimer ordered as he sat at the control console.

The interior of the vessel stank with a variety of odors, some of them simply those of a large mass of metal to noses unfamiliar with it. The control cabin could be sealed. The rest of the ship was a single open hold.

"What do you think of what we're doing?" Ricimer said to Gregg.

Then, before the landsman could reply, he added in a crisp voice, "All hands watch yourselves. I'm going to light the thrusters."

"I think. ." Gregg murmured as Ricimer engaged the vessel's AI, "that it's bad for business, my friend."

Near Virginia

Choransky and Bivens muttered, their heads close above a CRT packed with data. The navigator grimaced but nodded. Choransky reached for a switch.

Ricimer turned from where he stood in the midst of the forward attitude-control boards he now supervised. "All right, gentlemen," he said. "We're about to transit again."

He winked at Gregg.

Gregg clasped a stanchion. He kept his eyes open, because he'd learned that helped- helped -him control vertigo. There wasn't anything in his stomach but acid, but he'd spew that, sure as the sun shone somewhere, if he wasn't lucky.

The Sultan lurched into transit space-and lurched out again calculated milliseconds later. The starship's location and velocity were modified by the amount she'd accelerated in a spacetime whose constants were radically different from those of the sidereal universe.

They dropped in and out of alien universes thirty-eight times by Gregg's count, bootstrapping the length of each jump by the acceleration achieved in the series previous before they returned to the sidereal universe to stay-until the next insertion. The entire sequence took a little more than one sidereal minute. Gregg's stomach echoed the jumps a dozen times over before finally settling again.

"There!" cried Captain Choransky, pointing to the blurred starfield that suddenly filled the Sultan 's positioning screen. "There, we've got Virginia!"

"We've got something," Bivens said morosely. "I'm not sure it's Virginia. These optics. ."

Dole, at one of the attitude workstations, yawned and closed his eyes. Lightbody took out his pocket Bible and began to read, moving his lips. Jeude, at the third workstation, appeared to be comatose.

Two officers came in from aft compartments. They joined Choransky and Bivens at the front of the bridge, squabbling over the Sultan 's location and whether or not their consorts were among the flecks of light on the positional display. It was obviously going to be some minutes, perhaps hours, before the next transit.

Gregg maneuvered carefully through the cluttered three meters separating him from Ricimer. The landsman was getting better at moving in freefall. He'd learned that his very speed and strength were against him, and that he had to move in tiny, precisely-controlled increments.

Ricimer grinned. "These were easy jumps," he said. "Wait till the gradients rise and the thrusters have us bucking fit to spring the frames before we can get into transit space. But you'll get used to it."

"Where are we?" Gregg asked, pretending to ignore the spacer's comments.

He spoke softly, but the combination of mechanical racket, the keening of the Molts-they didn't like transit any better than Gregg's stomach did-and the increasingly loud argument around the positional display provided privacy from anyone but the trio at the attitude controls. Those men were Ricimer's, body and soul. They were as unlikely to carry tales against him as they were to try to swim home to Venus.

"The Virginia system," Ricimer said. "Both the captain and Bivens are pretty fair navigators. We're about a hundred million kilometers out from the planet; three jumps or maybe four."

"Why are you sure and they aren't?" the landsman asked.

Jeude turned his head toward the officers. He was a young man, fair-haired and angelic in appearance. "Because Mr. Ricimer knows his ass from a hole in the ground, sir," he said to Gregg. "Which that lot"-he nodded forward-"don't."

"None of that, Jeude," Ricimer said sharply. His expression softened as he added to Gregg, "I memorized starcharts for some of the likely planetfalls when I applied for a place on this voyage."

"But. .?" Gregg said. He peered at the flat-screen positional display, placed at an angle across the bridge. It would be blurry even close up. "You can tell from that ?"

Ricimer shrugged. "Well, you can't expect to have a perfect sighting or a precise attitude," he said. "You have to study. And trust your judgment."

"I'd rather trust your judgment, sir," Jeude said. When he spoke, it was like seeing a dead man come to life.

"I think that'll do for me, too," Gregg agreed.

"Right, it's Virginia and I don't want any more bloody argument!" Captain Choransky boomed. "We'll do it in four jumps."

"I'd do it in three," Ricimer murmured. His voice was too soft for Gregg to hear the words, but the landsman read them in his grin.

Above Virginia

"If they don't make up their mind in the next thirty seconds," Ricimer said in Gregg's ear, "we'll lose our reentry window and have to orbit a fourth time."