David Drake - [Reaches 03] - Fireships

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Fireships

To Carolyn Ross

Who's a long way away, but only physically

ABOVE LILYMEAD

June 1, Year 26 of Governor Halys

1000 hours, Venus time

"We can get one more aboard, Sal," called Tom Harrigan from the hatch of the lighter across the

temporary orbital dock from theGallant Sallie.

Captain Sarah—Sal—Blythe checked her vessel's hold and said, "No, let 'em go, Tom. We've got two

turbines and the crate of spare rotors left, so there'll be a part-load anyway. Tell them to start bringing the

return cargo on the next lift, though. We can have the last of this waiting in the dock and our hold clear by

the time they get back up."

The access tube connecting the lighter to the dock was three meters long. The valve at the inner end of

the tube opened automatically when the air pressure on both sides was equal. The system formed a

simple airlock while the outer end was attached to a ship's pressurized hold or cabin.

Technically the business of shifting cargo after a vessel docked was the responsibility of the planetary

staff, but Lilymead wasn't really set up to handle cargoes in orbit. The ships that traded to Near Space

colonies like Lilymead put down on the unimproved field and waited for tractors to haul lowboys full of

stevedores to them over dirt blasted by the exhaust of other vessels.

The huge freighters in which the North American Federation voyaged to the Reaches touched in Near

Space only when leakage and slow progress forced them to resupply their reaction mass and

atmosphere. Those monsters rarely dared to land on ports without hardened pads and full facilities.

Lilymead had a remotely controlled water buffalo to ferry water and air up to them.

Harrigan—Sal's mate—and the starboard watch of eight crewmen slid from the lighter's hold with the

delicacy of men experienced with weightless conditions. The Federation lighter's own crew of two wasn't

enough to handle cargo as massive as these turbines, even if Sal had been willing to wait while the locals

did the job. The dock was processed cellulose, constructed as cheaply as possible to be abandoned

after a single use. Inertia would tear a turbine that got away from its handlers right on through the fuzzily

transparent walls.

"Say, what's that?" Harrigan said in astonishment as he saw the featherboat that had grappled to another

of the dock's four access tubes while he and his men were striking cargo down in the lighter.

The 30-tonne vessel was too small to have an airlock of its own. As Sal and the mate watched, the

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dorsal hatch opened. A group of civilians caromed out with the spastic overcorrections of folk who

thought of gravity, not inertia, when they moved.

"Some local merchants, they said," Sal explained. "Asked to come aboard. We've got a return cargo,

but I didn't see any harm in talking to them." She grimaced. "We could use a little extra profit to cover

repairs to the attitude jets."

"Oh, Sallie," Harrigan said uncomfortably. The mate never jibbed at her orders, but he couldn't help

treating Sarah Blythe as the captain's daughter rather than as the captain in her own right. Harrigan had

always assumed that when Marcus Blythe's arthritis grounded him for good, Thomas Harrigan would

marry Sal and captain theGallant Sallie himself—while his wife stayed on Venus and raised children as a

woman should. "I don't think that'll be much, just a bad connection somewhere, only . . ."

TheGallant Sallie' s three bands of attitude jets kept the vessel aligned with the direction her main

thrusters were to drive her. On the voyage out to Lilymead, the jets occasionally failed to fire as

programmed. The problem forced Sal to go through the trouble and added expense of lightering down

her cargo, rather than landing in the port where two other Venerian vessels took advantage of the

relaxing of the Federation's embargo on trade with its Near Space colonies. If the jets—most likely their

controls—glitched during transit, the error required recomputation and lengthened theGallant Sallie 's

voyage. If the problem occurred during landing, well . . .

Captain Sarah Blythe was rightly proud of her reflexes and piloting ability. Since she had the choice,

though, the only landing theGallant Sallie would make this voyage would be back on Venus, where

dockyard mechanics could go over the vessel and cure what the crew's repeated attempts had not.

The featherboat's passengers, five men and two women, spun in the slight turbulence as they entered the

dock's main chamber. None of the seven was a spacer, though Sal was by no means sure they were all

the civilians their clothing proclaimed.

Her eyes narrowed. The dark speckling on one woman's cheek was a powder burn. While the stiff leg

of the group's leader could have come from any number of causes, the puckered skin of his right forearm

was surely a bullet scar.

"Captain Blythe?" the leader said to Harrigan. "I'm Walter Beck. These are my associates in the trading

community here on Lilymead."

TheGallant Sallie 's working party watched the Fed delegation with the amusement of spacers for

landsmen out of their element. Brantling, a senior man who'd have been bosun except for his jealousy of

Harrigan, snickered loudly.

"There's our captain!" Tom Harrigan said, anger at Brantling's laughter turning the words into a snarl.

"Deal with her if you've business here."

Beck was holding out a bottle of local liquor. He swung it from Harrigan to Sal at arm's length. The

gesture set his whole body pivoting away in reaction. Sal caught Beck's cuff and said, "You're welcome

aboard theGallant Sallie, miladies and sirs. Left up the passage from the hold, please. We'll speak in the

cabin so that my crew can continue their duties."

Sal's gentle tug sent Beck through the hatch ahead of her. Without needing direction, Harrigan and the

rest of the work party caught the other Feds and pushed them after their leader like so many billiard balls

into a pocket. A few of the thrusts were more enthusiastic than kindly; Sal, still gripping the coaming,

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braked those Feds with her free hand. The powder-burned female pinwheeled wildly because she'd

swiped at the head of the sailor who pushed her off. Brantling again . . .

"Brantling," Sal ordered. "Put a helmet on and check the nozzles of all twelve attitude jets again. Now!"

"Aye aye, Captain," Brantling said, cheerful despite the unpleasant, dangerous, and (at this point) useless

task he'd just been set. Brantling never failed to use Sal's title with due deference, because he believed it

irritated the mate to hear her called "Captain."

He was wrong. Tom Harrigan couldn't understand Sal's refusing his hand nor her insistence on sailing as

captain in lieu of her father; but he had neither jealousy nor anger toward her. He'd been ship's boy when

Marcus Blythe brought his two-year-old infant aboard theGallant Sallie for the first time.

Sal seated herself at the navigation console and hooked a tie-down across her lap to keep her there.

"What can I do for you, Master Beck?" she asked.

TheGallant Sallie was a freighter of standard Venerian design with a nominal burden of 150 tonnes.

She had a main hold aft; it could be pressurized, but the large outer hatch was single-panel, not an

airlock. The cabin forward served as crew quarters and control room. There were stanchions to help

people direct themselves in weightlessness, but the light screen around the toilet in deference to the

captain's sex was the only bulkhead within the compartment. There was an airlock near the navigation

console in the nose. Hatches at either end of the two-meter-long passageway between the hold and cabin

(through the air and water tanks amidships) turned it into an airlock as well.

The visiting landsmen hovered awkwardly in the cabin, stared at by the off-duty crew members. In

weightless conditions, all the compartment's volume was usable; but by the same token, gravity didn't

organize the space in an expected fashion. One of the Feds started noticeably when he realized his ear

was less than a finger's breadth from the feet of a spacer floating in his sleeping net.

Beck looked around before replying. His eyes lingered on the four 10-cm plasma cannon, dominating

the cabin by their mass despite being draped with netted gear at present. Beck still held the liquor bottle.

It couldn't be used in orbit without a pressure vessel, which Sal pointedly didn't offer. She'd decided that

whatever these folk were about, she wanted no part of it.

"I'm sorry for your engine trouble, Captain," Beck said. There was little distinction between the sexes in

Fed service, but a female captain on a Venerian ship was unusual enough to arouse interest. "Are you

sure you wouldn't like to land and see if our crews couldn't put it to right? You know how clever some

Molts can be, almost as if they were human."

"We'll manage," Sal said curtly. "We've got plenty of reaction mass for the return trip. InIshtarCity the

people who installed the system can troubleshoot it."

She didn't like Molts; the chitinous aliens made her skin crawl. There weren't many on Venus, but the

North American Federation used Molts as slaves to do much of the labor on their starships and the

colonies those ships served. Because Molts had genetic memory, they could operate the machinery

remaining across the Reaches where mankind had abandoned it after the Rebellion and the Collapse of

civilization a thousand years before.

No denying the Molts' value, but—they stank; the food they ate stank; and so far as Sal was concerned,

the Federation that depended on Molt abilities stank also.

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"As you please," Beck said with a shrug. He grabbed a bundle of dehydrated food to keep from drifting

away. "You know," he added as if it were a new thought, "I see that you've got plasma guns. Our port

defenses could do with some improvement. Would you—"

"Not interested," Sal said loudly, awakening two of the crewmen who were still asleep. Brantling, who'd

pulled an elastic pressure suit over his coveralls, paused beside the airlock without donning his air helmet.

"We could offer a good price," said the powder-burned Fed. She sounded calm, but the cabin wasn't

warm enough to have beaded her forehead with sweat.

"Not interested," Sal repeated sharply. She rose from her seat in obvious dismissal. "You know the old

saying: 'There's no law beyond Pluto.' Without the great guns, we'd be prey for any skulking pirate we

chanced across."

And for any Federation customs vessel;which she didn't say and didn't need to say. TheGallant Sallie

was a merchant ship, not a raider; but only a fool would put herself and her crew at the mercy of

Federation officials who had been bloodied so often and so badly by the raiding captains of Venus.

"Well, we're only here to offer you the hospitality of Lilymead," Beck said. "Now that the embargo for

Near Space is lifted, we hope to trade with you and your compatriots often."

He offered the bottle of liquor again. Sal took it. It was some sort of local brew, perhaps of native

vegetation. The contents were bright yellow and moved as sluggishly as heavy oil.

"Thank you, Master Beck," Sal replied. "I certainly hope we will." The profits were too good to pass up,

but she didn't know if she'd touch down the next time either. Too much about the conditions on Lilymead

made her uneasy.

Harrigan came up the passage from the hold. "Tom," Sal said, "help our visitors back to their vessel. I'll

bring up the rear."

With the loading done, the starboard watch was returning to the cabin behind Harrigan. The mate didn't

bother to send his men back into the hold ahead of the visitors, as Sal had meant he should. The passage

was a tight fit for people passing in opposite directions, even when they all were experienced spacers. Sal

heard curses. One of her Venerians responded to a bump by kicking a Fed hard down the passage into

the woman ahead.

The lighter had already cast off. As Sal entered the dock, she saw the little vessel's thruster fire. The

bulkhead's translucence blurred the rainbow haze of plasma exhaust. Lilymead hung overhead, its visible

continent a squamous green as distinctly different from that of Terran vegetation as it was from the ruddy

yellow cloudscape of Venus.

Tom Harrigan was a tall, rawboned man, bald at age 35 save for a fringe of red hair. He glared as the

visitors closed the hatch of their featherboat behind them. "If I never see another Federation toady," he

said, "it'll be too soon."

Sal glanced at her mate without expression. She was a short, stocky blonde, 24 years old. Earth years,

because the folk living beneath the crust and equally opaque atmosphere of Venus had never measured

time by Venus years or the yearlong days of the second planet. "I expect to turn around for Lilymead

again as soon as I can get another cargo from home," she said mildly. "There's a good profit on glazing

earths."

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"Glazing earths!" Harrigan said. "The real profit's in microchips from the Reaches, and President Pleyal

claims all those for himself. Why, the only reason the Feds even opened their Near Space colonies to us

is that Captain Ricimer's raids made Pleyal be a little more reasonable about trade!"

The featherboat cast off from the dock. It continued to hang alongside while the Molt pilot waited for a

reentry window. A few stars were bright enough for Sal to see them through the dock's walls.

"All I know," Sal said, a trifle more crisply than before, "is that there's money to be made hauling

manufactures out to Lilymead and glazing earths back. That's the trade theGallant Sallie 's going to

carry so long as the embargo's lifted and nothing better offers."

The featherboat's thruster flared. Its iridescent brilliance was brighter than the sun until the vessel

dropped well within the ball of the planet.

"I'll tell you though, Tom," Sarah Blythe said in an appraising tone. "If that lot comes back again, see to it

that I'm awake and the whole crew is on alert. I'm not sure what they've got in mind is trade."

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Framed

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ABOVE LILYMEAD

June 1, Year 26

1515 hours, Venus time

Sal watched through a magnifier as her fingers fed new coils through the narrow slots of an electric drill's

stator. She'd cut and teased out the shorted coils on the previous watch while waiting for the lighter to

return; now she was rewiring the unit. When she was done, the drill would work again—and as an

activity, it beat recomputing the course back to Venus for the umpteenth time.

Rickalds, on watch at the navigation console, straightened up sharply and said, "Captain, the lighter's on

course. They're not two minutes out, I swear,"

"Haven't they heard of radio?" Sal snapped as she struck the repair tools and pieces of drill down in a

canvas bag. Otherwise the bits would drift into all corners of the ship while she was away from the task.

"See if you can raise port control and see why they didn't warn us!"

"Port watch to the dock to load cargo!" Harrigan called, his voice echoing in the hold and up the

passageway to the cabin. Tom must have noticed the lighter's braking flare through the cellulose walls.

The lighter wasn't scheduled to return for another twenty minutes; based on past experience with the

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Lilymead personnel, Sal hadn'texpected them for an hour at best.

"Captain, it's two ships, I think," Rickalds said. He squinted at the holographic display instead of trying

to sharpen the view electronically. Rickalds was alert and a willing worker, but he was ill at ease with any

tool more complex than a pry bar.

"I've got the controls, Rickalds," Sal said, pushing the spacer from the console. "Airley," she said to the

senior man of the starboard watch, "stand by to take over here."

TheGallant Sallie 's optronics were original to the vessel and thus older than Sal herself. As built they

hadn't been as clear as one might wish, and it took a practiced hand to bring the best out of their aged

chips now.

Sal focused, raised the magnification, and rolled a ball switch with her hand to correct for drift as the

console's electronics were unable to do. "Damn their fool souls toHell, " she snarled.

"Sir?" said Airley.

"Take over!" she said as she left the console and propelled herself down the passageway in a pair of

reflexively precise motions. Two vessels were approaching. The lighter was five hundred meters out, still

braking with its thruster to match velocities. The featherboat that had brought Beck in the morning had

arrived again also, and it was already coupled to the temporary dock.

Harrigan was organizing his eight cargo handlers in the hold, nearly empty now that the rest of the

outbound freight had been shifted to the temporary dock. Sal brought herself up on a stanchion and said,

"Tom, keep the men aboard and ready the ship to lift. I'm going to see why Beck's here again. If I don't

like his reasons, we're out of here!"

She pushed off, using the hatch coaming to correct and brake her motion. "Sal?" Harrigan called to her

back. "If we leave, we miss the return cargo."

"Bugger the return cargo!" Sal said.

If theGallant Sallie cut and ran, Sarah Blythe would spend the voyage home worrying about what she'd

say to the noteholder, Ishtar Chandlery. She might even have to decide whether it'd be worse to lose the

ship than to call on a noble named Samuel Trafficant and . . . beg his kindness. For the moment, though,

her concerns were much more immediate.

TheGallant Sallie 's arms locker was strapped to the rear cabin bulkhead. Sal wondered if she should

have paused long enough to open the locker and take one of the six rifles or the shotgun inside. At least

she should have grabbed one of the powered cutting bars that spacers used for tools or weapons as

circumstances dictated. She hadn't thought of that till she noticed how lonely the empty dock seemed.

Sal used the crate of turbine spares to halt her. Its mass didn't visibly move when it stopped her 55

kilograms.

The featherboat's hatch, a two-meter-by-one-meter section of the upper hull, lifted as soon as the

dock's attachment lips were clamped around the coaming. Atmosphere from the featherboat filled the

access tube. The valve started to open inward, toward Sal.

A dozen figures from the featherboat entered the tube. They were armed. Three of them—Beck and

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two other of the morning's visitors—wore the white uniforms of Federation officials. Six of the others

were Molts, their purplish exoskeletons unclothed save for one draped in a pink sash-of-office.

The other three invaders were human also, but they were garbed in clothing cast off by Federation

colonists. These last were obviously Rabbits, the human remnants of Lilymead's pre-Collapse population;

sunken to savagery, and now slaves of the Federation like the Molts beside them.

"Harrigan, close the hatch!" Sal shouted in a cold, clear voice. She propelled herself toward the access

tube. The valve had sprung open when the featherboat equalized pressure, but perhaps she could jam

it—

A Molt caught her wrist with three chitinous fingers. Sal twisted. The Molt wasn't as strong as she was,

but he raised the cutting bar in his free hand. The surfaces of his triangular face were expressionless.

"I've got this one, bug!" shouted a pudgy human with customs service in tarnished braid on the collar of

his uniform. He socketed the muzzle of a revolver in Sal's left ear.

"Don't you move, bitch, or I'll paint your brains all over the walls!" the Fed added, his face centimeters

from hers. His breath stank of fear and unfamiliar spices.

Sal heard shots and a cry of pain from theGallant Sallie 's hatch. Beck, wearing a tunic with gold

epaulets and holding a rifle awkwardly, crossed the dock with the aid of two Molts.

The lighter was disgorging more armed Feds up a second access tube to join the force from the

featherboat. The two Fed vessels were much of a size, but the lighter had greater internal capacity

because it didn't need the equipment and hull strength for interstellar travel. There seemed to have been

forty or fifty personnel, mostly Molts and Rabbits, packed into the lighter's hold.

"We are here under a valid contract, approved by the Bureau of Out-System Trade in Montreal!" Sal

said. "You'll answer to President Pleyal for this piracy!"

"Shut up!" cried the Fed officer. "We've got orders, and by Mary and the Saints, we've got the power!"

He forced his revolver harder against Sal's ear. The two of them rotated slowly. Sal could now see the

backs of the attackers entering theGallant Sallie. A gunshot lighted the hold red. Cutting bars whined.

There were several more shots in quick succession, but this time the muzzle flashes were obscured.

A Molt drifted from the hatchway. The creature's head had been dished in. The edges of the wound

dripped brown ichor.

The Fed holding Sal gaped. There was a hollowthoonk. His face bulged and something sprayed Sal,

half blinding her. A bullet had taken the officer in the back of the skull and exited beneath his left eye. The

projectile went on out through the wall of the temporary dock, leaving a black void in the center of a

20-centimeter bulge stressed to white opacity.

Sal wiped her eyes. The corpse was floating away from her. She twisted the revolver out of fingers that

had clamped when the Fed's brain was destroyed.

TheGallant Sallie had a sprinkler system, nozzles in the hold fed directly from the tank of reaction mass

behind the midships bulkhead. Somebody opened the valve briefly. An opaque cloud of water vapor

filled the hold and gushed from the hatch. It was doubly blinding in the low-pressure atmosphere.

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Federation personnel retreated gasping through the gray mass. They collided with the reinforcements

continuing to arrive from the lighter. Beck reappeared, shouting an unintelligible order. A woman in

Federation uniform bumped him into a somersault as she pushed past.

Another bullet came through the wall of the dock from outside, from vacuum. This round smashed the

thigh of a Molt with an impact that spun the creature's legs above its head.

Orbit around Lilymead brought theGallant Sallie 's port side to the sun again. So illuminated, the

vessel's ceramic hull was clearly visible through the dulling medium of the cellulose walls. Everybody in

the dock could see a gunport open and the muzzle of one of the 10-cm guns appear.

Sal knew that the cannon couldn't be safely fired before the ship cleared for action; the gun probably

wasn't even loaded. The Federation groundlings didn't know that, and the blobs of blood and ichor

floating about them had drained their morale anyway. As a mob, they broke and forced their way up the

tubes to the vessels that had brought them.

Tom Harrigan appeared in the hatchway, veiled in dissipating water vapor. His forehead was gashed and

the pry bar in his right fist was bloody. Nedderington paused beside the mate, fired a shotgun at the

backs of the fleeing Feds, and recoiled into the hold.

Sal crouched against the side of the dock, holding herself steady by expert, tiny motions. Brantling, still

wearing his pressure suit and helmet, stood in the cabin airlock with a rifle. He fired again, this time killing

a Rabbit about to reenter the featherboat. Panicked Feds pressed the corpse aboard with them.

Beck, unable to control his body's spinning, drifted close to Sal. She aimed the revolver at him and tried

to fire it. The trigger wouldn't move: the ill-maintained weapon was rusted solid. The Fed leader

screamed in terror. Sal grabbed Beck by the collar and used the revolver to clout him twice above the

ear. Beck's eyeballs rolled up in their sockets.

The lighter pulled away with a blast of its thruster. The dock jerked before main force broke the seal.

The lighter's hatch was open, and there were still people trying to board through it.

The dock's inner door closed. The last of the air in the tube puffed the bodies into hard vacuum, their

limbs flailing momentarily.

The featherboat separated also. The Fed pilots were terrified by the plasma cannon, whose blast at this

range could turn either vessel into a fireball more gaseous than solid. No one was in the featherboat's

access tube, but a uniformed human and two Molts were trapped in the dock as the valve closed,

"Sal, are you all right?" Tom Harrigan said. He launched himself to his captain's side across the

blood-spattered dock.

Sal straightened, using Beck's mass to control her motion. The Fed leader was coming around. The

other Fed survivors stared at Sal and the weapons in the hands of the Venerians joining her in the dock.

"Cooney, give me a hand with the captain!" Harrigan ordered, taking Sal's silence for proof she'd been

incapacitated. "Leave these other bastards here to see how well they breathe vacuum!"

"No!" Sal said. "Bring them aboard. And fast—I want to be out of this system in five minutes!"

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Harrigan took her arm anyway. He pushed off the wall of the dock, guiding her as if she was a landsman

who couldn't navigate in weightlessness. "I say leave them, Sal," he repeated. "They killed Josselyn, and

there's a couple more might not make it home."

"No, don't leave me!" Beck pleaded, trailing behind Sal like a heavy dufflebag. "I'm the Fiscal of

Lilymead, the President's representative. I'm an important man!"

They entered the hold. Obedient to Sal's orders, her crewmen had policed up all the Fed survivors and

were following with them. She thrust the revolver down the throat of her tunic and caught a stanchion.

"You lying bastard!" Harrigan snarled in Beck's face. "If you're Pleyal's representative, why didn't you

honor the safe conduct Pleyal gave us?"

Sal kicked forward, up the passageway and into the cabin. Josselyn floated in midair with his throat cut.

Bealzy was trying to stuff a loop of intestine back through the bullet wound in Kokalas' abdomen.

"We had orders from Montreal," Beck whimpered behind her. He patted the pocket of his uniform

blouse. Paper crackled. "I'm carrying them right here with me. We're to confiscate all Venerian vessels

which arrive, regardless of their safe conducts. President Pleyal needs them to help equip the fleet he's

gathering to end the Venus rebellion for once and fox all!"

"Rebellion?" Harrigan said, too amazed at the term for the impact of the whole statement to register.

"Why, we're not rebels, we're citizens of the Free State of Venus!"

Sal thrust the Fiscal of Lilymead into a net that still held a day's supply of rations for the crew.

"Stay here, don't move, and you'll live even though you don't deserve to," she ordered savagely. To

Harrigan she added, "And I mean it, Tom, I want him to stay alive all the way back. There's a lot of

people on Venus who need to hear his story!"

Sal strapped herself to the navigation console. While the hard-used electronics moaned to life, she

dabbed absently at the grit on her face.

The main hatch clanged shut. Crewmen called to one another as they seated the manual dogs and

completed the other familiar business of liftoff.

The holographic display settled to a creamy saffron, picked out by a few strobing points where a circuit

misfired. Very shortly the ready prompt would come up and Sal could initiate the first transit sequence.

She glanced at her hands. What she'd wiped from her face was bits of the skull of the Fed who'd been

holding her in the dock. The chips were tacky with a slime of fresh pink brains.

Sal managed to turn her head so that her sudden rush of vomit didn't cover the navigation keyboard.

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Contents

ISHTAR CITY, VENUS

August 10, Year 26

1642 hours, Venus time

The woman who entered the pantry didn't notice Stephen until she'd closed the door behind her and cut

off the burr of voices from the party in the function rooms down the hallway. When she saw the big man

in the corner holding a bottle of slash, liquor distilled from algae, her eyes widened in startlement. "You're

Stephen Gregg," she said.

Stephen looked at her without expression. "I'm not too drunk to remember my name," he said. His eyes

flicked from the woman to the bottle in his hand. The slash was vaguely gray in hue. "In fact I'm not drunk

at all, though that's not for lack of trying."

"Do you mind if I . . ." she said. She nodded toward the closed door. "I needed to get away from that.

They're all over me like lice, each one trying to get his drop of blood."

Stephen smiled faintly. He recognized the woman as Sarah Blythe, the captain who'd brought to Venus

notice of the treachery, the latest treachery, of the North American Federation. Identifying her was no

great trick. Though the gathering had a social gloss in a mild attempt to mislead President Pleyal's spies,

the attendees were principals and agents only; they'd left their consorts at home. Only a handful of the

several score persons present were women.

"I'm not the most social of people myself," Stephen said in smiling understatement. He found a glass on

the shelf beside him, started to pour, and paused. "Will you have a drink?" he asked. "I only brought

slash with me when I ran the servants out, I'm afraid."

"Slash is fine with me," she said. She wore a pale blue jacket and jumper over a ruffed blouse. The outfit

was in unobtrusive good taste. Though it was inexpensive by the standards of the guests in the function

rooms, Blythe didn't stand out the way a space captain in the midst of a gathering of magnates could be

expected to do. "Ah, I'm Sal Blythe. I apologize for the way I—greeted you."

She wasn't a beautiful woman, but she was interesting in appearance as well as personality. Gregg had

the impression that Blythe had started to reach for the bottle to drink from it straight, the way he'd been

doing. She took a healthy swig from the tumbler he handed her, grimaced, and said, "Paint thinner. But

you know, it was what I grew up with, and nothing else seems like a drink."

She looked at him appraisingly. Not the way a man would have done, because when strange men

looked at Stephen Gregg, there was always a touch of fear or challenge in their eyes. Very few people

could say honestly that they knew Stephen, but almost every adult on Venus knewof him. . . .

"I never thought I'd meet you," Blythe said, drinking more of her slash. "And Captain Ricimer's out there

as well." She grinned wryly and added, "I'd say that it was worth being attacked by the Feds, but then

there's the rest of the pack. They all want the Commission of Redress they expect I'll be issued for the

damage the Feds did me on Lilymead."

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