Stephen shrugged. "Maybe they don't have commo," he said. "The Feds'd leave the air tanks off to save money if they could get away with it."
"Southerns, sir," Lightbody said unexpectedly.
Stephen and I looked at him; Piet grinned and continued to watch the strange vessel. "This one's Southern Cross construction, sir," Lightbody amplified. "Not Fed. The pairs of thrusters are too far apart for Feds."
The vessel's hatch clanged twice as those inside jerked it sideways by hand rather than hydraulic pressure. Six figures got out. They jumped as far as they could to clear the patch of thruster-heated ground.
One of the newcomers was a woman; common enough for a Terran crew, though I heard Lightbody growl. None of the strangers was armed, and their assorted clothing was entirely civilian.
Piet got up and strode to meet them.
"Guide a little left, Piet," Stephen said as he trotted to Piet's right side. Stephen's left index finger indicated a 30° angle. I moved over to give Piet room but he ignored the direction.
"Piet," Stephen said calmly, "Stampfer will have that plasma cannon trained on the open hatchway. I trust Stampfer, but I don't much trust junk he crabbed out of a Federation freighter. I'd really rather you didn't take the chance of something unlikely happening."
From the tone of Stephen's voice, he could have been asking where to place a piece of furniture.
Piet clicked his tongue, but he bore to the left as directed. "Where would you be without me to fuss over, Stephen?" he murmured.
Possible answers to that falsely light question rang through my head like hammerblows.
"Sirs?" the leader of the newcomers asked. "Are you from the North American Federation?"
He spoke Trade English with a distinct Southern accent. A good dozen additional people, including a few more women, climbed from the vessel behind him. They moved with greater circumspection than the initial party.
The ten of us spread slightly as we bore down on the strangers. We weren't being deliberately threatening, but a group of grim, armed men must have looked as dangerous as an avalanche.
"We are not," Piet said in a proud, ringing voice. "We are citizens of the Free State of Venus."
"Oh, thank God!" cried the woman at the leader's side. She knelt and kissed a crucifix folded in both her hands.
I grabbed Lightbody by the front collar and jerked him around to face me. "No!" I shouted.
I held the spacer till the light eased back into his eyes and he began to breathe normally again. "Sorry, sir," he muttered, bobbing his head in contrition.
Everyone was staring at us. I flushed and lowered the cutting bar in my right hand. Lightbody hadn't done anything overt.
I think Piet understood. I know Stephen did, because he gave me a slow smile and said, "If you ever change sides, friend, I'm not going to let you get in arm's length alive. Hey?"
In context, that was high praise.
The newcomer's leader embraced Piet. "Sir," he said, "I am Nicolas Rodrigo and these are my people, twenty of us."
I eyed the group quickly. If there were only twenty, then they were all in plain sight by now. There were no Molts in the group, surprisingly.
"Until forty days ago, we maintained the colony on Santos," Rodrigo said. "Then two Federation warships, the Yellowknife and Keys to the Kingdom, arrived under a beast named Prothero. He-"
The woman had risen again. At Prothero's name, she spat. Our eyes meshed, then slid sideways. Quite an attractive little thing in a plump, dark-haired fashion. Young; 18 or 20 at the outside, as compared with Rodrigo's 35 or so.
"— told us that the Southern Cross had been placed under President Pleyal's protection, and that he was taking control of Santos on behalf of the Federation. He-"
"What do you have aboard your ship?" Stephen interjected abruptly.
"What?" Rodrigo said. "Nothing, only food. Ah-we took back the Hercules, this ship, on Corpus Christi. There was confusion when a freighter crashed into the Yellowknife."
Kiley chuckled. "I wonder if them poor bastards'll ever figure out quite what happened," he said.
"Come along back to our ships, then," Piet said. "We'll be more comfortable there, and I don't want my men I've left there to be concerned."
The bosun's party was moving toward us, slowed by their weight of weapons and, for a few of them, armor. "Mister Dole?" Piet called. "Set five of your men to secure the ship, if you will."
Stampfer must have realized the situation was peaceful; he tilted the muzzle of the light cannon up like an exclamation point above the hasty barricade of crates across the hold of 17 Abraxis. Maybe the gesture helped the others relax.
Me, I was still trembling in reaction to a few minutes before, when I stopped Lightbody from blowing a pretty woman's head off.
"Prothero put his own men on Santos as overseers," Rodrigo explained, drinking a thimble glass of slash cut three to one with water. "The plantations are worked by Molts, of course. We don't-we didn't export, we just supplied convoys in the Back Worlds trade stopping over."
The Southerns mixed freely with the Oriflamme's crew. A joint party had gone back to the Hercules, for supplies including Santos wine. The Federation prisoners watched sullenly as they resumed hauling heavy thruster nozzles.
Piet, Stephen, Lacaille, and I sat with the Southern leaders at a trestle table on the shaded side of the gully. Rodrigo's wife, Carmen, was at his side across the table, occasionally eyeing me as she raised the glass to her lips. She wasn't actually drinking.
"I know Prothero," Lacaille said. "I don't know anybody who likes or trusts him, but he's. . able enough. In his way."
The Southerns watched the Fed castaway sidelong, uncertain about his status. I guess we all were uncertain, Lacaille himself included.
"The Hercules was on Santos when the Federation ships arrived," Rodrigo continued. "Captain Cinpeda commanded."
A short, dark Southern nodded. He'd drunk his slash neat. His eyes never left the carafe I'd deliberately slid out of his reach.
"Prothero filled the Hercules with food and put his own crew aboard," Rodrigo said. "It was no more than piracy. But how could we fight with no warships of our own?"
Stephen's lips smiled; his eyes did not. Ships don't fight: men do. And Rodrigo wasn't that sort of man.
"Prothero took us with him on the Yellowknife" Rodrigo said. "The Keys to the Kingdom was his flagship, but she needed repairs. He left her on Santos while he went ahead to Riel."
"She's a great, cranky tub of eight hundred tonnes, the Keys," Lacaille said. "I'm not surprised she broke down. Her water pumps again?"
Cinpeda nodded to Lacaille with respect.
"They can't be depopulating all the Southern colonies," I said. "Can they?"
"I think," Carmen Rodrigo said with her eyes lowered, "that the decision was Commander Prothero's. I believe his intentions toward me were. . not proper. Though he already has a mistress!"
"Prothero's always operated as though the Middle Ways were his own kingdom," Lacaille said. "I doubt he was acting completely on orders."
"We took our chance when the emergency siren sounded," Rodrigo said. "We thought it was a Chay raid. The prize crew had left the Hercules, so we went aboard and lifted as soon as the computer gave us a course."
"To home," Carmen said. "We're going back to Rio. Better Pleyal a continent away than Prothero in the next cabin."
There was an edge in her tone that I thought I understood. Carmen Rodrigo might or might not be a virtuous wife; I had my doubts. But she certainly intended to make any decisions of that sort on her own.