A plasma motor, its nozzle sealed by the 20 centimeters of tough plating rammed into it, became a fusion bomb. The flash seemed to transfuse solid metal. Remnants of the Holy Office, half the stern to one side and fragments that had been part of the bow to the other, blew back in a ravening white glare. The four upper decks of the exploding freighter lifted as a piece, flattening as they rose.
A munitions explosion, slighter than the first but cataclysmic nonetheless, gushed red flame from the center of the inferno. The top of the vessel flipped sideways. It struck the ground and carved a trench twenty meters deep through the concrete, then sheared into the remaining freighter.
The third vessel was pinned between the anvil of the berm and the upper half of the 1,200-tonner, a hammer more massive than the Holy Office had been when complete. Steam and fire engulfed the site. Slabs shook from the berm hundreds of meters away, and a pall of dust lifted from the surface of the port.
No skill could have planned a result so destructive. "Maybe God does fight for Venus," Sal whispered, though her mind couldn't find much of God in what she had just watched. She'd spent her life carrying cargoes, and shipwreck was the greatest disaster she could imagine.
Below Sal, two men in hard suits staggered toward the stairway. The gilded armor, now scoured and defaced by the plasma bath, was Piet Ricimer's.
Piet kept his right gauntlet against the berm to guide him where he didn't trust his eyes. His left hand gripped the right gauntlet of the bigger man, who held what looked like a bundle of smoking fabric.
Stephen was still alive, but at this moment Sal had only intellect left to be glad of the fact. The earthshaking thumps of further destruction blurred even that.
"That'll teach them not to mess with Venus, won't it, Mister Harrigan?" Brantling crowed. "We fed them the sharp end this time!"
"Aye, by God we did," Tom Harrigan said in guttural triumph. "We've singed President Pleyal's beard, we have!"
Across the port, three ships that could have supplied a large colony for a year blazed in devouring glory.
ISHTAR CITY, VENUS
June 6, Year 27
0331 hours, Venus time
Sal opened the door with exaggerated care, stepped into the front room of the apartment she shared with her father, and closed the door on her fingers. "Christ's bleeding wounds!" she shouted before she remembered she was trying not to disturb Marcus.
Marcus Blythe lurched upright on the divan where he'd been dozing. "Sal?" he called. He turned up the table lamp from a vague glow to full brightness.
"Sorry, Dad," Sal said. "I didn't mean to. ."
She shook her head in puzzlement, trying to remember what it was she'd meant to say. "Look, why don't you go off to bed now, Dad?"
"Here, you sit down," Marcus said. He tossed off the sheet covering him, then rose from the divan by shifting his torso forward and catching himself with his cane before he fell back. "I'll scramble some eggs for you. You always liked my eggs, didn't you, Sallie?"
"Dad, I'm not. ." Sal muttered. Maybe I'm hungry after all. Her legs weren't working right, certainly. She flopped into the straight-backed chair by the little table. She teetered for a moment but didn't fall over.
"Some food will be good, Sallie," Marcus said as he shuffled into the kitchenette adjacent to the front room. "Don't I know it. I've had my nights out partying too, you know."
Sal moved the lamp, certain that Marcus' bottle was on the other side of it. There was no bottle on the table. She frowned and bent over to see if the liquor was on the floor beside the divan. There wouldn't be much left, of course, but. .
No bottle on the floor either.
"Ferlinghetti at the Fiddler's Green was saying the Southern ship your squadron captured was as rich a prize as any Captain Ricimer ever brought back," Marcus said. Eggs spattered on hot grease.
"Richer than that," Sal said absently. "Where's your bottle, Dad?"
They'd stumbled into the Mae do Deus on Callisto, where the crew had attempted to conceal their 2,000-tonne monster when they heard Piet Ricimer was out with a squadron. The vessel had been one of the largest merchantmen of the Southern Cross before President Pleyal's coup de main six years before absorbed what had been a separate nation into the North American Federation.
"Ah, you know, Sallie dearest, I'm not sure there is a bottle in the apartment," her father said in brittle cheeriness. "I'll have to pick something up, won't I?"
"What d'ye mean, there's no bottle?" Sal shouted. She stood halfway up, lost her balance, and sat back down with a crash that jolted her spine all the way to the base of her skull.
Marcus' fork clinked busily against the pan, stirring in the spices and pepper sauce. "Fullerenes from the Mirrorside," he said as if he hadn't heard his daughter. "Worth more than microchips are, Ferlinghetti says."
"You bet," Sal agreed morosely. "A captain's share of what we took from the Mae. . I'm a rich girl, Daddy. Your little Sal is rich, rich, rich."
She reached into the right-hand pocket of her loose tunic and brought out a liter bottle of amber Terran whiskey. It was nearly full. She couldn't remember how it had gotten there.
"Sing praises to our God and king. ." Sal warbled, trying to open the bottle. After three failures, she squinted carefully and saw that the bottle had a screw cap instead of the plug stopper she was used to.
Marcus lifted the pan and scraped eggs onto a serving plate. "Ah, Sal?" he said nervously. "I thought that tonight you might, you know, have something to eat and go to bed. Instead of stay-"
"Who the hell are you to think anything, you damned old drunk?" Sal shouted. She stood up. The chair overset in one direction and the table in another. "I'll go to sleep when I'm damned-"
The lamp with a bubble-thin shade the color of a monarch butterfly's wing was Venerian ceramic. It hit the floor and bounced, chiming in several keys but undamaged. The glass bottle from Earth shattered in a spray of liquor.
"Oh, the bastards," Sal said. Her body swayed. "Oh, the dirty bastards."
Marcus scuffled across the room and embraced her. "Let's have a little something to eat, Sallie my love," he said. "You like my eggs, don't you, dear?"
"It'd be all right if I'd seen his face before I shot him," Sal whispered as she hugged her father.
"Sallie?" Marcus said.
"On Arles," she said, thinking she was explaining. "Every night he comes to me and he's a different face. I could take one, that'd be, that'd be. . But he's different every night, and then mush. Red mush, dad. One after another and then they die."
"Oh, Sallie," Marcus said. "Oh, my little baby girl."
Sal shuddered and drew herself upright. "That's all right, Dad," she said. "I appreciate the trouble you took, but I'm going out for a bit, I think. I'll be back, you know, later."
"Sal, please don't go out again tonight," Marcus pleaded.
Captain Sarah Blythe, heroine of Venus' struggle against Federation tyranny, closed the door behind her. The night clerk at the baths usually had a bottle under his counter.
BETAPORT, VENUS
July 1, Year 27
1412 hours, Venus time
"What do you think of them, Gregg?" said Alexi Mostert, gesturing as he shouted over the echoing racket of the New Dock. "All three of them as handy as the Wrath, and their scantlings just as sturdy."
"We've spread the nozzle clusters," Siddons Mostert added from Stephen's other side. "Another ten centimeters between adjacent thrusters to improve hover performance."