"Boarders away," Piet Ricimer said.
"Boarders away!" Gregg echoed as he and Dole threw the undogging levers that opened the featherboat's main hatch.
Dole stepped onto the coaming and checked his lifeline. The Federation ship hung above them, a section of its hull framed by the Peaches' hatch. He flexed his knees slightly and jumped.
Gregg climbed onto the hull. He couldn't see Rondelet or even the yellow sun the planet orbited. Perhaps they were below the featherboat. The metal skin of the Federation vessel was a shimmer of highlights, not a shape. He'd never been outside a ship in vacuum before.
"I'm anchored, sir," Dole's voice called. Gregg couldn't see the crewman. "Hold my line and come on."
Gregg hooked his right arm, his flashgun arm, across the end of Dole's lifeline. The multistrand fiber was white where the featherboat's internal lighting touched it. A few meters beyond the vessel, it vanished in darkness.
"I'm coming," said Stephen Gregg. He pushed off, too hard. His mouth was open. His limbs held their initial grotesque posture as though he were a dancer painted on the wall of a tomb.
The pull of the line in the crook of Gregg's arm made him turn a lazy pinwheel. The Fed ship rotated away. He saw the featherboat beneath him as a blur of grays and lightlessness.
The brilliant star beyond was Rondelet's sun. The few transits the Feds made before the Peaches brought them to had not taken the vessels beyond the local solar system.
Gregg hit, feet down by accident. His legs flexed to take the shock. "Good job, sir!" Dole cried as he steadied Gregg, attributing to skill what luck had achieved.
The boots of the hard suit had both electromagnets and adhesive grippers, staged to permit the same movements as gravity would. The suction system held here, as it would have done on a ceramic hull. The Fed ship was made of nonferrous alloys, probably aluminum. A plasma bolt would have made half the hull blaze like a torch. No wonder the crew had shut down as soon as they were aware they were under threat.
"Open them up, Dole," Jeude called. "They don't have suits, just an escape bubble, so they say they can't work the controls."
Jeude must have stuck his head out of the featherboat's hatch in order to use the IR intercom. Gregg thought he could see a vague movement against the straight lines of the coaming when he looked back, but that might have been imagination. He felt very much alone.
Large ships were normally fitted with airlocks for operations in vacuum. Small vessels didn't have space for them. In the case of this flimsy craft, cost had probably been a factor as well.
Dole twisted the wheel in the center of the hatch. It was mechanical rather than electronic. He had to spin it three full circuits before an icy twinkle of air puffed over him, shifting the hatch on its hinges at the same time.
As soon as the hatch had opened sufficiently for his armored form, Stephen Gregg pulled himself into the captured vessel behind his flashgun. He was unutterably glad to have a job he could do.
The three Fed crewmen cowered within the milky fabric of an escape bubble. Such translucent envelopes provided a modicum of protection at very little cost in terms of money or internal space. Inflated, they could keep one or two-three was stretching it, literally-persons alive so long as the air supply and CO2 scrubbers held out.
One of the two humans in the bubble was a Rabbit. The remaining crewman was a Molt. Alone of the three, the Molt didn't flinch when the laser's fat muzzle prodded toward the bubble.
Dole scrambled in behind Gregg. "The captain's coming," he said. "Leave the hatch open."
The speaker on the vessel's control panel was useless without air to carry the sounds to the boarding party. Piet must have used radio or intercom to alert the crewman while he was still out on the hull.
The cabin of the captured ship was small. It was partitioned off from the cargo spaces with no direct internal communication. The Venerian featherboat was cramped and simple, but this ship had the crudity of a concrete slab.
A third armored figure slid through the hatchway, carrying a rough coil over his shoulder: Dole's lifeline, which Ricimer had unhooked from the Peaches before he launched himself toward the captive. Dole reached out and drew the hatch closed.
When the dogs were seated but the air system had only begun repressurizing the cabin, Piet Ricimer opened his visor. "Gentlemen," he announced in a voice made tinny by the rarefied atmosphere, "when you've answered my questions, I'll set you down on the surface of Rondelet where your friends can rescue you. But you will answer my questions."
Another man would have added a curse or a threat, Gregg thought. Piet Ricimer did neither.
Though with the flashgun aimed at the captives from point-blank range, threatening words wouldn't have added a lot.
33
Sunrise
"The meeting's in ten minutes," said Piet Ricimer, wobbling as a long gust typical of Sunrise stuttered to a lull. Though the two men were within arm's length of one another, he used the intercom in order to be heard. "Time we were getting back."
"You're in charge," Gregg said. There were no real hills in this landscape. He'd found a hummock of harder rock to sit down on. There was enough rise for his heels to grip and steady his torso against the omnipresent wind. "The meeting won't start until you get there."
A three-meter rivulet of light rippled toward them across the rocks and thin snow. The creature was a transparent red like that of a pomegranate cell. Twice its length from the humans, it dived like an otter into the rock and vanished.
Gregg's trigger finger relaxed slightly. He leaned on his left hand to look behind him, but there was no threat in that direction either.
The Peaches, Dalriada, and the prize Ricimer had named the Halys were a few hundred meters away. The ships had already gathered drifts in the lee of the prevailing winds. Temporary outbuildings housed the crusher and kiln with which the crews applied hull patches, though neither Venerian vessel was in serious need of refit.
On a less hostile world, men would have built huts for themselves as well. On Sunrise, they slept in the ships.
"What do you think, Stephen?" Ricimer asked. He faced out, toward a horizon as empty as the plain on which he stood. Occasionally a tremble of light marked another of the planet's indigenous life forms.
Gregg shrugged within his hard suit. "You do the thinking, Piet," he said. "I'll back you up."
Ricimer turned abruptly. He staggered before he came to terms with the wind from this attitude. "Don't pretend to be stupid!" he said. "If you think I'm making a mistake, tell me!"
"I'm not stupid, Piet," Gregg said. He was glad he was seated. Contact with the ground calmed him against the atmosphere's volatility. "I don't care. About where we go, about how we hit the Feds. You'll decide, and I'll help you execute whatever you do decide."
A creature of light so richly azure that it was almost material quivered across the snow between the two men and vanished again. Gregg restrained himself from an urge to prod the rippling form with his boot toe.
Ricimer laughed wryly. "So it's up to me and God, is it, Stephen?" He clasped his arms closer to his armored torso. "I hope God is with me. I pray He is."
Gregg said nothing. He had been raised to believe in God and God's will, though without the particular emphasis his friend had received. Now-
He supposed he still believed in them. But he couldn't believe that the smoking bodies Stephen Gregg had left in his wake were any part of the will of God.