The line reached the buildings. The Molts in the warehouse doorway had moved only their heads to track the Venerians. Ricimer turned and gestured toward Coye, running to catch up with them. "Coye!" he called, aided by the breeze. "Watch that pair!"
Gregg stepped smoothly around the corner of the barracks, the nearer of the two buildings on his end, and presented his laser. The doors in the middle of both buildings were closed tightly against the windblown sand. There were no windows on this side either.
Nothing to see, and no one to impress by pomp.
"Who is in charge here?" Ricimer called to the Molts at the tramhead.
None of them reacted until Guillermo chittered something in his own speech. One of the Molts said in English, "Our supervisors have gone across the Mirror for the celebration. Who are you?"
Guillermo continued to talk in quick, clattering vocables. The local Molts moved, slight shifts of position that relieved the Venerians' tension at the abnormal stillness of a moment before. Ricimer approached the group. His men hung back by a step or a half-step each, so that the line of humans became a shallow vee. None of the aliens was armed or appeared hostile.
Guillermo turned to Ricimer and explained, "The Earth Convoy has arrived on the realside. There will be a party in Umber City. The humans from here have crossed the Mirror to join it."
"Most of the humans," said the Molt who had spoken before. He wore a sash of office, gray from a distance but grease-smeared white when Gregg saw it closer. "Under-clerk Elkinghorn is-there she is."
The Molt pointed. Gregg was already turning. The barracks door had opened. The woman who'd started toward the tramhead had failed to latch it properly behind her: as Gregg watched, the door blew open again, then slammed with a bang deadened by the adverse wind.
"Hey!" she called. She wore uniform trousers and tunic, but she had on house slippers rather than boots. "Hey! Who are you?"
"Hold it right where you are!" Dole shouted as he aimed his rifle.
"Don't!" Piet Ricimer cried. "Don't shoot!"
The woman turned and ran back toward the door from which she'd come. A bottle flew out of the pocket of her tunic and broke on the ground. It was half full of amber liquor.
Elkinghorn was ten meters away. Gregg aimed. He was coldly furious with himself for not having continued to watch the residence buildings.
"Stephen!" Ricimer called. "Don't shoot her!"
Elkinghorn threw open the door. Gregg fired past her head, into the partition wall opposite.
Elkinghorn flung herself backward, onto the ground. The laser bolt converted paint and insulation to blazing gas. It blew the door shut and bulged the sides of the barracks.
"I think," said Gregg as he clicked a fresh battery into his flashgun, "that she'll be in a mood to answer our questions now."
43
Umber
"Not a thing!" Jeude snarled as he stamped into the secretary's residence. "Not a damned thing."
"There's food," said Stampfer, closing the outer door behind himself and his partner in searching the nearer warehouse. The gunner sucked on a hard-cored fruit so lush that juice dripped into his beard. With his free hand, he pulled another fruit from his bulging pocket. He offered it to Ricimer, Gregg, and the Fed captive promiscuously. "Want one?"
Gregg shook his head at Stampfer and said to Jeude, "Maybe Dole and Coye had better luck."
"It's not up to date," Elkinghorn said miserably from the outpost's central computer. "I know it shows twelve cases of Class A chips here, but as God is my witness, they've all been trucked across. All of them."
She squeezed her forehead with her right hand, then resumed advancing the manifest with the light pen in her left, master, hand. She was trembling badly.
Ricimer had refused to give the prisoner more liquor. She'd been drinking herself comatose in irritation at being left behind, "in charge", while the rest of the outpost's complement crossed to Umber City for the celebration. The laser bolt had shocked her sober, but she wasn't happy about the fact.
"That other warehouse, Dole's looking, but it's not going to do a bit of good," Jeude replied. "Supplies, machinery-trade goods for other colonies on the mirrorside, that's all there is."
Stampfer dropped his pit on the coarse rug. He began eating the fruit in his left hand.
Lightbody came in the door, carrying his cutting bar in his hand. "I got through the sidewall of the barracks," he announced, "but it wasn't any good. You torched her right and proper, sir."
He nodded to Gregg. "Fully involved. Zip, I cut through the wall, and boom, the roof lifts off because air got to the inside that had about smothered itself out."
Gregg shrugged sheepishly. "I thought she might have a gun inside," he said.
"There's no guns here," the prisoner said. "There's nothing but Christ-bitten desert here, so what's to shoot?"
Anger raised her blood pressure. She dropped the light pen and pressed both hands to her temples. "Oh, God, I need a drink so bad," she groaned.
Ricimer stood. "Tie her," he said to Lightbody. At the tramhead, the Venerians had found a coil of rope woven somewhere on mirrorside. The Molt laborers said they used it to bind bulky loads onto the cars. "And give her a drink, if there is one."
Jeude shrugged and took a bottle out of his sabretache.
The door opened and banged closed again. Dole and Coye came into the office with a drift of sand despite the near airlock.
"It's all outgoing stuff, sir," the bosun said, echoing Jeude of a moment before. "There's not a chip in the settlement."
He noticed the office console and pointed his breechloader at it. "Besides whatever's in that unit, I guess."
Ricimer looked at his men. Greg winced mentally to see his friend's haggard face. While the rest of them simply tried not to scream during the slow suffocation of the Umber's approach, Piet brought the jerry-built vessel down softly by the standards of a manual landing on a proper ship.
"We've gotten here too late to find the chips I'd hoped," he said quietly. "Over the past week, the stockpile was taken across the Mirror in anticipation of the Earth Convoy's arrival."
He licked his lips, chapped by sand blown on the dry wind. "The chips haven't vanished. With the celebration going on, officials of Umber City and the convoy won't have had time to complete loading the ships. They may not even have started yet."
Ricimer's voice grew louder, stronger. Gregg grinned coldly to see gray tension vanish from his friend's face and his eyes brighten again.
"To get the chips, we would have to cross the Mirror again," he said. "To return to Umber City. You all know the risks. You all know-"
His voice would have filled a room of ten times the volume of this office.
"— that I failed before, that many of our f-friends and loved ones were killed because of my miscalculation. The risks are even greater now, because the convoy and all its personnel will be in Umber City."
"Hey, it's not that dangerous," Jeude protested. "The Feds won't be expecting us this direction, right?"
Ricimer's head rotated like a lathe turret. "They didn't expect us before," he said harshly to Jeude. "That didn't prevent them from reacting effectively."
He scanned his assembled men. "Guillermo tells me the labor force here will help us, run the trams the way they do for their masters. He's organizing that now. In exchange, we will take every slave off this planet. We can't return them to their home planets, but they'll be able to live free on Benison with K'Jax."
"Gonna be tight. ." Dole muttered. Catching himself, he added quickly, "Not that we're not used to it. No problem."