Free with K'Jax, Gregg thought. He was willing to grant that Molts were "human," whatever that meant. He hadn't seen anything to suggest they were saints, though; or that K'Jax would be considered a particularly benevolent leader of any race.
"I won't order you men to go to Umber City again with me," Ricimer went on fiercely. "I won't think the less of anyone who wants to stay. But I'm going across, and with the help of God I hope this time to succeed."
Stampfer dropped the second fruit pit on the floor. "I haven't come all this way to go home poor," he said.
Yeah/Sure/Count me in from the remainder of the crew.
Gregg said nothing. He was smiling slightly, and his eyes were light-years distant.
"Stephen?" Piet Ricimer said.
Gregg shook himself to wakefulness. "If the Earth Convoy's in, then so is Administrator Carstensen," he said in a trembling, gentle voice. "I'd like to meet him and discuss Biruta. For a time."
Coye, who hadn't been around Stephen Gregg as long as some of the others, swore softly and turned away from the expression on the young gentleman's face.
44
Umber
The tramcars were constructed of wire netting on light metal frames. Each car's weight and that of the Molt pushing it had to be subtracted from the potential payload.
Gregg eyed a car dubiously. "A motor wouldn't weigh as much as a, a person," he said. "If you've got tracks through the Mirror, then they'll guide the car whether or not there's somebody behind it pushing."
"Motors will not work in the Mirror," said the Molt leader. Her name was Ch'Kan.
"Electric motors?" Ricimer asked.
"Diesel, electric-even flywheels," Ch'Kan said. "None of them work in the Mirror."
She clicked her mandibles to indicate some emotion or other. "We work in the Mirror. Until we die."
The tracks ran from the warehouses to the lambent surface of the Mirror. The rails were solid and spiked deep into the surface of Umber for as far as the eye could follow them. Beyond the transition zone, the rails were laid with short gaps between ends. They weren't attached because there was no ground within the Mirror, merely a level which objects could not penetrate.
The Molts said that sometimes cars tilted off the rails. The slave pushing the vehicle could usually find his way to one end of the tramway or the other by following the tracks.
If he or she abandoned the load within the Mirror, the Federation supervisors whipped the creature to death for sabotage.
Ricimer clambered into a tramcar. It creaked under his weight.
"I'd better go in the first one," Gregg said. He climbed into a car in a siding beside his friend's. The main line split to serve both warehouses, and there were a dozen lay-bys on each branch to allow cars to pass and be sorted.
The Feds had left a dozen Molts on mirrorside for routine tasks. Most of the labor force had crossed with their masters to handle cargo for and from the Earth Convoy. Their heads rotated from one human officer to the other, waiting for clear directions. The Venerian crewmen watched in silence also.
"I'll lead, Stephen," Ricimer said with a touch of iron in his voice. The sun had set. Pole-mounted lights at the tramhead threw vertical shadows down across his face.
Gregg smiled and shook his head. "When you get a flashgun," he said, "and learn to use it the way I can use this one-"
He nodded his weapon's muzzle in the air. He handled the flashgun as easily as another man might have waved a pistol.
"Then you can lead. For now, we need as much firepower up front as we can get. And that's me, Piet-not so?"
Ricimer shrugged tightly. "Go ahead, then," he said.
The crewmen got into cars like those of their leaders. Stampfer's almost upset from a combination of his short legs and weight, but two Molts balanced the vehicle for him.
The Molt leader threw a switch lever, then stepped around behind Gregg's car and began to push it forward. He heard the wheels squeaking, a loud pulse at the end of each full turn. Gregg concentrated on that so completely that he barely started to tremble by the moment his face gleamed at him and the terrible cold turned his soul inside out.
Only the cold. Utterly the cold.
The car wheels clacked at the gaps between rails. If Gregg could have counted the jolts, he would have known the length of the trip. The tracks were no longer straight, though. They curved, and the rails were seconds clicking on a circular dial that would take him back to zero before starting again.
Only the cold.
The change was sudden and much sooner than Gregg expected. Time and space within the Mirror were not constants. However the temporal or spatial distance between realside and mirrorside was measured, it was shorter on Umber than had been the case on Benison.
The tramcar plunged Gregg into the sidereal universe. The shock was like a bath in magma. Floodlights overhead and the fireworks streaking the sky toward the center of Umber City merged with the patterns of frozen color which Gregg's optic nerves fired to his brain in the frozen emptiness.
Gregg gasped and threw himself sideways. The tramcar tipped over, as he intended. He wasn't sure he had enough motor control to climb out of the car normally.
He had to get clear of its confinement now.
Gregg hadn't been within a klick of the realside tramhead during the raid on Umber City, and Piet's fainting recollections of shots and chaos were of limited help for visualizing the place. Gregg hit the stone pavement, pointing his flashgun and trying to look in all directions at once.
The blockhouse was set three meters forward of the Mirror to provide space for the tracks to split and curve right and left of the building. Instead of individual switched sidings, the architect who laid out the tramway on realside used these two fifty-meter tails of trackway to store empties. At the moment, the lengths of track were nearly full of cars.
Rather than a wall, the rear face of the blockhouse was protected by a grille that was now rolled up to the roofline. The building's interior was stacked with rough wooden cases whose volume ranged from a quarter cubic meter down to half that size. There was a narrow passageway to the open door in the front wall, but Gregg couldn't tell if the loopholes to either side were blocked.
Cases of more irregular size were stacked to either side of the blockhouse. There were others between it and the bollards which formed a deadline separating the stored valuables and Umber City. Twenty or more Molts, singly or in pairs, poised to lift containers.
The diesel trucks that would normally have transported cargo to the landing field were burnt skeletons in front of the bollards. They'd been dragged out of the immediate way but not removed from where the defenders' own fire had destroyed them during the previous raid.
A human cradling a double-barreled shotgun oversaw the gang of Molt porters. Another human stood beside the back corner of the blockhouse, watching aliens work. A radio hung from the second man's belt. His weapon, a brightly decorated rifle, leaned against the wall beside him.
The shock of hitting the ground broke Gregg's mind free of the frozen constraints that bound it until that moment. The clatter as his tram toppled drew the eyes of Molts and human officials together. One of Gregg's trouser legs was caught in the wire mesh.
"Don't move!" he shouted. The short trip through the Mirror hadn't numbed him, but it sharpened his voice to an edge of hysteria more disquieting than the fat muzzle of his laser.
The man by the blockhouse stiffened as though he'd been given a jolt of electricity. His hip bumped the ornate rifle and knocked it down. As it rattled away from him, he threw both hands in front of his face and screamed, "Lord Jesus Christ preserve me!"