A bowser circled on the quay, heading back to the water point. Its huge tank had filled the Porcelain with reaction mass. I moved closer to the vessels to avoid the big ground vehicle. I walked on.
The Kinsolving was a sharp-looking vessel of 80 tonnes. A combination of sailors and ground crew were loading sections of three knocked-down featherboats into her central bay. Though equipped with star drive, a 15-tonne featherboat's cramped quarters made it a hellish prison on a long voyage. The little vessels were ideal for short-range exploration from a central base, and they were far handier in an atmosphere than ships of greater size.
What would it be like to stand on a world other than Venus? The open volume of the Betaport storage dock made me uncomfortable. What would it be like to walk under an open sky?
Why in God's name was I thinking of doing this?
The last of the expedition's four vessels was the 80-tonne Mizpah, also in a transport cradle. She was much older than the Porcelain and the Kinsolving. Clearly-even to a layman like me-the Mizpah wasn't in peak condition.
The Mizpah's main lock and boarding ramp amidships couldn't be used because of the transport cradle, but her personnel hatch forward stood open. On the hatch's inner surface, safe from reentry friction and corrosive atmospheres, were the painted blazons of her co-owners: the pearl roundel of Governor Halys, and the bright orange banderol-the oriflamme-of Councilor Frederic Duneen.
The Mizpah wasn't an impressive ship in many ways, but she brought with her the overt support of the two most important investors on the planet. If nothing else, the Mizpah's participation meant the survivors wouldn't be hanged as pirates when they returned to Venus.
If anyone survived. When I eavesdropped on the private discussion between Ricimer and Gregg, I'd heard enough to frighten off anyone sane.
Thomas Hawtry-Factor Hawtry of Hawtry-stepped from the Mizpah's personnel hatch. Two generations before, Hawtry had been a name to reckon with. Thomas, active and ambitious to a fault, had mortgaged what remained of the estate in an attempt to recoup his family's influence by attaching himself to the great of the present day.
He was a man I wanted to meet as little as I did any human being on Venus.
Hawtry was large and floridly handsome, dressed now in a tunic of electric blue with silver lame trousers and calf-high boots to match the tunic. On his collar was a tiny oriflamme to indicate his membership in Councilor Duneen's household.
Hawtry's belt and holster were plated. The pistol was for show, but I didn't doubt that it was functional nonetheless.
"Moore!" Hawtry cried, framed by the hatch coaming two paces away. Hawtry's face was blank for an instant as the brain worked behind it. The Factor of Hawtry was a thorough politician; though not, in my opinion, subtle enough to be a very effective one.
"Jeremy!" Hawtry decided aloud, reforming his visage in a smile. "Say, I haven't had an opportunity to thank you for the way you covered me in the little awkwardness with Lady Melinda."
He stepped close and punched me playfully on the shoulder, a pair of ladies' men sharing a risque memory. "Could have been ve-ry difficult for me. Say, I told my steward to pass you a little something to take the sting out. Did he. .?"
Lady Melinda was an attractive widow of 29 who lived with her brother-Councilor Duneen. Hawtry'd thought to use me as his go-between in the lady's seduction. I, on the other hand-
I would never have claimed I was perfect, but I liked women too much to lure one into the clutches of Thomas Hawtry. And as it turned out, I liked the Lady Melinda a great deal more than was sensible for a destitute member of the lesser gentry.
"Regrettably, I didn't hear from your steward, Thom," I said. No point in missing a target of opportunity. "And you know, I'm feeling a bit of a pinch right now. If-"
Not much of a target. "Aren't we all, Jeremy, aren't we all!" Hawtry boomed. "After I bring my expedition back, though, all my friends will live like kings! Say, you know about the so-called 'asteroids expedition,' don't you?"
He waved an arm toward the docked ships. A hydraulic pump began to squeal as it shifted the Absalom 231 in its cradle.
"Captain Ricimer's. ." I said, hiding my puzzlement.
"And mine," said Hawtry, tapping himself on the breast significantly. "I'm co-leader, though we're keeping it quiet for the time being. A very political matter, someone of my stature in charge of a voyage like this."
Hawtry linked his arm familiarly with mine and began pacing back along the line of expedition vessels. His friendliness wasn't sincere. In the ten months I knew Hawtry intimately in the Duneen household, the man had never been sincere about anything except his ambition and his self-love.
But neither did Hawtry seem to be dissembling the hatred I'd expected. Irritated at his go-between's lack of progress and very drunk, Hawtry had forced the Lady Melinda's door on a night when her brother was out of the house. The racket brought the servants to the scene in numbers.
I, the gentleman who was sharing the lady's bed that night, escaped in the confusion-but my presence hadn't gone unremarked. The greater scandal saved Hawtry from the consequences of his brutal folly, but I scarcely expected the fellow to feel grateful. Apparently Hawtry's embarrassment was so great that he'd recast the incident completely in his own mind.
"I'm going to take the war to the Federation," Hawtry said, speaking loudly to be heard over the noise in the storage dock. He accompanied the words with broad gestures of his free hand. "And it is a war, you know. Nothing less than that!"
A dozen common sailors examined the Porcelain's hull and thruster nozzles, shouting comments to one another. The men weren't on duty; several of them carried liquor bottles in pockets of their loose garments. They might simply be spectators. Ricimer's flagship was an unusual vessel, and the expedition had been the only subject of conversation in Betaport for a standard month.
"Asteroids!" Hawtry snorted. "The Feds bring their microchips and pre-Collapse artifacts into the system in powerful convoys, Jeremy. . but I'm going to hit them where they aren't prepared for it. They don't defend the ports on the other side of the Mirror where the wealth is gathered. I'll go through the Breach and take them unawares!"
Hawtry wasn't drunk, and he didn't have a hidden reason to blurt this secret plan. Because I was a gentleman of sorts and an acquaintance, I was someone for Hawtry to brag to; it was as simple as that.
Of course, the proposal was so unlikely that I would have discounted it completely if I hadn't heard Ricimer and Gregg discussing the same thing.
"I didn't think it was practical to transit the Breach," I said truthfully. "Landolph got through with only one ship of seven, and nobody has succeeded again in the past eighty years. It's simpler to voyage the long way, even though that's a year and a half either way."
Interstellar travel involved slipping from the sidereal universe into other bubbles of sponge space where the constants for matter and energy differed. Because a vessel which crossed a dimensional membrane retained its relative motion, acceleration under varied constants translated into great changes in speed and distance when the vessel returned to the human universe.
No other bubble universe was habitable or even contained matter as humans understood the term. The sidereal universe itself had partially mitosed during the process of creation, however, and it was along that boundary-the Mirror-that the most valuable pre-Collapse remains were to be found.