The Reaches Read Online Free PDF Page A

more of the trio of multijointed fingers that formed a normal "hand."
    "I'm my uncle's agent," Gregg said at last. "And I can tell you, nothing bothers my Uncle Ben if there's profit in it. Which there certainly is here."
    Ricimer nodded. "I'm second cousin to the Mosterts," he said.
    One of the crewmen he'd dragooned showed enough initiative to run ahead and find the hatch mechanism of the nearer ship. It sighed open.
    "Really, now," Ricimer added with a grin to his companion. "Though what I said about a factorial family, there's evidence."
    Gregg laughed.
    "All three ships are Alexi Mostert's," Ricimer continued. "In the past, my cousin's made the voyage himself, though he sent Choransky out in charge this time. I'm sure this is how Alexi conducted the business too."
    They'd reached the Southern Cross vessel. It weighed about 50 tonnes and was metal-hulled, unlike the ships of the Venerian argosy. Metals were cheap and readily available in the asteroids of every planetary system; but ceramic hulls were preferable for vessels which had to traverse the hellish atmosphere of Venus. Besides, the surface of the second planet was metal-poor.
    Survival after the Collapse had raised ceramic technology to a level higher than had been dreamed of while Venus was part of a functioning intergalactic economy. After a thousand years of refinement, Venerians sneered at the notion metals could ever equal ceramics—though the taunt "glass-boat sailor!" had started fights in many spaceports since Venus returned to space.
    "Some of you find the water intakes and figure out how to deploy them," Ricimer ordered as he sat at the control console.
    The interior of the vessel stank with a variety of odors, some of them simply those of a large mass of metal to noses unfamiliar with it. The control cabin could be sealed. The rest of the ship was a single open hold.
    "What do you think of what we're doing?" Ricimer said to Gregg.
    Then, before the landsman could reply, he added in a crisp voice, "All hands watch yourselves. I'm going to light the thrusters."
    "I think . . ." Gregg murmured as Ricimer engaged the vessel's AI, "that it's bad for business, my friend."
     

6
Near Virginia
    Choransky and Bivens muttered, their heads close above a CRT packed with data. The navigator grimaced but nodded. Choransky reached for a switch.
    Ricimer turned from where he stood in the midst of the forward attitude-control boards he now supervised. "All right, gentlemen," he said. "We're about to transit again."
    He winked at Gregg.
    Gregg clasped a stanchion. He kept his eyes open, because he'd learned that helped— helped —him control vertigo. There wasn't anything in his stomach but acid, but he'd spew that, sure as the sun shone somewhere, if he wasn't lucky.
    The Sultan lurched into transit space—and lurched out again calculated milliseconds later. The starship's location and velocity were modified by the amount she'd accelerated in a spacetime whose constants were radically different from those of the sidereal universe.
    They dropped in and out of alien universes thirty-eight times by Gregg's count, bootstrapping the length of each jump by the acceleration achieved in the series previous before they returned to the sidereal universe to stay—until the next insertion. The entire sequence took a little more than one sidereal minute. Gregg's stomach echoed the jumps a dozen times over before finally settling again.
    "There!" cried Captain Choransky, pointing to the blurred starfield that suddenly filled the Sultan 's positioning screen. "There, we've got Virginia!"
    "We've got something," Bivens said morosely. "I'm not sure it's Virginia. These optics . . ."
    Dole, at one of the attitude workstations, yawned and closed his eyes. Lightbody took out his pocket Bible and began to read, moving his lips. Jeude, at the third workstation, appeared to be comatose.
    Two officers came in from aft compartments. They joined Choransky and Bivens at the front of the