by David Drake
"At the time the unfortunate events were occurring," Dr. Jesilind said, "I was considering the origin of life. I wonder, Mr. Maxwell, if you've ever considered the possibility that all life in the universe springs from a common font?"
"I can't say that I have," Mark said. He'd begun shaking when he thought about the beating he almost got. And it wasn't Jesilind's fault, but at the time the click of the doctor locking himself into safety had sounded like the crack of doom.
"All knowledge is my field," Jesilind repeated, beaming.
"'I have taken all knowledge to be my province,'" Mark said, correcting the quote. "That was very well for Sir Francis Bacon, but I'm not nearly so broad, and the sheer quantity of available knowledge today is greater by orders of magnitude."
Jesilind blinked.
Mark deliberately turned toward Yerby and said, "What are you going to do with Alliance soldiers, Yerby? Or if it's secret . . ."
"I've got no secrets from my friends, lad!" Yerby boomed. "Besides, I don't care if the Zeniths do hear about it."
That was true enough. Everybody in the room could hear him if they wanted to, though the Rainbow wasn't the sort of place where anyone thought quiet restraint was a virtue.
"You see," Yerby continued around a mouthful of rare beef, "all us settlers on Greenwood, we're there on proper Protectorate grants. Now, there's a bunch of folks from Zenith, they claim they've got grants too and maybe they do. But ours are older and we're there on Greenwood, you see?"
Mark nodded. There was the little matter of the fact that Protector Greenwood might not have jurisdiction over the planet to begin with; but in a way that didn't matter. The Protector was an Atlantic Alliance official, and he'd been acting under at least a claim of authority. His Alliance superiors might have cause to punish him for improperly making grants, but that didn't mean that the grants themselves were invalid.
"So some folks from Zenith, they come round a couple months ago, looking things over," Yerby continued. "Folks from the Zenith army, only they call it the Zenith Protective Association. And they got liquored up enough one night to talk about shipping all us Greenwoods out to a labor camp on Zenith for being trespassers."
He paused to drink. With the food, the Rainbow served pitchers of full-bodied ale. Yerby used enormous quantities of it to wash his meal down.
"I suggested to Yerby that the Alliance has a base on Dittersdorf Minor," Jesilind said. "All the commander there has to do is detach a small body of troops to Greenwood to keep the peace. That will obviate enormous future difficulties."
"I see," Mark said.
He didn't see. Rather, he saw that Bannock and Jesilind lived in a mental universe where things operated differently than they did on the Quelhagen and Earth that Mark knew. Would a base commander really send troops off to nowhere in particular because a couple of strangers asked him to?
Not in Mark's universe. But perhaps things really did happen that way on the frontier.
"Well, lad," Yerby said with a broad smile. "You want to come with me tomorrow? It's a couple days before you ship out, right? The car's a two-seater and Doc decided he didn't want to come."
You'll be lucky if you don't break your neck, flying through soupy atmosphere on a strange planet! Mark thought. Then he thought, I was lucky that the Zeniths didn't break my neck, and all I did was sit on a bucket reading.
"I'd be delighted," Mark said. "I'd like to see more of the planets I'm staging through, but mostly I've been stuck in spaceports." Kept myself stuck in spaceports.
"Done!" Yerby said, wiping his hand on his shirt before he shook with Mark. "First light in the morning, then. I want to get us back to Major before dark."
"I'll look after Miss Bannock during your absence, Yerby," Dr. Jesilind said. "Perhaps we—"
"You'll do nothing of the sort!" Amy said. "Yerby, I'm coming with you."
"Only got two seats, child," Yerby said. He chuckled. "Besides, it's too dangerous for a sweet girl like you."
"What!" Amy said. She started to get up, bumped the table—her chair didn't slide back the way she'd thought it would—and slammed back down.
"Yerby, I think perhaps you should take your sister—" Mark said.
"Are you telling me my word's no good, boy?" Yerby said. His fist curled reflexively around the handle of a full pitcher.
"No, I'm telling you I made a mistake," Mark said evenly. Maybe it's just my day to get pounded to a pulp. You can't avoid your fate. . . .
"Stop!" said Amy. She didn't shout, but there was no doubt from the authority in her voice that she and Yerby Bannock were kin. "Mark, you'll go with Yerby in the morning, as you agreed. I have a good deal of work to do in my room. I will be there until you return in the evening."
She resumed eating, taking refined little bites. There wasn't a lot of talk around the table for the remainder of the evening.
4. The Funny Farm
The landscape of Dittersdorf Minor rolled by a thousand feet below the aircar. Compared to Major, the terrain was hillier and some of the vegetation could be called low trees.
The biggest difference was that Mark could see more than a fog-shrouded blur.
"I don't see why the port and all the settlement's on the big island," Yerby said. "Down there looks like pretty decent land, and you can see a hand in front of your face."
He had to shout to be heard over the persistent screech of the car's power plant. The turbine ran without stuttering on any liquid-hydrocarbon fuel, but it sounded like it was about to fly apart any moment.
"The Alliance won't allow settlement because of the fort," Mark said. "All Minor's a military reservation."
Bannock snorted.
Major, Dittersdorf's larger island (or small continent), was shaped like a broad crescent whose wings flowed backward in the press of a warm ocean current. Minor was a ball in the crescent's hollow, relatively clear of the rain and fog that constantly shrouded the bigger island.
The Easterns occupied Dittersdorf for strictly military purposes. After Alliance forces captured the planet, the Paris bureaucracy permitted construction of a civil spaceport to serve traffic to the Three Digits, but only three hundred miles away on the larger island.
Minor would have been a more comfortable site for the caravansary and the civilian settlement that had sprung up to service the port, but a bureaucrat always finds it easier to forbid than allow. From what Mark had seen in the Rainbow Tavern, the silly restrictions hadn't kept the settlers from enjoying themselves.
The car lifted slightly in an updraft. Mark saw their destination sprawled ahead of them.
The military base was a vast six-pointed star with turreted energy weapons at the angles and a spaceport in the paved central courtyard. The complex covered several acres on the surface, and Mark knew that several levels of tunnels extended through the bedrock beneath.
"Say, I didn't guess it was that big!" Bannock said as they swept down toward their destination. "I wonder how many soldiers they've got here?"
"It held six thousand when Alliance forces captured it from the Easterns in 2223," Mark said, quoting the figure he'd checked in a data chip before he went to sleep the night before. "I don't have any recent information on the garrison, though."
"Yerby Bannock calling Alliance fort," Yerby said, speaking into the microphone pickup in the cab roof. "We're just coming to visit you folks, so don't get your bowels in an uproar."
Mark wasn't sure the laser communicator actually worked. There was a two-hundred-foot communications tower at one point of the star, but he had no idea what format or frequency the fort used.
"Don't you think they might shoot us down?" he asked. He tried not to sound nervous.
"Piffle," Yerby said. "We don't look like an army of Easterns, do we? Besides, there's no war nowadays."
He throttled back the fans. The car dropped in a series of awkward slaloms as Yerby steered for the edge of the area marked to land three starships simultaneously. He handled the controls in a rough-and-ready
fashion, giving the impression of adequacy but not skill.
But Mark knew the big frontiersman had never touched the car's controls before he climbed aboard this morning, and the chances were he'd never flown anything very similar. The fact that Yerby was adequate at things outside his previous experience was probably the key to his survival on the frontier.
Yerby's assumption that he could handle most anything he tried was likely to get him killed one day, though Mark really hoped that Yerby's refusal to believe the soldiers would shoot at unannounced intruders didn't turn out to be that fatal mistake.
As they zigzagged low to land, Mark noticed that native foliage covered most of the fort's outworks. For a moment he thought that was for camouflage, but some of the broad-leafed shrubs were growing out of the courtyard pavement. Their roots must be breaking up the structure below.
"Wonder where everybody is?" Yerby said. Mark only understood the words because he'd been wondering the same thing. Nearer to the ground, the fort's low interior walls reflected the vehicle's noise into a squadron of screaming aircars.
"There—" said Mark, pointing at what he thought was a display of flags in a line on the other side of the landing zone.
Yerby had seen the flutter also. He hopped the car off the pavement where it first touched and skidded down again near the line.
The clothesline. Twenty or thirty garments, many too small for an adult to wear, were drying in the wan sun. Some of the clothes were dresses.
Bannock shut down the aircar. "Hey, you!" shrieked a woman scarcely less shrill than the turbine. "What do you think you're doing, blowing dirt on my wash? Couldn't you find anyplace else in this bleeding place to land?"
She'd come out of an armored door nearby. Weeds rooted in pavement cracks grew around the panel. The door hadn't been closed in a long time, and maybe couldn't be closed at all. Close up, the walls' fourteen-foot height looked more impressive than it had from the air when compared to the surface the fort covered.
The woman was short, dirty, and probably even younger than Mark himself. She wore a faded Alliance military shirt and carried a sleeping infant in a cloth sling on her left side. Her feet and her legs below the shirttails were bare.
"Sorry, sister," Bannock said easily as he got out of the car. "I'll be careful when I leave. My friend and I are just trying to find the colonel."
"Colonel, that's a laugh!" the woman said. "If you're looking for Captain Easton, you won't find him in married quarters. He'd be in the next bay over, but the chances are he's out with his vegetables anyhow."
She indicated the adjacent segment of the star with her thumb. The woman's voice had dropped a couple octaves since she got a good look at the strangers. Yerby Bannock wasn't a conventionally handsome man, but power has its own attraction and nobody could doubt the big man's power.
"His vegetables?" Mark said in surprise.
"That's it," the woman said with a nod . . . and perhaps a degree of speculation about Mark as well. "Flowers too. Anything you want to know about growing stuff, the captain's the one to tell you. Anything else, you may as well ask the boy here—"
Her hand brushed just above the forehead of the sleeping infant. She didn't look down as she gestured.
"—for all the good you'll get of it. Go to the open door, then down one level, then left at the main corridor till you hit the first blue corridor. Along it and up the ladder to hatch Blue Forty-two if it's standing open, which it likely will be."
"Thank you kindly, sister," Yerby said, lifting his broad-brimmed hat as he bowed to the woman. He strode across the bay in the direction she'd indicated.
"But won't somebody mind?" Mark asked, speaking to either of the others.
"Mind what?" the woman asked. "But don't expect much of a welcome unless you've got tomato seeds. He was complaining his tomato seeds didn't arrive."
An elevator and a staircase of slotted steel plates stood on opposite sides of the anteroom within. There was no passage directly through the fortress on this level. One of the elevator doors was missing; the shaft was empty.
The frontiersman led the way down the stairs surefootedly. The only light came from the open hatch and that, by the time they'd turned at the second landing, wasn't enough for Mark to feel comfortable. The treads were slick with condensate and the air was increasingly musty. The fort's ventilation system didn't seem to work any better than the lights did.
"Has the place been abandoned, do you think?" Mark asked. He could see some light below them, coming through another open doorway. "Is the woman just a squatter?"
"There was a ship landed in the past week or so," Yerby said. He sounded a little puzzled too. "You saw the way the plants coming up through the cracks had been squished down? Of course I don't know exactly how fast things grow here, but a week's close enough for a guess."
Mark hadn't noticed the crushed vegetation. Well, Yerby Bannock probably couldn't give a connected account of interstellar expansion over the past one hundred fifty years. People had differing skills and abilities.
But right now, Mark felt lost and completely useless in comparison with a man who was perfectly comfortable in circumstances that were new to both of them.
Nearer the doorway they could hear voices. A dozen children aged ten or younger played a ballgame in the corridor. Two of the lights in the ceiling here worked; the nearest other patches of illumination were hundreds of yards down the corridor.
A girl kicked the ball toward Yerby and Mark by accident as they stepped into the corridor. Yerby caught it. The girl screamed in surprise. A boy darting toward the kick collided with Mark instead.
"Do any of you young heroes know where Captain Easton would be?" Yerby asked, bouncing the ball back to the child who'd kicked it. "Hatch Blue Forty-two, the lady upstairs said."
"That's my mommy!" cried a child of indeterminate sex. "I'll take you!"
The child ran off down the corridor, baggy trousers flapping. He/she must have been at least six years old. Mark frowned. Either his estimate of the woman's age was wrong, or—
Or perhaps the kid was wrong about who'd given directions to the strangers. That was a comforting thought, so Mark clung to it.
A boy behind them called, "What do you want to see old Cabbage for? Are you from Earth? Is he going to be court-martialed?"
"Come on!" squealed their guide. The child's silhouette vanished down a cross-corridor, otherwise invisible in the gloom. Yerby lengthened his stride, covering an enormous amount of ground without seeming to run, but Mark had to jog to keep up.
At least half the lights worked in the blue corridor. The floor was painted, though the center was worn to bare concrete and the margins were too dingy for anyone to be absolutely certain of the color. The child stopped fifty yards from the intersection, pointing at what really was a ladder—Mark had thought the word might mean a stairway, like "companion ladder" on a starship. The three of them stared up at the oval of daylight thirty feet above.
A man stepped through the hatch and began to climb down without looking behind him. He wore a gray military uniform with patched knees and an apron over it. Tools clinked together as he moved.
"That's Cabbage," the child whispered.
When it was obvious that Easton wasn't going to notice them, Yerby said cheerfully, "Good morning, Captain!"
"Oh my goodness!" Easton said. He flung himself backward off the ladder while he was still ten feet in the air.
Mark grabbed the gaping child and dived clear of what he guessed was going to be the impact zone. Yerby caught Easton in a two-hand grip around the pudgy waist. He swung the captain first upright, then to the ground as lightly as a circus act.
A trowel dropped from an apron pocket clanged to the floor just as Mark was starting to relax. The child giggled and ran back down the corridor the way they'd come.
"What on earth are you doing here?" Easton demanded. He peered at Yerby, then Mark. His eyes were still adapted to the daylight above. "Do I know you?"
"W
e're from Greenwood, Captain," Bannock said, shading the truth a little for the sake of simplicity. "We'd like you to station some troops with us to keep the peace. It needn't be many. Fifty or a hundred, that'd be a right plenty."
"Oh, I couldn't do that," Easton said. He minced down the corridor at a surprisingly quick pace.
Mark and Yerby fell into step on either side. Easton looked over one shoulder, then the other. His round, bushy-bearded face took on a hunted expression. "Lieutenant Hounslow handles all that sort of thing. Yes, you'll have to talk to him. Not me."
"And you're taking us to Lieutenant Hounslow, sir?" Mark said.
They'd reached the intersection. The ballgame was still going on down the main corridor to the right. Easton turned sharply left, as if by pretending Yerby didn't exist he could make the big man vanish. Bannock skipped out of the way, holding station. He was frowning.
"Oh, all right," Easton said. "He'll be in the Command Center, I suppose. He's always in the Command Center."
Several men wearing portions of uniforms lounged in the corridor ahead. The ceiling fixtures didn't work, but a series of light-strips connected by extension cords gave off a yellow-green glow sufficient for seeing clearly.
"Hey, it's the Old Man," one of the troops said without concern.
The four doors open to the left all served a single dormitory big enough to sleep at least a hundred. Mark looked in at each doorway. There were only twenty or thirty bunks scattered across the room. Men lay on a few of them. Rows of large boxes staggered against the back walls. Some had fallen over, spilling what looked like trash.
"G'morning, sir," a couple of the men in the corridor said to Easton. One of them even touched his forehead in an attempt at a salute.
Easton grimaced and bobbed his head. He was trying to pretend the troops didn't exist either. "I don't suppose you know anything about collards, do you?" he murmured to Yerby. "Mine are getting little black spots near the edge of the leaves, and I don't know if that's a—"
"Not a thing about collards," the frontiersman said. "What're you growing collards for anyhow? Something wrong with your rations?"