Patriots

by David Drake

  The investors have gotten the grants dirt cheap because of those Zenith claims. To make the profits they intended, they'd have to convince would-be settlers that Hestia grants were valid.

  "I don't see what that's got to do with me," Yerby said. "You need to take it up with Zenith, right?"

  "We will indeed be exercising all our legal remedies, Mr. Bannock," Holperin said. "But that won't do us a great deal of good if the situation on the ground has changed in the meanwhile."

  "If there's a city of fifty thousand in the middle of a tract," Ms. Macey said bluntly, "all we can sell is a lawsuit. And that's what the matter has to do with you. As you saw today, the Zenith syndicate is regranting all the Hestia tracts, settled as well as open. The city could as easily be on your property as ours."

  "Oh," said Yerby. His smile made Mark tighten up before his conscious mind recalled that the big frontiersman was his friend. "I don't think they'll be settling my property any time soon. Nor that of any of my neighbors."

  "Exactly our point," Daniels said. "We're your neighbors too, Mr. Bannock, and like good neighbors we intend to help you. Our attorneys will defend your rights as if they were our own."

  "All we're asking in return," Holperin said, bending forward slightly on a wooden captain's chair which Mark knew from experience was just less uncomfortable than a torture rack, "is that you act as our agent here. Continue what you did today, that's all. If one large-scale immigrant community is built on Greenwood, let alone a dozen of them, you and your friends will be swamped and helpless. The time to act is now."

  "We think a slightly more formal basis would be useful," Macey said. "Form a planetary militia. It's important that you act in accordance with legal forms. Now—"

  "Legally, Greenwood is administered by the Protector of Zenith," Mark interrupted. "Are you asking Mr. Bannock to start an armed insurrection against the Paris authorities?"

  "Not at all!" Elector Daniels said. By his title, he was one of the officials elected by the citizens of Quelhagen instead of being appointed from Earth. Given the state of relations between the Council of Electors and the Protector, the Atlantic Alliance authorities would dearly love a chance to arrest Daniels for fomenting rebellion.

  "Zenith's claim is not certain," Holperin said. "We don't mean anyone should take arms against the Alliance, Mr. Maxwell. Zenith representatives attempting to grab land by force, however, can properly be resisted by a militia organized among the citizens of the threatened community."

  "They're asking you to hold an election and have your friends proclaim you militia commander," Mark translated. He turned to Daniels and continued, "If Mr. Bannock were willing to take on that dangerous burden, there would still be the question of compensation."

  "Pay?" said Yerby. "Say, don't worry about that, lad. I wonder if I'd need a uniform, do you think?"

  "I had more in mind a proposal that would benefit the planet as well as you, Mr. Bannock," Mark said. He noticed how formal he sounded, but that was the part of his mind that he needed to carry on a negotiation like this.

  "I don't need to be paid to do my duty, boy!" Yerby said in a near growl.

  "Yerby!" Amy snapped. She stepped to her brother and shook her finger under his nose. "Be quiet and speak when Mark tells you to speak! Do you understand?"

  Yerby backed a step and cleared his throat. "Sorry, Amy," he muttered toward a corner of the room.

  Mark cleared his throat also. "A reasonable recompense for Mr. Bannock's best efforts on your mutual behalf," he said, "would be a plant to process stockyard waste at the Spiker. Blaney's Tavern, that is. Assuming an arrangement can be worked out with Mr. Blaney."

  He cocked an eyebrow at Yerby in question.

  "To do what?" Yerby asked.

  "Allow us to place a ten-by-thirty-foot unit with solar collectors in the stockyard," Mark explained. "It'll take the manure as well as the slaughteryard waste and convert it into bricks of fertilizer and animal food."

  "There's a market for processed organics for food on immigrant ships as well," Ms. Macey said. She frowned. "But the plants are expensive, especially since Paris has embargoed industrial production on Quelhagen."

  "Sure, Blaney'd let me do that," Yerby said. "He's been complaining about the stink when the wind's the wrong way for as long as I've known him. Not that he was going to do anything about it."

  They'd need a formal contract with Blaney, but that could come later. The handshake agreement Yerby visualized might not hold when Blaney realized how much profit was involved.

  "A deal on those terms, then, madame and sirs?" Mark said. His palms were sweating and the hair along his arms prickled upright, but his voice was steady. He was dealing with some of the richest people on Quelhagen, and they were dealing!

  "Wait a minute," Elector Daniels said. "You're asking us to go to considerable up-front expense against what? Whatever Mr. Bannock says now, how do we know he won't change his mind the day after we deliver the plant?"

  Yerby started forward. Mark stepped sideways to put himself between the two men. Amy shouted, "Yerby! Please!" this time in fear rather than anger. She knew even better than Mark did what her brother was likely to do to someone he decided had insulted him.

  Daniels must have been able to guess, because his face went white and he babbled, "I'm most sorry, most sincerely sorry!"

  Mark took a deep breath. He said, "Elector, you'll have Mr. Bannock's word, which is all you'd ever have at this distance from Quelhagen. That's why you need an agent here, remember. Also, I think your syndicate might be allowed five percent of the plant's net profits. It should be quite a little moneymaker as well as being of environmental benefit."

  The investors looked at one another. Mark didn't see the signals they exchanged, but Daniels nodded to him, then to Yerby, and said, "Done on those terms."

  Mark felt as though his tendons had all been cut. He was as wrung out as he'd been immediately after the fight in the caravansary.

  Amy touched his shoulder to steady him. The camera was in her other hand. Mark had been so focused on the negotiation that he hadn't noticed she was recording the whole affair.

  "Despite the embargo, I think it's possible to get a plant shipped from someplace cheaper than Earth," Mr. Holperin said to his colleagues. "There are ways and ways."

  "Let's all have a drink!" said Yerby Bannock.

  11. The Voice of the People

  The slopes on three sides of the Spiker were colorful with the patterned wings of flyers and the fabric casings of dirigibles, but the area between the tavern and the spaceport had been kept clear for people to stand. Mark sat on the courtyard wall at the base of a speakers' platform cantilevered out from it. There must be close to a thousand Greenwoods staring up at him and the platform where Yerby stood with the Quelhagen investors.

  "A quarter of the whole planet's here," Amy said in her version of the same thought. "More than that, really, even though the people who've settled on Zenith grants wouldn't have come."

  "Can you boys hear me?" Yerby Bannock bellowed. During the week of preparation for the assembly, the crew of the investors' ship had installed a public-address system. It wasn't really powerful enough to reach the whole murmuring crowd, but it was better than the people in the back could have expected.

  Those folk could have moved forward if they wanted to hear the proceedings. They were men and women of the careful sort who were afraid not to attend an assembly called to discuss the future of Greenwood, but who were unwilling to be seen actually taking part in it. By keeping back on the fringes, they hoped to avoid all responsibility.

  "The business at Dagmar's focused attention about as well as a threat of hanging would," Mark said. "And I guess most of the settlers live pretty close to here or to the Doodle, which isn't that far away. Most of Greenwood's still unclaimed."

  He raised his eyes to the Quelhagens on the platform. "Except by them."

  The crowd was rumbling a general agreement to Yerby's question. A dozen uniformed
Quelhagen attendants stood just below the courtyard wall with handheld microphones, but most of the crowd couldn't comment except by shouting yes or no. The settlers at the base of the wall were those whose neighbors granted them status as speakers by allowing them to move to where they could reach a mike.

  "Then I'm going to turn this over to Elector Daniels," Yerby said. "He'll explain what's going on and what we need to do about it."

  He handed off the mike to the Quelhagen official. Daniels didn't have as powerful a voice as the frontiersman, but he was a polished speaker and better used to using a PA system to a large audience. He gestured in broad, rhetorical flourishes as he explained the history that led to Zenith surveyors arriving at Dagmar's.

  "They're going to want to bring just as many people to Greenwood as the Zeniths do," Mark said to Amy in a low voice. Daniels's discussion was nothing new to the pair of them. "They won't regrant tracts already settled, but it won't make any difference to how the planet goes."

  "Quelhagen doesn't claim to be the government of Greenwood," Amy replied. "If we get a government of our own and pass settlement restrictions, there's nothing the investors can do except obey them."

  Mark started to say something. What he was going to say was "The Alliance will never let Greenwood control immigration itself. That'll be under Paris control."

  Amy already knew that. Amy was talking about rebellion against the Atlantic Alliance.

  Mark pretended to be watching the crowd of intent faces. The assembly was the biggest entertainment Greenwood had ever seen. Even the folk who didn't care what the Elector was saying were excited to be present at the event.

  "The Alliance doesn't have any soldiers to speak of anywhere in the Digits," Amy said, making her position flatly certain. She looked at Mark until he turned and met her eyes. "Even on Kilbourn and Dittersdorf."

  "There's ten billion people in the Atlantic Alliance," Mark replied. He didn't want to think about rebellion. War was crazy, uncivilized.

  "Most people live on Earth because that's where they want to be," Amy said. Her expression got harder, muscle by muscle, with every word. "They don't want to come to Greenwood, and they don't want to fight."

  Mark shrugged. His skin felt hot. He wondered if Amy thought he was a coward.

  He wondered if he was a coward.

  Daniels had finished describing the investors' willingness to defend Hestia grants in court; he gave the mike back to Yerby. The frontiersman looked out over the assembly for a moment without speaking.

  "All right," Yerby said. He wore his green jacket and a cap with a feather a foot long. Even without that he was half a head taller and twice as broad across the shoulders as the Elector, though the latter wasn't a small man. "I guess everybody here knows how we ran the surveyors off of Dagmar Wately's land last week. If we just do that by getting a gang together each time a Zenith ship lands, they're going to call us bandits. We need to organize as militia so we're legal. You all see that?"

  There was a confused rumble from the crowd. A man in front took a microphone from an attendant and boomed over the PA system, "Are you telling us you figure to run this militia, Yerby Bannock?"

  Half the crowd went silent, but there was a chorus of cheers scattered across the area.

  Yerby stood arms akimbo till the shouting quieted. Then he raised the microphone again and said, "No, Zeb Randifer, I'm not telling you that. If you all think there's somebody who'd do a better job than I'd do, then I want you to pick him. But I'll tell you two things."

  Yerby paused, grinning like a wildcat out over the assembly. "First thing's this. While Zeb there was out in his barnyard pronging one of his sheep, I was running off that ship full of Zeniths. That's the first thing."

  Any reply Randifer might have made was lost in the thunderous laughter of the entire crowd. Randifer had friends in the gathering, but a joke that made Mark blink in amazement—it was a joke, wasn't it?—was just the thing to win over a thousand frontiersmen of both sexes.

  Yerby let the noise settle before raising the microphone again. "The other thing's this," he said. "If you do pick me to lead you, you'd better be ready to obey. Because you will obey. I won't warn you again."

  The crowd dissolved into a low-pitched roar. Everyone was talking with the two or three people nearest. Some folks gestured violently. Mark saw a number of fights break out, but they didn't last more than a few punches.

  Mark looked at Yerby Bannock, a man he'd known less than three weeks. All the people at this assembly were tough and committed, or they would have stayed on their home worlds rather than emigrate to an uninhabited wilderness.

  But Yerby had a fire in him that was as uncommon here as it would have been on Quelhagen.

  The noise muted to the point that Dagmar Wately could be heard bellowing into a microphone, "All right, all right. Let me say this, will you?"

  Two men helped the stocky woman clamber to the top of the wall. Mark gave her a hand.

  "I guess most of you know me," Dagmar said. "Those that do, you know I don't like worth a damn what I'm going to say now."

  She waved a hand toward the platform without looking away from the crowd, "Bannock's the only choice we got, people. It's him or it's fifty or so of us fighting each other instead of Zenith. So that means it's Yerby Bannock."

  The crowd shouted savage agreement. Mark, his arm around Amy, yelled until his throat was raw.

  12. Legal Process

  "My name's Zebulon Randifer," the frontiersman mumbled to Mark at the table Blaney had set up in the Spiker's courtyard. "I got tract NK-twenty-five and about three hundred square miles of NL-twenty-five to the center of Blue River. I got a flashgun but the battery needs replacing. It don't hold a charge more than maybe an hour."

  Mark keyed the information into his hypnagogue/viewer. The Spiker was the repository for settlement records for a large portion of the main continent, but Randifer's tract was to the north, in the Wanker's Doodle database. There was no reason the information couldn't have been combined; Mark intended to do just that as soon as he got to the Doodle and patched his unit to the repository server. For now, though, he could only note the location and add it to the map when he had one.

  Randifer had a cloth cap, which he repeatedly took off, twisted in his hands, and replaced. He was stone bald. Mark didn't know if the frontiersman was embarrassed because of Yerby's joke during the assembly or if the sight of Amy recording the sign-up was making him nervous.

  "And what kind of communications do you have?" Mark asked.

  "Huh?" said Randifer. "Oh, I got a radio in my cabin. Tania Dolen flew over and told me about this meeting, though, because the damned thing was on the blink and I couldn't hear nothing."

  Mark and Amy had come up with the checklist. In fact, it was Amy who suggested that Yerby do more than file in his head the names of those willing to "join the militia." So far as Yerby was concerned, the whole business was simply a legal fiction. He'd intended to operate exactly that way he had at Dagmar's: sound an alarm from high in the air to get the greatest coverage, then pile on. That the next attempted landing might be anywhere on the planet didn't concern him.

  "Thank you, Mr. Randifer," Mark said. "Next?"

  He'd processed almost a hundred and there were still two hundred people, mostly men, in line waiting to be enrolled. Others at the assembly might come to a summons also. Mark didn't have a clue as to how these frontiersmen's minds would work in a crisis, though he hadn't noticed many people on Greenwood unwilling to get into a fight.

  The woman behind Randifer was looking up at the sky. The whole line snaking out the gate turned man by man to watch a dirigible crawling twenty feet in the air toward the courtyard to land.

  "Hey, you danged fools!" a man shouted up. "Not here! Go out in the field!"

  "Hey, that's Ardis Saunderson's blimp!" Randifer said. "He and every soul with him in Blind Cove's from Zenith on a Zenith grant!"

  "Amy," Mark said as he closed his viewer, "go tell Yerby that—"<
br />
  The dozen or so leading settlers were meeting in the tavern's taproom to thrash out an organization for the militia. The courtyard door flew open. Old Man Blaney was the first out, but Yerby and Dagmar Wately were next through the doorway.

  The Blind Cove dirigible hovered over the center of the courtyard. Amy helped Mark move the table closer to the wall where it was out of the way.

  There were five people in the gondola, three of them dressed as if they came from off-planet. One of the locals dropped a rope from the open half of the car. None of the folk in the courtyard grabbed it to haul the dirigible in as they would normally do. The pilot in the closed cabin scowled through a window and vented hydrogen, bringing the airship down with a rush and a bang on the hard ground.

  The three strangers got to their feet and stepped iron-faced from the car. The woman as well as the two men wore black coats with white trousers, but the cut was flamboyant even though the garments' color was not.

  They weren't armed. Mark still tried to place himself in front of Amy. She elbowed him hard and went on recording the event.

  The trio faced Yerby. "Court officials," Mark whispered. "Process servers from Zenith." He'd seen their sort before in his father's office. Lucius Maxwell had a practice that involved a score of Protected Worlds and the courts on Earth as well.

  "We have a summons for ejectment lodged against persons occupying certain tracts of land in violation of the rights of ownership of Heinrich Biber and other parties," one of the men said. He spoke in a strong voice, but his face was pale and his eyes looked a mile through Yerby.

  "Where you from, lad?" Yerby said mildly. "Zenith, ain't you? You're on Greenwood now."

  "The summonses are signed by Magistrate Ardis Saunderson," the Zenith spokesman said. "Justice Saunderson is an official validly appointed by the Protector of Zenith. The court date is in one month in New Paris."

  The woman carried a hologram projector embossed with a gold Zenith Protectorate crest. "Come on, then, honey," Yerby said to her with his usual easy chauvinism. "Let's see who it is."