by David Drake
"Now, hold your tater!" Yerby snapped. "First thing, I don't guess a bunch of softies from Zenith are going to pack themselves near as tight as Mark says. Besides, they're going to have a lot of big equipment—aircars and such. That's right, ain't it, lad?"
He rotated his head to look at Mark. "I guess so," Mark said.
They are enemies. Maybe the only way to deal with them is to smash the Aten on hard rocks that can't hold enough of a magnetic field to slow the ship for a landing. But—
Mark's mind couldn't imagine a future in which he let something so horrible happen. And he couldn't imagine how he could prevent it from happening.
"Yerby, you can't kill all those people!" Amy cried.
Desiree looked from Amy to her husband. Her face had no more expression than a billet of wood, but Mark knew by now not to confuse stolidity with stupidity. Yerby's wife was anything but stupid.
"Now, who said a single flaming word about killing?" Yerby said loudly. He slapped the Execute key to transmit the landing codes he'd just entered.
He stood and faced the others. "I don't guess I'm risking anybody's life. Leastways, nobody's life more than I am my own, because I'll be going to fetch them myself. They'll have a soft landing, I guarantee."
Yerby smirked at his audience. He was enormously pleased with himself.
"Yerby, what have you done?" Amy asked.
"I brought them down on the big island in The Goo," Yerby said. "The wet ground'll build enough field that they won't smash to bits, but I don't guess they'll be invading any time soon."
Thomse chuckled; even Desiree's face seemed to soften somewhat. Mark and Amy looked blankly at one another.
"The Goo's a swamp just in from the coast," Yerby explained cheerfully. "It's a bowl twenty miles across and it drains out through cracks in the rock, not by a proper river. I reckon they'll have time enough to get out of the ship, the folks will. The cargo hatches are going to be under a couple yards of muck as soon as they hit, though."
He stretched and grinned. "By the time I show up, I don't guess there'll be much to see of the ship but another hummock in the swamp. Even the island's not as solid as all that, you know."
"I see," Mark said. Yerby's beaming face had just melted away the field of smashed bodies he'd been imagining.
Amy switched the radio to normal operation instead of data link to the landing system. "This is Woodsrunners command to all Woodsrunners," she said into the microphone. "Pass this message on."
"Tell 'em to gather at the north end of The Goo," Yerby ordered in a stage whisper. "That's where I'll take our visitors out."
Amy nodded. Mark and Yerby stepped into the hallway, where they could speak without interfering with Amy. She was switching bands after each set of radioed instructions.
"Are you planning to fly in alone?" Mark asked.
"I'm going to walk in," the frontiersman said. "I figure our visitors are going to keep their personal guns, most of them. I don't want them to capture a flyer. There's enough Zenith settlers on Greenwood that somebody'd likely mount a rescue try if he heard about it. Nobody's going to walk out of The Goo, though, without I lead him and he's real polite."
"I didn't know there was any way into The Goo, Yerby," said Tindouf, a hired logger whose cracked ribs had kept him hanging around the compound for the past few days. "Except you fly."
"There's a way," Yerby insisted. "But nothing some Zenith is likely to find by himself. I'll bring 'em all out and it won't cost them a centime they haven't paid already."
He frowned regretfully and said, "I'd sure like the aircars and other fancy stuff they brought, but I'm not going to try and dig down through a swamp neither. Guess we'll get some guns out of the business, though."
Mark started to speak, then closed his mouth in embarrassment at what he'd been about to ask. Yerby grinned at him and said, "Say kid? How'd you like to come along with me? It'll be muddy, mind."
Amy paused, half turned, then hunched closer to the microphone. She continued to reel off instructions to the militia.
"If you'll have me," Mark said, "I'd be honored."
He'd been afraid of putting himself forward into a situation where he clearly didn't belong; a form of boasting, and therefore unworthy of a gentleman.
"Yeah, I would," Yerby said. He scowled with embarrassment and continued, "Now, don't take this wrong, lad . . . but I want to make sure the path's safe for somebody who hasn't, you know, spent as many years outdoors as I have. OK?"
Mark grinned. "I'm your guinea pig," he said. "Let's get started!"
22. Greenwood Justice
The mud was gray, sulphurous and stuck like glue. Mostly it was covered by vegetation. Shrubs on firm ground grew as much as ten feet in the air and spread their leaves widely, and dazzling little splotches lifted themselves six inches from the nearly liquid surface.
Every once in a while, a tall stem that cantilevered itself out from a hummock decoyed Mark into placing a foot a little beyond where Yerby'd stepped. As a result, Mark had as good a view of the mud as anybody could wish: it coated his coveralls to the throat. That was a much closer acquaintance than Mark desired, certainly.
Yerby prodded the surface ahead of him with a long piece of tubing. Mark had tried to carry a similar staff, but he'd quickly decided that he was better off with his hands free to clutch shrubs or his companion in the frequent crises. "How you doing, lad?" the frontiersman asked over his shoulder.
"I'm all right," Mark lied. He didn't think he'd ever been as exhausted in his life. The mud was warm as well as being sticky. Trying not to gasp, he added, "I guess this basin must be volcanic."
"Yeah, I reckon," Yerby agreed as he hopped nonchalantly to what Mark would have guessed was a sinkhole. The footing easily held the big man's weight. "It's the prettiest thing you ever saw in winter if the mist blows away, all green and cheerful in the middle of the snow."
Mark jumped. His muddy legs weighed him down. Yerby grabbed Mark's hand and snatched him from disaster. The ground felt like rock beneath a slime of mud.
"Don't worry, lad," Yerby said. "We're just about there. If them Zeniths do half so good as you, we'll get them clear no problem."
Mark took another step by rote. He was too tired to do anything except previous actions. Yerby caught him and steered him to the right, through a copse of virid shrubs. To Mark the ground looked exactly the same.
"Right there," Yerby explained with a nod, "there's a pit that don't stop till you're on the other side of the planet."
He walked Mark through a screen of diaphanous tendrils. About a hundred frightened-looking men and women milled or squatted fifty feet away. The Aten's splashdown had disturbed the expanse of mud between them and Mark. Alternate bands of tumbled plants and glutinous mud marked the arcs of compression.
The starship was a low gray dome behind the Zeniths. Yerby'd been right when he guessed that the ship would have sunk almost out of sight by the time he reached it.
Zenith soldiers—to Mark's surprise they were wearing light blue uniforms—lurched to their feet. A squat man in particularly brilliant garb pointed at Yerby and Mark. "Hold it right there!" he shouted. "I warn you, we're armed!"
"Ah, but you won't be when you leave here," Yerby said without concern. He eyed the pattern of ripples, shock waves frozen or at least numbed into the ground. Despite his weight, Yerby hopped from one point to the next without his boots ever sinking above the instep. Mark followed, his heart in his throat. For a wonder he managed to join the frontiersman and the Zenith troops without another minor disaster.
"Hello, Mayor Biber," Mark said to the Zenith commander, panting only slightly. Success at crossing the open space made him feel so good that he didn't notice the pressure of the dozen or more guns pointed at his head and chest. "I didn't expect to find you here."
Biber glared at Mark, trying to place him. The Mayor of New Paris was all mud to the hips. The same misstep had sucked off one of his knee boots.
"You're under arrest
!" Biber said. "Captain van den Brook, take these men into custody!"
These weren't soldiers, they were police—the New Paris Civic Watch, according to the garish yellow-and-orange patches on their left shoulders. Their weapons were a mélange of a dozen different sorts—mostly nonlethal, at least by design. Mark remembered Yerby's warning about the dangers of a badly made nerve scrambler.
"I think you've misplaced your jail, Mayor," Yerby said. He hooked a thumb in the direction of the starship. The vessel gave a sad groan; the ground shivered. "Matter of fact, you've misplaced just about every durn thing, ain't you? Including food."
"All right, Bannock," Biber ordered curtly. He drew a long-barreled, chrome-plated pistol from a holster and pointed it in Yerby's face. "You're going to lead us out of here. Now!"
"And so I am," Yerby agreed. "That's what I come here for. But first you're going to lay all your pretty hardware down. Understood?"
"We can force you to tell us the path!" said Captain van den Brook, a woman whose face could give Desiree points for grim.
Mark started to laugh. Only a shade of his chortling peals was hysteria. "Oh, Captain!" he said. "Oh, Captain!"
When he managed to control himself—boy! had he needed a laugh—Mark pointed at his muddy coveralls. "Look," he said, "this is the best I could do following Yerby step by step."
The Zeniths already appeared cowed and puzzled. Mark grinned and continued, "If you think you can torture directions out of him, you'd better think again. He's got to lead, and he's got to be free when he does. I couldn't find my way back across the patch right there, and I just came over it."
He swept his hand in a broad circle at the rippled muck behind him.
"I can't let you keep your guns, you see," Yerby said in a tone of calm reasonableness. "But they wouldn't do nothing save drag you under if I did. You'll have work enough getting back to dry ground as it is."
Biber scowled. Instead of answering immediately, he walked a few steps in the direction from which Mark and Yerby had arrived. Maybe he was looking for footprints.
"Watch," Yerby said to Captain van den Brook. He put the tip of his thin rod on the ground beside him and thrust it several feet down at an angle.
Biber turned to see what the frontiersman was doing. A huge bubble, nauseating with sulfur and rotting vegetation, burped from the gooey soil at Biber's feet and swallowed him.
"Eee!" the Mayor screamed as he sank.
Yerby stepped over, grabbed, and dragged Biber up by the collar just as the return wave was about to flow over the mayor's mouth and nose. Yerby smiled at the man he held. "D'ye take my point, son?" he asked gently.
"Stack arms!" Captain van den Brook ordered. Biber nodded, but he was still too terrified to speak.
"Not there, boy!" Mark shouted at a Zenith policeman probably twice his age. "Bring your foot another six inches left or you'll sink to the other side of the planet. And I'm hanged if I bother to fish another of you losers out!"
Triumph had brought out a facet of Mark's personality he was pretty sure he was going to be ashamed of in the morning. Furthermore, the feeling of power didn't bring any real strength back into his muscles. His arms seemed to weigh tons, not just from the coating of mud he'd gotten pulling Zeniths to safety, and his legs were numb.
But oh! the triumph! Yerby led the column. He'd left Mark at the first really tricky spot, a dogleg where the bush that looked like a perfect handhold was actually covered by hair-fine poisonous thorns. When Mark had chivvied the last of the prisoners past that point, he'd tramped his way to the front of the line again.
Yerby had used him three more times as a human signpost. That made Mark as proud as the praise Dr. Kelsing had given his seminar paper, "The Evolution of Civil Law on Quelhagen."
After the first hundred yards of The Goo, a couple dirigibles had moved close to the line of march. By then, any weapons the Zeniths might have concealed in their clothes were too gummy to be used to hijack a vehicle. Ropes dangling from the dirigibles pulled a number of floundering Zeniths from the muck, but none of them were allowed to ride. Yerby was making sure that the invaders were punished and humiliated as well as being defeated.
In one sense that meant a lot of unnecessary effort for him and Mark, but Mark knew that it was at least as important to prevent the Zeniths from repeating their invasion as it was to stop them dead this time. He didn't think any members of this police unit would be back to Greenwood during their present lifetimes.
"Come on!" Mark snarled to the back of the last Zenith, who was swaying on the trunk of a sapling to gather strength. The hands of the folk ahead in the column had worn away the tree's soft bark. "You'll have plenty of time to rest when you head back to Zenith in a freighter's hold. Move it!"
Mark's civilized part was amazed at the way he was acting toward the prisoners. You'd have thought he was a frontiersman as barbaric as Yerby himself. The Zeniths probably did think that. . . .
A dirigible dropped close. Amy wasn't in this one, but she'd followed most of the line of march with her camera. A dozen dirigibles bobbed through the foliage in the near distance. The lip of the basin had to be close.
Mark's boots scraped the first firm ground in what felt like a lifetime. The vegetation changed abruptly from fleshy shrubs to Greenwood's equivalent of grass. He was out of The Goo.
"There you are, lad!" Yerby boomed. He offered a hand-blown bottle. "Say, I'll tell the world that you're a man! Come have a sip of something to cut the mud, why don't you?"
Well over a hundred Greenwood settlers, armed to the teeth, guarded the Zeniths on the downslope beyond The Goo. Many of the Greenwoods carried weapons that the police themselves had left behind at the Aten.
Groups of ten or a dozen prisoners at a time were herded into cargo nets slung from dirigible gondolas. Amy had her camera out. The Zeniths would squeeze together like fruit in a mesh bag when the dirigibles rose, but Mark didn't suppose anybody'd be seriously injured in the short flight to the Spiker.
He managed to stay upright for the few steps it took to reach Yerby and the bottle. Other Woodsrunners stood nearby, nodding to Mark with obvious respect. Yerby sounded as vibrant as he ever had, but Mark noticed that the big man was leaning on his staff. He'd dragged Zeniths from the clinging muck dozens of times during the trek; exertion like that took a toll even on Yerby.
Mark lifted the bottle, knowing that everybody was watching him, and drank deep. He gagged, coughed, and spewed the liquor out through his nostrils. It burned like molten lead on the delicate mucous membranes.
"Atta boy!" Yerby said, pounding Mark's back. "Clean the goo out, and by all that's holy, that's just what he did!"
The frontiersman expertly retrieved the bottle from Mark's numb fingers and went on, "Now, let's get off to the Spiker and finish this game, shall we?"
"Sounds good to me," Mark wheezed.
Yerby had to walk him onto the deck of the Bannock dirigible. It was nearly a minute before Mark's eyes stopped watering enough that he could see again. If what was in the bottle was whiskey, then Mark would ask for varnish remover the next time.
Desiree was at the controls. They were the last of the line of dirigibles, none of them more than twenty feet off the ground because of the overload of prisoners dangling below in the nets. Zeniths cursed with all the strength the trek had left them, which wasn't very much.
Flyers circled overhead like insects dancing. Mark had noticed that settlers hadn't taken them over The Goo, though. If bad luck or bad judgment landed a flyer in the slime, it and the pilot would sink out of sight before help could arrive.
The crusted mud was starting to flake off. Mark now itched as well as felt filthy.
"I can't believe I did that," he whispered. The phrase was starting to be a habit. He wondered how many more times he'd say it on Greenwood.
He wondered how much longer he'd survive on Greenwood. Assuming that he'd really survived this time. He was so tired . . .
Yerby took another pull from the
bottle and hugged Mark with one arm. "You did fine!" he said. "Amy, child? Did you get a ship at the Spiker to take these fools off-planet soonest?"
"Yes and no," Amy said. Mark had expected at least a minor explosion to follow "Amy, child," but she looked affectionately at both men. "Captain Krause of the Brother Jacques is willing to take them to Dittersdorf, but he wants you to pay him before they board. Since most of them will have to make the flight awake, he's doubtful that they'll be in any mood to pay when they arrive."
Yerby chuckled. "I'll see he gets paid," he said. He nodded toward the cabin and said in a lower voice, "Surprised Desiree didn't tell him to load them or she'd stick him for a bow ornament on his ship."
Amy's smile became wintry. "She said something like that," she said. "I said that wasn't acceptable in a civilized society."
She cleared her throat and glared. "Which Greenwood is."
Yerby started to throw the empty bottle over the side of the gondola. Mark raised a hand in reminder. "Oh, right," the frontiersman said. He stuck the empty inside his shirt. "Hard to remember this stuff, though."
The Brother Jacques was already winching itself onto the magnetic mass. Captain Krause was easy to identify because of his white coat with six inches of gold braid on the wrists. He stood just outside the Spiker in a group of Woodsrunners, spectators, and the prisoners brought by the leading dirigibles.
Desiree landed more forcefully than usual, giving the Zeniths a solid thump before she was done with them. Captain Krause strode toward the dirigible, waving his hat and shouting, "Yerby, you know I'm always willing to do you a favor, but this, this is a whole cargo! You must pay me!"
Yerby stepped briskly to the ground. Mark stumbled as he followed; he wondered if he should have tried another swig of that liquor, since it seemed to have worked wonders for Yerby. Amy steadied him, smiling again even though touching Mark muddied her hand.