by David Drake
The airship was tied to a pair of trees the settlers had planted in the park. They weren't species native to Greenwood; Mark thought he'd seen similar ones, much larger, around the Civil Affairs Building in New Paris.
It took him a moment in the flickering light to decide which end of the clove hitch to feed back through the loop to release the tension. By the time Mark found it, Yerby was already bleeding hydrogen from the storage tanks into the ballonets where it could expand. The dirigible lurched upward, snatching the line from Mark's hands.
"Yerby?" a Woodsrunner called. "What the hell are you up to, Yerby?"
The dirigible lifted only forty feet in the air. The props were spinning at coarse pitch as Yerby cranked the big vessel sharply to starboard. Because it had no forward motion, the airship turned with surprising nimbleness.
"I don't know what he's doing," Amy said close to Mark's ear. "Do you?"
"I've no idea at all," Mark said, his eyes on the dirigible. The nose continued to swing. The updraft from Saunderson's burning roof shook it.
Mark's chest tightened. He cupped his hands into a megaphone and shouted, "Yerby! You're drifting over the fire! Watch the fire!"
Hydrogen had much greater lifting ability than any other gas, and because it was cheap an airship's tanks could be vented whenever water vapor started to weigh the ballonets down. The only thing that kept hydrogen from being perfect rather than simply the best choice was that it oozed through any container and burned with a hot blue flame if ignited. Normally that wasn't a problem, since leaking hydrogen rose . . . but so did sparks popping from bubbles of roof sheathing.
The dirigible slid forward, over the fire.
Half the roof was now covered in flames no higher than moss growing from rocks in a slow stream. The plastic didn't burn easily, but the thermite torch had raised it to ignition temperature. The blaze would continue until the trusses collapsed and poured a gout of red fire through the building's interior.
Yerby dumped his ballast. The dirigible shot skyward in a booming mushroom of steam. Mist and hot water sprayed over the crowd. Frontiersmen screamed and cursed—
And started laughing, most of them, as they usually did after a surprise. And resumed drinking, as they always did. Woodsrunners started to untie villagers.
It took Yerby ten minutes to recompress enough of his hydrogen to bring the dirigible back to the open square. Forty or fifty people grabbed the drag ropes to haul the vessel the last of the way down. By that time, the bottles were passing to villagers as well.
Yerby stepped from the gondola and walked to Saunderson. The bonfire gave off a smudgy light. The magistrate had been holding his wife and child since Desiree untied him. He moved away from his family to face Yerby.
"Saunderson," Yerby said, "I'm going to give you a chance to stay here. I warn you, though—from now on act like a good citizen of Greenwood, Do you understand? If this is where you live, then this better be where you're loyal to."
He waved toward Saunderson's house. The thick roof sheathing hadn't burned through at any point, but the plastic sagged inches-deep between trusses at the center of the blackened, bubbled patch.
"Go on," Yerby ordered. "Clean it up. Go back to your houses, all of you. And pray neither you nor your neighbors bring me back here, for you'll regret that if it comes!"
Villagers edged, then trotted from the square, as eager to get away from the Woodsrunners as they were to return to their homes. Militiamen clapped their former captives on the back; friendly enough to look at, but also a warning of where the power continued to lie.
"I'm glad you did that, Yerby," Mark said in a low voice. "But it was very dangerous."
"Don't guess I'll do it again sober, leastways," Yerby said. He watched the Saundersons reenter their house. The roof still smoldered, and they'd have a job getting the boat's mast out of the hole it had punched in the other side.
"But you know?" Yerby continued so softly that Mark had to lean close to hear. "There ain't so many brave men that I want to chase one off Greenwood unless I have to."
27. Bedroom Games
Noises in the corridor woke Mark from a sound sleep. It was probably just Yerby staggering drunk to the room he used next to Mark's, but . . . hadn't he come in earlier?
Mark glanced out his window, but he couldn't see even the outbuildings. Tertia had waned to a sliver in the Earth month since the raid on Blind Cove, and neither of the other moons gave more light than a star.
Mark got out of bed. His door opened. There were a number of people in the lightless hallway. "Yerby?" he said.
A dazzling light blinded Mark. Something heavy slapped him in the chest, knocking him a step backward. The missile burst on impact, enveloping him in a cold fog. Gas gun!
"We're attacked!" Mark said. He meant to shout but his voice was a croak. He couldn't see. He grabbed his bedside chair by memory and lifted it for a weapon. Though he held his breath, the gas was obviously being absorbed through his skin. His chest was numb and he was already losing feeling in his legs.
"Attacked!" Mark gasped as he lunged forward. He started to fall. Another gas shell hit him. Mark thought somebody slugged him on top of the head besides, but that might have been the floor as blackness absorbed him completely.
Everything was suddenly in focus, but it wasn't all in the same focus. He felt the cords binding his wrists and ankles, he saw the figures carrying him and another bundle through the gate out of the Bannock compound, and he heard that other bundle snarl a curse in Yerby's voice.
A stranger was talking. "I dumped the gas from the blimp. They'll be a day refilling it. Did Woolsey get the radio?"
All those sensory inputs were clear, but it was a moment before they integrated with the consciousness that knew it was Mark Maxwell of Quelhagen. It was sort of like shaking a box of cornflakes and seeing them settle into half the original space.
Most of all, Mark tasted the aftereffects of the gas. His mouth felt as if it were full of powdered copper, an unspeakably foul sensation. The paralysis was already starting to wear off, and he'd be immune to a reapplication of the gas for the next several days; but if this taste lasted, Mark would almost rather be unconscious.
"Somebody help me!" snarled the man holding Yerby's legs. "I swear he weighs a ton!"
"Shut up, you fool!" said Berkeley Finch. Mark hadn't recognized the man's figure, but his voice was unmistakable even when tension raised its pitch. "Until we get—"
"Hey you!" somebody bellowed from the courtyard. A light shone across the kidnappers. All but one wore tan uniforms with Zenith Protective Association patches on the shoulders. The exception was Dr. Gabriel Jesilind, who hid his face in his hands as the light caught him.
"Come on!" Finch shouted. He fired a burst from his repeller. Either Finch was a lousy shot or he was more squeamish about murder than he was about kidnapping. His pellets shattered sparkling dust from the wall twenty feet to the left of the light. The cloud of ionized aluminum from the pellets' driving skirts hung in the air, glowing faintly.
An aircar started its motors fifty yards downslope. The Zeniths carrying Yerby and Mark broke into a run. Others turned and fired their gas guns toward the compound. A Zenith with a repeller shot straight in the air, and another sent a flare streaking its red arc toward the main building.
People were shouting within the compound's walls. The light vanished when Finch shot.
If somebody fires a flashgun at the kidnappers, they've got as good a chance of hitting me or Yerby as they do anybody else . . . The thought should have scared Mark. Instead it just made him wonder. Maybe he was still feeling the effects of the gas.
The aircar started forward, flattening the vegetation to all sides. Jesilind threw himself into the front seat beside the driver. The big vehicle had been lightened by removal of its roof, but it still wouldn't be able to fly normally with all the Zeniths and their captives aboard.
"Shoot!" Finch said to the woman beside him. She was loading her gas gun with ano
ther clip of fist-sized cartridges. Finch fired his repeller, this time skyward.
Three men and a woman struggled with Yerby's dead weight. Another man had to join them before they were able to dump him on the floor between the rear-facing middle bench seat and the front-facing seat in back. The pair who'd carried Mark had no difficulty in tossing him on top of the big frontiersman.
The kidnappers climbed in with nervous haste. The car's underside tilted against the dirt, bounced up, and grounded firmly when the last two Zeniths boarded. The driver cursed in despair and fed full power to his motors. The car wallowed a few inches into the air in a gout of dust and pebbles.
"We're too heavy!" the driver cried. "Colonel, you've got to leave them here!"
"Get going!" Berkeley Finch said. "If anybody's left here, it'll be you!"
The car got under way after scraping the undercarriage twice, the first time so hard that Mark thought he heard metal tear. The downslope helped. The overloaded vehicle accelerated to thirty miles an hour with the help of gravity and was able to climb, though very sluggishly, when the terrain started to rise again.
They needed surface effect to proceed. Instead of flying, the car lurched along on the blanket of air squeezed between their skid plate and the ground. The beam of the car's broad bar headlight wriggled down aisles of trees so massive that their branches had shaded out the undergrowth.
The last view Mark had of the Bannock compound was a blaze of light through the trees. He wondered which of the residents were still able to move. It seemed likely that everybody who slept on the second floor had been knocked out by gas.
"I don't generally complain about a guest, lad," Yerby rumbled, "but I'd sure appreciate you taking your toe out of my eye-socket."
"Sorry," Mark said. He had normal feeling back in his limbs; enough at least that he felt the sting of the tight cords binding him. He didn't have proper muscle control yet, but he and Yerby managed to squirm so that they were side by side rather than stacked.
Yerby tried to sit up. A Zenith hit him with the butt of her repeller. "Keep your head down or I'll blow it off!" she snarled.
"Now, now," Yerby said in apparent unconcern. "I just want to chat with my good friend Dr. Jesilind. Doc, it's been a while. And to tell the truth, I didn't expect to find you in the present company."
Yerby leaned back so that his shoulders rested on the boots of the Zeniths on the backseat. His eyes remained below the level of the car's sides.
For a moment, Mark didn't think Jesilind was going to reply. Finally the doctor twisted to look over the front seat and said, "Mr. Bannock, I'm very sorry to have to take this action, but I'm doing it in the best interests of Greenwood and for mankind in the larger sense."
"How much are they paying you, Jesilind?" Mark said. He was so angry that his voice warbled. "Since it's not a normal kidnapping, you won't just take a share of the ransom, I suppose."
"It's not a kidnapping at all, Maxwell," Berkeley Finch said. He was squeezed onto the rear seat, from which he'd been looking back the way they'd come. "We're a legally constituted posse, carrying those we've arrested back to a court of competent jurisdiction to stand trial. It's that simple."
"Yerby," Dr. Jesilind said, "I realize that you were acting with no more malice than a willful child has, but your presence on Greenwood was a disruptive influence. I couldn't let the progress of civilization be interrupted for reasons of personal friendship. I hope that some day you'll understand."
"Oh, I guess we understand each other, Doc," Yerby said. Mark wondered if Jesilind was smart enough to know that the mild words ought to terrify him.
The car was making better speed than before, mainly because the driver had learned how to handle the vehicle under the present conditions. A dirigible might barely be able to keep up with them, but the kidnappers' repellers would rip the ballonets to shreds in a burst or two. At the speed the pellets traveled, the sparks of one hitting a frame tube would ignite the escaping hydrogen into a pale blue inferno.
A Zenith had claimed he'd "dumped the gas from the blimp." Mark hoped that was true. He particularly hoped Amy wasn't pursuing in the Bannock dirigible.
From the car's heading, the Zeniths had landed at Wanker's Doodle. Their ship was probably waiting for them on the magnetic mass.
The Zenith militia were nervous. They kicked him every time they turned or tried to make a little more room than the car had. That was fair. Mark figured he deserved to be kicked. He'd really meant to set a remote link to the Doodle's landing system the way he had at the Spiker, but he'd been busy . . .
"Mr. Finch!" Mark said. "Or is it 'Colonel' that you're calling yourself now? May I ask what charges have been brought against me?"
Finch had been looking behind again. He turned. There was almost no light in the vehicle, but his face was a pale blob in greater shadows.
"An informant has identified you as one of the ringleaders of the criminal conspiracy, Maxwell," he said. "We wouldn't have gone after you alone, but we hoped to find you."
Mark began to laugh. "Well, I'm glad to hear Dr. Jesilind has been earning his pay so well," he said. "Or does he get thirty pieces of silver for each of us?"
He wouldn't have recognized that harsh, cruel voice as his own if he hadn't felt it trumpeting from his throat. They'd tied his body, but Mark Maxwell of Quelhagen was still a better man than these thugs from Zenith and the traitor who guided them!
"You see," Mark went on, "I thought perhaps my crime was preventing Dr. Jesilind from committing rape. Having seen what passes for the law on Zenith, that seemed very likely."
"Rape?" said Finch.
Yerby shifted his huge shoulders so that he could look at Mark. "Is this something you've forgot to tell me, Maxwell?" he said with no emotion at all.
"It was a matter that didn't concern you, Yerby," Mark said. "I took care of it, at your sister's request."
Yerby laughed. "Feisty little pup, ain't you, lad?" he said. "Well, I'm right glad you took care of it so good."
"I don't know anything about rape," Berkeley Finch said. He looked uneasily from Mark to the front seat.
"Your guide does, Colonel," Mark said. "Why don't you tell him about it, Doctor?"
"Attempts to blacken my name with falsehoods are of no use to you now, my man," Jesilind said in a haughty voice. "You face the justice of a civilized community."
"Oh, Doc," said Yerby Bannock mildly. "If it's your name you're worried about now, you've missed the point about as bad as you can."
"Colonel?" said a Zenith looking over the back of the vehicle. "There's somebody after us. I think it's an aircar."
"That's impossible!" Jesilind blurted. "The aircar at Bannock's doesn't work!"
Finch turned. His face was a mask of white rage in light reflected from a passing treetrunk. "What aircar?" he shouted. "You didn't say anything about an aircar!"
"It can't be Bannock's," Jesilind said. "I swear, that one doesn't work!"
The Zenith vehicle lurched into a broad lowland too boggy to support the dryland giants of the higher ground. The car bottomed once in a geyser of watery mud, but the driver didn't lose forward motion.
The going was actually a little easier for the overburdened vehicle, though they wallowed like a slowing roller coaster. The soft-leaved plants covering the ground here flattened beneath the car into a surface smoother than the forest floor. The vegetation was phosphorescent. The vehicle trembled forward in a faint green glow, as if it were being driven through the screen of a light-enhancing device.
The trees growing in the marsh had knobby surface roots that spread as much as twenty yards from their trunks. They didn't pose a real obstacle, because they were so sparsely scattered, but the car on surface effect needed to go around them.
The pursuing vehicle came into sight. It was an aircar, if you didn't care what you said. It staggered from among the treetops, apparently unable to climb over them, and quickly dropped to within a few feet of the ground. Its bow cocked up at fifteen d
egrees and kinked about the same amount to the direction of flight. It didn't have any headlight or running lights, but one of the motor nacelles glowed dull red.
"By the Lord God Almighty!" Yerby said in amused approval. "That's Desiree or I'm a—" He looked at one, then the other, seatful of his nervous captors. "—gentleman from Zenith! No way Elmont'd risk his neck like that, and George, heck, he don't know how to drive nothing!"
Mark levered himself into a sitting position. All the Zeniths but the driver were looking over the back of their vehicle. They were too worried to care what their prisoners did at the moment. The other aircar was a hundred yards away and closing the gap very slowly. A bearing or a rubbing drive fan screamed a note of utter high-pitched fury.
"I didn't think that car flew either, Yerby," Mark said. It just about didn't. Whatever metal screamed had to fly apart soon. At the speed the parts of an aircar's drive train spun, failure was likely to look like a grenade going off.
"I tell you, lad," Yerby said, "last time I flew her, she flipped and tried to squish me like a bug. If the courtyard wall hadn't caught the bow and held it up, that's just what she'd have done. But I guess maybe Desiree don't weigh so much or something."
The woman beside Finch leaned over the side of the car to give herself more room and fired her gas gun. The heavy projectile sailed through the air at least twenty feet above its target and twenty yards behind.
The recoil overbalanced the shooter; she pitched over the side. Yerby threw his full weight against her legs, pinning them within the vehicle. The Zenith dropped the gas gun, flailed for a moment, and finally managed to grasp the side of the car and pull herself in.
"Careful there, missie," Yerby said with a chuckle. "Wouldn't want to lose a sweet child like you."
"You sanctimonious prick!" the woman screamed in Finch's face. "You were going to lighten the car, weren't you? You wanted me to go overboard!"
Finch grimaced. "Go on," he ordered. "We'll have to shoot it down. Try not to kill the driver."