by David Drake
"Very well," Candace continued. "You realize, I'm sure, that the above discussion applies only to settlers in good faith. Speculators who bought up large tracts on grants which they knew to be invalid have no rights under any agreement we reach here."
"What's he mean?" Dagmar said to Mark. "I'm no speculator!"
"Ms. Wately's tract is of twenty-five hundred square miles," Mark said to Candace instead of answering Dagmar directly. "That's a typical holding for Greenwood."
"That's absurd," said Finch. He looked from Mark to the counselor. "That's absolutely absurd! You can't call a tract that large a homestead."
"Are we to understand that you'll disallow Ms. Wately's holdings, then?" Mark said. He fully intended to blow off any possible deal, but he couldn't afford to have it look that way. "In effect, to disallow all the present holdings, despite lip service to the contrary?"
"Large homesteads are normal on undeveloped worlds," Candace said coolly. "Mr. Finch, we're discussing a planet, not a tract in the middle of New Paris. I think we can allow holdings of up to the stated figure—" His face rotated to Mark. "—so long as they're undivided tracts held by resident individuals. Yes?"
"Please continue," Mark said. He was acting the part of a cautious negotiator who wasn't willing to commit to anything until he was sure the whole deal was on the table.
Candace nodded in grudging approval. "And there will be an indemnity from criminal and civil prosecution for actions taken by parties on both sides during the past, shall we say, six months," he said. "I think that covers the relevant points. Do you require further clarification, Mr. Maxwell?"
"If we were to agree to the offered arrangement," Mark said, "we'd be signing on behalf of the Greenwood Council, an elective body."
"Nothing of the sort," Candace said, flatly but without anger. The counselor had obviously expected this ploy and would have been disappointed if Mark hadn't tried it. "You'll be signing as representatives chosen ad hoc by Greenwood settlers to negotiate the planet's return to peaceful authority. For this matter only."
He smiled coldly at Mark. "No permanent citizens' body is legal without the express agreement of the relevant Alliance authorities. Without attempting to predict the future, I would judge it very doubtful that Protector Giscard or his vicar will form such a body on Greenwood, given the problems that have arisen—" Candace looked at Vice-Protector Finch. "—on Zenith and elsewhere, when local councils attempt to usurp power properly wielded by the Alliance alone."
Finch's eyes narrowed; Biber's expression hardened. Candace meant powers like the allocation of taxes raised from the citizens of the "protected" planet, Mark knew. Finch and Biber were both Zenith patriots . . . but as with Ms. Macey the night before, the most important question for them at the moment was their chance for a profit. They held their tongues.
"We can accept that," Biber said. "It seems to me that crimes are crimes and shouldn't be papered over in a land deal, but I can live with it."
He looked at Finch. Finch nodded curtly, unwilling to give his rival the courtesy of verbal agreement.
"Look," Dagmar said to Mark. "What's he saying about my land? And Bannock's, and the rest of us—what we bought?"
"You'll still own that land," Mark said. "You'll even be able to buy more if you're ready to pay these gentlemen's price."
He nodded across the table toward Biber and Finch, feeling the corners of his mouth spread in a slight grin. "But there'll be no way you can prevent them from putting a modular city down on any tract they own, even if that's right next to your property."
Candace nodded cool agreement. His bony fingers were crossed in front of him on the table. The Zenith investors were trying not to stare, but their faces showed a focused intensity. Colonel Wordsworth merely glowered at the whole gathering.
"But it won't be on my tract?" Dagmar said. "That's what you're saying, right?"
"Yes," said Mark. "That's what I'm saying."
"Well," said Dagmar, "I got no problem with that. I never asked to run somebody else's business. I just want them to keep their nose out of mine. That's pretty much how everybody feels. That's why we took up land on a place like Greenwood, I guess."
She looked from the investors to Candace. "So?" she said. "There's something we sign or what?"
The people who settled a new world—the survivors, at least—were folk who thought in terms of the immediate future. They didn't have time to worry about crowding and pollution that would come ten years down the road unless they took preventative measures now. Getting through the next winter was too pressing a problem.
"I think," said Mark, "that we'll sleep on the matter overnight, madame and gentlemen."
The investors' expressions hardened, but Candace allowed himself a bare smile. The counselor would have been horrified had the Greenwood contingent accepted the offer so quickly, even though that was the result he and Protector Giscard wanted.
Dagmar Wately looked in question at Mark but didn't speak. Mark continued, "If the parties are of the same mind tomorrow, then perhaps we can meet again to discuss the wording of the agreement."
What right had Mark Maxwell to put his judgment over that of folks like Dagmar Wately? He and Amy and maybe Yerby might be the only people on Greenwood who wouldn't welcome this compromise. Most of the settlers would willingly trade their planet's future for what they had now in their hands.
Maybe Mark had no right at all. But the Woodsrunners had sent him to this negotiation because they trusted his judgment in an affair they didn't understand themselves. So be it. They would get Mark Maxwell's best judgment.
Candace nodded approval. "Shall we say the same time and place, then?" he asked with a lifted eyebrow.
Mark got up from his chair and looked out the window. Crowds were gathering at many points in the park and streets below, but they didn't have the edgy violence of the mob the night before.
Colonel Wordsworth walked to the window beside him. "What in the name of heaven is going on?" she snarled. She turned and moved for the door at a pace just short of running. "This utterly and totally damned planet!"
"I'm going with her," Mark muttered to Dagmar.
In fact they all followed Wordsworth as fast as they could, Candace included. Under the present conditions on Zenith, any unusual event could be the fuse that ignited real trouble.
The colonel was still in the lead when the group reached the bronze-and-glass street doors. She barged through and skidded to a surprised halt outside.
A platoon of Alliance troops manned a sandbagged checkpoint in front of the Civil Affairs Building. Instead of tensely holding their guns and gas bombs, the soldiers were chortling in small groups. Holographic images quivered in the air before them.
"Let me see that!" Wordsworth said to the nearest group. The sergeant in the middle snapped to attention, startled by the colonel's sudden arrival. He handed over a thimble-sized cube. When its sides were squeezed, it projected a moving hologram for thirty seconds.
"Here," called a woman wearing the silver-winged uniform of a New Paris delivery service. She tossed a handful of the projection cubes over the sandbag barricade to Wordsworth and the negotiators.
Mark picked up a cube with the rest of them, mostly to check the resolution. It was clever of Ms. Macey to hire a local service to distribute them. . . .
He squeezed the cube. Heinrich Biber, stark naked except for a coating of mud, twitched miserably in the jet of the firehose washing him clean. His face was readily identifiable to anyone who'd seen the Mayor before. So, Mark suspected, were the Mayor's other attributes.
"You know," a female soldier said to her fellows, "I've seen Pekingese dogs that were hung better than he is!"
Gales of laughter came from the street and park. Mayor Biber had wealth and power, but he wasn't the sort of man his fellow-citizens weren't willing to laugh at. Chances were that out-of-work Zeniths disliked the local moneymen about as much as they did the Alliance troops.
"Who did this?" Bibe
r screamed. He flung a projection cube to the ground and jumped on where it would have been if it hadn't bounced away. "Who?"
"Why, Heinrich," Berkeley Finch said through the faint curtain of the hologram he was projecting over and over. "I now see an aspect of you I'd never imagined!"
Biber tried to throttle him. Finch backed away, still laughing. A pair of soldiers caught the Mayor's arms.
"It doesn't really matter," Mark said. His soul trembled but he was glad to note that his voice stayed steady. "You've already agreed that Yerby and me and all the Woodsrunners will keep our possessions on Greenwood, Mayor Biber."
Biber shook himself loose. "You," he said in a venomous voice, pointing at Mark.
"In fact," Mark said, "you've made us incredibly rich because of the way land prices will shoot up when you begin bringing in settlers by the tens of thousands."
"You think I'm going to make you rich after what you and your other swine did to me in that swamp?" Biber screamed. He turned to Candace. "There's no deal!" he said. "There's no deal but that every one of the bastards on Greenwood now gets scooped up in their underwear and dumped on an asteroid!"
"Biber, you don't speak for the syndicate," Berkeley Finch said in a worried voice. He'd suddenly realized the wider ramifications of what had just happened.
"And the syndicate doesn't speak for me if it plans to compromise with these grubby lice!" the mayor replied.
Candace tried to step between the men. Biber pushed the counselor back out of the way. "I'm telling you, Finch, I'm going to clear the tracts I own of all trespassers, and if—" He turned to Candace again. "—Protector Kiss-My-Ass Giscard has a problem with that, it's really too bad!"
Biber stumped out of the checkpoint, slapping at the projection cubes in the hands of the people he passed. Colonel Wordsworth watched him go with a speculative look.
"Well, Dagmar," Mark said to his fellow delegate. "I don't think we need stay on Zenith any longer. It appears that an agreement won't be possible after all."
He nodded to Counselor Candace, who seemed to be in shock.
31. Off the Deep End
Zenith's rich, red-orange dawn looked like the mouth of hell backlighting the new barricade on the spaceport approach road. As the taxi carrying Mark and Dagmar pulled up, soldiers backed a dump truck loaded with sand to the other side of the swinging crossbar and shut off the engine.
"What's going on?" the taxi driver called through his open window, sounding worried as well as angry at the delay.
The barricade was a hasty improvisation of sand-filled fuel drums and concrete blocks. It closed three of the four travel lanes; the dump truck now filled the other. Flashing emergency lights had made the structure look like a construction site as the taxi approached.
Mark stuck his head out to be sure. The folk at the barricade wore the tan uniforms of the Zenith Protective Association. A number of the troops looking worriedly over the line of drums carried repellers and other projectile weapons. The gun on the back of a pickup behind the barricade fired two-inch-rockets through a charger-fed launching tube.
The dump truck began to settle with a loud hiss. The vehicle had a central inflation pump. The militiamen were using it to vent all the air from the tires so it was impossible to roll the truck out of the way.
"Hey!" cried the taxi driver. "What're you doing?"
"Ms. Wately," said Mark, formal because he was frightened. "I think we'd better get out. We may have to leave our gear."
An officer with red shoulder boards on her tunic ducked under the crossbar and walked to the taxi. More traffic was backing up. Horns blew in a variety of timbres.
"I can buy more clothes," Dagmar said as she and Mark got out of opposite sides of the vehicle with their hand luggage. "So long as I don't get my head blown off first."
"There's no more traffic into the port!" the militia officer snarled. She was young, petite, and obviously as scared as Mark was. "Go on, get away from here! There's an Alliance column on the way and we're going to stop them!"
During the night everything on Zenith had changed as suddenly as a trap shuts. Mark didn't know whether there'd been a precipitating incident or if the general tension had suddenly coalesced into war the way rain forms from water vapor. When heavy gunfire began to shake the city, he and Dagmar headed for the starport.
They stepped toward the barricade. Mark had paid the driver when they got in, the only way the man would agree to drive through New Paris and the chance of trouble at any instant.
"Stop!" the officer cried to Mark. "I've got my orders!"
She wore a handgun of some sort in a covered holster on her wide belt. Her hands groped for the weapon, but she couldn't seem to get the flap open.
"Don't get your knickers in a twist, sister," Dagmar snapped. She was either a great actress or a lot more relaxed than Mark was. "We're Greenwood citizens going home. This fight is nothing to do with us."
"Madame Captain," Mark said, "your orders are to stop vehicles. We're going to Greenwood to bring help back here to you."
It was the best lie he could think of at the spur of the moment. Whatever happened, it didn't look like Greenwood need worry about another Zenith invasion any time soon.
A fast-moving aircar, low but nonetheless airborne and therefore in breach of the emergency regulations, came from the direction of New Paris. It looked as though the driver planned to cross at the normal entranceway instead of rising to hop over the high earthen berm surrounding the port proper.
The crew of the gun on the pickup fired three rockets in quick succession. Instead of a roar, the rounds blasted from the launching tube with a crack!/crack!/crack! that made Mark grab his ears as he hunched over.
If the militia meant the shots as a warning, they cut it closer than Mark would have recommended. One of the sizzling green balls snapped within arm's length of the vehicle's canopy. The car skidded in the air as the driver not only backed his fan nacelles but banked to use the vehicle's whole underside as a brake. The aircar settled to the shoulder of the road beside the taxi.
Heinrich Biber popped out of the back like the cuckoo from a clock, shrieking, "What are you doing? I could have been killed!"
Biber was in a police service uniform like the one he'd worn on Greenwood. The man and woman who got out of the vehicle with him, and the driver who stayed at the controls, were members of the New Paris Watch also.
"Colonel Finch says there's no entry to the port," the militia officer said. "There's a column of Alliance troops coming to seize control."
"I know there's an Alliance column coming, you idiot!" Biber said. "They've got tanks and you can't possibly stop them! I couldn't get through to Finch any other way, so I've come to warn him in person!"
Mark saw metal gleaming rosy orange a mile and a half away where the spaceport approach road left the main highway. By concentrating, he could feel the low-frequency drumming of hundred-ton tanks that pounded the highway with the cushion of pressurized air that supported them.
"I think," he said, "that it's too late even for that, Mayor. Dagmar, come on—run! And the rest of you run too, if you're smart, because those tanks will slide right over you even if they don't bother to shoot!"
Mark dodged around the dump truck, looking over his shoulder to make sure Dagmar was following. She was. They ran for the terminal building a quarter mile away. Mark could already hear the tank intakes shrieking like a flock of approaching harpies.
Two huge crawlers were moving the James and John, the ship that would carry Mark on the first leg of the journey back to Greenwood, toward a magnetic mass near the terminal. The James and John wasn't scheduled to launch until local midnight, but Captain Cobey obviously planned to leave Zenith as quickly as he could get the starship in order.
Mark felt the same way, so he didn't figure he could blame Cobey. He still felt a flash of anger to realize the captain would have abandoned his passengers if they hadn't headed for the port before dawn.
Folk moving with the a
imless busyness of ants from a disturbed hill swarmed about the doors to the terminal building. Spaceport staff, passengers and crew from ships in the port, and dozens of men and women in uniform or partial uniforms watched, shouted to one another, and wandered in or out. Two city buses, a dozen trucks, and scores of lighter vehicles including aircars were parked around the building in defiance of normal regulations.
Dagmar nodded at the chaos. "To blazes with that!" she said. "There's the James and John. Let's get aboard now. Nobody's going to be checking exit documents today."
Mark eyed the starship. The crawlers wouldn't have it on the mass for another twenty minutes, and even abbreviated liftoff preparations would take ten or fifteen minutes more. To advise Yerby and the Greenwood Council, Mark needed to know as much as possible about what was happening on Zenith.
Besides, he was curious.
"Dagmar," he said, "you go to the ship. Don't let them take off without me. I'll see what's happening in there and be with you in a few minutes."
Or not at all. Well, there was a risk in entering the terminal building, but the only certainty in life was that it ended sometime.
Mark trotted toward the entrance. Before Dagmar can object, he thought, but that was a remnant of his Quelhagen attitudes. Dagmar was a frontier settler who didn't figure it was her business if her neighbors risked their lives.
The rumble of the approaching tanks shook the starport as badly as the high-frequency hum of starships landing. Mark didn't hear any shots. He couldn't imagine anybody firing small arms at the impenetrable bulk of the Union vehicles, but everything happening today was beyond Mark's previous experience.
It was beyond the previous experience of everybody in the spaceport and probably most of the soldiers in the Alliance column as well. That made it as dangerous as playing catch with live grenades.
Mark squeezed through the doorway crowded with people uncertain whether to go in or out. "Let me through!" shouted the man behind him as they shoved together into the wailing room. Bits of clothing and equipment lost or broken in the nervous confusion littered the terrazzo floor. "Where's Finch? I need to speak with Colonel Finch!"