Patriots

by David Drake

  Mark looked at the man who'd spoken. He was Mayor Biber, who'd left or lost his aides somewhere between the barricade and here.

  "He's in the control room," a woman with a nerve scrambler said. She wore a tan Zenith Protective Association jacket, but her orange cap said CARGO and had the spaceport's arrow-in-circle logo. She was staring in puzzlement at her weapon as if trying to remember where it had come from.

  At least two sirens wailed within the port area. The tanks' intake whine was already louder, though it came from the other side of the berm.

  The pair of guards at the door to the control room carried repellers. One man looked blank. The other, a teenager, was gleefully bright-eyed and had his finger on the trigger.

  The past several months had given Mark an experience with weapons he'd never expected to need. He immediately noticed that the boy hadn't thrown the cocking switch that would drop the first pellet into the repeller's chamber.

  Mark didn't plan to tell the fellow. That mistake was very likely the only reason he hadn't accidentally blown holes in the ceiling and probably the twenty nearest people as well.

  "Let me by," Biber said curtly. "I'm the Mayor and I need to talk to Finch immediately."

  The older guard blinked. The boy's finger tightened unconsciously on the trigger.

  "It's all right," Mark said, patting the youth on the shoulder. "We're bringing reinforcements and need to know where to place them."

  Biber looked up in recognition. Until then Mark had been only a shape on the fringes of Biber's awareness. He nodded and led Mark in.

  Holographic displays covered three walls of the control room. A dozen people were present, four of them spaceport staff. Berkeley Finch stood in front of a real-time image of the port's barricaded entranceway, speaking into a radiophone with earnest desperation.

  The display was fed by cameras at the upper corners of the berm, twenty feet above ground level. Two tanks led a score of buses and trucks filled with Union soldiers.

  One of the tanks halted crossways so that its armor screened the soft-skinned vehicles from any shots that might be fired from the barricade. The other tank slid forward to clear the obstacles. Civilian vehicles, halted when the militia blocked the entrance, crunched and burst into flames beneath the tank's massive bow.

  Mark couldn't see any Zenith militiamen at the barricade. The truck with the rocket gun had been driven away. A lone officer crouched in the shadow of the thick berm, speaking into a phone—perhaps to Finch in the control room.

  "Finch, I've just come from downtown!" Biber said. "They've taken the Civil Affairs Building, your Association headquarters, and they're moving into Watch substations one by one. We can't stop them!"

  The two men had been enemies and would never be friends, but for now they had to be allies. Both appreciated Ben Franklin's advice in similar circumstances: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

  The tank pushed a wad of smoldering cars into the line of blocks and barrels. The driver pivoted his vehicle, ramming the mass out of the travel lanes and up the sixty-degree slope to the left of the roadway. Sand from crumpled barrels swirled in the whirlwind blasting beneath the tank's skirts. Some of the concrete slabs facing the end of the berm broke as the vehicle's bow brushed them.

  The mass of debris sagged down as the tank swung away, but there was still room for truckloads of soldiers to drive through the gap. The tanker was proceeding to clear the rest of the entranceway nonetheless. The militia officer had run away.

  "There aren't ten thousand Earth troops on Zenith!" Finch said. He squeezed the phone in his hand as if he wanted to crush it. "There's three million of us!"

  "Yes," said Biber. "And all those millions can't stop Giscard from sending his soldiers wherever he pleases so long as they have tanks and we don't have anything that'll more than scratch their paint. Get your people out of here, Finch!"

  Finch wiped his face with his free hand. He looked from Biber to the display, but there couldn't have been much solace there. The Alliance tank was using its bluff bow to bulldoze the remainder of the obstacles to the other side of the entranceway. The dump truck's ten tons of chassis and load skidded inexorably toward the end of the berm, pushed by a tank whose power plant could accelerate ten times that weight to fifty miles an hour. Parts tore off the truck's underside in a torrent of sparks.

  "We can't escape now," Finch said miserably. "As soon as they're through the entrance, they'll control the whole port from the inside. Those lasers can sweep us off the top of the wall if we try to climb out in some other direction."

  "Then we have to surrender," Biber said bluntly. "Hang yourself in your cell if you insist on committing suicide. If you try to fight, Giscard'll destroy the port instead of just taking it over. Zenith can't afford that, and New Paris certainly can't!"

  The James and John showed on the room's left-hand display, almost in position over the magnetic mass. The Earth troops aren't likely to blast a ship that's taking off. Things aren't quite that bad yet.

  "Gentlemen," Mark said, "I know where the tanks and artillery you need are, and I know how to get them for you. It'll cost you—"

  "Get them where?" Finch snapped.

  "On Dittersdorf," Mark said. "You won't be able to get enough troops off planet to do it, but we Woodsrunners can do it for you. You've got to pay the costs, and you'll have to agree—for Zenith! Agree on behalf of the whole planet—that Greenwood is free and self-governing from now on."

  "We can't free you from Earth," Mayor Biber said. "We can't free ourselves, you young fool!"

  He gestured toward the entrance display. The tank's bow had pushed the wreckage of the barricade halfway up the slope. The dump truck suddenly tilted downward onto its side, spilling tons of loose sand over the top of the armored vehicle. Rivers of sand flowed through the intakes on the whirlwinds the drive fans sucked down.

  The abrupt silicon hammer blows sheared half the blades from the forward impellers before burning out the motors in gouts of nacelle-devouring blue fire. The machinery screamed like a hundred-ton child being spanked.

  The tank bucked to a halt as the driver cut the rear fans before the inflowing sand could destroy them as well. The armored bulk rested squarely across the port entrance, blocking access as completely as the twenty-foot earthen wall to either side.

  "There's your chance to escape, gentlemen!" Mark said. "Now, if you accept the deal, I want one of you to come to Greenwood with me on the James and John. We'll need somebody who can speak for Zenith and your syndicate. Do you agree?"

  Mark couldn't believe what he was hearing himself say. It was as though his father or Yerby Bannock stood at his side, snarling the uncompromising demands. But it was Mark Maxwell alone—

  And he'd won. Finch and Biber exchanged glances. They were both decisive men or they wouldn't have been able to create the positions they had despite Alliance attempts to stifle all colonials to docility.

  "I'll go," said Biber. "You get your troops out, Finch. We'll need them again when we have tanks of our own."

  Finch nodded and raised his radiophone to send his militia over the berm to safety. Mark ran for the door. Mayor Biber, panting but determined, was at his heels.

  32. Some Are More Equal Than Others

  "So if you'll help us by providing the arms we need to free ourselves from Alliance tyranny," Mayor Biber said, as Amy recorded him, "Zenith will see to it that Greenwood also becomes independent. Vice-Protector Berkeley Finch has authorized me to make this pledge on behalf of the Zenith Assembly." Biber bowed deeply to the assembled settlers and stepped back from the microphone.

  Before Yerby could resume speaking to the crowd, a burly man whose fur coat and fur hat nearly doubled his bulk took one of the mikes in the crowd below. "I'm Magnus Newsome," the fellow boomed. "I got a double section on Big Bay north of the Doodle . . . and what I want to know is, is why anybody with the sense God gave a goose would trust a Zenith? If that fat bastard said the sun was
shining, I'd look up to be sure!"

  He waved skyward. Hundreds of the Greenwoods present thundered agreement.

  The sun was indeed shining, though it wasn't a day that Mark would have been outside for long if he'd been back on Quelhagen. There was no wind, but the brilliance of sunlight on snow didn't change the fact that the air temperature was well below freezing.

  The starship that had landed ten minutes before steamed sullenly. A pool of meltwater had refrozen in the dimple that hundreds of ships had hammered into hard ground. Friction and magnetic eddies had heated the hull enough during descent to vaporize the ice again now.

  A man had disembarked almost immediately. He walked toward the Spiker with the stolid determination of somebody virtually blinded by ghost images from sleep travel.

  The crowd had trampled the slope west of the tavern into muddy slush. Mark certainly wasn't going to show weakness, and nobody else seemed to mind the conditions. There wasn't any choice but to meet outdoors. No building on Greenwood could hold the five hundred people present, and the assembly was far to important to exclude anybody who wanted to attend.

  This might decide the future not only of Greenwood, but of every individual settler on the planet. The problem was, nobody could be certain what effect any particular decision would have.

  "May I speak to that?" the PA system boomed in a familiar, unexpected voice. Mark was so startled that he might have fallen forward off the wall if Amy hadn't clutched him.

  "Aye, you may," Yerby said. "And you can come up here on the platform to do it, because there's nobody on Greenwood who can advise us better. People, this is Lucius Maxwell!"

  The man from the newly landed ship was Mark's father. Yerby squatted and lifted Lucius to the eight-foot-high platform as virtually a dead weight. Mark knew that his father was doing well just to walk a quarter mile this soon after coming out of his transit capsule.

  Lucius swayed. Mark half rose, ready to hop up on the platform to help his father, but Yerby had already provided an arm.

  "Mr. Newsome's right," Lucius said. Dizziness made him look as white as a vampire's victim, but his voice was strong and vibrant. "You can't trust Zenith—not the Zenith Assembly or any members of it."

  He paused for effect, looking down at the settlers' worried faces. "But I'm advising you, I'm begging you, to do what Mayor Biber asks anyway. Because while you can't trust Zenith to help, you can trust the Atlantic Alliance to crush Greenwood and all of you individually unless it's stopped now!"

  The last words were in a ringing shout that brought a collective gasp from the assembly. Lucius let the exclamation die away, then raised his spread hands to silence the buzz of conversation that followed.

  "There's open rebellion against the Alliance on a score of worlds," Lucius continued. "I'm a delegate from Quelhagen to the parliament of free planets forming on Hestia. The Quelhagen Committee of Governance sent me here first, though, because you on Greenwood know me. Join us and other free peoples and help throw the Alliance out of our lives!"

  "Maybe you lot want to get your heads shot off!" shouted a woman Mark didn't know. "I don't see how that makes it our fight here!"

  "That's the question you all should be wondering," Lucius agreed, using the PA system to override the arguments that immediately broke out below. "And the answer is, if Earth crushes Quelhagen and the rest of the worlds that are protesting the closure of ports and factories to aid Earth manufactures, then the Alliance will try to prevent a recurrence by shipping millions of Earth citizens onto every settled world."

  He pointed to the front of the crowd. "You all remember the city they would have built on Dagmar Wately's land! There'll be a dozen cities here and hundreds on planets like Quelhagen, swamping the present citizens. The Alliance government knows the forced exiles won't get along with real settlers—and they'll make sure they don't by sequestering the best land on each planet for these modular cities. The new arrivals will have to support the Alliance or lose everything a second time to the real owners of the land!"

  Lucius gained strength with every word. Yerby had moved aside and stood arms akimbo, smiling and nodding at each point.

  "Look," Magnus Newsome said, "I'm not calling you a liar like I do the fellow from Zenith—you I don't know, Maxwell. But it don't make sense to me that Earth's going to send soldiers and what-all here if we don't get their backs up to start with. Sounds like they've got plenty on their plates already."

  "Mr. Maxwell," Dagmar Wately added through another of the microphones in the crowd, "you're a smart man and you've helped us a lot, I don't deny. If Earth sends soldiers here to fight us the way they sent soldiers to Zenith—well, they can look for a fight with me. Everybody who knows me knows that I'll hold up my end."

  The stocky woman turned to face the crowd as if daring anyone to doubt her word. In the pause, Yerby leaned to the mike on the platform and said, "All right, Dagmar, we all know you chew steel plates and spit out nails. Make your point!"

  "I'll make my point, Yerby Bannock!" Dagmar retorted. "I don't go looking for fights. I don't go gallivanting off to some mudhole to steal guns that somebody else needs for a fight that's none of mine. And I'm not going to change!"

  At least quarter the crowd sounded agreement, though there were a number of people trying to shout the sentiments down as well. Mark's father stepped back so that Yerby could take the microphone unhindered.

  When the initial reaction had bled away, the frontiersman said, "What a lot of pussies! And what a lot of fools with their heads in the sand!"

  The response was a near riot. Yerby raised his hands and bent his head to look at his boot toes rather than the crowd. Despite the PA system, it was almost two minutes before he could be heard again. "All right, all right," he resumed in apparent concession. "I don't figure I'd ever be willing to live with an Alliance soldier's boot on my neck, but I guess there's some of you that would. That's your business, I reckon."

  He cocked his head back and grinned in challenge at the assembly. "My business is simple. I figure to go to Dittersdorf and pick up hardware for some friends of mine. And I'll bet there's a hundred or two fellows on Greenwood who've got the guts to go with me! Is that true?"

  The shout of agreement wasn't general, but it was certainly the hundreds Yerby had asked for. Burly men and not a few women started to push forward to join him.

  "Yerby Bannock, you got no right to commit the whole blame planet!" Magnus Newsome said, his amplified voice barely audible over the crowd noise. "I—"

  Mark wasn't sure what Newsome meant to say next. Desiree Bannock stepped to the man's side and decked him with one punch as Amy recorded the scene.

  Democracy in action, Mark supposed. He was shivering with adrenaline, but he wasn't sure whether fear or excitement was the cause.

  Sometimes a man squatted by himself in the night with only his bedroll and a bottle. More often ten or a dozen folk sat in a circle around a lamp or a fire, passing a bottle. At a number of campsites, a couple shared their bottle in front of a small tent.

  It bothered Mark that booze was the only social constant he'd found on Greenwood. He knew that life was hard here and that liquor was as much a painkiller as it was recreation, but he knew also that being drunk worsened the problems while it masked them.

  But that was none of Mark Maxwell's business. Like Yerby's relationship with Desiree, Mark had both his opinions and the sense to keep them to himself.

  "Hey, Yerby!" said one of six men around a fire of oil burning in a tub of sand. "Have a sip of this!"

  "Don't mind if I do, Jace," Yerby said as he took the bottle. "Wanted to introduce my friends the Maxwells, Lucius and Mark. We'd be in a right pickle now without the two of them helping us mind our step. And that's my sister Amy with the camera."

  The firelight made the settlers' faces even ruddier than the liquor had. To Mark they looked sweaty and cheerful, though mud was spilling from all four sides of the groundsheet on which they sat.

  Mud seemed to be
the universal fact of Greenwood. When Mark flew over the forest in the daytime, it was a green carpet, and even tonight Tertia's light turned the ground at a distance into a plate of beaten silver, but close up there was always mud.

  "Honored, sirs," Jace said. "This is my Uncle Jerry Burns, my cousin Chris, and Bob, Ben and Obed, my brothers."

  "Have a drink!" Jerry said brightly, holding out a bottle of his own. "Tell me if this ain't better stuff than the eyewash Jace brews!"

  Lucius took the bottle and lifted it to his lips without first wiping the glass with his palm. "Whoo-ee!" he said, handing the liquor to Mark. "Guess I'll let you know what I think about the flavor after I get some feeling back in my mouth. You know how to run your batch strong, friend!"

  Mark tilted the bottle upward, blocking the opening with his tongue. This was the twentieth campsite they'd paused at as Yerby led them through the gathering. Even Yerby wasn't taking more than a mouthful from each bottle that came by.

  "Be sure to stick around tomorrow," Yerby said to the men around the fire. "We'll be choosing delegates to send to Hestia. If there's going to be a federation of free planets, we can't afford for Greenwood to be left out. Lucius here'll explain it all tomorrow."

  "You want some of this, miss?" Jace said, offering Amy the bottle Yerby had returned. "It's a mite strong for a girl like you, I guess."

  "Don't mind if I do!" Amy said sharply. She lifted the bottle and, to Mark's horror, really took a swig. He saw the bubble rise through the fire-reddened liquor.

  "Heck, Yerby," another of the seated men said. "You pick who you want. That's good enough for me!"

  "Hey, but look," Jace said, patting the ground beside him. "You know Chink Ericsson, don't you? Set for a minute and let me tell you about the problem we're having with him. Can you do that?"

  Yerby glanced back. Lucius nodded minusculely. Yerby squatted in the circle of settlers, listening intently as they talked. Lucius, Mark, and Amy moved a few steps back into shadow.