Patriots Read online

  "It feels as if I washed my mouth out with full-strength lye," Amy said in a tiny voice.

  "My tongue's numb," Lucius said. "I hope you didn't think I was really drinking, Amy. Nor Mark either, since he's still standing and he wouldn't be if he'd been swallowing what he pretended to be."

  "Dad?" Mark said. He spoke quickly, before he lost the courage to say what he needed to. "Do you really think the Alliance would move troops and settlements here if Greenwood kept out of the fight? It wasn't Earth, it was people from Zenith who were going to plant the city on Dagmar's land."

  Amy raised her camera. Mark shook his head quickly, harshly. "Not this," he said. "This is just between us."

  "I don't know, Mark," Lucius said, meeting his son's eyes. "I think it's not unlikely."

  This was their first chance to talk since the assembly had closed at dusk. Lucius had suggested to Yerby that they shake some hands to make sure the assembly wouldn't balk the next day at the notion of sending delegates to the parliament on Hestia. Yerby didn't need much urging to socialize and drink with his fellows.

  "But not a certainty like you told people today," Mark said. He didn't know whether he was angry or just confused; and, though he hadn't really been drinking, by lifting so many bottles to his lips he'd probably absorbed enough alcohol to affect him.

  "It's a certainty for Quelhagen," Lucius said quietly. "I'm here representing Quelhagen, son."

  Mark grimaced. "I hate to lie, even by shading the truth," he said. "Greenwood has more in common even with Zenith than it does with Earth, I know that! If we didn't break away now, we'd have to do it later and it might be worse then. But to lie to people who trust me . . ."

  "I haven't heard you lie, Mark," Amy said. "Or your father either. You have an opinion about what's going to happen. Maybe you're right, and maybe you haven't shared it with—" She nodded toward the group around the nearby fire. "—Jace Burns and his kin. But you just heard Obed say that whoever my brother wanted to send to Hestia was fine with them. There's a lot here who feel that way—and the ones who don't, you know they'll have a chance to speak tomorrow too."

  Somebody near the wall of the tavern fired a flashgun at Tertia. Some of the concentrated light might actually reach the moon in a few seconds. The nasty crack of the discharge had scarcely died away before a dozen other folk also shot into the sky.

  Mark shivered. "I'm afraid to be responsible for everything that could go wrong," he whispered.

  "You're right to be afraid," Lucius said. "But very generally the worst decision possible is to refuse to make a decision at all and just let events occur by themselves."

  He smiled wanly. "I don't think that's likely to happen in an environment that includes Yerby Bannock, though," he went on. "I'm trying to guide him, and the two of you are also. But don't ever imagine that we're pushing Yerby in a direction he wouldn't have gone without us. Don't ever be that arrogant."

  "It was terrible on Zenith," Mark said, almost to himself.

  "It's terrible on Quelhagen," Lucius agreed. "It'll be even more terrible when we have weapons to fight back with, but at least then there's the possibility that it'll become better in the future. Until there's revolutionary change, conditions on every 'protected' planet will continue getting bit by bit worse."

  "Mark would be a good choice for delegate to Hestia," Amy said.

  "No," said Mark. He didn't realize how strongly he felt about it until he'd spoken. "No! I'll be going with Yerby to Dittersdorf."

  "There's more to a revolution than fighting, boy," Lucius said. His tone was suddenly as coldly angry as Mark had ever heard it.

  "I know that," Mark said, straightening to attention, "but there's fighting too. Sir—Dad. I don't want to explain when I'm your age why I let other people fight for me. I know what you've said about only butchers and fools being fit to be soldiers."

  Lucius nodded grimly. "That's right," he said. "But did I ever explain why that was? Because if other kinds of people become soldiers, they find themselves doing things they'll regret for the rest of their lives!"

  "You're not going to change my mind!" Mark said. He stared at a campfire three hundred yards beyond the tip of his father's left ear.

  Lucius laughed with something close to humor. All the cold passion had vanished from his voice. "I'm not even trying, son," he said. "But when you were complaining a moment ago about the way we weren't telling—" He gestured. "—your neighbors everything we thought we knew . . . do you like it better now that I have tried to tell you all the things I think I know about this subject?"

  Mark chuckled and put his arms around his father, giving him a brief squeeze. Nobody on Quelhagen would have been that demonstrative, but they weren't on Quelhagen now.

  "Mark?" Lucius said. "If you like, I'll arrange for you to become a lieutenant in the Quelhagen Defense Forces. The force will certainly grow rapidly, and opportunities for promotion will be considerable." He grinned without humor. "For those officers who survive."

  "All right, I'll talk to him," Yerby said in a loud voice. He lurched to his feet, looking around for his companions. "Let's go find Chink Ericsson, Lucius. You can help me bring him around. If we start having wars of our own on Greenwood, we'll never get shut of the Alliance!"

  "We're coming," Mark said. In a softer voice he added, "Thanks, Dad, but my business is on Greenwood. And I guess Dittersdorf."

  33. A Nice Day to Visit

  The sun was shining. It was pale because there was a high overcast, but it was shining.

  Mark stood in the hatchway of the Chevy Chase and tried to count. This was the . . . The fifth? The sixth? Anyway, he'd been on Dittersdorf a number of times, and never before could he have sworn that the sun ever shone over the spaceport.

  He'd have taken it for a good omen, except that his vision was as fuzzy as it usually was when he come out of a transit capsule. This time trying to focus his eyes gave him a headache as if trucks were driving over his skull, crushing it against a concrete roadway.

  The Bloemfontein must have landed some hours earlier, because the Woodsrunners in the group walking toward the Chevy Chase showed no signs of disorientation from their voyage. The third ship of the little fleet, the Santaria, wasn't here yet. She might not arrive for days if the glitch with her oxygen system took longer to fix than her captain hoped.

  Three ships and fifty-three personnel, all that the commandeered vessels had transit capsules for. There was no point in trying to carry more people without capsules. They wouldn't be sane enough to speak coherently until they'd had a month on the ground to recover.

  That wasn't much of an army for a raid on which a multi-planet rebellion depended, but it was what there was available.

  "Mark, can you help me guide Yerby?" Amy asked in a faint whisper. Her brother walked like a long-legged zombie, veering from one side of the corridor to the other with each step. Amy's grip wouldn't have been enough to keep him from going right out the edge of the hatch.

  "I drank a bottle of Chink Ericsson's brew before we lifted," Yerby said in a dead voice. His eyes were closed. "Sloe gin, he called it. Slow death is more like. I'll tell the world, I'm sick as a dog!"

  "Let's wait here, Yerby," Mark said, touching the big man's arms. "Dagmar and some other of the people from the Bloemfontein are coming over."

  Yerby's eyes opened. They looked alert, if bloodshot. "Right," he said. "Dagmar! Did you capture the control room?"

  "What's there to capture?" Dagmar said with a snort. "But here's the controller, if that's what you mean."

  Half the two dozen men with Dagmar—and one other woman—weren't from Greenwood. The several strangers in rainsuits were locals, but the others looked and dressed with the variety of folk who happened to have been in the port when the Woodsrunners arrived.

  "Look, we don't handle any military traffic here, buddy," said the controller, a young man and ill at ease. "They've got their own port over on Minor. But I can tell you, there was a ship landed there last week, not the
usual supply run, and everybody here figures it must've been full of reinforcements."

  A man in the colorful one-piece rainsuit that marked those who had to live on this rain-sodden world nodded solemnly. "Stands to reason Earth's going to build up the fort on Minor when hell's a-popping right across settled space," he said. "Not much that happens anywhere that we don't hear about it on Dittersdorf!"

  Mark opened his mouth to sneer, "Dittersdorf, hub of the universe." He held his tongue because he realized that all he'd be doing was trying to hurt the locals in revenge for the way they'd hurt him—by saying something that they thought was the truth, and that he didn't want to hear.

  "We got all the transport we could find, Yerby," Dagmar volunteered. "That ain't much—two aircars and a surface-effect truck the guy says'll still run, but I dunno. They don't have flyers nor blimps here, it's mostly wheels on the ground. Which don't help us a lot getting across the water to this fort."

  "Let's go inside," Mark said. "I want to check something in the dead storage room."

  "Say, you know they got showers here?" a Woodsrunner said. He probably lived in a tent or lean-to on Greenwood and the luxury awed him. "And they run all the time!"

  "Water goes at a discount on Dittersdorf," Amy muttered grimly. "But we're not going to be here long. One way or the other."

  The party strode toward the caravansary entrance. "Now, I guess we can go scout out this fort, Yerby," Zeb Randifer said, "but that's likely to warn them, don't you think? Besides, I figure they'll just shoot first and ask questions later. From what these boys been telling us—"

  His thumb hooked to the locals and the off-planet travelers with them. They nodded gloomy agreement. Mark was quite sure that nobody in the whole port except him and Yerby had ever visited Minor, but there's never a shortage of people to swear to a rumor of disaster.

  Though if an unscheduled starship had landed at the port, then the rumor really did have some substance.

  "Don't worry yourself," Yerby said as they entered the caravansary. The building felt wet, though the humidity inside couldn't possibly have been higher than that of the open air. "I been in the place before and I'll go again. You can't tell what's happening in a place like that from the outside."

  He stretched mightily and added, "So long as I'm around, Zeb, I don't guess anybody'll need you to go stick your nose where somebody might nip it off."

  "Hey, you've got no call to say that!" Randifer protested. "I volunteered for this just the same as you did!"

  "We're going to take a look through the abandoned property," Mark said to the watchman. The storage room's door was closed, but the padlock wasn't in place.

  The watchman shrugged. He wasn't a man Mark remembered from previous trips though Dittersdorf. Sight of Amy had made his eyes widen, though he'd probably seen his share of women like Dagmar Wately here on the men's side. Mark didn't know Dagmar well, but he was quite certain that she didn't worry about sexual harassment any more than Yerby did.

  "What sort of communication with the fort do you have, sir?" Amy asked the controller. Her voice sounded strong, though her face was still pinched.

  Mark found that having to think cleared his mind faster than he otherwise recovered from transit. Maybe that was true for Amy as well.

  "No communication at all, miss," the controller said. "We don't need to talk to them, and they don't want to talk to us."

  Mark began lifting boxes of ragged clothing out of the storage room and setting them carefully on the floor of the common area. It isn't there. He wanted to hurl the trash out of the way, but he was irrationally convinced that if he let Fate know he was desperate, Fate would punish him.

  "Look, I'm not going to tell you fellows what to do," another local said, "but what I say is, you're going to get yourselves killed if you so much as fly over Minor the way things are."

  "Well, I'm glad you're not trying to tell me what to do," Yerby said, "because I am going to head over to Minor myself and see what's going on in the fort."

  Something rattled in the box Mark lifted. He reached into a jumble of boots—individuals, not pairs—and came out with the hologram reader he'd noticed on his first visit to the caravansary. He switched the sealed unit on. The seed catalog's opening images appeared, a profusion of flowers and succulent vegetables.

  "Bingo!" Mark called. He turned, holding up the reader. Everybody was staring at him.

  "You're not going to go, Yerby," he said. "You'd be recognized even by somebody as dotty as Captain Easton. But I won't have any trouble passing for a seed salesman like the poor guy who brought this here however many years ago!"

  "And I," said Amy calmly, "will go along to make sure they won't connect Mark with their visitors six months past."

  Dagmar Wately looked from Amy to Mark. "You know," she said, "it might work. If they don't just blow you to vapor the first time they see a speck on their sensor screens."

  "Well, if they do that," Zeb Randifer said judiciously, "then we know what we're up against."

  34. Back to the Funny Farm

  Amy circled the fortress slowly, a hundred feet in the air. She was carefully avoiding the appearance of being sneaky or threatening. "I didn't really think they'd just shoot us out of the air without warning," she said in a small voice.

  "Me neither," Mark agreed heartily. Of course, the car's radio might not work, leaving the fort with no way to warn intruders that they were about to shoot.

  "Though I wasn't sure they could warn us," she added. "I don't trust the radio." Great minds running in the same direction, Mark thought. Nervous minds, at any rate.

  Amy was driving to provide an excuse for her presence. It might have strained the credulity of even Captain Easton to believe that a Terran seed company had sent a pair of salespeople over so many light-years. This car was a twin-fan design, inherently unstable despite stub wings that worked only in forward flight. It was in better shape than the vehicle Yerby'd rented six months before, though, and Amy was a better driver. Less ham-fisted, at any rate.

  "There he is," Mark said, pointing to the figure hoeing energetically in the garden to the west of the fort's outer wall. "It must be Easton, I mean."

  Amy brought them in fast. Hovering in a two-fan aircar was like riding a bicycle along a tightrope—and just as likely to be fatal if you screwed up.

  "Don't crush his plants!" Mark warned. He remembered the kids' nickname for Easton and added, "Especially his cabbages."

  Amy sniffed. She turned the car ninety degrees just before touching down, aligning the undercarriage perfectly with the outer furrow and a foot beyond it. Easton looked up with a puzzled expression.

  "Good evening, Captain!" Mark called as he hopped out of the vehicle. "I'm with Sunrise Seeds of Vermont, and you're clearly just the sort of discerning customer we're looking for. Have we got a deal for you!"

  "Seeds?" repeated Easton on a note of rising hope. "No, let me come to you, young man. You might . . ."

  Easton hopped spryly to Mark's side, the tools in his belt jingling. His red waterproof boots didn't so much as brush a leaf of his carefully tended plants.

  Mark held his catalog reader so the captain could view the projected images. He ran his thumb over the index button and said, "Have you ever seen more gorgeous examples of—"

  Problem. Mark didn't have the slightest idea of what the projected flowers might be.

  "Heliotrope!" Captain Easton gasped. "Hellebore! Ageratum!"

  Not a problem after all. As for "gorgeous," Mark had never seen a catalog image that wasn't at least as pretty as any example of the object that existed in the sidereal universe.

  "Perhaps we could go inside, sir?" Mark prompted. "I'm sure you'll want to take some time with these, these riches."

  "By heaven I will!" Easton said. He started for the armored access port in the wall nearby.

  "Perhaps the gentleman would like to fly into the courtyard, sir," Amy suggested with sugary deference. "It seemed to me, humble driver though I am, that
there are wonderful expanses for sheltered planting within these walls."

  Easton paused with his foot raised for another step. He turned his head. "In the courtyard?" he repeated.

  "Our prices are very reasonable," Mark said. "I'm confident that Sunrise Seeds can undercut the prices you're now paying by . . ."

  He raised his eyebrow. "Am I correct in supposing that all your supplies come by special order from Earth?" he asked.

  "Except for some of the bulb stock that provides me with its natural increase," Easton agreed. "I have a long-term plan to border the external wall of the fort in paper-white narcissus. Though of course that's very long-term."

  Mark waved his hand airily. "Sunrise Seeds has built a warehouse on Dittersdorf Major to supply this entire arm of the galaxy, sir," he said. "For no more than the cost of what you have in the ground here—"

  He nodded toward the garden, about an acre and a half of varied plantings. The growth was lush. The plot must have good soil, and Mark was sure there was a sufficiency of rain everywhere on Dittersdorf.

  "For no more than your present cost," he continued, "you can have enough narcissus to plant a border three feet wide. And our narcissi are of particularly white paper, I might add."

  Amy winced. "Paper?" said Easton. His puzzlement turned to a frown. "Ah, you're joking. Well, have your joke, young man, but I trust that by the time you're my age, you'll have learned that plants are no fit subject for humor!"

  "I beg your pardon, sir," Mark said contritely. Apparently paper-white narcissi weren't paper after all. "I assure you that our prices are no joke, though. Ah—do you have the labor on hand to carry out a beautification project of such magnificence?"

  "Come on inside," Easton said brusquely. "Never mind the courtyard for now. We'll deal with that later. We've got to see Hounslow at once. He'll supply the labor!"

  Easton popped through the access door like a rabbit diving for its burrow an inch ahead of snapping jaws. "You know," his voice drifted back as Mark followed Amy down the ladder, "I could do a two-level border with narcissi against the wall and a row of erythronium on the outside. Or even three-level . . ."