Patriots

13. How the Other Half Lives

The spaceport at New Paris could land a dozen starships simultaneously, and there were covered storage facilities for over a hundred. Mark was too proud of Quelhagen to say that New Paris had a better port than Landingplace, but he had to admit it was impressive.

Mark held Amy's hand in a gesture of mutual support. She'd mastered the biofeedback techniques Mark taught her, but interstellar travel was still a disorienting experience. At least the ramp had handrails.

Attendants were helping the three investors to a limousine like the one in the ship's hold. Daniels and his fellows didn't intend to wait for cargo to be unloaded. Three less ornate aircars waited to take away the Greenwood defendants and the investors' servants.

"Wait a minute," Mark muttered. Four recently landed large vessels remained on the magnetic masses. One of them was still in the process of discharging cargo and passengers. The people disembarking were gray-uniformed Atlantic Alliance troops, and a huge ground-effect tank was being lowered from the hold by a mobile derrick and the starship's own crane.

Amy opened her recorder and focused on the troopship. The self-imposed duty seemed to steady her. Mark by contrast felt distinctly queasy. The four ships together must have held well over a thousand men, even with the heavy equipment they brought with them. He wondered if the Protector of Quelhagen was getting reinforcements also.

Yerby, first of the Greenwood defendants besides Mark to drag himself out of his transit capsule, clanged into the right handrail and shook the ramp. He bounced left, bounced right with his next step, and probably would have caromed like a cue ball into Mark and Amy if they hadn't grabbed his arms and gently helped him to the ground.

"Holy Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior," Yerby muttered. "Boy, I think there was something wrong with that last batch of whiskey I got from Blaney."

He noticed the troops disembarking. They felt the effects of transit too. Soldiers shambled without any order. Individuals stumbled, hunched, and squeezed their heads to relieve the pain. Either the Alliance didn't teach effective biofeedback techniques, or they didn't teach the techniques effectively.

"Whoo-ee!" Yerby said. "Now, there's the soldiers I was looking for. Should've come to Zenith instead of Dittersdorf, huh?"

"They wouldn't come to Greenwood if you invited them, Yerby," Amy said in a hard voice. "The worst possible result would be if they did come, though. I'll never forgive you if you go over and talk to them."

Yerby watched the troops with an odd smile; not the broad devil-may-care grin Mark had seen often in the past. "Guess they could go through us Woodsrunners pretty quick with those tanks," he said. "Though it could be there's some tricks they don't know about being out with just himself and a couple million trees."

The frontiersman turned to Mark and Amy. "Think that's what they're here for?" he asked. "To use against us?"

"No," said Mark. "They've almost certainly been brought to strengthen the Protector's hand against the population of Zenith."

He smiled at the irony. "The same ones we're having trouble with, yes. But people who assume that they're automatically friends with the enemy of their enemy generally wind up with barbarians in their living rooms. I think Amy's right. The farther we keep from Alliance soldiers, the better off we'll be."

"Just thought it was worth checking," Yerby said. His grin spread into familiar broad cheerfulness.

"Captain Bannock?" Mr. Holperin called from beside the limousine. "Would you and your aides care to join us for the ride to the hotel? I gather most of your codefendants haven't left their capsules yet."

Every one of the Greenwoods except Yerby had trusted to an electronic device more or less like the one Amy had used on the voyage from Kilbourn. There was something about the term "high tech" that suppressed the common sense of frontiersmen who were otherwise the most pragmatic people Mark had ever met.

"Didn't drink enough before the flight," Yerby said, giving his reading of his fellows' problem. "Well, I appreciate the offer, Holperin, but I need a little therapy myself. Seems to me the saloons around the spaceport might be more comfortable than whatever a fancy hotel's got in its lobby, so I'll wander off and join you later."

He waved the back of his hand to Amy and Mark. "You young folks," he said, "you go on. I wouldn't want you to miss riding in so pretty a rig, you know."

Amy snorted. "You think having civilized people around might cramp your style," she said. "Well, remember, Yerby, you're on Zenith for a purpose. If you spend your stay in a drunk tank, you'll be letting down a lot of people who've put their faith in you."

"Aw, Amy child," the big man said. "I never in my life been too drunk to do my job."

"Mr. Holperin," Mark said, "Ms. Bannock and I would be honored to join you if the invitation extends to us alone."

Holperin bowed. "A Quelhagen gentleman and his escort are always welcome in my presence," he said, stepping aside so that the attendants could hand Mark and Amy into the car's roomy passenger compartment.

Amy was stiffly nervous. She held her camera close to her body, but she didn't want to call attention to it by folding the lenses. The way rich folk lived on a highly developed world was as new to her as Greenwood 's raw frontier had been to Mark.

The roof, sides, and floor of the passenger compartment were transparent from within. Mark was impressed, though he acted nonchalant. Amy's breath drew in when she realized that when she sat, her feet would dangle in what looked like empty air.

"It's all right," Mark whispered. "I'm with you." I'm bragging to impress a girl I like. Well, I'm human.

The car held eight passengers comfortably, four facing four as if over an invisible conference table. Amy tugged Mark down beside her instead of letting him put a seat between them for politeness as he'd intended to do.

The aircar lifted with only a hum as soon as the door closed. Mark pivoted his head as they rose, trying to get a notion of how many cars were in the sky with them. He guessed about a hundred, not many by Earth standards in a city of several hundred thousand. Aircars were a status symbol. He'd have been chagrined if New Paris had a higher density of them than Landingplace did.

Ms. Macey probably understood, because she said with a cool smile, "In material terms Zenith is nearly as developed as we are on Quelhagen. But their taste is execrable."

The port was set off from the community proper by a high berm. The earthen wall would protect the densely populated city in the unlikely event that a starship lost power while landing. The driver held the car steady above the four-lane highway leading out of the port. They flew about a hundred feet high, well below the roofs of many of the buildings ahead.

Two tanks and a dozen truckloads of Alliance soldiers wound slowly along the road. The tanks were so wide that each one blocked both inbound lanes.

Amy's arms were on the rests of her seat. She kept her fingers spread open so that she wouldn't embarrass herself even worse by clenching the seat furiously. Mark thought of touching her hand; he decided that might not be a good idea. For that matter, he wasn't used to watching through a floor as clear as the air itself as the ground flashed by at 120 miles an hour.

"Sir," said the driver on an intercom from the separate front compartment. Mark felt the car slow in the air. "There's some trouble on the ground ahead of us. Should I overfly it or go around?"

The investors looked at one another. "Overfly it if you can," Daniels ordered. "It'll give us an idea of conditions on Zenith."

"But take us higher, driver," Holperin added. In a muted voice he said to the other passengers, "We don't know what they might be throwing. Or shooting."

Mark put his hand over Amy's, for his sake as much as for hers.

Another column of Alliance troops was stalled just short of the city center. A forty-passenger bus was turned on its side, crosswise at an intersection. A mob lined both sides of the road. The local people threw things at the soldiers and shouted, though Mark couldn't hear words inside the car.

An entire desk pitched from a twentieth-floor window. It fell, spinning and flinging out the contents of drawers. When the desk hit between two of the trucks, it exploded like a wooden bomb. The mob nearby lurched back, trampling some of its number.

"My God," Amy said. "What's happening? What are they doing?"

"It's the same on Quelhagen, nowadays," Elector Daniels said. His tone held a hint of grim satisfaction that things on Zenith were no better than they were at home.

But that also meant that in the three months since Mark left Quelhagen, things had gotten very, very much worse.

"Protector Giscard here's been implementing the Paris regulations against manufacturing on the Protected Worlds," Macey said. She nodded toward the mob below, her expression carefully emotionless. "No factories with more than six employees are permitted. Apparently the rest of the workforce is supposed to go into farming. Not all of the people who've lost their jobs feel that's a practical solution."

"Surely they can't enforce that?" Mark said. "No factories larger than six employees? That's absurd!"

"It's hit or miss," Macey said. "The Protector tries to close the factories he finds. Sometimes officials are paid off, sometimes the action is tied up in court… But recently the troops sent to deliver closing orders have taken to exercising their initiative. They wreck machinery instead of padlocking the plant."

Mark listened with only part of his mind. Most of his attention was on the riot. The aircar cruised slowly above the head of the Alliance column. Below, the leading tank slid forward, struck the overturned bus, and crumpled it. The tank drove the makeshift barricade slantwise across the street. Sparks showered from metal scraping the pavement. As the bus struck the far curb, it burst into smoky flames.

Mr. Holperin said, "It's rather like being struck by lightning-not a high risk, but devastating when it happens. That's why we invested in land on Greenwood."

"Sir?" said Amy in puzzlement.

"Manufacturing on civilized worlds is too risky a proposition in the current climate," Elector Daniels explained. "If I wanted to gamble, I'd find a roulette game. Paris hasn't tried to restrict land speculations."

Alliance troops threw gas grenades at the mob. The bombs burst in gulps of opaque white that faded to dirty gray as the contents spread. Rioters collapsed vomiting or ran blindly away from the irritant gas. Despite gaps in the mob there were still thousands of people tossing rocks and cans at the soldiers.

"But-what if Zenith wins the lawsuit?" Amy said. "Isn't that a gamble too?"

The lead tank plowed into traffic that had been stalled by the mob. The tank driver was no longer making any attempt to avoid civilian vehicles. Cars flattened like foil toys as a hundred tons of armor plate ground into and over them. A few caught fire, but the flames were sluggish and low. All that burned in the electrically powered vehicles was upholstery, tires, and goods abandoned when the occupants bailed out in terror of the oncoming juggernaut.

The military trucks picked up speed behind the tanks. Citizens still ran alongside, screaming hatred if they had nothing to throw. Soldiers fired into the air. They were using live ammunition. Mark saw a flash and puff of dust from a building's roof coping.

"A lawsuit is a normal business risk, madame," Holperin explained. "Quite a different matter. We can't fight the Alliance, after all."

"There's the hotel," Daniels said with satisfaction. "The Safari House. I was afraid it was going to be involved in the trouble, but the troops seem to be turning the other way, toward the Protectorate offices."

The aircar dropped onto the parking area on the roof of a building with a textured plastic facade. It looked like a twenty-story grass hut.

"Typical Zenith taste," Mark said. He was frightened by what he'd just seen. It's the same on Quelhagen…

"We'll have our first court appearance tomorrow," Elector Daniels said. "That's all we have to worry about for now."

"If things like that riot are happening," said Amy, "then we've got other things to worry about too. Everybody does."

Mark squeezed her hand in full agreement.