Patriots

21. Company Coming

Nothing unusual had happened in the month since Mark enabled the full range of the landing system at the Spiker, so he'd pretty well forgotten about it. Now when the alarm he'd rigged in the Bannock compound rang loudly, it took him a moment to recall what it meant. He dropped the extrusion nozzle he'd been cleaning in a shed and ran for the main house.

The commo room was on one end of the ground floor, across the central hall from the parlor. The kitchen, the large dining room, and an office/workroom completed the floor plan. The second story was broken into spartan bedrooms for guests-Mark had one of them, while the top was for the Bannocks themselves. During the time Mark had been on Greenwood, Yerby had slept in the guest room beside Mark's rather than on the third floor with Desiree.

Yerby had been asleep when the alarm rang. He crashed into the commo room just behind Mark, still wearing the clothes Mark had seen him in the night before.

"There's an anomaly in the data the ship's captain radioed down," Mark explained. "He says they're the three-hundred-ton Judy from Hestia, but the ship's own core memory says they're the Aten, a twenty-eight-hundred-ton liner in the Zenith-Earth trade."

Amy and three of the men who worked for the Bannocks arrived in the hallway outside the commo room. Tomse, the cook, wiped his floury hands on his apron.

Desiree managed the plastics plant, but she must have been up at the compound when the alarm sounded, because she appeared only a heartbeat later. She gestured the employees out of the way so that she could stand stone-faced beside Amy in the doorway.

"If they bothered to fake their landing announcement," Mark continued, "then this is the invasion we've been expecting. You've got to call out the militia at once. A ship that big could hold five hundred troops!"

"Now, don't have kittens, lad," Yerby said. He sat at the console, brushing Mark aside without noticing the contact. His big hands rested on the keyboard. "You've took over the whole system here, that's right? They can't land by themselves so long as this-" He rapped the terminal feeding through the compound's radio. "-is hooked to the box at the Spiker?"

"That's right," said Mark. He hadn't thought Yerby was following the description of the changes Mark had made in the automatic landing system. Yerby's "simple frontiersman" act covered a mind just as surprising as his physical strength. "They'll wait awhile for a control signal, because there might be another ship on the magnetic mass. But before long, they'll just decide to land at Wanker's Doodle."

Yerby chuckled. He changed screens and began to type information into the keyboard. He used two fingers, but he didn't need to hunt for the keys he hammered.

"They'll get their control signal, never fear," Yerby said as he worked. "For most nearly a year me and our daddy-"

He flicked a smile toward Amy. "D'ye remember that, girl? Or was you too young?"

"I remember," Amy said. She was tense with concern.

"Anyhow, we brought ships down on Kilbourn when the module packed up and we couldn't get a replacement in. Guess I haven't forgotten how to do it."

"Yerby," Amy said. Her voice trembled with suppressed emotion. "If you crash the ship, you'll kill hundreds of people. Many hundreds. Even though they're enemies-"

"Now, hold your tater!" Yerby snapped. "First thing, I don't guess a bunch of softies from Zenith are going to pack themselves near as tight as Mark says. Besides, they're going to have a lot of big equipment-aircars and such. That's right, ain't it, lad?"

He rotated his head to look at Mark. "I guess so," Mark said.

They are enemies. Maybe the only way to deal with them is to smash the Aten on hard rocks that can't hold enough of a magnetic field to slow the ship for a landing. But-

Mark's mind couldn't imagine a future in which he let something so horrible happen. And he couldn't imagine how he could prevent it from happening.

"Yerby, you can't kill all those people!" Amy cried.

Desiree looked from Amy to her husband. Her face had no more expression than a billet of wood, but Mark knew by now not to confuse stolidity with stupidity. Yerby's wife was anything but stupid.

"Now, who said a single flaming word about killing?" Yerby said loudly. He slapped the Execute key to transmit the landing codes he'd just entered.

He stood and faced the others. "I don't guess I'm risking anybody's life. Leastways, nobody's life more than I am my own, because I'll be going to fetch them myself. They'll have a soft landing, I guarantee."

Yerby smirked at his audience. He was enormously pleased with himself.

"Yerby, what have you done?" Amy asked.

"I brought them down on the big island in The Goo," Yerby said. "The wet ground'll build enough field that they won't smash to bits, but I don't guess they'll be invading any time soon."

Thomse chuckled; even Desiree's face seemed to soften somewhat. Mark and Amy looked blankly at one another.

"The Goo's a swamp just in from the coast," Yerby explained cheerfully. "It's a bowl twenty miles across and it drains out through cracks in the rock, not by a proper river. I reckon they'll have time enough to get out of the ship, the folks will. The cargo hatches are going to be under a couple yards of muck as soon as they hit, though."

He stretched and grinned. "By the time I show up, I don't guess there'll be much to see of the ship but another hummock in the swamp. Even the island's not as solid as all that, you know."

"I see," Mark said. Yerby's beaming face had just melted away the field of smashed bodies he'd been imagining.

Amy switched the radio to normal operation instead of data link to the landing system. "This is Woodsrunners command to all Woodsrunners," she said into the microphone. "Pass this message on."

"Tell 'em to gather at the north end of The Goo," Yerby ordered in a stage whisper. "That's where I'll take our visitors out."

Amy nodded. Mark and Yerby stepped into the hallway, where they could speak without interfering with Amy. She was switching bands after each set of radioed instructions.

"Are you planning to fly in alone?" Mark asked.

"I'm going to walk in," the frontiersman said. "I figure our visitors are going to keep their personal guns, most of them. I don't want them to capture a flyer. There's enough Zenith settlers on Greenwood that somebody'd likely mount a rescue try if he heard about it. Nobody's going to walk out of The Goo, though, without I lead him and he's real polite."

"I didn't know there was any way into The Goo, Yerby," said Tindouf, a hired logger whose cracked ribs had kept him hanging around the compound for the past few days. "Except you fly."

"There's a way," Yerby insisted. "But nothing some Zenith is likely to find by himself. I'll bring 'em all out and it won't cost them a centime they haven't paid already."

He frowned regretfully and said, "I'd sure like the aircars and other fancy stuff they brought, but I'm not going to try and dig down through a swamp neither. Guess we'll get some guns out of the business, though."

Mark started to speak, then closed his mouth in embarrassment at what he'd been about to ask. Yerby grinned at him and said, "Say kid? How'd you like to come along with me? It'll be muddy, mind."

Amy paused, half turned, then hunched closer to the microphone. She continued to reel off instructions to the militia.

"If you'll have me," Mark said, "I'd be honored."

He'd been afraid of putting himself forward into a situation where he clearly didn't belong; a form of boasting, and therefore unworthy of a gentleman.

"Yeah, I would," Yerby said. He scowled with embarrassment and continued, "Now, don't take this wrong, lad… but I want to make sure the path's safe for somebody who hasn't, you know, spent as many years outdoors as I have. OK?"

Mark grinned. "I'm your guinea pig," he said. "Let's get started!"