Patriots

24. Local Political Differences

The giant ribbonfish was at least a quarter of a mile long. It glittered beneath the slow billows like a bracelet made of millions of tiny jewels, each a separate living organism. Amy had been careful to keep the dirigible to the east of the creature so that their shadow wouldn't spook it. One of the high clouds moved across the afternoon sun. The whole huge assemblage dived slowly, following the microorganisms that were its food.

"I'm so glad we got to see that, Lucius," Amy said. "I hope it made the last day of your stay memorable."

Mark straightened; he'd been leaning over the deck railing. "You bring good luck, Dad," he said. "I hadn't seen a ribbonfish myself. Yerby'd mentioned them, is all."

"The luck was the sharp eyes of our hostess, I'd say," Lucius remarked. "Amy, I'm much obliged to you. Greenwood is indeed a lovely planet, and I couldn't have had a better pair of guides to it."

The men went into the cabin to join Amy at the controls. They'd followed the giant ribbonfish for nearly an hour, entranced by the shifting patterns of its structure, so it was probably time they headed home anyway. The Bannock compound was a good eighty miles away, so they wouldn't be reaching it till pretty close to nightfall.

"There's a village down there," Amy said, nodding to the right as she turned the rudder and four engine nacelles to full lock. The dirigible was the safest vehicle Mark could imagine for a planet as sparsely inhabited as Greenwood, but it was glacially slow to execute any change. "Where are we, Mark?"

Mark brought up a map display on his viewer. Lucius watched over his shoulder, hunching slightly to be able to see the air-formed holograms.

"I think…" he said. "OK, it must be Blind Cove. About ten houses?"

He peered out the side window. The community was several miles away, but its size seemed several times the figure in the atlas. The Spiker's database was out of date.

Several flyers were lifting from the houses. The sky was mostly sunny with sharply defined clouds. The locals would have no difficulty joining the dirigible in a few minutes.

"Blind Cove sounds familiar," Amy said. The slight breeze was still enough to make the dirigible handle like a barge in a millrace. As the bow came around, the whole vessel drifted downwind at better than a walking pace.

"A magistrate in Blind Cove issued the summonses in the ejectment suit," Lucius said. "Mark, are there any weapons aboard?"

Mark didn't know. He began to bang open the doors of the deck-level cabinets around the cabin. There were ropes and quite a lot of obvious trash, but nothing useful. The black patch on the royal blue fabric made the Bannock dirigible identifiable as far as anybody could see it.

Lucius checked the toolbox on the back of the cabin. "Some wrenches and screwdrivers," he announced. "Useful in a pinch, but I think we'll be better off not displaying them until we're quite sure of the others' intentions."

He not only sounded calm, he sounded as if this were the sort of thing that happened to him every day.

Mark walked out on the open deck. There were four flyers. They moved sluggishly, indicating they were heavily loaded even though each had only one man aboard. Amy was gaining altitude as quickly as she could without emergency measures. No matter what she did, the flyers could still outclimb the clumsy dirigible in ten or fifteen minutes, so there was no point in dumping ballast.

The dirigible wallowed, losing a noticeable amount of height and power. They'd entered the shadow of a cloud. The engines picked up again as the batteries came online, boosting the output of the solar cells on the top of the envelope. The Blind Cove flyers were of off-world manufacture and had working battery packs, though they had to keep beyond the shadow to climb.

"Amy," Lucius said. He stepped to her side. "Give me the controls, please." As he spoke, he put his hands on the helm without waiting for the woman to reply.

"Dad?" Mark said in amazement.

Amy backed away from the controls. Blank calm replaced her initial look of consternation. She didn't know what Lucius planned to do, but she was willing to trust his judgment in a case where she saw no way out.

Mark watched the flyers. When Amy joined him on the open deck he said, "I suppose they think we're Yerby."

"I suppose," Amy agreed in a flat voice.

Lucius had dropped the dirigible to twenty feet above the shadowed forest by the time the flyers from Blind Cove reached them. Three flyers mounted high while the last circled close to the gondola. The pilot was a bearded man whose face was red with drink and anger.

"Where d'ye think you're going, Bannock?" the man shouted. "We're not going to let you get away so easy, you know!"

He hurled a bottle one-handed at Mark. It didn't come within twenty feet of the dirigible. Several more empty bottles plunged past the vessel, warbling as the air streamed past their mouths. A clank and a shower of broken glass indicated that one of the flyer pilots above had found the range.

Amy took out her camera. A flyer dived past the gasbag, then zoomed up again as the pilot shouted curses in a hoarse voice.

Mark pressed his lips together and said nothing. Lucius had headed basically downwind. With a following breeze, the dirigible was about as fast as a flyer, but this course was going to take them out over the ocean again very shortly.

More missiles dropped. Several hit; the locals were improving their technique with practice. Even though they weren't using lethal weapons, the impacts would damage the solar cells. Sooner or later they'd start tearing holes in the ballonets. Mark didn't want to be over salt water if the dirigible was forced down.

When the dirigible was forced down.

"Dad?" he called. "If you get some altitude, we can maybe get a radio signal through to Yerby or the Spiker."

"In good time," his father said. He didn't raise his voice, but there was steel in his tone.

The dirigible crossed the sandy beach, still only twenty feet above the surface. A jagged piece of metal screamed past them and splashed in the surf. What sounded like a wooden crate of bottles smashed on the upper surface and rained shards of glass down on all sides.

The flyers were holding course directly above the dirigible, so now they hit more often than not. Mark put an arm around Amy without looking at her. She leaned forward, recording the pattern of fragments splashing in the water.

The dirigible was traveling at nearly forty-five miles an hour. Immediately ahead of them the sea brightened to sunlit splendor; they were about to leave the shadow of the cloud in which they'd been proceeding since before Lucius took the helm.

"Hold tight!" Lucius shouted. The dirigible entered sunlight. Lucius pulled the lever that dumped the entire water ballast from the bottom of the gondola. The sea roiled like a storm surge as the dirigible shot upward faster than Mark had dreamed it could.

Somebody screamed in fear from above them. The flyers flicked past to either side. Three were under marginal control; the wing of the last was cocked up at a 45° angle with a bent spar. It spiraled wildly down toward the sea as the bearded man who'd thrown the first bottle fought his controls in vain.

The dirigible gained five hundred feet in a few seconds and continued to rise. "Amy?" Lucius called from the helm. "Would you care to take the controls again? I'm not sure I could find the compound."

"Dad, what did you do?" Mark asked as Amy took the helm. They'd passed a thousand feet. At this rate, the flyers wouldn't be able to reach the dirigible again in less than an hour, even if the Blind Cove settlers had the stomach to try.

"The gas cools in the cloud's shadow," Lucius said. He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. "When we came into the sunlight, it expanded very quickly and gave us a great deal more lift. In combination with dumping the ballast, I thought we could rise fast enough to… at least disconcert the others."

"There's only a few hundred settlers on Zenith grants on the planet," Mark said quietly. "I suppose they've been treated pretty roughly the past month or two."

"No doubt," his father said. Lucius turned to Amy and went on, "Ms. Bannock? I'm very sorry about the ballast, but I thought it was necessary. I'm afraid it will make landing difficult."

"I'll manage, Lucius," she replied. "And I'm still Amy, remember."

Mark lifted the radio handset and said, "This is the Bannock blimp to all Woodsrunners. We're headed home from just west of Blind Cove, and I'd really like some company!"