Patriots

27. Bedroom Games

Noises in the corridor woke Mark from a sound sleep. It was probably just Yerby staggering drunk to the room he used next to Mark's, but… hadn't he come in earlier?

Mark glanced out his window, but he couldn't see even the outbuildings. Tertia had waned to a sliver in the Earth month since the raid on Blind Cove, and neither of the other moons gave more light than a star.

Mark got out of bed. His door opened. There were a number of people in the lightless hallway. "Yerby?" he said.

A dazzling light blinded Mark. Something heavy slapped him in the chest, knocking him a step backward. The missile burst on impact, enveloping him in a cold fog. Gas gun!

"We're attacked!" Mark said. He meant to shout but his voice was a croak. He couldn't see. He grabbed his bedside chair by memory and lifted it for a weapon. Though he held his breath, the gas was obviously being absorbed through his skin. His chest was numb and he was already losing feeling in his legs.

"Attacked!" Mark gasped as he lunged forward. He started to fall. Another gas shell hit him. Mark thought somebody slugged him on top of the head besides, but that might have been the floor as blackness absorbed him completely.

Everything was suddenly in focus, but it wasn't all in the same focus. He felt the cords binding his wrists and ankles, he saw the figures carrying him and another bundle through the gate out of the Bannock compound, and he heard that other bundle snarl a curse in Yerby's voice.

A stranger was talking. "I dumped the gas from the blimp. They'll be a day refilling it. Did Woolsey get the radio?"

All those sensory inputs were clear, but it was a moment before they integrated with the consciousness that knew it was Mark Maxwell of Quelhagen. It was sort of like shaking a box of cornflakes and seeing them settle into half the original space.

Most of all, Mark tasted the aftereffects of the gas. His mouth felt as if it were full of powdered copper, an unspeakably foul sensation. The paralysis was already starting to wear off, and he'd be immune to a reapplication of the gas for the next several days; but if this taste lasted, Mark would almost rather be unconscious.

"Somebody help me!" snarled the man holding Yerby's legs. "I swear he weighs a ton!"

"Shut up, you fool!" said Berkeley Finch. Mark hadn't recognized the man's figure, but his voice was unmistakable even when tension raised its pitch. "Until we get-"

"Hey you!" somebody bellowed from the courtyard. A light shone across the kidnappers. All but one wore tan uniforms with Zenith Protective Association patches on the shoulders. The exception was Dr. Gabriel Jesilind, who hid his face in his hands as the light caught him.

"Come on!" Finch shouted. He fired a burst from his repeller. Either Finch was a lousy shot or he was more squeamish about murder than he was about kidnapping. His pellets shattered sparkling dust from the wall twenty feet to the left of the light. The cloud of ionized aluminum from the pellets' driving skirts hung in the air, glowing faintly.

An aircar started its motors fifty yards downslope. The Zeniths carrying Yerby and Mark broke into a run. Others turned and fired their gas guns toward the compound. A Zenith with a repeller shot straight in the air, and another sent a flare streaking its red arc toward the main building.

People were shouting within the compound's walls. The light vanished when Finch shot.

If somebody fires a flashgun at the kidnappers, they've got as good a chance of hitting me or Yerby as they do anybody else… The thought should have scared Mark. Instead it just made him wonder. Maybe he was still feeling the effects of the gas.

The aircar started forward, flattening the vegetation to all sides. Jesilind threw himself into the front seat beside the driver. The big vehicle had been lightened by removal of its roof, but it still wouldn't be able to fly normally with all the Zeniths and their captives aboard.

"Shoot!" Finch said to the woman beside him. She was loading her gas gun with another clip of fist-sized cartridges. Finch fired his repeller, this time skyward.

Three men and a woman struggled with Yerby's dead weight. Another man had to join them before they were able to dump him on the floor between the rear-facing middle bench seat and the front-facing seat in back. The pair who'd carried Mark had no difficulty in tossing him on top of the big frontiersman.

The kidnappers climbed in with nervous haste. The car's underside tilted against the dirt, bounced up, and grounded firmly when the last two Zeniths boarded. The driver cursed in despair and fed full power to his motors. The car wallowed a few inches into the air in a gout of dust and pebbles.

"We're too heavy!" the driver cried. "Colonel, you've got to leave them here!"

"Get going!" Berkeley Finch said. "If anybody's left here, it'll be you!"

The car got under way after scraping the undercarriage twice, the first time so hard that Mark thought he heard metal tear. The downslope helped. The overloaded vehicle accelerated to thirty miles an hour with the help of gravity and was able to climb, though very sluggishly, when the terrain started to rise again.

They needed surface effect to proceed. Instead of flying, the car lurched along on the blanket of air squeezed between their skid plate and the ground. The beam of the car's broad bar headlight wriggled down aisles of trees so massive that their branches had shaded out the undergrowth.

The last view Mark had of the Bannock compound was a blaze of light through the trees. He wondered which of the residents were still able to move. It seemed likely that everybody who slept on the second floor had been knocked out by gas.

"I don't generally complain about a guest, lad," Yerby rumbled, "but I'd sure appreciate you taking your toe out of my eye-socket."

"Sorry," Mark said. He had normal feeling back in his limbs; enough at least that he felt the sting of the tight cords binding him. He didn't have proper muscle control yet, but he and Yerby managed to squirm so that they were side by side rather than stacked.

Yerby tried to sit up. A Zenith hit him with the butt of her repeller. "Keep your head down or I'll blow it off!" she snarled.

"Now, now," Yerby said in apparent unconcern. "I just want to chat with my good friend Dr. Jesilind. Doc, it's been a while. And to tell the truth, I didn't expect to find you in the present company."

Yerby leaned back so that his shoulders rested on the boots of the Zeniths on the backseat. His eyes remained below the level of the car's sides.

For a moment, Mark didn't think Jesilind was going to reply. Finally the doctor twisted to look over the front seat and said, "Mr. Bannock, I'm very sorry to have to take this action, but I'm doing it in the best interests of Greenwood and for mankind in the larger sense."

"How much are they paying you, Jesilind?" Mark said. He was so angry that his voice warbled. "Since it's not a normal kidnapping, you won't just take a share of the ransom, I suppose."

"It's not a kidnapping at all, Maxwell," Berkeley Finch said. He was squeezed onto the rear seat, from which he'd been looking back the way they'd come. "We're a legally constituted posse, carrying those we've arrested back to a court of competent jurisdiction to stand trial. It's that simple."

"Yerby," Dr. Jesilind said, "I realize that you were acting with no more malice than a willful child has, but your presence on Greenwood was a disruptive influence. I couldn't let the progress of civilization be interrupted for reasons of personal friendship. I hope that some day you'll understand."

"Oh, I guess we understand each other, Doc," Yerby said. Mark wondered if Jesilind was smart enough to know that the mild words ought to terrify him.

The car was making better speed than before, mainly because the driver had learned how to handle the vehicle under the present conditions. A dirigible might barely be able to keep up with them, but the kidnappers' repellers would rip the ballonets to shreds in a burst or two. At the speed the pellets traveled, the sparks of one hitting a frame tube would ignite the escaping hydrogen into a pale blue inferno.

A Zenith had claimed he'd "dumped the gas from the blimp." Mark hoped that was true. He particularly hoped Amy wasn't pursuing in the Bannock dirigible.

From the car's heading, the Zeniths had landed at Wanker's Doodle. Their ship was probably waiting for them on the magnetic mass.

The Zenith militia were nervous. They kicked him every time they turned or tried to make a little more room than the car had. That was fair. Mark figured he deserved to be kicked. He'd really meant to set a remote link to the Doodle's landing system the way he had at the Spiker, but he'd been busy…

"Mr. Finch!" Mark said. "Or is it 'Colonel' that you're calling yourself now? May I ask what charges have been brought against me?"

Finch had been looking behind again. He turned. There was almost no light in the vehicle, but his face was a pale blob in greater shadows.

"An informant has identified you as one of the ringleaders of the criminal conspiracy, Maxwell," he said. "We wouldn't have gone after you alone, but we hoped to find you."

Mark began to laugh. "Well, I'm glad to hear Dr. Jesilind has been earning his pay so well," he said. "Or does he get thirty pieces of silver for each of us?"

He wouldn't have recognized that harsh, cruel voice as his own if he hadn't felt it trumpeting from his throat. They'd tied his body, but Mark Maxwell of Quelhagen was still a better man than these thugs from Zenith and the traitor who guided them!

"You see," Mark went on, "I thought perhaps my crime was preventing Dr. Jesilind from committing rape. Having seen what passes for the law on Zenith, that seemed very likely."

"Rape?" said Finch.

Yerby shifted his huge shoulders so that he could look at Mark. "Is this something you've forgot to tell me, Maxwell?" he said with no emotion at all.

"It was a matter that didn't concern you, Yerby," Mark said. "I took care of it, at your sister's request."

Yerby laughed. "Feisty little pup, ain't you, lad?" he said. "Well, I'm right glad you took care of it so good."

"I don't know anything about rape," Berkeley Finch said. He looked uneasily from Mark to the front seat.

"Your guide does, Colonel," Mark said. "Why don't you tell him about it, Doctor?"

"Attempts to blacken my name with falsehoods are of no use to you now, my man," Jesilind said in a haughty voice. "You face the justice of a civilized community."

"Oh, Doc," said Yerby Bannock mildly. "If it's your name you're worried about now, you've missed the point about as bad as you can."

"Colonel?" said a Zenith looking over the back of the vehicle. "There's somebody after us. I think it's an aircar."

"That's impossible!" Jesilind blurted. "The aircar at Bannock's doesn't work!"

Finch turned. His face was a mask of white rage in light reflected from a passing treetrunk. "What aircar?" he shouted. "You didn't say anything about an aircar!"

"It can't be Bannock's," Jesilind said. "I swear, that one doesn't work!"

The Zenith vehicle lurched into a broad lowland too boggy to support the dryland giants of the higher ground. The car bottomed once in a geyser of watery mud, but the driver didn't lose forward motion.

The going was actually a little easier for the overburdened vehicle, though they wallowed like a slowing roller coaster. The soft-leaved plants covering the ground here flattened beneath the car into a surface smoother than the forest floor. The vegetation was phosphorescent. The vehicle trembled forward in a faint green glow, as if it were being driven through the screen of a light-enhancing device.

The trees growing in the marsh had knobby surface roots that spread as much as twenty yards from their trunks. They didn't pose a real obstacle, because they were so sparsely scattered, but the car on surface effect needed to go around them.

The pursuing vehicle came into sight. It was an aircar, if you didn't care what you said. It staggered from among the treetops, apparently unable to climb over them, and quickly dropped to within a few feet of the ground. Its bow cocked up at fifteen degrees and kinked about the same amount to the direction of flight. It didn't have any headlight or running lights, but one of the motor nacelles glowed dull red.

"By the Lord God Almighty!" Yerby said in amused approval. "That's Desiree or I'm a-" He looked at one, then the other, seatful of his nervous captors. "-gentleman from Zenith! No way Elmont 'd risk his neck like that, and George, heck, he don't know how to drive nothing!"

Mark levered himself into a sitting position. All the Zeniths but the driver were looking over the back of their vehicle. They were too worried to care what their prisoners did at the moment. The other aircar was a hundred yards away and closing the gap very slowly. A bearing or a rubbing drive fan screamed a note of utter high-pitched fury.

"I didn't think that car flew either, Yerby," Mark said. It just about didn't. Whatever metal screamed had to fly apart soon. At the speed the parts of an aircar's drive train spun, failure was likely to look like a grenade going off.

"I tell you, lad," Yerby said, "last time I flew her, she flipped and tried to squish me like a bug. If the courtyard wall hadn't caught the bow and held it up, that's just what she'd have done. But I guess maybe Desiree don't weigh so much or something."

The woman beside Finch leaned over the side of the car to give herself more room and fired her gas gun. The heavy projectile sailed through the air at least twenty feet above its target and twenty yards behind.

The recoil overbalanced the shooter; she pitched over the side. Yerby threw his full weight against her legs, pinning them within the vehicle. The Zenith dropped the gas gun, flailed for a moment, and finally managed to grasp the side of the car and pull herself in.

"Careful there, missie," Yerby said with a chuckle. "Wouldn't want to lose a sweet child like you."

"You sanctimonious prick!" the woman screamed in Finch's face. "You were going to lighten the car, weren't you? You wanted me to go overboard!"

Finch grimaced. "Go on," he ordered. "We'll have to shoot it down. Try not to kill the driver."

He fired his repeller. The stream of pellets didn't come within a country mile of the target, partly because Finch kept a worried eye on the angry woman beside him. Maybe he thought she was going to sling him out of the car. Maybe she thought the same thing.

Zeniths crammed beside Finch in the back started shooting with a repeller and a gas gun. A woman in the middle seat stood to launch a rocket flare. She stumbled sideways when the vehicle swayed, jostling the man seated beside her. His gas shell missed Finch's cheek by less than the colonel's razor had that morning.

Finch squealed and hunched down. His second burst chewed the back fender of his own car.

"Oh, you people!" Yerby said in obvious amusement. "You don't know Desiree the way I do. Why don't you just pack it in now? I promise I'll keep her off you."

"Shut up, you fool!" Finch snarled. As he raised his repeller to fire, he glanced nervously over his shoulder at the Zeniths behind him. He ducked down without actually pulling the trigger.

Mark looked at Yerby. He wondered how much of the frontiersman's nonchalance was an act. It also struck Mark that the relationship between Yerby and Desiree was a good deal more complex than the loud hostility he'd initially thought it was limited to.

The other car had pulled within fifty feet and was slightly to the right of the Zenith machine. One of the kidnappers with a repeller started hitting despite the vehicles' doubled motion. Pellets danced across the bow of the target, exploding in friction-heated violence. They had no effect on the car.

The Bannock aircar had at least the virtue of being sturdy. Its body shell was heavy plastic that cratered but didn't disintegrate at the high-velocity impacts. Occasionally a second or third pellet might hit the same point. The passenger compartment was of double-box construction for stiffness, so even those lucky coincidences didn't endanger the driver.

The two cars separated to round a tree that dangled aerial roots from its branch tips. The vehicles closed the wide circuit at increasing velocity. A gas shell burst on the target's bow and spread its cold fog across the plastic. The driver was the only target on which the Zeniths' weapons could have an effect, and she was protected by the skewed angle of flight of a vehicle with only two and a half of its four motors working.

The Zenith driver was focused on his compass course and the terrain ahead. As they rounded the tree, he steered toward rather than away from the oncoming vehicle. The Bannock car raced toward the Zeniths with its leading edge three feet above the ground.

"Turn!" Finch screamed. "Turn, you idiot!"

The Zenith with the flare gun fired it into the backseat of her own car. It zipped between the legs of a man desperately trying to reload his repeller in the crowded, jouncing vehicle. He screamed and threw himself forward as if the gout of red fire were rocket exhaust.

Desiree peered over the bow of her aircar, visible for the first time. She eased her leading edge over the Zenith vehicle's right rear inlet duct. The fan choked off for lack of air. The other three fans, operating at maximum output, flipped the car like a tiddlywink.

Mark had a view of the ground, then a sky full of flailing figures and weapons all on separate courses; then the ground again.

The aircar managed the last half turn the instant before it hit.

That was the difference between Mark's survival and him being driven into the ground like a tent peg.

The prisoners hadn't been flung out with the others because they were on the floor at the axis of the car's revolution. The ground was marshy. When the car hit, its undercarriage cut deep to form an air cushion with a perfect seal. Thin mud exploded in a brown curtain. An instant later the drive fans sucked in the mixture and ripped off impellers that were set too coarse for any medium but air.

"By all that's holy!" said Yerby Bannock. "Lad, if we could sell tickets to a ride like that, we'd make our fortunes!"

Mark managed to sit upright. The world had stopped spinning, but his head hadn't figured that out yet. The Bannock aircar was nearby, sticking out of the ground at a forty-five-degree angle. The two forward fan nacelles were clearly visible. The impellers were winding down; the damaged unit still glowed and gave off a faint moan.

Desiree Bannock climbed slowly out of the backseat of her vehicle. Her face had no particular expression. Since anger was the only emotion Mark had seen her express, he supposed that was just as well.

"Honey love, you're surely a sight for sore eyes!" Yerby called. "Come cut my hands loose before they fall off, the beggars tied me so tight!"

The Zeniths were picking themselves up from the bog. Mark couldn't be sure, but it looked like they'd all survived the crash also. Berkeley Finch stood knee deep in a particularly wet patch. He pointed a dripping repeller at Desiree and shouted, "Halt! You're under arrest for interfering with officers of the law!"

Desiree continued to stump toward the Zenith aircar. "You put that thing down," she snarled, "or I'll feed it to you! You hear me?"

Yerby cackled. "You better listen to her, Colonel!" he said. "You peeve my Desiree and you'll be lucky if it's your teeth that get first look at what you're stuffed with."

Desiree reached the car. "There's forty of our neighbors on the way here," she said. "By daybreak there'll be two hundred. The blimp's empty, so I took that bitch of a car up to three thousand feet and put a call out before I come chasing you."

She snipped the cords from her husband's ankles with a pair of wire cutters, then freed his wrists. "Yerby," she added, "I told you you were the biggest fool in all space to buy that piece of junk. Do you know the sucker flipped twice on me before I got her back down?"

"I'm sorry, honey love," Yerby said contritely. He stood and flexed his arms to work life back into them. "I'll get you a proper car next time I'm on Zenith, see if I don't."

The Zeniths had gathered in a tight bunch like sheep in a blizzard. Dr. Jesilind was trying to worm his way into the center of the group. Boots and elbows drove him back with universal determination.

"If you're thinking you got help coming from the Doodle," Desiree called to them as she cut Mark free, "you can forget it right now. There's folks there by now ready to blow the nose off anybody who peeks out of the ship you lot come in."

Some of the kidnappers had kept or found their weapons. The chances that anything would shoot without a thorough cleaning was nothing to bet your life on, though. The battered Zeniths didn't look as though they were up to a fight in any case.

Mark stood. His feet felt as if somebody were hammering needles into them. Still, they held him.

A dirigible approached from the northeast. It crawled along low to the ground so that the crew could jump to safety if Zeniths shot the gasbag to bits. More dirigibles bobbed closer from all points of the horizon.

Yerby rose in the passenger compartment of the Zenith aircar as if he were on a dais addressing a rally. "Now, I tell you what I'm going to do, Finch my boy," he said. "I'm going to let you and your band of heroes stick all your guns here with me where they can be collected. Then I'm going to tell my friends to take it easy. We'll haul you lot to the Doodle and you can go back where you came from."

"After they've paid for the damage they caused on Greenwood," Mark interjected. "That includes a working-a demonstrably working-aircar destroyed."

Yerby chuckled. "Yep, he's a feisty one, my attorney here," he said. In a tone with more hard edges than a file he went on, "Now, I hope you take the deal offered, Finchie. If you don't, the best thing that's going to happen is that you walk around a while, and that won't be longer than sunrise. I don't much mind what happens to you, but there's me and mine here too… and a bullet don't have eyes."

Colonel Finch wiped his forehead. "Stack arms in the car," he ordered hoarsely.

The community of Wanker's Doodle was at the south end of Centipede Lake, a multibranched thickening of the glacial White River. The lake was three hundred miles long, and its shoreline was ten or twenty times as great. Heavy loads of the sort that had to be ferried to the Spiker by dirigible could be rafted to the Doodle from any point on the lake's circumference.

Despite that, Wanker's Doodle wasn't as busy a port as the Spiker. The Doodle itself was a finger of basalt, the core of an ancient volcano, that thrust up through soil deposited by the floods every spring. The hard rock spreading from the base of the Doodle could hold only three starships at a time-four if they were smaller than average-and other ground nearby was too soft for the concentrated weight.

There were two typical freighters on the basalt at the moment. The third, larger vessel waiting on the magnetic mass was much shinier than what usually landed at Greenwood. Frontiersmen with guns and bottles sat in the big ship's open hatches while crewmen in spiffy white uniforms watched them glumly.

Yerby was leaning over the rail of Bat Lunaan's dirigible to view the approaching community. "Pretty as a picture, that ship, ain't it? Bet the captain's having conniptions because the boys are tracking mud on his clean floors."

Because the prisoners in the netting below weighed so much, Lunaan had only Yerby and Mark with him in the gondola. Even so, his airship was slower than the others. The flat ground near the Doodle was brilliant with the coverings of thirty or more dirigibles and the wings of flyers that had started arriving soon after the sun came up.

"There's Amy," Mark said, pointing. She stood near the starship's hatch holding a gas gun.

Somebody must have picked her up on the way to the Doodle. It would be another day at least before enough water had been electrolyzed into hydrogen-the oxygen was vented-to refill the tanks of the Bannock dirigible.

Yerby stepped back from the railing. "What do you figure our friends from Zenith are going to try next, lad?" he asked quietly. "Oh, not this lot," he added, gesturing toward the deck and the captives who dangled beneath it. "The syndicate of folks that wants to steal our land, I mean."

"I think…" Mark said. "I think there'll be a peace conference. Protector Giscard'll call it, or maybe even a delegation from Earth. You've made the Zenith authorities look very foolish. They'll make a compromise offer to avoid worse."

The dirigible settled in the cleared space near the starship's hatch. Pumps whined to suck hydrogen from the ballonets now that the prisoners' weight rested on the ground.

"I thought maybe something like that," Yerby said as if he were making idle conversation. "Myself, I've never been much for compromise, though."

Yerby jumped from the gondola while the deck was still six feet above the ground. Mark sighed and followed. He didn't fall over when he hit, so he figured the paralysis must have worn off completely by now.

Mark's mouth still tasted worse than he could imagine. The swig of what Lunaan claimed was whiskey had added its own ghastly flavors without in the least cutting the miasma of the gas.

The cargo net collapsed about the Zeniths when Lunaan dropped it and moved the dirigible off the starport. Desiree took charge of freeing them. Yerby nodded approval, then sauntered to the starship's captain standing beside the boarding ramp. Mark smiled to Amy as they both followed her brother without speaking.

"Well, Captain…" Yerby said, peering at the nametag. "Captain Drumm. I'll bet you're not very pleased about how things went this voyage, are you?"

"My ship's been looted!" Drumm said. He was a dapper man with, at the moment, the red face of someone on the verge of a stroke. "Are you responsible for this, sir? My liquor cabinet's been emptied and my passengers' private lockers have been broken into as well!"

Yerby nodded sympathetically. "Looting's a terrible thing, yes sir. But-did you lose anything besides booze, Captain?"

"My pistol," Drumm said. Apprehension was replacing anger as he realized how very powerful Yerby was. "I don't know that there was anything else. Except the liquor."

"Peaceful visitors don't need guns on Greenwood," Yerby said with the smile of a cat for the mouse between its paws. "Reckon we can forget that."

"It isn't important, no," Drumm agreed. "And the liquor-"

"And the liquor's the sort of hospitality a smart fellow'd offer people when he came waltzing into their house without a by-your-leave," Yerby continued, overriding the captain's nervous mumble. "Which is the thing I wanted to take up with you, Captain. The next time you want to land on Greenwood, why don't you hold in orbit until I've radioed you a personal invitation? Because if you land without my permission again, you'll never take off."

Drumm licked his lips. His face was as sallow as it had been red a moment before. "I understand," he said.

Yerby smiled and patted Drumm on the shoulder. "I thought you would," Yerby said. Whistling "Men of Harlech" between his teeth, he turned to watch the prisoners being marched in line toward the ramp.

Dr. Jesilind felt the weight of Yerby's stare. He eased to the side to put Colonel Finch between him and the frontiersman. A Woodsrunner thrust Jesilind back into place. Yerby walked toward him, still whistling.

Berkeley Finch swallowed and deliberately faced Yerby. "One moment, please, sir," he said in a voice that got higher with every syllable. "My troops and I surrendered our weapons upon your promise of safe conduct until we were off-planet."

"And that's just what you'll have if you step out of my way," Yerby said in a tone Mark had never heard him use before. It was like listening to millstones speak. "There's a personal matter between me and the doc, though I guess you can have part of it if you're fool enough to want it."

He brushed the Zenith aside with an arm as hard as the threat he'd just implied.

If it hadn't been for Finch's terrified courage, Mark wouldn't have been able to step in front of Yerby himself. "Yerby," he said. He was so tense that he wasn't sure whether his voice squeaked as he feared it did. "If it's a personal matter, it's the one I've already taken care of. Please. It's on my honor if I let you kill him."

"You don't let me do any blame thing I choose, boy!" Yerby shouted. He tried to step around Mark.

Mark grabbed Yerby's right wrist with both hands. It was like trying to hold a spinning driveshaft. Yerby bent Mark's arms back and took a handful of his shirt. He lifted Mark completely off the ground with one hand.

"Yerby!" Amy cried. She pressed the fat muzzle of her gas gun against her brother's chest. "Stop this right now! Put him down!"

"I don't need a woman to fight for me!" Mark wheezed. He wasn't exactly being strangled, but he sure wasn't getting the amount of air his lungs thought they needed.

"And I don't need a man to fight for me!" Amy replied. "Yerby, put him down this instant."

Yerby looked at her. He lowered Mark gently to the ground. "Sorry, lad," he muttered. His big hands tried to straighten Mark's shirt. "Got a bit above myself there."

Amy let out her breath in a vast sigh. She flung her gun down.

Nobody else had moved during the confrontation. Now Finch got cautiously to his feet and the other spectators relaxed sightly.

"Doctor," Yerby said to the trembling Jesilind, "I think you and I better not meet again. I don't figure I'll ever go to Marques… but if I see you anywhere else, anywhere at all but your home planet-"

He didn't finish the sentence. He just smiled.

Jesilind said in a tiny voice, "I'm leaving immediately, Mr. Bannock."

"How right you are," Yerby said. Before anyone could react, he'd grabbed Jesilind by collar and waistband. Yerby took a step forward, swinging the doctor back; then took a second step and launched Jesilind toward the open hatch.

It was a beautiful throw. Jesilind didn't touch anything but air for the twenty feet before he crashed into the starship's hold.

28. Democracy in Action

Major Ustinov was one of the military aides Mark had seen in Protector Giscard's office. The Alliance emissary wore a gray field uniform in place of the sky-blue jacket and silver trousers of the previous occasion, but he still looked remarkably neat and clean to eyes that had gotten used to Greenwood settlers over the past four months.

Yerby hammered the table that had been brought into the Spiker's bunkroom for the meeting. All six legs jounced off the floor. "And just how do you figure to keep me from going, Dagmar Wately?" he shouted. Ustinov winced even though the anger wasn't directed at him.

"By knocking you cold as a trout with a gas gun," Zeb Randifer replied, leaning over the table from the other side. "If you're that big a durned fool, that is. And I mean it!"

This had started as a Woodsrunner muster called because a Zenith ship wanted to land. When the passengers turned out to be from Protector Giscard instead of more thugs sent by the investment syndicate, what might have been a battle turned into a meeting almost equally heated. The three dim lamps shone on angry, puzzled faces.

"You put me in charge!" Yerby said. "That means I go!"

The rain that hammered the tavern's uninsulated roof would probably be sleet by nightfall. By clearing out all the bedframes, most of the hundred or so Woodsrunners at the Spiker could squeeze into the barracks-style sleeping room. The rest were in the hallway-or the taproom below, drinking instead of worrying about Protector Giscard's offer of truce negotiations.

The meeting was very likely going to decide the fate of Greenwood. It bothered Mark that the people present were a small fraction of the settlers and had been called for a purpose completely different from the one they were involved with now. On the other hand-

You could make a case that folks who came out in dangerous weather to defend their planet had as much right to decide for that planet as any group could possibly have.

"Yeah, you're in charge, Bannock," Dagmar said. "And that's exactly why you're not going back to Zenith. They'd snatch you sure, and much as I'd like to be shut of you for a neighbor, we can't afford that now."

The concrete wall was directly behind Yerby with Major Ustinov to his right. Mark was to the left, and Amy stood on a low stool in the corner behind Mark, recording the proceedings for posterity. Mark wondered if Blaney had deliberately arranged things so that the table was a barrier in case Yerby really lost his temper.

Probably not. In a rage, Yerby was strong enough to use the massive table for a weapon.

"All envoys will be under the protection of the Atlantic Alliance!" Ustinov said huffily. "You need have no fears on that score."

Desiree stared at the Alliance envoy. She stood directly opposite Yerby, as fitting a place as there was for her. "You can stuff that up your ear," she snorted.

"Look, Bannock," Dagmar said. "I'm not trying to say you're not boss."

She gestured to Ustinov. "I'm not even saying that this guy's a lying prick in a fancy uniform. I'm saying that after the way you did Biber and Finch in the eye, there's no chance they won't grab you, I don't care what anybody promises. Not if they went to jail for it, which they wouldn't."

"If you don't want to deal, Yerby," Randifer said, "we don't deal. But it ain't going to be you on that ship to Zenith. That's free passage all right. Free passage to a cell you won't leave till you're old and gray!"

"And we need you," Dagmar repeated. "Little though I care to admit it."

"Aw, you worry like a bunch of old women," Yerby muttered; but his grimace and mild tone showed that he'd accepted the argument against him.

"Seems to me Zeb put his finger on it the first time," said Buck Koslovsky, one of the defendants in the ejectment action. "What does any of us want to be going to Zenith again for? You name me one thing we got out of going the first time!"

The rumble of the settlers' response was varied, but it was mostly agreement. The chorus of "Yeah!" and "Damn right!" far outweighed the one peevish, "Well, Zeb can stick his finger right back where it was!"

"There's a problem with that course," Mark said. He shouted to be sure of being heard, but he hoped he didn't sound like he wanted to start a fight.

Yerby banged his fist on the table again. "All you shut up and listen what my legal advisor's got to say!" he bellowed. "Or I'll start knocking heads till you do shut up!"

Mark smiled faintly. Nobody had to worry about sounding belligerent so long as Yerby Bannock was present to do it for him.

"Fellow…" He'd started to say, "Fellow-citizens," as if he were addressing a meeting on Quelhagen. "Friends and neighbors!" he said instead. "It's not the Zenith investors or even the Zenith government who's proposed this meeting."

"It is so the Zenith government!" Koslovsky said. "I just heard that fellow Ustinov say it was!"

"We're being summoned by the Alliance!" Mark said, wishing he had Yerby's presence and leather lungs, "speaking through its representative, who happens to be the Protector of Zenith. If we reject out of hand Protector Giscard's attempt to mediate, it will leave the Alliance very few options as to how to proceed."

He looked over the table at a sea of blank stares.

"What the lad's saying and you lot are too dumb to understand," Yerby said, "is that if we don't send somebody to this meeting, Giscard's going to send his soldiers to drag us there by the neck. That's right, ain't it, Mark?"

"The citizens of Greenwood would never fail to obey the Protector's request," Mark said. He turned toward Ustinov so that he could be sure the major heard him. "We are all loyal citizens of the Atlantic Alliance."

Ustinov sniffed, but he looked more disdainful than hostile. So long as he didn't report to his superiors that Greenwood was in a state of rebellion against the Alliance…

"All right, Bannock," Randifer said. "But you still don't go."

"I'll go!" said Emmreich enthusiastically. He'd been too cheerfully drunk to walk to his capsule for the trip home from Zenith after the hearing.

"You will not go!" Yerby said. His voice alone shook the heavy table.

The room quieted. In a somewhat diminished tone, Yerby continued, "I'm still in charge, right? I grant you that I don't go, but I still decide who does."

The room buzzed like a hive of bees the size of grizzly bears. Dagmar Wately's voice cut through the background noise with, "Why don't you tell us who you pick, Bannock, and we'll tell you whether we go along with it?"

"All right!" Yerby said. "We need a settler whose been on Greenwood long enough to know pretty much all the players. I figure you'll do for that, Dagmar."

People nodded, clapped, or stamped their feet. From the faces Mark saw, all the different versions meant yes.

"And!" Yerby bellowed. "Shut up, now, you all! And we need somebody along who's got the sense God gave a goose. As Dagmar does not, and I know she don't from the way she carried on about transit rights across my property!"

"Want me to feed you them transit rights, Bannock?" Dagmar shouted back over the laughter.

"So I figured the right person to go along with Dagmar was Mark Maxwell," Yerby continued. "For those of you who don't know him, he's smart as all the rest of you lot together."

Yerby put an arm around Mark's shoulders. "And I'll tell you something else about the lad!" Yerby said. "You couldn't ask to have a better man at your back than him in a fight!"

Mark felt himself blush with pride. He didn't feel particularly honored to be called smart in this company, because to Yerby and the other settlers the word meant "formally educated." But even though he knew that the other half of the compliment wasn't true, he'd never been praised in a fashion that meant more to him.