Patriots

31. Off the Deep End

Zenith's rich, red-orange dawn looked like the mouth of hell backlighting the new barricade on the spaceport approach road. As the taxi carrying Mark and Dagmar pulled up, soldiers backed a dump truck loaded with sand to the other side of the swinging crossbar and shut off the engine.

"What's going on?" the taxi driver called through his open window, sounding worried as well as angry at the delay.

The barricade was a hasty improvisation of sand-filled fuel drums and concrete blocks. It closed three of the four travel lanes; the dump truck now filled the other. Flashing emergency lights had made the structure look like a construction site as the taxi approached.

Mark stuck his head out to be sure. The folk at the barricade wore the tan uniforms of the Zenith Protective Association. A number of the troops looking worriedly over the line of drums carried repellers and other projectile weapons. The gun on the back of a pickup behind the barricade fired two-inch-rockets through a charger-fed launching tube.

The dump truck began to settle with a loud hiss. The vehicle had a central inflation pump. The militiamen were using it to vent all the air from the tires so it was impossible to roll the truck out of the way.

"Hey!" cried the taxi driver. "What're you doing?"

"Ms. Wately," said Mark, formal because he was frightened. "I think we'd better get out. We may have to leave our gear."

An officer with red shoulder boards on her tunic ducked under the crossbar and walked to the taxi. More traffic was backing up. Horns blew in a variety of timbres.

"I can buy more clothes," Dagmar said as she and Mark got out of opposite sides of the vehicle with their hand luggage. "So long as I don't get my head blown off first."

"There's no more traffic into the port!" the militia officer snarled. She was young, petite, and obviously as scared as Mark was. "Go on, get away from here! There's an Alliance column on the way and we're going to stop them!"

During the night everything on Zenith had changed as suddenly as a trap shuts. Mark didn't know whether there'd been a precipitating incident or if the general tension had suddenly coalesced into war the way rain forms from water vapor. When heavy gunfire began to shake the city, he and Dagmar headed for the starport.

They stepped toward the barricade. Mark had paid the driver when they got in, the only way the man would agree to drive through New Paris and the chance of trouble at any instant.

"Stop!" the officer cried to Mark. "I've got my orders!"

She wore a handgun of some sort in a covered holster on her wide belt. Her hands groped for the weapon, but she couldn't seem to get the flap open.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, sister," Dagmar snapped. She was either a great actress or a lot more relaxed than Mark was. "We're Greenwood citizens going home. This fight is nothing to do with us."

"Madame Captain," Mark said, "your orders are to stop vehicles. We're going to Greenwood to bring help back here to you."

It was the best lie he could think of at the spur of the moment. Whatever happened, it didn't look like Greenwood need worry about another Zenith invasion any time soon.

A fast-moving aircar, low but nonetheless airborne and therefore in breach of the emergency regulations, came from the direction of New Paris. It looked as though the driver planned to cross at the normal entranceway instead of rising to hop over the high earthen berm surrounding the port proper.

The crew of the gun on the pickup fired three rockets in quick succession. Instead of a roar, the rounds blasted from the launching tube with a crack!/crack!/crack! that made Mark grab his ears as he hunched over.

If the militia meant the shots as a warning, they cut it closer than Mark would have recommended. One of the sizzling green balls snapped within arm's length of the vehicle's canopy. The car skidded in the air as the driver not only backed his fan nacelles but banked to use the vehicle's whole underside as a brake. The aircar settled to the shoulder of the road beside the taxi.

Heinrich Biber popped out of the back like the cuckoo from a clock, shrieking, "What are you doing? I could have been killed!"

Biber was in a police service uniform like the one he'd worn on Greenwood. The man and woman who got out of the vehicle with him, and the driver who stayed at the controls, were members of the New Paris Watch also.

"Colonel Finch says there's no entry to the port," the militia officer said. "There's a column of Alliance troops coming to seize control."

"I know there's an Alliance column coming, you idiot!" Biber said. "They've got tanks and you can't possibly stop them! I couldn't get through to Finch any other way, so I've come to warn him in person!"

Mark saw metal gleaming rosy orange a mile and a half away where the spaceport approach road left the main highway. By concentrating, he could feel the low-frequency drumming of hundred-ton tanks that pounded the highway with the cushion of pressurized air that supported them.

"I think," he said, "that it's too late even for that, Mayor. Dagmar, come on-run! And the rest of you run too, if you're smart, because those tanks will slide right over you even if they don't bother to shoot!"

Mark dodged around the dump truck, looking over his shoulder to make sure Dagmar was following. She was. They ran for the terminal building a quarter mile away. Mark could already hear the tank intakes shrieking like a flock of approaching harpies.

Two huge crawlers were moving the James and John, the ship that would carry Mark on the first leg of the journey back to Greenwood, toward a magnetic mass near the terminal. The James and John wasn't scheduled to launch until local midnight, but Captain Cobey obviously planned to leave Zenith as quickly as he could get the starship in order.

Mark felt the same way, so he didn't figure he could blame Cobey. He still felt a flash of anger to realize the captain would have abandoned his passengers if they hadn't headed for the port before dawn.

Folk moving with the aimless busyness of ants from a disturbed hill swarmed about the doors to the terminal building. Spaceport staff, passengers and crew from ships in the port, and dozens of men and women in uniform or partial uniforms watched, shouted to one another, and wandered in or out. Two city buses, a dozen trucks, and scores of lighter vehicles including aircars were parked around the building in defiance of normal regulations.

Dagmar nodded at the chaos. "To blazes with that!" she said. "There's the James and John. Let's get aboard now. Nobody's going to be checking exit documents today."

Mark eyed the starship. The crawlers wouldn't have it on the mass for another twenty minutes, and even abbreviated liftoff preparations would take ten or fifteen minutes more. To advise Yerby and the Greenwood Council, Mark needed to know as much as possible about what was happening on Zenith.

Besides, he was curious.

"Dagmar," he said, "you go to the ship. Don't let them take off without me. I'll see what's happening in there and be with you in a few minutes."

Or not at all. Well, there was a risk in entering the terminal building, but the only certainty in life was that it ended sometime.

Mark trotted toward the entrance. Before Dagmar can object, he thought, but that was a remnant of his Quelhagen attitudes. Dagmar was a frontier settler who didn't figure it was her business if her neighbors risked their lives.

The rumble of the approaching tanks shook the starport as badly as the high-frequency hum of starships landing. Mark didn't hear any shots. He couldn't imagine anybody firing small arms at the impenetrable bulk of the Union vehicles, but everything happening today was beyond Mark's previous experience.

It was beyond the previous experience of everybody in the spaceport and probably most of the soldiers in the Alliance column as well. That made it as dangerous as playing catch with live grenades.

Mark squeezed through the doorway crowded with people uncertain whether to go in or out. "Let me through!" shouted the man behind him as they shoved together into the wailing room. Bits of clothing and equipment lost or broken in the nervous confusion littered the terrazzo floor. "Where's Finch? I need to speak with Colonel Finch!"

Mark looked at the man who'd spoken. He was Mayor Biber, who'd left or lost his aides somewhere between the barricade and here.

"He's in the control room," a woman with a nerve scrambler said. She wore a tan Zenith Protective Association jacket, but her orange cap said CARGO and had the spaceport's arrow-in-circle logo. She was staring in puzzlement at her weapon as if trying to remember where it had come from.

At least two sirens wailed within the port area. The tanks' intake whine was already louder, though it came from the other side of the berm.

The pair of guards at the door to the control room carried repellers. One man looked blank. The other, a teenager, was gleefully bright-eyed and had his finger on the trigger.

The past several months had given Mark an experience with weapons he'd never expected to need. He immediately noticed that the boy hadn't thrown the cocking switch that would drop the first pellet into the repeller's chamber.

Mark didn't plan to tell the fellow. That mistake was very likely the only reason he hadn't accidentally blown holes in the ceiling and probably the twenty nearest people as well.

"Let me by," Biber said curtly. "I'm the Mayor and I need to talk to Finch immediately."

The older guard blinked. The boy's finger tightened unconsciously on the trigger.

"It's all right," Mark said, patting the youth on the shoulder. "We're bringing reinforcements and need to know where to place them."

Biber looked up in recognition. Until then Mark had been only a shape on the fringes of Biber's awareness. He nodded and led Mark in.

Holographic displays covered three walls of the control room. A dozen people were present, four of them spaceport staff. Berkeley Finch stood in front of a real-time image of the port's barricaded entranceway, speaking into a radiophone with earnest desperation.

The display was fed by cameras at the upper corners of the berm, twenty feet above ground level. Two tanks led a score of buses and trucks filled with Union soldiers.

One of the tanks halted crossways so that its armor screened the soft-skinned vehicles from any shots that might be fired from the barricade. The other tank slid forward to clear the obstacles. Civilian vehicles, halted when the militia blocked the entrance, crunched and burst into flames beneath the tank's massive bow.

Mark couldn't see any Zenith militiamen at the barricade. The truck with the rocket gun had been driven away. A lone officer crouched in the shadow of the thick berm, speaking into a phone-perhaps to Finch in the control room.

"Finch, I've just come from downtown!" Biber said. "They've taken the Civil Affairs Building, your Association headquarters, and they're moving into Watch substations one by one. We can't stop them!"

The two men had been enemies and would never be friends, but for now they had to be allies. Both appreciated Ben Franklin's advice in similar circumstances: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

The tank pushed a wad of smoldering cars into the line of blocks and barrels. The driver pivoted his vehicle, ramming the mass out of the travel lanes and up the sixty-degree slope to the left of the roadway. Sand from crumpled barrels swirled in the whirlwind blasting beneath the tank's skirts. Some of the concrete slabs facing the end of the berm broke as the vehicle's bow brushed them.

The mass of debris sagged down as the tank swung away, but there was still room for truckloads of soldiers to drive through the gap. The tanker was proceeding to clear the rest of the entranceway nonetheless. The militia officer had run away.

"There aren't ten thousand Earth troops on Zenith!" Finch said. He squeezed the phone in his hand as if he wanted to crush it. "There's three million of us!"

"Yes," said Biber. "And all those millions can't stop Giscard from sending his soldiers wherever he pleases so long as they have tanks and we don't have anything that'll more than scratch their paint. Get your people out of here, Finch!"

Finch wiped his face with his free hand. He looked from Biber to the display, but there couldn't have been much solace there. The Alliance tank was using its bluff bow to bulldoze the remainder of the obstacles to the other side of the entranceway. The dump truck's ten tons of chassis and load skidded inexorably toward the end of the berm, pushed by a tank whose power plant could accelerate ten times that weight to fifty miles an hour. Parts tore off the truck's underside in a torrent of sparks.

"We can't escape now," Finch said miserably. "As soon as they're through the entrance, they'll control the whole port from the inside. Those lasers can sweep us off the top of the wall if we try to climb out in some other direction."

"Then we have to surrender," Biber said bluntly. "Hang yourself in your cell if you insist on committing suicide. If you try to fight, Giscard'll destroy the port instead of just taking it over. Zenith can't afford that, and New Paris certainly can't!"

The James and John showed on the room's left-hand display, almost in position over the magnetic mass. The Earth troops aren't likely to blast a ship that's taking off. Things aren't quite that bad yet.

"Gentlemen," Mark said, "I know where the tanks and artillery you need are, and I know how to get them for you. It'll cost you-"

"Get them where?" Finch snapped.

"On Dittersdorf," Mark said. "You won't be able to get enough troops off planet to do it, but we Woodsrunners can do it for you. You've got to pay the costs, and you'll have to agree-for Zenith! Agree on behalf of the whole planet-that Greenwood is free and self-governing from now on."

"We can't free you from Earth," Mayor Biber said. "We can't free ourselves, you young fool!"

He gestured toward the entrance display. The tank's bow had pushed the wreckage of the barricade halfway up the slope. The dump truck suddenly tilted downward onto its side, spilling tons of loose sand over the top of the armored vehicle. Rivers of sand flowed through the intakes on the whirlwinds the drive fans sucked down.

The abrupt silicon hammer blows sheared half the blades from the forward impellers before burning out the motors in gouts of nacelle-devouring blue fire. The machinery screamed like a hundred-ton child being spanked.

The tank bucked to a halt as the driver cut the rear fans before the inflowing sand could destroy them as well. The armored bulk rested squarely across the port entrance, blocking access as completely as the twenty-foot earthen wall to either side.

"There's your chance to escape, gentlemen!" Mark said. "Now, if you accept the deal, I want one of you to come to Greenwood with me on the James and John. We'll need somebody who can speak for Zenith and your syndicate. Do you agree?"

Mark couldn't believe what he was hearing himself say. It was as though his father or Yerby Bannock stood at his side, snarling the uncompromising demands. But it was Mark Maxwell alone-

And he'd won. Finch and Biber exchanged glances. They were both decisive men or they wouldn't have been able to create the positions they had despite Alliance attempts to stifle all colonials to docility.

"I'll go," said Biber. "You get your troops out, Finch. We'll need them again when we have tanks of our own."

Finch nodded and raised his radiophone to send his militia over the berm to safety. Mark ran for the door. Mayor Biber, panting but determined, was at his heels.