Patriots

by David Drake

  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.

  29. Preparing the Trap

  A tank with its Klaxon groaning slid past the front of the Safari House. The monster terribly dwarfed the elephants molded into the lobby walls. Behind the tank were three trucks with mounted gas projectors. The soldiers in the sandbagged truck beds carried repellers and rocket launchers.

  A platoon of Alliance troops wearing body armor and armed with lethal weapons guarded the front of the hotel against the mob in the square. A brick had shattered one of the broad front windows. Members of the hotel staff were trying to cover the hole with stiff plastic sheeting.

  Ms. Macey came in through a side door, looking agitated. She didn't see Mark until one of her aides coughed and pointed to him.

  "There's a ban on aircars, Maxwell!" she said. "I had to come through the streets from the trade mission!"

  Gas guns thumped in the square. Mark thought he heard the snarl of nerve scramblers as well, a more painful way of paralyzing the motor nerves of a person within a hundred feet or so. The scramblers' field generated conflicting chemical messages that knotted the target's muscles with violent cramps.

  The mob howled over the Klaxon's moan.

  "I'm very sorry, madame," Mark said, "but my only transportation was the car and driver which Protector Giscard provided. I didn't care to alert him that I was meeting you, since you investors aren't permitted at the negotiations."

  "Yes, yes," Macey said. The broken window kept drawing her eyes, though she shuddered every time saw it. Viewing the riot was for her like touching the stump of an amputated limb. "Why is it so important that I see you in person, then?"

  Repellers cracked. Each hypersonic pellet bounced shock waves from the building facades. The echoes were individually tiny, but the total of them sounded like sleet on tin.

  There were no other guests in the lobby. The clerk cowered behind his counter looking blank-eyed. The party of waiters covering the window focused on their task so that they didn't have to think about what was happening outside now, and what might happen to them in the next instant or the next day.

  "I have a hologram master," Mark said, taking the video chip from his breast pocket. He was wearing casual Zenith-style clothing he'd bought at a kiosk in the starport. For most of his stay he wanted garb less conspicuous than the Quelhagen formalwear he'd put on for the conference the next day.

  Macey took the chip but looked at it with only vague interest. Her eyes kept drifting back to the scene beyond the windows.

  "I want you to have this copied onto thirty-second projection cubes—as many as you can, thousands if possible," Mark said in a louder voice. "Distribute them—give them away—all over New Paris, especially right downtown here. They have to be on the street by the end of the truce meeting tomorrow afte
rnoon. Can you arrange that?"

  Macey shuddered and returned her attention to Mark. "Yes, I suppose," she said. "The mission has a duplicating lab for commercial presentations. What is this, anyway?"

  "Necessary for your syndicate's purposes," Mark said without answering. "Look, I don't want anybody else to know where it came from. None of the other Greenwoods, do you understand?"

  Macey raised an eyebrow.

  "No, I'm not selling them out!" Mark said harshly. "Some of them might think I was, though, if they knew what I was doing. I'm doing what I think's right for Greenwood. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not a traitor."

  A sickly green flash lit the square momentarily. A tank had fired the huge Cassegrain laser it carried as main armament. The pulse must have been aimed skyward. The only sound was the sharp hissCRACK! of cold air slapping the heated track closed, instead of the roaring collapse of a building.

  "I don't suppose my father's on Zenith now, is he?" Mark said softly.

  "What?" said the investor. "No, no. This meeting wasn't announced, you know. The only reason I'm here is that my associates and I thought it was best to leave one of us here in case the Zeniths tried something of the sort."

  Macey looked at the chip again. "I'll take care of this," she said, but she showed no signs of wanting to leave the doubtful security of the hotel while the riot continued. Her aides—two of the three were clearly bodyguards—paced restively nearby.

  "I'd planned to have the material duplicated at a local shop," Mark said. He wasn't sure whether he ought to stay with the investor or go back to his room and hope that she'd return to the Quelhagen trade mission building more quickly. "I wasn't expecting a—"

  He nodded toward the windows. The hotel staffers were outside now, considering ways to attach more sheeting to protect the still-undamaged panes.

  "A riot like this," Mark continued. "Is this common?"

  "There's trouble every day," Macey said, staring toward the square, "but I've never heard of it being this bad. I don't know where it's going to go from here. And there's trouble on Quelhagen too."

  "Madame?" Mark said. "I want to be very clear about my position in all this. I'm not on your side, I'm on Greenwood's. There happens to be a convergence of interests at the moment, that's all."

  Macey turned sharply. "What are you talking about?" she demanded. "There isn't any Greenwood except dirt and dirty people. And the investment potential. Are you telling me that you want to be paid? Is that it?"

  There was no more cutting insult that one Quelhagen aristocrat could fling at another. Mark felt his lips instead spread into a smile. As if he could be worried about money with what was happening outside the hotel right now!

  But Macey was. To her, money was always the first principle. Concern about losing money had brought her out tonight, even though that meant risking her life.

  "No, ma'am," said Mark. He realized for the first time how much he'd changed in the past months. "Nothing like that. I just felt honor-bound to let you know where my basic loyalties lie. Honor is important, even to a dirty Greenwood settler like me."

  "Bah!" Macey said. She held the video chip out to one of her aides. "Langley, don't lose this," she ordered. "We've got to get back to the mission and hope the riot hasn't spread in that direction."

  She swept Mark again with her eyes. "I couldn't understand how you and Bannock got along, Maxwell," she said coolly. Her fear of the riot seemed to have passed, or at least been controlled. "Now I do. I've never seen intelligent men as determined to go off in crazy directions as the pair of you. You're human pinballs!"

  She turned and strode toward the door by which she'd entered the lobby. Her aides fell into step with her.

  At the door Macey looked back over her shoulder. "Also," she added across the empty room, "I suspect you're both too dangerous to live!"

  30. Watching the Fireworks

  The windows of the seventh-floor conference room looked down on the street in front of the Civil Affairs Building and the central park. Vehicles and pedestrians were moving normally, though Mark thought there was less traffic than he'd seen on his previous visit to New Paris.

  Several cars, crushed and burned out, had been pushed through hedges to get them out of the travel lanes. Clothes, repeller magazines, and gas canisters littered the view. One of the streetscape's trees was now a shattered stump three feet across. A maintenance crew wearing orange dickeys was sawing up the wooden corpse for disposal.

  Candace, Protector Giscard's legal advisor, closed the door behind him as he returned to the conference room with a sour expression. Everyone in the room—Mark and Dagmar Wately, Biber and Finch representing the Zenith claimants, and Colonel Wordsworth of the Alliance military forces—stared at Candace silently.

  "I believe we can get started now," the counselor said briskly as he pulled out a chair at the circular table. "Protector Giscard has just informed me that I'm to deputize for him at this meeting. The events of last night require his urgent attention at headquarters."

  Colonel Wordsworth snorted. Her iron gray hair was cut short to fit under a helmet. "What he should turn his attention to is finding a pair of balls to replace the ones he lost before he was appointed protector here," she said, glaring at Candace.

  "If Giscard's afraid to come to New Paris," Dagmar asked, "why isn't he holding the meeting at his palace?"

  "Because to guard against spying and sabotage in the present state of unrest," Wordsworth said gratingly, "no Zenith citizens are being permitted into the headquarters area. That particularly includes—" She rotated her grim expression toward the pair of Zenith investors. "—our esteemed vice-protector there. Eh, Finch?"

  "Colonel," Candace said coldly, "if you choose to discuss local politics, I strongly recommend you find another venue for it. Your words in this company might well be considered treason against the Atlantic Alliance if they were reported by an enemy of yours."

  Wordsworth grimaced. "Giscard knows what I think about all this pussyfooting around," she muttered, but she didn't meet the legal advisor's eyes.

  "Very well," Candace said. He waited until everyone was seated, then continued, "For the purpose of this meeting, Mr. Finch is acting as a private party rather than as a representative of the Alliance. I wish to be very clear on that point."

  Finch flushed. "We're here to negotiate, Candace," he said. "If instead you plan to play tin god, then I have better ways to spend my time."

  "Finch has no more rights here than anybody else," Mayor Biber said. "And you bet we're here to end this nonsense once and for all."

  Both men were in flashy civilian clothes in place of the uniforms they'd worn for their court appearance. Nevertheless, Wordsworth glowered at them like a cat eyeing caged birds.

  It struck Mark that he and Dagmar were the only two people in the room who didn't heartily dislike all the others. Zenith's internal muddle was worse in some ways than what was happening on Greenwood, and all the players were looking for other people to blame.

  Of course, nobody was threatening to plant a city of fifty thousand in Mayor Biber's front yard.

  "We accept that Protector Giscard is acting on behalf of the Alliance, not for parochial interests," Mark said. "This meeting isn't an attempt by a corrupt official to circumvent the plans of his superiors on Earth."

  Candace gave Mark a smile of respect if not liking. He'd understood Mark's threat to go over Giscard's head if matters didn't develop to Greenwood's liking.

  "I'm glad positions are clear," Candace said. "Now, first." He looked at the investors. "While Protector Greenwood of Hestia clearly had no authority to make settlement grants for the planet that now bears his name, it appears that a number of Alliance citizens have in good faith transported themselves and their chattels to Greenwood on the basis of such grants. It would be inequitable to displace those innocent parties."

  Heinrich Biber started to rise. "If you think," he said, "that I'm going to let Giscard take the money I paid into his pocket for those
grants go with a 'Sorry, guess I made a mistake,' then you haven't seen the start of trouble on this planet!"

  Dagmar opened her mouth to speak. Mark quickly put his hand across hers to silence her. It wouldn't help if she blurted the threat he knew was on the tip of her tongue.

  "Do you plan to negotiate this matter from a cell in the Protector's palace, Biber?" Finch said with a sneer. "Counselor Candace, continue with your appraisal. We'll refrain from comment until you're done." He glanced at the Mayor and added, "Further comment."

  Biber's face was angry, but there was a touch of unease in his expression also. He knew that his outburst had indeed been grounds for arrest under the emergency regulations, though Protector Giscard wasn't confrontational enough (or probably brave enough) to jail a prominent citizen.

  Candace focused his attention on the settlers' representatives. "A right to remain on Greenwood doesn't mean a right to ignore legal obligations, however," he said. "Administrative control of the planet is in the hands of the Protector of Zenith. Unless you settlers are willing to accept that, you're in rebellion against the Atlantic Alliance."

  Dagmar looked worriedly at Mark. He touched her hand again. "We're loyal citizens of the Alliance, sir," he said to Candace. "Of course we accept her laws and administrative structures."

  Mark wasn't sure how true that was, even for himself. He was sure it was the proper thing to say.

  "As a corollary to that," Candace continued, "illegal armed groupings on Greenwood will have to disband immediately or face suppression by the armed forces of the Alliance. The Alliance will guarantee the rights of individual settlers, but harassment of officials properly appointed by authorities on Zenith has to stop immediately."

  He glared at Mark. Mark, who'd faced a furious Yerby Bannock, tried to avoid smiling. He nodded solemnly and said, "Our only desire is for justice, sir."

  The counselor seemed to have taken Mark's statements as gospel truth, because he relaxed noticeably at the mild replies. One of the problems faced by people who deal with words—and laws are only words—is that those folk tend to mistake the image for reality.