Patriots

by David Drake

36. Once More into the Breach

  The land ahead loomed out of the sea's soft phosphorescence. "See?" Yerby crowed. "Didn't I tell you we'd be OK? I don't need a compass, I got a natural compass in my head!"

  "It was monstrously irresponsible to leave before navigational aids were installed in this vehicle!" Berkeley Finch said. "I didn't dream that you were considering such a thing!"

  "You were welcome to stay at the spaceport, Colonel," Amy said.

  "Naw, Finchie," Yerby said. "I knew I could find Minor. It'd have been a lot riskier to wait around the port, looking for a radiocompass that maybe we wouldn't find anyhow."

  "And have the Alliance reinforcements arrive early while we were cooling our heels," Mark put in. "On the frontier, we learn to make do."

  He was talking as if he'd been raised in a log cabin instead of conditions of luxury as civilized as those of the Vice-Protector himself. The past months had changed Mark, though. He hadn't blinked when Yerby announced that he'd need to eyeball their overwater course because the compass didn't work.

  A few of the recruits from more ordered planets had indeed backed out when they heard about the compass. The frontiersmen from Greenwood and other planets had taken the matter in stride. Yerby said he could get them to the fort on Minor; and if he didn't, well, they'd make do.

  Finch had come anyway. His hopes for a political future were greater than his fear of drowning.

  "Now hang on, everybody!" Yerby roared over his shoulder. "This may get a mite rough."

  The surface-effect truck looked like a conventional aircraft with wings and a pair of turbine engines at the roots of the vertical tail. The wings were too stubby to support the fat fuselage in normal flight. Their steep camber trapped a cushion of air between them and the surface of the ground or sea so long as the vehicle flew forward.

  The truck could sail ten feet in the air at 220 miles an hour with a modest expenditure of energy, perfect for carrying heavy loads over water or flat ground. It couldn't hover, though, and crags or a wall would rip the vehicle apart.

  If the engines failed you'd better like the immediate terrain, because you were either going to land there or crash.

  Mark tensed as the shoreline approached beyond a frill of seafoam. He hadn't paid any attention to the coast on his previous trips to Minor, and he doubted Yerby had either. If the margin rose too abruptly, rocks were going to take the truck's bottom off as sure as a grater scrapes cheese.

  "Amy," he said. "Lift your feet."

  "Why—" said Berkeley Finch.

  The truck dipped, then lifted as if the shelving beach were a trampoline. Vegetation whickered beneath their keel like the brushes of an automatic car wash. Occasionally something more solid would thump the vehicle, but for the most part even the tree trunks were soft and sappy. Nothing came ripping through the bottom plates, at any rate.

  "This is a much bigger vehicle than the ones you used to scout the fort earlier," Finch muttered. "It may well be above a detection threshold that the cars escaped."

  "Naw, nothing much works down there," Yerby said unconcernedly. "You ain't seen the place, Finchie."

  "Don't call me that," Finch said, but he spoke in an undertone that carried no conviction. Yerby chuckled and tousled Finch's hair.

  "There's a signal!" Mark said. "There's a light flashing ahead of us!"

  "That's the warning light on the fort's antenna tower, lad," Yerby said. "It flashes in the daytime too, when we was there before, but I guess you didn't pick it out."

  He throttled back the turbines and rotated the big horizontal steering wheel hand over hand. You couldn't bank the truck without spilling the supporting cushion of air, so the rudder had to supply all the turning force. The vehicle wallowed and sideslipped as it curved around the nighted bulk of the fort.

  They coasted down on a three-hundred-foot strip on the north side of the fort, where the walls' shade stunted the vegetation. The ground sloped but not badly. The double-bogie wheels on the truck's hull jounced brutally, but the vehicle tracked straight enough that the small wing outriggers could handle the sideways jolts.

  The turbines roaringly reversed thrust, and the wings pivoted further down into airbrakes instead of lifting devices. The truck stopped with a final whiplash.

  "Next time we do this, Bannock," said Axel Kockler as he picked himself from the tangle of other raiders who'd lost their hold on the bulkhead straps, "we bring blimps, you hear me? This is no way for human beings to travel!"

  "Who decided you was human, Kockler?" a neighbor called. Sliding hatches in the cargo compartment rumbled open.

  Yerby opened the door on his side of the cab. "Well, anyhow," he said across the general laughter, "it's fast."

  "If I wanted fast," Kockler muttered, checking the flashgun he'd dropped when he fell, "I wouldn't drink whiskey. I'd just club myself on the head and get straight to the hangover."

  Vines curtained the outer wall of the fortress. The stems were leafless until they reached the top and exploded in a profusion of foliage. Some of the more active raiders were already climbing, carrying rope ladders for the others to follow by.

  "All right, Colonel," Yerby said to Finch. "I want you and your people to be special careful when you pick up the families. Chances are, most folks won't want trouble because they got their kids around; but there'll be a few who get panicky for the same reason. I'll tell you right now, anybody who hurts a kid because of an itchy trigger finger had better shoot me too before I hear about it. Right?"

  "Nobody's going to get hurt, Yerby," Zeb Randifer said. "It's going to be like Blind Cove, no trouble at all."

  "I'd like to accompany the body that captures the Command Center, Bannock," Finch said formally—for at least the fourth time since Yerby decided in the caravansary who'd go where on the raid.

  "I'd like you to get on with the job I give you, Finch," Yerby said. There was enough granite for a landslide in his tone. "Or if you like, you can guard the truck here in place of Rinaldi."

  "As you please," Finch said with pinched nostrils. He turned to the nearest ladder and climbed, the repeller on his back swinging with the violence of his motions. Mark braced the rope with one hand till Finch reached the top, then followed him.

  Yerby backed a few steps and took a run at the wall. His boot got enough purchase on the vines that the frontiersman was able to catch the lip and swing himself onto the broad battlement. Amy shook her head at her brother's showing off, but she was recording him nonetheless.

  Dittersdorf had no moon. The raiders' only light came from the warning flasher on the antenna. Somebody missed his footing on the inner ladder. He fell with a clatter of equipment and curses, his own and those of the people he bounced into. Mark expected an alarm, but the only answering sound was that of the nightbirds. Papashvili's engineers were all the way across the starport, and there was probably nobody else in the garrison above ground.

  One of the raiders started to wander off toward the stairwell that led directly down to quarters for the soldiers living in family groups. The underground corridor between those rooms and the barracks-style arrangements for the remaining troops was open, but none of the ceiling lights worked.

  Married quarters were Finch's responsibility. "Hey you!" he called to the man. "Where do you think you're going?"

  The frontiersman turned. "I'm going down the stairs, like I'm supposed to," he said. "But if you want, pretty boy, I'll clean your clock before I do that."

  "Now, you just hold where you are, Casey Tafell," Yerby said in a mild but carrying tone. "Nobody goes anywhere till we're all ready."

  Tafell grimaced. "Who died and made you God?" he asked, but he spoke in a lowered voice which Yerby was willing to ignore.

  "The little prick sure gets up a fellow's nose," Yerby said to Mark in a generally audible aside. "But we can't have folks haring off on their own."

  Finch was welcome to think Yerby was talking about Casey Tafell if he liked. Anyway, all the raiders stayed at the base of the wa
ll until the last person—Dagmar, making sure that nobody was still screwing around in the truck—was over the wall.

  "That's it," she said. "My lot, come on, we'll collect them engineers before somebody gets up to take a leak and sees us."

  She headed across the vast paved courtyard, cradling a repeller captured in one or the other of the Zenith invasions. Ten frontiersmen followed her. They weren't moving fast, but neither does the surf as it sweeps up the shore; and like the surf, they'd keep going until they were darned good and ready to stop.

  "Finch, good luck to you," Yerby said. "And remember, watch out for kids."

  Yerby sauntered to the entrance by which he'd entered the fort the first time. He didn't give orders to the raiders who were supposed to go with him. Mark wasn't sure if Yerby knew everybody would follow or if he just didn't care.

  Mark didn't look over his shoulder either. He couldn't imagine that the people who'd come this far wouldn't go the rest of the way. Besides, Amy was a half step behind her brother; Mark was going in even if it was nobody but the three of them.

  Boots shuffling on the slotted metal stair treads set up echoes in the shaft. By the time Mark was three-quarters of the way down to the first level, it sounded as though an army or an extremely large centipede was coming down the stairs behind him.

  "Yerby?" he said. "We'd better stop before you open the door to the corridor. The racket'll wake the guards up even if they've all been dead for three days."

  Yerby got to the first landing and reached for the door latch. He hadn't heard Mark's warning over the clatter of feet.

  "Yer—" Mark shouted.

  The door opened inward to the hallway before Yerby touched it. An Alliance soldier, half turned to say something to his companion in the corridor, jerked his head around. He faced Yerby Bannock in the dim light of the stairwell.

  Amy peered around her brother's shoulder with the three lenses of her camera spread like the eyes of a monstrous insect. Mark was on the first step behind the Bannocks, trying to aim his gas gun. In back of him the stairs were full of hairy, ragged frontiersmen, armed to the teeth.

  "Mother!" the Alliance soldier screamed. He flung his repeller down the corridor in one direction and fled in the other.

  His companion raised and pointed her own weapon. Her face was pallid in the light in the ceiling above her.

  "The door!" Mark cried. He couldn't level the gas gun because the sling swivel in the butt was tangled in the belt of the man behind him.

  The door was made of quarter-inch armor plates that sandwiched an insulating honeycomb. The hypervelocity pellets would disintegrate on the panel's first layer without penetrating. If Yerby could pull the door closed—

  Yerby jumped straight toward the gun and clouted the soldier with a sweep of his left arm. He held his flashgun to the side in the other hand, out of the way.

  The Alliance soldier bounced like a rubber ball off the far wall of the corridor. Her repeller sparked and skidded along the concrete flooring. Mark grabbed it, trying to glance in both directions to see if there were more soldiers coming.

  Mark couldn't tell anything except that there was nobody in the two pools of light in the distance to the right. The other way there was no light at all, though an occasional clatter suggested the fleeing soldier was caroming from one side to the other at a dead run.

  The rest of the raiders crowded into the corridor, jostling Mark aside. "Hey, now," Yerby said. "Don't step on the poor child I whacked on, here. She's had enough trouble tonight."

  Mark slung his gas gun and peered at the repeller. Yerby cradled the dazed sentry in the crook of his arm like a mother with her infant.

  "Yerby," Mark said, "that was a crazy thing to do. She'd have blown your head off if her gun was in better shape!"

  He'd thought the repeller might be on safe. It wasn't. The receiver was so corroded that the trigger hadn't made contact when the sentry tried to shoot.

  "Well, lad," Yerby said judiciously. "There's a lot of things that can happen in a fight, that's true. But I generally find the best rule is go right at the other fellow and not stop till he's down."

  The thirty Woodsrunners in this group were milling in the corridor. The single overhead fixture lighted them grotesquely. Yerby bent toward his captive and said, "Well, little lady. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting to find you awake. How many of you lot are on guard?"

  "Nothing to report, Lieutenant Hounslow, sir," the soldier mumbled. Her eyes didn't focus, but at least the pupils were the same size. "Just like every other bloody night in this bloody place."

  Yerby propped the soldier in a sitting position against the wall. "Somebody set here with her," he said. "I wouldn't want the poor thing to wander off before she comes around proper like and hurt herself."

  He straightened. "Let's finish this, fellows," he said, starting toward the barracks and command post. Mark took long strides to keep up, but Amy had to jog to stay on her brother's other side.

  Glowstrips lighted the corridor alongside the enlisted barracks; there weren't any soldiers standing in the hallway as they had been the previous times Mark visited the fort. Although the garrison seemed to spend no more time in the upper world than a cave fish does, they kept a day and night schedule religiously. Mark didn't understand that, but as he saw more of life he was beginning to realize that nobody understood why other people lived the way they did.

  Three of the barracks doors were closed; the last was only ajar. Yerby gestured four raiders to each door. At the end, he pointed four more to watch down the corridor in the direction of the Command Center and officers' quarters. With Mark, Amy, and old Pops Hazlitt poised behind him, Yerby pushed the panel fully open. Mark ducked past and turned the bank of light switches to the left of the door on.

  There were loud crashes from down the hall. The other raiders were smashing their doors open, though Mark didn't imagine that any of them were locked.

  Roused sleepers groaned and shouted in irritation. Something between a dozen and twenty of the bunks were occupied.

  "Oh, who's the joker?" a soldier cried as she sat up in bed. "Carstairs, if that's you I'll break your—"

  Her eyes focused on the shaggy faces glaring over the muzzles of their guns. She fell completely silent.

  "Now you all sit tight," Yerby said with cheerful nonchalance. The flashgun's short, fat barrel enclosed a nest of mirrors which multiplied the laser beam's lens path. He waggled the big weapon toward the captives as if it were his index finger. "The fellows here are going to tie you up for a little bit, but nobody's going to get hurt. Everybody hear me?"

  The flashgun nodded from one awakened soldier to another, sweeping the room. The weapon was a single-shot. After firing, it couldn't be recharged until daylight. It still looked horrifying, and Mark knew that the real effect of the gun's momentary pulse was even more shocking than the threat.

  Some of the captives nodded agreement; others held themselves as stiff as statues chipped from rock salt. None of them looked as if they were even thinking of resistance.

  "You lot tie them up," Yerby said, sweeping his left hand to indicate all the raiders who'd entered by the other three doors. He crooked his arm to rest the barrel of his flashgun on his right shoulder as he walked out of the barracks. Whistling an old tune, "The Irish Washerwoman," Yerby sauntered down the corridor with his usual lack of concern about whether anybody was coming with him.

  The door to the latrine was slightly ajar. Amy pulled it closed with a click; Mark assumed she felt a perfectly understandable queasiness at the odor oozing through the previous opening.

  Yerby paused in the hallway outside the door marked COMMANDANT. He motioned the others to stand clear and pointed his flashgun at the panel. Mark turned his head aside; so did Amy, though her camera continued to whir as it recorded the scene.

  "Come out, you damned old rat, or I'll smoke you out!" Yerby bellowed with all the strength in his lungs. He fired.

  The flashgun's spike of coherent light
was saffron verging on chartreuse. Its millisecond brilliance was swallowed in a deep red fireball as the plastic door panel disintegrated. The shock wave slammed Mark into the far wall and knocked several Woodsrunners down. Yerby remained as solid as a crag in the surf.

  The room beyond the blasted door was being used for storage. Racks of gardening implements, drawers containing bulbs, and bags of lime, fertilizer, and potting soil filled all but a narrow path to the bed.

  The bed was empty except for two more bags of potting soil.

  Lieutenant Hounslow burst from the adjacent room. "What's going on!" he cried. He was wearing a uniform shirt, a conical cloth nightcap with a tassel, and a pair of polka-dotted boxer shorts. "What's—"

  Yerby poked the flashgun, discharged and as harmless as a club of the same size, in Hounslow's face. "Surrender, you son of a Paris whore!" he thundered.

  "Oh, my goodness," Hounslow said. A raider opened the door marked COMMAND CENTER. The room was empty. "Oh, don't do that!" Hounslow protested. "You'll scatter my charts!"

  Mark started to speak. He shut his mouth, then changed the subject by saying, "Where's Captain Easton, Hounslow?"

  The lieutenant pulled the command center door closed. "What?" he said. "How would I know? Out in his garden, I suppose."

  "I'll get him," Mark said. "I know where he is and, well, I wouldn't want him to get hurt by accident."

  "I'll come along," said Amy.

  The hand-lettered sign was tacked to the wooden door of the Command Center. She tugged it loose and added wryly, "I'll get the real pictures, but then we'll stage something for public release. Yerby, you've got no sense of history."

  "Huh?" said her brother.

  "I suspect," Mark said as he started down the corridor toward the ladder to Easton's garden, "that most of the people making history are too busy to have a sense of it."

  It was late in the year, but some of Captain Easton's flowers gave off a rich, spicy perfume.

  "Night-blooming cereus," Amy murmured. "It's a cactus, really."

  The flowers of the cereus were huge and white with tendrils all around the bloom. They showed up even in the starglow between pulses of the antenna light.