Patriots

"Mark here had a bit of a dustup with some Zeniths today, Amy," Yerby said. "He was kind enough to let me have a piece of it."

The food arrived, heaping platters of meat, bread, and vegetables; unordered and unexpected, at least by Mark. Apparently the Rainbow had one specialty, and the staff didn't bother asking customers if that's what they wanted. If they didn't, why had they come?

"Since when has there been a brawl within shouting distance that you didn't get involved in, Yerby?" Amy said sharply.

"I would have been badly beaten had your brother not rescued me, Ms. Ba

He didn't know what to say next. He'd never seen a man beaten unconscious, but he was quite sure the Zeniths would have gone at least that far.

"Amy, please, Mark," Amy said. "I wouldn't want you to think that Miss Altsheller's Academy had made me stuck-up."

"At the time the unfortunate events were occurring," Dr. Jesilind said, "I was considering the origin of life. I wonder, Mr. Maxwell, if you've ever considered the possibility that all life in the universe springs from a common font?"

"I can't say that I have," Mark said. He'd begun shaking when he thought about the beating he almost got. And it wasn't Jesilind's fault, but at the time the click of the doctor locking himself into safety had sounded like the crack of doom.

"All knowledge is my field," Jesilind repeated, beaming.

"'I have taken all knowledge to be my province,'" Mark said, correcting the quote. "That was very well for Sir Francis Bacon, but I'm not nearly so broad, and the sheer quantity of available knowledge today is greater by orders of magnitude."

Jesilind blinked.

Mark deliberately turned toward Yerby and said, "What are you going to do with Alliance soldiers, Yerby? Or if it's secret…"

"I've got no secrets from my friends, lad!" Yerby boomed. "Besides, I don't care if the Zeniths do hear about it."

That was true enough. Everybody in the room could hear him if they wanted to, though the Rainbow wasn't the sort of place where anyone thought quiet restraint was a virtue.

"You see," Yerby continued around a mouthful of rare beef, "all us settlers on Greenwood, we're there on proper Protectorate grants. Now, there's a bunch of folks from Zenith, they claim they've got grants too and maybe they do. But ours are older and we're there on Greenwood, you see?"

Mark nodded. There was the little matter of the fact that Protector Greenwood might not have jurisdiction over the planet to begin with; but in a way that didn't matter. The Protector was an Atlantic Alliance official, and he'd been acting under at least a claim of authority. His Alliance superiors might have cause to punish him for improperly making grants, but that didn't mean that the grants themselves were invalid.

"So some folks from Zenith, they come round a couple months ago, looking things over," Yerby continued. "Folks from the Zenith army, only they call it the Zenith Protective Association. And they got liquored up enough one night to talk about shipping all us Greenwoods out to a labor camp on Zenith for being trespassers."

He paused to drink. With the food, the Rainbow served pitchers of full-bodied ale. Yerby used enormous quantities of it to wash his meal down.

"I suggested to Yerby that the Alliance has a base on Dittersdorf Minor," Jesilind said. "All the commander there has to do is detach a small body of troops to Greenwood to keep the peace. That will obviate enormous future difficulties."

"I see," Mark said.

He didn't see. Rather, he saw that Ba

Not in Mark's universe. But perhaps things really did happen that way on the frontier.

"Well, lad," Yerby said with a broad smile. "You want to come with me tomorrow? It's a couple days before you ship out, right? The car's a two-seater and Doc decided he didn't want to come."

You'll be lucky if you don't break your neck, flying through soupy atmosphere on a strange planet! Mark thought. Then he thought, I was lucky that the Zeniths didn't break my neck, and all I did was sit on a bucket reading.

"I'd be delighted," Mark said. "I'd like to see more of the planets I'm staging through, but mostly I've been stuck in spaceports." Kept myself stuck in spaceports.

"Done!" Yerby said, wiping his hand on his shirt before he shook with Mark. "First light in the morning, then. I want to get us back to Major before dark."

"I'll look after Miss Ba

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" Amy said. "Yerby, I'm coming with you."

"Only got two seats, child," Yerby said. He chuckled. "Besides, it's too dangerous for a sweet girl like you."

"What!" Amy said. She started to get up, bumped the table-her chair didn't slide back the way she'd thought it would-and slammed back down.

"Yerby, I think perhaps you should take your sister-" Mark said.

"Are you telling me my word's no good, boy?" Yerby said. His fist curled reflexively around the handle of a full pitcher.

"No, I'm telling you I made a mistake," Mark said evenly. Maybe it's just my day to get pounded to a pulp. You can't avoid your fate…

"Stop!" said Amy. She didn't shout, but there was no doubt from the authority in her voice that she and Yerby Ba

She resumed eating, taking refined little bites. There wasn't a lot of talk around the table for the remainder of the evening.

4. The Fu

The landscape of Dittersdorf Minor rolled by a thousand feet below the aircar. Compared to Major, the terrain was hillier and some of the vegetation could be called low trees.

The biggest difference was that Mark could see more than a fog-shrouded blur.

"I don't see why the port and all the settlement's on the big island," Yerby said. "Down there looks like pretty decent land, and you can see a hand in front of your face."

He had to shout to be heard over the persistent screech of the car's power plant. The turbine ran without stuttering on any liquid-hydrocarbon fuel, but it sounded like it was about to fly apart any moment.

"The Alliance won't allow settlement because of the fort," Mark said. "All Minor's a military reservation."

Ba

Major, Dittersdorf's larger island (or small continent), was shaped like a broad crescent whose wings flowed backward in the press of a warm ocean current. Minor was a ball in the crescent's hollow, relatively clear of the rain and fog that constantly shrouded the bigger island.

The Easterns occupied Dittersdorf for strictly military purposes. After Alliance forces captured the planet, the Paris bureaucracy permitted construction of a civil spaceport to serve traffic to the Three Digits, but only three hundred miles away on the larger island.

Minor would have been a more comfortable site for the caravansary and the civilian settlement that had sprung up to service the port, but a bureaucrat always finds it easier to forbid than allow. From what Mark had seen in the Rainbow Tavern, the silly restrictions hadn't kept the settlers from enjoying themselves.

The car lifted slightly in an updraft. Mark saw their destination sprawled ahead of them.

The military base was a vast six-pointed star with turreted energy weapons at the angles and a spaceport in the paved central courtyard. The complex covered several acres on the surface, and Mark knew that several levels of tu