Patriots

"-Dr. Jesilind is right, there's no time for me to board with you. Perhaps a later vessel?"

Yerby laughed heartily. "You go bring your traps, boy," he said with a dismissive wave toward the caravansary five hundred yards away. "If you need help, the doc'll help you, won't you, Doc?"

Jesilind looked startled. "No, that won't be necessary," Mark said. "It's just the one bag."

"And me," Yerby continued, "I'll stay here and make sure the ship don't lift before you get back. Which it won't, or my name's not Yerby Ba

Mark ran anyway, as best he could. The combination of Amy's pleasure and Jesilind's sour expression both spurred him.

6. Home Is Where the Heart Is

"Holy Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior," Yerby Ba

"I'm always a little woozy after sleep travel," Mark said. "This was a longer trip than some. But I'm all right."

The ship had landed on a grid a hundred feet in diameter, big enough for a single ship but far too small to hold two at a time. The steel spiral against which ships braked themselves was buried ten feet down in the stony soil, but the ground still radiated heat from the mutually repelling magnetic fluxes. On more highly developed spaceports the surface was thick concrete or even vitrified earth. Here ships landed on dirt, and a few plants between the twists of the steel managed to survive the heat that baked their roots at every landing.

Landing-site preparation was the factor that limited interstellar trade. Ships traveling between prepared sites braked orbital velocity against the planet's magnetic field, but for actual landing they required a denser flux to cushion them down. Except for a few nickel-iron asteroids, that meant burying a huge mass of magnetic material in which the incoming ship could induce a field to repel that of the vessel itself.

The bigger the ship, the greater degree of site preparation. Even small tramp freighters like the one Mark had arrived on required hundreds of tons of metal to ease them in safely. That was a major project for a completely raw planet, but until it was accomplished all ships had to land by rocket. The weight penalty of the rocket motors and fuel was enormous, and it was a lot more dangerous than almost idiot-proof magnetic landings besides.

"Boy, I think there was something wrong with the gin I got on Dittersdorf," Yerby said. He closed his eyes, shuddered at whatever he saw inside his head, and opened them again. "The top of my skull feels like it's going to pop off."

"You drank more than two quarts of liquor immediately before we got into our sleep capsules," Mark said, trying not to scold. "I was afraid you might have poisoned yourself drinking so much."

Yerby shrugged and winced at the motion. "Oh," he said, "I always do that before transit to keep from scrambling my brains. The doc's got a machine but it never worked for me. I just get drunked up before I go under, and I come through okay."

Yerby didn't look okay, but Mark wasn't in perfect shape himself. Nobody was at his best following days of electronically induced suspended animation. Mark knew how to bring his brain waves in line with the induction apparatus instead of fighting it, but sleep travel still wasn't his idea of a fun time.

The alternative was to stay awake during transit between bubble universes, where all physical laws changed and life itself was an u

The flight crew had disembarked before ground perso

The captain plaited grass blades into a chain. As his fingers formed the chain from the bottom, he swallowed the other end.

There were worse things than Mark's wooziness, or even than Yerby's hangover.

The landing site was a rough plain. A dozen winch points-bollards set down to bedrock-ringed the field three hundred yards out. A ship could skid itself off the magnetic mass to allow another vessel to land. Two ships similar to the freighter Mark stood in were on the margins of the field now.

Most of the hills surrounding the field were heavily forested. " Greenwood " wouldn't have been a bad name for the planet even if the Protector of Hestia had been a Mr. Smith. On the knoll five hundred yards to the east sprawled a complex of stone and concrete buildings. Several brightly colored dirigibles bobbed on tethers above the courtyard wall; winged flyers, seemingly too delicate to be machines, lifted toward the ship.

"There's the Spiker, lad," Yerby said. He pointed toward the buildings with the care his throbbing hangover demanded. "Blaney's Tavern to the ship crews, but all the folk on Greenwood call it… See the critter there at the front gate?"

Mark squinted. "I thought it was a truck," he said. "Or a tank."

"The critter" was thirty feet long, ten feet broad, and ten more feet high. It stood on six stumpy legs and appeared to have neither a neck nor a tail. The huge head was jagged with scores of spines a foot or two long; rows of similar projections ran down the backbone and the flank Mark could see from this angle.

"A spiker," Yerby said. "Ain't very many of them. Guess there couldn't be or they'd eat the place down to the rock. That one charged a bulldozer while they were building the field. Would've flipped the dozer over, too, if old Blaney hadn't finally managed to burn through the hide."

The freighter's winch hummed, tracking the first load of cargo out of the hold. Much of it was Amy's luggage. "Guess I'm ready to do some work," Yerby said. To Mark he didn't look ready for anything but embalming, but it wasn't Mark's place to judge.

Ground perso

"Hope Desiree's here with a blimp," Yerby said. "My wife," he added with an apologetic grimace. "Damned if I know why I ever married her. Drunk, I suppose."

Mark's lips pursed. It wasn't his place to comment on Yerby's attitudes or domestic arrangements, either.

Amy appeared at the hatch above them, gray-faced. She moved with short, shuffling steps like a mummy whose feet were still wrapped together. She started to walk out into space.

"Amy!" Mark shouted as he bounded up the ten steps a lot faster than he'd have bet he could manage in the aftermath of suspended animation. He caught Amy by the shoulders an instant before she went off the edge of the top step.

"Something hurts," Amy said in a tiny voice. Her eyes didn't point in quite the same direction. "I think my head hurts."

"Here, lad, I got her," Yerby said. He reached past from the step below Mark. "Jump clear and I'll lift her down. Didn't the little gadget work for you neither, darling? The doc showed me the best one and I bought it."

"Do you think-" Mark said. Do you think you're in shape to carry jour sister, Yerby? he'd have continued, but obviously Yerby did think that and nothing anybody else said was likely to change his mind.