Patriots

"By the Lord God Almighty!" Yerby said in amused approval. "That's Desiree or I'm a-" He looked at one, then the other, seatful of his nervous captors. "-gentleman from Zenith! No way Elmont 'd risk his neck like that, and George, heck, he don't know how to drive nothing!"

Mark levered himself into a sitting position. All the Zeniths but the driver were looking over the back of their vehicle. They were too worried to care what their prisoners did at the moment. The other aircar was a hundred yards away and closing the gap very slowly. A bearing or a rubbing drive fan screamed a note of utter high-pitched fury.

"I didn't think that car flew either, Yerby," Mark said. It just about didn't. Whatever metal screamed had to fly apart soon. At the speed the parts of an aircar's drive train spun, failure was likely to look like a grenade going off.

"I tell you, lad," Yerby said, "last time I flew her, she flipped and tried to squish me like a bug. If the courtyard wall hadn't caught the bow and held it up, that's just what she'd have done. But I guess maybe Desiree don't weigh so much or something."

The woman beside Finch leaned over the side of the car to give herself more room and fired her gas gun. The heavy projectile sailed through the air at least twenty feet above its target and twenty yards behind.

The recoil overbalanced the shooter; she pitched over the side. Yerby threw his full weight against her legs, pi

"Careful there, missie," Yerby said with a chuckle. "Wouldn't want to lose a sweet child like you."

"You sanctimonious prick!" the woman screamed in Finch's face. "You were going to lighten the car, weren't you? You wanted me to go overboard!"

Finch grimaced. "Go on," he ordered. "We'll have to shoot it down. Try not to kill the driver."

He fired his repeller. The stream of pellets didn't come within a country mile of the target, partly because Finch kept a worried eye on the angry woman beside him. Maybe he thought she was going to sling him out of the car. Maybe she thought the same thing.

Zeniths crammed beside Finch in the back started shooting with a repeller and a gas gun. A woman in the middle seat stood to launch a rocket flare. She stumbled sideways when the vehicle swayed, jostling the man seated beside her. His gas shell missed Finch's cheek by less than the colonel's razor had that morning.

Finch squealed and hunched down. His second burst chewed the back fender of his own car.

"Oh, you people!" Yerby said in obvious amusement. "You don't know Desiree the way I do. Why don't you just pack it in now? I promise I'll keep her off you."

"Shut up, you fool!" Finch snarled. As he raised his repeller to fire, he glanced nervously over his shoulder at the Zeniths behind him. He ducked down without actually pulling the trigger.

Mark looked at Yerby. He wondered how much of the frontiersman's nonchalance was an act. It also struck Mark that the relationship between Yerby and Desiree was a good deal more complex than the loud hostility he'd initially thought it was limited to.

The other car had pulled within fifty feet and was slightly to the right of the Zenith machine. One of the kidnappers with a repeller started hitting despite the vehicles' doubled motion. Pellets danced across the bow of the target, exploding in friction-heated violence. They had no effect on the car.

The Ba

The two cars separated to round a tree that dangled aerial roots from its branch tips. The vehicles closed the wide circuit at increasing velocity. A gas shell burst on the target's bow and spread its cold fog across the plastic. The driver was the only target on which the Zeniths' weapons could have an effect, and she was protected by the skewed angle of flight of a vehicle with only two and a half of its four motors working.

The Zenith driver was focused on his compass course and the terrain ahead. As they rounded the tree, he steered toward rather than away from the oncoming vehicle. The Ba

"Turn!" Finch screamed. "Turn, you idiot!"

The Zenith with the flare gun fired it into the backseat of her own car. It zipped between the legs of a man desperately trying to reload his repeller in the crowded, jouncing vehicle. He screamed and threw himself forward as if the gout of red fire were rocket exhaust.

Desiree peered over the bow of her aircar, visible for the first time. She eased her leading edge over the Zenith vehicle's right rear inlet duct. The fan choked off for lack of air. The other three fans, operating at maximum output, flipped the car like a tiddlywink.

Mark had a view of the ground, then a sky full of flailing figures and weapons all on separate courses; then the ground again.

The aircar managed the last half turn the instant before it hit.

That was the difference between Mark's survival and him being driven into the ground like a tent peg.

The prisoners hadn't been flung out with the others because they were on the floor at the axis of the car's revolution. The ground was marshy. When the car hit, its undercarriage cut deep to form an air cushion with a perfect seal. Thin mud exploded in a brown curtain. An instant later the drive fans sucked in the mixture and ripped off impellers that were set too coarse for any medium but air.

"By all that's holy!" said Yerby Ba

Mark managed to sit upright. The world had stopped spi

Desiree Ba

"Honey love, you're surely a sight for sore eyes!" Yerby called. "Come cut my hands loose before they fall off, the beggars tied me so tight!"

The Zeniths were picking themselves up from the bog. Mark couldn't be sure, but it looked like they'd all survived the crash also. Berkeley Finch stood knee deep in a particularly wet patch. He pointed a dripping repeller at Desiree and shouted, "Halt! You're under arrest for interfering with officers of the law!"

Desiree continued to stump toward the Zenith aircar. "You put that thing down," she snarled, "or I'll feed it to you! You hear me?"

Yerby cackled. "You better listen to her, Colonel!" he said. "You peeve my Desiree and you'll be lucky if it's your teeth that get first look at what you're stuffed with."

Desiree reached the car. "There's forty of our neighbors on the way here," she said. "By daybreak there'll be two hundred. The blimp's empty, so I took that bitch of a car up to three thousand feet and put a call out before I come chasing you."

She snipped the cords from her husband's ankles with a pair of wire cutters, then freed his wrists. "Yerby," she added, "I told you you were the biggest fool in all space to buy that piece of junk. Do you know the sucker flipped twice on me before I got her back down?"

"I'm sorry, honey love," Yerby said contritely. He stood and flexed his arms to work life back into them. "I'll get you a proper car next time I'm on Zenith, see if I don't."