Patriots

"You know," a female soldier said to her fellows, "I've seen Pekingese dogs that were hung better than he is!"

Gales of laughter came from the street and park. Mayor Biber had wealth and power, but he wasn't the sort of man his fellow-citizens weren't willing to laugh at. Chances were that out-of-work Zeniths disliked the local moneymen about as much as they did the Alliance troops.

"Who did this?" Biber screamed. He flung a projection cube to the ground and jumped on where it would have been if it hadn't bounced away. "Who?"

"Why, Heinrich," Berkeley Finch said through the faint curtain of the hologram he was projecting over and over. "I now see an aspect of you I'd never imagined!"

Biber tried to throttle him. Finch backed away, still laughing. A pair of soldiers caught the Mayor's arms.

"It doesn't really matter," Mark said. His soul trembled but he was glad to note that his voice stayed steady. "You've already agreed that Yerby and me and all the Woodsru

Biber shook himself loose. "You," he said in a venomous voice, pointing at Mark.

"In fact," Mark said, "you've made us incredibly rich because of the way land prices will shoot up when you begin bringing in settlers by the tens of thousands."

"You think I'm going to make you rich after what you and your other swine did to me in that swamp?" Biber screamed. He turned to Candace. "There's no deal!" he said. "There's no deal but that every one of the bastards on Greenwood now gets scooped up in their underwear and dumped on an asteroid!"

"Biber, you don't speak for the syndicate," Berkeley Finch said in a worried voice. He'd suddenly realized the wider ramifications of what had just happened.

"And the syndicate doesn't speak for me if it plans to compromise with these grubby lice!" the mayor replied.

Candace tried to step between the men. Biber pushed the counselor back out of the way. "I'm telling you, Finch, I'm going to clear the tracts I own of all trespassers, and if-" He turned to Candace again. "-Protector Kiss-My-Ass Giscard has a problem with that, it's really too bad!"

Biber stumped out of the checkpoint, slapping at the projection cubes in the hands of the people he passed. Colonel Wordsworth watched him go with a speculative look.

"Well, Dagmar," Mark said to his fellow delegate. "I don't think we need stay on Zenith any longer. It appears that an agreement won't be possible after all."

He nodded to Counselor Candace, who seemed to be in shock.

31. Off the Deep End

Zenith's rich, red-orange dawn looked like the mouth of hell backlighting the new barricade on the spaceport approach road. As the taxi carrying Mark and Dagmar pulled up, soldiers backed a dump truck loaded with sand to the other side of the swinging crossbar and shut off the engine.

"What's going on?" the taxi driver called through his open window, sounding worried as well as angry at the delay.

The barricade was a hasty improvisation of sand-filled fuel drums and concrete blocks. It closed three of the four travel lanes; the dump truck now filled the other. Flashing emergency lights had made the structure look like a construction site as the taxi approached.

Mark stuck his head out to be sure. The folk at the barricade wore the tan uniforms of the Zenith Protective Association. A number of the troops looking worriedly over the line of drums carried repellers and other projectile weapons. The gun on the back of a pickup behind the barricade fired two-inch-rockets through a charger-fed launching tube.

The dump truck began to settle with a loud hiss. The vehicle had a central inflation pump. The militiamen were using it to vent all the air from the tires so it was impossible to roll the truck out of the way.

"Hey!" cried the taxi driver. "What're you doing?"

"Ms. Wately," said Mark, formal because he was frightened. "I think we'd better get out. We may have to leave our gear."

An officer with red shoulder boards on her tunic ducked under the crossbar and walked to the taxi. More traffic was backing up. Horns blew in a variety of timbres.

"I can buy more clothes," Dagmar said as she and Mark got out of opposite sides of the vehicle with their hand luggage. "So long as I don't get my head blown off first."

"There's no more traffic into the port!" the militia officer snarled. She was young, petite, and obviously as scared as Mark was. "Go on, get away from here! There's an Alliance column on the way and we're going to stop them!"

During the night everything on Zenith had changed as suddenly as a trap shuts. Mark didn't know whether there'd been a precipitating incident or if the general tension had suddenly coalesced into war the way rain forms from water vapor. When heavy gunfire began to shake the city, he and Dagmar headed for the starport.

They stepped toward the barricade. Mark had paid the driver when they got in, the only way the man would agree to drive through New Paris and the chance of trouble at any instant.

"Stop!" the officer cried to Mark. "I've got my orders!"

She wore a handgun of some sort in a covered holster on her wide belt. Her hands groped for the weapon, but she couldn't seem to get the flap open.

"Don't get your knickers in a twist, sister," Dagmar snapped. She was either a great actress or a lot more relaxed than Mark was. "We're Greenwood citizens going home. This fight is nothing to do with us."

"Madame Captain," Mark said, "your orders are to stop vehicles. We're going to Greenwood to bring help back here to you."

It was the best lie he could think of at the spur of the moment. Whatever happened, it didn't look like Greenwood need worry about another Zenith invasion any time soon.

A fast-moving aircar, low but nonetheless airborne and therefore in breach of the emergency regulations, came from the direction of New Paris. It looked as though the driver pla

The crew of the gun on the pickup fired three rockets in quick succession. Instead of a roar, the rounds blasted from the launching tube with a crack!/crack!/crack! that made Mark grab his ears as he hunched over.

If the militia meant the shots as a warning, they cut it closer than Mark would have recommended. One of the sizzling green balls snapped within arm's length of the vehicle's canopy. The car skidded in the air as the driver not only backed his fan nacelles but banked to use the vehicle's whole underside as a brake. The aircar settled to the shoulder of the road beside the taxi.

Heinrich Biber popped out of the back like the cuckoo from a clock, shrieking, "What are you doing? I could have been killed!"

Biber was in a police service uniform like the one he'd worn on Greenwood. The man and woman who got out of the vehicle with him, and the driver who stayed at the controls, were members of the New Paris Watch also.

"Colonel Finch says there's no entry to the port," the militia officer said. "There's a column of Alliance troops coming to seize control."

"I know there's an Alliance column coming, you idiot!" Biber said. "They've got tanks and you can't possibly stop them! I couldn't get through to Finch any other way, so I've come to warn him in person!"

Mark saw metal gleaming rosy orange a mile and a half away where the spaceport approach road left the main highway. By concentrating, he could feel the low-frequency drumming of hundred-ton tanks that pounded the highway with the cushion of pressurized air that supported them.

"I think," he said, "that it's too late even for that, Mayor. Dagmar, come on-run! And the rest of you run too, if you're smart, because those tanks will slide right over you even if they don't bother to shoot!"