Patriots

Mark dodged around the dump truck, looking over his shoulder to make sure Dagmar was following. She was. They ran for the terminal building a quarter mile away. Mark could already hear the tank intakes shrieking like a flock of approaching harpies.

Two huge crawlers were moving the James and John, the ship that would carry Mark on the first leg of the journey back to Greenwood, toward a magnetic mass near the terminal. The James and John wasn't scheduled to launch until local midnight, but Captain Cobey obviously pla

Mark felt the same way, so he didn't figure he could blame Cobey. He still felt a flash of anger to realize the captain would have abandoned his passengers if they hadn't headed for the port before dawn.

Folk moving with the aimless busyness of ants from a disturbed hill swarmed about the doors to the terminal building. Spaceport staff, passengers and crew from ships in the port, and dozens of men and women in uniform or partial uniforms watched, shouted to one another, and wandered in or out. Two city buses, a dozen trucks, and scores of lighter vehicles including aircars were parked around the building in defiance of normal regulations.

Dagmar nodded at the chaos. "To blazes with that!" she said. "There's the James and John. Let's get aboard now. Nobody's going to be checking exit documents today."

Mark eyed the starship. The crawlers wouldn't have it on the mass for another twenty minutes, and even abbreviated liftoff preparations would take ten or fifteen minutes more. To advise Yerby and the Greenwood Council, Mark needed to know as much as possible about what was happening on Zenith.

Besides, he was curious.

"Dagmar," he said, "you go to the ship. Don't let them take off without me. I'll see what's happening in there and be with you in a few minutes."

Or not at all. Well, there was a risk in entering the terminal building, but the only certainty in life was that it ended sometime.

Mark trotted toward the entrance. Before Dagmar can object, he thought, but that was a remnant of his Quelhagen attitudes. Dagmar was a frontier settler who didn't figure it was her business if her neighbors risked their lives.

The rumble of the approaching tanks shook the starport as badly as the high-frequency hum of starships landing. Mark didn't hear any shots. He couldn't imagine anybody firing small arms at the impenetrable bulk of the Union vehicles, but everything happening today was beyond Mark's previous experience.

It was beyond the previous experience of everybody in the spaceport and probably most of the soldiers in the Alliance column as well. That made it as dangerous as playing catch with live grenades.

Mark squeezed through the doorway crowded with people uncertain whether to go in or out. "Let me through!" shouted the man behind him as they shoved together into the wailing room. Bits of clothing and equipment lost or broken in the nervous confusion littered the terrazzo floor. "Where's Finch? I need to speak with Colonel Finch!"

Mark looked at the man who'd spoken. He was Mayor Biber, who'd left or lost his aides somewhere between the barricade and here.

"He's in the control room," a woman with a nerve scrambler said. She wore a tan Zenith Protective Association jacket, but her orange cap said CARGO and had the spaceport's arrow-in-circle logo. She was staring in puzzlement at her weapon as if trying to remember where it had come from.

At least two sirens wailed within the port area. The tanks' intake whine was already louder, though it came from the other side of the berm.

The pair of guards at the door to the control room carried repellers. One man looked blank. The other, a teenager, was gleefully bright-eyed and had his finger on the trigger.

The past several months had given Mark an experience with weapons he'd never expected to need. He immediately noticed that the boy hadn't thrown the cocking switch that would drop the first pellet into the repeller's chamber.

Mark didn't plan to tell the fellow. That mistake was very likely the only reason he hadn't accidentally blown holes in the ceiling and probably the twenty nearest people as well.

"Let me by," Biber said curtly. "I'm the Mayor and I need to talk to Finch immediately."

The older guard blinked. The boy's finger tightened unconsciously on the trigger.

"It's all right," Mark said, patting the youth on the shoulder. "We're bringing reinforcements and need to know where to place them."

Biber looked up in recognition. Until then Mark had been only a shape on the fringes of Biber's awareness. He nodded and led Mark in.

Holographic displays covered three walls of the control room. A dozen people were present, four of them spaceport staff. Berkeley Finch stood in front of a real-time image of the port's barricaded entranceway, speaking into a radiophone with earnest desperation.

The display was fed by cameras at the upper corners of the berm, twenty feet above ground level. Two tanks led a score of buses and trucks filled with Union soldiers.

One of the tanks halted crossways so that its armor screened the soft-ski

Mark couldn't see any Zenith militiamen at the barricade. The truck with the rocket gun had been driven away. A lone officer crouched in the shadow of the thick berm, speaking into a phone-perhaps to Finch in the control room.

"Finch, I've just come from downtown!" Biber said. "They've taken the Civil Affairs Building, your Association headquarters, and they're moving into Watch substations one by one. We can't stop them!"

The two men had been enemies and would never be friends, but for now they had to be allies. Both appreciated Ben Franklin's advice in similar circumstances: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

The tank pushed a wad of smoldering cars into the line of blocks and barrels. The driver pivoted his vehicle, ramming the mass out of the travel lanes and up the sixty-degree slope to the left of the roadway. Sand from crumpled barrels swirled in the whirlwind blasting beneath the tank's skirts. Some of the concrete slabs facing the end of the berm broke as the vehicle's bow brushed them.

The mass of debris sagged down as the tank swung away, but there was still room for truckloads of soldiers to drive through the gap. The tanker was proceeding to clear the rest of the entranceway nonetheless. The militia officer had run away.

"There aren't ten thousand Earth troops on Zenith!" Finch said. He squeezed the phone in his hand as if he wanted to crush it. "There's three million of us!"

"Yes," said Biber. "And all those millions can't stop Giscard from sending his soldiers wherever he pleases so long as they have tanks and we don't have anything that'll more than scratch their paint. Get your people out of here, Finch!"

Finch wiped his face with his free hand. He looked from Biber to the display, but there couldn't have been much solace there. The Alliance tank was using its bluff bow to bulldoze the remainder of the obstacles to the other side of the entranceway. The dump truck's ten tons of chassis and load skidded inexorably toward the end of the berm, pushed by a tank whose power plant could accelerate ten times that weight to fifty miles an hour. Parts tore off the truck's underside in a torrent of sparks.

"We can't escape now," Finch said miserably. "As soon as they're through the entrance, they'll control the whole port from the inside. Those lasers can sweep us off the top of the wall if we try to climb out in some other direction."