Patriots

"I haven't heard you lie, Mark," Amy said. "Or your father either. You have an opinion about what's going to happen. Maybe you're right, and maybe you haven't shared it with-" She nodded toward the group around the nearby fire. "-Jace Burns and his kin. But you just heard Obed say that whoever my brother wanted to send to Hestia was fine with them. There's a lot here who feel that way-and the ones who don't, you know they'll have a chance to speak tomorrow too."

Somebody near the wall of the tavern fired a flashgun at Tertia. Some of the concentrated light might actually reach the moon in a few seconds. The nasty crack of the discharge had scarcely died away before a dozen other folk also shot into the sky.

Mark shivered. "I'm afraid to be responsible for everything that could go wrong," he whispered.

"You're right to be afraid," Lucius said. "But very generally the worst decision possible is to refuse to make a decision at all and just let events occur by themselves."

He smiled wanly. "I don't think that's likely to happen in an environment that includes Yerby Ba

"It was terrible on Zenith," Mark said, almost to himself.

"It's terrible on Quelhagen," Lucius agreed. "It'll be even more terrible when we have weapons to fight back with, but at least then there's the possibility that it'll become better in the future. Until there's revolutionary change, conditions on every 'protected' planet will continue getting bit by bit worse."

"Mark would be a good choice for delegate to Hestia," Amy said.

"No," said Mark. He didn't realize how strongly he felt about it until he'd spoken. "No! I'll be going with Yerby to Dittersdorf."

"There's more to a revolution than fighting, boy," Lucius said. His tone was suddenly as coldly angry as Mark had ever heard it.

"I know that," Mark said, straightening to attention, "but there's fighting too. Sir-Dad. I don't want to explain when I'm your age why I let other people fight for me. I know what you've said about only butchers and fools being fit to be soldiers."

Lucius nodded grimly. "That's right," he said. "But did I ever explain why that was? Because if other kinds of people become soldiers, they find themselves doing things they'll regret for the rest of their lives!"

"You're not going to change my mind!" Mark said. He stared at a campfire three hundred yards beyond the tip of his father's left ear.

Lucius laughed with something close to humor. All the cold passion had vanished from his voice. "I'm not even trying, son," he said. "But when you were complaining a moment ago about the way we weren't telling-" He gestured. "-your neighbors everything we thought we knew… do you like it better now that I have tried to tell you all the things I think I know about this subject?"

Mark chuckled and put his arms around his father, giving him a brief squeeze. Nobody on Quelhagen would have been that demonstrative, but they weren't on Quelhagen now.

"Mark?" Lucius said. "If you like, I'll arrange for you to become a lieutenant in the Quelhagen Defense Forces. The force will certainly grow rapidly, and opportunities for promotion will be considerable." He gri

"All right, I'll talk to him," Yerby said in a loud voice. He lurched to his feet, looking around for his companions. "Let's go find Chink Ericsson, Lucius. You can help me bring him around. If we start having wars of our own on Greenwood, we'll never get shut of the Alliance!"

"We're coming," Mark said. In a softer voice he added, "Thanks, Dad, but my business is on Greenwood. And I guess Dittersdorf."

33. A Nice Day to Visit

The sun was shining. It was pale because there was a high overcast, but it was shining.

Mark stood in the hatchway of the Chevy Chase and tried to count. This was the… The fifth? The sixth? Anyway, he'd been on Dittersdorf a number of times, and never before could he have sworn that the sun ever shone over the spaceport.

He'd have taken it for a good omen, except that his vision was as fuzzy as it usually was when he come out of a transit capsule. This time trying to focus his eyes gave him a headache as if trucks were driving over his skull, crushing it against a concrete roadway.

The Bloemfontein must have landed some hours earlier, because the Woodsru

Three ships and fifty-three perso

That wasn't much of an army for a raid on which a multi-planet rebellion depended, but it was what there was available.

"Mark, can you help me guide Yerby?" Amy asked in a faint whisper. Her brother walked like a long-legged zombie, veering from one side of the corridor to the other with each step. Amy's grip wouldn't have been enough to keep him from going right out the edge of the hatch.

"I drank a bottle of Chink Ericsson's brew before we lifted," Yerby said in a dead voice. His eyes were closed. "Sloe gin, he called it. Slow death is more like. I'll tell the world, I'm sick as a dog!"

"Let's wait here, Yerby," Mark said, touching the big man's arms. "Dagmar and some other of the people from the Bloemfontein are coming over."

Yerby's eyes opened. They looked alert, if bloodshot. "Right," he said. "Dagmar! Did you capture the control room?"

"What's there to capture?" Dagmar said with a snort. "But here's the controller, if that's what you mean."

Half the two dozen men with Dagmar-and one other woman-weren't from Greenwood. The several strangers in rainsuits were locals, but the others looked and dressed with the variety of folk who happened to have been in the port when the Woodsru

"Look, we don't handle any military traffic here, buddy," said the controller, a young man and ill at ease. "They've got their own port over on Minor. But I can tell you, there was a ship landed there last week, not the usual supply run, and everybody here figures it must've been full of reinforcements."

A man in the colorful one-piece rainsuit that marked those who had to live on this rain-sodden world nodded solemnly. "Stands to reason Earth's going to build up the fort on Minor when hell's a-popping right across settled space," he said. "Not much that happens anywhere that we don't hear about it on Dittersdorf!"

Mark opened his mouth to sneer, "Dittersdorf, hub of the universe." He held his tongue because he realized that all he'd be doing was trying to hurt the locals in revenge for the way they'd hurt him-by saying something that they thought was the truth, and that he didn't want to hear.

"We got all the transport we could find, Yerby," Dagmar volunteered. "That ain't much-two aircars and a surface-effect truck the guy says'll still run, but I du

"Let's go inside," Mark said. "I want to check something in the dead storage room."

"Say, you know they got showers here?" a Woodsru