Patriots

Mark slung his gas gun and peered at the repeller. Yerby cradled the dazed sentry in the crook of his arm like a mother with her infant.

"Yerby," Mark said, "that was a crazy thing to do. She'd have blown your head off if her gun was in better shape!"

He'd thought the repeller might be on safe. It wasn't. The receiver was so corroded that the trigger hadn't made contact when the sentry tried to shoot.

"Well, lad," Yerby said judiciously. "There's a lot of things that can happen in a fight, that's true. But I generally find the best rule is go right at the other fellow and not stop till he's down."

The thirty Woodsru

"Nothing to report, Lieutenant Hounslow, sir," the soldier mumbled. Her eyes didn't focus, but at least the pupils were the same size. "Just like every other bloody night in this bloody place."

Yerby propped the soldier in a sitting position against the wall. "Somebody set here with her," he said. "I wouldn't want the poor thing to wander off before she comes around proper like and hurt herself."

He straightened. "Let's finish this, fellows," he said, starting toward the barracks and command post. Mark took long strides to keep up, but Amy had to jog to stay on her brother's other side.

Glowstrips lighted the corridor alongside the enlisted barracks; there weren't any soldiers standing in the hallway as they had been the previous times Mark visited the fort. Although the garrison seemed to spend no more time in the upper world than a cave fish does, they kept a day and night schedule religiously. Mark didn't understand that, but as he saw more of life he was begi

Three of the barracks doors were closed; the last was only ajar. Yerby gestured four raiders to each door. At the end, he pointed four more to watch down the corridor in the direction of the Command Center and officers' quarters. With Mark, Amy, and old Pops Hazlitt poised behind him, Yerby pushed the panel fully open. Mark ducked past and turned the bank of light switches to the left of the door on.

There were loud crashes from down the hall. The other raiders were smashing their doors open, though Mark didn't imagine that any of them were locked.

Roused sleepers groaned and shouted in irritation. Something between a dozen and twenty of the bunks were occupied.

"Oh, who's the joker?" a soldier cried as she sat up in bed. "Carstairs, if that's you I'll break your-"

Her eyes focused on the shaggy faces glaring over the muzzles of their guns. She fell completely silent.

"Now you all sit tight," Yerby said with cheerful nonchalance. The flashgun's short, fat barrel enclosed a nest of mirrors which multiplied the laser beam's lens path. He waggled the big weapon toward the captives as if it were his index finger. "The fellows here are going to tie you up for a little bit, but nobody's going to get hurt. Everybody hear me?"

The flashgun nodded from one awakened soldier to another, sweeping the room. The weapon was a single-shot. After firing, it couldn't be recharged until daylight. It still looked horrifying, and Mark knew that the real effect of the gun's momentary pulse was even more shocking than the threat.

Some of the captives nodded agreement; others held themselves as stiff as statues chipped from rock salt. None of them looked as if they were even thinking of resistance.

"You lot tie them up," Yerby said, sweeping his left hand to indicate all the raiders who'd entered by the other three doors. He crooked his arm to rest the barrel of his flashgun on his right shoulder as he walked out of the barracks. Whistling an old tune, "The Irish Washerwoman," Yerby sauntered down the corridor with his usual lack of concern about whether anybody was coming with him.

The door to the latrine was slightly ajar. Amy pulled it closed with a click; Mark assumed she felt a perfectly understandable queasiness at the odor oozing through the previous opening.

Yerby paused in the hallway outside the door marked COMMANDANT. He motioned the others to stand clear and pointed his flashgun at the panel. Mark turned his head aside; so did Amy, though her camera continued to whir as it recorded the scene.

"Come out, you damned old rat, or I'll smoke you out!" Yerby bellowed with all the strength in his lungs. He fired.

The flashgun's spike of coherent light was saffron verging on chartreuse. Its millisecond brilliance was swallowed in a deep red fireball as the plastic door panel disintegrated. The shock wave slammed Mark into the far wall and knocked several Woodsru

The room beyond the blasted door was being used for storage. Racks of gardening implements, drawers containing bulbs, and bags of lime, fertilizer, and potting soil filled all but a narrow path to the bed.

The bed was empty except for two more bags of potting soil.

Lieutenant Hounslow burst from the adjacent room. "What's going on!" he cried. He was wearing a uniform shirt, a conical cloth nightcap with a tassel, and a pair of polka-dotted boxer shorts. "What's-"

Yerby poked the flashgun, discharged and as harmless as a club of the same size, in Hounslow's face. "Surrender, you son of a Paris whore!" he thundered.

"Oh, my goodness," Hounslow said. A raider opened the door marked COMMAND CENTER. The room was empty. "Oh, don't do that!" Hounslow protested. "You'll scatter my charts!"

Mark started to speak. He shut his mouth, then changed the subject by saying, "Where's Captain Easton, Hounslow?"

The lieutenant pulled the command center door closed. "What?" he said. "How would I know? Out in his garden, I suppose."

"I'll get him," Mark said. "I know where he is and, well, I wouldn't want him to get hurt by accident."

"I'll come along," said Amy.

The hand-lettered sign was tacked to the wooden door of the Command Center. She tugged it loose and added wryly, "I'll get the real pictures, but then we'll stage something for public release. Yerby, you've got no sense of history."

"Huh?" said her brother.

"I suspect," Mark said as he started down the corridor toward the ladder to Easton 's garden, "that most of the people making history are too busy to have a sense of it."

It was late in the year, but some of Captain Easton's flowers gave off a rich, spicy perfume.

"Night-blooming cereus," Amy murmured. "It's a cactus, really."

The flowers of the cereus were huge and white with tendrils all around the bloom. They showed up even in the starglow between pulses of the ante

There was what Mark had taken to be a toolshed at the near edge of tilled area. He heard soft snores coming from it. Amy raised her camera. She was using image intensification instead of the built-in light. The images would be grainy, but flooding the scene with a harsh glare would have been wrong. As wrong as Yerby Ba

"Captain Easton?" Mark said. He tapped on the side of the shed, then opened the door. "I'm afraid you'll have to come with us, sir."

"What?" said Easton. He was sleeping on a cot with only a pillow and a rough blanket for comfort. The Sunrise Seeds catalog reader hung from the cot's frame so that it didn't risk damage on the damp ground.

"Is it…" Easton said. "Why it is! Have my bulbs come, young man?"

"Sir," said Mark, "I'm very sorry, but that's not what I'm here about at all. We've captured the fort and taken you prisoner with the rest of your troops."