David Drake: Patriots

The fellow carried on one shoulder a packing case as big as he was-which made it a large case. Rain dripped from his poncho, the broad brim of his hat, and his flaring red mustache. For all that he beamed like summer sunshine as he took the bag from his companion and tossed it expertly on top of the packing case, a minuscule addition to his previous load.

The big man noticed Mark and gave him a merry nod as he and his companion strode across the common area to their room. Mark sighed and returned to staring at the jumble of items in the caravansary's dead storage room.

Dittersdorf wasn't a planet of any significance for its own manufactures or agriculture, but the spaceport on Dittersdorf Major was a stopping point for ships traveling between the worlds of the Three Digits and the rest of the settled universe. The gear abandoned in the caravansary was so varied that Mark couldn't guess what most of it was, much less whether it might be useful to him on the frontier.

"Guess you'd be from Earth?" said the watchman, a fat man with a bad limp and a constant wheeze.

"From Quelhagen, sir," Mark said. He was twenty-two standard-Earth-years old, thin and brown-haired. He felt as though there were a six-inch glass wall between him and the boisterous chaos behind him.

The caravansary was a circular building with a domed roof. The doors of windowless rooms around the circumference opened onto the common court in the center. The watchman's kiosk was beside the outer door, and the first room was used to store the goods that travelers left behind, sometimes because they'd died. The caravansary staff sold the leavings for what they brought. Inevitably, the collection had been picked over many times before Mark took the watchman's invitation to look at it. Most of what remained was junk.

"Quelhagen and Zenith, they're the same as Earth, pretty much," the watchman said. He scratched himself, bored but mildly hopeful that Mark would find something worth beer money. "They're all built up just like Earth."

"Not at all," Mark said. He spoke calmly and precisely, without any emotional loading. Quelhagen's social style was quiet reserve, even among friends. Mark, so alone that he didn't even feel he was of the same species as the frontiersmen with whom he shared the caravansary, had completely shut down his emotions. "Landingplace is the largest city on Quelhagen as well as being our capital, but it would be a minor community even in the interior of the Atlantic Alliance. On the Atlantic Circuit, why, I've seen buildings more populous than Landingplace."

That was an exaggeration, but not an enormous one. Mark had seen arcologies holding a hundred thousand people, but he doubted there were any quite as big as the quarter million who by now lived in Landingplace.

He took a holoviewer from beneath a bundle of clothing barely fit to become wiping rags. The viewer was a dedicated unit, loaded and sealed instead of having a socket in which different chips could be placed.

When Mark switched the viewer on, it projected a spray of flowers and vegetables in the air of the room. SUNRISE SEEDS CATALOG FOR 2249, read a legend in fluorescent letters. YOUR BEST CHOICE FOR QUALITY, PRICE, AND VARIETY!

The watchman spit onto the floor of the courtyard. When Mark had arrived, a few hours earlier, a pair of men whose ankles were chained to their waists had been hosing the caravansary down. The bare concrete was already returning to a state of mud and squalor.

"Salesman from Hestia," the watchman explained, tapping the holoviewer with his finger. "Earth company he traveled for, but he was Hestian. Caught a bug or a bellyful of the wrong whiskey, I guess. Either way, it carried him off. Had some nice clothes, but they went right off."

He yawned and scratched himself again. "You like flowers?" he asked in vague hope.

"I don't mind them," Mark said, putting the viewer back on the pile where he'd found it.

A man in a rain-sodden poncho and muddy boots strode through the caravansary's personnel door. He shouted "Hey you! Wake up!" to the watchman and opened the double-panel vehicle door, which latched only on the inside. Three similar men and the high-wheeled cart they were pushing stood on the apron.

The downpour of an hour ago was over. The drizzle Mark saw beyond the open door was fog a trifle too heavy to remain suspended. Lights gleamed in the windows of buildings otherwise concealed by the gloom.

Mark noticed a one-cubic-foot carrying case. Its hard shell was decorated in the blue-white-gray crystalline pattern of blue john, the myrrhine that the ancient Romans had used for their most valuable cups. He tugged the case out of a jumble of chipboard containers full of obviously broken appliances.

"Ah," said the watchman approvingly. "That's a bit of a grab bag, sir. From the weight there's something inside, but you'll have to cut it apart to open it. There's no latch, you see."

The four new arrivals pushed their cart into the caravansary, slipping and swearing. The vehicle was loaded-overloaded-with a dozen large trunks of uniform design. Their ends were stenciled BIBER/ZENITH/IN CARE OF GRIGGS/N OF 12-DO NOT SEPARATE. The cargo handlers had piled individual gear-duffel bags and bedrolls-on top of the trunks. Splotches of mud indicated that several of the bags had fallen on the path from the ship to the caravansary.

"Hey, fatso!" called the man who'd opened the larger doors. "Give us a room. And don't say you haven't got one, because we'll clear one ourselves if we've got to. This baggage belongs to Mayor Heinrich Biber, it does. Mayor of New Paris on Zenith!"

The watchman, obviously nervous about leaving Mark alone in the dead storage, nonetheless turned his attention to the newcomers. "Thirty-seven's empty, sirs," he said. "Ah-will Mayor Biber be staying here himself tonight?"

"Dream on, fatso!" another of the new arrivals said. "The Honorable Heinrich Biber is returning by yacht in two stages, leaving dogs like us to carry his luggage by freighter."

"Twelve bloody stages from Kilbourn to Zenith," the original spokesman added. "And we'll be lucky if it isn't bloody thirteen! Get moving, boys."

Biber's servants braced themselves against the luggage trolley.

"You'll have to wait-" the watchman began, trotting over to the receipt pad he'd left in his kiosk.

"We don't have to do any damned thing!" the spokesman snarled. "And if you don't keep out of our way, you'll find wheel tracks running the length of you!"

Mark grimaced as he knelt before the stone-finished carrying case. He didn't blame the servants for being in an ill temper after shifting that heavy load through the rain, but… Room 37 was next to Mark's own Room 36. He'd have preferred other neighbors. Still, the caravansary was built from cast concrete, including the partition walls between individual cells. The interior of Room 36 was dark and dank, but it was certainly private.

Mark had insisted that, having completed his education on Earth, he wanted to visit the frontier for himself instead of taking articles as an attorney's clerk with his father or one of his father's Quelhagen friends. This caravansary was what visiting the frontier meant.

The case was of a sort introduced on Earth within the past two years. The pattern of "crystals" on two of the corners rotated. The latch could be set to a nearly infinite series of combinations, but most users just left the cases on the original setting: both latches identical, with the peak of a large white crystal bisecting each corner.

The watchman closed the large doors, then dithered a moment as he glanced between Mark and the luggage trolley squealing its way across the common area. At last he trotted after the new arrivals, waving his receipt book. Nobody yet had been able to open the case, so he probably thought it was proof against Mark's examination.