David Drake - Patriots

There were five people in the gondola, three of them dressed as if they came from off-planet. One of the locals dropped a rope from the open half of the car. None of the folk in the courtyard grabbed it to haul the dirigible in as they would normally do. The pilot in the closed cabin scowled through a window and vented hydrogen, bringing the airship down with a rush and a bang on the hard ground.

The three strangers got to their feet and stepped iron-faced from the car. The woman as well as the two men wore black coats with white trousers, but the cut was flamboyant even though the garments' color was not.

They weren't armed. Mark still tried to place himself in front of Amy. She elbowed him hard and went on recording the event.

The trio faced Yerby. "Court officials," Mark whispered. "Process servers from Zenith." He'd seen their sort before in his father's office. Lucius Maxwell had a practice that involved a score of Protected Worlds and the courts on Earth as well.

"We have a summons for ejectment lodged against persons occupying certain tracts of land in violation of the rights of ownership of Heinrich Biber and other parties," one of the men said. He spoke in a strong voice, but his face was pale and his eyes looked a mile through Yerby.

"Where you from, lad?" Yerby said mildly. "Zenith, ain't you? You're on Greenwood now."

"The summonses are signed by Magistrate Ardis Saunderson," the Zenith spokesman said. "Justice Saunderson is an official validly appointed by the Protector of Zenith. The court date is in one month in New Paris."

The woman carried a hologram projector embossed with a gold Zenith Protectorate crest. "Come on, then, honey," Yerby said to her with his usual easy chauvinism. "Let's see who it is."

The bailiffs whispered among themselves. From the corner of his eye, Mark saw the Quelhagen investors watching from the tavern doorway. They'd been in the meeting with the settlers' leaders, but they were being careful rather than rushing into whatever was about to happen in the courtyard.

The bailiff switched on the projector and handed it to Yerby, who turned it so that he could make out the shimmering orange words hanging over the unit. "Wately," Yerby read aloud. "Barnes, O'Neill, Emmreich, Koslovsky, and Chin."

He gave the bailiffs a playful scowl. "Come on, where's my name? Yerby Bannock?"

"The only tracts covered by this action are the ones owned by those individuals," the Zenith spokesman said. He'd relaxed very slightly now that he and his companions hadn't been attacked the instant they said what they were here for.

Mark stepped forward. He didn't know what he was about to do until the instant he did it. "Ms. Wately?" he said in a clear voice. "Will you please sell me an acre of your holdings? I'd like to be joined as a defendant in this lawsuit."

"Attaboy, Mark, lad!" Yerby boomed. "Dagmar, I want a piece of this one too!"

He stuck his hands on his hips and added, "By all that's holy, we'll show them what it means to mess with the free citizens of Greenwood!"

"You'll see all right," said the bailiff who hadn't spoken until that moment. "You'll see when a Zenith marshal and a dozen deputies sends you all running back into those woods!"

The other two Zeniths stiffened; the eyes of the man who'd first spoken unfocused again. Yerby Bannock laughed and patted Mark on the shoulder. "Get on with enrolling our people, lad," he said. "Wouldn't be surprised if we needed to defend ourselves one of these days."

He looked around the courtyard and added, "Woodsrunners. That's got a ring. I think we'll call ourselves the Woodsrunners!"

The spaceport at New Paris could land a dozen starships simultaneously, and there were covered storage facilities for over a hundred. Mark was too proud of Quelhagen to say that New Paris had a better port than Landingplace, but he had to admit it was impressive.

Mark held Amy's hand in a gesture of mutual support. She'd mastered the biofeedback techniques Mark taught her, but interstellar travel was still a disorienting experience. At least the ramp had handrails.

Attendants were helping the three investors to a limousine like the one in the ship's hold. Daniels and his fellows didn't intend to wait for cargo to be unloaded. Three less ornate aircars waited to take away the Greenwood defendants and the investors' servants.

"Wait a minute," Mark muttered. Four recently landed large vessels remained on the magnetic masses. One of them was still in the process of discharging cargo and passengers. The people disembarking were gray-uniformed Atlantic Alliance troops, and a huge ground-effect tank was being lowered from the hold by a mobile derrick and the starship's own crane.

Amy opened her recorder and focused on the troopship. The self-imposed duty seemed to steady her. Mark by contrast felt distinctly queasy. The four ships together must have held well over a thousand men, even with the heavy equipment they brought with them. He wondered if the Protector of Quelhagen was getting reinforcements also.

Yerby, first of the Greenwood defendants besides Mark to drag himself out of his transit capsule, clanged into the right handrail and shook the ramp. He bounced left, bounced right with his next step, and probably would have caromed like a cue ball into Mark and Amy if they hadn't grabbed his arms and gently helped him to the ground.

"Holy Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior," Yerby muttered. "Boy, I think there was something wrong with that last batch of whiskey I got from Blaney."

He noticed the troops disembarking. They felt the effects of transit too. Soldiers shambled without any order. Individuals stumbled, hunched, and squeezed their heads to relieve the pain. Either the Alliance didn't teach effective biofeedback techniques, or they didn't teach the techniques effectively.

"Whoo-ee!" Yerby said. "Now, there's the soldiers I was looking for. Should've come to Zenith instead of Dittersdorf, huh?"

"They wouldn't come to Greenwood if you invited them, Yerby," Amy said in a hard voice. "The worst possible result would be if they did come, though. I'll never forgive you if you go over and talk to them."

Yerby watched the troops with an odd smile; not the broad devil-may-care grin Mark had seen often in the past. "Guess they could go through us Woodsrunners pretty quick with those tanks," he said. "Though it could be there's some tricks they don't know about being out with just himself and a couple million trees."

The frontiersman turned to Mark and Amy. "Think that's what they're here for?" he asked. "To use against us?"

"No," said Mark. "They've almost certainly been brought to strengthen the Protector's hand against the population of Zenith."

He smiled at the irony. "The same ones we're having trouble with, yes. But people who assume that they're automatically friends with the enemy of their enemy generally wind up with barbarians in their living rooms. I think Amy's right. The farther we keep from Alliance soldiers, the better off we'll be."

"Just thought it was worth checking," Yerby said. His grin spread into familiar broad cheerfulness.

"Captain Bannock?" Mr. Holperin called from beside the limousine. "Would you and your aides care to join us for the ride to the hotel? I gather most of your codefendants haven't left their capsules yet."

Every one of the Greenwoods except Yerby had trusted to an electronic device more or less like the one Amy had used on the voyage from Kilbourn. There was something about the term "high tech" that suppressed the common sense of frontiersmen who were otherwise the most pragmatic people Mark had ever met.

"Didn't drink enough before the flight," Yerby said, giving his reading of his fellows' problem. "Well, I appreciate the offer, Holperin, but I need a little therapy myself. Seems to me the saloons around the spaceport might be more comfortable than whatever a fancy hotel's got in its lobby, so I'll wander off and join you later."