David Drake: Patriots

"As you please," Finch said with pinched nostrils. He turned to the nearest ladder and climbed, the repeller on his back swinging with the violence of his motions. Mark braced the rope with one hand till Finch reached the top, then followed him.

Yerby backed a few steps and took a run at the wall. His boot got enough purchase on the vines that the frontiersman was able to catch the lip and swing himself onto the broad battlement. Amy shook her head at her brother's showing off, but she was recording him nonetheless.

Dittersdorf had no moon. The raiders' only light came from the warning flasher on the antenna. Somebody missed his footing on the inner ladder. He fell with a clatter of equipment and curses, his own and those of the people he bounced into. Mark expected an alarm, but the only answering sound was that of the nightbirds. Papashvili's engineers were all the way across the starport, and there was probably nobody else in the garrison above ground.

One of the raiders started to wander off toward the stairwell that led directly down to quarters for the soldiers living in family groups. The underground corridor between those rooms and the barracks-style arrangements for the remaining troops was open, but none of the ceiling lights worked.

Married quarters were Finch's responsibility. "Hey you!" he called to the man. "Where do you think you're going?"

The frontiersman turned. "I'm going down the stairs, like I'm supposed to," he said. "But if you want, pretty boy, I'll clean your clock before I do that."

"Now, you just hold where you are, Casey Tafell," Yerby said in a mild but carrying tone. "Nobody goes anywhere till we're all ready."

Tafell grimaced. "Who died and made you God?" he asked, but he spoke in a lowered voice which Yerby was willing to ignore.

"The little prick sure gets up a fellow's nose," Yerby said to Mark in a generally audible aside. "But we can't have folks haring off on their own."

Finch was welcome to think Yerby was talking about Casey Tafell if he liked. Anyway, all the raiders stayed at the base of the wall until the last person-Dagmar, making sure that nobody was still screwing around in the truck-was over the wall.

"That's it," she said. "My lot, come on, we'll collect them engineers before somebody gets up to take a leak and sees us."

She headed across the vast paved courtyard, cradling a repeller captured in one or the other of the Zenith invasions. Ten frontiersmen followed her. They weren't moving fast, but neither does the surf as it sweeps up the shore; and like the surf, they'd keep going until they were darned good and ready to stop.

"Finch, good luck to you," Yerby said. "And remember, watch out for kids."

Yerby sauntered to the entrance by which he'd entered the fort the first time. He didn't give orders to the raiders who were supposed to go with him. Mark wasn't sure if Yerby knew everybody would follow or if he just didn't care.

Mark didn't look over his shoulder either. He couldn't imagine that the people who'd come this far wouldn't go the rest of the way. Besides, Amy was a half step behind her brother; Mark was going in even if it was nobody but the three of them.

Boots shuffling on the slotted metal stair treads set up echoes in the shaft. By the time Mark was three-quarters of the way down to the first level, it sounded as though an army or an extremely large centipede was coming down the stairs behind him.

"Yerby?" he said. "We'd better stop before you open the door to the corridor. The racket'll wake the guards up even if they've all been dead for three days."

Yerby got to the first landing and reached for the door latch. He hadn't heard Mark's warning over the clatter of feet.

"Yer-" Mark shouted.

The door opened inward to the hallway before Yerby touched it. An Alliance soldier, half turned to say something to his companion in the corridor, jerked his head around. He faced Yerby Bannock in the dim light of the stairwell.

Amy peered around her brother's shoulder with the three lenses of her camera spread like the eyes of a monstrous insect. Mark was on the first step behind the Bannocks, trying to aim his gas gun. In back of him the stairs were full of hairy, ragged frontiersmen, armed to the teeth.

" Mother! " the Alliance soldier screamed. He flung his repeller down the corridor in one direction and fled in the other.

His companion raised and pointed her own weapon. Her face was pallid in the light in the ceiling above her.

"The door!" Mark cried. He couldn't level the gas gun because the sling swivel in the butt was tangled in the belt of the man behind him.

The door was made of quarter-inch armor plates that sandwiched an insulating honeycomb. The hypervelocity pellets would disintegrate on the panel's first layer without penetrating. If Yerby could pull the door closed-

Yerby jumped straight toward the gun and clouted the soldier with a sweep of his left arm. He held his flashgun to the side in the other hand, out of the way.

The Alliance soldier bounced like a rubber ball off the far wall of the corridor. Her repeller sparked and skidded along the concrete flooring. Mark grabbed it, trying to glance in both directions to see if there were more soldiers coming.

Mark couldn't tell anything except that there was nobody in the two pools of light in the distance to the right. The other way there was no light at all, though an occasional clatter suggested the fleeing soldier was caroming from one side to the other at a dead run.

The rest of the raiders crowded into the corridor, jostling Mark aside. "Hey, now," Yerby said. "Don't step on the poor child I whacked on, here. She's had enough trouble tonight."

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 Woodsrunners in this group were milling in the corridor. The single overhead fixture lighted them grotesquely. Yerby bent toward his captive and said, "Well, little lady. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting to find you awake. How many of you lot are on guard?"

"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 beginning to realize that nobody understood why other people lived the way they did.

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.