David Drake: Patriots

"Follow me!" Finch cried as his shoulder hit the door and he lurched into the room beyond. His momentum carried him into the board that served as the latrine's seat. He broke it and plunged into the eight-foot hole in the floor.

"Holy sh-" Finch screamed.

There was a loud plop. A brown geyser spouted above the floor and sank back.

The Greenwoods crowding forward behind Finch stopped dead as though the horrible stench were a brick wall. Mark had known what to expect, so he'd held his breath, but his eyes started to water.

Yerby stepped into the converted pump room. "I don't guess I've ever been taken for a coward," he said, "but I'll tell the world I never done a braver thing in my life than this."

He bent over the hole. When he straightened again, he held Colonel Berkeley Finch dangling by the collar. Yerby walked into the hall, keeping the dripping, sputtering Zenith out at arm's length.

Almost everyone in the corridor, raiders and prisoners alike, dissolved in helpless laughter. Amy moved to the other side of the scene so that she could record Finch together with the spectators laughing at him.

"But you know," Captain Easton said sadly, "with proper preparation, it makes a really wonderful fertilizer."

"Don't worry, Colonel Finch," Amy called from behind her camera. "You'll get the only copy of this recording just as soon as the government of Zenith declares Greenwood to be a free and independent world."

Mark hugged the Alliance commandant. "Captain," he said, "believe me, your fertilizer has done more good for the whole planet of Greenwood than it could possibly have done for your plants!"

Lucius Maxwell was the first man to disembark from the freighter Stellar Conveyor when it arrived at the military port on Dittersdorf Minor from Hestia. Four more starships waited in orbit for landing instructions.

Amy hadn't completely catalogued the heavy weapons warehouse in the bowels of the fort, but she'd guessed it would fill at least twenty vessels the size of the Stellar Conveyor, or over a hundred tramps like the ones trading to Greenwood. The Atlantic Alliance had saved money and effort by storing equipment on the frontier instead of shipping it home at the end of the Proxy Wars.

Now, twenty years later, the Alliance had to pay for that savings. The price would be their whole interstellar empire.

Mark waited at the bottom of the boarding ramp. There wasn't an official delegation to greet the reinforcements, but about half the raiders were standing around out of curiosity. Amy recorded events; Yerby's smile was one of real warmth.

Colonel Finch was present also, wearing his dress uniform. Nobody made a pointed comment, but he blushed whenever a Greenwood looked hard at him.

"I guess I should've expected you'd turn up, Dad," Mark said. He hugged his father. "I'm glad to see you."

"I'll be glad to see you, as soon as my eyes focus again," Lucius said. "On a matter of this significance the Assembly had to send an envoy, and I seemed the obvious one to go."

He chuckled and added, "For one thing, because I was willing. Dittersdorf isn't viewed as the garden spot of the universe, though I've always found Minor more attractive than the civilian port."

Lucius was in formal clothes. The four men and two women who followed him down the ramp wore battle dress of six individual styles. A squat, fifties-ish man noticed the turret from which a laser with a five-inch objective lens pointed toward the Stellar Conveyor. "Hey!" he said. "Does that thing work or is it just for show?"

"I guess it works," Mark said sharply. He was reacting to the challenge that he might not have recognized six months before. "I burned an acre of woods clear to test it, and last week we warmed an Alliance transport in orbit hot enough they decided to go back where they came from. Zeb's supposed to redirect it now that we're sure who you are, though."

As he spoke, the laser tube pivoted vertically again. Tags of vine, cut but not completely cleared from the turret, fluttered like deliberate camouflage.

The man who'd spoken raised an eyebrow. "Not bad, kid," he said. "I'm General Carswell. Come see me in a day or two and we'll talk about a job."

"I need to see an inventory soonest," said one of the women. "Can we…" She shrugged.

"I'll take them to the Command Center," Amy said, folding the lenses of her camera. She grinned wryly. "We can't be so busy recording history that we forget to make it, after all."

"I'll accompany you, if I may," Finch said. "General, I'm Colonel Berkeley Finch. I have an Assembly commission."

"Glad to meet you, Finch," Carswell said, but he didn't bother to shake the hand the Zenith offered.

Amy took off across the paved courtyard with the uniformed personnel in tow. The new arrivals walked like drunks, upright only because their determination overbore their disorientation.

A second starship glinted in the high sky at the start of its landing approach. The militia who'd come for the show walked away also, correctly deciding there was nothing more to see here.

"Yerby," Lucius said, "we've scraped up three hundred troops to take over from you here. With your permission, of course."

Yerby nodded. "Wasn't a place I figured to spend any more time than I had to," he remarked, glancing at the drab concrete and drabber vegetation surrounding them.

"The Assembly has voted you a colonelcy and a lifetime pension," Lucius continued. He smiled slightly. "How much the pension is worth depends on whether the Assembled Planets gain their freedom from the Alliance, of course."

Yerby's laughter was briefer than Mark expected. "I never turned down money, Lucius," he said. "If it don't do nothing else, at least it looks pretty, most of it. But being colonel, that you can keep."

"The decision's yours, of course," Lucius said. He looked down as if he were examining his fingernails.

"It's not like I don't see the honor," Yerby said uncomfortably. "It's just-Lucius, I don't like the idea of killing other folks. I know, there's a lot of things a guy's got to do in life and I've done most of them, good and bad, one time or the other. But that's one I druther leave for other folks if I can."

"It's good to meet a man with principles," Lucius said. He bowed to Yerby, then turned to his own son. "Mark," he continued, "you've been elected in your absence to the Greenwood Committee of Governance. One of three members, your delegates to the assembly on Hestia tell me. Congratulations."

"Me?" said Mark. "But I can't serve. I'm with the Woodsrunners. The army, I suppose we are now."

Yerby snorted. "If you mean you think the boys is going off to Zenith to fight just because we put our oar in here, you couldn't be more wrong, lad. I don't guess there'll be ten fellows leave with Lucius, and half them's going to come back to Greenwood in a week."

"If they leave with General Carswell," Lucius said grimly, "they'll stay till the general releases them. His men called him Iron Sam when he was a captain, and I don't believe the past twenty years have changed his ideas of discipline."

He returned his attention to his son. "Mark," he said, "you've proved you can be a soldier. I hope by now you realize how easy that is anyway. Go back to Greenwood."

Yerby squeezed Mark's shoulder as gently as if he was pinching a raw egg. "We need you, lad," he said. "More than we know, I shouldn't doubt, but even the folks we left on Greenwood do know it or they wouldn't have picked you like they done."

Mark scowled. The two older men were the stones of a mill, trying to grind away his determination.

"It's time to prove you can be a statesman, son," Lucius said. "That's a great deal harder, I assure you."