Patriots

33. A Nice Day to Visit

The sun was shining. It was pale because there was a high overcast, but it was shining.

Mark stood in the hatchway of the Chevy Chase and tried to count. This was the… The fifth? The sixth? Anyway, he'd been on Dittersdorf a number of times, and never before could he have sworn that the sun ever shone over the spaceport.

He'd have taken it for a good omen, except that his vision was as fuzzy as it usually was when he come out of a transit capsule. This time trying to focus his eyes gave him a headache as if trucks were driving over his skull, crushing it against a concrete roadway.

The Bloemfontein must have landed some hours earlier, because the Woodsrunners in the group walking toward the Chevy Chase showed no signs of disorientation from their voyage. The third ship of the little fleet, the Santaria, wasn't here yet. She might not arrive for days if the glitch with her oxygen system took longer to fix than her captain hoped.

Three ships and fifty-three personnel, all that the commandeered vessels had transit capsules for. There was no point in trying to carry more people without capsules. They wouldn't be sane enough to speak coherently until they'd had a month on the ground to recover.

That wasn't much of an army for a raid on which a multi-planet rebellion depended, but it was what there was available.

"Mark, can you help me guide Yerby?" Amy asked in a faint whisper. Her brother walked like a long-legged zombie, veering from one side of the corridor to the other with each step. Amy's grip wouldn't have been enough to keep him from going right out the edge of the hatch.

"I drank a bottle of Chink Ericsson's brew before we lifted," Yerby said in a dead voice. His eyes were closed. "Sloe gin, he called it. Slow death is more like. I'll tell the world, I'm sick as a dog!"

"Let's wait here, Yerby," Mark said, touching the big man's arms. "Dagmar and some other of the people from the Bloemfontein are coming over."

Yerby's eyes opened. They looked alert, if bloodshot. "Right," he said. "Dagmar! Did you capture the control room?"

"What's there to capture?" Dagmar said with a snort. "But here's the controller, if that's what you mean."

Half the two dozen men with Dagmar-and one other woman-weren't from Greenwood. The several strangers in rainsuits were locals, but the others looked and dressed with the variety of folk who happened to have been in the port when the Woodsrunners arrived.

"Look, we don't handle any military traffic here, buddy," said the controller, a young man and ill at ease. "They've got their own port over on Minor. But I can tell you, there was a ship landed there last week, not the usual supply run, and everybody here figures it must've been full of reinforcements."

A man in the colorful one-piece rainsuit that marked those who had to live on this rain-sodden world nodded solemnly. "Stands to reason Earth's going to build up the fort on Minor when hell's a-popping right across settled space," he said. "Not much that happens anywhere that we don't hear about it on Dittersdorf!"

Mark opened his mouth to sneer, "Dittersdorf, hub of the universe." He held his tongue because he realized that all he'd be doing was trying to hurt the locals in revenge for the way they'd hurt him-by saying something that they thought was the truth, and that he didn't want to hear.

"We got all the transport we could find, Yerby," Dagmar volunteered. "That ain't much-two aircars and a surface-effect truck the guy says'll still run, but I dunno. They don't have flyers nor blimps here, it's mostly wheels on the ground. Which don't help us a lot getting across the water to this fort."

"Let's go inside," Mark said. "I want to check something in the dead storage room."

"Say, you know they got showers here?" a Woodsrunner said. He probably lived in a tent or lean-to on Greenwood and the luxury awed him. "And they run all the time!"

"Water goes at a discount on Dittersdorf," Amy muttered grimly. "But we're not going to be here long. One way or the other."

The party strode toward the caravansary entrance. "Now, I guess we can go scout out this fort, Yerby," Zeb Randifer said, "but that's likely to warn them, don't you think? Besides, I figure they'll just shoot first and ask questions later. From what these boys been telling us-"

His thumb hooked to the locals and the off-planet travelers with them. They nodded gloomy agreement. Mark was quite sure that nobody in the whole port except him and Yerby had ever visited Minor, but there's never a shortage of people to swear to a rumor of disaster.

Though if an unscheduled starship had landed at the port, then the rumor really did have some substance.

"Don't worry yourself," Yerby said as they entered the caravansary. The building felt wet, though the humidity inside couldn't possibly have been higher than that of the open air. "I been in the place before and I'll go again. You can't tell what's happening in a place like that from the outside."

He stretched mightily and added, "So long as I'm around, Zeb, I don't guess anybody'll need you to go stick your nose where somebody might nip it off."

"Hey, you've got no call to say that!" Randifer protested. "I volunteered for this just the same as you did!"

"We're going to take a look through the abandoned property," Mark said to the watchman. The storage room's door was closed, but the padlock wasn't in place.

The watchman shrugged. He wasn't a man Mark remembered from previous trips though Dittersdorf. Sight of Amy had made his eyes widen, though he'd probably seen his share of women like Dagmar Wately here on the men's side. Mark didn't know Dagmar well, but he was quite certain that she didn't worry about sexual harassment any more than Yerby did.

"What sort of communication with the fort do you have, sir?" Amy asked the controller. Her voice sounded strong, though her face was still pinched.

Mark found that having to think cleared his mind faster than he otherwise recovered from transit. Maybe that was true for Amy as well.

"No communication at all, miss," the controller said. "We don't need to talk to them, and they don't want to talk to us."

Mark began lifting boxes of ragged clothing out of the storage room and setting them carefully on the floor of the common area. It isn't there. He wanted to hurl the trash out of the way, but he was irrationally convinced that if he let Fate know he was desperate, Fate would punish him.

"Look, I'm not going to tell you fellows what to do," another local said, "but what I say is, you're going to get yourselves killed if you so much as fly over Minor the way things are."

"Well, I'm glad you're not trying to tell me what to do," Yerby said, "because I am going to head over to Minor myself and see what's going on in the fort."

Something rattled in the box Mark lifted. He reached into a jumble of boots-individuals, not pairs-and came out with the hologram reader he'd noticed on his first visit to the caravansary. He switched the sealed unit on. The seed catalog's opening images appeared, a profusion of flowers and succulent vegetables.

"Bingo!" Mark called. He turned, holding up the reader. Everybody was staring at him.

"You're not going to go, Yerby," he said. "You'd be recognized even by somebody as dotty as Captain Easton. But I won't have any trouble passing for a seed salesman like the poor guy who brought this here however many years ago!"

"And I," said Amy calmly, "will go along to make sure they won't connect Mark with their visitors six months past."

Dagmar Wately looked from Amy to Mark. "You know," she said, "it might work. If they don't just blow you to vapor the first time they see a speck on their sensor screens."

"Well, if they do that," Zeb Randifer said judiciously, "then we know what we're up against."