"I've got no secrets from my friends, lad!" Yerby boomed. "Besides, I don't care if the Zeniths do hear about it."
That was true enough. Everybody in the room could hear him if they wanted to, though the Rainbow wasn't the sort of place where anyone thought quiet restraint was a virtue.
"You see," Yerby continued around a mouthful of rare beef, "all us settlers on Greenwood, we're there on proper Protectorate grants. Now, there's a bunch of folks from Zenith, they claim they've got grants too and maybe they do. But ours are older and we're there on Greenwood, you see?"
Mark nodded. There was the little matter of the fact that Protector Greenwood might not have jurisdiction over the planet to begin with; but in a way that didn't matter. The Protector was an Atlantic Alliance official, and he'd been acting under at least a claim of authority. His Alliance superiors might have cause to punish him for improperly making grants, but that didn't mean that the grants themselves were invalid.
"So some folks from Zenith, they come round a couple months ago, looking things over," Yerby continued. "Folks from the Zenith army, only they call it the Zenith Protective Association. And they got liquored up enough one night to talk about shipping all us Greenwoods out to a labor camp on Zenith for being trespassers."
He paused to drink. With the food, the Rainbow served pitchers of full-bodied ale. Yerby used enormous quantities of it to wash his meal down.
"I suggested to Yerby that the Alliance has a base on Dittersdorf Minor," Jesilind said. "All the commander there has to do is detach a small body of troops to Greenwood to keep the peace. That will obviate enormous future difficulties."
"I see," Mark said.
He didn't see. Rather, he saw that Bannock and Jesilind lived in a mental universe where things operated differently than they did on the Quelhagen and Earth that Mark knew. Would a base commander really send troops off to nowhere in particular because a couple of strangers asked him to?
Not in Mark's universe. But perhaps things really did happen that way on the frontier.
"Well, lad," Yerby said with a broad smile. "You want to come with me tomorrow? It's a couple days before you ship out, right? The car's a two-seater and Doc decided he didn't want to come."
You'll be lucky if you don't break your neck, flying through soupy atmosphere on a strange planet! Mark thought. Then he thought, I was lucky that the Zeniths didn't break my neck, and all I did was sit on a bucket reading.
"I'd be delighted," Mark said. "I'd like to see more of the planets I'm staging through, but mostly I've been stuck in spaceports." Kept myself stuck in spaceports.
"Done!" Yerby said, wiping his hand on his shirt before he shook with Mark. "First light in the morning, then. I want to get us back to Major before dark."
"I'll look after Miss Bannock during your absence, Yerby," Dr. Jesilind said. "Perhaps we-"
"You'll do nothing of the sort!" Amy said. "Yerby, I'm coming with you."
"Only got two seats, child," Yerby said. He chuckled. "Besides, it's too dangerous for a sweet girl like you."
"What!" Amy said. She started to get up, bumped the table-her chair didn't slide back the way she'd thought it would-and slammed back down.
"Yerby, I think perhaps you should take your sister-" Mark said.
"Are you telling me my word's no good, boy?" Yerby said. His fist curled reflexively around the handle of a full pitcher.
"No, I'm telling you I made a mistake," Mark said evenly. Maybe it's just my day to get pounded to a pulp. You can't avoid your fate…
"Stop!" said Amy. She didn't shout, but there was no doubt from the authority in her voice that she and Yerby Bannock were kin. "Mark, you'll go with Yerby in the morning, as you agreed. I have a good deal of work to do in my room. I will be there until you return in the evening."
She resumed eating, taking refined little bites. There wasn't a lot of talk around the table for the remainder of the evening.
4. The Funny Farm
The landscape of Dittersdorf Minor rolled by a thousand feet below the aircar. Compared to Major, the terrain was hillier and some of the vegetation could be called low trees.
The biggest difference was that Mark could see more than a fog-shrouded blur.
"I don't see why the port and all the settlement's on the big island," Yerby said. "Down there looks like pretty decent land, and you can see a hand in front of your face."
He had to shout to be heard over the persistent screech of the car's power plant. The turbine ran without stuttering on any liquid-hydrocarbon fuel, but it sounded like it was about to fly apart any moment.
"The Alliance won't allow settlement because of the fort," Mark said. "All Minor's a military reservation."
Bannock snorted.
Major, Dittersdorf's larger island (or small continent), was shaped like a broad crescent whose wings flowed backward in the press of a warm ocean current. Minor was a ball in the crescent's hollow, relatively clear of the rain and fog that constantly shrouded the bigger island.
The Easterns occupied Dittersdorf for strictly military purposes. After Alliance forces captured the planet, the Paris bureaucracy permitted construction of a civil spaceport to serve traffic to the Three Digits, but only three hundred miles away on the larger island.
Minor would have been a more comfortable site for the caravansary and the civilian settlement that had sprung up to service the port, but a bureaucrat always finds it easier to forbid than allow. From what Mark had seen in the Rainbow Tavern, the silly restrictions hadn't kept the settlers from enjoying themselves.
The car lifted slightly in an updraft. Mark saw their destination sprawled ahead of them.
The military base was a vast six-pointed star with turreted energy weapons at the angles and a spaceport in the paved central courtyard. The complex covered several acres on the surface, and Mark knew that several levels of tunnels extended through the bedrock beneath.
"Say, I didn't guess it was that big!" Bannock said as they swept down toward their destination. "I wonder how many soldiers they've got here?"
"It held six thousand when Alliance forces captured it from the Easterns in 2223," Mark said, quoting the figure he'd checked in a data chip before he went to sleep the night before. "I don't have any recent information on the garrison, though."
"Yerby Bannock calling Alliance fort," Yerby said, speaking into the microphone pickup in the cab roof. "We're just coming to visit you folks, so don't get your bowels in an uproar."
Mark wasn't sure the laser communicator actually worked. There was a two-hundred-foot communications tower at one point of the star, but he had no idea what format or frequency the fort used.
"Don't you think they might shoot us down?" he asked. He tried not to sound nervous.
"Piffle," Yerby said. "We don't look like an army of Easterns, do we? Besides, there's no war nowadays."
He throttled back the fans. The car dropped in a series of awkward slaloms as Yerby steered for the edge of the area marked to land three starships simultaneously. He handled the controls in a rough-and-ready fashion, giving the impression of adequacy but not skill.
But Mark knew the big frontiersman had never touched the car's controls before he climbed aboard this morning, and the chances were he'd never flown anything very similar. The fact that Yerby was adequate at things outside his previous experience was probably the key to his survival on the frontier.
Yerby's assumption that he could handle most anything he tried was likely to get him killed one day, though Mark really hoped that Yerby's refusal to believe the soldiers would shoot at unannounced intruders didn't turn out to be that fatal mistake.