Mark walked out on the open deck. There were four flyers. They moved sluggishly, indicating they were heavily loaded even though each had only one man aboard. Amy was gaining altitude as quickly as she could without emergency measures. No matter what she did, the flyers could still outclimb the clumsy dirigible in ten or fifteen minutes, so there was no point in dumping ballast.
The dirigible wallowed, losing a noticeable amount of height and power. They'd entered the shadow of a cloud. The engines picked up again as the batteries came online, boosting the output of the solar cells on the top of the envelope. The Blind Cove flyers were of off-world manufacture and had working battery packs, though they had to keep beyond the shadow to climb.
"Amy," Lucius said. He stepped to her side. "Give me the controls, please." As he spoke, he put his hands on the helm without waiting for the woman to reply.
"Dad?" Mark said in amazement.
Amy backed away from the controls. Blank calm replaced her initial look of consternation. She didn't know what Lucius planned to do, but she was willing to trust his judgment in a case where she saw no way out.
Mark watched the flyers. When Amy joined him on the open deck he said, "I suppose they think we're Yerby."
"I suppose," Amy agreed in a flat voice.
Lucius had dropped the dirigible to twenty feet above the shadowed forest by the time the flyers from Blind Cove reached them. Three flyers mounted high while the last circled close to the gondola. The pilot was a bearded man whose face was red with drink and anger.
"Where d'ye think you're going, Bannock?" the man shouted. "We're not going to let you get away so easy, you know!"
He hurled a bottle one-handed at Mark. It didn't come within twenty feet of the dirigible. Several more empty bottles plunged past the vessel, warbling as the air streamed past their mouths. A clank and a shower of broken glass indicated that one of the flyer pilots above had found the range.
Amy took out her camera. A flyer dived past the gasbag, then zoomed up again as the pilot shouted curses in a hoarse voice.
Mark pressed his lips together and said nothing. Lucius had headed basically downwind. With a following breeze, the dirigible was about as fast as a flyer, but this course was going to take them out over the ocean again very shortly.
More missiles dropped. Several hit; the locals were improving their technique with practice. Even though they weren't using lethal weapons, the impacts would damage the solar cells. Sooner or later they'd start tearing holes in the ballonets. Mark didn't want to be over salt water if the dirigible was forced down.
When the dirigible was forced down.
"Dad?" he called. "If you get some altitude, we can maybe get a radio signal through to Yerby or the Spiker."
"In good time," his father said. He didn't raise his voice, but there was steel in his tone.
The dirigible crossed the sandy beach, still only twenty feet above the surface. A jagged piece of metal screamed past them and splashed in the surf. What sounded like a wooden crate of bottles smashed on the upper surface and rained shards of glass down on all sides.
The flyers were holding course directly above the dirigible, so now they hit more often than not. Mark put an arm around Amy without looking at her. She leaned forward, recording the pattern of fragments splashing in the water.
The dirigible was traveling at nearly forty-five miles an hour. Immediately ahead of them the sea brightened to sunlit splendor; they were about to leave the shadow of the cloud in which they'd been proceeding since before Lucius took the helm.
"Hold tight!" Lucius shouted. The dirigible entered sunlight. Lucius pulled the lever that dumped the entire water ballast from the bottom of the gondola. The sea roiled like a storm surge as the dirigible shot upward faster than Mark had dreamed it could.
Somebody screamed in fear from above them. The flyers flicked past to either side. Three were under marginal control; the wing of the last was cocked up at a 45° angle with a bent spar. It spiraled wildly down toward the sea as the bearded man who'd thrown the first bottle fought his controls in vain.
The dirigible gained five hundred feet in a few seconds and continued to rise. "Amy?" Lucius called from the helm. "Would you care to take the controls again? I'm not sure I could find the compound."
"Dad, what did you do?" Mark asked as Amy took the helm. They'd passed a thousand feet. At this rate, the flyers wouldn't be able to reach the dirigible again in less than an hour, even if the Blind Cove settlers had the stomach to try.
"The gas cools in the cloud's shadow," Lucius said. He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. "When we came into the sunlight, it expanded very quickly and gave us a great deal more lift. In combination with dumping the ballast, I thought we could rise fast enough to… at least disconcert the others."
"There's only a few hundred settlers on Zenith grants on the planet," Mark said quietly. "I suppose they've been treated pretty roughly the past month or two."
"No doubt," his father said. Lucius turned to Amy and went on, "Ms. Bannock? I'm very sorry about the ballast, but I thought it was necessary. I'm afraid it will make landing difficult."
"I'll manage, Lucius," she replied. "And I'm still Amy, remember."
Mark lifted the radio handset and said, "This is the Bannock blimp to all Woodsrunners. We're headed home from just west of Blind Cove, and I'd really like some company!"
25. A Pause for Reflection
The fireworks for Lucius' send-off celebration were homemade. The first bomb choonked into the night sky from the tube by the Spiker's front entrance and exploded in a green flash five hundred feet over the starport. The second followed twenty seconds later and burst brilliantly white.
The third blew the launcher up in a great scarlet eruption. Fragments of metal pinged off the courtyard wall. The pyrotechnics crew, four brothers jointly settling a tract well to the east, capered and beat at places where sparks had ignited their clothing and hair. The crowd-those who hadn't been close enough to have their own mini-fires to deal with-cheered wildly and continued drinking.
There were several hundred people at the gathering, far too many for the tavern itself to put up. Lights and fires dotted the slope down to the landing field. Folk were camping in tents or just bedrolls, and many were heating their dinners besides.
The freighter Ice Queen, bound for Quelhagen after a quick turnaround on Greenwood, had been winched onto the magnetic mass. The starship's underside was brightly lit as the crew gave a last-minute check to an induction module.
When the brothers started to light the fireworks, Lucius had backed himself and Mark into the nook beside the gateposts-out of direct sight of the nearby launchers. Now father and son eased forward again.
"Good thing we were covered," Mark said, patting the gatepost with the heel of his hand. "Good thing you thought of it."
Lucius looked at the cheerful settlers. They were a scattering of silhouettes and shadows; firelight picked out an occasional bearded face or the glint of a bottle. He knew only a handful of them, and many didn't know him. They were present for a party, and because Yerby Bannock had called them to honor an ally.
"What are you thinking, Dad?" Mark asked. His father's smile was oddly wistful.
Lucius looked at him. "That for people on the edge of disaster, risking their lives every day, living in enormous discomfort and often squalor," he said, "they're oddly happy, aren't they? But perhaps it's not so odd. Just something one becomes too sophisticated to appreciate."
"We're trying to do something about the squalor, at least," Mark said defensively. "The Ice Queen brought the recycling plant for the Spiker. You've seen the unit Yerby's installing, right?"
His father laughed wholeheartedly, a sound as unlikely and disconcerting as sight of Lucius in battle dress on his arrival had been. He'd returned to being a proper Quelhagen gentleman for his departure. "I'm sure you will, Mark," he said. "One of the problems with frontiers is that they attract folk whose only concern is where their next meal is going to come from. Of course those are the people most likely to survive on a frontier, as well."