"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.

As they zigzagged low to land, Mark noticed that native foliage covered most of the fort's outworks. For a moment he thought that was for camouflage, but some of the broad-leafed shrubs were growing out of the courtyard pavement. Their roots must be breaking up the structure below.

"Wonder where everybody is?" Yerby said. Mark only understood the words because he'd been wondering the same thing. Nearer to the ground, the fort's low interior walls reflected the vehicle's noise into a squadron of screaming aircars.

"There-" said Mark, pointing at what he thought was a display of flags in a line on the other side of the landing zone.

Yerby had seen the flutter also. He hopped the car off the pavement where it first touched and skidded down again near the line.

The clothesline. Twenty or thirty garments, many too small for an adult to wear, were drying in the wan sun. Some of the clothes were dresses.

Bannock shut down the aircar. "Hey, you!" shrieked a woman scarcely less shrill than the turbine. "What do you think you're doing, blowing dirt on my wash? Couldn't you find anyplace else in this bleeding place to land?"

She'd come out of an armored door nearby. Weeds rooted in pavement cracks grew around the panel. The door hadn't been closed in a long time, and maybe couldn't be closed at all. Close up, the walls' fourteen-foot height looked more impressive than it had from the air when compared to the surface the fort covered.

The woman was short, dirty, and probably even younger than Mark himself. She wore a faded Alliance military shirt and carried a sleeping infant in a cloth sling on her left side. Her feet and her legs below the shirttails were bare.

"Sorry, sister," Bannock said easily as he got out of the car. "I'll be careful when I leave. My friend and I are just trying to find the colonel."

"Colonel, that's a laugh!" the woman said. "If you're looking for Captain Easton, you won't find him in married quarters. He'd be in the next bay over, but the chances are he's out with his vegetables anyhow."

She indicated the adjacent segment of the star with her thumb. The woman's voice had dropped a couple octaves since she got a good look at the strangers. Yerby Bannock wasn't a conventionally handsome man, but power has its own attraction and nobody could doubt the big man's power.

"His vegetables?" Mark said in surprise.

"That's it," the woman said with a nod… and perhaps a degree of speculation about Mark as well. "Flowers too. Anything you want to know about growing stuff, the captain's the one to tell you. Anything else, you may as well ask the boy here-"

Her hand brushed just above the forehead of the sleeping infant. She didn't look down as she gestured.

"-for all the good you'll get of it. Go to the open door, then down one level, then left at the main corridor till you hit the first blue corridor. Along it and up the ladder to hatch Blue Forty-two if it's standing open, which it likely will be."

"Thank you kindly, sister," Yerby said, lifting his broad-brimmed hat as he bowed to the woman. He strode across the bay in the direction she'd indicated.

"But won't somebody mind?" Mark asked, speaking to either of the others.

"Mind what?" the woman asked. "But don't expect much of a welcome unless you've got tomato seeds. He was complaining his tomato seeds didn't arrive."

An elevator and a staircase of slotted steel plates stood on opposite sides of the anteroom within. There was no passage directly through the fortress on this level. One of the elevator doors was missing; the shaft was empty.

The frontiersman led the way down the stairs surefootedly. The only light came from the open hatch and that, by the time they'd turned at the second landing, wasn't enough for Mark to feel comfortable. The treads were slick with condensate and the air was increasingly musty. The fort's ventilation system didn't seem to work any better than the lights did.

"Has the place been abandoned, do you think?" Mark asked. He could see some light below them, coming through another open doorway. "Is the woman just a squatter?"

"There was a ship landed in the past week or so," Yerby said. He sounded a little puzzled too. "You saw the way the plants coming up through the cracks had been squished down? Of course I don't know exactly how fast things grow here, but a week's close enough for a guess."

Mark hadn't noticed the crushed vegetation. Well, Yerby Bannock probably couldn't give a connected account of interstellar expansion over the past one hundred fifty years. People had differing skills and abilities.

But right now, Mark felt lost and completely useless in comparison with a man who was perfectly comfortable in circumstances that were new to both of them.

Nearer the doorway they could hear voices. A dozen children aged ten or younger played a ballgame in the corridor. Two of the lights in the ceiling here worked; the nearest other patches of illumination were hundreds of yards down the corridor.

A girl kicked the ball toward Yerby and Mark by accident as they stepped into the corridor. Yerby caught it. The girl screamed in surprise. A boy darting toward the kick collided with Mark instead.

"Do any of you young heroes know where Captain Easton would be?" Yerby asked, bouncing the ball back to the child who'd kicked it. "Hatch Blue Forty-two, the lady upstairs said."

"That's my mommy!" cried a child of indeterminate sex. "I'll take you!"

The child ran off down the corridor, baggy trousers flapping. He/she must have been at least six years old. Mark frowned. Either his estimate of the woman's age was wrong, or-

Or perhaps the kid was wrong about who'd given directions to the strangers. That was a comforting thought, so Mark clung to it.

A boy behind them called, "What do you want to see old Cabbage for? Are you from Earth? Is he going to be court-martialed?"

"Come on!" squealed their guide. The child's silhouette vanished down a cross-corridor, otherwise invisible in the gloom. Yerby lengthened his stride, covering an enormous amount of ground without seeming to run, but Mark had to jog to keep up.