"I understand," Mark said. He understood perfectly: neither he nor his father knew how to say goodbye for what might be the last time. "I'll explain to people."
He nodded to Lucius, one Quelhagen gentleman taking leave of another.
"Mark," Lucius said, "know that while you're doing your duty, whatever that may be, your father is doing the same in his own way."
He turned abruptly on his heel and strode toward the starship. He moved with ease through the crowd of reveling settlers.
"Say, that's Lucius!" Yerby Bannock said as he walked toward Mark from the group in the vicinity of the late fireworks launcher. "Is he coming back, then?"
Yerby's broad-brimmed hat was still smoldering. An odor of burned leather clung to him. Amy followed her brother, looking diffident and concerned. Mark was glad to see she'd avoided the gout of sparks.
"Ah, not this trip," Mark said. "He asked that I thank everyone for their hospitality. Goodbyes embarrass him." Lucius would have winced to hear that truth, but he wouldn't have disagreed.
"Well, he'll be back," Yerby said, still watching the elder Maxwell walk briskly toward the starship. He took off his hat and fanned himself with it, blurring together the tendrils of smoke.
"You know," the frontiersman added, "your old man ain't a big package, but I sure hell wouldn't choose him for an enemy. Not so long as I've got to sleep sometimes, anyhow."
"I'm glad we could show your father some of Greenwood, Mark," Amy said quietly.
Mark swallowed and nodded. "Like Yerby says, he'll be back," he said. "We'll have the recycling plant here at the Spiker working by then, too."
"Next thing to do," Yerby said, still looking in the direction of the Ice Queen, "is to take care of Blind Cove. Tomorrow night, I figure. That's the other reason I called this get-together."
26. More Local Politics
Mark leaned on the dirigible's railing to peer forward past the cabin. He could see Blind Cove's forty-odd dwellings clearly, because Greenwood 's third moon was at mid-sky, but the only artificial light in the community was the lamp hanging above Magistrate Saunderson's two-story house.
Twenty dirigibles were packed with nearly three hundred Woodsrunners. Two more airships approached the community from the sea, carrying only a few marksmen each.
Blind Cove was a fishing village. There was a chance that the locals would try to escape in the boats hauled up on the shore. Yerby didn't intend to allow anybody to get away.
The Woodsrunners weren't using flyers, since the attack was timed to arrive at Blind Cove at midnight. To Mark's slight surprise, the armada had managed to keep together and wasn't running more than ten minutes late.
Most of the dirigibles landed beyond the outer buildings of the community. As planned, Desiree brought the Bannock vessel down in the small park fronting Saunderson's house. "Come on!" Yerby called, vaulting over the rail with his flashgun in his free hand.
The overload of militiamen followed as suddenly as a dump of ballast. Nobody was waiting to grab the mooring lines, so the airship bounced skyward again.
By the time Mark reached the gate-he wasn't about to go over the railing when he was burdened with a heavy-duty nerve scrambler-the deck was ten feet in the air. He jumped anyway. The shock of landing drove the breath from his lungs, but at least he didn't lose his footing and fall flat.
The last man off the deck cannoned into Mark and knocked him flat. The shoulder-stocked nerve scrambler flew out of Mark's arms like a javelin to spear the ground at Yerby's feet.
If Yerby even noticed he'd almost been crippled by the sharp muzzle, he didn't seem to care. "All right!" he ordered. "Let's wake them up!"
Militiamen pulled the igniters of light spikes, thermite/paraffin candles that gave five minutes of brilliant illumination even in a thunderstorm. The spikes' rippling glare turned the sleepy village into a suburb of Hell.
The Wily brothers were in one of the dirigibles that had landed on the beach. They tossed the bombs they'd prepared into the fishing boats whose empty holds would magnify the blasts.
The bombs flashed white in quick stuttering succession. It seemed to Mark that they'd have been plenty noisy without the cavernous echoes. Three of the eight went off almost simultaneously. The villagers would have been justified in expecting the next sound to be that of buildings falling into a huge crack in the earth.
The pole supporting one boat's net-stretching boom shot skyward, nearly skewering an airship on the way up. It plunged back down through the thick plastic roof of Saunderson's house.
"Yee-ha!" Yerby cried. "Come on out, you Zenith land-robbers! The law's just caught up with you!"
Lights went on in most of the houses, though Mark noticed some of the locals had realized that there was nothing good to be gained by illuminating themselves. It wasn't going to matter in the long run. Eight or ten Woodsrunners were breaking into every dwelling. Yerby had brought such overwhelming numbers that none of the villagers would even think of resisting.
Mark wiped at the muzzle of his nerve scrambler as he ran with Yerby to Saunderson's door. He'd gotten the discharge needle dirty and he was afraid he'd bent it besides.
It might not matter. Mark wasn't sure he was willing to shoot somebody even with a weapon that wasn't supposed to be lethal.
Yerby kicked the lockplate. He bounced back as the panel boomed. In Blind Cove the settlers built their houses of stone or concrete; whatever the magistrate used for his front door was a lot sturdier than wood. Yerby hobbled away on one foot, swearing a blue streak as he tried to squeeze life back into the numbed heel of the other.
"Let me get it, Yerby!" Troll Larsen bellowed. Troll was barely five feet tall, but he weighed as much as Yerby and was reputed to be equally strong. The other thing everybody knew about Troll was that he was the ugliest man on Greenwood.
He ran toward the door, adding his forward speed to the velocity of the twenty-pound sledgehammer he was swinging with the strength of both enormous arms. "I've got-"
The door opened from the inside. "What's the meaning of this?" demanded an erect, middle-aged man wearing a nightgown.
Troll spun through the open doorway, dragged by the inertia of the heavy hammer. Saunderson stepped back. "Yeeeeeeee!" Troll screamed. He hit something out of Mark's sight with a crash like another noise bomb.
The woman standing on the stairs behind Saunderson screamed also. That was a pretty common reaction for women meeting Troll for the first time, but this one had more reason than most.
"Mr. Ardis Saunderson?" Yerby boomed. "I hereby arrest you as a traitor to the citizens of Greenwood! George, hold him while we ferret out other miscreants."
Amy had waited for Desiree to set the airship down properly before she followed the armed Woodsrunners, but she was now on the ground recording events. At the moment the way Yerby stood like a stork on one leg rather spoiled what would otherwise have been an impressive scene.
"You have no authority whatever, you villain!" Saunderson cried.
George, one of Yerby's loggers, snatched the magistrate out of the way enthusiastically. Yerby skipped by them, using the toe only of his right foot. Mark, Amy, and half a dozen Woodsrunners jogged along behind.
The house's interior partitions weren't as sturdy as its outside walls. Troll lay in the wreckage of an imported sideboard and the dishes it had held. He still gripped the handle of his sledge. The twenty-pound head had knocked a huge hole into the kitchen. The dent beneath the hole was from Troll's head, judging from the paint sticking to his bare scalp.