"I'm going with her," Mark muttered to Dagmar.
In fact they all followed Wordsworth as fast as they could, Candace included. Under the present conditions on Zenith, any unusual event could be the fuse that ignited real trouble.
The colonel was still in the lead when the group reached the bronze-and-glass street doors. She barged through and skidded to a surprised halt outside.
A platoon of Alliance troops manned a sandbagged checkpoint in front of the Civil Affairs Building. Instead of tensely holding their guns and gas bombs, the soldiers were chortling in small groups. Holographic images quivered in the air before them.
"Let me see that!" Wordsworth said to the nearest group. The sergeant in the middle snapped to attention, startled by the colonel's sudden arrival. He handed over a thimble-sized cube. When its sides were squeezed, it projected a moving hologram for thirty seconds.
"Here," called a woman wearing the silver-winged uniform of a New Paris delivery service. She tossed a handful of the projection cubes over the sandbag barricade to Wordsworth and the negotiators.
Mark picked up a cube with the rest of them, mostly to check the resolution. It was clever of Ms. Macey to hire a local service to distribute them…
He squeezed the cube. Heinrich Biber, stark naked except for a coating of mud, twitched miserably in the jet of the firehose washing him clean. His face was readily identifiable to anyone who'd seen the Mayor before. So, Mark suspected, were the Mayor's other attributes.
"You know," a female soldier said to her fellows, "I've seen Pekingese dogs that were hung better than he is!"
Gales of laughter came from the street and park. Mayor Biber had wealth and power, but he wasn't the sort of man his fellow-citizens weren't willing to laugh at. Chances were that out-of-work Zeniths disliked the local moneymen about as much as they did the Alliance troops.
"Who did this?" Biber screamed. He flung a projection cube to the ground and jumped on where it would have been if it hadn't bounced away. "Who?"
"Why, Heinrich," Berkeley Finch said through the faint curtain of the hologram he was projecting over and over. "I now see an aspect of you I'd never imagined!"
Biber tried to throttle him. Finch backed away, still laughing. A pair of soldiers caught the Mayor's arms.
"It doesn't really matter," Mark said. His soul trembled but he was glad to note that his voice stayed steady. "You've already agreed that Yerby and me and all the Woodsrunners will keep our possessions on Greenwood, Mayor Biber."
Biber shook himself loose. "You," he said in a venomous voice, pointing at Mark.
"In fact," Mark said, "you've made us incredibly rich because of the way land prices will shoot up when you begin bringing in settlers by the tens of thousands."
"You think I'm going to make you rich after what you and your other swine did to me in that swamp?" Biber screamed. He turned to Candace. "There's no deal!" he said. "There's no deal but that every one of the bastards on Greenwood now gets scooped up in their underwear and dumped on an asteroid!"
"Biber, you don't speak for the syndicate," Berkeley Finch said in a worried voice. He'd suddenly realized the wider ramifications of what had just happened.
"And the syndicate doesn't speak for me if it plans to compromise with these grubby lice!" the mayor replied.
Candace tried to step between the men. Biber pushed the counselor back out of the way. "I'm telling you, Finch, I'm going to clear the tracts I own of all trespassers, and if-" He turned to Candace again. "-Protector Kiss-My-Ass Giscard has a problem with that, it's really too bad!"
Biber stumped out of the checkpoint, slapping at the projection cubes in the hands of the people he passed. Colonel Wordsworth watched him go with a speculative look.
"Well, Dagmar," Mark said to his fellow delegate. "I don't think we need stay on Zenith any longer. It appears that an agreement won't be possible after all."
He nodded to Counselor Candace, who seemed to be in shock.
31. Off the Deep End
Zenith's rich, red-orange dawn looked like the mouth of hell backlighting the new barricade on the spaceport approach road. As the taxi carrying Mark and Dagmar pulled up, soldiers backed a dump truck loaded with sand to the other side of the swinging crossbar and shut off the engine.
"What's going on?" the taxi driver called through his open window, sounding worried as well as angry at the delay.
The barricade was a hasty improvisation of sand-filled fuel drums and concrete blocks. It closed three of the four travel lanes; the dump truck now filled the other. Flashing emergency lights had made the structure look like a construction site as the taxi approached.
Mark stuck his head out to be sure. The folk at the barricade wore the tan uniforms of the Zenith Protective Association. A number of the troops looking worriedly over the line of drums carried repellers and other projectile weapons. The gun on the back of a pickup behind the barricade fired two-inch-rockets through a charger-fed launching tube.
The dump truck began to settle with a loud hiss. The vehicle had a central inflation pump. The militiamen were using it to vent all the air from the tires so it was impossible to roll the truck out of the way.
"Hey!" cried the taxi driver. "What're you doing?"
"Ms. Wately," said Mark, formal because he was frightened. "I think we'd better get out. We may have to leave our gear."
An officer with red shoulder boards on her tunic ducked under the crossbar and walked to the taxi. More traffic was backing up. Horns blew in a variety of timbres.
"I can buy more clothes," Dagmar said as she and Mark got out of opposite sides of the vehicle with their hand luggage. "So long as I don't get my head blown off first."
"There's no more traffic into the port!" the militia officer snarled. She was young, petite, and obviously as scared as Mark was. "Go on, get away from here! There's an Alliance column on the way and we're going to stop them!"
During the night everything on Zenith had changed as suddenly as a trap shuts. Mark didn't know whether there'd been a precipitating incident or if the general tension had suddenly coalesced into war the way rain forms from water vapor. When heavy gunfire began to shake the city, he and Dagmar headed for the starport.
They stepped toward the barricade. Mark had paid the driver when they got in, the only way the man would agree to drive through New Paris and the chance of trouble at any instant.
"Stop!" the officer cried to Mark. "I've got my orders!"
She wore a handgun of some sort in a covered holster on her wide belt. Her hands groped for the weapon, but she couldn't seem to get the flap open.
"Don't get your knickers in a twist, sister," Dagmar snapped. She was either a great actress or a lot more relaxed than Mark was. "We're Greenwood citizens going home. This fight is nothing to do with us."
"Madame Captain," Mark said, "your orders are to stop vehicles. We're going to Greenwood to bring help back here to you."
It was the best lie he could think of at the spur of the moment. Whatever happened, it didn't look like Greenwood need worry about another Zenith invasion any time soon.
A fast-moving aircar, low but nonetheless airborne and therefore in breach of the emergency regulations, came from the direction of New Paris. It looked as though the driver planned to cross at the normal entranceway instead of rising to hop over the high earthen berm surrounding the port proper.
The crew of the gun on the pickup fired three rockets in quick succession. Instead of a roar, the rounds blasted from the launching tube with a crack!/crack!/crack! that made Mark grab his ears as he hunched over.