"Oh, my goodness," Hounslow said. A raider opened the door marked COMMAND CENTER. The room was empty. "Oh, don't do that!" Hounslow protested. "You'll scatter my charts!"
Mark started to speak. He shut his mouth, then changed the subject by saying, "Where's Captain Easton, Hounslow?"
The lieutenant pulled the command center door closed. "What?" he said. "How would I know? Out in his garden, I suppose."
"I'll get him," Mark said. "I know where he is and, well, I wouldn't want him to get hurt by accident."
"I'll come along," said Amy.
The hand-lettered sign was tacked to the wooden door of the Command Center. She tugged it loose and added wryly, "I'll get the real pictures, but then we'll stage something for public release. Yerby, you've got no sense of history."
"Huh?" said her brother.
"I suspect," Mark said as he started down the corridor toward the ladder to Easton 's garden, "that most of the people making history are too busy to have a sense of it."
It was late in the year, but some of Captain Easton's flowers gave off a rich, spicy perfume.
"Night-blooming cereus," Amy murmured. "It's a cactus, really."
The flowers of the cereus were huge and white with tendrils all around the bloom. They showed up even in the starglow between pulses of the antenna light.
There was what Mark had taken to be a toolshed at the near edge of tilled area. He heard soft snores coming from it. Amy raised her camera. She was using image intensification instead of the built-in light. The images would be grainy, but flooding the scene with a harsh glare would have been wrong. As wrong as Yerby Bannock in Quelhagen formal dress.
"Captain Easton?" Mark said. He tapped on the side of the shed, then opened the door. "I'm afraid you'll have to come with us, sir."
"What?" said Easton. He was sleeping on a cot with only a pillow and a rough blanket for comfort. The Sunrise Seeds catalog reader hung from the cot's frame so that it didn't risk damage on the damp ground.
"Is it…" Easton said. "Why it is! Have my bulbs come, young man?"
"Sir," said Mark, "I'm very sorry, but that's not what I'm here about at all. We've captured the fort and taken you prisoner with the rest of your troops."
"Oh, dear," Easton said. "Oh."
He got up, shuffling his feet to find his slippers. He was wearing a flannel nightshirt long enough to cover his ankles. His patched uniform and tool belt hung from pegs on the wall of the shed.
"We'll want you to come into the fort and surrender formally," Amy said. "You do have a dress uniform of some kind, don't you?"
"I suppose I still do," Easton said morosely. "I haven't been into that closet in…"
He paused and shook his head. "This isn't going to look very good on my record, is it?" he said. "Well, I don't suppose I was really cut out for the military anyway. That's why they sent me here."
"When we're at the Command Center," Amy continued, "my brother will ask you to surrender. You'll say, 'In whose name do you call me to surrender?' And he'll say, 'In the name of almighty God and the Assembly of Self-Governing Worlds.' And you'll surrender. Have you got that?"
"I'll do my best," Captain Easton said. He shook his head again.
"We can try it a few times until you've got it right," Mark said soothingly. "And Captain? You can take the seed catalog if you like. You're welcome to keep it forever."
Easton 's face brightened as though a moon had appeared. "Really?" he said. "Why, you are a very generous young man."
He snatched up the reader. "Now," he said firmly, "I suppose we'd better get this business taken care of."
37. One Hand Hoses the Other
The raiders' portable lights made the corridor in front of the enlisted quarters brighter than it had been in a decade. A pair of recruits from Hestia had started to line the Union soldiers up against the wall, but the Greenwoods didn't see any point in that. Now some of the prisoners huddled for mutual support, watching glumly as raiders went through the room's contents, but others chatted with their captors. A few card games had started.
Mark came out of Hounslow's office. The fort's real Command Center was sixty feet down in the bedrock, but the office terminal worked-to Mark's surprise-and was linked to the main unit.
"Yerby," Mark said, "it looks like at least half the defensive guns are still operable. I'm the closest thing to an expert and I'm not very close, but I think we can get one turret turning. That'll keep off any Alliance ships that arrive before whoever the Assembly sends to take over from us. Or capture them if they do land."
"Good work, lad," Yerby said cheerfully. "It was a bright day for Greenwood when you showed up. Ain't that the truth, Amy girl?"
"Yes it is," Amy said. She grinned at her brother, then gave Mark a smile that was warm enough to make him blush with pleasure.
Lights were coming down the corridor from the direction of the garrison's married quarters. Crying children and the voices of angry adults, mostly women, echoed ahead of them. A man was singing, "… violate me in the violet time, in the vilest way you know!"
Mark thought he recognized the singer as Casey Tafell. Colonel Finch wasn't straitlaced, but he had a civilized sense of propriety. The bawdy song would bother him a great deal. Tafell's sense of humor was more subtle than Mark would have guessed.
The married prisoners with their spouses and offspring arrived as a wailing horde. Half a dozen of the women and a couple men weren't soldiers. Mark wondered whether they'd drifted over from Minor or if some of the garrison's members had managed to bring in companions on the supply vessels.
Finch marched at the head of the mob. He straightened when he noticed that Amy was recording them, but his momentary grimace showed that he knew just how absurd he looked.
Finch had probably tried to impose discipline on the others, but the raiders were even less likely to obey a silly order like that than the prisoners were. The rest of the entourage walked, shambled, or-in the case of some of the younger prisoners-skipped while calling shrilly to their friends.
"Colonel Bannock," Finch said. He saluted. "My troops and I have accomplished our mission without casualties."
"Glad to hear it, Finchie," Yerby said. His eyes narrowed slightly. "I hope that nothing happened to the other folks neither?"
"No," said Finch. He shook his head. "No, there were no incidents."
He scanned the mob of raiders and captives until he found Captain Easton sitting by himself, wearing a blue uniform with tarnished gold braid. "Colonel Bannock?" Finch said. "There'd be no difficulty, I trust, if Ms. Bannock here recorded me, ah, seeming to take the fort's surrender from the commandant?"
"We can do much better than that, Mr. Finch," Amy said crisply.
"We can?" Yerby and Mark blurted at the same time.
"We can show you blasting your way into the Alliance Command Center," Amy said. "Not the real Command Center, of course. You might damage the terminal that we need. But you can shoot your way through this door to the living quarters. No one on Zenith will be able to tell the difference."
She held the hand-lettered COMMAND CENTER sign up to the door by which she stood. "Yerby," she went on. "Please drive the nail in."
Yerby turned slightly and drove the tack home with a quick, perfectly aimed stroke with his flashgun. The laser's buttplate clunked, seating the head flush with the door panel. Yerby's face was expressionless.
"But-" an Alliance soldier said.
Mark, behind Finch's back, pointed one index finger at the soldier and drew the other across his own throat. Pops Hazlitt pulled a big skinning knife from his belt and raised an eyebrow to Mark for instructions.