Asimov's SF, October-November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The rest of the time, I stared out the window, watching Coyote as it gradually came back into view, growing larger with each passing hour. My flight was long enough that I witnessed most of a complete day as it rotated on its axis; what I saw was a planet-size moon a little larger than Mars, lacking oceans but criss-crossed by complex patterns of channels, rivers, estuaries, and streams, with a broad river circumscribing its equator. By the time I was scratching at my face and wishing the emergency kit contained a shaver, I was able to make out geographic features: mountain ranges, volcanoes, tropical savannahs, and rain forests, scattered across subcontinents and islands of all shapes and sizes.

  A beautiful world, as close to Earth as anything yet discovered in our little corner of the galaxy. Worth the effort to get there ... provided, of course, that I didn't end my trip as a trail of vaporized ash following the slipstream of a man-made meteor.

  When the lifeboat was about three hundred nautical miles away, the autopilot buzzed, telling me that the time had come for me to take over. By then I was strapped into my couch again. I took a deep breath, murmured the Astronaut's Prayer—"Lord, please don't let me screw up"—then I switched off the autopilot, grasped the yoke, and did my best to put my little craft safely on the ground.

  While I was earning my wings in the Academia del Espacio, I logged over two hundred hours in simulators and four hundred more in training skiffs. Before I was thrown out of the UA, I'd also flown Athena shuttles, including one landing on Mars. But those were winged spacecraft, complete with all sorts of stuff like elevators and flaps and vertical stabilizers. As I said, though, the Lou Brock was only a lifeboat, and for this sort of thing I'd completed only as much training as I needed to graduate from cadet to ensign: four hours in a simulator, and my flight instructor had forgiven me for a crash landing that would have killed everyone aboard.

  Now I was getting a second chance to show that I'd learned something from the part of my education that few spacers thought they'd ever use in real life. Watching through the windows, I carefully adjusted the lifeboat's attitude until it assumed a trajectory that would bring it over Coyote's northern hemisphere. I'd studied maps of the world, so I had a pretty good guess of what was where. Once I determined that I was somewhere above Great Dakota, I initiated entry sequence.

  Keeping an eye on the eightball, I maneuvered the RCS thrusters until the lifeboat made a 180-degree turn, then I ignited the main engine. My body was pushed against the straps as the engine burned most of what remained of my fuel reserves. This lasted several minutes, and once my instruments told me I'd shed most of my velocity, I shut down the engine and fired the thrusters again, delicately coaxing the lifeboat until it had assumed the proper attitude for atmospheric entry. Then I revved up the main once more, this time to make sure that I didn't hit the troposphere too fast. When everything looked copasetic, I goosed the yaw and pitch a bit, fine-tuning my angle of attack.

  This went on for about fifteen or twenty minutes, during which I barely had time to look out the porthole, let alone give the lidar more than a passing glance. Since I was coming in backward, I didn't have the luxury of selecting a precise landing site. At that point, though, all I wanted to do was make it through the upper atmosphere in one piece. So by the time a white-hot corona began to form around the heat shield, I couldn't tell where the hell I was going. Except down.

  Gravity took over like a baby elephant that had decided to sit on my chest. Gasping for air, I struggled to remain conscious ... and when my vision began to blur and I thought I was about to lose it, I hit the button that would activate the automatic landing sequence. It was a good thing that I did so, because I wasn't totally myself when the Lou Brock entered Coyote's stratosphere.

  I was jerked out of my daze by the sudden snap of the drogue chutes being released. The altimeter told me that I was twenty-seven thousand feet above the ground. Through the porthole, I could see dark blue sky above a cotton-gauze layer of clouds. So far, so good, but I was still falling fast ... but then there was another jolt as the drogues were released, and one more as the three main chutes were deployed. I sucked in a lungful of air. All right, so I wasn't going to become toast. Thank you, St. Buzz, and all other patron saints of dumb-luck spacers.

  But that didn't mean that I was out of danger yet. Although the fuel gauge told me I still had .03 percent in reserves, that was practically worthless so far as controlling my angle of descent. Firing thrusters now might cause the parachute lines to tangle, and then I'd be dead meat. So my fate was cast to the wind. Although I'd done my best to pick my landing site, so far as I knew I might splash-down in a channel. Or descend into the caldera of an active volcano. Or land on top of the Wicked Witch of the East and be greeted by the Lollipop Guild.

  In any event, I had no vote in the outcome. So I simply hung on tight and clenched my teeth as I watched the altimeter roll back. At a thousand feet, there was the thump of the heat shield being jettisoned, followed by the loud whoosh of the landing bags inflated.

  By then my rate of descent was thirty-two feet per second, according to the altimeter. I began a mental countdown from the half-minute mark. Thirty ... twenty-nine ... twenty-eight ... twenty-seven ... At the count of twenty, I decided that this was pointless, and simply waited.

  Touchdown was hard, but not so violent that I did something foolish like bite my tongue. To my relief, I didn't come down in water; there was no rocking back and forth that would have indicated I'd landed in a channel or a river, just the tooth-rattling whomp of hitting solid ground. A few seconds later, there was the prolonged hiss of the airbags deflating; when I felt the bottom of the lifeboat settle beneath me, I knew that I was safe.

  Welcome to Coyote. Now where the hell was I?

  * * * *

  XIII

  I waited until the bags collapsed, then unbuckled the harness and rose from my couch. After eighteen hours of zero-gee, my legs felt like warm rubber, but otherwise I had no trouble getting on my feet. The deck seemed stable enough, but nonetheless the first thing I did was look out the window to make sure the lifeboat hadn't come down in a treetop. I saw nothing but what appeared to be a vast savannah of tall grass.

  I already knew the air was breathable, so I went to the side hatch, removed the panel covering the lock-lever, and twisted it clockwise. The hatch opened with a faint gasp of overpressurized air. A moment later my ears popped. Coyote's atmosphere was thinner than Earth's, so I swallowed a couple of times to equalize the pressure in my inner ears, then I climbed through the hatch and dropped to the ground, landing on top of one of the deflated bags.

  It was early afternoon wherever it was that I'd landed, the alien sun just past zenith in a pale blue sky streaked here and there with thin clouds. Although the air was a little cooler than I'd expected, the day was warm; it was midsummer on Coyote, if I correctly recalled recent reports of this world, which meant that it wouldn't get cold until after Uma went down. About two or three miles away, beyond the edge of the field, was a line of trees; when I stepped away from the lifeboat and turned to look the other way, I saw more forest, with low mountains rising in the far distance.

  The lifeboat had a survival kit; I'd already found it during my long trip here. Yet although it included a map of Coyote and a magnetic compass, a fat lot of good they'd do me now. The mountains represented no landmark that I recognized from ground level, and although the compass would help me tell north from south and east from west, a sense of direction was all but useless when I was ignorant of exactly where I had landed. So far as I knew, I was on the outskirts of Munchkin Land, about a hundred miles from the Emerald City.

  But the kit also included food sticks, six liters of water, a firestarter, a survival knife, and a satphone. I could always use the satphone to call for help ... but only as a last resort. I'd arrived aboard a stolen lifeboat, after having made a somewhat violent escape from a Coyote Federation starship. Therefore, it made little sense to yell for help when it was all but certain my rescuers would ta
ke me to the nearest jail. And although my two feet were safely planted on Coyote soil, these weren't exactly the right circumstances in which to beg for political asylum.

  So ... first things first. Gather as much stuff as I could carry, pick a direction, and slog it out of there, with the hope that I wasn't too far from civilization. I climbed back into the Lou Brock and used the survival knife to cut away the lining of my seat, with the intent of using it as a makeshift pack for everything I'd take with me, and perhaps also as a bedroll. Once I had a nice, long strip of fabric, I laid it flat on the deck, then placed within it water bottles and food sticks. I wrapped the strip tightly around my belongings and lashed it across my chest and back, where it made an acceptable sling. The satphone and firestarter went into my jacket pocket along with the map and compass, and the knife was attached to my belt. As an afterthought, I removed my ascot and tied it around my forehead as a sweatband.

  So now I was good to go. Ready to tackle the Coyote wilderness, wherever it might lead me. Despite my trepidation, I found myself eager to discover whatever lay out there. This was why I'd joined the Union Astronautica in the first place: to explore new worlds, to go places where no one had ever gone before. Well, now I'd have my chance....

  One last look to see if I'd forgotten anything, then once again I dropped out of the lifeboat. Farewell, Lou Brock. You've stolen one more base, and this time slid home farther than you ever have before. Making sure that my sling was tightly knotted, I began to walk away from the lifeboat...

  And straight into the muzzle of a Union Guard carbine, pointed straight at me from less than six feet away.

  “Stop right there!” The kid holding the gun wore a blue vest over a short-sleeve uniform of the same color, and looked barely old enough to shave. “Don't move!"

  “Not moving.” Nonetheless, I started to raise my hands. The customary gesture of surrender wasn't appreciated, because the kid's trigger finger twitched ever so slightly. “Easy, soldier,” I added, making like a statue. “Harmless. Unarmed. See?"

  “Keep it that way.” Still keeping his hands on his weapon, the boy spoke into his headset mike. “Charlie two, this is Bravo leader. We've got him. Repeat, we've got him."

  We? Keeping my hands half-raised, I turned my head as much as I dared. To my left, another trooper was emerging from the high grass only a few yards away. I looked to my right, and caught a glimpse of a third soldier coming into view from behind the lifeboat. Like the squad leader, both carried Union Guard rifles, probably leftovers from the Revolution. Unless my guess was wrong, they belonged to the Colonial Militia, second-generation members of the Rigil Kent Brigade that had kicked the Western Hemisphere Union off Coyote nearly twenty-five years before. These were the descendants of guerrilla fighters, and therefore wouldn't care much for the son of the son of their enemy.

  I may have been surprised to find them, but they sure as hell weren't surprised to find me. Within minutes, a gyro roared down out of the sky, its twin-prop rotors flattening the grass around us as it touched down only thirty feet away. By then Bravo Company had forced me to my knees, ripped my sling from my shoulders, patted me down and removed everything from my pockets, then used a plastic strap to tie my hands behind my back. They marched me to the gyro at gunpoint, and offered little assistance as I struggled aboard.

  And that's how I came to Coyote.

  * * * *

  FOUR

  Busted on Coyote ... the discreet charm of the Colonial Militia ... weird incident in the stockade ... and a business proposition from Mr. Morgan Goldstein.

  * * * *

  XIV

  A couple of hours later, I was in a jail cell in Liberty. We will now have a brief pause to relish the irony of that statement.

  As it turned out, my lifeboat landed in a savannah on the southern half of Midland, a large subcontinent just across the East Channel from New Florida. Indeed, if the Lee hadn't tracked the Lou Brock on its way down and informed the Colonial Militia of its touchdown point, I could have hiked east to Goat Kill River, then followed it north to Defiance, a settlement near the mountains I'd seen from my landing site. If I'd headed south, I would have found a fishing village called—so help me, I'm not lying—Carlos's Pizza, located on the banks of the Great Equatorial River. And if I'd gone west, I would have eventually reached the East Channel, where one of any number of pirogues, catamarans, tugboats, or yachts that plied the river could have picked me up.

  In any case, I was never more than a day or two away from civilization. All the same, though, perhaps it was just as fortunate that the Colonial Militia found me when they did. Although I was close enough to a couple of towns to reach them on foot, the grasslands were rife with boids ... and considering that I was unarmed save for my survival knife, an encounter with one of those man-eating avians would have been fatal. But the blueshirts got to me before that could happen, and so...

  Well, to make a long story short, I wound up in what was colloquially referred to as the stockade, even though it was an adobe structure larger than some of the homes in town. Liberty, of course, was the first colony on Coyote, established almost a half-century ago by the original colonists from the URSS Alabama. It had since grown into what might pass as a city if you squinted hard enough. I didn't get to see much of it, though; once the gyro landed just outside the stockade, the blueshirts marched me straight in.

  The crime rate on Coyote must be really low, because the six cells on the ground floor were unoccupied save for a drunk passed out in the first one. The blueshirts handed me over to a proctor, a not-unkindly old guy they called Chief Levin. He walked me down to the end of the cell block, where he unsnapped my handcuffs before sliding open the iron-bar door. Dinner would be at sundown, the chief told me, and my arraignment was scheduled for tomorrow morning. If I needed anything before then, just yell. Then he slammed the door shut and walked off. I heard him return a little while later to rouse the drunk and usher him out, and after that I was pretty much left alone.

  My cell was primitive but comfortable, or at least as comfortable as these things go. A foam-stuffed pad on a wrought-iron frame, complete with a blanket woven from some coarse fabric that I'd later learn was called shagswool. A pitcher of water and a ceramic cup. A commode that didn't flush, but instead was ... well, call it a porcelain throne above a foul-smelling netherworld eight feet below; one whiff, and I resolved to keep the lid shut. Baked clay walls upon which previous guests had scratched their initials, along with some fairly interesting, if sometimes rude, graffiti. A ceiling light panel that looked as if it had been recently installed, evidence that modern technology had lately been imported from Earth.

  It was the window that I enjoyed the most. Ribbed with four iron bars sunk deep within the adobe, with hinged wooden shutters on the outside, it wasn't glazed, but instead was open to the air outside. As I sat on the cot, back propped against the wall and legs dangling over the side, I savored the warm breeze of a late summer afternoon. Sure, I was a prisoner, and it was very possible that I would soon be aboard the Robert E. Lee again, this time as a deportee bound for whatever punishment the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Union Astronautica had in store for me. But for a short while, I'd get a chance to...

  Something itched at my mind.

  There's no other way to describe it. Imagine a mosquito bite, perhaps at your ankle. Annoying, but not painful. But when a mosquito tags you, it's just a flesh wound; you can scratch it until it goes away.

  What I felt was a little like that, but instead deep within my head. Like something had crawled into my cerebrum and given me a tiny yet distracting little sting. Sitting up on my bunk, I reached up to rub the back of my neck. For a moment, the sensation went away, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Evening was closing in, with light fading through the window. I hoped that someone would close the outside shutters before it got too cold. And perhaps bring me something to eat, too. I hadn't...

  Then I glanced at the window, and saw someone standing just outside.


  In the waning light of day, it was difficult to make out his features. I stood up, stepped closer to the window. “Hey there,” I said. “Who are you?"

  He said nothing, but continued to stare in at me. He wore a dark brown robe, its hood pulled up around his face. A fairly young man, a little older than myself, or at least that was my first impression.

  Again, there was the itch in my mind ... and suddenly, I tasted chicken. Roast chicken, warm, perfectly seasoned with just the right amount of paprika, garlic, saffron, sea salt, and black pepper. The chicken of the gods. Chicken the way Mama used to make it, back when I was...

  Then my mind fell open.

  Again, I have no other way to describe it. Imagine that there's a little trap door at the back of your skull, one that's been closed for so long, you've forgotten that it even exists. Then, one day, someone who has the key inserts it into the lock, turns it ... and whomp, everything that is you rushes out. All your memories, all your knowledge, all your fantasies, all your little loves and hates, everything that comprises what you may call your soul gushes out as a stream of viscous black sludge.

  As swiftly as it had opened, the door of my mind slammed shut. And as it did, the taste of chicken faded from my palate. Staggering away from the window, I managed to make it to the bunk before I keeled over.

  I slept for only a little while before I woke up again. Feeling strangely hungover, I stumbled back to the window. Twilight was fading, and the stranger was nowhere to be seen. Once again, I was alone.

  Something within my mind insisted that this was an illusion—you dozed off, a small voice said, and had a vivid dream—yet I couldn't quite believe this explanation. I'd just received a visitor. Of that, I had little doubt.

  * * * *

  XV