Coyote

by Allen Steele

  C O Y O T E

  “Passionate, inspirational, and plausible…Steele’s is a future to believe in—and it shows us how to believe in ourselves.” —Stephen Baxter

  Coyote marks a dramatic new turn in the career of Allen Steele, Hugo Award-winning author of Chronospace. Epic in scope, passionate in its conviction, and set against a backdrop of plausible events, it tells the brilliant story of Earth’s first interstellar colonists—and the mysterious planet that becomes their home…

  The crime of the century begins without a hitch. On July 5th, 2070, as it’s about to be launched, the starship Alabama is hijacked—by her captain and crew. In defiance of the repressive government of the United Republic of Earth, they replace her handpicked passengers with political dissidents and their families. These become Earth’s first pioneers in the exploration of space…

  Captain R. E. Lee, their leader. Colonel Gill Reese, the soldier sent to stop Lee. Les Gillis, the senior communications officer, a victim of a mistake that will threaten the entire mission. Crewman Eric Gunther, who has his own agenda for being aboard. His daughter, Wendy, a teenager who will grow up too quickly. Jorge and Rita Montero, ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. And their son Carlos, who will become a hero in spite of himself.

  After almost two-and-a-half centuries in cold sleep, they will awaken above their destination: a habitable world named Coyote. A planet that will test their strength, their beliefs, and their very humanity…

  In Coyote, Allen Steele delivers a grand novel of galactic adventure—a tale of life in the newest of frontiers.

  Ace books by Allen M. Steele

  ORBITAL DECAY

  CLARKE COUNTY, SPACE

  LUNAR DESCENT

  LABYRINTH OF NIGHT

  THE JERICHO ITERATION

  THE TRANQILLITY ALTERNATIVE

  OCEANSPACE

  CHRONOSPACE

  COYOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  COYOTE

  An Ace Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  Visit our website at

  www.penguinputnam.com

  Copyright © 2002 by Allen M. Steele.

  The material in this book has all been previously published, in versions that are either slightly or substantially different. Only “Glorious Destiny” is completely unaltered.

  “Stealing Alabama”—January 2001, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “The Days Between”—March 2001, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Coming to Coyote”—July 2001, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Liberty Journals”—October/November 2001, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “The Boid Hunt”—Star Colonies, edited by Martin Greenberg and John Heifers. Daw, June 2000

  “Across the Eastern Divide”—February 2002, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Lonesome and a Long Way from Home”—June 2002, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  “Glorious Destiny”—December 2002, Asimov’s Science Fiction

  Jacket art by Ron Miller.

  Jacket design by Rita Frangie.

  Interior art by Allen M. Steele and Ron Miller.

  Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be

  reproduced in any form without permission.

  First edition: November 2002

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steele, Allen M.

  Coyote : a novel of interstellar exploration / Allen M. Steele— 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-441-00974-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Outer space—Exploration—Fiction. 2. Space colonies—Fiction. 3. Dissenters—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T338425 C69 2002

  813'.54—dc21

  2002074517

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  Martha Millard

  —Literary agent, good friend

  Dramatis Personae

  Prelude

  Book One: The Journey from Earth

  PART ONE: Stealing Alabama

  PART TWO: The Days Between

  PART THREE: Coming to Coyote

  PART FOUR: Liberty Journals

  Book Two: Shores of the Unknown

  PART FIVE: The Boid Hunt

  PART SIX: Across the Eastern Divide

  PART SEVEN: Lonesome and a Long Way from Home

  PART EIGHT: Glorious Destiny

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  URSS Alabama—crew

  Robert E. Lee—Captain

  Tom Shapiro—First Officer

  Jud Tinsley—Executive Officer

  Dana Monroe—Chief Engineer

  Kuniko Okada—Chief Physician

  Leslie Gillis—Chief Communications Officer

  Sharon Ullman—Senior Navigator

  Eric Gunther—life support engineer

  Wendy Gunther—daughter

  Jack Dreyfus—engineer

  Lisa Dreyfus—wife

  Barry Dreyfus—son

  Ellery Balis—quartermaster

  Jean Swenson—communications officer

  Kim Newell—shuttle pilot

  Ted LeMare—ensign

  Paul Dwyer—engineer

  URSS Alabama—colonists

  MONTERO FAMILY:

  Jorge Montero—electrical systems engineer

  Rita Montero—wife

  Carlos Montero—son (older)

  Marie Montero—daughter (younger)

  LEVIN FAMILY:

  James Levin—exobiologist

  Cecelia “Sissy” Levin—wife

  Chris Levin—son (older)

  David Levin—son (younger)

  CAYLE FAMILY:

  Bernie Cayle—biochemist

  Vonda Cayle—schoolteacher

  GEARY FAMILY:

  Lew Geary—agriculture specialist

  Carrie Geary—agriculture specialist

  Henry Johnson—astrophysicist

  Beth Orr—botanist

  Michael Geissal—law officer

  Patrick Molloy—engineer

  Naomi Fisher—chief cook

  Soldiers, United Republic Service

  Col. Gilbert “Gill” Reese

  Sgt. Ron Schmidt

  Corp. William Boone

  Corp. Antonio Lucchesi

  Corp. John Carruthers

  On Earth

  Hamilton Conroy—President, United Republic of America

  Joseph R. Rochelle—Senator, United Republic of America

  Elise Rochelle Lee—his daughter, R. E. Lee’s former wife

  Roland Shaw—Director of Internal Security, United Republic of America

  Ben Aldrich—Launch Supervisor, Gingrich Space Center

  An unnamed Prefect

  An unnamed doctor

  This is the story of the new world. It begins not there, however, but on Earth, in the closing years of the twentieth century.

  The Milky Way galaxy is nearly one hundred thousand light-years in diameter; within its spiral structure are approximately fifty thousand stars, ranging from tiny protostars coalescing within great clouds of interstellar gas to white dwarfs nearing the end of their life spans. Between these extremes are tens of thousands of suns: some tightly clustered together near the galactic core, the vast majority isolated from one another by distances incomprehensible save
by mathematical reckoning. Planets are commonplace among the main-sequence stars. Comprised of the leftover mass from a star’s infancy, gradually formed over the course of millennia by tidal forces within their accretion belts, they’re the afterthoughts of Creation.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, only a handful of scientists and the smallest fraction of the public thought intelligent life existed beyond Earth; by the time the twenty-first century arrived, it was difficult to find a well-educated person who believed otherwise. It stood to reason that, if planetary systems existed throughout the galaxy, then life, too, must be widespread. Yet even as writers, artists, and filmmakers envisioned a galaxy—indeed, an entire universe—teeming with extraterrestrials of every conceivable shape and size, many astronomers and astrophysicists began to suspect the opposite. Although it was true that most main-sequence stars were capable of generating planets, it appeared far less likely than assumed earlier that most of these planets were able to harbor life, save perhaps in its primitive condition. The planets might orbit too close to their suns, or too far away, for their surface conditions to allow the emergence of complex multicellular life-forms. Although colonies of bacteria may evolve around the hot vents of volcanic fracture zones, it seemed unlikely that many of them would eventually develop into something greater. Not impossible, by any stretch of the imagination, just…improbable. Faith and wishful thinking were not enough; although the Drake Equation maintained that the universe was filled with life, the Fermi Paradox posed a question that no one had yet been able to answer.

  During the last months of 1995, two astronomers from San Francisco State University, Geoffery Marcy and Paul Butler, were engaged in the search for extrasolar planets by carefully observing stars through infrared inferometry to see if they displayed regular shifts in their apparent magnitude, which in turn would indicate the gravitational influence of a large body nearby. This technique had recently allowed astronomers at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland to detect a gas giant closely orbiting 51 Pegasi, a G-type star fifty light-years from Earth; now Dr. Marcy and Dr. Butler, working with the 120-inch telescope at Lick Observatory outside San Jose, were hoping to find more.

  Their efforts paid off in January 1996, when the planet hunters publicly announced the confirmed discovery of a giant planet revolving around 47 Ursae Majoris, a type-GO star 46 l.y.s from Earth. Direct observation of the new world was still impossible, yet judging from its effects upon its primary, Marcy and Butler were able to determine that 47 Ursae Majoris B was a gas giant three times the mass of Jupiter, and that it occupied a nearly circular orbit 2.1 astronomical units from its sun. Compared to 51 Pegasi B, a planet 0.6 joves in mass yet located only .05 A.U.s from its primary, 47 Uma B was an almost textbook example of what a gas giant should look like. A normal planet, if such an astounding discovery could be classified as normal.

  The announcement made the front pages of newspapers across the world before it gradually faded from the public consciousness. During the following year Marcy and Butler would duplicate their success by locating more planets in orbit around Tau Bootis A, Upsilon Andromedae, and Rho Coronae Borealis. By May 2000, over forty extrasolar planets had been discovered, some of them so exotic as to make 47 Ursae Majoris B mundane by comparison. Yet 47 Uma B remained of interest to exobiologists because its orbit lay just beyond what many astronomers considered to be the “habitable zone,” the approximate distance a planet would revolve around its sun in order for it to support life. According to that theory, 47 Uma B was just a little too far away from its primary for it to be habitable, yet astrophysicists at Pennsylvania State University postulated that if the superjovian had its own satellite system, infrared radiation reflected from the gas giant might possibly render one or two of those moons capable of supporting life.

  Five years later, in August 2001, Marcy and Butler announced the discovery of a second gas giant orbiting 47 Ursae Majoris, this one less massive and farther away from its primary. With the discovery of 47 Ursae Majoris C, humankind had evidence of a solar system that closely resembled Earth’s.

  Concurrent with the discovery of extrasolar planets, new interest was emerging among physicists and astronautical engineers in the idea of interstellar travel. During 1997 and 1998, NASA sponsored two academic conferences on the subject; one concentrated on breakthrough propulsion systems, the other on robotic probes. Although conference participants often held wildly different opinions on when and how spacecraft could be sent beyond Earth’s solar system, the consensus that emerged was that interstellar travel, while perhaps unlikely in the near term, was not impossible.

  Early in the twenty-first century NASA launched the Sagan Terrestrial Planet Finder, an array of four eight-meter optical telescopes positioned in low-Earth orbit by two successive shuttle missions. Once the TPF was bought on-line, researchers at CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory began pointing the instrument toward those stars believed to have extrasolar planets. To no one’s great surprise, it turned out that a couple of the superjovians in the catalog were really brown dwarfs, feeble remnants of what might have been binary companions to their primaries. Interesting in their own way, but not what the JPL planet hunters wished to find. Over the course of the next few years, though, they managed to confirm through direct imaging the existence of several Earth-size planets in systems where superjovians had previously been detected. However, none of these planets lay within habitable zones; they either orbited too close or too far away from their suns for life to have been able to evolve upon them.

  Yet when the JPL team focused the TPF on 47 Ursae Majoris B, they discovered six major satellites, ranging in approximate size from that of Io all the way to one whose mass was almost identical to that of Mars. Six moons in stately circular orbits around a gas giant beyond the edge of what had previously been established as a habitable zone…but what did that mean, exactly? At one time, the depths of Earth’s oceans beyond the continental shelves were believed to be lifeless and near-sterile, until volcanic black smokers were discovered and, teeming around them, dozens of different kinds of plants and animals, all well adapted to crushing pressure and complete lack of sunlight. Conditions on some of 47 Uma B’s satellites couldn’t be anywhere near as extreme as that; something might have found a way to evolve on one of them, despite previous estimates of habitability.

  By the late twenties, NASA’s political clout was nearly exhausted. Private enterprise had taken the lion’s share of manned space operations, and the success of commercial lunar mining operations had prompted widespread discussion within Congress that NASA should be dismantled, its operations folded into a new Federal Space Agency. Yet public interest in 47 Uma B and its satellites was sufficiently high to allow NASA’s administrators to go to the Hill with two new-start programs: the Infrared Spectrum Telescope, which would be able to analyze absorption bands from 47 Uma B’s moons and determine if any of them held telltale signatures of atmospheric carbon dioxide, ozone, or water vapor, and Project Starflight, a long-term program to investigate the construction of an interstellar probe. The first reliable nuclear-fusion tokamak had been put into operation in France six months earlier, and the United States was actively engaged in its own fusion program; a starship utilizing a fusion engine now seemed feasible.

  NASA’s request might have been dismissed had it not been for timely intervention from an unlikely ally: Hamilton Conroy, a first-term congressman from Alabama who was one of the ideological leaders of the new Liberty Party. Although only in his early thirties, Conroy was already making a name for himself on the Hill; at the top of his agenda was the formation of a National Reform Program, which among other things called for a Third Constitutional Congress that would substantially revise the U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. Yet Conroy’s vision extended beyond reactionary politics; captivated by the hazy images of 47 Uma B’s moons captured by the TPF and arguing that America had a manifest destiny in space, he managed to persuade his colleagues in the House to fund bot
h projects. For their part, NASA administrators quietly decided to hold their noses and accept Representative Conroy’s political assistance. If it took the support of a right-wing ideologue to keep their hopes alive, they rationalized, then so be it; they only prayed that it wouldn’t be a Faustian bargain.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, a friendly competition was quietly being held by JPL scientists. The six major satellites orbiting the superjovian had been officially cataloged as 47 Uma B1, 47 Uma B2, and so forth, but someone suggested that these moons and their primary should be given proper names. So an informal contest was held, open only to CalTech researchers, to be judged by senior administrators. Suggestions were emailed back and forth, posted on bulletin boards, chatted about over lunch tables; they included everything from the names of the original seven Mercury astronauts to astrological signs to favorite Disney characters, but in the end the judges ruled in favor of animal-demigod names drawn from Native American mythology. Thus 47 Ursae Majoris B was called Bear, and in ascending order its satellites were designated Dog, Hawk, Eagle, Snake, and Goat.

  The fourth moon, the largest and most likely to sustain life, was named Coyote.

  Book One

  Space is huge enough, so that somewhere in its vastness there will always be a place for rebels and outlaws. Near to the sun, space will belong to big governments and computerized industries. Outside, the open frontier will beckon as it has beckoned before, to persecuted minorities escaping from oppression, to religious fanatics escaping from their neighbors, to recalcitrant teen-agers escaping from their parents, to lovers of solitude escaping from crowds. Perhaps most important of all for man’s future, there will be groups of people setting out to find a place where they can be free from prying eyes…

  —FREEMAN DYSON,

  From Eros to Gaia

  Part One

  STEALING ALABAMA

  PHILADELPHIA 7.4.70 / T-28.25.03

  The Liberty Bell is much larger than he expected. Nearly fifteen feet tall, weighing over two thousand pounds, it’s suspended by its oak arm between two cement supports, the ceiling lights casting a dull sheen from its bronze surface. Captain Lee stands in front of the bell, meditating upon the long crack that runs down its side, the biblical inscription carved around its top: Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof. Lev. XXV:X.