Coyote Frontier

by Allen Steele

  “So where’s the fire?” Without sitting down, Wendy poured coffee for Chris, then for herself and Carlos. She seldom let business get in the way of breakfast. “Or did someone steal one of your mother’s chickens again?”

  It was an old joke between them; Chris forced a smile. “No fire, but you guessed half right. Someone stole a bird this morning…the Virginia Dare, a skiff from the Drake.”

  “Really?” Carlos raised an eyebrow. “The one that landed yesterday?”

  “Uh-huh.” Chris sipped his coffee. “Don’t blame yourself if you didn’t hear it take off. Happened around three-thirty, and whoever did it was careful not to engage the main engines until they reached altitude. Woke up a few people, but most slept right through it.”

  Well, that was serious enough. The European Alliance had landing rights throughout the colonies, but they’d come to use New Brighton as their principal spaceport. Ana Tereshkova had landed in Albion, aboard the Walter Raleigh; no doubt she’d be aggravated over the theft of one of her landing craft.

  “What about the night watch?” Wendy took a seat, poured some goat’s milk into her coffee. “Didn’t they see anything?”

  “My guy says he’d just walked the area. Didn’t see anything. We found a pair of bolt cutters next to the gate, along with the lock.” Chris shrugged. “I was tempted to dock him a week’s pay, but then I read the log. He wasn’t slacking off. Just didn’t see it coming, that’s all.”

  “Who would have?” Carlos fetched the biscuits from the stove top. Picking up a jar of strawberry preserves, he carried everything back to the table. “Why would anyone want to steal a skiff?”

  “My thoughts exactly.” Wendy cast him a hard look. I’m the president. You’re the ex-president. Shut up and serve the biscuits, and let me do my job. “Did anyone try to make contact with the pilot?”

  “Of course. The minute it took off, my officer hustled the radio chief out of bed. Not a peep, from any frequency. Whoever hijacked that thing, they’re ignoring all transmissions.”

  “Uh-huh.” Wendy nodded. “But I think you’re missing something. Like Carlos said, why steal a shuttle? It’s not like you could go anywhere with it…or at least, not to any other colony, because it’d be recognized as soon as it touched down. Maybe you could land somewhere else.”

  “But then you’d have to fend for yourself.” Chris nodded. “We thought of that already. I’ve got my people going to all the shops in town, to see if anyone recently purchased the stuff you’d need if you wanted to set up camp out in the boonies.” A pensive frown. “But that doesn’t make sense, either. Why steal a skiff if you could just as easily hire someone to fly you wherever you want to go?”

  “Got a point there.” Wendy used a knife to open a biscuit and spread preserves on it. “You said they dropped a pair of bolt cutters…”

  “We’re looking into that.” Chris helped himself to a biscuit. “And that’s weird, too. That sort of purchase can be traced easily enough…it was Earth-made, and there’re only a few shops carrying that sort of hardware. So it’s almost as if they didn’t care whether we find out who they are.”

  “Not only that, but how many people here are rated to fly a skiff?” Wendy’s brow furrowed. “Five, ten? A dozen at most? I’ll have Tomas check the records. Maybe he’ll—”

  “Where the heck is Susan?” It was an irrelevant question, but amid the discussion of one mystery, Carlos abruptly realized that there was another that hadn’t been solved. Her door remained shut, and there was no sound of movement from her room. “Not like her to sleep in.”

  “Maybe she had a late night.” Wendy was paying little attention. “Wake her up, tell her breakfast is ready.”

  As he walked across the room, Carlos found himself wondering, once again, when his daughter would find her own place. She was an adult now, with a job at the university that frequently sent her out into the field. Very often she’d been gone for weeks on end, conducting research on the native fauna, the chirreep in particular. A long absence, then she’d return, sunburned and exhausted, with clothes so filthy and ripped that they should be burned instead of washed out and stitched.

  Not only that, but lately they hadn’t been getting along very well. She’d been upset when she discovered that he’d purchased stock in Morgan Goldstein’s company. He’d tried to explain to her that Janus stood to make a lot of money from the development of Albion, and now that Coyote had opened trade with Earth there was no reason why their family couldn’t take advantage of this. Yet she seemed to disregard everything he said; the last time they’d duked it out, she’d accused him of selling out his principles, of betraying the very things for which he’d fought when he was Rigil Kent. That had hurt, perhaps more than he cared to admit.

  Dammit, Carlos thought. I love her dearly, but she’s a grown woman. If she’s going to feud with me, maybe she ought to stop living at home with her parents.

  This even as he rapped on the door. “Susie? Breakfast. Rise and shine.” No response. He tried again. “Time to get up.” More silence. He turned the knob, gently pushed open the door, peered inside.

  Her bed was still made; it hadn’t been slept in since yesterday. Her jacket wasn’t hanging on the hook next to the dresser, and the calf boots she customarily wore when she was in the outback were missing as well.

  “Susan?” Wendy’s voice from the main room. “Is she there?”

  Carlos strode across the bedroom to her desk. Her field journal, which she always carried with her when she was on an expedition, lay next to her lecture notes. Strange. He opened drawers. No satphone; she’d taken that, though. He turned to the closet. Yet here was her pack…

  “Where’s Susan?” Wendy had left the table, come to the bedroom door; there was motherly concern on her face. “She’s not—?”

  “No.” Carlos took a deep breath. “Gone.” Rubbing his eyes with his fingertips, he struggled to put everything together. Susan was missing; she’d disappeared sometime during the night. She had taken her jacket, her heavy boots, her satphone…but no pack, no journal.

  “Something’s going on here.” He looked around at Wendy. “I don’t know why, but I’ve got a feeling about this.”

  STARBRIDGE COYOTE / 1324

  “Chief? We’ve got a skiff requesting permission to dock with us.”

  Hearing the voice in his headset, Jonas Whittaker looked away from the galley microwave where he’d been patiently waiting for his lunch to warm up. He tapped the mike wand. “Repeat that, please? You said something about a skiff?”

  “Uh-huh. Identifies itself as the EAS Virginia Dare, from the Drake.” The com officer hesitated. “I don’t see anything on the schedule about any craft coming up today.”

  The oven beeped, signaling that his Swedish meatballs were ready. “We don’t, the last thing I checked. What does the pilot say they’re doing here?”

  “He hasn’t given a reason. Just wants permission to rendezvous and dock.”

  Jonas held on to a ceiling rail as he opened the oven and pulled out a plastic-covered tray. Wincing as it burned his fingertips, he hastily transferred the tray to the table and clamped it down. This was weird…“Can you patch me through, please? I want to talk to the pilot.” A long pause, then a soft click in his headset. “Hello? With whom am I speaking?”

  “Lt. Commander Jeffery Thomas, executive officer of the Drake.” The accent was British, the tone formal and precise. “May I ask the same, please?”

  “Jonas Whittaker. Chief of operations, Starbridge Coyote. Mr. Thomas, we haven’t heard anything about receiving a skiff from the Drake. Why are you here?”

  “Ah, Dr. Whittaker. Pleasure to make your acquaintance.” The voice thawed a little. “Many apologies for the confusion. We’re not coming directly from the Drake, rather, but from Albion. I thought someone was supposed to have gotten in touch with you about arranging for a visit.”

  Jonas pushed himself away from the table, glided across the galley to the porthole. This section
of the gatehouse faced away from Bear, so he was able to see Coyote. The moon was a green-tinted scimitar, its nightside turned toward Bear; among the stars he could make out a pair of red and blue beacons that flashed in sequence. The formation lights of an approaching skiff, less than twenty-five nautical miles away.

  Sure took their sweet time about giving us a shout. “No one contacted us,” he said. “There must be a mistake. We don’t normally allow tours.”

  “I understand, Dr. Whittaker, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. It’s just that…” A slight pause. “You see, we have U.N. delegates aboard. We’ve been trying to keep this as hush-hush as possible, so that’s probably why someone neglected to contact you. I hope you understand.”

  Jonas closed his eyes. That’s all he needed: some VIPs barging in, demanding that he and his crew drop everything they were doing to give them a tour. And just when they were getting ready for another hyperspace transition, this time for the passage of the new EAS ship. Didn’t these people have any idea how difficult it was to…?

  “Dr. Whittaker?” Thomas again. “We’re on final approach. If there’s some sort of problem, perhaps we can reach Ambassador Vogel, ask him to clarify the situation.”

  “No, that’s all right.” Dieter was a jerk; the less Jonas had to deal with him, the better. He turned away from the porthole. “Permission granted…but Mr. Thomas, please be advised that we’re making an exception. The gatehouse is no place for tourists.”

  An embarrassed chuckle. “Understood. We’ll try to keep it brief and not to get in the way. Virginia Dare over and out.”

  A second later, the com officer came back online. “Sorry, chief. I know it’s the last thing you want to—”

  “Can’t be helped, Sam.” Jonas regarded his lunch for a moment, then glided back across the compartment to remove it from the table. “Better let me take care of this,” he added, opening the fridge and pushing the tray inside. “Maybe I can get rid of these guys quick so we can get back to business.”

  A laugh. “All yours. We’ll tidy up a bit before they get here.”

  “Please do. Out.” Jonas tapped his mike again, then, regretting the lost chance to enjoy one of the better frozen entrees the station had in its larder, he pushed himself toward the hatch leading to the access shaft.

  It had been nearly a full Coyote year—a couple of months shy of three Earth years—since the starbridge had become operative, and still Jonas found himself spending much of his time aboard the gatehouse. Too much time, really. By all rights, he should have retired by now; he’d worked hard to train his five-person crews, which alternated each month between two teams, each with their own managers. He had a nice place in Leeport, a rough-bark cabin on the West Channel where he could sit on the front porch, drink ale, and watch barges moving up and down the river…a far cry from floating around in a tin can, eating frozen crap as he waited for the next vessel to pop out of hyperspace.

  Yet Jonas was proud of his creation. Although he was always careful to say that he’d stood upon the shoulders of giants—Einstein, Hawking, Thorne, and others—the fact remained that he’d managed to transform theory into practicality, and in doing so had opened the stars to humankind. This is not something from which a man could easily walk away. And so he came up here as often as he could, running a hand-picked shift of technicians just so he could see the flash of light from the distant torus as the starbridge opened to allow a spacecraft to vault through hyperspace, bypassing forty-six light-years in the blink of an eye.

  The day comes when I’m bored with that, Jonas thought, making his way headfirst down the narrow shaft, that’s the day I start raising tomatoes. Until then, this baby’s mine.

  He’d reached the docking module, located halfway down the station’s spindle-like structure, when Sam’s voice chirped in his ear again: “Ah, chief, there’s something about this…”

  “Tell me about it,” he grumbled as he pushed a button above the hatch. It irised open, revealing a spherical compartment. “Next time they send us VIPs, it’d be nice if they’d give us some advance warning.”

  “That’s just it. I’m not sure if they did.”

  Grasping a rung next to the hatch, Jonas swung himself feet-first into the ready room. Four airlocks on each side of the compartment: two leading to docking collars, the other two direct to space. Suit lockers and equipment racks lined the curved walls between the airlock hatches. A small compartment, without much room to maneuver.

  “C’mon, Sam, I don’t got all day.” Jonas did a somersault that oriented himself toward Hatch 2, then peered through a porthole the size of a saucer. Through the collapsed accordion-tube of the docking collar, he could see the approaching skiff. The ring of its dorsal hatch was lined up precisely with the collar; a brief flare every now and then from RCRs corrected the skiff’s trajectory. “What’s the problem?”

  “Look, I don’t know if it means anything, but I just checked the Drake’s crew and passenger manifest, and I didn’t find any U.N. diplomats registered—”

  “You’re right. It doesn’t mean anything. VIPs don’t always use their titles.” The skiff drew closer. Whoever was flying that thing had a nice hand at the stick. No back-offs or second tries, not one wasted motion. Smooth and steady.

  “Maybe so, but I don’t find any crew by the name of Jeffery Thomas, either. He said he was the executive officer, right? According to my records, the Drake’s XO is Milos DiNardo.”

  “Could be a mistake. Check to see if—”

  “I did. That’s according to the current manifest. The one for the last time the Drake came through lists Jeffery Thomas as the exec, but—”

  “So they got things screwed up.” He let out his breath in exasperation. “Look, I don’t have time for this, and neither do you. Let’s just get these guys in and out of here, then we can get back to what’s important.” Like lunch. He was hungry and, God help him, he’d actually been looking forward to those Swedish meatballs.

  “Will you listen to me? Please? I just checked the log for the most recent advisories…”

  Gatehouse crewmembers seldom looked at text messages from Coyote. For the most part, they were routine reports: global weather forecasts, landing conditions at Shuttlefield and New Brighton, technical data meant to be loaded directly into the comps. There was the daily mail from family and friends, which the crew read when they weren’t doing anything else, but otherwise most messages was stored in memory until someone found time to weed through all the junk.

  “Yeah, and…?” The skiff blotted out the sunlight. The station floodlights reflected dully from its hull, then the collar expanded to mate with the craft’s airlock ring. A moment later there was a dull jar as the docking cradle closed around the skiff.

  “There’s a flash advisory from Liberty. Says that a skiff was stolen from Shuttlefield at about 0330 this morning. Want to guess which one it was?”

  Everything the com officer had told him suddenly fit together. “Aw, crap,” he muttered. “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Does it sound like I’m kidding?” In the background, someone was yelling. Kendrick, probably; the traffic officer was on duty the last time Jonas went topside. “Whoever’s on that shuttle, it’s not who he says he…”

  Jonas glanced up at the panel above the hatch, watched the lights go green. The sleeve was beginning to pressurize. “Keep that hatch shut!” he snapped. “Don’t release the bolts until I say so!”

  “No can do. They still can open it from inside.”

  “Then see if you can disable it somehow! And get someone else down here!” Jonas backed away from the airlock, began to look frantically around the ready room. Suits, helmets, gloves, a first-aid kit…nothing that could be used as a weapon. Didn’t anyone ever think that we might need a stunner up here? Of course not. This was a space station. Who the hell would want to hijack a space station?

  “Jodi and I are on the way down, chief.” Maurice’s voice on the comlink. “Hold the fort till we get ther
e.”

  Good. The last time he saw Jodi and Maurice, only fifteen minutes ago, they were in the crew quarters. That was only three decks up, less than a hundred feet away. Of course, neither of them had been fully dressed; Jodi’s hair was still wet, and both she and Maurice were wearing robes, indicating that they’d just spent some quality time in the shower together. They’d have to put on their jumpsuits first. And with both Sam and Kendrick in the com center…

  He remembered the nearest fire extinguisher, located in the access shaft about ten feet away. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would have to do. Jonas pushed himself through the ready room hatch, hastily pulled himself up along the ladder until he reached it. The tank was fastened tight against the bulkhead; he had to brace his feet and back against the tunnel and haul at it with both hands until it snapped loose from its breakaway straps. God help them if there was ever an actual fire in this place.

  “What’s going on down there?” Ninety feet up, Maurice was emerging from a hatch, wearing drawstring pants and a T-shirt that looked as if he’d just pulled them from the laundry sack. “If this is some kind of—”

  “Shut up and get down here!” Tucking the fire extinguisher under his left arm, Jonas pushed himself feet-first toward the ready room hatch. Too late, he realized that he’d left it open. He should have closed it behind him. But that shouldn’t matter. He’d been gone only a minute. Ninety seconds, tops. There was no way…

  His feet had barely gone through the hatchway before a pair of hands—not hands, really, but metallic claws, ice-cold and unyielding—grabbed his ankles. Jonas didn’t even have time to yell before he was yanked through the manhole. The back of his shirt ripped against the hatchway, then he was slammed against the wall by something stronger than a mere mortal.

  Jonas looked up, saw a skeletal face peering at him, one ruby eye gleaming at him from within a dark hood, the other covered by a patch. A Savant. He’d heard of these beings, seen their pictures yet hadn’t met any since his revival; they’d come and gone during the years he’d spent in biostasis, becoming creatures that most people in this time spoke about only in tones of dread.