Coyote Frontier

by Allen Steele

  “He probably did. Something like this, he wouldn’t have ignored.” She let out her breath. “Damn it. Of all the times…”

  Carlos moved closer to her. “Captain, you can’t keep me in the dark like this,” he said quietly. “Is there something I should know?”

  “Just wait!” she snapped. Carlos shrank back, and D’Costa glared at him. “Inform Ambassador Vogel that the Magellan is scheduled to arrive soon,” she went on. “I’ll leave it to him to inform the proper colonial authorities.” She tried to ignore the fact that the president’s husband was standing next to her. Better let Dieter take care of this himself; diplomacy was his game, not hers, and she had more important issues to consider just now. “Has the hyperspace relay channel been shut down?” D’Costa shook his head. Good. That was something in their favor. “Then inform them what’s happening here, and let them know that I…”

  She stopped to think for a moment. “Advise them that the situation is critical, and that I believe that the Magellan fly-through is a bad idea at this time and should be delayed.” D’Costa hurried away, heading for the com station. Ana leaned forward to peer over the railing. “Ms. Jones, are we alive this evening?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Wide awake and ready to travel.” The young woman seated at the helm grinned as she glanced up at her.

  “Excellent. Mr. Rollins, I trust you’ve plotted a trajectory for the Gatehouse.”

  “Plotted and programmed, ma’am.” The navigator’s hands hovered above his board, ready to do her bidding.

  “Then take us there. Full thrust until we reach cruise velocity, then engage the main drive.”

  Jones’s eyes widened. “Main drive? Captain…”

  “I want us there soon as possible. Work out emergency braking maneuvers, even if we have to drain the reserves.” This was no idle request; in order to decelerate from the high velocity of the diametric drive, Drake would have to dump most of its deuterium fuel straight into the fusion reactors. Risky business, but it would cut their ETA from ten hours to less than four. They’d limp home on dry tanks, if they had to. “Tell me now if it can’t be done.”

  Jones took a moment to run some figures through her comp. She traded a cautious glance with Rollins, then looked at her captain again. “We can do it, skipper. On your mark.”

  “Roll with it.” Pulling up her lapboard, Tereshkova activated the intercom and the flight recorder, then pressed her jaw. “All hands, this is the captain,” she said. “Sounding general quarters. Repeat, general quarters. Prepare for deorbit and max thrust in sixty seconds, with main drive engagement in ten minutes. This is not a drill.”

  Orange lamps flashed to life along the ceiling as bridge officers snapped their seat belts into place. She studied the screens, quickly analyzing the graphs and bars of information that scrolled down them. All systems operative. No signs of trouble. Her people knew their jobs, even if they had to scramble to—

  “Ana? I mean, Captain…what are you doing?”

  She’d forgotten about Carlos. Obviously bewildered, he anxiously watched the activity around them. The ensign hadn’t yet reappeared with the seat she’d requested, and now that they were on GQ he was doubtless at his station.

  “Getting us to your daughter, soon as possible.” She tried to reassure him with a quick smile. “Don’t worry, the field is still active. We won’t pull more than a half-g or so. But you might want to hold tight.”

  Carlos fastened his grip upon the railing, turned his back against the windows. He understood that Drake was about to rip out of orbit. “You still haven’t told me what’s going on. What is the Magellan? Why is it—?”

  “There’s much I need to tell you, but…” She shook her head. “Trust me, please,” she added quietly. “I’m trying to do what’s right.”

  “All right. I understand.” He paused. “But for whom?”

  She couldn’t answer that. The flight recorder was active; the truth might incriminate her. “Just hold on,” she murmured, then she snapped her belt around her waist. “Helm, are we ready?”

  “On your mark, Captain.” Jones’s right hand held steady above her panel.

  “Mark.”

  STARBRIDGE COYOTE / 1828

  Susan listened for another moment to her headset, then turned her chair away from the com station. “Bad news. We’re going to have company soon.”

  Jon was standing watch over Whittaker, who was seated on the other side of the command center, his wrists still bound together. They both looked at her. “The Drake?” Jon asked, and she nodded. “What’s going on?”

  “It broke orbit about five minutes ago. Their com officer says the negotiator’s aboard. They still want to speak to us, but—”

  “So why don’t you?” Whittaker asked. “Might as well. After all, they’ve received your demands. No point in—”

  “We’ll talk to them when we’re ready.” Jon was more nervous than his captive. Indeed, Whittaker had finally relaxed a bit, now that he knew that no one was going to harm him. The rest of the Gatehouse crew had been confined to their quarters; they had plenty of food and water, but Jon had carefully searched the compartment, removing anything that might conceivably be used as a weapon, before he sealed the hatch from the outside, using hemp rope he’d brought up for this purpose to bind the lock-lever to a rung of the access shaft ladder.

  “Maintain silence,” Jon went on, clinging to a ceiling rail, “but keep monitoring that channel. I expect we’ll hear from them before they get here.” He glanced at his watch. “Should be about four, maybe five hours.”

  “That soon?” Susan was surprised. “But it took ten hours for us to—”

  “We came in on a skiff, remember? If I know Tereshkova, she’ll engage the main drive. That’ll get her here sooner.” Pulling himself hand-over-hand across the compartment, he extended the stunner to her. “Keep an eye on him,” he said, then he went over to Manny. “Any luck yet?”

  “Luck’s not a factor. Only probability.” The Savant stood before a console, his feet held in place by a pair of stirrups. A thick cable led from his chest to a dataport; his claws tapped against the keyboard as information flashed across a comp screen faster than the human eye could follow. “I haven’t cracked the password, if that’s what you’re asking. Given enough time to run all the possible permutations—”

  “How much time?”

  “Best estimate?” The slightest of pauses. “Seven hours. Perhaps eight.”

  “Not good enough. The Drake will be here by then.”

  “Then we’re back to probability.” Manny continued to work, the quantum comp in his chest processing all feasible alphanumeric configurations within nine decimal places. “Or luck, if you prefer.”

  “Dammit, Manny…”

  “This conversation has involved three megabytes of my capability. That’s about two hundred fewer computations per second. A quick game of chess would be less time consuming, and it might help calm you.” Manny tapped a couple of keys out of sequence, and a chessboard appeared on one of the screens. “Black queen’s pawn forward two. Your move.”

  Whittaker snickered. He tried to hide his amusement by looking away, but Susan heard him, and so did Jon. He pushed himself off the ceiling, sailed across the compartment to where Whittaker was seated. “Look, are you going to tell me—?”

  “Not a chance.” Whittaker grinned at him. “Like your friend says, you roll the dice, you take your chances.”

  Jon slapped a hand against the ceiling, then pushed himself back across the room to where Manny continued to work.

  Susan shut her eyes. Taking over the Gatehouse should have been the hard part, but it wasn’t. Just before the crewmembers on duty in the command center surrendered, one of them managed to encrypt all major command functions behind a nine-figure password. The fact that she and Jon had been forced to stun both of them hadn’t helped the situation either; an hour had passed before they’d regained consciousness, and since then neither one had been cooperative. Like Whit
taker, they’d come to realize that any threats to shove them out the airlock were empty at best. All they had to do was wait until the Drake arrived.

  It’s all going wrong, she thought. How did I ever let myself get talked into this?

  Desperation, yes. She’d seen firsthand the effects of global colonization: the clear-cutting of forests, the burning of savannahs, the slaughter of wildlife habitats, the threatened extermination of the chirreep. That, and anger at her father: he’d turned a blind eye to what the Thompson Wood Company was doing to the Black Mountains, then he’d used his presidency to negotiate the rape of her world, and finally he’d invested in Janus even as it made environmental destruction into a profit-making enterprise.

  Rebellion ran strong in her family. Her grandfather helped Captain Lee hijack the Alabama, and her father led guerilla raids on Liberty. When Jon proposed his scheme, she hadn’t hesitated to go along with it. Outrage wasn’t her only motivation, though, but also love…and not only for Coyote.

  No one in her family knew that, all those times she’d gone to Great Dakota, ostensibly to conduct university research, she’d actually been visiting the camp Jon and Manny had built in the Black Mountains. At first, she’d thought she’d only been helping them learn more about the chirreep, yet only recently she’d come to realize that something else had drawn her.

  Like it or not, she’d fallen in love with Jonathan Parson. She still didn’t know whether the feeling was mutual—they’d spent a few nights in bed together, but she’d told herself that this had only been casual—yet she’d been unable to confess her feelings toward him, and even now she wondered if he had any toward her. Nonetheless, she loved him. And now she wondered if she’d let her emotions take her into something she’d never intended.

  Damn it, if only her father had listened…

  “You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, do you?”

  Startled, she looked around at Whittaker. The physicist quietly gazed at her, a knowing look in his eyes. He’d spoken quietly, so that the others couldn’t hear him.

  “What do you—?”

  “You know what I mean.” Whittaker nodded toward Jon and Manny. “You’re a smart girl. You know you don’t have a chance. In a few hours, you’re going to have visitors…and believe me, they’re not going to take no for an answer.”

  “I’m not worried about the Drake.” She looked away. “They won’t try anything if they think we’re keeping you and your friends hostage.”

  “I thought you said we weren’t hostages.”

  “I mean…”

  “Yeah, sure. I know.” Whittaker shook his head. “But the Drake’s not your problem. You’ve got a bigger one than that.” She looked back at him, and he nodded. “Maybe Mr. Parson can negotiate with Captain Tereshkova. You’re not going to be dealing with her, though, or anyone else you know.” Susan stared at him. “Come again? I don’t…”

  “Yes, please,” Jon said. “Tell us more.”

  Susan looked up, saw that Jon had overheard them; he kept his distance, yet carefully listened to their conversation. “You’ve got something to say, Dr. Whittaker?”

  “Might as well.” Whittaker no longer bothered to keep his voice low. “No point in hiding it. In about four and a half hours, the starbridge is going to open, and a ship is going to come through…the Magellan, sister ship to the Drake, on her first shakedown cruise.”

  “How do you know this?” Jon asked.

  “Received final confirmation from Highgate only a few hours before you showed up. That’s when we entered the activation program into the station AI.” Whittaker shrugged. “It’s all preset. The comps do the rest, right down to charging the torus at precisely the right moment. All we do here is sit back and watch.”

  “Then we send them a message, tell them to back off.”

  Whittaker shook his head. “You’d have to open a hyperspace channel, and for that you need the password.” He grinned. “Of course, the Drake can do that…and I have no doubt that Captain Tereshkova is already in touch with them. But as far as you’re concerned—”

  “Then we’ll shut down the starbridge. Prevent them coming through.”

  “Jon…” Manny turned half around. “We can’t do that either. Not without the—”

  “Oh, bloody hell!” Jon slammed a fist against a console. “What’s the password? Give it to me, or I’ll—”

  “Do what?” Whittaker remained passive. “March me into the airlock? Space one of my crew?” Again, he shook his head. “You’re not a killer. None of you are. And you know it, too.”

  A long moment of silence within the command center. No one knew what to say next. Susan stared helplessly at Jon; he swore under his breath, turned away from her. Manny returned his attention to the console, diligently continued to try to crack the password. It was all for nothing. The entire effort had been doomed from the beginning. They should have realized this.

  A double-beep in her headset. Ignoring Jon’s orders to maintain radio silence, she prodded its lobe. “Coyote Gatehouse,” she murmured. “Go ahead.”

  “Susan? Sweetheart, is that you?”

  Her eyes widened. Her father’s voice.

  And she knew, even without having to look at the com station, that the source of transmission was the Drake.

  LIBERTY / 1917

  Night had fallen outside the windows of the second-floor conference room when the Proctor opened the door and let Wendy in. Hawk was taking a nap at the table, his head resting on his arms; he sat up as she walked in, but he didn’t speak to her, only regarded her with sullen eyes. “Thanks,” Wendy said. “I’ll let you know if we need anything.” The blueshirt nodded, then closed the door behind her. “Doing okay there? Have you been treated well?”

  Hawk gave an absent shrug. Wendy glanced at the dinner tray on the other side of the table; the water glass was empty, but the chicken sandwich and fried potatoes had gone untouched. “Doesn’t look like you have much of an appetite,” she said. “If you want something else…”

  Another shrug. Hawk made a pretense of gazing at a watercolor landscape framed on the wall beside the door. “Guess not,” Wendy murmured, then she pulled back a chair across from him and sat down. “But, y’know, if the silent routine is supposed to impress me, you’re not getting very far. And it’s not going to do your friends any good.”

  A hint of a sneer before he looked away again. He’d been here for nearly five hours now, without anyone visiting him other than to deliver dinner. Long enough for him to mentally rehearse any number of responses to the next person to come through the door. She should have talked to him earlier, but she’d been busy all afternoon, meeting first with Dieter Vogel, then with the Council representatives. Yet when she hadn’t been engaged in diplomacy and politics, she’d been working on how to deal with her nephew. And, unlike Hawk, she’d had the advantage of not working in a vacuum.

  “You know,” she went on, “your cousin’s in a lot of trouble. Same for Parson and Castro. Bad enough that they took control of the Gatehouse, but if they’d just give up now, things would go a lot easier for them. I’d be willing to work out something with the magistrates…probation, community service, something on those lines. Same for you, if you’ll cooperate.”

  No reaction. Hawk continued to study the painting. “But the longer they hold out, the more impatient other folks are likely to get…the EA, for starters. They built the starbridge, after all, and they negotiated treaties with us in good faith. If they believe that we can’t be trusted to hold up our side of the bargain, then they may take measures to make sure that it remains operational. Do you understand?”

  Hawk sighed, pretending to be bored by all this. Yet Wendy had anticipated such a reaction. “Maybe not. Or maybe you do, but you just don’t care. It’s even possible that you think I’m lying. If I was in your position, I’d probably think the same thing. But here’s the truth.”

  Leaning forward, she looked him square in the eye. “There is no way we�
�re going to agree to your demands. All treaties are going to remain intact. No agreements are going to be annulled. No one is going to be sent back to Earth. Even if your friends destroy the starbridge, we won’t renege on our promises. That’s a fact.”

  Wendy slipped a hand into a pocket of her skirt, pulled out the satphone the Proctor had taken from him a few hours earlier. “Call them yourself, if you want,” Wendy said, sliding the unit across the table to him. “Maybe you’d like to give them the bad news. Doesn’t matter. Your uncle is aboard the Drake, and in a few hours he’ll reach the Gatehouse. No doubt he’s already in radio contact. Maybe Susan will listen to her father, maybe she won’t, but the message will remain the same. No deals. No compromises. Comprende?”

  Hawk flinched as the satphone came to rest next to him. His hand twitched, as if he wanted to pick it up yet couldn’t bring himself to do so. His resolve was crumbling, though, and now it was time for her to play her trump card.

  “Mind if I have this?” Wendy reached over to the tray, picked up half of the chicken sandwich. “Haven’t eaten yet, and I’m starving.” Ignoring the ravenous look in his eye, she took a bite, chewed thoughtfully. “Shame to let it go to waste. Oh, by the way, want to come clean about what happened to your father?”

  Hawk’s face became ashen, and he quickly looked away. “I called your mother, had a long talk with her,” she went on, keeping her voice casual. “Your uncle and I heard that Lars went missing a few weeks ago, of course, but until today I hadn’t gotten the full story. That the two of you had gone up into the mountains looking for chirreep, but only one of you had come back. You’d said something about you and him getting lost up there, and how he’d fallen into a ravine.”

  “A sinkhole.” Hawk’s voice was hollow. “There was a sinkhole, and he fell in.”

  “That’s it. He fell into a sinkhole.” Wendy took another bite from the sandwich, brushed crumbs from her mouth. “Then you managed to find your way back to camp, but somehow you couldn’t remember where that sinkhole was.”