Coyote Destiny

by Allen Steele

  The air outside was cold, although not frigid, and thicker than he anticipated. Jorge had known that Earth’s atmospheric density was greater than Coyote’s, but his first few breaths made his lungs ache. As he stepped out from beneath the Mercator’s fuselage, he felt as if he’d just run a couple of miles; his legs were rubbery, and his lower back was sore. Jorge was suddenly grateful for the intense physical training that he, Inez, and Greg had undergone just prior to leaving Coyote; without it, they would have been crippled. Even so, he realized that, until their bodies adapted to the higher gravity and pressure, they would tire easily, with fatigue a constant enemy.

  Yet all this was forgotten as soon as he looked around. To the east, the sky was beginning to turn a few shades lighter, and although a dense fog still lay about them, he began to make out some details. The Mercator had touched down on a concrete landing strip much like those on New Brighton, but it was obvious that it hadn’t been used in decades; floodwaters, only recently receded, had eroded the surface. Long cracks ran through it, with weeds and grass sprouting from the fissures. From somewhere nearby, there was the odor of salt.

  Turning around, he got a better view of the object Greg and Inez had spotted. Although it was still indistinct through the haze, he now perceived that it was a spacecraft that had apparently crashed during takeoff. Judging from its size and shape, Jorge figured that it had probably been an orbital passenger transport. Yet it was little more than a blackened skeleton; its port landing gear had buckled, causing its hull to smash down against the concrete, and fire had done the rest, reducing the vessel to a burned-out ruin.

  “You can only imagine how that happened.” McAlister had come up beside him. He, too, was staring at the wreckage. “Something must have caused the pilot to panic, make some sort of error…”

  “A lot of people were panicking back then.” From behind them, Vargas’s voice was low; Jorge suddenly realized that this was the first time the former UA pilot had shown any real regret for what had happened to his world. “Everything was falling apart. No one was thinking straight. It was like”—a long pause—“I dunno. The end of the world or something.”

  Jorge didn’t want to think how many lives had been lost. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived the crash. Looking aside, he saw that Inez had deliberately turned her back on the demolished spacecraft, her arms crossed tightly across her chest as if to ward off the cold. He had little doubt, though, that what she saw and heard had given her the chills much more than the weather.

  “All right,” he murmured, “what’s done is done. Let’s see about getting out of here.”

  Although they couldn’t yet see the sun, the new day was coming; with the fading of night, only the early-morning fog was left behind. It soon became apparent that the Mercator had landed a few hundred feet from the edge of the small peninsula on which Port Logan was built. Just past its steep embankment lay the inner harbor; beyond that, still lost in the thick haze, was Boston itself.

  Jorge put his team to work unloading the rest of their gear: back-packs, a case of food, two tents, and a portable stove. And most important, an inflatable boat, complete with collapsible paddles and a small outboard engine, which had been included in the expedition’s equipment just in case they had to cross water. He and Greg got their morning exercise by lugging its container bag to the embankment; although the boat weighed a little less than a couple of hundred pounds, they had to stop and rest a few times before they finally reached the weed-grown shore.

  After they unpacked the boat, Greg went about inflating it with a portable air compressor while Jorge went back to the shuttle. Inez and McAlister were setting up the tripod-mounted parabolic antenna for the expedition’s long-range transceiver. It had already been determined that McAlister would remain at Port Logan, where he would guard the shuttle while maintaining radio contact with the exploration team. If there was any trouble from which they couldn’t extricate themselves, the pilot would take the Mercator aloft and come to their rescue. Likewise, if or when they managed to find Inez’s father, Jorge would have the option of asking McAlister to pick them up.

  The fog was beginning to dissipate when the expedition rested for a few minutes to have breakfast: fruit bars and cereal sticks, eaten while sitting on their packs and boxes. About a mile away, they could make out the port’s terminal and its adjacent control tower; both were in ruins, with the tower little more than a broken pylon, its cupola a heap of twisted metal and shattered glass that lay beside it. The crashed transport was the only other spacecraft in sight; it had been many years since anything had flown out of Port Logan. And in the far distance was Boston, little more than a vague silhouette shrouded by the haze.

  There seemed little else left to say or do except make their way there. A brief radio check to make sure that everyone’s headset was on the same channel, then Jorge shook hands with McAlister before leading the others to the boat. Once their gear was loaded into the amidships cargo area, Greg and Vargas took their places in the bow, then Jorge and Inez waded through the cold shallows to push the craft into the water before climbing aboard themselves on either side of the engine. Jorge made sure everyone was comfortably seated, with his map case in his lap and their guns not far from their hands, then used a paddle to shove the boat the rest of the way from shore.

  The engine started without effort, its hydrogen cell supplying all the power the motor would need. After one last look behind, Jorge grasped the tiller and twisted its handle. The prop churned water, and the small boat purred away, heading for the lost city.

  Before the expedition had left Coyote, a senior officer from the Corps of Exploration quietly visited the University of New Florida, where he consulted archivists from the history department. As he’d hoped, the university database included maps of the North American continent; some that had been aboard the Alabama dated as far back as the United Republic of America. Among them were maps of the East Coast, including the greater Boston area. Although the most recent was from the early twenty-fourth century, it was not so old as to be unusable; it clearly showed the streets and major buildings of downtown Boston, along with the inner harbor and the nearby Charles River.

  Without explaining why, the Corps officer requested that the map be downloaded into datapads. The pads were later issued to the expedition, but just to be safe, a waterproof chart was also prepared by the Corps, if only for the sake of redundancy.

  As the boat moved across the mile of water that separated Port Logan from Boston, Jorge silently thanked that nameless Corps officer back home for his foresight. With his left hand on the tiller, he wasn’t able to use his pad easily; for that, he’d need to have both hands free. Instead, he took a few moments to open the cylindrical map case, pull out the chart, and spread it across his lap, using his rifle barrel to keep it from being blown overboard. With the fog still thick upon the inner harbor and visibility reduced to a few dozen yards, only the map and Inez’s compass would prevent the expedition from veering off in the wrong direction.

  The sun had started to burn away the mist, though, and by the time the boat was more than halfway across the harbor, they were able to see Boston more clearly. Jorge hadn’t known quite what to expect, but he was nonetheless stunned by what he saw. Where there had been a great city was now a decayed and abandoned ruin; towers once sleek and graceful were in a state of slow disintegration, their windows shattered, their elevated walkways collapsed, their arches and lower floors covered by creeping vines. Once gleaming in the sunlight, they’d become dark and burned-out hulks; uncontrolled fires had devastated many of the skyscrapers, with only their concrete inner cores preventing them from collapsing altogether. Even so, one building had fallen against its closest neighbor; they precariously leaned upon each other like a couple of drunk titans, threatening to eventually crush the smaller buildings beneath them.

  No one said anything as the boat approached the waterfront. The horror of what they saw was beyond words, and the air reeked of
ash and putrescence. Jorge had originally planned to make landfall at one of the harborside piers, but as they came closer, he saw that this would be impossible. Long Wharf had vanished, with only a few barnacle-encrusted wooden posts left in its place; as they came closer, they made out the upended stern of a sunken ferry, rotting seaweed dangling from its rusted propellers. The waters had begun to recede, but they still hadn’t returned to the levels where they’d been before the catastrophe.

  Consulting the map, Jorge decided to head for the Charles River; perhaps they’d find a way to go ashore once they left the harbor. He turned the boat to the north, and they slowly moved along the waterfront, passing harbor-view condominiums whose lower levels were now submerged, their upper balconies overrun by tangled brush and vines that had somehow managed to take root. Cabin cruisers and catamarans, the pleasure craft of the rich, lay capsized or half-sunk along the adjacent piers; Jorge wondered why they had been left behind, and decided that their owners must have believed that the boats would remain afloat even while the rest of the city drowned. Whether they had ever returned to discover the results of their foolishness, he had no idea.

  They passed the spire of Old North Church, built over six centuries ago yet miraculously intact despite the fact that its white paint had peeled away and the steeple cross was missing, and circled the city’s North End until they approached the mouth of the Charles River. Before them lay what the map identified as the Charlestown Bridge. The floodwaters had devastated its ironwork, causing the roadway to topple into the river, but its center trestle, supported by an enormous, drumlike rotary pedestal, had been moved aside, forming a gap that would allow sailboats to pass beneath the bridge. Perhaps port-authority engineers had decided, in the last days of the city, that doing so would save the historic old bridge from destruction. The river lapped against the pedestal as Jorge maneuvered the boat through the gap. As they moved under the bridge, he noticed a rusting sign dangling from the trestle: SLOW NO WAKE. He would have liked to smile, but he just wasn’t in the mood.

  Just past the Charlestown Bridge were the Gridley Locks, two artificial canals set within a concrete dam that had been built across the river, with a series of iron-reinforced wooden gates leading from one section of each canal to the next. The locks had been installed to control tide levels in the Charles River Basin, yet they had never been designed with global catastrophe in mind. At some point, the waters had risen above flood stage, demolishing the gates and sweeping away the lampposts and guardrails atop the canal walls. A capsized boat blocked the entrance to the one on the right; the canal to the left, though, was clear of obstruction. Yet as they passed through the locks, he noted that, although the water stopped just below the thirteen-foot line on a tide marker, brown stains along the top of the wall showed where it had once risen much higher than that.

  Just past the locks, they encountered their first major obstacle. The Bunker Bridge, which had once carried cars and a maglev rail across the river, had collapsed, causing both the roadway and an eight-car train to plummet into the water. The river was blocked by debris; rusting coupes and railcars stuck up from the water between enormous chunks of concrete and twisted coils of bridge cable. There was no easy way through; Jorge turned off the engine and raised its prop to prevent it from getting fouled by the half-submerged cables, then he and Inez picked up paddles and carefully maneuvered the boat close to the southern shore, where the debris seemed a little less dense. Even so, they found their way blocked by pieces of the fallen bridge; ultimately, they were forced to paddle over to an overturned support pylon, where all four of them climbed out and portaged the boat across the pylon before climbing aboard again. A slow and hazardous diversion, but at least no one slipped and fell into the water.

  The river became narrow at that point, leading to a second, much older dam, upon which Boston’s science museum and planetarium had been built. The dam had survived, but at some point the floodwaters had spilled over its top, breaking through the museum windows and inundating its ground floor. As the boat moved into the narrow canal leading through the dam, Jorge spotted a pair of slender, four-legged creatures placidly grazing on the high grass that had grown up on the riverbanks. They stared at the boat for a couple of moments, then turned and bounded away.

  “White-tail deer,” Vargas said. It was the first time he’d said much of anything since leaving Port Logan, and he seemed to be as surprised as anyone else. “I’ll be damned…I thought they’d become extinct.”

  “So that’s what they look like.” Jorge tried to catch another glimpse of the animals, which he’d only read about in books brought from Earth, but they’d vanished within the thickets of an overgrown park. “I guess nature finds a way.”

  “Sometimes it does,” Inez murmured. “It’s humans who have problems with change.”

  This small moment of wonder seemed to break the spell. Up until then, the ruined city had weighed heavily upon everyone, silencing them with its oppressive darkness. Yet the sun was beginning to pierce the clouds, dissipating the last of the fog; the day was becoming warmer, and they gradually opened their parkas and removed their gloves. As the boat moved through the final canal and entered the river basin, they were able to see more of the city. To the right, on the other side of the river, lay Cambridge, the dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology covered with vines but still visible above the low buildings along the shore. To the left, closer to them, was a massive white edifice that the map identified as Massachusetts General Hospital. The hospital appeared to be intact, and as they slowly cruised past it, Inez spotted something floating on the river just in front of a nearby embankment.

  “I’m not sure,” she said, keeping her voice low, “but that looks like a dock.”

  Jorge throttled down the engine to idle, and Greg pulled out a pair of binoculars. “It’s a dock, all right,” he said. “I see several boats tied up…two or three sailboats, some canoes, a skiff or two. Nothing big.”

  “Anyone in sight?” Jorge asked.

  Greg shook his head. “No…but there’s something on the riverbank that looks like a sandbag wall. If that’s the hospital, then it makes sense that someone would’ve tried to protect it.”

  “That’s not all.” Vargas pointed toward the low buildings just south of Mass General. “Look…”

  Raising a hand against the sun, Jorge searched for what Vargas had spotted. Two thin tendrils of smoke rose from some area not far from the hospital; they could have been wildfires, yet they looked too small for that.

  “There’s someone living over there,” Inez murmured.

  “I told you there were squatters,” Vargas said. “At least that’s what I’d heard.” He nodded toward the smoke trails. “That’s Beacon Hill, if I remember correctly.”

  Jorge studied his map, closely examining its topographical gradient lines. “Looks like the highest point of land. Makes sense for someone to set up camp there, especially if the rest of the city was flooded.”

  Greg turned to look back at him. “What about it, chief? Go ashore and see if we can find them?”

  Jorge considered the question for a moment. “I’d like to go a little farther,” he said. “Just to see if there are any other signs of habitation. If we don’t find anything, we can always circle back.”

  “That might be our best shot, Lieutenant.” Vargas continued to gaze at the smoke. “We ought to take it.”

  He had a good point, and Jorge was about to agree when he felt Inez’s hand on his knee. Glancing sideways at her, he saw her silently shake her head. He didn’t know why, but something in her expression made him think that she might have sensed something that he didn’t…or couldn’t.

  “No…no, I’d like to explore the river a little more,” he said slowly. “Just to be sure we don’t miss anything.”

  Vargas frowned but didn’t argue as Jorge throttled up the engine again. But as soon as the boat was in motion once more, Jorge leaned over to Inez. “What’s going on?” he said as quiet
ly as he could, using the engine noise to cover his voice.

  “He’s nervous,” she whispered, putting her face close to his. “I can’t be sure, but I think he’s hiding something.”

  “Like what?”

  Inez shook her head; she didn’t know. Yet Jorge decided to trust her feelings. His doubts about Vargas had never subsided; once again, he was wondering how much faith they should put in their guide.

  The river broadened as the boat traveled upstream, and a few minutes later they came upon a massive stone bridge that looked as if it had been built several centuries ago. The map identified it as the Longfellow Bridge, and although three of its outer spans had fallen, the ones near the middle were still standing. The boat passed below the bridge, giving them a chance to look at the ornate scroll carved into the stone just below its center support; most of its Latin inscription had eroded away, but the words Bostonia Condita AD 1660 remained legible within the shield at its center.

  “Eight hundred years,” Inez said quietly. “Almost eight hundred years, this city has been here.” Gazing at the scroll, she shook her head in sadness. “Gone, all gone…and it didn’t need to happen.”

  Past the bridge, the Charles River become nearly as wide as one of the smaller channels back home, and it was there that they sighted the Back Bay area. The urban neighborhood near the river had reverted to swamp, its brownstone town houses and mansions long since lost to water, mud, and brush. Farther inland rose the massive edifice of the Hancock Hub, the eighty-story arcology that had once straddled six square blocks. Fire had ravaged the giant building, turning it into a colossal black skeleton that loomed over the smaller buildings around it. Hawks circled the remains of the Hub’s twin towers, searching for prey in the streets below.