Coyote Destiny

by Allen Steele

  “Take this,” he said, as he handed the lantern to Jorge. “You’ll need it…we’ve knocked out their generator.” From somewhere nearby, more gunshots; Shadow Three whipped around, raising his weapon to his shoulder. He waited a moment, then spoke again. “Copy that, Shadow Two. We’re clear.” Then he looked over his shoulder at Jorge and Inez. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  Just outside the door, one of the guards was sprawled facedown across the corridor floor, his pistol at his side. In the pale light of the lantern, Jorge saw that he appeared to still be breathing, and that there was no blood on his body. “Is he…?” Jorge started to ask.

  “No,” Shadow Three said. “We used darts.” Jorge started to reach down to pick up the guard’s weapon, but his rescuer kicked it away. “Don’t worry about that,” he added, stepping over the guard to lead the way down the hall. “He’s out of it for the next few hours.”

  Another black-clad figure—apparently a woman, although it was hard to tell—emerged from an open doorway halfway to the stairs. She held a carbine in her right hand, and with her left arm she supported what appeared to be a wounded man. It wasn’t until Jorge got closer that he realized that it was Hugh McAlister.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” McAlister’s face twisted into a wry grin. “Did you enjoy the accommodations, too?”

  “Very nice, yes.” Jorge saw that his left leg was stiffly wrapped in bloodstained bandages from the thigh down. “What happened to…?”

  “Caught a bullet while trying to protect the shuttle.” The pilot winced as, held up by the woman at his side, he limped forward on his good leg. “Should’ve paid more attention to the guys on those boats. They…”

  “Be quiet.” The woman stopped, glanced down the corridor. “Shadow Two to Shadow Leader. I’m with Shadow Three, and I’ve got Coyote Three. Gunshot wound to left thigh but otherwise unharmed and mobile.” Without waiting for a response, she turned to her colleague. “Ready?”

  “Wait a sec,” Jorge said before Shadow Three could respond. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re barefoot. We can’t…”

  “Your stuff’s upstairs.” Shadow Two turned to head down the corridor, McAlister’s arm still draped across her shoulders. “We’ll get it before we leave. Hurry, now…”

  Another Provisional Army soldier lay at the foot of the stairs; Jorge recognized him as Sam. He was tempted to kick their former native guide in the ribs, but they were in too much of a rush for him to exact petty revenge. Instead, they hurried up the stairs, Inez taking over from Shadow Two to help McAlister manage the steps. They reached a landing, where Jorge saw an outside door that stood ajar. Dangling from its hinges, its outer panel was blackened and had been dented; the lingering, acrid scent of explosives testified that it had been blown open. It was night outside, and Jorge caught a glimpse of another figure in black running past; he thought they were going to leave that way, but Shadow Three continued the rest of the way up the stairs, beckoning for him and Inez to follow.

  Another landing, then they went through a door into what appeared to be the building’s ground floor. Glowing lightsticks lay upon the black-marble floor of a long, wide hallway; more Provisional Army soldiers were scattered across the corridor, all apparently unconscious. Figures in black darted from room to room, kicking open battered oak doors to aim their rifle barrels inside before entering. The gunfire had largely stopped, but every few moments they heard another loud report from somewhere.

  Shadow Three led the group to what appeared to be a conference room. Leather armchairs, their upholstery long since chewed up by rats and mice, were arranged around a long mahogany table. Jorge found their parkas, caps, and boots lying in a heap upon it, but that wasn’t the first thing he noticed. At the far end of the table, slumped back in a chair and staring up at the high ceiling with sightless eyes, was Major General Roland Black. The wet, gaping hole in the back of his skull told what had happened in this room.

  “Shot himself when we came through the door,” another raider said as they walked in. “Crazy bastard.” Then he turned away. “Shadow Leader to all units,” he said quietly. “All hostages located. Shadows Two and Three commencing evac operation. All other units, continue sweep of premises. Detain any suspects, but don’t use fatal measures if it can be helped.”

  Jorge stared at Black, wondering at the mind-set of a man who’d rather kill himself than be taken alive by adversaries carrying nonlethal weapons. “C’mon, hurry up,” Shadow Three growled. “We’re not out of this yet.”

  Jorge needed no further urging. He pulled on his boots and yanked on his parka and cap, then helped Inez do the same for McAlister. There didn’t seem to be anything handy for the pilot to use as a crutch, so he and Inez supported McAlister between them. The rest of their equipment—datapads, weapons, watches, and headsets—were nowhere to be seen, but there was no time to search for them; Jorge figured that they must have been taken by the Provisional Army, with only their clothes left unclaimed. Probably because Black had decided that his prisoners would need to be wearing them when the chaaz’maha showed up.

  “Just tell us one thing,” he asked Shadow Leader before they left the room. “You are with the Terra Concorde, aren’t you?”

  Shadow Leader was distracted by reports coming in through the headset beneath his mask, but he managed to give Jorge a withering look. No answer was necessary. Jorge nodded, then extended his hand. “Thank you.”

  Shadow Leader hesitated, then grasped his hand. “You’re welcome, Lieutenant. Sa’Tong qo.”

  Jorge felt his jaw drop. He’d heard this Sa’Tongian expression all his adult life, but the last thing he’d ever expected was to hear it said on Earth. He was still grappling with this when Inez came to his assistance.

  “Sa’Tong qo,” she responded, bowing slightly. Shadow Leader nodded and turned away again, then Shadow Three motioned for her, McAlister, and Jorge to follow him.

  “He’s a Sa’Tongian?” Jorge whispered to Inez as they hurried down the darkened corridor, Shadow Two guarding their rear flank. “I didn’t see that coming.” Inez didn’t reply, but he didn’t miss the knowing smile that briefly appeared on her face.

  The corridor intersected with another from the right. Shadow Three paused at the corner; he peered around it, his gun at the ready, then silently waved for the others to follow him. Passing a Terra Concorde raider standing watch on two captured Provisional Army soldiers who knelt on the floor with their hands laced together behind their heads, they hurried down the corridor until they reached a large hall, two stories in height, with a bronze statue at its center. Jorge realized that they were in some sort of public building, but it wasn’t until they passed a pair of raiders guarding the front doors and exited the building through a row of brick arches that he saw where they were.

  Stopping on the veranda just past the arches, he let go of McAlister so that he could turn around and look up at the building. A gold dome rose from the third-floor roof; having seen it only yesterday morning from the Charles River and Revere Street, he immediately knew where they were. The Massachusetts State House. They weren’t far from where they had been captured on Beacon Hill.

  Jorge didn’t get a chance to remark on the irony, though, before Shadow Three and Shadow Two ushered them down a flight of cracked granite steps into a broad, fenced-in courtyard that lay in front of the capitol building. “We’re going to wait here,” Shadow Three said, coming to a halt and turning to the freed prisoners. “Your ride is on the way.”

  Jorge looked up again. A pair of gyros was orbiting the State House, their searchlights trained on the grounds below; another had landed only a dozen yards away. In the far distance, he could see a reddish orange haze just above the rooftops of the nearby buildings, the first light of dawn. It occurred to him that it had been almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier that the Mercator had touched down at Port Logan. A lot had happened since then…

  “You came in by gyro?” McAlister asked. He leaned upon Inez’s sh
oulder, left leg raised a few inches above the ground. “It’s a miracle those guys didn’t see you before…”

  “Not by gyro,” Shadow Two said. Her back was turned to them as she continued to watch the building’s front entrance. “On foot, from all sides of the hill. We didn’t bring in the gyros until after we secured the premises.” She paused, then added, “Our inside man told us where you were being held. All we had to do was get to this location, and wait until…”

  She was interrupted by an abrupt roar from somewhere above. Jorge thought at first that it was another gyro coming in, until he realized that the noise was too loud. A second later, from just beyond the State House dome, a dark form swept into view, the twin beams of its floodlights traveling across the building’s slanted roof. As the craft came closer, stopping to hover in midair above the courtyard, Jorge suddenly realized what it was.

  “What the hell?” McAlister shouted. “That’s my ship!”

  The Mercator made a slow, gradual descent, its landing thrusters causing a miniature whirlwind to whip across the State House grounds. Raising a hand to his face, Jorge watched as the shuttle’s landing gear lowered from beneath its fuselage. McAlister was yelling something, and it sounded as if he was angry, but Jorge couldn’t make out the words. All he knew was that the shuttle was the last thing he had expected to see.

  The Mercator settled upon its wheels, but its engines didn’t throttle down all the way before its belly hatch opened, and its ladder unfolded. “What are you waiting for?” Shadow Three shouted. “Go, go…get out of here!”

  Jorge helped Inez carry McAlister again as the three of them hurried to the shuttle. “Who the hell is flying my ship?” the pilot demanded, as they ducked beneath its starboard wing. “That was the worst landing I’ve ever—”

  “Never mind.” Jorge glanced up at the cockpit, but it was too dark to make out who was at the controls. “Let’s just go while we can.”

  Shadow Three and Shadow Two remained behind, but when Jorge assisted McAlister up the ladder, he found two more Shadows waiting for them in the passenger compartment. He stayed long enough to put McAlister into a seat and make sure that Inez was aboard, then trotted down the center aisle and scrambled up the ladder to the cockpit.

  Sergio Vargas was strapped into the pilot’s chair, his hands upon the yoke. He turned his head to look up at Jorge, and grinned when he saw the astonishment on the lieutenant’s face.

  “I know, I know…this is going to take a lot of explaining,” he said. “But right now, we’ve got somewhere else we need to be.” Before Jorge could respond, he reached up to nudge his headset’s mike wand. “Secure aft hatch and prepare for takeoff,” he murmured, then nodded toward the right seat. “Strap in, Lieutenant. We’re lifting wheels.”

  From behind him, Jorge heard the belly hatch slam shut. McAlister was still protesting, and Jorge fervently hoped that Inez would prevent him from entering the cockpit; the last thing anyone needed just then was to have McAlister see who was flying the shuttle. Jorge had a lot of questions of his own, but he kept them to himself as he climbed over the center control board to the copilot’s seat.

  “Where are we going?” he finally asked as he buckled the seat harness.

  “Where do you think?” A sly smile from Vargas as he rested a hand on the thruster bars. “We’re going to see the chaaz’maha.”

  And then he slowly pushed the bars forward, and the Mercator rose into the dawn sky of Boston.

  Part 6

  KING PHILIP’S LIGHTHOUSE

  (from the memoirs of Sawyer Lee)

  Late afternoon of the day after Chris Levin was murdered, I reached Navajo.

  From a passenger cabin porthole of a Corps skiff, I watched as the suborbital transport reentered the atmosphere over Coyote’s eastern hemisphere. The captain and copilot were not very happy with me, nor were the three blueshirts also aboard; no one had said as much, but I could see it from the look in their eyes. Bad enough that I’d ordered the skiff to fly down from Fort Lopez to Defiance, picking me up shortly after noon at the airfield. Or that I’d also mustered the soldiers from the local Militia garrison out of their warm bunkhouse when they would have rather spent a lazy Orifiel playing poker and drinking ale. No, I’d gone further than that; I’d also demanded to be flown to the other side of the world, and didn’t explain why until we’d left Midland.

  Captain Hansbach had done his best to try to reason with me, but I let him know that this wasn’t a request but rather a direct order that wasn’t open to negotiation. He’d calmed down a bit when I told him what it was all about. Nonetheless, I had little doubt that, once this was over, he’d lodge a formal complaint with President Edgar. An official reprimand was probably coming my way, yet I couldn’t have cared less what the president or Hansbach or three irate soldiers thought of my actions. There was a man in Manuelito I wanted to find, and when the day was done, he’d either be in handcuffs or lying dead at my feet.

  So I sat alone in the back of the cabin as the skiff made the long descent that shed the rest of its airspeed. Through the porthole, I could see the icy blue waters of the Narragansett Channel pass beneath us. A brief glimpse of King Philip, the large island off the west coast of Navajo where the Providence Straits flowed into the channel, then the transport cruised over the confluence on its final approach to the fishing village of Manuelito.

  A recent settlement, Manuelito was not much more than a collection of cabins, shops, and warehouses nestled beside the wharf where the whaling fleet was anchored. This time of year, the ships were anchored at harbor, its crews waiting for the coming of spring, when the North Sea would break up and the catwhales would begin swimming south from their winter spawning grounds to the warmer waters of the Great Equatorial River. Until then, few boats would venture into the Straits; the fishermen stayed at home, temporarily becoming greenhouse farmers by helping their families raise the crops that would get them through winter. Like many such places on Coyote, Manuelito was a town whose residents preferred the isolation of the frontier. No doubt they’d be surprised to see a Corps spacecraft coming in for an unscheduled visit.

  Which was exactly what I wanted. If David Laird, a.k.a. Peter Desilitz, was in Manuelito, I didn’t want him to get any advance warning. That was why I’d ordered Captain Hansbach to pick me up in Defiance as soon as possible and fly me straight to Navajo. Although I hadn’t had any problems explaining Chris’s death to Defiance’s chief proctor or the reason why we’d been in town in the first place, I didn’t want to risk having one of Desilitz’s pals learn what had happened and, putting two and two together, send word to Manuelito. Laird had already proven himself to be slippery; the sooner I made it to Navajo with a squad of blueshirts, the better my chances of nabbing him before he made another getaway.

  I was no longer pretending to be a traveling salesman. I’d tried subtlety, and it had cost me the life of someone I respected. So once again I was General Sawyer Lee, commandant of the Coyote Federation Corps of Exploration. But what I was doing was barely legal; the Corps wasn’t in the business of tracking down fugitives, and my rank and uniform gave me scant authority to recruit Militia soldiers in pursuit of what amounted to a personal vendetta. Edgar might well demand my resignation once this was all over. No doubt he would. There was no love between us, and he’d probably use this incident as an excuse to get rid of me.

  I didn’t care. To hell with protocol. I was out for revenge.

  The skiff touched down on a small airstrip on the outskirts of Manuelito, not far from the waterfront. The townspeople hadn’t failed to notice our arrival; by the time Captain Hansbach shut down the engines and his copilot cranked open the side hatch, a couple of local officials had driven a shag wagon out to greet us. That, too, was something I’d expected, and even hoped for; it would save me the effort of having to find them instead.

  A tall, thin-faced man watched as the blueshirts came down the ladder. His eyes widened when he saw them, and it was obvious that armed soldiers
were the last people he thought he’d see. But there was a flash of recognition in his eyes when I emerged from the skiff, and although it occurred to me that I’d met him before, I couldn’t quite remember where or when.

  “General Lee,” he said, stepping forward to extend a hand. “What a surprise.”

  I shook his hand. “Yes, I imagine it is, umm…”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” A trace of disappointment in his reedy voice. “Gerald Copperfield, the mayor of Manuelito. We met…oh, I think it was four, maybe four and a half years ago, when the Corps surveyed this area. I was one of the original settlers. We had dinner together, talked about the prospects of establishing a catwhaling station.”

  Even after he reminded me, I barely recollected our previous encounter. The Corps of Exploration was still new back then, and I’d spent its formative years going from one survey mission to the next. I met a lot of settlers during that time, most of whom I never saw again.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, doing my best to pretend recognition. “It’s been a while. You looked a little different back then.”

  “Umm…yes, perhaps.” Copperfield continued to smile, but I could tell from the look in his eyes that he knew I was faking it. “And this is our chief proctor, Emma Stanley,” he went on, motioning to the heavyset and unsmiling woman standing beside him. “A more recent resident…I don’t think you’ve met her before.”

  “No, but it’s a pleasure,” I said, offering my hand.

  Chief Stanley nodded, but didn’t accept my handshake. Instead, she regarded the blueshirts with suspicion, like they were invaders from another world. “All mine,” she murmured, her voice as cold and dry as the northern breeze that whipped up snow from the airfield. “So what brings you out here, General? This can’t be a courtesy call.”