Coyote Rising

by Allen Steele

  “I’m not kidding. We give ’em a chance to surrender first.” Carlos stared him straight in the eye. “That’s the way it is”

  For a few long moments, the two of them gazed at one another, until Lars finally shrugged and looked away. “You’re the chief,” he mumbled, as if resenting the fact. “But if they start shooting . . .”

  “If they start shooting, we fire back. But not until.” Carlos hesitated. “That skimmer’s going to be a problem, though. If the pilot gets to the gun . . .”

  “Let me handle the skimmer.” Barry’s voice was low. “I’ll circle wide, come in from the beach. If he tries anything, maybe I can pick him off first.” He grinned. “And I’d love to get my hands on a skimmer, wouldn’t you?”

  Barry was a dead shot, and he knew how to sneak through the woods without being heard. And, Carlos had to admit, bringing home a Union Guard skimmer would be a major coup. “You got it. Are we set?” Barry gave him a thumbs-up; Lars shrugged again, his eyes on the soldiers gathered at the river’s edge. “All right, then. We roll on my signal.”

  Carlos crawled back to the boulder, spent a few seconds explaining the plan to Marie and Garth. As he expected, Garth was just as reluctant as his brother to give the patrol a chance to surrender; he insisted upon joining Lars, until Carlos pointed out that he needed to keep them separated in order to facilitate communications between the two halves of the team.

  “I’m going with Lars.” Marie started crawling over to where the other two were waiting.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” Carlos snagged his sister by the hood of her parka; it pulled back, exposing her dark brown hair, tied into a bun behind her head. “You’re sticking with me.”

  She angrily swatted his hand away. “If Barry’s going after the skimmer, then Lars is going to need backup. Either you do it, or I will.”

  Marie was right; Lars couldn’t handle his side alone. Carlos didn’t like it very much—he was reluctant to leave his sister in a firefight—but the other reason he wanted to keep the Thompson brothers apart from each other was that they were bloodthirsty. Thompson’s Ferry had been a massacre; none of the Union soldiers who’d raided the settlement had come away alive. Perhaps they had it coming, but then again . . .

  “Okay. But no firing until I say so.” Marie grinned, then scuttled away, keeping low to the ground. Carlos watched her go and prayed that he hadn’t made a mistake.

  Another exchange of too-too-sweets, then he and Garth began to advance down the hillside, moving single file on hands and knees, remaining behind trees and large rocks as much as possible. The deep snow muffled the sounds they made, and they were careful to avoid putting any weight upon dead branches their gloved hands found beneath the drifts. Once again, Carlos found himself impressed with how well Garth handled himself; the kid was only fifteen, but it was as if he’d been practicing this sort of thing his entire life. Perhaps he had; his uncle was a former Union Guard colonel, after all, before he’d decided to resign his commission and bring his nephews to Coyote in search of a new life.

  Carlos had been Garth’s age when he’d arrived here with his own family, but he’d been very much a boy then, still thinking all this was a great adventure. His childhood ended two days after the Alabama party set foot on New Florida, when his father and mother were killed by a boid. That was over thirteen Earth-years ago, and everything had been different since then. He doubted that Garth had much of a childhood, either. No one got to savor adolescence very long on Coyote.

  The voices gradually became louder. Hearing someone laugh, he froze in place, thinking that they had been spotted. As he peered through the underbrush, though, he saw that the soldiers’ backs were still turned toward him. The group was only a few dozen feet away, gathered around the two men kneeling on the riverbank. It appeared as if they were assembling some sort of instrument on a tripod. The three men standing carried rifles, but they were still hanging by their shoulder straps; the two kneeling on the ground, he noticed, weren’t wearing Union parkas, but instead catskin jackets. Civilians? What were they doing with a Union Guard patrol?

  Carlos glanced back to make sure that Garth was still with him, then he motioned toward a clingberry thicket at the bottom of the slope, not far from the group. Garth nodded, and Carlos began creeping closer. They could hide there for a moment, wait until Marie, Lars, and Barry were in position. Then they might be able to . . .

  A shout from the skimmer. Once again believing that they’d been seen, Carlos dropped flat to the ground. Hearing footsteps against metal, he raised his eyes; the skimmer pilot was walking across the ramp, swinging a canvas bag by its strap. He was about to hop down onto shore when there was sharp bang like someone pushing a pin into a balloon, and the pilot suddenly twisted sideways and toppled off the gangway, falling into the shallow water below.

  Damn it! Who fired? Carlos didn’t have time to wonder. The men on the riverbank were already reacting to the gunshot, the soldiers reaching for their weapons, the two civilians scrambling for cover. More semiauto gunfire, again from the other side of the riverbank. One of the soldiers brought up his carbine, began firing wildly in that direction. The two civilians threw themselves to the ground, knocking over the tripod as they covered their heads with their hands.

  Carlos leaped to his feet. “Hold your fire!” he yelled. “Stop shoo . . . !”

  He didn’t get a chance to finish before the nearest Guardsman whirled around, brought up his rifle. Carlos caught a glimpse of the black bore of the gun muzzle, and in that instant realized that he had made a mistake. The soldier was no more than thirty feet away, and he was completely exposed.

  Oh, shit, I’m dead. . . .

  The gunshots behind him nearly deafened him. He ducked, instinctively raising his hands to his ears, but not before he saw the soldier’s parka rip apart, his helmet flying off the back of his head. Carlos barely had time to realize that Garth had saved his life; remembering his own gun, he brought it up to his shoulder, aimed at the soldier turning toward them.

  No time to bother with the scope; he lined up the barrel, held his breath, and squeezed the trigger. The second soldier had just enough time to take his own shot before a bullet caught him in the gut. He doubled over like someone with a bad case of stomach cramps, then another shot from somewhere behind caught him between the shoulder blades, and he went down.

  Carlos looked for another target, but there were none to be found. The remaining soldier lay facedown a few yards away, sprawled across a patch of red snow. All that could be seen of the Armadillo pilot was a pair of legs sticking up out of the water next to the skimmer’s ramp. The hollow echoes of gunfire were still reverberating off the tree line on the other side of the river; the chill air, once fresh and clean, now reeked of gunpowder.

  Carlos heard a rebel yell from a dozen yards away. Lars emerged from the undergrowth, his rifle held in both hands above his head. “Skragged three!” he shouted. “Score for the home team!” He did a little victory dance, looking like a soccer player who’d managed to drive a ball into the opposing team’s net. “We rule!”

  Sickened by what he . . . what they . . . had just done, infuriated by how it had happened, Carlos dropped his rifle, marched out from behind the clingberry bush. “You cold son of a bitch,” he snarled, “I told you not to . . .”

  Lars’s face changed. Arms falling to his sides, he gazed at Carlos in confusion. “Whoa, hey, wait a second . . . I didn’t shoot first. She did.”

  Carlos stopped. Unable to believe what he’d just heard, he stared at Marie, who was coming out from behind a tree, rifle clasped in her hands. He was still taking in the smile on her face when he heard a voice behind him.

  “Carlos? Carlos, man, is that you?”

  One of the two civilians who had taken cover when the shooting began. He had all but forgotten them, and it was only the fact that they had hugged the ground that had saved them. Carlos looked down at the person struggling to his knees, saw a face he’d almost thought he would
never see again.

  “Chris?” he whispered. “Chris, what the hell are you doing here?”

  GABRIEL 75/1012—WHSS SPIRIT OF SOCIAL COLLECTIVISM CARRIED TO THE STARS

  “Shuttle from Liberty on approach, Captain. Requesting permission to dock.”

  Fernando Baptiste lifted his head to peer up at the ceiling of the command center. Projected against the dome was the fourth moon of 47 Ursae Majoris-B: a vast landscape of islands, some the size of small continents, separated from one another by a sinuous maze of rivers. Above the silver-blue limb of the planet, he could make out the tiny form of the shuttle carrying the governor of the New Florida colony.

  “Permission granted,” Baptiste told the lieutenant seated at her console a few feet away. “Inform the Matriarch that I’ll meet her in the conference room on Deck 10.”

  She nodded, then prodded the side of her jaw as she repeated his message. Baptiste took a last glance at the section report on his lapboard, then pushed it away and carefully stood up, feeling sluggish against the pull of gravity. Nearly a week had passed since he had been revived from biostasis; during this time, the internal gravity induced by the Spirit’s Millis-Clement field had been gradually increased to .68g to match Coyote’s surface gravity, yet he still felt sluggish, perpetually off-balance. He wasn’t the only person aboard—or at least, the only baseline human—experiencing such malaise; all around him, he observed crewmen with slumped shoulders, moving as if in slow motion.

  All the same, he was looking forward to setting foot on the planet below. Before he’d been picked by the Union Astronautica to command the sixth ship to 47 Ursae Majoris, he’d spent almost his entire life on the Moon or Mars, with most of his adulthood aboard one vessel or another. What would it be like to walk beneath an open sky, without having a pressurized dome above his head or be surrounded by compartment bulkheads? It would be worth spending forty-nine years in biostasis for the simple pleasure of feeling unfiltered sunlight against his face, grass beneath his feet. Would he get a skin rash if he removed his boots? Perhaps he should query the doctor if he needed another inoculation before . . .

  “I’d like to join you, Captain, if you don’t mind.”

  Baptiste looked around, saw a tall form standing beside him. Wearing a long black robe, its cowl pulled up around his head, Gregor Hull regarded him with red eyes that gleamed softly in the darkness of the command center. Once again, the Savant had come up from behind without his noticing.

  “Of course,” Baptiste replied. “In fact, I was about to call you.” It was a lie, of course, but if the Savant knew this, there was no indication on his metallic face. “Please, come with me.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” Hull stepped aside, allowing him to lead the way to the lift. “I’m rather hopeful that the Matriarch will clear up a mystery.”

  “Oh?” He waited until Hull was aboard the lift, then pushed the button for Deck 10. A slight jar, then the cab began to move downward. “I’m surprised. I would have thought that there was little in the universe that remained mysterious to your kind.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you well, sir.” As always, the Savant’s voice was dull, without inflection. Except when he laughed, and fortunately that was seldom—it sounded like acoustical feedback. One more thing Baptiste disliked about Savants. Perhaps he was subconsciously bigoted against them, but the fact remained that he’d never enjoyed their company.

  “My apologies. I thought I was being sincere.” Another lie,and they both knew it. “What’s so mysterious?”

  “Shortly after we made orbit, I attempted to make contact with one of my brother Savants . . . Manuel Castro. He has been on Coyote for the past seven years. I haven’t been able to hear him.”

  “Hear him? I don’t understand.”

  “My kind share a symbiotic relationship.” Was he imagining things, or was Hull rubbing it in, the way he phrased that? “Virtual telepathy, achieved through extralow-frequency transmissions. A sort of group mind, if you will. It’s usually short-range, but we can increase the distance by tapping into long-range communications systems. I’ve attempted to do so, but I haven’t received any response from Savant Castro.

  “Have you spoken with anyone in Liberty about it?”

  “I have, yes. I was informed that Savant Castro disappeared over a month ago by local reckoning . . . about three months ago Earth-time. He led a military detail to a small settlement on New Florida, to round up some colonists who had fled from Shuttlefield. Apparently there was an incident during which the soldiers were killed. When another detail was sent out to investigate, they discovered that the settlement had been torched. The remains of the soldiers were found, along with those of a few of the colonists, but there was no trace of Savant Castro.”

  “Which means he’s dead.”

  The Savant shook his head; it was strange to see such a human gesture, and it reminded Baptiste that Hull wasn’t a robot, appearances notwithstanding, but rather a human intelligence downloaded into a mechanical body. That made Savants perfect stewards of starships outbound to 47 Ursae Majoris; they remained awake while everyone else lay in dreamless coma within their biostasis cells, carrying on endless philosophical arguments with each other, indulging themselves in studies of things that few people would ever understand or even deem necessary. Another aspect of their existence that made them seem so remote, so disconnected from the rest of humanity . . . but then, they preferred to refer to themselves as posthuman, didn’t they?

  “When one of us perishes,” Savant Hull continued, “it’s usually by accident. In that case, our internal systems are programmed to transmit a steady signal, indicating a state of morbidity. Since I haven’t received such a signal, this indicates that either Savant Castro’s body has been destroyed, or he’s unable to respond.”

  Baptiste nodded. Total destruction seemed unlikely, at least under the circumstances Hull had just mentioned. For all practical purposes, Savants were immortal, their forms designed to endure all but the harshest of conditions; the quantum comps that contained their minds were deep within their chests, protected by layers of shielding. If Castro was still alive, then what would prevent him from being able to contact Hull?

  He was still mulling this over when the lift glided to a halt. The doors whisked open, and they stepped out into one of the short, narrow hallways that led to the concentric passageways circling the ship’s axial center. “Perhaps the Matriarch will be able to tell us,” Baptiste said as he led the Savant to the nearest intersection and turned left. “There’s probably a good explanation.”

  “I can already think of one.” Hull stepped aside to allow a crewman to pass. “Not for the disappearance of Savant Castro in particular, but for the general reason why.”

  The captain nodded, but said nothing. A revolt among the colonists. This had been foreseen by the Council of Savants even before the Spirit left Earth nearly a half century ago. Four thousand people had been sent to the 47 Ursae Majoris system since 2256, aboard the four Western Hemisphere Union starships that had followed the URSS Alabama, itself launched in 2070. In their endless musing, the Savants had come to the conclusion that the original Alabama colonists would resent the arrival of newcomers; the political system of the Western Hemisphere Union, based upon social collectivism, was radically different from that of the United Republic of America, which the crew of the Alabama had sought to escape when they stole their ship from Earth orbit. This was one of the reasons why Union Guard soldiers had been aboard the WHU ships sent to Coyote nearly two hundred years later. . . .

  To his right, a door abruptly slid open. A sergeant major, shaven-headed and wearing a cotton jumpsuit, stepped backward out into the corridor. “And no excuses,” he was saying to someone on the other side of the door. “When I get back, I want everyone ready for weapons drill. I don’t care if . . .” Looking around to see Baptiste, he quickly snapped to attention, his right fist clamping against his chest. “Pardon me, sir!”

  Baptiste casually returned
the salute. “Carry on,” he murmured. Just before the door shut, he caught sight of the room behind him: two dozen Guardsmen, wearing identical jumpsuits, sitting on bunks or standing in the narrow aisles. Throughout the Spirit, there were many others just like them: men and women recently revived from biostasis, sent as reinforcements for the troops already on the ground. Unlike the first four Union ships, which had carried mostly civilians as its passengers, only a few colonists were aboard the Spirit. His mission was primarily military in nature.

  This isn’t why you came here, a small voice inside him said. This isn’t what you were meant to do. And indeed, it wasn’t. Until just a few days before the Spirit had departed from Highgate, his mission had been to bring more colonists to Coyote. He remembered Tomas Conseco, the young boy he’d met on the maglev train a few days before launch; he and his parents were in biostasis on another level, waiting to be revived. He’d have to wait a while longer before setting foot on Coyote; first, his captain would have to quell a potential uprising, by any means necessary.

  That isn’t for you to decide. Again he disciplined his conscience. You have your orders. Don’t ask questions. Just carry them out.

  The conference room was located farther down the corridor. The Matriarch hadn’t arrived yet; doubtless she was still undergoing decontamination procedures. Seating himself at the console at the end of the table, Baptiste spent a few minutes checking on the status of the heavy-lift landing vehicles that would ferry soldiers down to the planet. The wallscreen displayed the cavernous interior of the Bay Four; crewmen moved around a teardrop-shaped spacecraft, loading cargo through the hatch beneath its horizontal stabilizer. The Spirit carried three HLLVs; he wondered how and where they’d be able to land. The shuttle fields outside Liberty weren’t large enough for all of them. . . .

  The door opened. He looked up to see two Guardsmen step into the room. They wore winter gear and had rifles slung over their shoulders; their faces were tanned, and one had a thick beard. Union soldiers, up from the planet below; they looked like barbarians tramping through the gates. They saluted as he stood up, then assumed positions on either side of the door, making way for the woman behind them.