Coyote Rising

by Allen Steele

  It’s easy to talk about courage when you’re sitting at the table, sharing a bottle of sourgrass ale with your husband; it’s something else again when you find yourself the target of an armored hovercraft loaded with enough rockets to take out a small town. Hiding behind the well, I covered my ears, closed my eyes, tried to wish it all away. It was a bad dream, nothing but a bad dream. In a minute, I’d wake up to find out that I was still in bed, with Carlos curled up against me and Susan asleep on the other side of the room. Yet I couldn’t ignore the evidence of my senses: the cold, the smoky odor of burning wood, the gunfire. This was no nightmare. My town was under attack. If we didn’t do something, then we were all going to die. . . .

  “Get some rifles up here!” All around me, voices. “Don’t fall back!” “Find some water, put out that fire!” “C’mon, dammit, move!”

  No, I thought, you can’t do this. Go back to the cabin. It’s warm and dry and safe up there. Susan needs her mother. You’re not supposed to be here. . . .

  “Fan out! Don’t let ’em get through!”

  Another rocket ripped into the settlement. Another tree house went up in flames. For a terrifying moment I thought it was my own, until I looked back and saw that, no, it wasn’t mine, but the Gearys’. But it could have been my home, and Susan could have been . . .

  “Where’s the kids? Someone get the kids out of here!”

  In that instant, something came over me. It wasn’t bravery, or courage, or honor, or any of those things. Fear, yes, but also pure rage, plain and simple. Someone out there wanted to kill me, but worse than that, they wanted to kill my little girl, too.

  And I just went berserk.

  Before I fully realized what I was doing, I was on my feet, charging out from the tree house village, racing into the fields with my rifle in my hands. The cold meant little to me now, the fact that I was barefoot even less. Nothing mattered save the cauldron of hate that boiled within me, a white-hot furnace that melted away all considerations for my own safety. This was my home, everyone and everything I loved and held dear. I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—let that be taken away.

  Through the fog, I spotted a figure—little more than a silhouette, but obviously a Union soldier. I went down on one knee, braced the rifle stock against my right shoulder. Line up the target in the crosshairs. Take a deep breath. Hold it. Fire. The rifle kicked against my shoulder. Three sharp cracks, and the half-seen Guardsman sagged in upon himself, toppled to the ground. I leaped to my feet again, continued to run forward. . . .

  “Wendy!” From somewhere behind me, Carlos. “What are you . . . ?”

  To my left, another soldier, this one closer than the first. I could see his uniform clearly, along with the face beneath his helmet. He gaped at me in astonishment, as if not believing what he was seeing, then his gun started to turn my way. No time to take careful aim; I sprayed bullets in his direction until he grabbed at the right side of his chest and pitched sideways. He squirmed on the ground, blood bubbling upward from a punctured lung, as I walked over to him. He was trying to raise a hand toward me, as if to beg for mercy, when I fired again. One shot, and his brains were blown across the snow. No mercy.

  My friends and neighbors were running past me. I was about to join them when a heavy force slammed into my back, knocking me facedown to the ground. Snow stung my eyes, blinding me for a moment, as the rifle fell from my hands, landing a few feet away. For a second I thought I’d been hit. . . .

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Carlos was kneeling on top of me, pinning my body to the ground. “Stay down!”

  I was trying to crawl out from under him when I heard engines. Rubbing snow from my eyes, I saw the colony’s captured Union skimmer roar past, Clark Thompson standing behind the 30mm chain gun mounted above its bubble canopy. He turned the gun on a line of advancing soldiers and mowed them down, then the skimmer—doubtless piloted by Barry Dreyfus, who had liberated the craft only a month earlier during the Goat Kill Creek incident—roared away into the mists.

  Carlos removed his knee from my back. “I thought I told you to . . .”

  “Get off me!” I impatiently shoved him aside, scrambled to retrieve my rifle. “You want me to fight or what?”

  Carlos started to argue, then thought better of it. “Just stick close,” he said as he yanked me to my feet. “You don’t want to get lost in this.”

  I wasn’t about to object. The soldiers were among us, and it was hand-to-hand combat within a white veil. I caught a glimpse of Paul Dwyer, blood streaming down one side of his face, as he buried a machete within the chest of a soldier. Ron Schmidt and Vonda Cayle ran past us, firing at anything that moved. Ben Harlan and Molly Thompson and Klon Newall: all newcomers to Defiance, yet nonetheless just as determined to defend the settlement as if they’d been with us from the beginning. Ron Schmidt, one of the URS soldiers who’d tried to retake the Alabama when it was being hijacked, shot someone, then fell as someone else shot him.

  A few feet away, Ellery Balis knelt to the ground, a stolen Union Guard RPG resting upon his right shoulder. As a gyro lifted off a hundred yards away, Ellery trained his weapon on the aircraft. He squeezed the trigger and a shell lanced through the fog. The gyro’s port nacelle exploded; the aircraft careened sharply to one side, lost altitude, plummeted back into the mists, and went up as an orange-red blossom. Ellery pumped his fist once, then stood up, tucked the RPG beneath his arm, and ran away.

  “Let them handle this.” Carlos pulled at me, trying to lead me to safety. “You’re only in the way.”

  “No!” I tore myself loose. “I want to see!” In hindsight, I must have sounded like a petulant child, being told that she couldn’t stay to watch the gory part of a flix. And perhaps I was; I’d never been in battle before, and there was a certain terrible fascination to all this. And I’d killed two men myself; now I wanted more.

  There were no other soldiers in sight. I could still hear gunfire within the fog, but it was less frequent. Somewhere out there, I heard the chatter of dueling chain guns, like two mad pianists trying to top one another in a lethal symphony. The missile carrier hadn’t fired any more rockets, which meant that its crew must be engaging Thompson’s skimmer. Another gyro lifted off; I could see wounded Guardsman within its open aft hatch, staring down at us. Ellery fired another grenade at it, but it missed and the gyro peeled away.

  And then, all of a sudden, an eerie calm descended upon the field. No more shots. No more explosions. It was if God had come down to silence the guns. Now I could only hear the groans of the wounded, the cries of the dying. The sun had risen above the mountains, its warmth burning away the fog, revealing bodies strewn over the ground. Some still twitching, others perfectly still.

  Finally, I felt the cold, and with it, a strange delirium. Leaning against Carlos, I turned away, began to lurch back toward town. It was over. We were safe. No one could touch us. We’d fought back and won. But I felt no jubilation, no rejoicing. Only sickness.

  A body lay on the ground before us, lying in a patch of blood-drenched snow. For a second I thought it was a Guardsman, then I came close enough to recognize the face . . .

  Tom Shapiro. The former first officer of the Alabama, the first man to set foot on Coyote. His chest had been ripped apart, his sightless eyes dully reflecting the cold light of the rising sun.

  I stared at him for a few moments, then I tore myself away from Carlos, staggered a few feet, collapsed to my knees and threw up.

  We lost Tom that morning . . . and twelve others, too, including Michael Geissal, Tony Lucchesi, and Ron Schmidt. The latter three were blueshirts, members of our local militia: the first to fight, and the first to die. Their lives weren’t meaninglessly sacrificed, though; the bodies of fifteen Union Guard soldiers were also found, and no telling how many of their wounded had been airlifted out by the gyro that Ellery failed to take down.

  Over twenty of our people were wounded as well—some critically, including Henry Johnson, who took bullets in t
he gut and his left knee and came close to bleeding to death before Kuniko got to him, and Jean Swenson, who suffered massive internal injuries and severe burns across most of her body when one of the tree houses collapsed on top of her. As soon as the battle was over, we set up a tent as a temporary hospital—Kuniko’s infirmary simply wasn’t large enough—and started drafting people as blood donors.

  Shortly after Defiance was established as a new colony, Kuniko started breaking me in as her assistant. Most of the Alabama crew members had first-aid training, but Dr. Okada was the only one among us who had gone to med school. So when I wasn’t doling out pills and delivering babies, I was also learning how to perform minor surgery.

  If I had been Kuniko’s student before the firefight, that day I received my final exam. Until then, the most I’d done was assist her in an emergency appendectomy; after the Union attack I found myself removing bullets, tying off veins, stitching wounds, performing transfusions, and trying like hell not to lose either my wits or my stomach. By noon my arms were drenched with blood up to the elbows; we didn’t have enough instruments to exchange them after each operation, so it was all that we could do to have them sterilized in boiling water before we went to work on the next patient. Don’t ask about nanites, cloned tissue grafts, or any of that stuff; we didn’t have them. This was combat surgery at its most brutal, as primitive as anything since the early twentieth century. We didn’t have enough drugs to go around, so we reserved general anesthesia for those who needed it the most, administered local sedatives to the others, and offered bite-blocks and jolts of bearshine to those strong enough to take it.

  Not everyone made it. We did our best for Jean, and she toughed it out as long as she could, but shortly after midday she lapsed into a coma and two hours later she passed away. I pulled a sheet over her face and said a silent prayer for her; a few moments to dry my tears, then I went out to tell her husband that she was gone. That was the hardest thing I’d ever done; Ellery probably saved a lot of lives when he shot down one of the gyros, but in the end he’d not been able to save his own wife.

  Someone once said that liberty is paid for with the blood of patriots. If so, then the bill was paid in full, for we saw a lot of blood that day.

  Sometime around twilight, I finally left the tent and began trudging home, making my way along a quiet path that led through the trees. For a few minutes, I was alone, which was what I needed. I was exhausted, heartsick, and miserable. I’d seen enough violence and death to last a lifetime. The next morning we’d have to bury thirteen of our friends. Up on the high meadows outside of town, their graves were being dug in the frozen ground with pickaxes, along with those for all the soldiers who’d been killed. My husband and daughter were waiting for me; I wanted to take them in my arms, tell them how much I loved them, then collapse in my bed and sleep for a year. It was early evening, yet it felt like midnight.

  “Wendy? Got a few minutes?”

  I looked around, saw Robert Lee coming toward me. From the Town Council meeting, I assumed; while I was in the tent, Vonda came in to tell me that it was being convened in an emergency session. I was a Council member—the youngest, in fact—but there was no way I could attend. Vonda told me that she’d explain my absence, and someone would tell me later what happened.

  “Yeah, sure.” The last thing I wanted to do just then was talk to anyone. But this was town business, and it couldn’t be avoided. “How did the meeting go?”

  “Maybe I should wait till later. You look like you need a rest.”

  Someone had delivered hot coffee to the tent, but I hadn’t eaten all day, and my eyes were heavy-lidded. I was about to agree when I raised my face to look at him. Robert E. Lee wasn’t just the mayor; he was also captain of the Alabama, our leader from the very beginning. Over the course of the past few years, his dark hair had become streaked with silver, his beard white as ivory. We’d often remarked on how much he’d come to resemble his famous ancestor, sometimes even jokingly referring to him as General Lee, yet at that moment the similarity wasn’t just superficial. There was a darkness within his eyes that I’d never seen before; he looked like a man who’d just fought a bloody battle and was aware that he’d have to fight again all too soon. You don’t say sorry, try me again tomorrow to someone like him.

  “No, go on. Let’s have it now.” I looked around, spotted the well behind which I’d taken cover an impossible amount of time ago. Strange that I would find myself there again; I sat down on the wall, bunching the hood of my parka around my neck.

  Robert took a seat beside me. “First off,” he began, “I want to tell you what a fine job you’ve done today. We would have lost more people if it hadn’t been for you and Kuniko.”

  He was trying to say the right things, but only a couple of hours ago I’d pronounced Jean Swenson dead. Doctors might get used to the fact that they occasionally lose patients, but I barely qualified as a paramedic. Jean’s death made me sick to my soul, and I wasn’t ready to handle any well-meaning words of gratitude.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled, and there was an uncomfortable silence. Not far away, the ruins of the Geary house smoldered upon the ground. The tree in which it had been built was still standing; blackwoods are as tough as they are large, and it takes a lot to destroy them. If only human flesh were as resilient . . .

  “So what happened at the meeting?” I asked again, trying to change the subject.

  Robert straightened his back, gave me the full rundown. Two houses were destroyed by enemy fire. The Geary and Sullivan families were moving in with friends until new homes could be built for them, but the Construction Committee informed the Council that it was unlikely that new tree houses could be erected within the next two months—i.e., the end of Machidiel, the last month of winter. A grain silo had also been destroyed; like the cabins, it could be rebuilt, but one-third of the autumn harvest saved for the feeding of livestock had been lost. The Farm Committee had been instructed to put the goats and chickens on half rations and look toward culling their numbers by slaughtering the older animals. That in turn, meant a reduction of food; we could only hope that we’d be able to hold out until we could plant new crops next spring.

  Finger-pointing was inevitable. Some of the Council members were inclined to blame Rigil Kent—that is, Carlos and his brigade—for bringing the Union down upon us, yet Robert refused to hear any of it. He pointed out that the Union had been looking for Defiance for over two Coyote years now, and, despite all our precautions, it was only a matter of time before they managed to locate our position. Luisa Hernandez would have ordered a raid even if there hadn’t been a resistance movement, he said, and in fact we should be thankful that Rigil Kent had captured a patrol skimmer last month; otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have been able to beat off the attack.

  There was one bright point. Lew Geary had inspected the missile carrier—hearing that, I had to wonder; though his house had been destroyed, the man was still capable of examining the machine that did it—and determined that it could be salvaged. Even though its cockpit was riddled with bullet holes and one of its engines had been shot up, its launchers still worked, with eight rockets remaining in their magazines. Lew already had his people working on it, and they hoped that the skimmer could be restored to operating condition. To defend the town if—or, more likely, when—the Union returned.

  And that was the question. When would they attack again? And what could we do about it?

  “This isn’t over. Not by a long shot.” Robert idly tapped at the ground with a stick he’d picked up. “They know where we are. Sooner or later they’ll try again.”

  “We need to fortify the town.”

  “We discussed that. Sandbag emplacements, tiger traps. And now that we’ve got enough guns to go around, everyone is going to be armed.” He shrugged. “But I’ve got a feeling that they were just testing our defenses. Seeing how much we could take.”

  “You don’t think they were serious?”

  “Oh, they were seri
ous, all right . . . to a certain extent.” He turned his head to gaze across the field where only a few hours earlier we’d fought for our lives. “But we know that they’ve received several hundred troops from the ship that arrived last month, along with heavy equipment like that missile carrier. So why didn’t they throw everything at us at once?”

  “They were taking a poke at us. Seeing what we’re made of.” I remembered the bullies I used to have to deal with when I was in the youth hostel. The dumb ones came straight at you with their fists; if you could take them down the first time, then they’d leave you alone, knowing that you’d fight back and it wasn’t worth getting a bloody nose. The guys you really had to watch out for, though, were the ones who prodded and needled you, seeing how much you could take, observing your weaknesses. Only then would they attack—late at night, when you weren’t ready for a pillowcase over your head and sawed-off baseball bat to your stomach. “I think I understand.”

  “I thought you would.” Robert nodded appreciatively; he knew my life story. “Then you know our situation. Even if we arm everyone in town, we’re still on the defensive. That isn’t where you want to be if you have any hope of winning. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to take the fight to them.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got a plan?”

  “Sort of.” His voice became quiet. “Nothing I’ve told anyone yet . . . or at least, no one who’s still with us. Tom knew, but . . .”

  Robert stopped, looked away. Before his hand came up to rub his face, I saw tears in his eyes. As long as I’d known Captain Lee, this was one of the few times I glimpsed even a trace of deep emotion. Perhaps Dana, his mate and the Alabama’s former chief engineer, saw a side to him that we didn’t. To most of us Robert was intensely private, even enigmatic. Tom Shapiro had not only been one of his senior officers, but also a close friend. Losing him hit closer to home than he was willing to admit.