Coyote Rising (29 page)

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?”

G
ABRIEL
75/1012—WHSS
S
PIRIT OF
S
OCIAL
C
OLLECTIVISM
C
ARRIED TO THE
S
TARS

“
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
.