Coyote Rising (42 page)

And every day, our destination grew a little closer. Mt. Bonestell was the highest point on the Gillis Range, and also the second-tallest volcano on Coyote, exceeded only by Mt. Pesek on the western side of Hammerhead. Like Mt. Eggleton and Mt. Hardy in the southern hemisphere, it had been named after a twentieth-century astronomical artist—Henry Johnson’s idea—yet even though Pesek was the largest, Bonestell was impressive in its own right. An enormous cone rising twenty-six thousand feet above sea level, its flat-topped summit was beyond the reach of any climber unaided by oxygen. Frequently shrouded by high clouds, it was awesome to behold on a clear day. We had compasses and maps to
guide us, but even if we’d lost them, we would have been able to find our way to Shady Grove simply by hiking toward Mt. Bonestell.

On the eleventh day, shortly after we’d stopped for lunch, we heard the low clatter of rotors. Looking up, we spotted a pair of tiny specks moving across the sky, coming from the west. Not taking any chances, Carlos quickly moved the caravan beneath a couple of blackwoods, and there we waited while two gyros cruised high overhead, heading due west. Until then, the Union had been the least of our worries. This small incident reminded us that our journey wasn’t a camping trip, as we had managed to pretend, but something far more serious.

Three days after we saw the gyros, we were about sixty miles from Shady Grove. We’d entered the broad mountain valley between the Gillis Range and Mt. Bonestell, where Longer Creek flowed south from the highlands. The marshes behind us, once again we were surrounded by dense forest, yet we’d located a trail leading north to the settlement. Barring any problems, we’d reach our destination in a couple of days. Ben was carrying the radio, and, once we were within range, Carlos planned to get in touch with the settlement and tell them we were coming.

Late that afternoon, as Uma was beginning to set behind the mountains, we came upon a small clearing that looked suitable. By then the Scouts and Dauphins had become accustomed to their roles. While the High Riders unloaded our equipment from George the Magnificent, the Dauphins helped unroll the tents, and the Scouts went into the woods to scrounge for firewood. The kids liked sharing the responsibilities; the older ones had made it a game to see who could find the best dry wood, and the toddlers had learned how to use branches to sweep away snow to make room for the tents. So we had the tents set up, and Lewis and I were breaking up kindling for the fire, when we heard a girlish scream from the woods.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. We’d become used to this sort of thing; someone finds a dead swamper decaying under the leaves, or a kid takes a snowball and shoves it down the back of another kid’s parka. Easy to ignore. But then I heard the scream again, and this time it had a note of pure terror. The others heard it, too, because Carlos and Marie dropped the rain tarps they were setting up and Ben scrambled out of
the tent where he’d been taking a siesta. I told Ben to stay back with the Dauphins, then Carlos and Marie grabbed their rifles and we bolted for the woods.

We were only about fifty yards from camp when Genevieve came running toward us. Clingberries covered her arms and legs where she’d charged through the undergrowth, and there was a thin streak of blood across her nose from when a low branch had whipped against her face, but it was the look in her eyes that I noticed first: absolute horror, as if she’d just seen something that scared her half to death. She ran past Marie and Carlos and barreled straight into my arms as I knelt to stop her.

“I saw . . .I saw . . .I saw. . . !”

“Easy, easy. It’s all right. Everything’s okay.” I stroked her hair as she buried her face against my parka. Never before had I felt a child tremble so much. “You’re safe. You’re fine. . . .”

“What did you see?” Marie was standing nearby, her rifle half-raised. “C’mon, kid, spill it.”

“Marie . . .” Carlos shot her a look, then crouched down next to us. “We’re here,” he said, laying a hand on Genevieve’s shoulder. “Nothing’s going to get you, I promise. Now what did you . . . ?”

“A . . . a . . . a m-man. A l-l-little man.”

I stared at her. “You saw a man?”

“Uh-huh. A li-little man.” Genevieve snuffled, raised her face. Tears diluted the blood from her cut; she started to wipe them away, but I caught her hand, not wanting the scratch to get infected. “B-but not like a real man. L-like a . . . a monkey. A monkey, with fur and everything.”

A little man, or a monkey. Which was more implausible? The nearest human settlement was over sixty miles away, nor were there any monkeys, or simians of any kind, on Coyote. Genevieve must have learned the word from tutorial discs, because it was beyond the range of her experience.

“Probably a creek cat.” Disgusted, Marie lowered her gun, started to turn away. “Hell . . .”

“Go see what you can find.” Carlos nodded in the direction from which Genevieve had come. “If you spot anything . . .” He hesitated. “Don’t shoot. Just come back, that’s all.”

Marie looked at him askance. “You can’t be . . .”

“Just do it, all right?” By then we could hear the other Scouts crashing through the underbrush toward us; they’d heard Genevieve’s screams and were rushing over to investigate. Marie gave her brother a skeptical look, then walked away. Carlos watched her go, then turned to Genevieve again. “You saw a little man,” he said quietly, looking her straight in the eye. “What did he do? Did he say anything?”

“N-n-no. H-h-he was just standing behind a t-t-tree, w-watching me.” She was calming down a little, beginning to pick clingberries off her parka. “And . . . and then he started for me, and th-then I . . .”

“You ran away?” I asked.

“Uh-huh.” She looked up at me again. “Did I do something wrong?”

“Not at all, sweetie. Not at all.” I took her in my arms again, but she was through crying by then. When her friends showed up a few moments later, Genevieve told them all about what she’d seen.

Marie returned a while later with nothing to report, and that was it for the evening. We discussed the incident over dinner, and although Genevieve stuck to her story, the other kids either disbelieved her, or else believed her but decided that this was just another story like the ones Ben had been telling them all along. When you’re very young, the line between fact and fantasy is thin; this was a good ghost story, and it helped us get them in bed a little earlier than usual.

Carlos and I didn’t get a chance to talk that night. Even if we had, though, I don’t think he would have told me everything he knew. Yet just before we tucked away the kids, he told Ben that he’d take the overnight watch, and quietly cautioned us to keep our guns where we could find them in the dark.

He knew something we didn’t. But he wasn’t letting on.

Two days later, late in the afternoon, we reached Shady Grove.

The town was smaller than Defiance by at least half, and looked little like it: a nine-foot stockade wall of blackwood timbers surrounding a half dozen longhouses, thatch-roofed barracks providing shelter for ten people, each arranged around a small commons where a well had been
dug. Just outside the stockade were barns and corrals for livestock, toolsheds and grain silos; not far away was a broad plastic dome, apparently a greenhouse. The front gate was open, and we could see woodsmoke rising from behind the walls. Nonetheless I had the impression we were approaching a fortress. It should have been comforting, but it wasn’t.

A watchtower rose on stilts from the center of town; as we came within sight, a sentry called down to someone below. We’d barely reached the gate when several dozen men and women rushed out to greet us. The residents of Shady Grove might have been strangers, yet they had received our radio message, and they treated us as if we were long-lost relatives they hadn’t seen in years. They clapped us on the back, shook our hands, introduced themselves so fast that I was barely able to remember their names. Several men helped us unload the shags before they were led to a nearby corral, then we trooped inside the stockade and went straight to the main lodge, where we discovered that they had already prepared dinner for us.

Shady Grove had been in existence for a little less than four months. Its population was just over fifty—all adults, although a few women were obviously expecting children soon—but in that short time they had done well by themselves. Life in Shuttlefield and Forest Camp had taught them how to make do with what little they’d managed to bring with them when they’d escaped. The greenhouse we’d seen earlier was carefully stitched together from transparent plastic tarps and heated by a wood furnace; in this way they managed to grow crops even in the dead of winter. The longhouses had been built with energy conservation in mind; internal partitions allowed for privacy while allowing heat from woodstoves to circulate through the rafters, and the cracks between the log walls were stuffed with cloverweed as insulation. One of the longhouses served as the main lodge; long tables ran down half of its length, and it was there that everyone had breakfast and dinner. No one was starving; no one was sick. Everyone there worked hard to survive, sure, but that was the way it was in Defiance, too.

It seemed as if everything was perfect. We’d crossed eight hundred miles of wilderness to find a settlement inhabited by friendly people who’d welcomed our arrival. There was a storage space in the back of
the lodge that could be cleared out to make room for the children; a few more bunk beds would have to be built, but that wasn’t much of a problem. And they had enough food to go around, so long as no one minded shag stew on occasion. Although the residents also used shags as pack animals, they weren’t disinclined toward slaughtering the old and weak. I decided to keep my mouth shut about the practice. People in Defiance had come to revere shags as more than livestock and seldom had we eaten one, and only then in desperation.

The mayor of Shady Grove was Frederic LaRoux. A geologist by training, he’d been a member of the expedition that Chris Levin had led up the East Channel to pick out a site for the Garcia Narrows Bridge. Following the sabotage of the bridge, he and the others had fled Forest Camp, making their way across the mountains to establish Shady Grove on the other side of the Gillis Range. Carlos had met him back then, but only briefly, and over dinner they came to know each other a little better. When the tables had been cleared, and Carlos broke out one of the jugs of bearshine he’d brought with us, the discussion became more serious.

“I appreciate the necessity of what you’ve done,” Fred said, speaking in Anglo, “and why you had to do it. But Rigil . . . Carlos, I mean . . .”

“Don’t worry about it. You can call me Rigil.” Carlos grinned as he poured a shot of bearshine for LaRoux. His mastery of the newer form of English had become better since Chris had taught him the nuances. “Most people in the new settlements know me only by that name. I’m used to it by now.”

“As well you should. You’ve become something of a legend, you know.” Fred settled back in his chair, idly swishing the liquor around in a ceramic mug. “Rigil Kent, scourge of the Union, leader of the revolution.” He raised an eyebrow. “When we first met, you were younger than I expected. But now that I see that you have a wife and child . . . this explains much.”

“Just trying to protect them, that’s all.” Carlos glanced in my direction. Ben had escorted the children to bed, and everyone else was either cleaning up or doing other odd jobs. For the moment, it was only the three of us. “I hope this isn’t an inconvenience. We’re asking a lot of you.”

“Under any other circumstances, no, it wouldn’t be.” Fred shook his head. “Either the Union doesn’t know we’re here—rather unlikely, since we’re out in the open—or our town is so small and remote that they don’t consider us much of a threat. It’s also possible that they’ve seen our stockade and figured that we’d be a hard target to take down.”

“They used a missile carrier against us,” I said, speaking up for the first time. “Your walls wouldn’t stop something like that.”

Carlos cast me a look; but LaRoux just nodded. “She’s right. We couldn’t fight them off if they came at us the way they came at you. But we’ve kept our heads low, haven’t caused any trouble. Maybe that’s the reason.”

“Maybe for now, but not very much longer.” Carlos bent forward. “Sooner or later, they’re going to—”

“Why is this inconvenient?” Yes, I was trying to change the subject. Carlos was looking for recruits, but my top priority was the safety of the children. “Is there something we should know about?”

Fred took a drink, made a face as the corn liquor scorched his throat, then rested his mug on the table and tapped his fingers against it. “There’s an irony in all this,” he said, very quietly, “because I was thinking about sending someone down south to ask if we could take refuge in your town.”

Carlos stared at him. “But you just said—”

“I know, I know. But this isn’t about the Union.” He let out his breath. “Tell me something . . . while you were coming up here, did you feel any tremors? Did the ground shake at all?”

Carlos and I looked at each other. “No . . . no, we didn’t,” he said, and I shook my head.

“Good. Glad to hear it.” Fred took another sip. “Twice since we’ve been here, we’ve experienced small tremors. Nothing major, just enough to break a few things and knock down part of the stockade. All the same, I think we made a serious mistake by settling here.”

“Earthquakes?” I nearly said
Coyote-quakes
, but that would have sounded silly.