Coyote - A Novel of Interstellar Exploration Part 30

"I... I haven't changed," Chris protests. "You're the one who's..."

"Yes, I have," Carlos says. "I'll admit it... I'm not the same guy I was last summer. A lot's happened since then, and none of it's been easy. There are things I did back then that keep me awake at night, and believe me, there's no way I think of myself as a hero. But I keep going, because I've got my kid to take care of..."

"His kid, you mean." Ms. Levin has also stopped; from the corner of his eye, Carlos can see her glaring at him. "That's my granddaughter you're holding.

I hope you're treating her right."

Carlos suppresses a sigh; they've been through this many times before. When Wendy was still in the early stages of her pregnancy, there was some doubt over who was the father. Although it seemed certain that Carlos was responsible, there was also the fact that Wendy had a brief affair with Chris. Dr.

Okada settled the question through DNA tests, yet even after she certified that Susan was Carlos's child, and Chris reluctantly accepted her findings, Sissy Levin remained adamant in her belief that Susan was Chris's offspring, even going so far as to accuse Kuniko of tampering with the test results and lying to everyone involved, including the Town Council. This occurred during the depths of her breakdown, yet even though her depression has stabilized-at least she's no longer threatening suicide-Sissy continues quietly to insist that Susan is a grandchild who has been unjustly taken away from her.

"Mom, please let me handle this, okay?" Chris gives her a sharp look, and Ms. Levin seems to fold into herself. "Go on home. I'll make lunch for us, all right?"

His mother nods numbly, then turns and starts walking toward town, her head bowed. Watching herleave, Carlos feels pity for the once- strong woman who used to make grilled cheese sandwiches for them. "I hope she's doing okay," he says quietly.

"Some days are'better than others. This isn't..." Then Chris seems to remember that he's supposed to be angry. "What do you expect? If it wasn't for you..."

"How many times do you want me to say I'm sorry?" Carlos feels Susan impatiently squirm against the back of his neck. "Okay... I'm sorry. I'm really sorry about what happened to David, and I'm sorry about your father..."

"And last night? After you set me up at the Cantina?" Chris's eyes are cold. "Maybe you'll be happy to know that Lew's barred me from his place again. Only beer joint in town, and I can't go there anymore."

Maybe it'll do you some good, Carlos thinks, but he doesn't say this. "I didn't set you up, but if you want to think that..."

"Yeah, right, you're sorry. Heard it before, means just as much as it did the last time."

"Chris..."

"Forget it. What's the point?" Then he glances up at the sky, watching the contrails as they're whisked away by the breeze. "But, y'know... I kind of hope that's a Republic ship. It'd sure be sweet to see someone come down here and..."

He stops, shakes his head. "Never mind. Go back to... whatever." He turns his back to Carlos, begins following his mother. "Take it easy, hero. Don't lose any more sleep." flllen M. Steele Carlos waits a few moments to let Chris get ahead of him, then he falls in with the last of the townspeople leaving the landing pad. Susan restlessly kicks at the side of his face; he'll probably have to change her diaper once they're home. Wendy's been gone for only ten or fifteen minutes, and he misses her already.

He scarcely notices that the wind has begun to rise. plymouth: Orifiel, Gabriel 17 / "UJendy? Time to make up."

Captain Lee's voice in her headset nudges her from a dreamless sleep. Wendy opens her eyes, glances across the aisle of the pa.s.senger compartment. Henry yawns and stretches; Dana's seat is empty, though.

"I'm here," she mumbles. Her mouth tastes like cotton; she reaches beneath her couch for the plastic squeeze bottle of water she'd stashed down there. No response; Henry motions to the wand of his headset, and now she remembers that she has to tap it to activate the comlink. "I'm up, Captain," she says.

"Where are we?"

"Last place we were when you sacked out." Dana's voice. She must have gone forward to the c.o.c.kpit.

"But we're no longer alone, just in case you're interested."

Wendy and Henry trade a look, then both of them scramble to unbuckle their seat harnesses. Wendy's first out of her couch; floating upward from her seat, she grabs the ceiling rail, then begins pulling herself hand over hand toward the c.o.c.kpit. The bulky s.p.a.ce suit she's wearing hinders her movements, but she manages to squeeze through the narrow hatch ahead of Henry.

The view from the c.o.c.kpit is spectacular. Three hundred sixty miles below, Coyote stretches out before them as a vast, curving plain, the green-and-tan landscapes of its continents and major islandscrisscrossed by the aquamarine veins of river channels and tributaries, the Great Equatorial River cutting through them as a broad blue swath. They're pa.s.sing over the eastern hemisphere; it's early morning down there, which means it must be close to midnight back in Liberty. Bear would be somewhere behind them.

"Not down there," Lee says quietly. "Look up."

Wendy raises her eyes, and her breath catches in her throat. Through the center window, she sees an elongated shape, off-white and reflecting the sunlight, the apparent size of her forefinger yet steadily growing larger: cylindrical in form, wasp-waisted at its center, slightly wider at one end.

"Twenty nautical miles and closing." In the left seat, Jud Tinsley keeps an eye on the instrument panel.

"On course for orbital rendezvous."

"Very good." Lee glances back at Wendy and Henry. "I know it's tight up here, but try to find a place where you're out of the way." Wendy looks around, finds Dana jammed into the narrow s.p.a.ce behind the right seat; she moves over a little more to make room for her. Henry tucks himself behind Jud/s seat, murmuring an apology when he jostles the pilot. Plymouth's c.o.c.kpit wasn't designed to hold so many people, but it can't be helped; there are no windows in the back of the shuttle.

Lee waits until everyone is settled, then reaches the corn panel and flips a couple of switches. Wendy hears the soft purr of carrier static in her headset.

"WHSS Glorious Destiny, this is Coyote s.p.a.cecraft Plymouth, do you copy? Over." He waits a moment.

"WHSS Glorious Destiny, this is Alabama shuttle Plymouth, formerly URSS Jesse Helms. Do you copy?

Please acknowledge, over."

Silence. Lee looks back at Dana. "I'm transmitting on the KU frequency band," he says, cupping a hand around his mike, "but I don't think they're picking this up."

"Maybe they're using..." she begins.

"URSS Jesse Helms, this is WHSS Glorious Destiny." The voice they hear is clear, but not the same one they heard before. "We receive you. Do you receive us? Over."

Smiles and relieved laughter, until Captain Lee raises a hand to quiet the others. He unclasps his headset wand. "Affirmative, Glorious Destiny, we... um, receive you. We are presently in low orbit, at coordinates..." He pauses to check a comp screen. "X-ray one-eight-point- nine, Yankee four-seven-point-five, Zulu three-three-zero, distance eighteen nautical miles and closing. Do you copy?

Over."

"Understood, Helms," the voice says after a moment. "We have acquired you. Please stand by."

"Understood. Standing by." Again, Lee m.u.f.fles his headset. "Not good," he says quietly. "That's the second time they've called us the Helms, even though I first identified ourselves as the Plymouth."

"Alabama didn't have a shuttle called the Plymouth," Dana says. "Maybe they..."

"Plymouth, do you receive?" A new voice: feminine, with an accent that sounds vaguely Hispanic. "Est...

this is Matriarch Luisa Hernandez, commander of Glorious Destiny. With whom am I speaking, par favor? Over."

"Got it right this time," Lee says, then he takes his hand from the mike. "This is Captain Robert E. Lee, commanding officer of the URSS Alabama. Good to hear you, Captain... I mean, Matriarch Hernandez.Welcome to Coyote. Over."

Another pause, only this time they can hear other voices in the background. Wendy listens hard, but she can't make out what they're saying; it sounds like a polyglot of English, Spanish, and French. The others seem just as perplexed; Lee looks over at Tinsley, shakes his head.

"Thank you, Captain Lee," Matriarch Hernandez says haltingly after J a few moments. "We're certainly... ah, pleased to learn that you're still alive."

Now Wendy knows it's not her imagination; Glorious Destiny's commander speaks English only as a second language. "We have... um, attempted to contact you previous, but... ah, until now, there has been no response."

Lee's prepared for this. "My apologies, Matriarch Hernandez. Our communications system is rather deficient." A blatant lie, but one that hides the fact that the colony is unwilling to expose its location through high-gain radio transmissions. "When we saw you coming, we launched a shuttle to intercept your ship. May we have permission to rendezvous and dock with you, please? Over."

This time, the delay is even longer. Almost a minute pa.s.ses before Hernandez comes back online once more. "You have permission, Captain Lee. Our external docking hatch is located on the forward section of our vessel. It will be marked by a blinking red beacon. One of my crew will meet you at the airlock."

"Understood, Matriarch Hernandez. We'll be docking in about a half hour. I'm looking forward to meeting you. Plymouth over and out." He clicks off the comlink, looks at the others. "What do you make of that?"

"So far, so good," Tinsley says quietly. "But why do I have a bad feeling about this?"

"Same here," Lee replies. "But they're opening the front door."

The ship is huge, much larger than anyone suspected. Over twelve hundred feet long, it's more than twice the length of the Alabama, and at least three times more ma.s.sive: two enormous cylinders, each about five hundred feet in length, joined at the center by a slightly smaller midsection. The forward section is encircled by rows of perpendicular windows, indicating the presence of at least five pa.s.senger decks, yet there are also portholes within the hemispherical bulge protruding from its blunt bow.

The aft section is more mysterious. Elevated above the otherwise featureless cylinder are four long convex vanes, running parallel to the hull; wedge-shaped f.l.a.n.g.es rise from the rear of the vanes, just past which is the giant bell of the fusion engine. At first Lee thinks they may be heat radiators, yet as Plymouth moves closer he hears a low whistle from behind his seat.

"Got an idea what those things are?" he asks, peering over his shoulder at Henry.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned." The astrophysicist is clearly awestruck. "I think these people have a diametric drive."

He points to the vanes. "If I'm right, those are field generators." Then he gestures to another set of f.l.a.n.g.es at the front of the ship; these are folded down against the hull. "Positive and negatives polarities would be generated from either end of the ship, so that it creates an asymmetric field around itself. In that way, it warps s.p.a.cetime around itself and..."

"You mean, like a wormhole or something?" Wendy asks.

Henry shakes his head. "No, no... nothing so exotic. This is something else. The concept goes all the way back to the mid-twentieth century. My team at Marshall played with it for a while, but no one could figure out how to make it work, though, so we stuck to developing a Bussard engine. But it looks likesomeone.came along behind us and licked the energy-conservation problem. Probably using zero-point energy as a power source."

"Then why include a fusion engine?" Dana asks. "That's like putting a mule harness on a race car."

"Probably to boost the ship to sufficient velocity so that the field would take effect, and to slow it down again once it reaches..."

"That's all very interesting/' Lee interrupts, impatient with the discussion, "but you haven't told me one thing... how fast would it go?"

"I don't know. How fast do you want it to go?" Henry shrugs. "I don't mean to sound facetious, but in theory a diametric drive could accelerate a ship to within a few percentiles of light-speed."

"If that's the case..." Jud doesn't finish the thought, nor does he have to. If Glorious Destiny traveled to 47 Ursae Majoris at velocities approaching the speed of light, then it could have been launched from Earth within the last fifty years.

By now the starship fills the c.o.c.kpit windows. Jud has matched velocity with the giant vessel; now he's carefully moving in. "There's our docking port," he murmurs, not taking his hands off the yoke as he gently maneuvers the shuttle upside down toward a rectangular superstructure rising between a couple of f.l.a.n.g.es; a red beacon strobes next to a docking collar. "Looks easy enough."

"Sure." For the moment, Lee's distracted by something else: halfway down the cylindrical hull, just below the rows of portholes, he's noticed what appears to be closed pair of double doors, large enough for a shuttle to fly through. A quarter of the way around the hull, he spots an identical hatch.

Shuttle hangars? More than likely... and if there are more than just these two, then Glorious Destiny must be carrying at least four landing craft, each possibly the size of the Plymouth.

How many people are aboard this thing? He s.n.a.t.c.hes his mind away from this thought, focuses on the task of helping Jud guide the shuttle in for docking.

Shifting his eyes between the radar screen and the windows, he calls out numbers while Jud moves the yoke a few fractions of an inch at a time, easing the shuttle toward the docking collar. At last there's a hard thump as Plymouth's dorsal hatch mates with the ship.

"We're here." Jud's hands move across the instrument panel, putting the engines on standby. He checks a screen, gives Lee a nod. "Docking probe shows equal pressure on both sides. You should be able to go right in."

Lee unlatches his shoulder harness while Jud remains in his seat; the pilot's remaining behind to prevent anyone from coming aboard during their absence.

Lee turns to the others. "We can get out of our flight gear now. Ellery put some old Alabama jumpsuits aboard before we left... they're stowed in the lockers in the back of the pa.s.senger compartment. We'll take a few minutes to change before we pop the hatch."

Henry and Wendy sigh with relief; they're not used to wearing s.p.a.ce suits, and leaving them behind would be a blessing. Before they turn to leave the c.o.c.kpit, though, Lee holds up a hand. "Just a second... let's get one thing clear before we go in. We don't know who we're dealing with, so let me do the talking.

Is that all right with you?"Henry nods reluctantly, but Wendy is less sanguine. "How are we supposed to learn anything if we can't ask questions?"

"Ask all the questions you want," Lee replies. "I hope you do, in fact. But these people are going to have some questions of their own, and for the time being I'd prefer to be the only one who gives them answers. Understood?"

She slowly nods, and Lee gives her a rea.s.suring smile. "All right, then. Let's go meet the new neighbors."

Liberty: Raphael, Gabriel IB / The night is colder than it has any right to be. Heavy clouds hide Bear from sight; a brutal wind moans through town, blowing newfallen snow off rooftops, causing shutters to clatter softly against window frames. The town is dark; everyone has gone to bed.

Almost everyone. Hood pulled up around his head, scarf tied across his nose and mouth, Tony Lucchesi stamps through the snow, gloved hand griping the shoulder strap of his rifle. Tough luck to have drawn the graveyard shift; it was originally Boone's turn, but since he came down with a bad cold earlier today, Chief Schmidt picked Tony to take his place on the night watch.

Not that it's necessary to have anyone on patrol after midnight this time of year. The boids migrated south months ago, the swampers have gone into hibernation within the ball plants, and even the creek cats know better than to come out on a night like this. But the Town Council, in its infinite wisdom, has ordained that the blueshirts keep someone on duty twenty-seven hours a day, nine days a week. Like it's really necessary.

Tony's tempted to return to the Prefect barracks, curl up in a chair beside the stove, and steal a few hours of shut-eye before the sun comes up. A former URS soldier, though, he's one of Gill Reese's men; the colonel may be long dead, but his ghost still haunts the grunts who once served under him, and Gill would have kicked the a.s.s of anyone caught sleeping on guard duty. So Tony staggers down Main Street and hopes the barracks coffee is still warm by the time he completes his hourly swing through town.

Tony reaches the grange and is about to turn and head back the other way when he notices something odd: a faint blue light, glowing between the cracks of the shutters of one of the rear windows. That would be the comp in the mayor's office; he's seen it before, when either Lee or Mon- roe were working late.

Both of them are gone, though, so no one should be in there, least of all at this unG.o.dly hour.

d.a.m.n. One of them must have left the comp switched on. A minor thing, really, but since the aerostat went down last month, everyone's been urged to conserve electricity. So Tony mutters an obscenity into his scarf as he tramps up the front steps of the grange...

And finds something else unusual: the front door, normally shut by this time, is slightly ajar, as if the wind has blown it open. With the exception of the armory and the mess hall kitchen, there are no locks on any of doors of Liberty's public places, simply because there's no need for them. Theft is almost nonexistent within the colony-why steal anything when you can have it merely by asking?-and locks themselves are a valuable commodity. And the last person to leave the grange at night always shuts the door behind them...

Tony's training takes over; he's no longer a blueshirt performing a thankless task, but a URS soldier making a sweep. Pulling his rifle from his shoulder, he flicks off the safety and switches on the infrared range finder, then lowers the monocle from his head strap. Carefully pushing open the door, he steps into the foyer, quietly closing the door behind him. Noting the empty coathooks, he unlatches the inside doorand tiptoes into the meeting hall.

He raises the rifle to eye level, uses its infrared beam to guide him through the dark hall. The door leading to the offices in the back of the building is open; he peers around the corner, sees the blue glow coming from beneath the door of Captain Lee's office. The door is shut, but he can make out a soft clatter of someone typing at a keyboard.

One step at a time, Tony inches down the corridor, back pressed against the wall, rifle at waist level. As he reaches the door, a floorboard creaks beneath his boot. He stops, holds his breath. Unseen hands pause at the keyboard; for a few seconds all Tony can hear is the hollow groan of the wind. Then once again the typing resumes.

Tony lays his left hand on the doork.n.o.b. He counts to three, then throws open the door. "Freeze!" he yells, bringing the rifle up into firing position.

"Don't move!"

Startled, the figure silhouetted against the comp screen whips around. "I said don't move!" Tony snaps.

"Stay right there!"

"Okay, okay! Don't shoot!" The voice is young, male, badly frightened; he raises his hands slightly, and now Tony sees he's still wearing a parka. "I give up, all right?"

"Good. Keep it that way." Switching his grip on the rifle, Tony fumbles along the wall next to the door until he locates the light switch. The ceiling panel flashes on, and Tony tries not to wince in the sudden glare.

Chris Levin is seated at the mayor's desk, his eyes wide with fear. Tony dislikes Levin; a couple of months ago he hauled the kid down to the stockade after he took a poke at Carlos Montero, and he's been on the perp list for one thing or another ever since, usually drunk and disorderly. Breaking and entering is a new low, though.

"What are you doing here?" Tony doesn't lower the rifle even though it's clear that Chris is unarmed.

"Tony, man, take it easy. I just wanted to use the comp, that's all. My pad fried out, and I just..."

Chris starts to rise, and as he does so his right hand drifts to the keyboard. "I told you to freeze," Tony says, "and I meant it. Now put on your hands on your head." Chris obediently folds them atop his skull.

"Now step away from the desk... easy does it."

"C'mon." Chris a.s.says a smile that trembles at the corners of his mouth. "I'm sorry if I... I mean, y'know, it's a mistake. Nothing to get worked up about."

For a moment, Tony's inclined to agree. The kid sneaks into the mayor's office after midnight to steal some comp time. No reason to put him under arrest; just send him home and enter the incident in the logbook once he returns to the barracks. Tony's almost ready to lower his rifle when he happens to glance at the comp.