Coyote Rising (56 page)

“No, ma’am. I refuse.”

She gaped at him in astonishment. “What did you say?”

Baptiste assumed a formal military position: feet spread apart, hands locked together behind his back, back rigid and chin uplifted. “It’s my judgment,” he continued, staring straight ahead, “that the objectives of this mission . . . that is, to establish a self-sustaining colony upon this world . . . have been neglected by a personal desire for—”

“Get those soldiers on the ground!”

“It’s over, Matriarch.” Lee spoke softly, yet his quiet voice carried more force than her outraged shout. “Captain Baptiste knows the truth,
and I suspect the Savant does as well. You can’t conquer a place whose people don’t want to be conquered. The most you can do is occupy it for a short time. Ancient Rome learned this, and so did Nazi Germany and the United Republic . . . those who want to be free will remain free, at any cost, even their own lives.”

All this time, Hernandez had held the pistol upon him. Suddenly she seemed to shrink in upon herself, like a woman who had once worn pride as her armor and suddenly found it replaced by mere flesh. The pistol wavered, shook within her grasp; Lee found himself remembering the last time he’d stared down a gun barrel, many years ago aboard the
Alabama
.

“What is it that you want?” she asked, almost in a whisper.

“Removal of all Union Guard troops from Coyote. Relinquishment of all territorial claims by the Western Hemisphere Union. Return of the
Spirit
to Earth, along with anyone who wishes to go back . . .”

“Of course.” Her hand dropped, as if tired of holding the gun for so long. Her eyes were dull, registering hopeless defeat. “It’s all yours. You win.”

Lee fell silent. All the years of exile, all the years of revolution, had come to this moment: a quiet surrender, in a place he’d once helped build. His namesake had surrendered inside a courthouse in Appomattox, with his defeated troops gathered just outside; this evening, with the last few shots of battle dying off in the distance, his own war was drawing to a close.

Turning away from the Matriarch, he found Carlos waiting nearby. To his relief, the younger man had lowered his rifle. That was a good start. “Tell your people to cease—”

“Robert!”

Gunshots from behind him, then something slammed into his back: three bullets that punched through his spine, his lungs, his heart. His mind barely had time to register the pain before his muscles lost control and he pitched forward, his hands grasping at the unexpected wetness at his chest. He hit the floor facefirst, barely able to think, unable to move.

Everything came to him as a hollow roar of sensation—gunshots, voices, hands grasping at him. He fell over on his back, saw Carlos staring down at him even as his vision began to form a lightless tunnel. He heard
something pounding, at first with loud persistence, and then much more slowly. Carlos was saying something to him—
Captain, can you hear me?
—but he could barely comprehend the meaning of the words.

Beneath the pain there was a warm inviting pillow. He felt himself falling into it. Yet there was one last thing he had to say before he rested . . .

He spoke, hoping that Carlos heard him. Then darkness closed in upon him.

2614—S
HUTTLEFIELD
, N
EW
F
LORIDA

Within the stark glare of the Union shuttle’s landing lights, a long
row of bodies lay upon the ground, each wrapped in a black plastic bag. A pair of Guardsmen picked up their fallen comrades one at a time, and carried them up the ramp, where other soldiers secured them to the deck with cargo nets. Twenty-two bodies in all, including that of the Matriarch; Carlos couldn’t tell which was hers, and he was reluctant to ask.

“I’m sorry it had to end like this,” he said quietly, careful not to raise his voice lest it break the silence. “I know that sounds awful, but if there could have been any other way . . .”

“You don’t have to apologize.” Baptiste stood next to him, watching the dead being taken away. The night was cold, and his hands were shoved in the pockets of the military-issue parka someone had given him. “In fact, I prefer that you didn’t. These men died in the line of duty. It’s not for you to say whether it was right or wrong.”

Carlos didn’t know what to say to this. He’d killed one of the men himself; the fact that he’d done so to liberate his home mattered very little at that moment. Sometime the next day, he’d have to bury some of his
own: twelve Rigil Kent members, along with seven colonists from Shuttlefield and Liberty who’d given up their lives in the name of freedom.

And one more, whose death weighed upon him most of all.

“But you’re right.” Baptiste looked down at the ground. “There could . . . there should have been another way. This world belongs to you, and we had no right to take it from you.” He looked up at Carlos. “If there’s anyone who owes an apology . . .”

“Thank you, but . . . maybe you’re right. Anything you’d say now would only be an insult.”

Baptiste said nothing, but simply nodded before turning his face away. Within the ring of armed men surrounding the landing field, Carlos watched Union Guard soldiers marching aboard other shuttles. With their guns taken away, they represented the defeated remnant of the force that had once held New Florida. Among them were several dozen civilians: a handful of Union loyalists, but mainly those colonists who’d simply decided that they’d had enough of Coyote. More would join them before the last shuttle lifted off early the next morning, yet Baptiste had assured him that the
Spirit
had enough biostasis cells to accommodate everyone who wanted to return to Earth.

“Are there going to be more?” Carlos asked. “I mean, will the Union send more ships out here?”

“I don’t know.” Baptiste shrugged. “My ship was the last one in the fleet . . . and believe me, they were expensive to build. But that was almost fifty years ago, and I don’t know what’s happened since then. For all I know, there could be more on the way . . . or none at all.”

“But Savant Hull will be awake during the journey, right?” Carlos had seen him board the shuttle just a few minutes ago. Baptiste nodded. “Then tell him to send a message to any ships they see coming this way. Tell them that . . .”

He took a deep breath. “Tell them that this is our home. We want freedom, and we’ll fight to keep it that way. Tell them, Captain.”

Baptiste didn’t respond. Once more, his eyes returned to the bodies of the fallen Guardsmen. “I believe you,” he said at last, his voice low, “and I’ll pass the word along, but tell me one thing.”

“Yes?”

“What are you going to do now?” Baptiste turned to look him in the eye. “You’ve won your freedom. So what are you going to do with it?”

Carlos met his gaze without blinking. “We’ll do what we’ve always done best. We’ll survive.”

For a long while, the two men regarded one another in silence. Then Baptiste offered his hand, and Carlos took it. “Good luck to you,” Baptiste said. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Then he turned away, joining the procession of men, both living and dead, going aboard the shuttle that would take them back to the
Spirit
and, eventually, back to Earth. In the days to come, Carlos would regret never having thanked him for the choice he’d made, or for failing to realize that his last words echoed something that had been said to Lee a long time ago.

After Baptiste disappeared within the craft, Carlos watched the last few Union Guard soldiers march up the ramp. It slowly rose upward, then the hatch closed behind it. He stepped back as the ascent jets whined to life. A ragged cheer rose from the crowd as the shuttle slowly lifted off, and a few people fired their guns into the air. All he felt was exhaustion, as if the weight of a world had settled upon his shoulders.

Coyote was free. Yet Robert Lee’s last words haunted him, echoing through his mind:
It’s yours . . . it’s yours . . . it’s yours . . .

Part 8
HOME OF THE BRAVE

The monster rose from the East Channel on a clear and sunny afternoon
in late summer, a day so warm and fresh that it was as if the world had not skipped a season and a retrograde spring had finally come. The monster wasn’t aware of these changes; for ten months he had known only the darkness and cold of the silent depths that had been his prison. At long last he’d had finally escaped, and now he emerged to see the sky again.

The creature that shambled out of the water was human-shaped and had a human mind, yet he wasn’t human. His ceramic-alloy body, once a burnished shade of chrome silver, was now dull and corroded; weeds clung to the creaking joints of his skeletal limbs, and dark mud caked the clawlike feet that sank deep into the coarse gravel of the river shore. His right leg, broken last autumn by gunfire at close range, had been braced with a piece of sunken wood, lashed against it with lengths of tightly coiled weed; even then, he was only able to stand upright with the assistance of a waterlogged tree branch he’d fashioned into a makeshift crutch. Within his skull-like head, only his right eye emitted a ruby glow; his left one had been shattered when he’d attempted to scale an underwater cliff, only to become half-blind when he slid back down and his face struck a sharp rock.

Ten months in the channel. Ten months by the Coyote calendar; by Gregorian reckoning, that was two and a half years. That’s how long it had taken for him to find a way out of his watery tomb. A hundred feet down, there had been only the most wan light from far above. Trapped within a narrow canyon, he’d crawled along its belly through silt and sludge, dragging his broken leg behind him as he struggled through
muck and the decaying carcasses of dead fish, until he finally discovered a slope he was able to climb. And even then, more than seventy feet separated him from the surface. It had been a long hike across the river bottom until he reached the shallows, and yet he’d done it. He had no choice but to survive; death was a gift he couldn’t give himself.

For a long while he stood upon the rocky beach, water drooling off his body, held upright only by the length of wood that he’d come to think of as his best friend. Sunlight registered feebly upon his remaining eye; lacking stereoscopic vision, everything seemed flat and one-dimensional.

Turning around, for the first time he saw where he was. The massive limestone bluffs of the Eastern Divide towered above him; a half mile away, an immense wooden bridge rose above the channel, connecting New Florida to the distant shores of Midland. He remembered the bridge; he’d watched it being built, witnessed the act of sabotage that caused its midlength spans to come crashing down. Now the bridge had been repaired; indeed, he could dimly make out forms moving along its roadway.