Coyote Frontier

by Allen Steele

  And indeed, Vogel did his best to put us at ease. He seemed to notice that we didn’t like his aide very much, so once the young man minced about serving us wine—’81 Mare Crisium, an exceptional lunar Bordeaux, or perhaps we’d prefer beer instead?—Vogel dismissed him, then apologized for his manners once he was gone. He inquired about our jaunt through hyperspace, and seemed genuinely curious about the experience. He expressed interest in our clothing and asked about the wildlife on Coyote from which the materials had been derived. Small talk, of course, but nonetheless it helped to make us feel more like envoys than hayseeds who’d just fallen off the potato wagon.

  By this time, stewards had finished setting the table. Once we were seated, they ladled chilled vichyssoise into pewter bowls before each of us. Vogel sipped his soup as he listened to Chris finish an anecdote about hunting boid on Miller Creek in New Florida, then daubed his lips with a linen napkin.

  “Quite fascinating, Herr Levin,” he said. “You must save that story for my colleagues in the diplomatic corps. I think they’ll be intrigued by your descriptions of the native fauna, once you meet them.”

  Obviously he was changing the subject. “We’d only be delighted,” Carlos replied. “And this will be…?”

  “As soon as you like, of course.” Laying down his spoon, Vogel signaled for a steward to take away his soup. “Unless you have serious objections, our present schedule calls for us to board a yacht for Earth tomorrow morning at 1000 hours. If all goes well, we should arrive in London by 1400 Greenwich time the following day.” He smiled. “It’s not quite as fast as it sounds…the entire trip will take twenty-eight hours.”

  “Of course.” Carlos put aside his own spoon. “And I take it that you’re going to accompany us?”

  “My government has requested that I do so, yes. I’ve been assigned as your official escort. Since you’ve come here aboard an Alliance spacecraft, we consider you as our guests.” He favored Carlos with a sly wink. “Naturally, we hope that you’ll remember our patronage during your negotiations. We believe that you won’t find a more worthwhile ally among the members of the U.N. General Assembly.”

  “We’ll try to keep that in mind.” Carlos shot me a glance, and I rubbed the corner of my left eye. A prearranged signal: be careful. “I’m rather surprised that you’re flying us into London,” he continued. “Didn’t the ESA once operate a space elevator in New Guinea?”

  Vogel didn’t miss a beat. “Unfortunately, as you may have already heard, our beanstalk no longer exists. It was destroyed by a terrorist action about fifteen years ago…a bomb planted aboard one of its climbers, which detonated sixty miles aboveground. We haven’t rebuilt it since then.”

  “Any idea who did it?” Chris asked.

  “Living Earth claimed responsibility…a terrorist group that wants to put an end to space colonization.” Vogel shook his head. “However, we have reason to believe that their action may have been covertly sponsored by another country.”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s not my place to speculate.” Vogel signaled for the stewards to bring the next course. “However, I will offer the observation that the Ecuador space elevator remains operational, nor has it ever received any serious threats.”

  Carlos and I traded another look. Even if he wasn’t coming straight out and saying so, Vogel clearly meant to implicate the Western Hemisphere Union. And he had a point; it was difficult to believe that a terrorist group opposed to space colonization would sabotage one beanstalk only to leave the other alone.

  As if he’d read our minds, Vogel went on. “You can expect that the WHU will do their best to assert territorial rights to Coyote,” he continued, as the stewards placed what looked like broiled lamb cutlets before each of us. “I’ve already spoken with Captain Tereshkova, and she told me that the colonies successfully rebelled against the Union and forced their troops to leave. My congratulations. However, I sincerely doubt their U.N. delegation will accept that prima facie. They’ll probably say that the Union still has control—”

  “We considered that,” Carlos said. “We’ve brought recent pictures of our colonies, along with sworn affidavits by colonists who came over on Union ships. That should help prove that the WHU is no longer in charge of the government.”

  It was a weak leg to stand on, though, and we knew it. Our evidence of having achieved independence was tenuous at best. Yet Vogel smiled as he picked up knife and fork. “Good, very good. That should go a long way to convincing the General Assembly.” An indifferent shrug. “And if they’re not, then we have other means of persuading them.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  A steward interrupted to ask if we wanted more wine. Vogel nodded, then went on. “You may have noticed the vessel dry-docked in Alpha Port. The Francis Drake, the first starship specifically designed for hyperspace travel. Since it doesn’t have to accommodate biostasis decks, it can transport up to 10,000 tons of freight or passengers in a single run. As soon as it’s christened, it’ll take very little effort to carry U.N. representatives to Coyote to verify your claims.”

  Now the reasons for its streamlined hull were apparent; the Drake could land directly on Coyote, instead of having to rely upon shuttles to haul passengers and cargo to and from the surface. Chris whistled appreciatively, yet Carlos showed little emotion as he allowed a steward to refill his wineglass. “Quite impressive,” he said, “but isn’t that quite an effort to make on the presumption that we’d make a trade agreement with the EA?”

  “Possibly.” Vogel shrugged as he spooned some mint jelly onto his cutlets. They were a little well done for my taste, but on the other hand, I wasn’t sure they were lamb at all. Possibly a soybean substitute; the texture wasn’t quite right. “But we’re confident that you’d rather have us as a principal trading partner than the Union or the Pacific Coalition. And, to be quite honest, even if the WHU had maintained control of your colonies, sooner or later they would’ve had to negotiate with us. A round-trip journey of nearly a hundred years versus a starbridge jaunt of only a few minutes…?”

  “I see your point.” Carlos absently ran the tip of his finger around the stem of his wineglass. “But since you have this sort of capability, what prevents you from attempting the same sort of hostile takeover that the Union did?”

  Vogel didn’t respond at once. He deliberately took time to sip his wine. “Nothing,” he said at last. “At least not in military terms. But”—he raised a finger—“I should point out that the EA has a better grasp of history than the WHU does. We’re aware that you can’t hold a hostile population at gunpoint for very long before they rise against you. Even their Savants tried to warn their Patriarchs and Matriarchs that such a revolution was inevitable…”

  “And your Savants?” I asked. “What did they advise?”

  “The Savants in the European Alliance were never allowed to hold positions of responsibility.” Dieter’s voice turned cold. “When the Union’s Savant Council turned against them, we told ours to leave…and so they did. For the outer asteroid belt.” Then his manner thawed. “We don’t intend to repeat the Union’s mistakes. As I said, we’d rather enjoy a peaceful partnership based on trade and cultural exchange than have to worry about your people staging guerrilla raids and blowing up spacecraft. Wouldn’t you say…Rigil Kent?”

  Carlos’s mouth went tight, and I felt my own heart skip a beat. Damn it, just how much had Ana told him? It was obvious that Dieter Vogel was far more than the minor cog that he’d first appeared to be. “Not to worry,” he continued, his voice low as he leaned forward. “Your background as a…shall we say, a freedom fighter…is classified information. No one needs to know about it.”

  “Not that it makes much difference.” Carlos got hold of himself. “I did what had to be done. I won’t apologize for that.”

  I could have kissed my husband. From the look on Chris’s face, he was just as proud of Carlos as I was. Unruffled, Vogel slowly nodded. “Very good. I’m pleased to hear that.
But for others to know this…”

  “I fought in the war, too,” Chris interrupted. “So did almost everyone else on Coyote. You’re just going to have to get used to that.”

  I shut my eyes. Very patriotic, but now wasn’t the right time to wave the flag. Yet Carlos nodded at his old war buddy, and the two exchanged a grin that made me want to kick both of them beneath the table.

  “Yes, well…” Vogel glanced at the antique grandfather clock in the corner. “I hate to run, but I have other duties this evening. This has been a delightful—”

  “One more question, if I may?” I raised a hand, and all three turned to look at me. “The Drake…when we saw it earlier, I couldn’t help but notice something rather unusual about its hull.”

  “Such as?” Vogel gave me a distracted glance. Perhaps he was expecting me to ask something obvious, like why it had wings.

  “There were hatches on either side of its forward section. They weren’t cargo doors, and they were in the wrong position for landing gear.” I paused. “In fact, they looked very much like weapon bays…torpedo tubes, maybe?”

  Vogel’s face lost color. From the corner of my eye, I could see Carlos covering his mouth with his hand. Chris covered his expression by taking a drink…a major thing for him, since he’d studiously avoided the wine all evening.

  “You’re very observant,” Vogel said.

  “I try to be,” I replied.

  “The Drake is intended to be primarily a merchanteer. Which means that it will carry valuable cargo. Considering that the EA has been attacked once already, we believe that it’s in our best interests to provide protection for its crew and passengers. So, yes, we’ve installed missile launchers…torpedoes, if you will…as a means of preventative measures.”

  Perfect bureaucratese. A Govnet flack from the old United Republic of America couldn’t have done better. “Thank you,” I said. “Just wanted to know.”

  Vogel blinked, then once again offered apologies as he stood up. A few bows, then he hastened out the door. One of the stewards offered coffee and dessert, but we declined; it had been a long day, and we needed to get some sleep. Yet once we left the dining room and Vogel’s aide—who’d apparently been waiting in the corridor the entire time—nervously led us back to our quarters, Carlos took my arm.

  “Nice try,” he murmured, “but I wish you hadn’t done that.”

  “Why not?” I was still grinning. “I haven’t smelled manure that fragrant since I cleaned out the goat pen last week.”

  Chris chuckled under his breath, yet Carlos glowered at me. “There’s more about this than you know,” he whispered.

  I darted a glance at him, and he shook his head. “Another time. When we’re sure the walls aren’t listening.”

  Next morning, another journey: this time aboard a delta-winged transport twice the size of the Isabella. The EAS Von Braun was intended to shuttle VIPs to and from Highgate; its passenger cabin was fitted with faux-leather seats with individual viewscreens, a small galley, even a plasma billiards table. A uniformed steward offered us squeeze bulbs of champagne shortly after the vessel undocked from Alpha Port, then handed out menus for what would be the first of several meals.

  I passed on the champagne and nibbled at some cheese and grapes as I gazed at Earth through the window beside my seat. From lunar orbit, the planet of my birth was so small that I could easily cover it with my thumb. An impressive sight, to be sure, yet after a little while I started looking for other things to do.

  Although the yacht was too small to have its own Millis-Clement field generator, its nuclear engines fired at constant quarter-g thrust that cut our travel time from days to hours, so there was sufficient gravity inside the craft to allow us to walk around the cabin. I shot a couple of rounds of pool with Chris—strange to play billiards on a table that operated in three dimensions, with cues that generated an electromagnetic pulse and balls that were nothing more than colored spheres of light—and let Vogel explain the rules of zero-g handball to me while we watched a game. I took a nap, woke up and had dinner, went over the draft of the trade agreement one more time with Carlos, played another game with Chris…

  And still, despite my best efforts to distract myself, I kept returning to the porthole, watching Earth as it gradually swelled in size. When we left Highgate, I had to crane my head to see it through the window by my seat, but as the hours went by the planet slowly crawled closer to the center of the pane, slowly waxing as its daylight terminator moved from east to west. I discovered that my seat’s viewscreen allowed me to access a close-up view from a camera positioned in the yacht’s bow, and it wasn’t long before I was able to distinguish the major continents. At one point I was even able to spot the Ecuador space elevator, a silver thread rising in a horizontal line from the equator above South America, reflecting sunlight until it reached its terminus in geosynchronous orbit.

  But that wasn’t what caught my attention. As the Von Braun drew closer, the pilots made midcourse corrections so that we’d be able to land in the northern hemisphere. It wasn’t long before southeastern Europe was spread out before us, and certain geographic changes soon became apparent. Italy had lost its boot-like appearance, becoming instead a slender peninsula, with Sicily little more than a speck in a Mediterranean Sea that had become a vast gulf that altered the coastline of much of North Africa.

  “Too bad we can’t see the South Pole from here,” Vogel said. Surprised, I looked around to find him leaning over my shoulder to peer at the screen. “That’s where it all began.”

  “I know. The collapse of the east Antarctic ice sheet.” Vogel seemed surprised that I knew about this, and I nodded. “We’ve already heard. Dr. Whittaker already told us…so did the Columbus’s crew.”

  “Then if you’re aware of what’s happened, there’s not much for me to tell you.”

  “I’m aware only that it happened, not how or why. Go on, please. I’d like to learn more.”

  Vogel hesitated, then settled into Carlos’s seat across the aisle. “It didn’t happen overnight,” he said, his voice low. “The climate started to change during the late twentieth century, when Greenland began losing its glacial icepack. The trend continued through much of the twenty-first century, but even after the major industrial nations curtailed the use of fossil fuels that discharged carbonic oxides into the atmosphere…” He paused, then added, “With certain notable exceptions, as I’m sure you know.”

  Feeling my face grow warm, I looked away. He didn’t need to say it, but one of those “notable exceptions” had been the United Republic of America. One of the dubious achievements of National Reform had been the rollback of every environmental protection program intended to reduce global warming, which the Liberty Party claimed was only liberal propaganda. There had been protests, of course, but it wasn’t long before activists and the more outspoken scientists joined the ranks of those sent away to government reeducation camps.

  Vogel noticed my discomfort. “I forget…you were only a child then,” he said, gently patting my arm as if to absolve me of personal guilt. “In your time, the global sea level had only risen by a dozen or so centimeters…enough to cause a few beaches to disappear in your country, but not much else.”

  I gazed at the screen. By now, I could make out the Middle East; the Persian Gulf had swelled to consume the lowlands of the Arabian Peninsula. “All we heard from Govnet was that it was a natural occurrence. A temporary problem, nothing more.”

  “A temporary problem.” Vogel shook his head in wonder. “If only they’d been right…” He stopped himself. “Well, be that as it may, ocean temperatures continued to rise through the late twenty-first century and into the twenty-third until, in 2265, one-third of the east Antarctic ice sheet slipped into the ocean.”

  “So we’ve heard.” But not until much later. By then, the Alabama was still on its way to 47 Ursae Majoris, and I’d been in biostasis for nearly two hundred years. The last of the Union starships had already departed from Ea
rth by that time, though, so no one on Coyote would know about this until the Columbus arrived. “That was the tipping point.”

  “That’s one way of putting it, yes.” A wan smile. “In hindsight, it’s fortunate that it happened much later than most climatologists predicted. That gave some countries time to prepare themselves.” Then his face darkened. “Coastal regions and river deltas flooded, and the subsequent loss of freshwater supplies afflicted much of the inland regions. Drought caused some regions to become uninhabitable. But that was only part of the problem. The introduction of freshwater from the ice sheet also caused seawater to expand at the molecular level while at the same time growing warmer. And that, in turn, caused the Gulf Stream of the North Atlantic to reverse itself.”

  As he spoke, I stared at the screen. The southern half of India was no longer recognizable; Sri Lanka had all but disappeared. Vast stretches of Southeast Asia were now separated from one another by bays and channels that hadn’t been there before. “That probably had an effect on wind patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, didn’t it?”

  Vogel nodded. “Europe got colder, yes, while much of North America got considerably hotter. The results were crop failures, deforestation, mass extinctions of wildlife…”

  “Yet the colonies on the Moon and Mars…”

  “They managed to hold out.” Vogel shrugged. “The Union, the Alliance, the Coalition…they’d had the foresight and the resources to build colonies on the Moon, with a few more on Mars. The wealthy migrated there, and they were able to preserve much of human culture. Nonetheless, a lot of people died.”

  “How many?”

  “No one knows for certain. They stopped counting the dead a long time ago.” Almost impulsively, Vogel reached forward to switch off the screen. “So far as we can estimate, though, there’s less than three billion people now alive on Earth.” He shook his head. “What the Savants failed to do, we managed to accomplish ourselves…starting three hundred years ago.”