Coyote Horizon (5 page)

So anyone who was able to do so was leaving Earth, sometimes with little more than the clothes on their backs. But the limited resources of the Moon and Mars colonies couldn’t support so many people, and the Jovian moons were inhospitable to all but the most brave, adaptable, or crazy. Which left Coyote as the last, best refuge for the human race.

Day after day, Hawk saw the faces of those fortunate enough to buy passage to 47 Ursae Majoris. Even as they pulled dog-eared passports from their pockets and mumbled replies to his questions, what he saw in their eyes said more than words. Desperation, fear, loss, confusion . . . but more often than not, hope. Hope that the new world, so far away from everything familiar, would offer a fresh start.

So Hawk listened to them, and handed out the proper forms, and tagged their passports before sending them to the inspection tables or, in the cases of those who were obviously sick, to the health officials who’d make sure they weren’t carrying any contagious diseases and quarantine them if they were. Although he was careful never to expose his emotions, nonetheless he secretly resented them. Because as shattered as their lives might be, at least they had the belief that the worst was behind them and that tomorrow would be a better day.

That was something he’d lost a long time ago.

 

 

 

Ten hours in the cube, then his shift ended and it was time for
him to go home. Hawk took a few minutes to straighten his desk, then he pushed back his chair and left the kiosk, shutting the door behind him. He didn’t say good night to the other inspectors—none were his friends, and in fact he didn’t even know most of their names—and they’d long since stopped saying hello or good-bye to him. So there was nothing more for him to do than simply leave, with the knowledge that, tomorrow morning, he would be back there again.

The spaceport was located on the outskirts of New Brighton, on the northern coast of Albion, across the Great Equatorial River from New Florida. Although the colony had been established only a few years ago, it had grown faster than any other settlement on Coyote. Much of the expansion was because of the spaceport; the most immediate problem faced by most immigrants was finding a place to live, so a small city had quickly risen where there had once been only a seacoast fishing village.

Hawk unlocked his bicycle from where he’d parked it at an EMPLOYEES ONLY rack outside the main entrance. Mounting the saddle, he pedaled away from the terminal to join the stream of shag wagons, rickshaws, hoverbikes, and the occasional coupe moving down the gravel road leading into town. A loud clatter overhead, and he glanced up to see the arrival of the late-afternoon gyrobus from Liberty; if he remembered the launch schedule, it would be bringing in the crew of the
Robert E. Lee
, scheduled to depart from orbit tomorrow for its next biweekly flight to Earth. He’d heard that the gyros might soon be replaced with airships imported from Germany; he had little idea where Germany was, but if airships would help reduce the noise pollution over New Brighton, then he was all for it.

A two-mile ride, then he passed through the red Japanese gate marking the city limits. Immigrants from the Pacific Coalition had erected the
torii
a year earlier as their gift to the new world; traditionally found at the entrance to Shinto shrines, it was supposed to ward off demons, but so far as Hawk could tell, it hadn’t done much good. Most of New Brighton consisted of tenement houses built of cheap parasol wood harvested from Albion hill country. They’d originally been meant to serve as temporary shelter for immigrants making their way to Coyote since the opening of the starbridge. In that, at least, the intent had been benign. No one wanted a repeat of what had happened many years ago during the Union occupation, when thousands of settlers from the Western Hemisphere Union had been forced to live in the tents and shacks of Shuttlefield.

Yet temporary solutions often become permanent; not only had the tenements become a lasting fixture, but more were being built. The gravel road came to an end shortly after he passed through the
torii
, and Hawk was soon pedaling through narrow, packed-dirt streets past three-and four-story buildings so close together that children sometimes dared each other to jump out their windows and into those of their neighbors across the alley. Clotheslines formed a dense web between buildings, while ground-floor shops, bodegas, and cafes crowded one another for room. The evening was unseasonably warm for late winter, so men and women who’d just come home from work took advantage of it by sitting out on front steps, gossiping with friends and family. From hundreds of brick chimneys, the smoke of kitchen fires rose into the air, adding to the miasma that seemed to perpetually hover above the rooftops.

A right turn on Freedom Avenue, then left on Fortune Street, and a couple of blocks later Hawk rolled to a stop in front of his building. A handful of neighborhood kids were playing soccer in the middle of the street, under the watchful eye of their mothers as they cooked dinner in their apartments. No one paid attention to him as he climbed off his bike; stepping onto the concrete sidewalk, Hawk picked it up by its frame and carried it on his shoulder up the steps to the front door. He added it to the row of bikes chained to a rack inside the foyer, then climbed the staircase, its smudged plaster walls scrawled with graffiti in several languages. The multicultural nature of the residents was reflected by the voices he heard as he walked down the third-floor hall; from behind closed doors, he heard Anglo, Spanish, Korean, and Russian—sometimes in calm conversation, more often arguing, occasionally punctuated by the cries of hungry or frustrated babies. When he’d first moved in, the noise had kept him awake at night. Now it was simply a background hum that he barely noticed anymore.

Hawk’s apartment was a one-room flat in the southwest corner of the building, its windows overlooking both the street and the adjacent alley. Its furniture, sparse and utilitarian, had come with the place: a metal-frame bed with a cheap foam mattress; an unfinished faux-birch dresser; a small square table with a couple of chairs; a wood-pellet stove which supplied both heat and the means by which he cooked his meals, with a fire extinguisher clamped to the wall next to the chimney duct; a cabinet for food, cookware, and other belongings. The flat’s only luxury was that it had its own private bath, although the toilet seat was broken and the shower leaked; whenever the people in the apartment above relieved themselves, Hawk knew about it from the gurgle of flushed water rushing down exposed pipes running across his ceiling.

Hawk took off his uniform, placing his shirt and trousers on the kitchen sink so that he could wash them later. The control bracelet stayed in place, though, as did the inhibitor patch affixed to his rib cage beneath his left arm. His parole officer was due to visit him tomorrow after work; he’d change the patch then, once he’d made sure that Hawk hadn’t murdered anyone this week.

He changed into drawstring pants and a loose tunic, preferring to go barefoot unless it got cold. From the cabinet’s refrigerator box, he pulled out a jar of leftover turkey chili. Unscrewing its top, he took a quick sniff to make sure it hadn’t gone bad, then emptied the jar into an iron skillet. Dinner was eaten at his table as he watched the kids wind up their soccer game.

The last light of day was fading above the rooftops as Hawk sat at the table, plate and fork still in front of him, hands clasped together in his lap. His mind was a blank, filled only by the sounds that entered his range of hearing. Down in the alley, two men argued about which one of them had failed to close a Dumpster, thus allowing swampers to scatter garbage all over the place. Across the hall, the woman who was his closest neighbor opened her door, inviting a man who’d come to visit inside; Hawk hadn’t met her, but he suspected that she was a prostitute. Farther down the hall, a little girl was having a tantrum; her mother yelled at the child to shut up. And down on the front steps, another one of his neighbors strummed at his guitar, the evening breeze carrying his words to Hawk’s open window:

 

 

Hawk didn’t know where Kentucky was, either, but he did remember another night, not so long ago, when he’d watched the sun go down upon the Black Mountains. Back when he’d been a free man and his life, hard as it might have been, had more meaning than it did now.

Unable to laugh, unwilling to cry, he sat at the window and watched as darkness once again settled upon the town.

 

 

 

A few hours later, he’d washed his uniform and laid it out to dry, Hawk was in bed, reading
The Chronicles of Prince Rupurt
by Leslie Gillis. Like everyone else born and raised on Coyote, he had been brought up with the novel, written under strange circumstances by a crewman aboard the
Alabama
; unlike others, though, Hawk hadn’t left it behind with adolescence, but often revisited the epic fantasy. Comfort food for the mind, yet—as many before him had noted—oddly resonant with the world in which he lived.

He’d just reached the scene where the exiled prince was bargaining with the merchant-king of Yawhana for the price of an enchanted sword when he heard a loud slam within the apartment across the hall, followed a moment later by the muffled sound of a woman crying out in pain.

Hawk looked up from his pad, listened more closely. His apartment was dark now that he’d turned off the ceiling panel, the only illumination coming from the pad’s screen. Another thud, a little louder; he couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if someone had been thrown against the door. Then a man’s voice, unintelligible yet angry; an instant later, the sharp crash of breaking glass, followed again by a woman’s scream.

For a few seconds, he lay still in bed, not quite knowing what to do. Then the man yelled something obscene; another impact against the wall, and now he could hear the woman whimpering. He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if she was begging for her assailant to stop, please stop . . .

Before he knew what he was doing, Hawk shoved aside the blanket and pushed himself out of bed. As usual, he wore only his briefs; he considered getting dressed, but when he heard something shatter as if it had been hurled across the room, he realized that there was no time for such niceties. Someone was being hurt. He could pretend to ignore what was going on and wait for it to stop on its own, or . . .

The woman screamed again, and there was such pain in her voice that he grabbed his shirt and pulled it on, then unlatched his door and threw it open. Down the hall, some of his neighbors stood in the doorways of their own apartments. They’d heard the fight, too, and a few had dared to peek outside to see what was happening. But he knew that that was as far as they’d go; in the crowded tenements of New Brighton, the first rule of survival was mind your own business.

Apparently the maxim didn’t apply to him. Everyone looked his way, as if expecting him to do something. Hawk suddenly realized that he was wearing his uniform shirt. At this moment, he was the closest they had to a law-enforcement official. Even if someone had called the law—which was doubtful—the New Brighton proctors were notoriously slow about responding to domestic disturbances; it might be a while before someone showed up.

Another second or two of hesitation, then Hawk stepped across the hall. Raising a fist, he banged it against the door.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Is everyone . . . Are you okay in there?”

Silence, then a man’s voice: “Get the hell outta . . . !”

“Help!” A woman’s voice, shrill with terror. “Please, someone . . . !”

“Shut up!” The dull sound of flesh striking flesh, then something struck the door. The knob started to turn, and suddenly stopped. “Oh no, you don’t, bitch! You’re not getting away from . . .”

The woman shrieked, and Hawk grabbed the doorknob. The door was unlocked; he shoved it open and entered the one-room flat, which had been torn apart. The bed was disheveled, its sheets lying askew from a mattress that was half-off its frame; a chair lay on its side, and broken glass was scattered across the floor beneath the shelf from which it had fallen. An earthenware jug had been hurled against the wall, leaving a crater in the plaster; he caught the reek of the corn liquor it had once contained.

But the first thing that he saw was a naked man dragging a woman across the floor by a fistful of her long blond hair. She wore only a silk teddy; its front was ripped open, and what he first took to be a embroidered red rose was a smear of blood from where she’d been punched in the nose. She was reaching above her head, trying to pull her assailant’s hands away. He was older than Hawk, but no larger; with a shaved head and ugly goatee, his potbelly attested to too many nights spent at the tavern.

He looked up at Hawk, his eyes dark with fury, and in that instant, his face seemed to disappear, and Hawk saw someone else: his father, the nights he’d come home from the lumber mill and take out his frustrations on Hawk’s mother. A childhood memory he’d tried very hard to suppress, along with everything else he remembered about the old man. But in less than a second, the lessons learned during two and a half years of therapy were forgotten.

The bracelet beeped, announcing that its sensors had detected a sharp rise in the adrenaline and vasopressin levels of his bloodstream. A moment later, there was a sharp jab in the soft flesh beneath his left arm as the inhibitor patch, signaled by the bracelet, administered a dose of benzodiazepine. Hawk knew that it would be only seconds before the drug triggered the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters in his brain, slowing down his thoughts as well as his muscles. If he was going to act, it would have to be immediately.