Coyote Rising (34 page)

“Damn, you’re swift.” Chris’s smile was fatuous, the smug look of someone who’d played a good game and figured that he held the winning hand. “They’re looking for you, genius. The famous Rigil Kent. And now they’ve got you where they . . .”

The distant sound of rotors interrupted him. Looking around, Carlos spotted the second gyro lifting off from farther down the canyon; it looked as if it had touched down somewhere on the river, at least three or four miles away. He couldn’t see or hear the gyro that had been tracking him and Chris, but he had little doubt that it had managed to find someplace to land farther up the mountain.

One squad coming at them from above, another from below. The team in the canyon would be homing in on Constanza’s transponder, though, and he’d just destroyed Chris’s. He had something of a head start. So long as Marie and her guys weren’t still . . .

“So what now?” Chris was almost casual about this. “Leave me? Shoot me? Better make up your mind. I think you’re going to have company soon.”

“That way.” Carlos gestured in the direction of Johnson Falls. “You’re coming with me.”

“Sure. Why not?” Chris gave a nonchalant shrug. “Sort of figured you’d say that.” He turned, then stopped to glance back over his shoulder. “In fact, so did she.”

“What’s that?” Carlos didn’t have to ask whom he was talking about. “What did she say?”

“That you’d never kill me.” Again, the self-assured smile. “To tell the truth, though, that’s not why I told her I’d go along with this. I just want to be there when they bring you down.”

“Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not dying today.” Carlos pointed in the direction of the falls. “Now march.”

G
ABRIEL
76/0837—F
ORT
L
OPEZ

“Flight One reports Diablo Alpha is on the ground.” The master
sergeant seated at the carrel closest to Baptiste didn’t look away from his wraparound console. “They’ve lost the transponder, but they’ve had visual contact with primary target. Closing in to intercept.”

“Diablo Bravo reporting in, sir.” Acosta, seated at the adjacent carrel, glanced back at him. “They have a clear fix on secondary target. It appears immobile. Moving to investigate.”

“Thank you.” Baptiste continued to study the map wall. Two red markers on a ridgeline below the summit of Mt. Aldrich indicated the position of Diablo Alpha. As Sergeant Cartman had just said, the crosshatch indicating the location of the ELF beacon worn by Chief Proctor Levin had disappeared shortly after he had been spotted by Flight One. The transponder worn by Enrique Constanza, though, was still active; it hadn’t changed position since it had been acquired by the
Spirit
the night before, though, and that worried him.

He walked over to the Diablo Alpha carrel. “Tell them to proceed with caution,” he said quietly. “This could be a trick of some sort.”

“What makes you think that, Captain?” Luisa Hernandez came up from behind him, her cloak brushing softly against the cement floor. The situation room was crowded, filled with Union officers monitoring the operation. “For all we know, that might be the location of the
Alabama
party.”

She had a point. Constanza’s signal was coming from a point a considerable distance from the last-known whereabouts of the advance team. The loss of contact with its other four members tended to support the
theory that it had been ambushed by Rigil Kent nearly fifty miles down-river; it had to be assumed that they were now dead, their transponders buried along with their bodies. If Constanza had been taken prisoner, then his captors might have taken him to a site somewhere upstream . . . perhaps even their ultimate objective, the
Alabama
party’s hideaway.

Baptiste absently rubbed his chin as he watched the images being transmitted from Bravo Leader. One of the screens displayed a shot from the camera mounted on the Diablo’s chest: fuzzy and monochromatic, lurching a bit with each heavy step that the team leader took, it showed a riverbank overgrown with dense brush, the river itself a silver surface reflecting the morning sun.

“Too easy,” he murmured, not so much to the Matriarch as to himself.

“What did you say?” She stood next to him, her arms folded across her chest. “You think this is easy? Captain, this operation has been months in the planning. I assure you, we have the ability to . . .”

“And from what you’ve told me,” he said quietly, “you’ve consistently underestimated them. You seem to believe that, simply because you have more men and more equipment, your adversary lacks resources. That’s a mistake.”

Her hands fell to her sides, and she glared at him with something close to contempt. Although he hadn’t raised his voice, Baptiste was conscious of the fact that the room had gone quiet; all around them, officers were listening to the exchange. He wondered how many had felt the same way themselves but had been unwilling to challenge the authority of the colonial governor.

Hernandez stepped back, her eyes narrowing. “Perhaps you’re correct, Captain. We should change the purpose of this operation.” She turned away, walked over to the Diablo Alpha carrel. “Where are your men now?”

“Descending the ridge now, ma’am.” Cartman pointed to a screen depicting the location of Diablo Alpha, a pair of asterisks slowly making their way down a close-set pattern of contour lines. Its chest camera displayed a blurred image of trees and snow-covered boulders. “They haven’t made visual contact yet, but sonic patterns indicate movement about five hundred yards ahead. . . .”

“Show me the shot Flight One caught of them,” she demanded. Cartman worked his keyboard, and another screen lit to depict a jolting overhead image: two men, captured for a few brief seconds by a gyro’s belly camera, peering up at them from beneath snow-covered branches. “Freeze!” She pointed to the man on the right: young, bearded, a Union carbine slung over his shoulder. “Take a good look, Captain . . . Carlos Montero, Rigil Kent himself. Tell me, do you think this is a person you’d underestimate?”

“No, ma’am, I wouldn’t.” It wasn’t fear that Baptiste saw in Montero’s face, but something else . . . a determination that, under other circumstances, he would admire.

“Neither do I. And I’ve been dealing with him for much longer than you have.” Hernandez prodded her lower jaw. “Patch me into Alpha and Bravo,” she told Cartman. “I wish to speak with them directly.”

“Matriarch,” Baptiste said, “may I remind you that this is a Union Guard operation. . . .”

“And may I remind you that I’m colonial governor.” She deliberately turned her back upon him. Cartman looked up and nodded, indicating that she was being heard by the two strike teams. “Diablo Alpha, Diablo Bravo, this is the Matriarch Luisa Hernandez. The mission objective has now changed. Your first priority is termination, not capture. Repeat . . . termination is now the primary objective. That is all.” She prodded her jaw again, then looked at Baptiste once more. “I think that should convince you how seriously I regard this.”

Baptiste regarded her with horror that he hoped his face wouldn’t betray. This wasn’t what he’d been led to believe they were doing. “I never doubted it,” he said, carefully choosing his words, “yet you realize that your orders include the termination of two civilians . . . including your Chief Proctor.”

Her face went pale, as if she suddenly realized what she’d done. There was always time to rescind the order, or at least change it. But then the coldness returned.

“Of course I know that,” she said. “Just do as I say.”

She walked away, and it was in that moment that Baptiste realized just how far her obsession with Rigil Kent had gone.

G
ABRIEL
76/0846—P
IONEER
V
ALLEY

At first, the binoculars revealed nothing save the swaying of tree
limbs in the wind. Then a shadow passed across the bottom of the bluffs, flitting across the rockslide. Almost as soon as Carlos spotted it, though, it seemed to vanish; as he continued to watch, he caught a brief glimpse of snow falling off a clingberry bush, as if knocked down by a specter following the tracks he and Chris had left behind.

“Having trouble?” Chris lay against the boulder next to him, a smirk on his face. “I imagine they’re hard to spot in ghost mode.”

“And I bet you’re not going to tell me what that is, are you?” Carlos kept his eyes on the bluffs, hoping to spot any further movement. Yes, there it was again . . . but now there appeared to be two shadows, one just behind the other.

“Umm . . .” Chris thought about it a moment. “Okay, let me give you a hint. You’re looking at them all the wrong way.”

Carlos considered what he’d just said, then laid down the binoculars and picked up his rifle. Peering through the scope, he switched to infrared. Everything went dark, as if twilight had settled upon the forest. He could make out two hulking silhouettes, ill defined yet vaguely man-shaped, resembling eggs with short legs and oversize arms.

“There you go.” Chris chuckled. “That’s their weak point. Their suits are coated with some sort of polymer that lets them camouflage themselves, but they’ve never been able to mask the heat from their power systems. Go IR, and on a cold day like this, you can see ’em . . . sort of.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about these things.” Carlos studied the two figures slowly making their way along the bottom of the cliff. He
had led Chris to a large, tooth-shaped outcropping about a hundred yards downhill from the bluff. For a few minutes, they were safe. Just enough time for him to take stock of their pursuers. “What did you call them? Diablos?”

“Diablo Mark III combat armor, uh-huh. Tactical assault gear. Some friends in the Guard told me all about them, but I’ve never seen one until now. Wanna let me take a look?”

Carlos ignored him as he squinted through the scope, lining up the two figures within the crosshairs. He had a clear shot, if he cared to take it. If their shielding was heavy armor, though, it was probably impervious to low-caliber ammo; shooting at them would only expose his position. “Anything else you’d care to tell me?”

“Well . . . if this is a standard hunter-killer team, then it means that the leader is probably sweeping this entire area with his sensor array. So if you think they don’t know where we are, you’re wrong. They’re probably listening to us right now . . . if they haven’t picked up the infrared beam from your scope.”

Carlos felt his blood freeze. At that moment, the Diablo in front turned toward him. A cylindrical shape mounted on its right shoulder swiveled his way, as if taking aim directly at him. He ducked, pulling his rifle against his chest; an instant later, there was a faint hiss as hot flecks of superheated granite stung the right side of his face.

“Oh yeah . . . and they’re armed with particle-beam lasers, too!” Chris laughed out loud. “Oh man, you are so screwed!”

Chris wiped a hand across his forehead and cheek; his glove came away with blood from a half dozen scratches. He cast a baleful look at Chris as he slid down the boulder. If they were fast enough, they might be able to get the rest of the way down the hillside before . . .

“Hey! Down here! You guys, down here!”

Carlos looked around. While his back was turned, Chris had scampered past him up the outcropping. He stood on top of the boulder, waving his arms above his head.