The River Horses

  Allen Steele’s novels about the frontier planet Coyote—Coyote, Coyote Rising, and Coyote Frontier—have become one of the most critically acclaimed series of the last decade. Yet there remain stories about humankind’s new home that have not been told. “The River Horses” is one of those tales.

  Taking place between the events of Coyote Rising and Coyote Frontier, this standalone novella tells the story of Marie Montero and Lars Thompson, two veterans of the revolutionary war against Earth who have been exiled from the colonies. Sent out to explore the unmapped regions of Coyote, they are accompanied by Manuel Castro, a posthuman Savant who was once the lieutenant governor during the Union occupation. The three of them don’t trust one another, but in order to survive the challenges of the wilderness, they must find a way to work together. Yet Coyote has a way of changing people…and once they encounter the river horses, nothing will ever be the same again.

  A tale of adventure, suspense, and romance, The River Horses is the latest chapter of an epic by a Hugo-winning author.

  The River Horses Copyright © 2007 by Allen Steele.

  All rights reserved.

  Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2007 by Ron Miller.

  All rights reserved.

  Interior design Copyright © 2007 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  ISBN

  978-1-59606-132-3

  Subterranean Press

  PO Box 190106

  Burton, MI 48519

  www.subterraneanpress.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / Chapter 3 / Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6 / Chapter 7 / Chapter 8 / Chapter 9 / Chapter 10 / Chapter 11 / Chapter 12 / Chapter 13 / Chapter 14 / Chapter 15 / Chapter 16 / Chapter 17

  The shed’s wooden doors rumbled as they were pushed apart by a couple of proctors. Early morning sun flooded the barnlike interior, causing Marie to raise a hand to her eyes. About thirty yards away, her brother walked up the dirt path that would lead him back to town. For a moment she thought Carlos would turn to wave goodbye, but he’d turned his back upon her, and there was nothing more to be said between them.

  The proctors finished opening the vehicle shed. Neither of them spoke as they turned toward her, but the one on the left tucked a thumb in his gun belt, his hand only a few inches from the butt of his holstered flechette pistol, while his companion nodded toward the skimmer parked behind her. A wayward grasshoarder fluttered into the building; Marie’s eyes followed the small bird as it alighted upon the floodlight rack mounted above the glass hemisphere of the hovercraft’s cockpit. Then Lars started the twin duct-fan engines; alarmed by the abrupt roar, the grasshoarder flew away.

  “Time to go, Ms. Montero.” Manny loaded the last crate of supplies aboard the skimmer; grasping the hatch-bar of the starboard cargo bin and pulling it shut, the savant walked over to her. “We have to leave.”

  Marie didn’t respond. Instead, she glanced back toward where she’d last seen Carlos, only to find that her brother had already disappeared into the tall grass that lay between Sand Creek and Liberty. She’d expected him to watch her leave, at least; finding that he wasn’t going to do even this, she felt something cold close around her heart.

  “Ms. Montero…”

  Something touched her left shoulder; looking around, she saw that Manny had laid one of his clawlike hands upon her. “Get away from me,” she snapped as she tried to swat it away. The four-fingered claw was made of ceramic carbon, though, and was hard as steel. Flesh met unresisting metal, and she winced in pain.

  “Sorry.” As always, the savant’s face registered no emotion; it was only a silver skull, a death’s head shrouded by the raised hood of his black cloak. His remaining eye, the right one, emitted a faint amber hue; the left one was covered by a patch. His hand disappeared within the folds of his robe. “I didn’t mean to…”

  “Just stay away, all right?” Marie had spent the last several years of her life learning how to hate Manuel Castro; just because he’d volunteered to accompany her and Lars didn’t give her any reason to make friends now. Massaging her fingertips, she stepped around him and marched toward the skimmer. Within the cockpit, Lars waited for her, his face impassive as he kept the engines at idle. Marie glanced up at him and he gave her a quiet nod. No point in standing around, and they had no choice; it was time to go.

  She was about to mount the ladder to the skimmer’s middeck when Chris Levin came up behind her. “Marie…”

  She paused, her hands on the ladder’s bottom rung. The Chief Proctor held out a satphone, wrapped in a waterproof catskin packet. “In case the com system goes down,” he said, his voice barely audible above the muttering engines. “Don’t use it unless…”

  He stopped, not needing to finish the rest: Unless you’re in so much trouble that you can’t get yourselves out of it. Then we might come get you, but only if it’s a life or death situation. Otherwise, you’re on your own.

  She wondered if he was embarrassed by what was happening here. After all, he himself had been made an outcast once, many years ago. Marie took the satphone, hooked it to her belt. She thought to say something, then realized that any words from her would be pointless. Behind Chris, another proctor watched her; his eyes were hidden by a pair of sunglasses, yet his expression was unkind. Not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of hearing her beg forgiveness, she simply nodded. Chris gave her a tight-lipped smile, then offered his hand. Marie chose to ignore the gesture, though; the last thing she wanted was belated sympathy from her brother’s best friend. Turning away from them, she grasped the ladder rungs and climbed up onto the skimmer.

  The top hatch was open; she climbed down into it and, ducking her head, clambered through the narrow aft compartment into the cockpit. The skimmer was an Armadillo AC-IIb, a light assault vehicle left behind by the Union Guard after the Revolution; there were four seats within the bubble, two forward for the pilot and co-pilot, two in back for the gunner and engineer. The 30mm chain gun and rocket launchers had been removed, though, and only a few capped wires showed where the weapons-control panel had been dismantled. Seeing this, she wondered whether the skimmer’s armament had been taken out before now, or if the magistrates had decided that they didn’t want to risk giving her and Lars enough firepower to level most of the colony. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Ready to go?” Lars glanced over his shoulder at her. Marie didn’t say anything as she squeezed past him, making her way toward the bucket seat on the right forward side. “Okay, then let’s go.”

  “You’re not forgetting someone, are you?” Castro’s leaden footfalls had been lost in the growl of the idling engines; Marie looked around to see the savant’s head and shoulders emerge through the hatch leading to the aft compartment. “I’d be insulted if you did.”

  Lars didn’t reply, yet his hands fell from the control yoke and his head fell back on his neck. “I wouldn’t be…never mind.” Then he turned to look at the savant. “Look, we’re going to get along fine if you’ll just keep your mouth shut.”

  “My mouth is shut, Mr. Thompson.” Castro’s voice emerged from the vocoder grille on the lower part of his face. “I wouldn’t have it any other way…and you?”

  Lars slowly let out his breath. He turned back around, but when he grasped the yoke again, Marie noticed that the knuckles of his hands were white. “Keep pushing it,” he murmured. “Just keep pushing it…”

  “Let’s just go, okay?” Through the curved panes of the canopy, she could see the proctors watching them, their hands never far from their sidearms. Chris had stepped away from the vehicle; she briefly met his eye, and saw that any vestige of their childhood friendship had been lost behind
an implacable mask of authority. Suddenly, she was sick of Liberty, and everyone who lived here. “C’mon. I just want to get out of this place.”

  A grim smile crept across Lars’ face. “Your wish is my command.” He reached to the twin throttle bars, gently slid them upward. The engines revved to a higher pitch, and the hovercraft rose upon its inflatable pontoons and began to ease forward…and then, obeying a sudden, violent impulse, Lars shoved the bars the rest of the way into high gear.

  “Hang on!” he yelled, as the skimmer lunged for the shed doors.

  The proctors standing at the entrance were caught by surprise. For a moment, they simply stared at them in shock, then they threw themselves out of the way. Marie caught a brief glimpse of the proctor to the right as he tripped over a barrel and fell to the concrete floor. For a moment, she thought Lars would run over him, but the proctor managed to scramble out of the way before the Armadillo swept out of the shed.

  “Yeee-haaah!” Lars’s rebel yell reverberated within the cockpit, almost drowning out the engines. “Run, you sons of bitches! Run!”

  Once the skimmer was clear of the shed, he twisted the yoke hard to the right, aiming for the nearby creek. Pieces of grass and flecks of mud spattered the bottom part of the bubble; Marie clung to her armrests as her body whiplashed back and forth in her seat.

  “Gangway!” Lars shouted. “Mad driver! Run for your…!”

  “Stop it!” Marie reached forward, grabbed the throttle bars. “Stop it right now!”

  She yanked the throttle back in neutral. The back end of the skimmer lifted slightly as it coasted to a halt, less than a half-dozen yards from the creek. Through the tall grass, she caught sight of a canoe drifting near the shore; two teenagers, neither much younger than she or Lars, stared at them in horror, their fishing poles still clutched in their hands. In another second or two, Lars would have mowed them down.

  Lars’s laughter died, the ugly amusement in his eyes suddenly turning to frustrated anger. “You said you wanted to get out of here,” he said, grabbing her hand and trying to pry it away from the throttles. “I was just doing like you…”

  “That’s not what I meant!” Wincing against his grasp, she wrapped her fingers more firmly around the bars. “I don’t want to leave this way,” she added, speaking more softly now. “I just want to…” I want to come back some day when no one is afraid of me anymore, or at least when my own brother can look me in the eye. “Just take it easy,” she finished, struggling for words that might get through to him. “Show a little class, y’know what I mean?”

  Dull comprehension crept across her boyfriend’s face. “Yeah, sure,” he murmured. He released his grip from her hand, and it wasn’t until then that she realized how much he’d hurt her. “Just take it easy,” he said, repeating what she’d said as if the idea was his own. “Show a little class.”

  “That’s it.” Marie let go of the throttles. “Be cool. That’ll really bug ’em.”

  The outlaw smirk reappeared on Lars’s face. He laid his right hand on the throttles again, and for a moment Marie thought he’d jam them forward once more. But instead he eased the bars up just a half-inch, and the skimmer responded by sluggishly moving forward. The teenagers in the canoe had already paddled out of range by the time the Armadillo entered the narrow river; there was a mild splash as the pontoons drove water against the cockpit, rinsing away torn-up grass and mud.

  “So,” Lars asked, “which way you want to go?”

  “To…” Marie hesitated. “I don’t know.” She pointed downstream, south from where they were now. “That way, at least until I can get our bearings.”

  “Our bearings?” He glanced at her. “What, you don’t know where you are? I mean…”

  “Just go that way, okay?”

  She pushed herself out of her seat. Castro’s skeletal face raised slightly as she brushed against him; for a brief instant, as the multifaceted ruby of his right eye gleamed at her, she caught dozens of tiny reflections of herself, each tinted the color of diluted blood. Yet the savant said nothing as she ducked her head to make her way through the aft-section hatch, and anything else Lars might have said to her was lost in the thrum of the skimmer’s engines.

  The day was a little older when she climbed out through the topside hatch. Grasping the slender handrails, she stood upon the middeck, feeling the engines vibrating beneath the soles of her boots as she gazed back the way the way they’d just come. The wood-shingled rooftops of Liberty were already lost to her; she caught a last glimpse of the grange hall, the tall mast of its adjacent weather tower rising above the treetops. A minute later, the faux-birch cabins and shops of Shuttlefield went by; the shadow of Swamp Road Bridge fell across her, and Marie looked up to see a little girl, not much older than she herself had been when she’d come to Coyote, waving to her from its railing. Marie lifted her hand to wave back, and the girl beamed at her, delighted to be acknowledged by a woman traveling down Sand Creek, bound for glories that she could only imagine.

  Marie stood on the deck until the last vestiges of human civilization disappeared behind her. Then, wiping tears from her eye with the back of her hand, she climbed back down the hatch.

  From the journal of

  Wendy Gunther:

  Uriel 47, c.y. 06

  Today was First Landing Day, our first since the Revolution. I should be happy, but it’s hard for me to join the celebration: we sent Marie and Lars into exile today.

  That’s not the official term, of course. The magistrates are calling it “corrective banishment,” and claim that it’s a more benign form of punishment than sentencing them to a year in the stockade. Perhaps this bends Colony Law a bit, but count on Carlos to come up with a new idea; he didn’t want to see Marie do hard time, so he used his mayoral influence to convince the maggies that his sister and her boyfriend would benefit from being sent to explore the wilderness. And since Marie and Lars are former members of the Rigil Kent brigade, no one wanted to put a couple of war vets on the road crew. Better for them to do something that might serve the community more than digging ditches and hauling gravel.

  I thought Clark Thompson would object. After all, he’s not only a member of the Colonial Council, but Lars is also his nephew. From what I gather, he and his wife Molly raised Lars and his brother Garth as their own children after their parents were killed (never got the full story on that—wonder what happened?). But Clark is as tough as Molly is gentle, and he was furious when he learned that his boy held a man’s arms behind his back while Marie slashed his face with a broken bottle, the outcome of a tavern brawl that should have been settled with fists and nothing worse. Like Carlos, Clark figured that statutory reform was preferable to penal time, so he agreed not to stand in the way while the magistrates sent Lars and Marie into exile…pardon me, “corrective banishment.”

  They may be right. Marie and Lars aren’t hardened criminals, nor are they sociopaths (or at least Marie isn’t—I’m not too sure about Lars). Yet the fact remains that both of them came into adulthood fighting a guerilla war against Union forces. In a better world, Marie would have spent her adolescence knitting sweaters and fidgeting in school, while Lars might have done nothing more harmful than pestering the neighbors with homemade stink bombs. But they were deprived of that sort of idyllic fantasy; they grew up with rifles in their hands, learning how to shoot enemy soldiers from a hundred yards away with no more remorse than killing a swamper. Their first date should have been a shy kiss and a furtive grope behind the grange hall, not a quick screw somewhere in occupied territory, with one eye on the woods and their weapons within arm’s reach.

  So this morning, just before sunrise, Chris had his proctors release them from the stockade. They were marched down to the vehicle shed, where they were given a decommissioned Union Guard skimmer, along with rifles, ammo, wilderness gear, and enough food to last them a month. And then Carlos told them to get lost…literally. Go out and explore the boonies, and don’t come back for six months. If th
ey show up in any of the other colonies—Defiance, Forest Camp, New Boston—they’ll be arrested and sent back here to serve out the rest of their sentence, plus six months, in the stockade. Until then, they’re expected to survey the wilderness and use the skimmer’s satphone to make a report every couple of days or so on what they’ve found.

  I have to hand it to my husband: as solutions go, it’s not such a bad one. The Union occupation pretty much forestalled further exploration of Coyote, or at least beyond what we found on Midland while we were hiding from the Union. Once the Revolution ended, we had our hands full, dealing with the climatic after-effects of the Mt. Bonestell eruption. So nearly eight-tenths of this world have never been seen except from space; the maps we have, for the most part, are little more than composites of low-orbit photos.

  Time to send out the scouts, even if they’re conscripts. Carlos spent several months alone on the Great Equatorial River, so he knows it’s possible to live off the land. And I know how he changed for the better from that experience. He left Liberty as an irresponsible, reckless boy, and came back as the man I was willing to marry and be the father of my child. Why not have his sister and her boyfriend have the same benefit?

  And it isn’t as if they’re completely on their own. Manny Castro has volunteered to go with them. To be sure, this is a calculated risk. Manny isn’t just a savant—he was also the lieutenant governor of Liberty during the Union occupation. Lars even attempted to drown him after he was captured during the Thompson’s Ferry massacre. But Manny is trying to find his place in the world, I think, now that the Matriarch is gone and the Union has fled Coyote…and perhaps Lars should learn what it’s like to live with someone whom he once tried to murder.

  So it’s all very logical, all very sane, all very benign. Everything we’ve done today is in keeping with the sort of society we aspire to create on this world. And yet…I’m still not certain whether we’ve done the right thing. We can justify our actions with our choice of words, yet the fact remains that we’ve just sent three people into exile.