Free Coyote Horizon by Allen Steele Page A

for him on the front steps of their building. Melissa had already heard about what happened at the spaceport; indeed, it seemed as if everyone on the street was watching him as he climbed off his bike and carried it inside. News traveled fast in New Brighton, especially when it came to crime.
    “Not really.” He saw the look of disbelief in her eyes, and shrugged again. “Look, if it’s something that doesn’t have anything to do with me, I just don’t care very much about—”
    “Yeah, well, now it does, okay?” Melissa wasn’t about to let it go. “And Living Earth isn’t a social club. They’re a major terrorist organization . . .”
    “So I’ve been told.”
    “Remember the bombing of the New Guinea space elevator? They claimed responsibility for that. Same for the blowout of the Descartes City dome.” She saw the blank look on his face. “On the Moon, Hawk. Seventy-six people killed. You never heard about that?”
    “Must have happened while I was . . .” On the farm, he was about to say, but stopped himself. He didn’t hear a lot of news while he’d been in rehab, and events back on Earth had never interested him very much in the first place. “Okay, maybe I haven’t been paying a lot of attention. So what’s their problem?”
    Melissa stood up from the table. “Ready to eat? Don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.” He nodded, and she took a soup ladle down off its hook. “Living Earth is a group opposed to off-world colonization,” she went on as she scooped stew into a couple of wooden bowls. “They believe that the money spent to support colonies on the Moon and Mars would be better used to preserve what remains of Earth’s environment.”
    “Little late for that, isn’t it?” Hawk might not pay attention to the news, but he’d learned Earth history in school and knew that lunar colonies had been around for nearly three hundred years, with the first outpost built by the old United States before the Liberty Party took over the country and renamed it the United Republic of America.
    “Yeah, well . . . old grudges die hard, I guess.” Melissa carried the bowls over to the table, then went to the cabinet to fetch napkins and spoons. “They started as a legitimate environmental organization but went underground when their leaders opted for direct action instead of working through the system. Rumor has it that they’re secretly bankrolled by the Union—can’t be a coincidence that all their strikes have been directed at the European Alliance—but they deny that, of course.”
    She put a spoon in front of Hawk, then sat down across the table from him. “Until now, they’ve had nothing to do with us . . . Coyote, I mean. But if you caught one of them trying to get through customs . . .”
    “He was pretty stupid about it.” Hawk tried the stew. As usual, it was a little bland for his taste; he reached for the pepper mill. “Fake name, fake passport . . . nothing the biometrics couldn’t sniff out. Should’ve known better than to think he could get through customs without someone catching on.” He grinned. “I had him pegged the minute I spotted him.”
    “All right, so he was stupid. That’s not the point. If there was one, then what’s to say that there haven’t been others before him?”
    Hawk didn’t say anything for a moment. Like it or not, Melissa was right. Peter Desilitz—or rather, David Laird, his real name—had been caught, but there was no telling how many other members of Living Earth might have slipped through customs. True, he could have been only the first person to try . . . or he could have been the fifth, or the fifteenth, or the fiftieth. Hawk knew better than anyone that customs inspectors didn’t always pay as much attention as they should. On a busy day, they might process dozens of passports. And Laird might have been just the one guy unfortunate enough to have a face that was identifiable through biometric profiling.
    “I don’t know,”