Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  Finally the bodybuilder flung his victim away. Whemper spun half-conscious into the bulkhead and sank to his knees, gasping raggedly for breath and clutching his throat. Nobody moved to his assistance.

  “The name’s Fazio, not Bronx,” sneered the big man. “But today I’m feeling generous. Lucky for Whemper. Lucky for you.”

  Heward gave him no time to react. His fist flashed out in a blur and crushed the man’s voice box. An instant later, Heward’s knee caught him squarely in the groin with enough force to lift him off the ground. Then a swiftly descending elbow hammered down on his shoulder, and he collapsed.

  Heward wasn’t even winded.

  He smiled grimly at them as he walked over to pick up his gun. “There’s a reason why I’m in command, you know. It’s because I’m meaner and smarter and stronger and faster than the rest of you. If you ever begin to doubt that, I’ll be happy to set you straight. Or you can ask Bronx or Fatso or whatever his name is.”

  He jerked a thumb at Chen, who knelt with her medikit. Fazio wasn’t breathing right. Rafa turned away as Chen swabbed his throat and selected a scalpel.

  2

  Julie Sterlyn Orosco was struggling with only marginal success to give her daughters a bath.

  The idea had seemed sensible enough. The twins had been romping in the hayloft for hours, while Grandpa made half-hearted attempts to monitor their mischief. When they finally traipsed through the rain and into the kitchen, sneezing, dripping, and laced with the warm organic odor of the barn, her maternal instincts had led her directly to the tub.

  But in true child spirit, the girls weren’t ready for play time to end. Lauren, normally the quieter of the twins, had promptly ducked her blonde ponytail into the water and begun to shake it back and forth.

  “Look, Mommy, I’m just like Dolly.” Droplets of water flew in every direction. Kyrie shrieked with delight and began scooping handfuls of bubble bath, which she lobbed despite high-pitched objections. Soon all three were laughing and splashing, and Julie’s jeans and sweatshirt were soaked.

  “I might as well have jumped in with you two,” said Julie, pressing chin-length hair back from her eyes and puffing at the suds dripping from her eyebrows. She pushed up her sleeves and reached for a towel. “Okay, Kyrie, you first.”

  Kyrie plopped out and stood shivering while her mother circled the towel and tucked it in. Then she ducked her chin so her hair could be rubbed and turbaned. In a minute Lauren was also out, and the two girls were chattering up the stairs to find pajamas. Lightning flickered through the window glass.

  Julie surveyed the sodden bathroom with a sigh. She loved her daughters, loved to mother them. These bouts of silliness had become a sort of tradition between them. She straightened the shower curtain and replaced the soap and shampoo, not wanting to admit how often she found such moments draining. Rafa used to be chief giggle-generator.

  Slowly Julie stood, turned off the bathroom light, and pulled the door shut. Rafa. Her almost-ex-husband. She could see his face sometimes in the wide brown-eyed gaze of the twins, in their mannerisms. Every so often she would still roll over in the night expecting to find him there, breathing quietly next to her. When she felt the emptiness she could only clutch his pillow and cry softly so the twins wouldn’t hear her.

  * * *

  She had been standing at the kitchen sink, shucking corn, when Rafa came home from the murder. The twins were toying with one diminutive cob boiling on the stove—their “Rubber Duckie,” they said—as she heard the front door shut and called out a hello.

  In a moment she felt him slip an arm around her waist and nuzzle her softly behind the ear.

  “You smell like a locker room,” she laughed. “How was the meet? Did all the extra workouts with what’s-his-name pay off?”

  Rafa lifted some corn silk out of her hair and kissed her again, on the nape of the neck this time. Lauren and Kyrie, accustomed to Daddy’s romantic interest in their mother, hooted in appreciation. But somehow the lingering touch triggered a premonition of trouble. Julie swiveled, felt his arms tremble, and studied his face. It looked pinched, withdrawn.

  His finger touched her lips before she could voice her question.

  “Saw something sad on the way home. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  Partly reassured, she nodded as he turned to climb slowly up the stairs. When she followed soon after, she found Rafa at the side of the bed, head bowed in prayer.

  In the early days of their marriage her husband’s religious feelings had been a surprise. Despite a thorough Lutheran upbringing, Julie’s beliefs had never felt particularly compelling to her, while Rafa approached day-to-day life in a manner that made words like “faith” and “providence” seem as natural as breathing.

  She grew to appreciate the structure and stability that Rafa’s habits brought to their lives, even if she didn’t always share his perspective. And she was pleased to observe the twins acquiring a faith of their own, drawing on their father’s example.

  At the moment, however, the sight of Rafa intent on communication with a higher power was somewhat unnerving. Just how bad could things be? She knelt and rubbed her palms across his rigid shoulders and waited to find out.

  * * *

  Her mother looked up from arranging silk daisies and dried lavender as Julie collapsed into an easy chair with a sigh.

  “Are they in bed?”

  “Not yet. They still have to brush their teeth. And they’ll probably want a story.” She could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

  A thump vibrated the ceiling.

  “What are you girls up to?”

  “Mommy, Kyrie’s jumping off the bed again!”

  Her dad put down the paper with a heroic sigh. “I’ll go read something to them.” He scooped up a pile of children’s books and winked at Julie as he disappeared through the doorway.

  Julie breathed a sigh of relief.

  “You two have been great. The girls are loving this visit. I hope we aren’t driving you crazy.”

  “Of course not.” Her mother stepped back to assess her handiwork. “We haven’t seen enough of you for ages. First college kept you away, then the Peace Corps. Then you moved to California.”

  Julie felt a familiar twinge at the disapproval in her mother’s voice. They had never seen eye to eye on Julie’s decision to marry Rafa and settle half a continent away; the rest of her siblings were all conveniently clustered within an hour’s drive of the old family farm in Wisconsin.

  Her mother had never said much about her feelings, though. She’d even gone out of her way to get to know Rafa.

  Until the arrest.

  The police had showed up on the doorstep with a warrant, and Julie’s world had crumbled. Suddenly Rafa was unwilling to repeat the story he’d told her the night before, about finding a body moments after a fatal shooting. They had handcuffed him in front of two panicked little girls who were crying for their Daddy, opened the door and walked him right out of their life.

  Julie cleared her throat. “Lauren found the rope swing in the loft. I thought you took that thing down years ago.”

  “Your father wouldn’t let me. Jamie and Christian spend hours on it when they come. I wish they wouldn’t. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

  “Of course it is. That’s the only kind of play kids are interested in.”

  Julie’s mother laughed in agreement.

  The conversation lapsed. Julie gradually felt her weariness melt into a foggy drowse. She was nearly asleep when she realized her mother had asked about something. The zoo on Friday?

  Julie yawned while her brain re-engaged. “I don’t know. We might not even do it. Sandra was thinking about going along, but it turns out she’s got to pick up Jamie from a campout. Maybe we’ll go next week instead.”

  “I can watch the girls here, then. You could use a little time to yourself. Might help you finish up that paperwork if you didn’t have Lauren and Kyrie to worry about for an afternoon.”


  Julie exhaled slowly. “Maybe.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. Sometimes her mother couldn’t leave well enough alone.

  Lydia’s head came up from behind the flower arrangement. “Having second thoughts again?”

  When Julie said nothing, her mother came around the counter and took a seat on the sofa. She leaned forward.

  “Julie, I can understand how you feel. These kinds of decisions are scary sometimes, even when you know what you have to do.”

  Julie avoided her gaze, fingering the fringe of the afghan in her lap. If she hadn’t felt so sick at heart she would have laughed. I can understand how you feel. Nobody could understand how she felt! For all the sincerity in her mother’s voice, the two women were living in different universes.

  It was easy to see her mother’s motivation: Get her daughter to divorce the mistake she’d married so she could put the past behind her and get on with a promising life. Find someone who could be a father to her two granddaughters, someone who would treat Julie right and make her happy.

  Her mother had known Rafa was guilty from the beginning, and that made all the difference.

  She hadn’t seen Rafa in the delivery room, his low murmurs of reassurance drowned by squalls from the tiny bundles he was cradling.

  She had never seen him read Dr. Seuss or give piggy-back rides or take Julie for moonlight walks on the beach.

  She hadn’t heard Rafa croon softly in Spanish while he rubbed lotion into his mother’s calloused hands.

  The man Julie knew could not possibly be the same person who had stalked and executed an FBI agent to stem investigations into his shadowy life of crime. Surely Rafa had simply discovered the victim, as he blurted out that nightmare night when the police hauled him away. So she had insisted. For months.

  But the evidence, in the end, refused to go away. Three eyewitnesses had heard the gunshots from across the street, had picked Rafa out of a lineup without hesitation. Threatening phone calls had been made to the woman’s apartment, each from Rafa’s mobile phone during busy track and cross country meets, when nobody could vouch for the coach’s minute-by-minute activities. Computer experts had salvaged dozens of deleted emails from her computer, all sent from Rafa’s account at the university. The gun was never found, but ballistics identified it as an old Beretta like the one Rafa had kept in their safe—until he inexplicably “lost” it a week before the arrest.

  Julie snapped back into the present. Her mother was still talking.

  “...help the girls. They’ll be so much better off when you put this whole thing behind you.”

  “You think so?” Again the bitterness was there.

  “It’s surprising how resilient kids can be.”

  “Oh, sure, right. I sign some papers and their dad just evaporates like a bad dream.” She could feel the anger welling up inside her.

  “Julie, they need to find a way to heal and have some closure to this whole business. As long as you’re holding on to Rafa, they’ll keep expecting him to magically come home some day. You have to show them how to move on.”

  “Finalizing the divorce isn’t going to make him go away. I’d be lying to myself to think so. And teaching the girls denial won’t help anything.”

  “Look who’s crying denial! You still believe he’s innocent.”

  Julie met her mother’s accusing gaze for a split second, then turned away and swallowed hard. Unwelcome tears cascaded down her cheeks. Yes, she wanted to say, I still believe him. I do.

  But the words wouldn’t come. And that was what was tearing her up inside. When she finalized she’d have to admit it.

  Her mother moved to comfort her, but Julie pushed roughly away and ran out into the driving rain and blackness of the storm, her weeping subsumed by the low bass of thunder.

  3

  Night was falling over the Texas cityscape as Mike Satler pushed out the doors of the monorail, hurried across the platform to an escalator, and rocked from foot to foot while the stairs clacked down to the streets below.

  In a minute he was rounding a corner, bearing sideways through heavy pedestrian traffic until he reached a glass and granite doorway. Passing through without a pause, he headed directly for an elevator, hardly aware of the landscaped atrium with its fountain and potted palm trees.

  The research wing was guarded by windowless doors, arranged airlock-fashion at the mouth of a long hallway. It was a long-memorized routine: tap in this week’s password, stare at the light as it scanned briefly over his retina, wait for the buzzer.

  The rest of the team was there already, arranged in an assortment of postures ranging from ramrod alertness to casual sprawl. He surveyed the room and waited while his gaze had its usual quieting effect. When the background buzz disappeared, he unclasped his attaché case and frowned at the glow of his touchpad’s screen.

  “Erisa Explorer touched down twenty-three minutes ago,” he began without preamble. “They still haven’t contacted us, which is why you’re all twiddling your thumbs. We don’t know what’s happening yet. They came down in a heavy rain; you know that complicates things. Our satellite is receiving the automatic signal from the tracking beacon, and we haven’t had any direct indications of disaster, so for now we hope for the best. Eccles, where are we with the vike feeds?”

  “I’ve got the setup heuristics idling. Soon as they’re transmitting, we should be able to link you in.”

  “Good,” continued Satler. “I’ve already sent out a work schedule rotation to each of your stations. We begin the minute they uplink; that means you’re going on standby effective immediately. You all know the drill. I won’t waste time on the regular procedures right now.”

  He paused for effect.

  “You are no doubt wondering why this mission was scheduled so suddenly. Several of you were on vacation, I understand, when we called you in. And most of you were training for a different planet.”

  “The truth is, I can’t get much of an answer about this abrupt shift in priorities. Scuttlebutt has it that satellite recon found some really spectacular heavy metal deposits in the southern hemisphere. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. But whatever the reason, they’re giving this project top priority. Let’s do our best to succeed.”

  He nodded, allowing the group to break up and head for their personal cubbyholes and the waiting vike equipment.

  Beneath his professionalism, a sense of apprehension filled Satler’s mind. It was not normal to bump a mission so high on the priority list so suddenly. And it definitely wasn’t kosher to keep him in the dark like this about mission objectives.

  Something was up.

  He didn’t for a moment believe his own story about mineral deposits. Probably none of the other scientists did either. If there was mining to be done in the far south, why were they landing near the equator? Besides, if a planet was known to contain valuable resources, usually the first exploratory mission was slowed down while the company fussed about safety mechanisms and just the right scientific expertise.

  Hurrying the timetable of exploration meant even less training than normal for the viking crews, less focused scientists back here on Earth, and poorly researched conditions on the alien world.

  It was like a kamikaze mission for the vikings.

  Maybe it already had been a kamikaze mission.

  What was going on down there? And what could be so important or so unusual about Erisa Beta II that the planet couldn’t wait an extra few months for human visitors?

  * * *

  Three hours later, Satler stifled a yawn, pushed back his chair, and rubbed his eyes. They still were not online. Some of the scientists were beginning to make nasty comments about upper management, and he didn’t blame them. If there was one thing Satler hated, it was playing the hurry-up-and-wait game.

  He’d been called back from the golf course in Dallas out of the blue. “You’ve been reassigned to Erisa Beta II. We need you to postpone your vacation and come back right away,” they had said, as if h
is summons represented a dire emergency. So he’d hopped the next shuttle and been at work inside the hour, his mind abuzz. Had one of their other exobiologists quit? Had there been some momentous discovery? He was the senior specialist in his field; maybe he was needed in an advisory capacity.

  But instead of an immediate assignment, an uplink, or even a much-needed briefing from the powers above, he’d been stuck twiddling his thumbs and trying to placate the rest of the scientists. Some reason to skip a vacation!

  By now he’d nearly worn out the carpet between his desk and the candy machine in their break room, and was feeling like he could quote the meager documentation in the mission profile. There wasn’t anything obviously unusual about Erisa Beta II. It was a close match for Earth in most respects: lots of animal and plant life, plenty of ocean, broad climatic variations, thick, oxygen-rich atmosphere.

  In fact, if it weren’t for the late hour and the abrupt reassignment, Satler would have been fairly cheerful. This planet looked like a biological treasure trove, and his love for exobiology ran deep. He had no family attachments, no serious responsibilities other than his job, so he was content to live on junk food and catnaps, closeted away in his office, while the mission played itself out.

  But he’d had little sleep the night before, and he’d been on track for the low 80’s or maybe even high 70’s in the round of golf that was cut short. Already the schedule for their shift was a mess; who knew how much longer they’d be waiting.

  At least his viking looked promising. Mike had spent man-months linked with out-of-shape drug addicts and poorly-educated criminals—not the most pleasant of experiences. They tired easily, often misunderstood his directions, and were difficult to motivate. He’d even had to resort to a neural prod on occasion. He detested the practice and avoided it more assiduously than many of his fellow scientists—but sometimes it was the only thing that would convince a recalcitrant viking to cooperate.

  Orosco was the first viking Mike had ever seen whose background included a graduate degree in anything, and he appeared to be in superb physical condition. Idly he wondered what sort of experiences would turn a coach and college professor into a violent criminal, and then into someone desperate enough for viking service.