They were big—maybe three meters at the shoulder, and a full seven from breastbone to hindquarters. But they seemed aloof or distracted rather than dangerous. Their baggy skin—mostly a dusty turquoise, with an occasional splash of plum or cobalt—was covered with a mosaic of oblong, flexible scales as big as a thumb. A few of the largest animals sported pompadour-shaped crests between chameleon eyes the size of saucers. There was no tail—perhaps because its value for balance was wasted on a six-legged animal. They had wide, flattened, hippo-like snouts, long necks, and an arched, curiously broad center pelvis that allowed front and back legs to swing along the line of motion without interference from the midsection.
The crew studied them in silence.
“Pretty ugly,” Abbott finally observed.
Fascinating, Satler corrected in Rafa’s ear. Look at the way their eyes move independent of each other.
The other vikings just shrugged.
The team assigned to mining controls began sorting and stacking all kinds of odd-looking gear while Rafa and Abbott unpacked the sequencer. One man made clumsy passes at Chen while he loaded the tranquilizer gun. Heward mumbled under his breath in response to earthside’s silent instructions and headed off to a modest rocky knoll with a transit over his shoulder.
14
“What do you want now?” Bezovnik snapped irritably. “I assume you got your money.”
“Indeed I did,” the disembodied voice mused harshly. “Indeed I did.”
Despite his tone, Bezovnik was in excellent spirits. As soon as he’d completed the arrangements for this last payoff, he’d turned to a scrutiny of viking dossiers and mission logs. He was becoming more and more convinced that somehow, his leak originated planetside. Maybe this conversation would give him a chance to narrow his candidates.
“Well?” Bezovnik finally prompted, when he judged that his blackmailer would expect him to be impatient.
“Now that you’ve actually landed, I just keep coming up with more and more dirt. It’s tough for a concerned citizen like me to live with an uneasy conscience.”
“I’ll bet it is,” Bezovnik spat sarcastically. “How do you manage to sleep at night?”
The speaker barked with hoarse laughter. “Suppose I get a bit more specific.”
“Suppose you do. Might as well air all the dirty laundry before you take me to the cleaners.”
“All right. Let’s start with that thug you’ve got leading the mission.”
“Heward? What about him?”
“You’re letting him get away with all sorts of things.”
“Such as?” Bezovnik kept his voice surly, even as his silver-plated pen hovered eagerly over a notepad. This was one of the angles he’d hoped for. None of Heward’s antics had made the public broadcasts, and most had gone unobserved even by his own team of scientists. It hadn’t been hard to identify a few offenses and prepare lists of planetside eyewitnesses for each.
“Do I have to itemize?”
“Only if you want the tax-free donation. I’m taking the position that he’s innocent till proven guilty.”
“That’s a laugh. The guy’s meaner than a pit-bull. You can’t have him threaten the rest of the crew with a gun every time he gets the urge.”
Bezovnik crossed several scientists’ names off his list. They hadn’t been serious suspects anyway, but it was nice to be sure.
“And that pistol-whipping was totally uncalled-for.”
“I can’t argue there. But our vikings know they’re not signing up for a picnic in the park.”
“Well, you’ve still got a legal responsibility to enforce the law.”
“What are we supposed to do, wave a magic wand and turn them into model citizens?”
“You do have the implants, you know.”
“And the vikings have their privacy. We’re not supposed to tune in after hours except to spot-check.”
“Well, spot-check more often. Fazio just about died before breakfast. How’d you like that to leak out?”
Bezovnik’s pen slashed two viking names and most of the remaining scientists. He looked at his watch and pondered the time lag thoughtfully.
“I’m not too interested in keeping Heward’s name out of the papers,” he responded, careful to strike just the right note of defiance. “And if that’s all you’ve got, you can take a hike. MEEGO’s not responsible for his behavior.”
“The press won’t buy it.”
“I don’t care if they buy it or not. It’s not grounds for disciplining the company.”
“What about Compton?”
“What about it? She hasn’t filed a complaint, you know.” Four more names crossed out. Could his caller really be this careless? But it fit with the theory of a viking informant—the blackmailer would have no way of knowing who had witnessed a given event, other than direct—and limited—personal observation through one set of eyes.
“It’s sexual assault.”
“Are you kidding? The woman actually seemed to be enjoying herself. Besides, it happened before the shift started, when we weren’t monitoring.”
“So you claim. But how did you know what I was talking about if you weren’t listening in?” There was a note of triumph in the throaty rasp from the speaker.
Bezovnik shook his head in disgust. Let his caller gloat; pretty soon it would make no difference.
His viking list was down to three.
15
Julie yawned and rubbed her eyes slowly. It was nearly one o’clock in the morning. According to the program listing on MEEGO’s web site, the first excerpt of Rafa’s broadcasts had been posted forty-five minutes ago, and still her computer screen remained stubbornly blank.
She could hear the twins breathing softly in the next room, the hushed rise-and-fall rhythm lulling against the trickle of water from the eaves of the house. Tomorrow—or rather today, she corrected herself—was Saturday, and Lauren and Kyrie would be up early, excited about a trip to the zoo.
Another yawn.
She debated silently with herself: stay up and wait for a connection, or go to bed and try in the morning? She could leave a cube in the recorder to catch anything she might miss during the night. But somehow, not waiting up seemed like a defeat. How could she go to bed when there was a chance of being with her husband—well, almost ex-husband—for the first time in ages and possibly the final time ever? It felt callous, unfeeling.
The emotion riled as soon as it was cast into words. The man no longer had any claim on her loyalty. She had given it freely, even through the trial when most wives would have washed their hands and walked away. But she had her limits. Everyone did. Besides, she genuinely needed some sleep, after the restless nights she’d been having. Rafa didn’t have to get up at sunrise and fix breakfast and do laundry and watch the girls all day.
She eyed the open box of memorabilia at the foot of the bed. A strange find, that. She’d gone up to the attic to get an extra quilt, and noticed the old-fashioned photo albums lying half-buried under a saddle. Something had drawn her to them—probably a need to remember happier times. So she hauled out the warped, musty cardboard box and carried it down to her room.
Then she’d seen that the albums were from her wedding, and she’d pushed the box aside in anguish, irrationally angry with her packrat father.
A soft beep from the computer ended Julie’s reverie. She glanced at the screen and came instantly awake.
“Stream acquired. Loading codec and buffering data...”
Questions suddenly gone, Julie configured her recorder and walked to the couch with the heavy vike helmet. During contact the body would essentially sleep as her mind’s conscious energy focused on interpreting incoming signals; she needed a place to lie down until she broke the connection.
Strapping the equipment into place, she settled back and sank into an ocean of nothingness. All perception of up and down disappeared, as did her ability to sense the cool metallic hardness of the helmet, the soft yielding of the cushions agai
nst her back, or the ambient noises of the farmhouse. The silence and darkness were absolute.
But more disconcerting than the loss of sight, sound, and external touch was a total lack of kinetic awareness. She could feel no arms, no legs, no body at all. No heart throbbed away beneath her ribs at the edges of awareness; no steady tightening and relaxing of the diaphragm breathed a hint of lungs or respiration. No teeth, no tongue, no lips gave feedback with attempted speech. Many people speculated that this moment of utter unconnectedness was a faithful facsimile of death.
And then, with dizzying abruptness, the world came to life around her in a riot of sound and sensation. A dozen, a hundred perceptions burst into her mind, each clamoring for an organizing frame of reference. Although she had been through it before at vids, Julie always hated the mental muddle that accompanied the first lurch of connection.
Gradually she made sense of the new world she had entered. She was seeing and hearing, touching and smelling through Rafa’s mind now, and she was astonished at the strangeness.
Most people who received vike transmissions elected to screen out all but the most relevant sensory data from the viking. In vids, audiences typically activated visual and auditory feeds, plus a limited tactile affinity that allowed perceptions of hot and cold, tension and comfort. Other sensations such as hunger and pain were conveniently omitted, making the “vicarious experience” of a modern vid as much an imaginative idealization as movies from Hollywood’s golden age had been.
Even in planetary exploration, the majority of data produced by a viking was ignored by those who linked in. Researchers had little desire to experience the symptoms of an exotic alien disease or itch helplessly as virtual beads of sweat rolled between borrowed shoulder blades.
Julie, however, had decided to be with Rafa as literally and as completely as possible. She had set her equipment to relay everything. His imagery settled now into her mind with an overpowering taste of foreignness that fairly took her breath away. It was amazing to think that she could know someone like she knew her husband, yet be so ignorant of what being him felt like.
How could she not have understood that he was so tall? She felt like she had suddenly grown a dozen centimeters. And she focused in wonder on the contours of his face, only fleetingly perceptible at the edges of his field of vision. His nose was straighter than hers, and longer. His eyebrows arched lower and more thickly than her own.
The color of his eyelashes when he blinked—a brief cloud of black, instead of the tenuous copper that she was used to—it was all so startling.
He spoke briefly. His familiar but long-unheard voice rang with a tenor resonance she had never noticed before; his tongue brushed against teeth less straight and farther forward than those in her own jaw; and she felt a painful twinge below the right ear that would have made her wince if she had been herself.
That would be the TMJ problem Rafa had complained about for years. The eroding cartilage at the fulcrum of his jaw had caused chronic headaches; Julie had given hundreds of neck massages, had kneaded the hard muscles along his scalp until her own fingers throbbed, without ever knowing what it felt like.
Now Rafa was bending to lift a heavy metal crate of some sort. Julie felt the bunching of dense quadriceps and the bulge of muscles in his back and shoulders. She observed the weight of it pull against her arms and laughed at the ease with which it rose from the ground. Had he been lifting weights in prison?
16
“You seem to be having an implant malfunction.” The earthside engineer’s voice had been replaced by a deeper, more guttural one.
Heward set down the gear with a sigh and tapped at his wrist display. “So I do. All my readouts are wacko.”
“We’ll have to take you offline for a little while to recalibrate and run some diagnostics.”
Heward shrugged. “Go ahead.” He sank ungracefully into a loose-jointed squat and squinted in the glaring sunshine. The bio team was several hundred meters away now, slowly approaching the herd of weird-looking reptilians. He watched them idly, a bored expression playing across his features. In a moment, the voice inside his head was back.
“Ready to earn your paycheck?”
Heward’s lip curled disdainfully. “I always am, Bezovnik. You finally decide what you want me to do?”
“We’re about to change the mission.”
“What do you mean—different objective or different location?”
“Both.”
“Someone coming to pick us up?”
“Same planet. We’ll have you abandon the module and ferry everything by skimmer.”
“Can’t carry the big stuff that way. And without the module the attrition rate’s going to be nasty.”
“You’ll be well paid.”
“How well?”
“Hundred thousand a day.”
“Five. And unlimited stimulation.”
“Don’t haggle with me, Heward. I could have you locked away for good.”
“Not without getting your own hands plenty dirty.”
There was a pause.
“Two. I’m a busy man, Heward, and you’re not indispensable.”
“Five.”
“Three. And the stimulation. I go any higher, and eyebrows start twitching with our auditors.”
Heward shrugged. “Have it your way.” He leaned back into the grass and stared at the billowing clouds overhead.
Bezovnik tried to sound exasperated but came off smug instead. “Glad that’s settled. Now let’s talk business.”
“I thought that was business.”
“That’s a part of it. But first we’ve got to tie up some loose ends.”
“Such as?”
“A certain crewmember who won’t survive the day.”
Heward sat up and began a half-hearted assembly of the tripod for his transit. “I’m listening,” he finally prompted.
“Orosco can’t be around for the rest of the mission.”
Heward’s hands became motionless, and a slow smile spread over his face. “Why him?”
Bezovnik laughed. “I knew you’d be happy. Never mind why. That’s irrelevant.”
Heward went back to his work. “How do you want me to do it?”
“I’m thinking that he’s walking dangerously close to those hexapods right now. Don’t you agree?”
Heward scanned across the open prairie briefly, then closed his eyes in thought.
“And I’m thinking that you have your pistol handy and your implants are offline.”
Very slowly, Heward began to nod. “Amazing coincidence, when you come to think of it.”
Bezovnik chuckled.
17
Julie’s heart beat faster as Rafa approached the strange six-legged animals. Her feed didn’t relay the voice of his earthside control, but from Rafa’s responses she guessed that he’d been ordered up close to tranquilize one of the beasts. To say that the move seemed stupid would have been a serious understatement. Suicidal was more like it.
The animals looked calm enough, but who knew how that would change when one gave a startled yelp and rumbled to the ground like a ten-ton sack of potatoes? For that matter, why expect the paralyzing drug to have any effect at all on an alien nervous system? Maybe the dart would do nothing except infuriate Rafa’s target. That could not be good.
The familiar smell of dust and hot dry air came to her nostrils, tinged with a gamy, slightly rancid strangeness that presumably emanated from the herd. Rafa continued to pace calmly forward. She caught the buzzing of insects and saw the hides of the nearest animals twitch with surprising mobility to keep the parasites at bay. A horse-sized calf lifted its blunt, three-toed feet and hopped closer to protective adults.
She gave up the battle with unheeding legs and forced herself to stop gritting virtual teeth. Rafa was kneeling now, sighting along the bloated muzzle of the tranquilizer rifle. Without looking he extended a finger and flicked off the safety, then made feather-soft contact with the trigger. The crosshair
s on his scope traveled carefully along a scaly torso, over a front shoulder, and settled rock-steady on a softly pulsing stretch of neck where an earthborn animal would have the jugular.
Never one for death-defying amusement park rides or heart-stopping vids, Julie steeled herself and gave a mental wince.
With no warning a sudden high-pitched squeal floated eerily from the far side of the herd. Julie felt Rafa’s half-bent finger relax as the neck disappeared from his scope and dozens of grazing animals reared up on their back four feet, craning to get a look at the disturbance.
An alarmed lowing rippled through the herd, and then another squeal, higher and more desperate this time.
“What’s going on?” shouted one of the nearby vikings.
But Rafa had already rotated and was thrusting booted feet into a sprint. He’d spent enough time on a ranch to know what was coming. “Get away!” he yelled hoarsely as grass whipped against his thighs. “Get away!”
Julie’s view bobbed in dizzying rhythm as Rafa swerved around chest-high bushes and adjusted his stride to variations in the terrain. She could feel him angling to the left and caught disjointed, momentary glimpses of a massive boulder a couple hundred meters away. He passed one crewmember who was just beginning to scramble out of a crouch and screamed an incoherent encouragement over his shoulder.
Behind, an ominous thunder rumbled and began to swell. Rafa cast away the rifle without a pause and lengthened his stride. The air was whistling through his clenched teeth, and Julie could feel the see-sawing tension across shoulder and pectoral muscles as his arms pumped savagely and his heart galloped in unison.
He stumbled in a small depression, staggered momentarily.
“Come on,” Julie groaned helplessly. “Come on, Rafa.”
The rock was still fifty meters away.
Forty.
Now even bellow-like breathing noises became inaudible under the pounding, pulsing drum of thousands of heavy feet. The sound broke in runaway crescendo across Rafa’s shoulders and battered his ear drums like a relentless hurricane.
Viking Page 9
