Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  The message ended, leaving Julie staring out the dark farmhouse window, lost in thought. Could Rafa have survived? He’d been so close to the rock when the signal cut out... But why would MEEGO have lost his transmission, if he was still broadcasting?

  Glancing back at the phone, she saw a second message from Satler. This one was only a couple hours old. She hit play, eager for more information.

  “Mrs. Orosco, Mike Satler again. I don’t intend to be a bother. Sometimes the next of kin to a viking actually has no interest in these sorts of details. But Rafa’s file showed that he was still married...” He trailed off awkwardly, as if uncertain whether he should continue.

  “Well, in any case, I’ve been snooping a bit, and the upshot is that I’m convinced the company is up to something. I quit a few hours ago. Uneasy conscience. I’ve found some more evidence that Rafael is alive. Call me whenever you get this message. If you’re interested.” The screen went blank, but his name and number remained behind for a few seconds.

  Hesitantly, Julie put down her fork and thumbed the reply button.

  21

  The setting sun, striking his eyelids through rustling grass, eventually woke Rafa up. For a moment he lay there, not remembering anything, puzzled by the bloody dirt on his lips and the cramp in his neck. He blinked and became aware of dryness in his throat and an ache that began at his shoulders and radiated all the way to his toes.

  As he rolled into a crouch, a searing pain shot through his right forearm. He gasped and fell back on his left elbow to take weight off the arm. Gently he probed the ulna, stifling the urge to cry out at the throb the touch provoked. There was a definite break just in the middle of the bone. Skin was intact, but not by much. He felt light-headed and sluggish.

  Using his good arm as a brace against the stone at his back, Rafa staggered to his feet. A handful of hexapod carcasses were scattered across the trampled veldt, covered by winged scavengers. The details of the stampede came surging back. He’d been fleeing the thundering, plunging river of animals. He remembered approaching the boulder just as he was engulfed by the herd, being rammed from behind and hurtling like a rag doll into the lee of the rock. Then nothing.

  Where were the others? Judging by the approaching sunset, the mad dash must have happened hours ago. Why hadn’t anyone picked him out of the aftermath? Surely his implants would have reported him alive and relatively undamaged, would have easily pinpointed his location for searchers. Maybe Heward had figured out a way to leave him behind on purpose.

  He surveyed the grassland carefully, using his good hand to shield eyes from the bright horizon, hoping for any signs of a skimmer or vikings on foot. He saw nothing—just crushed vegetation, muddy tracks around the small stream that bisected the area, and the lifeless bulk of hexapods who couldn’t keep up with their neighbors.

  A profound sense of loneliness descended, bringing a lump to his throat. This was not the aesthetic solitude of the poet—it was a brutal, chilling thunderclap of desolation, a naked aloneness that was all too aware of acres of unbroken wilderness in every direction, vast stretches of continent and ocean untouched by a human footstep, and an eternity of empty blackness between here and home.

  He shouted at the top of his lungs, heard the primal appeal dissipate into azure without so much as an echo, and slumped to his knees, ears ringing in the resurgent silence. The breezes of cooling twilight played with his hair, gusting and subsiding fitfully.

  Rafa remained motionless.

  Gradually, almost unconsciously, he began to pray to dispel the awful isolation. Father in Heaven, he mouthed silently. Tears sprang unbidden to his eyes, and he wiped them away angrily with his good arm. Help me! ¡Ayúdame! A dozen other sentences flitted through his thoughts. He discarded each in turn; this because it was angry, that because it seemed so pitifully inadequate. He was adrift in a whirlpool of overwhelming emotion, too dizzy and disoriented to voice a more articulate cry for help.

  One emotional current was bitter resentment. Ah, what a redoubtable god! Hadn’t he done everything he could to deserve a little divine intervention in the shambles that was left of his life? Hadn’t he begged for mercy, for safety, for a way out of the hell that had begun with his arrest an eternity ago? That this should be his reward—abandonment and a lonely death—was almost beyond belief.

  Swirling under and through the bile was a powerful tide of dread. This was it—the final horseman of the apocalypse, come to claim his cringing prize. Rafa could conceive of no way he might survive any length of time without food, without water, without a weapon.

  What drove the flow of feelings into spiraling confusion was the faith inculcated in Rafa by a believing mother long ago. He’d questioned it as a youth, but ultimately adopted belief in his own right, and welded it deep in his heart. He clung to faith now, instinctively, fiercely. It was his lifeline—the glimmer that refused to let darkness triumph. But by its stubborn persistence it generated a maddening paradox that could only be resolved by killing God or killing his anger. Nietzsche had chosen one road, Job the other. Either way, it made all the difference. And he lacked the resolve to step in either direction.

  For nearly five minutes Rafa knelt, his face flushed, his lips trembling with potential utterance that remained suppressed, his soul convulsed. He heard no answer, but at last there came into his heart a stillness. It wasn’t weary resignation or rigid resolve—just a quiet, unspectacular catharsis that allowed his mind to clear.

  Since he hadn’t been found, Rafa concluded grimly that nobody was looking. If he wanted to emerge from the wilderness alive and rejoin the crew, it was up to him. With a gloomy detachment he observed the struggle for the choicest bits of carrion on the nearest carcass. The ecological equivalent of vultures were screeching and hopping aggressively, posturing with leathery wings and occasionally raising razor-lined jaws to gulp especially large chunks of flesh.

  Definitely red in tooth and claw.

  He wondered why they’d left him alone. Maybe they’d nibbled the virtually indestructible biosuit while he lay unconscious, then moved off in favor of more edible morsels. Or possibly he smelled bad. Maybe predators would avoid him.

  It was a nice thought.

  But it raised a rather nasty question. A feast this big would attract a lot more than vultures back on earth. Where were the jackals, the hyenas, and the lions of this ecosystem? Not here.

  Not yet, anyway.

  Perhaps they were nocturnal.

  Rafa shuddered.

  The first thing to do was to inventory his assets and make some plans before daylight was gone. He clambered awkwardly up the warm west face of the boulder, squatted cross-legged at the top, and began emptying the pockets and pouches in his biosuit onto the rose-tinged granite. They’d cataloged a suit once during training back on Earth, but it had been a cursory scan with little explanation or comment, and he didn’t remember much—so he was surprised and somewhat encouraged at what his rummagings discovered.

  There was a palm-sized pliers-like compound tool that folded out into a dozen combinations of blade, gripper and probe, a small first aid kit, a package of water purification tablets, and a large survival knife in a thigh sheath. He also found a lighter, a palm-sized flashlight, a coil of thin cord, a compass, a collapsible ceramic cup, a signaling mirror, an empty water bag, and a styrocele survival blanket.

  Inside the first aid kit, which was sealed in zippered mylar, was a small note directing him to his online manual for survival instructions. Rafa read the words twice before they meant anything. Then his brain finally clicked, and he remembered the wealth of information at his fingertips.

  He activated his wrist display and scanned its menus with renewed appreciation. Besides complete advice for a variety of medical emergencies, he found a series of satellite-generated maps, a weather forecast, and a flora/fauna database that had been populated by a combination of orbital surveys, his own roving work with biologists, and detailed DNA analysis by sequencers on Earth. It was
hopelessly incomplete, of course, but every scrap of knowledge might be useful.

  Rafa pored carefully over the maps. The GPS pinpointed his location with a tiny red dot. On his wrist he was a mere centimeter from the module—but in actual scale it was over sixty kilometers by skimmer, and probably vastly more by foot. Topographical details matched his recollection all too well; the way home included long stretches of sun-drenched savannah, a river, and a line of steep, densely wooded foothills.

  Thoughts of travel led to ideas of food and water. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and his stomach churned restlessly. No help there; maybe later he’d see if the biology database could tell him anything about edible plants. But he could at least relieve his arid throat.

  He slid awkwardly down to the grass and trudged to the stream with his water bag, wondering about the purification tablets. No doubt he’d be ingesting a generous dosage of alien microbes—if the tablets only worked against terrestrial parasites he shuddered to imagine the consequences. However, he had little choice; he could hardly spend long days hiking through sun-baked terrain without water.

  Kneeling carefully, Rafa clenched teeth against the pain in his broken arm and plunged the container into the burbling water, holding its mouth open with his good hand. He continued to scan the horizon carefully, alert for anything dangerous-looking or human, but seeing nothing new. The current was surprisingly cold and rapid, and the flaccid bag soon swelled full. He dropped in two purification tablets, zipped it shut, then clipped it, still dripping, to a ring on his belt. The instructions said to wait fifteen minutes.

  Again his broken arm throbbed. He immersed it in the brook and sighed audibly. With the other hand he dug through the first aid kit until he found some oral pain reliever, then gulped two of the orange capsules. Without moisture they stuck stubbornly in the throat, and he had to swallow half a dozen times before they went down.

  That task accomplished, Rafa resealed various pouches on his suit and flexed aching muscles, careful to keep the soaking arm in the current. He felt completely weary and depressed, and he dreaded the descending darkness.

  As the bruised muscles and bone soaked, he noted a growth of small bushes leaning out from the bank downstream and gazed at them speculatively. Too green to be useful for a fire—but maybe he could make a splint with some branches. Rafa drew his survival knife and walked toward the near edge of the thicket.

  He nearly stepped on the body. His foot swerved at the last minute, avoiding the crushed skull by centimeters and sending him stumbling and splashing into the slippery shallows of the brook. After a moment he regained his balance and squelched unsteadily out of the ankle-deep water, his jaw locked against rising nausea. A herd of ten-ton herbivores had left little that was recognizable. But it was the tattooed kid—had once been, anyway.

  He looked away, but it was too late. He vomited violently, over and over again, until there was nothing left.

  Finally Rafa wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and stared at the spattered rocks between his boots, trembling as he strove to erase the picture of a crushed and mangled corpse from his mind. The image wouldn’t go, and after a minute he angled toward the bushes again, deliberately staring straight ahead. He suppressed a guilty twinge about leaving the body unburied, especially after his indignant comments to Edvardsen a few days earlier. He’d psych himself up for the job tomorrow, before he left for good. Now was not the time.

  The thicket proved even denser than it had appeared at first glance, and Rafa immediately discarded his vague intention to return to the rock for the night. The tangled branches and finger-length thorns might be terribly uncomfortable, but they offered some protection against enemies in the dark.

  He battled several meters into the underbrush, slashing judiciously with his knife. Once he flushed a rabbit-sized ball of fur that disappeared like lightning and left his heart in his throat. Another time he felt something slither past his ankle and froze for nearly a minute.

  The tough material of his biosuit snagged on thorns but did not puncture, and Rafa was grateful for his gloves. He was sweating heavily by the time he stopped, ensconced in a small opening he had carved in the bramble. He checked his watch. Still five minutes before he could drink anything.

  Then he heard a shout. Someone was calling, faintly, from the other side of the brook. It sounded like they were quite a distance upstream as well, and Rafa couldn’t make out the words.

  Instantly he was struggling back out of his hiding place, yelling at the top of his lungs. He thrashed wildly, heedless of scratching thorns and sharp twigs that left welts on his face and neck. All he could think about was the relief of other human company.

  In a few moments he was crashing free, then staggering into an all-out run along the bank of the stream. He skirted the kid’s body by dead reckoning alone—lingering dusk was fading—and continued to shout hoarsely.

  Now there were answering calls, rapidly approaching. From long habit he disciplined his breathing, synchronizing the whistling gusts with alternate pounding footfalls, deliberately pumping his good arm to maximize each stride. The shapes on the grassland were hazy and indistinct, difficult to make out against the slightly lighter sky where a sprinkling of stars had appeared.

  Abruptly the sound of splashing reached Rafa’s ears. It emanated from a shadowy region where the banks of the stream obscured his vision, and his mind flooded with unreasoning fear. Was this all a trap baited by some cunning alien predator that could trigger hallucinations, a siren’s snare about to be sprung? He skidded to a stop and gulped air quietly, every sense alert for danger, belatedly aware of the target he made for any interested carnivore.

  A moment later the black silhouettes of his fears resolved into two human beings, wading eagerly out of the knee-deep current. Abbott and Chen. They looked bedraggled but relatively uninjured.

  As proximity resolved faces, a sudden silence fell, punctuated only by heavy breathing. Rafa watched the optimism melt from Chen’s lined features, flicker out of Abbott’s eyes as they faltered to a stop in the muddy grass. He wondered if the death of hope showed as plainly on his own face. Clearly they were all anticipating a rescue party, safety, and transportation to the utopic prospect of the explorer module.

  The bitterness was too intense for words, so they just stood there, panting, until Abbott at last broke the silence.

  “Well, Orosco, they say misery loves company.”

  Rafa snorted, the ghost of a humorless smile playing grimly on his lips. “It’s just the two of you, then?”

  Chen nodded. “We made it to some trees ahead of the stampede. Couldn’t do much but wait it out.”

  “You see anybody else?”

  “The skimmer flew by before it was safe to climb down. It was pretty low. Must have been searching. It didn’t notice us.”

  “Some search! I was stretched out in the open and they didn’t find me either.”

  Abbott nodded morosely. “The dust was terrible. For a while I could hardly breathe.”

  Chen stared dully at the ground. “They gave up awfully quick. Think they’ll be back?”

  There was a long silence. Finally Rafa shook his head. “They’d still be around if they were all that interested in finding us.”

  Abbott put his hands in his pockets. “We couldn’t see the skimmer very well, but I think it headed for home after our flyby. We were actually going that direction, following them, when we heard you shout. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Guess it was.”

  “We backtracked quite a ways to get here. We thought maybe they’d left someone behind in case anybody showed up.”

  “What I don’t understand is why they’re not getting our signal from the implants. It should be a piece of cake to home in on us.”

  “Maybe something was damaged. They were parked awfully close to the herd when it all started.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe the skimmer doesn’t carry any homing equipment and they went back to
get it.”

  “That could be.” It was the first explanation that gave Rafa any spark of hope.

  “If something on the skimmer broke, would they be able to fix it back at base?”

  “Depends. There’s a bunch of replacement broadcasting equipment and some basic electrical supplies. But I don’t think they planned on anybody rebuilding microcircuits. Everything’s supposed to be disposable and redundant.”

  “Including us.”

  “Including us. Exactly.”

  “So do we wait around here to be rescued?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to give them till morning. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be traveling at night anyway.”

  “Maybe there’s others wandering around, too. Montaño was away from the skimmer. So was Compton.”

  “Montaño’s the kid with the lollipop, right? He didn’t make it. I found him a few minutes ago.”

  Abbott grunted. “Earthside wanted him to get samples of some stupid flower that was growing right next to the herd. What a waste!”

  Chen sank wearily to the trampled grass. “I think we’re probably it. Compton was on the far side, away from the direction the hexapods ran. Everybody else was close enough to get airborne in time.”

  Rafa unclipped his water bag. “Want some?”

  Chen guzzled gratefully, then passed the container to Abbott. There was a loud gurgle while his dark Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and moisture spilled along his throat. When he was finished Rafa gulped the last few swallows and walked back to the stream for a refill.

  “That come out of the stream?” Abbott’s tone was carefully casual.

  “Yeah. I used some purification tablets. Hope they work.”

  Abbott forced a grin. “Me too.”

  Chen was idly scattering pebbles into the weeds. “So where do we spend the night? I’m not too excited about being out in the open.”

  Rafa shifted position to re-immerse his aching arm as the container filled. “I found a good spot,” he said. “Downstream a ways. Really nasty thicket. It’s definitely not comfortable, but nothing’s going to come in after us.”