Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  “What’s the matter?” Chen asked, suddenly noticing the way Rafa was bathing his arm in the stream.

  “Think it’s broken,” Rafa said.

  “Let me take a look.”

  “Wait till we get under cover. I don’t want to be out in the open in the dark any longer than I have to.”

  Abbott yawned mightily and rubbed his eyes. “Let’s go. I’ve got dibs on the presidential suite,” he said. “And I’ll kill anyone who wakes me up. I plan to sleep in tomorrow.”

  * * *

  A gray haze hung in the air when Rafa abandoned his attempt at sleep and opened leaden eyes. Breezes were riffling the leaves a few meters overhead. It smelled cool and slightly damp, though there was no question that it would be hot in the full light of day.

  He unclipped the water pouch and took a swig of the tepid liquid, hoping to wash the pastiness from his mouth. Last night he’d been too thirsty to notice, but now the grit and moldy aftertaste were strong on his tongue.

  He forced himself to swallow.

  The sounds of his stirring apparently disturbed the bugs or frogs or whatever they were that had provided background music throughout the night. They fell silent, leaving only the murmuring of the brook and the faint resonance of Abbott’s snoring to break the stillness.

  Since no bathroom was available, he unbent into a stiff crouch and began to crawl out of the thicket, cautiously favoring his newly-splinted forearm. Chen sat up and looked around with bleary eyes.

  “Where are you going?” Her hoarse voice sounded nervous.

  “Out to water the weeds.”

  Chen blinked and yawned as she became more awake.

  “I left you a drink there. Tastes terrible.”

  There was gurgling, then Chen’s voice sounding slightly more alert. “Like a cross between a duck pond and dishwater. Those purification tablets are nasty.”

  Rafa was busy pushing through the last few meters of bramble and tangled branches. At last he reached grass and stood up, pressing his good arm into the small of his back to ease the soreness.

  “You get any sleep?” he asked loudly.

  “Some. You?” Chen was coming out. She swore efficiently as she batted through the thick undergrowth.

  “Not a wink. You’ll have to kick me if I doze off today.”

  Now Abbott’s voice raised querulously. “I thought I said I was sleeping in.”

  “Be our guest,” snapped Chen, still entangled in the bushes.

  “If you two would shut up, maybe I could have some peace and quiet.”

  Rafa ignored the interchange. He was scanning the area now beginning to glow with the smolder of sunrise.

  During the night some sort of carrion-eater had been busy. To the west, the field was broken by a handful of imposing skeletons, picked entirely clean. Surely that was not the work of the leather-winged scavengers. They hadn’t seemed that efficient.

  He looked east. In the extreme distance he saw a sinuous dark band moving slowly against the lavender of snow-capped mountains. It was probably the herd of hexapods, grazing on untrampled fodder with fast-fading memories of whatever had provoked their flight yesterday.

  Much nearer, and framed into silhouette by the brightness of morning, what was left of another hexapod crawled with life. Viewed in profile, it was difficult to make out any details, but it looked like a host of cat-sized creatures were eating their way industriously through the remains.

  But these were not felines. By shielding his eyes against the light and squinting, Rafa could make out weird crab-like forms with bony, jointed exoskeletons, dozens of pincer-tipped legs, and slowly writhing tentacles. They swarmed around and over one another, dust-colored limbs scrabbling against mottled carapaces, with the all-consuming purpose of insects in a hive, bent on gorging themselves.

  There were scores of them—maybe hundreds. Even as Rafa watched, the dead hexapod sagged and crumbled slightly inward under their ravenous onslaught.

  “Nasty buggers.” Abbott had emerged from their den with less noise than Chen, and Rafa started slightly.

  “Piranhas with legs.”

  “Think they’re dangerous?”

  “They don’t look very fast, but I’d hate to get close.”

  Chen came up, tightening the belt on her suit. “Looks like they’ve been eating leftovers since yesterday. I’m glad we weren’t out in the open waiting to be rescued.”

  Rafa nodded. “Wouldn’t have done any good anyway. Nobody came in the night. I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Think it’s worth waiting around?”

  “I say we take off after we get some more water and eat something. We know they’ll be coming from the east. If they fly low they can’t miss us while we’re out in flat open area like this. The sooner we’re back, the better I’ll feel.”

  “I agree with you there,” said Abbott with feeling. “And I’d much rather travel when it’s still a bit cool.”

  22

  They wandered over to the stream and refilled all the water pouches, then sat on boulders along the bank and choked down fibrous carob ration bars—retrieved from the small caches in their thigh pouch—with the eagerness of the truly hungry. The bars had enough calories and nutrition to sustain them, but did little to ease the gnawing emptiness in their stomachs.

  Chen, perched on a shoulder-high rock for maximum visibility, kept up a blow-by-blow description of the gruesome activities of the “crabbies” between bites of breakfast. They had nearly finished the current corpse and would soon be scouting for additional morsels.

  Rafa wanted to be as far away as possible when that happened.

  Out of a strong sense of duty, he gulped a final bite of ration, steeled himself, and trotted reluctantly back to Montaño’s final resting place. There wouldn’t be time for a burial, but at least he could cover the body with rocks or something.

  There were only bones and tattered strips of cloth left. So much for the hope that alien carnivores wouldn’t like terran flesh.

  More nervous than ever, Rafa hurriedly formed a mound with a few stones from the stream and strode back to his crewmates.

  “Let’s get going.”

  Chen slid off the rock and smacked the dust from her trousers. “Montaño?”

  “Crabbies ate what was left.”

  Abbott spat and tossed his wrapper to the ground. “Hope they didn’t like the flavor.”

  “That’s what I’m worried about. We’ve got to get around them, but I think we better swing south and keep as far away as possible.”

  They took off at a half-jog, roughly parallel to the watercourse. The pace took them quickly past the spot where they’d spent the night and toward a flat, treeless horizon. The grass was waist-high in most places, studded with brightly-petaled wildflowers and knee-high ferns, but occasionally patches reached overhead and made their hearts pound with the fear of what might be hiding just out of sight.

  After half a kilometer of detour the crabbies were safely out of sight, and they turned east. Abbott and Chen both slowed down with obvious relief. Rafa, accustomed to regular distance workouts with the cross country team, would have kept up the pace for another twenty kilometers before he tired—but his companions were winded, and he impatiently eased into a walk.

  “Hey, take a look at that.” Chen gestured south with a grimy finger, to where the sky was speckled with thousands of distant green dots. It looked like a ballooning convention—only on a scale several orders of magnitude larger than any man-made event could achieve.

  “Pufferbellies.” Abbott shuddered.

  “You think?”

  “What else could it be?”

  Chen swished through the prairie for a moment while she thought about it.

  “Think they see us?”

  “Probably not. The only time I got close to one, I couldn’t even find the eyes. Maybe they don’t have any.”

  Rafa spoke up. “They have them, all right. Remember how the one reacted when we switched on the miner’s
search lights?”

  Abbott nodded, lips pursed in disgust at the memory. “Yeah, that’s true. But anyway, they’re too far away to pay much attention to us. At least, I hope they are.”

  The sun was completely airborne now, and already the temperature was rising. A dry breeze, smelling faintly of dust and pollen, broke across the grassland in undulating waves. Without breaking stride, Chen kicked at a small mound of dirt—an anthill of sorts—and deliberately looked away from the aerial menace.

  Rafa, a dozen strides ahead of the others, pressed through a particularly dense growth of weeds and abruptly halted.

  “Forget the puffers,” he hissed, his voice brittle with tension. “We’ve got other problems.”

  Abbott and Chen lurched to a stop, hardly daring to breathe. Rafa slowly sank down into the protective obscurity of the brush, keeping his vision glued straight ahead. In a moment he crawled backward, finally risking a crouch as he reached their position.

  “More crabbies,” he whispered. “A big pack.”

  Chen’s eyes widened.

  “How far?” Abbott murmured.

  “Maybe fifty meters.” He motioned for them to follow him and began stealthily retreating.

  “They see you?”

  “Hard to say. I think they’ve got eyes on stalks, like a lobster. Makes it tough to tell what they’re looking at. But two or three of them acted interested.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “Mostly just laying around. There was a crater or hole or something. Maybe a nest.”

  “Think they’ll follow? Think we can outrun them if we have to?”

  Before he could answer, the grasses began to rustle and twitch, and several dozen crabbies scuttled into view, moving with a silent, efficient speed that bespoke deadly intent.

  * * *

  The air whistled with weary regularity as it passed in and out of Rafa’s parched throat. At his side, Abbott’s eyes had long since glazed from exhaustion and now reflected only the most tenuous of connections with consciousness; any moment Rafa expected the rigid mask of terror on his face to slacken as Abbott surrendered to unassailable limits of human endurance and the relief of death.

  A step behind, he heard Chen stumble and recover clumsily.

  The crabbies trotted closer.

  In the initial moments of flight it was apparent that the humans were outsprinting their pursuers. By a hair. For the time being.

  They would survive as long as they kept running. But they weren’t going to get away.

  The crabbies were not just lazy gourmands of the already dead. They were apparently patient and intelligent—and ravenous—pack hunters. Maybe they’d even provided the trigger for yesterday’s stampede. Now that he saw what he was up against, Rafa could hardly blame the hexapods for taking to their heels.

  As soon as the trio bolted, the nasty creatures fanned out into a smooth semi-circle that channeled their flight and tightened slightly with every twist and turn of the chase. Always they were driven through the higher grass, the more broken ground, the sandier soil, while the crabbies scuttled with untiring intensity at their backs.

  Once the heady rush of adrenaline subsided and they realized the attack would not end cheetah-style, the humans had eased out of a dead sprint. Surprisingly, the crabbies remained at a distance, content to get their meal by attrition.

  And get it they would—the pace was brutal for a trained marathoner in top form. Neither of Rafa’s companions could hope to sustain it much longer. They’d only managed this much by sheer desperation.

  Rafa experienced a flicker of grim amusement. There was an old joke about two hunters running away from a grizzly, and one stopping to don track shoes. After all, the man reasoned, he didn’t have to outrun the grizzly—just his buddy.

  But Rafa wasn’t about to abandon Abbott and Chen. They’d come back for him...

  As he scanned for a heavy stone or a branch that might serve as a club, his mind suddenly put two and two together and knew the race’s finish line. The cordon had steadily crowded them harder on the right, pushed them in a counter-clockwise arc that he only now understood to be deliberate.

  They were bending back to the nest.

  23

  Julie took a sip of her bottled water and eyed Satler speculatively. He was a big man in every sense, completely filling the other side of the table, with blunt fingers, ham-like fists, a bull neck, and arms that strained at the confinement of overtight shirt sleeves. Definitely not congruent with her mental picture of the intellectual, retiring scientist.

  She’d had her doubts about the meeting, second-guessed herself throughout the shuttle ride south, but sitting face-to-face, the man exuded a straightforward competence that was reassuring. She hoped his information was worth the trip.

  As if in answer to her concern, Satler drew his chair closer and leaned forward, his elbows resting on the formica and causing the furniture to creak in protest.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been busy since we spoke, and there’s a lot to discuss.”

  “Anything new on Rafa?”

  Satler shook his head. “Not exactly. But I have more information from my hacker friend.”

  “He got in?”

  “Well, he was partly in when I called you before, and already things smelled fishy. That’s why you’re here. But that was just administrative and financial stuff—nothing specific about the day-to-day decision-making for the mission. A few hours ago he hit the jackpot.”

  “Where?”

  “He tapped into the communications subsystem that controls the satellite around Erisa Beta II. Actually found the logs for all the implants.”

  From regular online work as a translator, Julie was familiar with telecommunications in general, but Satler was losing her now. “I don’t understand. Isn’t that what I get in MEEGO’s public broadcasts?”

  “No, you get the outbound signals that the implants produce—after MEEGO filters them for public digestion. These are logs of implant diagnostics, configuration, and offline maintenance. They show exactly when and how a viking’s implants are functioning.”

  “What do they show during the stampede?”

  “Rafa’s transmission ended because MEEGO tuned him out, not because his implants were destroyed.”

  Julie slapped her hands on the table and sat ramrod straight. “But that means he’s still alive!” The relief was obvious in her voice.

  Satler was shaking his head. “Hold on for a minute. We can’t afford to jump to conclusions. For sure it means that Rafa was alive when his transmission ended. Whether he survived the stampede is another question.”

  Julie gradually slumped. “Do the logs say anything about tuned-out signals?”

  “Not the logs themselves. Not once the blocking starts. But apparently the planetside signal processor relays transmissions in a bunch of wavelengths besides the ones allocated to the vikings. The satellite forwards what it’s looking for, and stores extra stuff in a cache that gets purged when it starts to overflow. I’m not sure why. Probably it’s useful for atmospheric analysis or something. Anyway, my friend had a look in the cache and found all sorts of goodies. It hasn’t been emptied since the mission began.”

  “You mean it showed broadcasts that aren’t accounted for by the vikings?”

  “A whole bunch of them.”

  “I don’t get it. What could cause that? Storms, maybe?”

  “Well, lightning generates radio static, but I think the booster is smart enough to filter most of that out. I’m talking about coherent broadcasts. Artificial signals.”

  Now Julie leaned forward in excitement. “Did any of them show up right after the stampede?”

  Satler smiled. “Maybe woman’s intuition isn’t as imaginary as I thought. As a matter of fact, three new signals were logged within a few seconds after Rafa went off the air.”

  “Three?”

  Satler’s face darkened. “I guess you would only know about Rafa. Th
ere were actually four vikings lost in the stampede. That’s another reason that I find the official account a bit hard to swallow. Even supposing their ‘technical difficulties’ aren’t manufactured, it’s hard to see how they could miss four people with any kind of a serious search—and harder still to explain why they would give up so quickly.”

  “So why three instead of four?”

  Satler shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe one of the vikings really did die.”

  “Can’t we just read those new signals from the cache and see if one’s coming from Rafa?”

  Satler shook his head grimly. “These signals were logged when they first showed up, but they’re not in the cache. It looks like they’re being filtered out planetside.”

  Julie’s face fell. “Oh. Well, how much do the logs say about them? Can you tell for sure that they’re viking broadcasts?”

  “Maybe. You understand about codecs?”

  “I know the viking streams are compressed and encrypted. I suppose the codecs you use are a bit different from the stuff I see on documents in my translation work.”

  “Same general idea. Except that viking codecs vary by implant hardware as well as data content.”

  “So can you ID a stream by its codec?”

  “Sometimes. In this case we don’t have a lot to go on, though. There are some clues about the codec that was negotiated to process the streams before they were blocked. I’m trying to trace it right now. Plus get a line on the other stuff in the cache.”

  “What else is there?”

  “Like I said, it’s full. Hundreds of broadcasts, all over the spectrum.”

  Julie leaned back. “I don’t get it. Who else could be broadcasting?”

  “Good question. I’m beginning to wonder if there’s not another viking mission already on the planet. It would explain some of the strange things MEEGO did.”

  “It’d have to be a massive operation if there are hundreds of vikings.”

  Satler nodded. “You’ve got a point. And the traffic patterns are wrong, anyway. Most of the signals in the cache come and go, almost like a conversation. There’s only one other steady-state stream.”