Viking (11 page)

“Where do you want the sequencer?” he asked out loud.

Satler echoed like a cheerful phantom in his ear.
Take it out to the skimmer and
strap it someplace where it can’t fall off. We won’t need it until we unload
again.

“And when will that be?” Rafa grunted as he stomped into the sunshine, failing to
mask his annoyance. On the deck of the skimmer, Abbott heard him and looked up in
confusion. None of them were accustomed to this strange game in which people were
continually speaking aloud in random snatches.

Sorry. I guess this morning’s briefing focused more on protocol than agenda. The
mining team’s supposed to get some soil samples and seismic imaging out on the plains
to the southeast. They think they’re onto petroleum deposits or something. Since they
need the large skimmer to carry the equipment, Edvardsen said the biology folks could
tag along to check animal populations and collect more genetic samples.

“How are we all going to fit?”

Well, meteorology’s headed down to the coast in the smaller skimmer, and some of
the geology group’s riding into the mountains on a robot. So not everybody’s
going.

Rafa slid his heavy carton onto the galvanized deck and vaulted up to secure it with
nylon straps. After seeing a pufferbelly play with their mining machine like a toy, he
wasn’t eager to get up close and personal with any of the larger fauna. He doubted the
others were all that thrilled either. But MEEGO wanted data about everything under this
strange alien sun, and there was no use protesting.

Nickerson and Whemper are both feeling better.

“That’s good.” There was soft but genuine relief in Rafa’s voice.

Doctors think it was just a boring old bug from Earth.

Rafa nodded and straightened up, rubbing the small of his back.

“What now?”

Go grab the sampler kit and tranquilizer rifle. Manifest says they’re in
G-3.

“Why the rifle?”

We’re going after some herd animals today. Where we’re headed it’s a lot like
African savannah. Satellite recon shows some heavy six-legged herbivores about the size
of an elephant—hexapods, we’re calling them—plus smaller browsers like antelope and
bovines. Hard to see in low res, but they look reptilian, mostly.

“You mean you want us to bring down a lizard the size of my living room and then
walk up to borrow a blood sample? What if the tranquilizer doesn’t work? What if
they’re aggressive?”

It’s a risk. But it’s no different than back here on Earth. Half the time you
don’t know whether the dart penetrated very well or stayed in. Just have to wait and
see what happens and be ready to run like the wind if what you hit turns out livelier
than you thought.

“That’s a comfort,” Rafa observed wryly.

* * *

Heward finished the pre-flight checks about the same time Rafa returned with a final
load of equipment.

“Everybody up. Time to head out.”

Rafa climbed into the glass-enclosed portion of the cockpit and stopped at the
hardness in Heward’s eyes.

“Don’t have room for everyone,” Heward said. “Why don’t you grab some straps on the
deck?”

Rafa shrugged and dropped back to the grass. His cheek and nose still throbbed from
last night’s violence. But the look of amazement and confusion on Heward’s face—and
Fazio’s, for that matter—when he pompously hauled the bloody-throated man down the hall
for an inspection of the cargo hold—it made Rafa’s secretive labors doubly sweet. Now
it was tempting to remind Heward about the copilot rule, just to make him eat crow
again. Rafa was a better pilot anyway, according to pre-mission testing.

It wouldn’t make any difference, though, especially after the scene with Compton
coming out of the shower this morning. Echoes from Heward’s abusive attack on a
slow-to-rise Fazio were still bouncing off the walls when she’d bellowed her own
accusation. Someone—probably Whemper—had stolen her clothes for kicks; Rafa hardly
endeared himself when he retrieved them from Heward’s bunk and tossed them down the
corridor in disgust. Then the perverse woman had snickered a thanks every bit as
sarcastic as everyone else’s, and proceeded to clothe in full view of half the
unblinking crew, to a chorus of catcalls.

Well, he certainly couldn’t claim surprise that people were behaving like
barbarians. He’d signed on the dotted line.

Abbott was groaning as he popped the remains of a ration bar in his mouth and rolled
painfully to his knees. In the muddy shadows of the module, Compton looked up as she
zipped her heavy worksuit. “Got time to take a pit stop?” She still seemed to be
enjoying the residual interest from her exhibitionism.

Heward’s eyes narrowed. “We did five minutes ago.”

Compton shrugged. “I’ll save it then.” She slipped gracefully into the cockpit and
stretched supple arms in feline laze, fully aware of Heward’s steady appraisal. Behind
her, half a dozen other crew members clambered into the cockpit. Another two assumed
positions next to Rafa, on the open cargo deck, and wrapped wrists around restraining
straps for support.

They rose in a pulsing gush of wind and fumes, the coppery outline of the module
quickly dwindling into the swath of the mud slide. Overhead, scimitar rings sliced the
morning sky, tapering to a razor-thin line as they disappeared behind the mountains.
Mist floated beneath them as they shot over low-lying jungle, obscuring unknown
creatures whose hoots and calls drifted upward. The faint odor of distant ocean swelled
and receded again.

The ride was bumpy; their skimmer wasn’t built for fast or smooth travel, but even
heavily burdened it generated a hundred-kilometer-per-hour slipstream.

As they skirted an approaching mountain, the terrain fell away into a large
bowl-shaped valley. Glancing down from eight hundred meters, Rafa felt for an instant
like a migratory bird traversing the Minnesota boundary waters: the ground seemed to be
covered with lakes and ponds. But why the strange colors and perfectly circular
shapes?

At the sound of whirring engines washing across the valley, the ponds began to
shimmer and surge skyward. In a moment they became recognizable as pufferbellies, some
so massive that Rafa’s sense of scale was momentarily stymied. It was an awesome sight;
the entire floor of the valley seemed to be lifting to greet them. The crew had seen
one of the creatures in Rafa and Abbott’s visual feeds, but this was a first personal
encounter for most. They gazed in open-mouthed astonishment.

But there was no time to enjoy the startling beauty of the image; the skimmer was
hurtling forward, directly into the path of the gigantic creatures. With a low ceiling
and limited maneuverability at high speeds, the skimmer was in imminent danger of
collision.

They were fast enough to pass safely over the first ascenders, but a second wave of
pufferbellies soared so rapidly that Heward was forced to backthrottle and bank in a
steep cut around them, tilting the deck at a crazy angle. Rafa clutched to the taut
packing straps, the muscles in his arms and shoulders rippling beneath bronzed skin.
One of his companions slipped, blew down and to the lee, and then caught himself at the
last minute, his feet dangling ominously into rushing emptiness.

The expanse of a pufferbelly’s midsection rushed by, mere meters over the skewed
deck. Rafa caught a glimpse of scaly yellow on its bulging skin. For a split second he
thought he also saw dark shadows on the far horizon through the translucence of its gas
sac.

Then the curve of alien flesh rolled away again in a blur, and the skimmer righted
itself.

“Everyone okay?” Heward shouted over his shoulder.

Rafa’s companions swore fervently and made no answer in the wind.

Thirty minutes later they landed on a plain of chest-deep grass dotted by an
occasional tree, within easy walking distance of a herd of the so-called hexapods.
Disturbed by the sound and wind of the skimmer’s descent, the animals milled
uncertainly for a few moments before settling back into a rhythm of steady grazing.

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.

“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.

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.