Viking (12 page)

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 against 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?

“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.

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 crosshairs 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.

A series of meteoric impacts on his right threw up clouds of dust from which walls
of ribs and flashing legs and outstretched necks surged.

Twenty meters. She could see the grainy texture of lichen on the rock, the jagged
dimness of shadow along its base. Out of nowhere a towering, scaly limb slammed down in
Rafa’s path. She felt him lunge desperately toward the sheltering granite.

And then nothing.

No sight, no sound, no smell.

No breathing.

No heartbeat.

No Rafa.

Satler sat at the back of the room, his arms folded warily. It was obvious that
Edvardsen was bursting with news. Maybe she’d finally wrung some answers out of
Bezovnik when she came in today, while he himself was still busy running a shift. Or
perhaps she could explain the puzzling technical failures that were hampering their
search and rescue operation after the stampede.

Of course, as far as he could tell, he was the only one who seemed to think it was
important to look for lost vikings. Edvardsen had hardly spent a minute on it in their
handoff, and now that didn’t seem to be the focus of this impromptu meeting,
either.

“Well,” she began, “I appreciate you staying a few extra minutes for this briefing.
I know it’s been a long, hard day for everyone, but I think you’ll feel amply rewarded
for your investment.”

That sort of statement always seemed to get people’s attention.

“I just returned from a meeting with MEEGO’s upper management. They’ve asked me to
discuss an unusual request that affects you all.”

Nakamura tossed a candy-bar wrapper toward the trash can and put his feet up on the
table. “Don’t tell me they want to change our brand of coffee again.”