Viking (17 page)

“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.”

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.

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. There 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.”