Viking (27 page)

After a short rest they pressed on, stubbornly maintaining and even increasing their
pace in a desperate bid to win through by nightfall. More hills came and went, with the
overall elevation rising gradually. The banana look-alikes gradually gave way to more
conifers and celery-stalks. The terrain grew more vertical and rocky, but thinning
vegetation between the mighty columns made progress somewhat easier.

Dusk was fading into true night when they crested a final foothill and gazed down in
relief at the dried mudslide and its precious connections to humanity. The burnished
rings gave off enough light to cast angular shadows from the most exposed corners of
the module. Small evidences of habitation—scattered tools, ankle-deep tracks through
the mud, the imprint of a skimmer’s skids—nearly brought tears to Rafa’s eyes.

Abbott let out a whoop that echoed hollowly in the night stillness, and sagged into
a meager trot. After thirteen hours of relentless march, all of them were beyond
footsore. Chen was swaying with exhaustion, and Rafa half wondered whether her knees
could take another descent right now.

Given the catatonic state of the crew by shift-end, nobody was surprised that their
approach provoked no stirrings from within the module—not at first, anyway. But as Rafa
slipped on muddy boulders at the ragged edge of the slide’s path, he began to wonder
about the lack of vehicles and heavy equipment. Surely they hadn’t moved everything
back into the shattered hold.

By then Abbott was at the door. Suddenly his posture filled with uncertainty.

“It’s locked,” he called out. “And nobody answers when I buzz.”

Chen looked puzzled. “You think they’re all out exploring? Our shifts weren’t
following day and night cycles.”

Rafa sat down in the half-dry dirt and swatted at some circling gnats, looking far
calmer than his companions. “Maybe. Let me see what the scheduler says.” He fiddled
briefly with the menus on his wrist, then looked up, frowning. “They should be sleeping
for a couple more hours. Unless earthside changed the rotation.”

“Then where are they?”

“Maybe they didn’t make it back after the stampede,” said Chen.

Rafa shook his head. “The surveying team was only half the crew. We’d still see some
people here unless everybody else had problems at the same time.”

“Now what?” Abbott said, trying to keep a tremor out of his voice. “Sit around and
hope someone shows?”

Rafa levered himself back to his feet with effort, making no attempt to wipe his
dirty trousers clean. “Now we get in the module. There ought to be food and water in
there. And a safe place to sleep.”

“I’m going to snooze till kingdom come, but not before I get some calories in me,”
said Chen.

Abbott closed his eyes and leaned against the metal of the main hatch. “I doubt
we’ll get the combination. Unless it’s somewhere in the mission database. Why’d they
have to lock everything up?”

“Some cat burglars you two would make,” snorted Rafa. “Come on.”

After exchanging dull glances, the others fell in unsteady step behind him. In a
minute Rafa had descended into the hollow formed in the lee of the cargo hold, and was
worming gingerly through the gaping rent in the thick steel of the hull. The others
followed without a word.

* * *

The module was still filled with sounds of snoring when Rafa opened his eyes to
stare at the struts along the bulkhead above his bunk. For an instant he was confused.
This was not his bunk in H block.

Then recollection flooded back, and he rolled to a sitting position with his toes on
the floor. Across the tilted room, Chen was curled up in a classic fetus position, her
braid circling under her chin in a loose, disheveled tangle. She’d stripped off the
outer layer of her biosuit and left it in a muddy heap at her side; even dry, her
underwear was hardly a triumph of modesty.

Abbott stirred fitfully in the bunk above her. His boots had smeared muddy streaks
along the cushion at his feet, and he looked gaunt and filthy.

In the center of the floor, ripped envelopes and ration boxes were scattered in a
careless heap. Wherever the rest of the crew had gone, they’d taken most of the
supplies. He and Abbott had nearly given up on eating when Chen crowed in triumph and
hauled out the boxes from a dented locker in the hold last night.

They’d dragged everything up to the commons and had a feast. His stomach still felt
bloated, his hands and lips sticky from shoveling peaches and mashed potatoes and
something that vaguely resembled rubbery ham into his mouth. It had all tasted
good—exquisite, even—after two days of hard march with only monotonous dried survival
bars that did little for their empty stomachs.

Rafa stumbled down to the bathroom, his mind on the inverted shower. To be clean
again! But he stopped quickly inside the door, his nose wrinkling. The drain now
clinging so futilely to the ceiling had not been able to dissipate run-off from several
days of visits by the crew; this left the stall enclosure full of stagnant, sweaty,
hip-deep water. Where the partition around the shower turned to doorway, soapy liquid
had spilled over the floor in an enormous puddle. The place smelled like a locker room
ripe with mold and slime and fungus.

Gritting his teeth, he squelched gingerly across the floor and peeked in the stall.
The shower head wasn’t quite submerged, but the murky water turned his stomach. Better
to forego the shower entirely, no matter how dirty he felt.

On a sudden inspiration, he looked back at the sink. The rubber membrane over the
basin had been removed, and the floor beneath it was slick where a slow drip plopped
monotonously. Upside down, it was probably a disaster for washing hands, but maybe it
would service another way.

He returned to the hallway to doff his boots, biosuit and skivvies, careful to leave
the fresh change from his locker in a separate pile, then crouched under the sink with
a barefoot grimace, trying hard to ignore the odor. The splash of lukewarm water across
his neck and shoulders was ample reward for the cramped squat and cockeyed use of
plumbing. The accumulated perspiration and filth washed away.

As he dressed afterward, his mind was filled with questions. Where was everyone? The
state of the bathroom proved that people had been here recently. So why pick up and
leave? He remembered the Halifax colonists, devoured alive by alien locusts, and
shivered. Surely nothing like that had happened; he’d been out in the biosphere,
totally unprotected, for multiple days, with plenty of hair-raising encounters but
nothing quite that ugly.

Why couldn’t they get any signal on their implants? It was like the broadcasts from
the others had simply ceased to exist during the stampede—yet Chen and Abbott were
confident they’d seen a functional skimmer zoom by overhead, a few minutes after the
dust began to settle. Had it come here?

He walked purposefully back to the cargo hold. Judging from the light streaming
through the jagged corner, it was full day outside. Maybe it was even afternoon; by the
time he had finally stretched out last night, he’d felt like he could sleep forever.
Yawning, he squirmed up into the sun, his shoulders bunching with the effort to lift
without brushing against the serrated edges. The new cast on his forearm felt strange
and awkward. Chen had found enough supplies to do that, though there had been no
antibiotics for Abbott.

The day was still and only moderately hot—nothing like the dry bake they’d battled
down on the prairie. He shielded his eyes against the orb overhead and scanned the
surroundings for clues he’d missed at their arrival. Almost immediately he noticed a
rutted trail from the cargo doors beneath his feet to a high spot that had been deeply
pitted with the skids of a skimmer.

They’d loaded the equipment and flown it away, then. It must have taken several
trips; no way could a skimmer handle the weight and bulk of the mining probe and the
backhoe and the rest, plus all the crew at the same time. Obviously they’d found
something interesting enough to abandon headquarters.

Frowning, he considered the communications equipment that he and Abbott had
installed on the hillside. At the time, he’d been too busy worrying about a downpour
and pufferbellies to notice much on its configuration menus. Would it help diagnose the
problems with their implants, or possibly even let him signal to the missing crew?

He trudged uphill, his thighs stiff from yesterday’s brutal march, but the small,
level shelf of rock where they’d anchored the fission battery and broadcasting setup
was empty. He stared at the piton scars in mute frustration. As a rule he rarely voiced
feelings, but this was one of those times he wished his inventory of vulgar adjectives
was a bit deeper. A full minute crept by while his shoulders grew warm in the sun and
the breeze fretted through his half-clenched fingers.

“I wondered if you might have come up here,” said Abbott’s voice behind him.

Rafa pivoted, a wry resignation on his face. “They even took the com unit.”

“I imagine they’d have to, if they wanted to transplant the camp.”

“That means they’re not coming back.”

Abbott shrugged. “So we say good riddance and stick it out on our own.”

Rafa’s eye met Abbott’s, and an understanding flickered between them. But he spoke
anyway. “How long do you suppose we could survive here, by ourselves?”

“A while. They didn’t leave us much in the way of tools or supplies, but at least
we’re protected from attack and from the weather. I suppose we could hunt.”

“With what?”

“Bow, maybe. At least we could make a spear.”

The pair began to walk back downhill. “You want to take on a pack of crabbies with a
sharpened stick?”

“Good point.” Abbott grimaced at his own word play.

“Even supposing we had the means, how would we know what was edible? They took the
bio kits along. And we don’t have any medicine or water purification tablets.”

“I hadn’t thought about water. Doesn’t the module have some?”

“Some. Supposedly it can recycle for ages. But with the plumbing turned on its head,
I’d be surprised if those systems work right.”

Silence fell as they scrambled over a particularly mucky jumble. Abbott looked
troubled. Rafa’s eyes flickered over the terrain, but his focus was elsewhere. His face
wore a look of calm concentration. As they approached the module, he snapped his
fingers.

“The emergency transponder.”

Abbott looked confused. “Huh?”

“The mission manual talked about an emergency beacon or some such on the module
itself. It was supposed to help earthside locate us in the event of disaster, and tell
them we were alive if normal communication got disrupted. The computers ought to be
able to tell us how to turn the signal on.”

Abbott gave him a sidelong glance. “You sure you want to find the crew? As bad as it
might be to go it solo, getting back with that lot could be worse. I wasn’t real
impressed with their search and rescue or the way they handled the stampede.”

In other words
, Rafa thought,
you’re wondering whether it’s safe to be
with the group. Did someone try to kill us, or are we the victims of ordinary stupidity
and indifference?
Outwardly he shrugged. “At least the sorts of dangers we might
face with the crew are relatively familiar. I’d rather see a cobra than step on one
blind.”

Abbott nodded, looking unconvinced. Rafa pursed his lips for a moment, then
shrugged. “Besides, we’ve got to get Chen back.”

“Chen?”

Rafa stopped walking, the crows feet near his eyes deepening in the sharp alien
shadows. His voice sounded strangely quiet. “You’ve never seen video of a joaker dying, have
you?”

Heward wiped the sweat from his forehead with one muscular arm, careful not to
disturb the focus of the cutting laser he was wielding with the other. The rock
continued to emit broiling waves of heat as it reluctantly gave way. Two more minutes
and he’d have an opening—though it would be longer before it was cool enough to pass
through.

Without warning, the disembodied voice in his ear spoke. “You feel fried. Why don’t
you take a break? No point in killing you with heat exhaustion.”

Heward looked around, careful to strip the surprise from his expression. “You don’t
have to ask twice. Mind if I go to the can while I’m at it?”

“That’s fine. I’ll give you five minutes.” There was a tiny clicking sound, like a
mic being switched off, but the
online
status indicator on his wrist only glowed
red for a second. As he powered down the laser and turned toward the nearest stand of
trees, the voice returned.

“We’ve got a problem.”

Heward spoke quietly, minimizing the movement of his lips. Compton was watching him
enviously over the deck of the skimmer, where she had been loading and unloading bulky
equipment all morning. “What’s up?”

“It seems you’re not quite as efficient a killer as I thought. Orosco’s alive, and
so are Chen and Abbott.”

There was a flicker of movement to Heward’s eyebrows, but he continued to march
toward the trees without a break in step.

“How do you know?”

“Somehow they must have made it back to the module. The emergency transponder was
reactivated about an hour ago.”

“Just a quirk. Poltergeist in the wiring.”

“No dice. The transponder is keyed to automatically acquire the identifying signal
of each person on the crew, and beam out a head count. It’s them, all right.”

“But how? I might believe Abbott or Chen made it; they were out a ways. But Orosco
was practically within spitting distance of that herd. You saw. He should have been
flat as a pancake.”

“Montaño probably is, since it’s just the three. But Orosco’s not.”

“I don’t get it.”

Now the voice was edgy with sarcasm. “Obviously.”

Heward stepped through some spiny knee-high bushes that smelled of acetone and
swatted at a thumb-sized centipede clinging to his thigh. It squished like a brittle
grape and left a black smear on his glove as it fell away. The waiting trees closed
around him, hiding the rest of the crew. His voice rose perceptibly. “Even if he did
make it, you can’t just do a sixty kilometer stroll through untracked wilderness.”