Viking (29 page)

Could they be from Rafa anyway? Her mind said it was a foolish leap of logic—but
intuition cared little for rational inference.

Well, there was one easy way to find out. Gulping the last mouthful of steaming
noodles from the open Chinese take-out box on the end table, she tapped a key and
settled back to find out what a thousand credits had bought her.

The picture flickered and jumped like shadows chased by candlelight, and tracers of
whitish noise shot steadily across the screen; the audio seemed to pulse and pause in a
syncopated buzz that was heavily laced with echo and warping feedback—so it took
several seconds before she could understand what she saw.

Somebody was running through knee-high grass and occasional clumps of taller
sagebrush, hurdling boulders and depressions in the sandy soil. The rhythmic bobbing of
a phantom head on top of a distorted picture made it almost impossible to catch
details. She could see the flash of brown hands and the blur of knees and boots at the
periphery of the picture as the runner planned his route and weaved across the
terrain.

He was working hard, but clearly this was not an all-out sprint. His breath came and
went in bellow-like surges that coincided exactly with every third step. Small clouds
of dust rose with every blurred footfall. Light from the sun overhead cast crisp, tiny
shadows.

Abruptly the runner looked back, and Julie caught her breath. For a split second she
had a view of two other people, each clad in the familiar biosuit of Rafa’s crew. They
were running, too, dusty and haggard and exhausted almost to the point of death. One
was a woman who seemed vaguely familiar; the other was an older viking Julie recognized
from her earlier links to Rafa. Their faces were hardened in fear.

Behind them, a wave of shelled, tentacled creatures hopped forward, clicking
hungrily.

* * *

When Satler used the agreed-upon knock on her hotel room door half an hour later,
Julie opened numbly, without bothering to wipe the tears from her eyes.

After the first clip her mind had been full of images—some real, some painted with
the broad brush strokes of imagination—of Rafa’s battle with the crabbies. She saw his
hands slick with alien blood, plunging a survival knife with desperation; saw him
somersaulting and screaming and kicking. The sound that burst from his throat when he
joined battle had sent chills down her spine and brought a lump to her throat.

So Julie had started the second clip with trembling fingers. By then she knew it was
Rafa, and had seen him survive the encounter relatively intact. The clip ended without
warning as he crumpled in a heap among some stunted trees. But
the crabbies and that bizarre floating thing with tentacles did not bode well; she
braced for the worst.

Nothing prepared her for that other peek at Rafa’s world. Instead of violence, it
was a muted conversation in the flickering dimness around a campfire. Hearing Rafa’s
voice had been heavenly—but his words stole her breath as surely as a physical blow.
Her brain could hardly wrap itself around all the implications.

Rafa acknowledged that he'd been named David?

He really had been in law enforcement?

Oberling was an old friend, not a victim chosen in cold blood?

He’d kept silent about it all to protect his family?

By the time Rafa left the tiny grove, Julie’s eyes were glazed with heartbreak and
regret and pity and astonishment—plus a generous dose of wrath at her tight-mouthed
husband. He could have told her during one of the visits to prison. Surely that would
not have been dangerous. She wanted to weep and laugh and scream with frustration, all
at once. But nothing came out.

So she sat frozen, sharing her husband’s view of rings and starry night but feeling
farther away than ever before. When Chen stole up and touched him softly on the
shoulder, she flinched. One aspect of the woman’s intentions was immediately obvious
from her body language, and Julie felt a terror far profounder than the heart-stop
she’d experienced during the fight with crabbies—this was fear so raw and primal that
it nearly drove her mad. Yet Julie found herself unable to sustain either jealousy or
anger. Instead there was an infinite, ineffable sadness, a regret big enough to fill
the world to overflowing.

A wedding ring glinted in the darkness.

Rafa’s words came through terrible distortion, as from an infinite distance. And
then Chen went away and Rafa sank to his knees on the alien prairie and Spanish was
flowing in soft, choking whispers, and Julie was sobbing uncontrollably. She pulled a
pillow from the bed and sank to the floor against the wall, weak with emotion and
totally blinded by tears.

She felt the line of her chin grow wet and begin to itch at the drip, but the
emotional pain was too paralyzing to move. She wanted to say something, shout out a
word that would somehow wing its way to Rafa and embody all the sorrow and tenderness
and desperation. But her thrashing thoughts came up with nothing. No language could
possibly express what she was feeling.

Her lips formed Rafa’s name and held it, unuttered, while her shoulders heaved and
the sleeves of her sweater grew damp and lights flashed in the night outside her
window. With her thumb she twisted the narrow band of gold that had always felt like it
belonged on her finger.

By the time the knock came, Julie had moved from vocal anguish to shocked silence,
but her mind was still light years away. She didn’t even register the need to check the
peephole before she shot back the deadbolt and let Satler in.

Stepping through the doorway, he opened his mouth to admonish greater caution, but
stopped short at the look on her face.

“What is it?” he asked, sounding concerned.

Julie opened her mouth, closed it again, hesitated, and then looked away, shaking
her head.

“What?” he demanded. Now the worry was more pronounced.

Julie dropped into a chair and waved him to another. By the time he had settled his
bulky form, she’d achieved a semblance of self-possession.

“Some of the stuff in the cache is from Rafa.”

His look of amazement made the silence eloquent.

After a minute Julie continued. “Two of the seven. I’ve just been watching
them.”

Satler hesitated, feeling his way uncertainly. “Is he okay?”

Julie managed a quavery smile. “I must look pretty bad, huh?”

A nod.

“Well, actually, he’s alive and well, at least as far as I could tell from
broadcasts. Or was a day or two ago, anyway. He definitely survived the stampede.”

“Mind if I take a look?”

Julie nodded assent and padded off to the bathroom. Satler heard the door lock and
water splash in the sink.

When she emerged a few minutes later, most evidence of tempestuous emotion was gone,
though her eyes were still a bit red, and her sweater had some dark, moist patches. She
smiled a bit sadly and returned to her chair, curling her feet underneath her with
supple grace.

Satler tapped his fingers on the table as if deliberating, then swiveled around to
face her.

“You sure picked the guy on the white horse, Julie.”

The corners of her mouth twitched.

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“I felt like a trespasser at the end. Maybe I should have turned it off.”

“I’m sure you’ve seen worse.”

Satler pondered that for a protracted moment, then kneaded his temples with powerful
fingers. “Anyway, we’ve got to decide what to do with this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, now we’ve got proof that he’s alive. That ought to make the feds perk up
their ears and take us seriously. Maybe we can get some protection.”

“Geire gave me the impression that they do all their work earthside. Do you really
think he’d send agents out there to pick up Rafa, and spoil his chances for a
bust?”

“Not protection for Rafa. Protection for us.”

“Oh.” Somehow personal danger had faded in Julie’s mind.

“Don’t kid yourself, Julie. Someone tried to take us out a few hours back, and if
they’re halfway serious, checking into separate hotels on my aunt’s credit card will
hardly stop them. We’re in over our heads here. It’s high time we called in the
cavalry.”

“Think they’ll come? Geire didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about bailing out
someone the bureau put behind bars for killing one of their own.”

“When they see the video, they will. And if they have any sense, they’ll reopen the
murder case. There’s got to be proof of what Rafa said.”

“You believe him, then?”

Satler cocked a solemn eye at Julie. “I believed him even before I heard an
explanation. Same as you.”

Julie nodded, wishing she felt happier about her own show of faith.

Eccles cleared his throat and clutched his computer nervously as he entered the
president’s office. It was a part of the building he’d never been in before. He had no
idea why he’d been summoned.

Bezovnik came right to the point. “We’ve got a problem with our communications
system on the Erisa mission.”

If a man could raise his eyebrows violently, Eccles did.

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know. I’ll get right on it.”

Bezovnik waved impatiently to cut him off. “I think you misunderstand. I’m not
accusing you of negligence. The system’s working fine.”

Eccles looked puzzled.

“Let me ask you a question. If a viking gets out of range of the planetside signal
processor, we lose his transmission, right?”

“Right.”

“Why is that?”

Eccles felt his way cautiously. This was all common knowledge; he wasn’t certain
what was prompting the quiz.

“Well, sir, the implants draw power from the electrochemical impulses in their
host’s body. Unless you implant a battery and booster, they only have strength for very
limited-range broadcasts. And they don’t typically use a frequency that would penetrate
the ionosphere, anyway. They depend on the planetside signal processor to encode the
transmission and shoot it up to our satellite.”

Bezovnik nodded. “And I assume that the skimmers have some sort of built-in relay as
well?”

“That’s right. A viking could go a thousand clicks and still stay online, as long as
he didn’t wander away from the skimmer.”

“Okay, now, suppose a viking
did
have a battery to boost the transmission.
Could he send directly to the satellite?”

Eccles nodded. “Of course, if he used the right frequency. That’s what the old
iridium phones did, before they started blinkering to de-clutter the spectrum.”

“Could we set up one of our vikings to do that?”

Eccles shook his head. “In theory, it would be easy. But only in theory.”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, continuous high-powered radio emissions from within the host’s
body would be a cancer risk. And for another, the satellite depends on the signal
processor to relay properly encoded streams. There’s no provision to encode a stream in
orbit, even assuming the viking implants were rerouted to the appropriate
frequency.”

Bezovnik leaned back in his chair, a hint of cheer stealing across his blunt
features.

“So any transmissions like that would get ignored by the satellite?”

“They’d probably be logged. I think meteorology uses radio traffic to study the
composition of the atmosphere. But that’s about it.”

“In other words, we’re stuck with a scenario where all viking broadcasts go through
the signal processor?”

Eccles was puzzled. “Yes. Is that a problem?” Where was this leading?

“No, no. Just wanted to be sure I had the picture.” Bezovnik gazed at the ceiling
for a moment, apparently pondering. “Okay. Now, let’s go back to the question of
wandering out of range for a minute. You’ve probably heard that some of our vikings
just turned up.”

Eccles nodded.

“We thought we’d lost them in the stampede, but somehow they hiked all the way back
to base camp.”

“Pretty amazing.” Something in Bezovnik’s expression told Eccles not to be more
enthusiastic.

“When they got back to the module, we didn’t pick up their implants—just some bleeps
from the emergency beacon.”

“That’s because we moved the signal processor to our new headquarters. They’re still
out of range.”

“I’m sending out our planetside commander, Heward, to pick them up and fly them in.
Will we get their transmissions through the skimmer?”

“Before they get back, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“We ought to. The relay should redetect the implants automatically, same as the main
signal processor.”

Bezovnik pursed his lips. “Eccles, you know I ran a diagnostic scan of the comlinks
after the stampede.”

It sounded more like a question than a statement, so Eccles nodded.

“You probably wondered what I was thinking, taking everybody offline during the
search, and ordering you out of the room. I admit, it must have looked slightly
odd.”

Eccles tried to keep his expression neutral.

“I was looking for a spy, Eccles. Industrial espionage. It’s a big problem in this
business. We had reason to believe someone was leaking information about the Erisa
mission to a competitor—information vital to our success and the company’s future. At
first I suspected the earthside crew, including you.”

Here his sharp eyes stabbed at Eccles unmercifully. Eccles squirmed.

“Anyway, after a while I realized the leak must be coming from planetside. And I
thought maybe a viking was double broadcasting. That’s what the diagnostic was about. I
was looking for a direct satellite feed.”

“The scan wouldn’t have picked up that sort of thing.”

Bezovnik nodded slowly. “I realize that now. And it doesn’t really matter, because
if what you said is true, they wouldn’t be transmitting that way at all. They’d simply
piggyback an extra signal through the processor.”

“A routine scan wouldn’t pick that up, either.”