Viking (31 page)

For once, Julie was able to listen without taking offense. She couldn’t fault Lydia
for being simultaneously relieved to hear from a missing daughter, and worried about
her being in hiding.

When her mother began to wind down, Julie took a deep breath and dropped the second
bombshell. Rafa was alive, despite MEEGO’s assertion to the contrary, and she had
decided not to get a divorce after all.

That triggered a long stretch of wordless astonishment. Julie could almost see the
wheels turning in her mother’s head, considering how to talk her out of this
foolishness; if the conversation hadn’t been anchored in so much frustration and sad
history, it would have been funny. She launched a pre-emptive strike before her mother
could collect her thoughts.

“You think I’m nuts, Mom. I understand. But actually I’ve never been saner. When I
get home I’ll sit down and explain the whole thing.”

“But what’s to explain? You’ve hashed this all out over and over again.”

“I was working with half the facts. Trust me, Mom.”

“Now Julie, ...” her mother began. But at that point Julie’s father, who had taken
in most of the conversation in troubled silence, leaned over and whispered something
gently in his wife’s ear.

“But...” Lydia said.

Another whisper in the ear.

Julie leapt into the lull. “Well, I need to sign off.”

“Call us later,” her father said solemnly. “We’ll be worried if you don’t.”

“I will,” Julie said, trying to sound as casual as possible.

And that was how the call ended—her mother clearly itching for more details, her
father smiling determinedly, and Julie surprised to get off so easily. As soon as the
screen darkened, she realized with regret that, in her haste to avoid a long debate,
she’d disconnected without speaking to the twins.

She had started to redial, then thought the better of it. Her mother would be playing
bridge tonight; she could talk then without complications.

Instead, she’d made another futile attempt to call Geire.

When that didn’t pan out, she even tried Ray Gregory again, and left a message. What
did these agents do, spend their lives dozing on the beach while the public needed them
most?

She pushed back her chair, stretched, and walked over to the window. Layers of
flying traffic wove across a backdrop of glassy high rise that extended a hundred
stories above and below. Nearby, a relatively short building ended in a rooftop park.
It was a picturesque little square, complete with sand volleyball and a miniature golf
course and neatly groomed lawn bordered by palm trees—a much tamer manifestation of
nature than the raw wilderness of Rafa’s broadcasts.

Where was he now? What was he seeing? Would he ever know that she’d called off the
divorce?

Julie wanted more than the two clips she’d watched last night and again this
morning. Could there be more? Satler was supposed to be contacting his hacker friend
surreptitiously to get a new batch of data from the satellite cache—or even better, to
set up a steady feed that would let them monitor in real time. With the decrypter
program, anything interesting could be displayed almost as soon as it
arrived...

A buzzing droned steadily through the canopy and penetrated Rafa’s thoughts. With
effort he retrieved a word and sluggishly forwarded it to the language centers of his
brain.

Cricket.

He contemplated the word with dull incomprehension.

Cricket.

Still no reaction. He fell back to simpler concepts.

Thirst.

Death.

The words were coming faster now. Falling. Salt.

Salt? That triggered a response. His tongue and lips were coated with a briny,
alkaline film of some sort. Weakly, he spat it out, too dazed to speculate on the
question of how it got there.

The motion brought a whoosh of kinetic sensation. Rafa’s forehead was throbbing and
his neck felt unbelievably stiff. In fact, he could hardly move his chin from side to
side at all. And what was causing the excruciating fire in his ankle?

He opened his eyes. One responded readily, flooding his perception with flashing
emerald leaves and an olive tangle of branches and vines. The other eye, its lashes
crusted with blood, was too swollen to admit much light and did not answer his
command.

Other thoughts filtered through his rekindling awareness, one following another in a
rapid succession that eluded full, deliberate grasp. He noted with a sort of detached
surprise that he was floating, nearly vertical, in a pool of algae-covered swamp water
that stank of decomposed vegetation and mold and a handful of other exotic odors. The
stiffness at his neck was a flotation collar, embedded in his heavy biosuit and
maybe triggered by violent submersion in the underjungle.

Thirst, raging and desperate, hit like a thunderclap with almost physical force. His
throat was parched and bruised, his tongue bloated. Hunger twisted in his belly, but it
was secondary to the need for water.

Without thinking Rafa kicked toward a cluster of roots a dozen meters away, then
gagged at the stab that shot from a tortured ankle. For several minutes the pain was so
intense that he couldn’t move. He hung motionless, heedless of the slimy plant matter
on his face and the buzzing insects inspecting his forehead, breathing shallowly to
resist the nausea, and clinging to consciousness.

At last his head cleared, and he set about a more cautious inventory of his
condition, ignoring as well as he could the maddening dehydration and vertigo. What
else hurt? His casted arm did; it hung heavy and sodden in the water, the fiberglass
cracked. But it was tolerable. There was a crushing pressure around his left side,
along his ribs. Felt like the time he’d been kicked by a horse in almost the same spot,
only many times worse. And his face, hands, legs and back all stung from welts and
tearing gashes left by his fall through the trees.

Now the full recollection of his plummet from the skimmer came rushing back. He
remembered the disorientation, the fear, and the queer, soothing resignation of a
surrender to death’s sure embrace. What he did not remember—and could not
understand—was how he’d survived. The curtain of vegetation was thick and unbroken
overhead, obscuring the sun and making it difficult to guess the time of day; his
trajectory had left no lasting scars. Apparently the dense mat of forest had broken his
tumble enough to make a landing in the swamp water survivable, and safety features in
his suit had done the rest.

Gingerly Rafa rolled to his side and paddled toward more solid ground, careful to
keep his broken ankle motionless. The pressure under his arm erupted into a flaming
burn. He gritted his teeth and continued to claw through the slime, puffing to keep
algae off his lips. The stiffness of the biosuit blunted his strokes, slowing progress
until it was barely perceptible. But he persisted, suppressing steady groans of pain,
until, after what seemed like an eternity, he was within reach of underbrush growing on
solid ground.

The water was still about waist-deep, with an invisible bottom of slippery rocks or
roots that didn’t lend itself to standing upright. He rested for a moment, then twined
the fingers and wrist of his good arm around the sturdiest plants he could see. The
motion disturbed a small snake that whipped through the reeds and slid into the murky
water at his left.

He shuddered. What other fauna might be lurking? Every food chain had its king; the
highest niches in Earth’s tropical swamplands were generally occupied by crocodilians
large enough to consider him a tasty snack. And then there were the venomous spiders
and insects, the ticks and leeches, the predatory cats... Rafa’s heart began to hammer.
The opacity of the water assumed a sullen mystery. The mossy expanse of tree trunks,
the twisted foliage that curved above his line of sight, loomed threatening and
sinister.

Even as the fear swelled, he heard a soft splash from the far side of the pool, and
a ripple rose on the water’s surface at the periphery of his vision. He lurched out of
the water, staggering at the sudden weight in his ballooned biosuit and the unspeakable
agony of his bad ankle. He flopped into the weeds, face slapping the mucky grass, and
grabbed blindly for higher support. His fingers found only reeds that came out
by the roots without affording any purchase.

He slapped his cast onto the bank, felt its lower edge snag on a rock embedded
in the ground, and pulled against it, digging his fingers deeply into the mud and
arching his back to snap knees and feet out of the water. For a moment he felt his grip
eroding, and a sick surety of falling backward flitted through his brain. But then his
digging fingers found another rock, and shoulders bunched to haul his knees underneath
him.

He crawled awkwardly through ferns and rushes, over the gnarl of a man-sized root,
and onto a low-slung tree branch that extended into the deeper jungle away from the
water. It was waist-high where it met the trunk, but Rafa scooted anxiously outward
until the ground was a safe two meters below, nearly losing his balance once on the
slickness of the rounded surface between his knees and arms.

Only then, with his breath coming in ragged gasps and his ribs and ankle shrieking
at the pain, did he dare look back at the water. His exodus had torn a ragged black
path across the surface, culminating in an irregular ellipse near the bank where he’d
exited. There the water was clear and motionless—except for a pair of unblinking golden
eyes that twisted at the end of snail-like mocha stalks.

As Rafa watched, the stalks rotated and arched smoothly outward, moving
independently, to perform an inspection of the bank and its environs with the unhurried
precision of a predator at work. Finding nothing, one stalk retracted, a nictating
membrane closing shutter-like across the eye as it submerged in the inky morass. The
other stalk elongated until it was finger-thin and impossibly long and slid into the
bruised, broken reeds he’d passed through moments before. A meter of it lifted off the
ground and hung motionless, perfectly camouflaged against the mud and greenery, looking
for all the world like the stem of another marsh plant.

The pulse of distant insects seemed to quiet, and Rafa realized he was holding his
breath. He let it out slowly, his nerves straining. Cautiously he began to inch outward
along the limb. Whatever was in the water, he wanted to be as far away as possible.
Clearly it was big enough to be dangerous, and the unmistakable splash he’d heard meant
it could travel on land.

He’d scooted another body length outward when his boots slipped and scraped loudly
on the tree limb. The eye swiveled instantly on its stalk. He held its mottled golden
gaze for what seemed like an eternity, heart pounding and feet scuffling ineffectually
for a toe hold. A wave of lightheadedness swept over him, and he had to fight the urge
to vomit. At last the alien brain behind the eye stalk seemed to conclude that Rafa
wasn’t worth the effort of further hunting. Noiselessly it receded through the reeds,
sliding into the water without a ripple.

* * *

Once he reached the broad fork in the tree branch, Rafa rested. The sweat was
streaming down his neck and shoulders, and his face was ghastly pale. But he felt a
little safer.

He was ten meters up, with a clear view of the forest floor and the zigzagging
branches all around. Overhead, the canopy seemed even thicker. Or maybe the sun was
simply lower in the sky now.

Not that it made any difference to the temperature. It was beyond torrid in the
jungle—almost sauna-like. The atmosphere, steamy with humidity, hung with a thickness
that was almost palpable. The drones and clicks of insects, the hoots of unseen tree
dwellers imbued the riotous greenery with a life and energy that Rafa didn’t feel.

For the first time he thought to consult his wrist readout. It reported 0330 hours
mission time, but of course that had nothing to do with the local cycles of day and
night. It had been 1420 when they’d left the module. Had he been unconscious for twelve
or thirteen hours? With a grimy fingernail that trembled from fatigue, he navigated a
series of menus and studied the digital plot on the small screen. It would be getting
dark soon. He’d drifted in the swamp from before sunrise till almost dusk. He wondered
how he’d escaped the notice of local predators for so long.

At least that explained the thirst. During his tortuous climb he had begun to
speculate that it might be a sign of internal bleeding, maybe from his cracked ribs.
But now he guessed with relief that it was the normal reaction to hours of baking in
the jungle oven. After he had attended to the stabbing pain in his ankle and found a
way to slake the pangs for water, he’d get into the medical manual and see if there
were other signs he should monitor.

He checked the remaining menus methodically. His blood pressure looked good, and his
pulse was steady though rapid. Not surprisingly, levels of adrenaline were sky-high and
his blood sugar was low. There was no real diagnostic equipment to test for broken
bones, but a diagram of his body showed bright red areas of pain localized around his
ribs and ankle.
No kidding
.

A study of the status of the communications system wired into his body showed green
lights for functionality but static on the standard viking bandwidths. Nobody was
listening or broadcasting—at least not to him.

Déjà vu.

At this point Rafa was too exhausted, too endorphin-spent to panic, but he
considered the implications with a dreary, morose sort of pessimism. Obviously nobody
was mounting a rescue effort. He admitted grimly that he hadn’t expected them to. They
hadn’t lifted a finger before; they certainly wouldn’t now. For one thing, the fall
should have killed him. For another, the jungle was so thick that aerial surveys were
impossible; any rescuers would be forced to tackle the terrain on foot, which would be
both hopeless and suicidal.