Viking (37 page)

The constructed ring appeared to sit on a terrace that had been sculpted, as with
the blade of a master carver, from a background stutter of cliff and ledge that rimmed
about a third of the circumference and threw a swath of the arches into shadow.
Opposite the shadow, the terrace fell away toward subdued sounds of the sea.

All these impressions accumulated in a few short seconds, as Rafa’s nonplussed
senses recalibrated. And as the tide of perception rushed in, it brought an eddy of
unanswered questions. What had happened? Clearly he was
elsewhere
, but how, and
why, and how far from where he’d been a moment ago? Was he even on the same planet?

Practical considerations first. He crawled painfully away from the arch, every
moment fearing a restraining pressure at his head and shoulders. But the field was
gone, and in a moment he was resting under an umbrella of cycad frond, wincing and
panting, the pineapple-like texture of its trunk pricking his shoulders through thick
layers of biosuit.

He tapped his wrist display. According to the compass, the ocean beyond the near
edge of the shelf lay due south. That meant shadows were running east, as they had when
he climbed out of the water.

He consulted the GPS and shivered with relief. Never had a little red dot seemed
more welcome on a map. The triangulating signal of the satellites placed him about
ninety kilometers farther down the coast, far beyond the spot where he’d calculated for
the viking crew. But it was the same coast, the same ocean, the same world he’d been
snatched from a hundred heartbeats ago.

At least there was that.

A perverse urge to self-pity crowded up along with his relief, and for a moment he
was tempted to give in to anger at the capricious fate that had doubled the journey he
was facing. Could he survive long enough for the backtrack? But he dismissed the
emotion, as he had so many times before.

Gracias, Padre
, he prayed with silent intensity.
¡Ayúdame otra
vez!

After a moment he opened his eyes again to study the deepening indigo overhead.
Regret touched the pale crowsfeet at the edges of his eyes, but his mouth and lips
remained motionless. No rain tonight. Not here, anyway.

Maybe he should try to go back through the arch. It would shorten his journey, and
the cloud cover had been more promising where he came from. But the idea died aborning.
He had no confidence that he could manipulate the raised ideographs correctly, even
assuming they were functional on this end, and it was pure folly to run more risks in
his weakened and injured state. He had no taste for a force field prison or a jaunt to
the other end of the planet.

His eyes ran over his scuffed, sand-crusted boots and came to rest on a bulging
pocket at his thigh. The white berries he’d cut last night were still there, no doubt
crushed by the steady action of pumping legs in the water and the bruising climb to the
arch. His stomach twisted with hunger. Did he dare eat them? He’d gone without food for
several days now, and it might take another week to work his way back to safer rations.
A healthy man at rest could hold out far longer than that—but could he? As a marathoner
he’d eaten as much as five or six thousand calories a day, just to keep energy up and
hunger at bay. His pace was no less punishing now, and he was seriously injured. The
boil had gone down, but who knew what sickness or infection the beetle bite would yet
bring? He needed all the strength he could get.

But he didn’t need to poison himself, either.

He unzipped the pouch, scooped its contents into his brown palms, and sniffed
experimentally. The mangled berries oozed a green gel that smelled sweet, citrusy, and
unbelievably inviting.

Rafa stuffed them back and wiped his palms on the rock, then on his trousers. If it
came down to sickness or starvation, he’d choose the former. But for now he wouldn’t
take the risk.

To take his mind off the lingering smell, Rafa got back on his knees and went
exploring. If he was going to reverse the unexpected jag in his travels, he had to get
back down to the water, and that meant finding a way off the terrace.

He was near the northwest rim of the ledge, only a stone’s throw from the beginning
of shadows cast by the collaring cliffs. He crawled farther south, into the reddening
light, straight for the nearest access to the edge. The surf grew louder.

He stopped near a shoulder-high post a meter from the edge, swaying with weariness
and vertigo. It appeared to be made of the same silvery metal as the arches, and it had
begun to glow around the top. He stretched out a hand, frowned at the sudden
resistance. Glancing along the perimeter, he saw other posts, spaced about every twenty
or thirty meters.

A guard wall.

Not a bad idea. Rising to his knees, he looked down at plunging, jagged spines of
rock and pounding spumes of aquamarine and white. Gusts of sea air whipped at his
lashes and ears. Despite the height—nearly two hundred meters, he estimated—he could
feel the spray and sense the stentorian thunder at the breakwater. Not a climb for the
faint-hearted, even if he could somehow scale the barrier. In fact, not a climb for
anyone who valued their life.

He squinted east, along the edge of the face, looking for gaps in the spacing of
posts. Surely the builders of this lonely perch had left themselves a way off.

That thought was followed hard on its heels by visions of the arches. Maybe they
didn’t need to get down the hard way at all... But he wasn’t about to risk another
encounter there until he’d thoroughly checked for good old-fashioned stairs or a
natural incline amenable to descent.

Deep in the shadows along the far eastern rim, he thought he saw doubled posts.
Could there be a gate? He cut across the plaza, detouring around a cycad, feeling the
beginnings of wear as his knees scraped the rock. The sky was streaming orange and gold
with sunset now, the bronze sickle of rings slanting behind a cloud bank along the
southern horizon.

By the time he completed the traversal, his arms were weak from crawling, and the
ambient light was noticeably attenuated. But it
did
look like a gate of sorts,
and beyond it Rafa glimpsed broad, convex steps like a series of overlapping dinner
plates, carved deeply into the rock. He rose unsteadily on his knees at the near
gatepost, running his eyes along their trajectory through a rib of cliff to the point
where they emerged on the other side.

And gasped.

At the foot of the cliffs the steps broadened out to a fan-shaped dais that
overlooked a crescent bay of beach and forest. It was difficult to identify details
through headache blur and the dim wake of sunset, but the profusion of elegant curves
and sweeping shadows bore clear evidence of hundreds of buildings. And one cluster of
structures, smaller and nearer the shore than all the others, was glowing with half a
dozen points of light.

While he watched, mouth open, one of the lights dimmed and then rebrightened as a
dark shape temporarily obscured it.

There was someone—some
thing
—alive down there!

He was slinking reflexively back from the gate when one of the bulky structures in
the cluster coughed to life and began to hum. It sounded exactly like... A skimmer!

Puzzlement mixed with relief flashed through his brain, but instantly it was crowded
out by an unreasoning panic. Had he chanced on the crew in a fleeting visit? Were they
powering up the skimmer to return to a distant base? He couldn’t stand the thought of
coming so close, only to be forsaken once again.

He plunged through the gate, too intent to be surprised at the lack of a restraining
force field, and began to scurry and flop awkwardly down the steps, yelling hoarsely,
his knees bruising on the hard outlines of steps. He’d never make it. The stairway
stretched away to infinity below, and he imagined the hum of the skimmer had gone up a
notch. They couldn’t possibly hear him over the sound of crashing waves and the
powering up of the flying machine, but his throat quivered in harsh strain for decibels
anyway.

“Up here! Hey!”

Another light flickered below. Someone headed for the cockpit.

Rafa stopped crawling and fumbled weakly with the zipper on his suit. He ripped,
tore with desperate fingers, then pealed the sweaty upper half off, heedless of the
scalding pressure at his ribs. He lurched onto one knee and raised the garment overhead
like a banner.

Look, someone. Please look.
His arms felt like they were weighted with
lead. Every flailing gyration drained his strength. His vision blurred, doubled,
cleared, blurred again. With the last of his strength, he hurled the heavy fabric
outward, away from the steps and over the steep jumble of stone, across the span of
water toward the beach below. Then he pitched forward, bare chest and face slapping the
warm slab underfoot, and knew no more.

Eccles emerged from the final security checkpoint and rubbed the stubble on his chin
with a yawn. The sequestering was starting to wear on everyone; he was glad they had
only a few more days before the claim was finalized and they could go public.

Nobody remarked on his tardy return; the scientists were cocooned in electronics,
totally immersed in their own worlds of discovery. Besides, regular schedules had
evaporated of late. He’d slept on a cot in the break room again, after working half the
night on a phantom bug that turned out to be user error. That was par for the course.
Whenever anybody had an emergency, he was in the hot seat, whether it was Bezovnik or
the scientists.

They were all arrogant and impatient. Sometimes it made him pity the vikings.

A message was blinking away on the screen in his cubicle. “Piggyback detected.” He
read it twice before it made any sense. Then he swore and dropped heavily into his
chair. His fingers flew over the keyboard.

After the Bezovnik crisis, he’d come back to his desk in a panic, knowing that he
would never get the signal processor reprogrammed in time. He’d flipped through page
after page of electronic manual before he found the right section. Then it was almost
an hour before he could modify the sample code into something remotely usable and test
it on an emulator.

It was buggy. And all it did was find a leak, not stop it.

When Edvardsen came stalking over, he’d been expecting the axe to fall. He simply
didn’t have anything to report yet. But instead she announced Orosco’s death, and
Eccles had sagged with relief.

Bezovnik still wanted the patch, she said. Eccles had nodded obediently, then
flipped the computer off as soon as her back was turned. Maybe the scientists could
work these insane hours on academic adrenaline, but he had no reward except greasy
potato chips and a steady stream of gripes. He wasn’t about to invest hours in a
pointless monument to somebody’s paranoia. Not if the spy was dead.

But now the whale had spit Jonah out again, and Eccles was in deep, deep trouble. He
started to pull up his source code, then changed his mind and opened a direct channel
to the control interface on the signal processor. First plug the leak and then worry
about a permanent fix. The time stamp on his alert was only about three minutes old, so
the problem had barely resurfaced. Maybe nobody would ever know.

After a quick glance through the documentation, he tapped his way tentatively
through several menus, and manually dumped the unwanted signal. That would stop it as
long as the piggyback used its current frequency.

With scarcely a pause in his keystrokes, he switched to an admin session on the
satellite. Here he was on slightly more familiar ground; it was a matter of a couple
minutes to hunt up the record of the unwanted signal and purge it. Unless a snooper had
compromised the system and was downloading from the cache in real time, they’d never
see whatever that brief three minutes contained.

That reminded him: he ought to go purge the whole cache and check the security logs
on the satellite, as soon as he had the program written and could breathe a little
easier.

He reactivated his compiler and got to work, hoping feverishly not to see Edvardsen
or Bezovnik until he was finished.

Oristano deactivated the viking link and peeled layers of electronics from her
face.

The truncated clip they’d managed to download was not very long, but it was scary.
Underneath, her skin was ashen. Panic filled her eyes. She felt a tremble from her lips.

Now she knew what Bezovnik was hiding.

Of course, a long career of blackmail and corruption had always meant flirting with
fire. If she got caught and they could prove it, she’d spend years behind bars. But
somehow the thought had never worried her much. Experience showed that even
apprehended, she might buy her way out; isn’t that what her clients did? Or she could
wiggle free by exchanging dirty little secrets in the best blackmailer tradition.

Aliens were a whole different story.

In the entire history of civilization, nobody had gambled with bigger stakes. What
if the aliens showed up tomorrow and took offense at squatters? What if Bezovnik’s crew
unwittingly triggered a signal that alerted a hostile army, and Erisa Explorer was
traceable back to Earth? What if Bezovnik smuggled some harmless-looking artifact
home—he had to be planning
that
, if he had any imagination—and it was a bomb or
a viral vector?

She had been letting him get away with it.

If anybody found out, there would be no hope of walking away from the powder keg;
she’d be at ground zero. They’d lock her up and throw away the key, if she wasn’t
executed for treason or eaten alive by some unquarantined plague or cooked by a killer
ray under the direction of nonhuman eyes.

There was only one way to salvage things. She had to bust MEEGO immediately.

If not sooner.