Viking (8 page)

“Ah, my friend, how surprising to hear from you again.”

“Spare me your sarcasm,” barked a gravelly voice from the speaker.

“Very well.” Bezovnik pulled out the old-fashioned notepad he’d been using to keep
notes, undid the cufflinks at his wrists, and leaned forward. “How much do you want
now?”

The speaker emitted a raspy laugh. “Well, I certainly can’t fault your business
instincts.”

“How much?”

“Considering your willingness to pay up, I think I’ve been a bit miserly in my
little invoices.”

Bezovnik raised his eyebrows. “Miserly?”

“The longer this operation goes on, the more obvious it gets. You’ve found something
worth a fortune.”

“Any planet we finalize is worth a fortune. That’s not so unusual in this
business.”

“This mission has been out of the ordinary from the start. You picked a target that
had minimal survey data, assigned a viking crew and chartered a transport in nothing
flat.”

“True. But not illegal.”

“We could get a couple indictments just based on the crazy route you flew. Thirty
thousand light years in two jumps! You’re lucky the vikings didn’t mutiny.”

Bezovnik frowned and made a note in a neat, precise hand. It said “flight plan.” He
underlined it. “Look, I’ve already paid you ten times what a reckless endangerment plea
would cost.”

“At least. In fact, you’ve probably paid more than the whole mess would cost you,
even with the bribery and fraud charges I had on you to start with.”

“And that’s why you’re calling.”

“Perceptive, aren’t you? Yes, I’ve decided that whatever else you’re trying to hide
about this mission, it ought to be worth another million.”

Bezovnik sat bolt upright and pounded his desk. “A million!” he shouted. “Are you
crazy?”

“Am I?”

Bezovnik muttered bitterly and shook his head. It galled him if he’d given
indications that previous payments were less than catastrophic. Clearly he had not been
sufficiently cautious; the last thing he wanted was to reveal the true value of the EB
II project. He considered upping the ante by bluffing a non-payment. It might convince
his anonymous problem that a million was the limit.

It might also land him in court or a jail cell—and if that happened, the government
would rescind MEEGO’s permits and prematurely confiscate the find of the century. Poker
player that he was, it was a chance he simply couldn’t afford. He was sitting on
something so lucrative that no amount of hush money seemed exorbitant. At least, not if
it was a temporary rather than an on-going expense.

That was the crux of the problem, of course. There would never be a final payment
until he staunched the flow of information. And as long as exposure was a risk, he
didn’t dare proceed with the real mission on Erisa Beta II. He’d juggled schedules and
assignments and put the viking crew in a harmless holding pattern to buy a few days,
but it couldn’t go on like this much longer. He had to plug his leak in time to shift
the crew and lay claim to the ground he wanted.

A massive breach of the company’s network might explain it. That had been his first
thought after initial threats to expose the EB II claim fraud. But security experts
assured him that a digital invasion, even if successful, would trigger all sorts of
alarms. Audits had been squeaky clean, and the fabricated evidence he’d left in
strategic locations hadn’t been touched. Nobody was snooping on his files.

That left people. Some individual—or, even worse, some group—with personal, internal
knowledge of MEEGO’s activities must be selling the information. Or using it directly,
of course. For the past couple weeks he’d been wracking his brains to discover who it
could be. The scientists were natural suspects, so he’d completely replaced the
earthside EB II team. It made no difference.

He had briefly considered Edvardsen, the project director. The scope of the
culprit’s knowledge sometimes coincided pretty closely with hers. Certainly neither she
nor the blackmailer knew what the future focus of the mission would be. But her hands
were too dirty to blackmail anyone. Senior management? Not likely; the handful who knew
details of the mission were in up to their necks and couldn’t risk exposure. And they
would soon be fabulously rich anyway. Besides, a blackmailer with their knowledge would
hardly be asking for chicken feed.

The flight plan changed things.

He had spoken with the ship’s captain personally when he signed the charter. MEEGO
wanted quick departure and minimal transit time at any cost.
Minimal time
, he’d
stressed.

“It’ll be more expensive to work on a short timetable,” the captain had
responded.

“As long as you stay within reason. The schedule is critical for us.”

“That’s fine. I’ll send along a flight plan in a couple hours when I clear all the
red tape.” The captain had eyed him intently as he said it, waiting for a response.

“That won’t be necessary. We’ll just leave it in your hands.”

The captain had nodded solemnly, and they had both understood that MEEGO was looking
the other way while the captain skirted the edges of the law. So how did the
blackmailer know how many jumps they’d done? Nobody at MEEGO knew that—only the vikings
themselves.

Could a viking be in on this? He hadn’t seriously considered that possibility
before, because some of the information was beyond their clearance. Besides, they’d
been in isolation since their training began, and now that the implants were activated,
they couldn’t even go to the bathroom in privacy. But maybe a viking informant had
found a way to pass back mission particulars to an outside partner with more limited
access. He couldn’t see how—yet it would explain the detailed knowledge of some items
and the apparent ignorance of others... If a crewmember was the only source of the
blow-by-blow happenings on the planet, there was suddenly light at the end of the
tunnel.

“Well?”

Bezovnik snapped back to the conversation at hand, trying to suppress the surge of
elation in his voice.

“I’m telling you, a million is a lot of money.”

“Poor Bezovnik! The police will feel sorry for you.”

“Very funny. Since you’re so clever, why don’t you tell me how to get that kind of
cash? I certainly don’t have it in my pocket.”

“I’ll bet MEEGO will float a loan.”

“MEEGO has auditors and accountants, you fool! How do I expense it? I can’t commit
another crime just to keep my nose clean with you!”

“Oh, come, come. I’m sure your conscience will see the light. Given your experience
with creative record-keeping, I have no doubt you’ll find a way.”

Bezovnik sulked in silence.

“Good for you. I hear your little wheels already starting to spin. I’ll expect the
same sort of delivery as before. Tomorrow. By noon. Or the phone rings at FBI
headquarters.”

Rafa unslung his backpack, let it drop to the sodden turf, and slowly straightened
up, wiping the sweat from his eyes and stifling a yawn. Truncated sleep had been
dragging at him all day, and he still had hours more work to do. The schedule was
brutal.

“Mind if I take a quick break?” he said.

Go ahead.
Faint echoes of Satler shifting in his chair sounded in Rafa’s
ear. The scientist had signed on at last shift change, sounding annoyingly fresh and
well rested.

Rafa pulled a canteen from a pouch in his pack and guzzled gratefully, his eyes
casting about for a convenient place to sit. Finding nothing useful, he folded his legs
pretzel-style and sank to the ground where he was, ignoring muddy boots and the
moisture that immediately coated his heavy kevrotex trousers.

The sky was mostly blue now. The remnants of the storm front were scudding rapidly
toward the east horizon, offering a first glimpse at an alien sun. Cooler than Sol,
Erisa Beta glowed with a decidedly orange hue and could almost be viewed comfortably
with the naked eye. They were orbiting at a comparatively cozy distance of 55 million
kilometers, making the star appear nearly three times the size he was used to. The sun
was close to zenith; in this planet’s short diurnal cycles, noon followed sunrise by
only about four and a half hours.

Their ship had come to rest in a clearing a few degrees south of the equator, near
the foothills of a spectacular mountain range. Snow-covered cones rose in profusion
like granite teeth to the northwest, their summits towering in many places above the
hazy clouds. Volcanic forces had pushed the rocky heights up along a subduction zone
between colliding tectonic plates, where continent met ocean. A series of verdant hills
surrounded the pinnacles, sweeping in an arc from north to southwest.

Where the hills petered out to the south, the land sloped gently downward, slipping
from grassy plains into kilometers of dense tropical rainforest, before eventually
spilling out into white beaches that glittered against the deep azure of the sea. To
the east their clearing faded into ever thicker, taller grassiness, with a hint of
treetops in the distance. The beauty of the scene had a feral quality to it that left
Rafa at once awestruck and uneasy.

Below and to the east of Rafa’s vantage point on the hillside, the brown scars of
last night’s mudslide marred the smooth green of the clearing. Several of the vikings
were clustered near the jaws of the partly-buried cargo hold, assembling and repairing
heavy equipment under the direction of skilled mechanics back on earth. Two of the
skimmers were now working, and the growing skeleton of their damaged backhoe was taking
shape like a resurrecting dinosaur.

Meanwhile, the mining probe had been pressed into service as an excavator. Its
hydraulic shovel was methodically clearing mud away from the main hatch, which faced
directly into the hillside. Rather than supervise a viking in its operation, earthside
was controlling the machine directly; watching it scoop and swivel without a driver
gave a queer illusion of sentience to the robot. Occasionally its jerky motions caused
teeth-grating scrapes as it hit the thick metallic hull of the module.

Rafa watched it slave tirelessly and reflected with bitterness on his own
status.

Despite his exhaustion, the hard work of the morning had been a welcome distraction;
for a few hours at least, he’d been able to suppress the despair that had hung so
heavily since his imprisonment. But now the bleakness of his situation returned with a
vengeance, like a dreary threnody he could not drown out. He was just another robot,
valued purely for utilitarian considerations. In a few days he’d be buried in this
muddy clay—if he was lucky—without so much as an “Alas, poor Yorick” over his grave.
And Julie would probably never even know.

Abruptly he sprang to his feet, his hands clenching unconsciously, his jaw set.

“What’s next?”

There was a short pause while Dr. Satler flipped some toggles and reactivated the
uplink portion of his own connection.

Hold on! I was just in the middle of a sandwich.
Satler’s voice sounded
thick and muffled, like his mouth was full.

“Sorry. I just decided that a break is worse than being worked into the ground.”

Satler’s voice was clearer this time, but it was slurred by a yawn and tinged with
annoyance.
You won’t be feeling that way at the end of your shift, I’ll tell you
that much. You’ll be lucky if you’re still walking.

Rafa drummed his gloved fingers on his coveralls.

All right. We’ve got plenty of samples to keep the DNA sequencer busy. It’s come
back with preliminary profiles on some of the bacteria, but running just the
interesting species of plants and animals will take hours. I’ve got a team crunching
through your visual feed, indexing everything and adding it to our master database.
Enough raw data on a small scale. Let’s see if we can fill in some of the holes in our
biosurvey. I’ve got a skimmer freed up for a couple hours.

Rafa hoisted the bulky pack onto his shoulders and clomped back down the hill.

The virtual noise came without warning, crescendoing exponentially like feedback
from a mispositioned microphone. No eardrum could have withstood the intensity of such
sound; the auditory centers of his brain were overwhelmed as they processed the
signal.

Rafa pitched forward on his face, experiencing a powerful electrical shock from his
implants as he fell. For a moment he was too stunned to move; then he spat mud from his
mouth and staggered out of a prone position, gasping at the pain in his head. A wave of
dizziness sent him reeling.

The initial overload subsided, and everything faded into a merciful silence that was
as absolute as anything Rafa had ever known. Then came a fleeting sensation of distant,
distorted buzzing, and the horizon curled itself up in a swirl of vertigo and
blackness.

With the storm dispersing, it was easy for 1291 of pod 71 to detect the chatter that
a scout had reported the night before.

It wasn’t random, like the static that crackled and sizzled between thunderheads.
And it was definitely more speech-like than the monotone siren parked in The Cold far
overhead, or the primitive squealers that had recently materialized near the mountains.
But as she sank through the cloudbank, she had to agree: if it was language, it was a
bizarre and mystifying sort that she’d never encountered before.

Receptors perked, she shrugged off the lethargy induced by days of miserable weather
and reluctant babysitting. The smaller juveniles hadn’t been able to clear the front
and were forced to take the brunt of the storm at twenty thousand meters. Of course the
adults had remained at the same altitude to provide comfort and reassurance. It had
been a fatiguing chore.

Now pods to the south and west were chatting happily in unbroken sunshine, their
photosynthetic skins pulsing with living green as they renewed energy reserves. Soon
her own group would be in the clear as well. Still listening, she quickened the pace of
descent at the thought of the three missing young ones. In all likelihood they were
simply off exploring, but each year the monsoons tore and grounded careless calves, and
she was anxious for their safety.