Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  Julie opened her mouth to comment, but Geire took no notice. “I suppose it might give MEEGO a motive for arranging his death, if they thought a viking was part of some sort of undercover sting... But really, how could MEEGO find out, if the bureau itself didn’t know? And why would they feel threatened? And being brutally pragmatic, how does it change anything? Nothing you’ve told me establishes criminal intent on the part of MEEGO. I can think of half a dozen innocent explanations, all of which would convince a jury that the company is pure as the driven snow.”

  Julie blinked back unbidden tears of frustration and fought to keep the quaver out of her voice. “An investigation might force them to do a more thorough search. If Rafa or any of the other vikings survived the stampede it could be a matter of life and death.”

  “If you’re right, if we investigate, if he survived, if we find him... Let’s face facts: the chances that anything we do will make any difference at all are almost nil.”

  Julie tried to suppress her desperation and failed. “Mr. Geire, I suppose you think I’m just another wife who’s unwilling to give up my fantasies. I’m not. I know that most vikings die, that the crews of those missions are violent and divisive, and that the companies who sponsor them are more interested in the bottom line than anything else. I’m not attempting to start a crusade to change the world, and I’m trying hard not to pin my hopes on foolishness. But there’s definitely something wrong with MEEGO calling off a search after only a few minutes, and without a shred of evidence that their missing vikings died in the stampede.”

  Geire sighed wearily. “Sorry to be playing devil’s advocate. Fact is, I agree with you. An awful lot of viking work plays fast and loose with the law, and this sounds like a typical example. I just wish there were better prospects of nailing MEEGO for something specific. I wish we knew why they’d want to get rid of your husband. And I wish these logs of yours gave more hope of making a difference to him.”

  Julie bit her lip. Would she ruin her credibility if she went farther?

  “Actually, the logs do show one more anomaly. I’m not sure what it means yet, but it might prove there’s at least one survivor to be found.”

  Geire placed his elbows on his desk and leaned toward the phone screen. “What do you mean?”

  Julie brushed her bangs back to cover her nervousness. “Since the stampede the satellite has had some transmissions from an unknown source. They’re badly garbled and impossible to pinpoint, but they’re definitely from a viking.”

  “How has MEEGO reacted?”

  “I don’t think they even know about them. The signals weren’t on any wavelength that earthside was interested in, so they’ve just been sitting in a cache waiting to be deleted.”

  “How do you know they’re from a viking?”

  “I’m not much of an electronics expert, but we showed them to a ham I know. He said the signal was unmistakable, even though it couldn’t be decoded. Guessed it might be encrypted or just damaged in some way.”

  “Can you send me a copy of these logs?”

  Julie nodded eagerly. “Of course. I’ll piggyback them right now.” She reached for her keyboard.

  Geire shook his head brusquely. “Don’t do that. It’s not safe.”

  Julie’s eyebrows knitted. “Safe?”

  “Mrs. Orosco, perhaps you haven’t thought through all the implications of your actions yet. Suppose your guess about foul play is accurate. How will MEEGO feel about an FBI investigation?”

  “Not good.”

  “Not good? They’ll be scared to death if they have any sense. Murder and manslaughter are serious business, and they’ll be frantic to stay out of it if they can. Desperate people do desperate things.”

  “Are you saying I’m in personal danger?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say. Maybe not. After all, if anything happened to you, it would direct that much more suspicion in their direction. However, you do have information they’d like to suppress, and ‘maybe’ is a poor guarantee. I suggest you don’t take any chances.”

  Julie felt her palms begin to sweat as the ramifications of Geire’s statement sank in. She had been pursuing this course to satisfy her thirst for a lost husband, never imagining that it could have consequences for her own safety.

  Or the twins.

  She felt sick.

  “You think MEEGO would monitor all my phone calls? Why would they be interested in that?”

  “Depends on how good your hacker friend is. Somebody world-class might get in and out of that satellite without leaving tracks. But the amateurs—and most professionals, truth be told—aren’t quite so clean. If MEEGO got wind of a snooper and traced him back to you, and if they really are up to something, then you can bet they’ll watch you. And more than just your phone calls.”

  “Could they be listening right now?”

  Geire shook his head. “No chance. We encrypt every conversation as policy. You were safe as soon as I picked up the line. But I’ll have to open the data channel on this end before you send the logs; otherwise someone could intercept those. Hold on for a minute.” He leaned out of range of the camera, and after a moment another channel announced itself on Julie’s end as his head came back into view.

  “You showing another line?”

  Julie nodded, the transmission progress already climbing. “Yes. It’s on its way.”

  “Good. Now, I’ll take a look at the logs and see what I can dig up. And in the mean time, don’t take any chances with MEEGO.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Julie was already anxious to hang up and check on the twins. Not that she imagined anything was wrong—but the prospect of violence made her skin crawl.

  28

  After a hot day of dreary march, jungled foothills that marked the end of the prairie lay in sight. They’d avoided the crabbies, whether by strategy or plain dumb luck, and made steady eastward progress. Rafa estimated they were almost halfway home.

  Everyone’s feet ached, and they’d long since used up the meager water supply they’d purified from a trickling rivulet they stumbled across at noon. Their stomachs gnawed with hunger, and they were sweaty and sun-burned and bent with fatigue.

  But they were alive.

  This close to the edge of the forest, it was hard to say what new dangers might await from local fauna. Abbott and Chen were against braving the canopy for the first time at night, and too weary to continue at any rate. None felt comfortable sleeping in the open. After some debate, they finally ensconced themselves in another cluster of midget trees out on the prairie, and bedded down, oblivious of discomfort, as soon as darkness fell.

  The pufferbelly came during Abbott’s watch. Rafa woke at his first urgent shake and rolled catlike to his feet, knife drawn in a blur. His eyes flashed as his mind struggled to restore context to the shifting smokiness of the campfire and tree trunks.

  Were the crabbies at them again?

  Abbott gestured over Rafa’s shoulder with exaggerated motions, and Rafa swiveled to look behind him. At first he saw nothing. Then his ears caught a rustling from overhead, and one of the vertical shadows twisted sinuously.

  A tentacle, poking around for food. Pufferbelly? Didn’t they have better and more interesting things to eat? The one they’d seen yesterday afternoon seemed quite content to munch on crabbies.

  Rafa put a finger to his lips and gestured at Chen’s somnolent form with the knife. Abbott looked puzzled, and Rafa repeated the gesture, more urgently. “Wake her up,” he hissed, “but keep her quiet.”

  Abbott bent over Chen, whispered, got no response, and slipped bandaged fingers over her nose. After a moment she flinched, kicked reflexively, and, her airway still blocked, opened her mouth to snarl in disoriented panic. Abbott released her nose and clamped his least bandaged hand over her mouth until the tension left her shoulders and she sat up. Her eyes, taking a cue from Abbott’s body language, were wide with apprehension.

  Behind Rafa, a branch whiplashed as the tentacle worked toward th
em. It moved deliberately, feeling around gnarled roots and through thick leaves, passed within centimeters of his foot, and snaked toward the fire. Chen began to backpedal, looking ready to scream, but Rafa’s grim gesture and Abbott’s grip on her arm brought quiet again.

  They waited, not daring to move. The tip of the tentacle was close enough for Chen to touch. It hung through the leafy canopy for what seemed like ages while they held their breaths, their hearts racing. Could it sense them, somehow, through the cover of the pygmy trees? At last it lifted slightly, rotated almost like a periscope, and dipped rapidly toward the flickering embers.

  The recoil was so fast that it could not be seen. One moment an inky tendril was touching flame; the next, leaves and branches were fluttering down, torn by the whip crack of retraction.

  Rafa was across to his companions before the leaves settled to the ground, hauling Chen to her feet with his good hand. Abbott scampered after them, his face a rictus of fear.

  Behind, a sudden frenzy of thrashing shook the trees.

  Rafa stopped after only about twenty meters.

  “Keep going,” Abbott hissed over the sound of snapping limbs and groaning roots.

  “Can’t. There’s open sky in a few more steps.”

  Chen peered back to the battering of trees behind them. “What’s it doing?”

  “Having a tantrum,” Rafa whispered back.

  “So now what?”

  “Now we wait till it loses interest and goes away.”

  “Will it go away?” Abbott rejoined.

  Rafa shrugged and hunkered down in a clump of shoulder-high ferns.

  “We can’t just sit here.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “Maybe we should make a break for it. It’s dark enough that we might not be noticed.”

  “Who knows how that monster sees? For all we know, it’s got night vision and will spot us before we’ve taken three steps. If it’s the same one that we saw this afternoon, we’re probably not even out from under it yet. At least it’s focused on somewhere besides here.”

  Abbott’s voice took on a stubborn tone. “I say get out while the getting’s good. Even if it does come after us, we can outrun it. We only have to make it to the forest.”

  Rafa’s face twisted in grim amusement. “How fast can you run a kilometer?”

  Abbott opened his mouth but was unable to come up with a pithy retort. Instead his jaw hung slack for a dozen heartbeats; then he swore softly and looked away.

  Chen crouched down and hugged her knees miserably, her eyes still glancing back to the chaos behind them.

  Several minutes passed with no break in the monster’s attack. Showers of dirt and pebbles rained through the leaves. Once, a bulb of soil and trunk careened like a cannonball and smashed to a stop a few meters from their position.

  Finally Rafa shifted to his feet again and gestured peremptorily.

  “What now?” Abbott growled.

  “I was wrong. This is no display of temper.”

  “I don’t get you. Maybe it’s taking a while to give up, but...”

  “It’s not pulling trees at random. It’s moving in a line, back and forth across the thicket.”

  “Why?” Chen wheezed.

  “Process of elimination. It knows we’re in here somewhere, but it didn’t like what happened when it reached in blind. So it’s weeding itself a clearing until it either finds us or flushes us out.”

  They looked at him, too horror-struck to respond.

  Rafa’s lips thinned into a bleak smile. “Spilt milk, I suppose, but I should have listened to you, Abbott. Anyway, we’ve got to make a break.”

  Chen swayed wearily to her feet. “You had a point about more running.”

  Rafa nodded. “I know. You guys aren’t going anywhere fast. I’m going to take off and see if it follows me. With luck, you can go at an easy walk in the other direction once the coast is clear. If I can stay ahead, I’ll circle around and meet you in the forest. I don’t think it’ll follow us there.”

  Chen was already shaking her head. “You’ll be history if it catches you, and even if it doesn’t, it won’t be easy to find you. I’m not sure you’d make it back to the module on your own. We certainly won’t.”

  “I hate to repeat myself, but do you have a better plan?”

  Abbott pushed his way forward. “Maybe we should give it another minute or two.”

  “It’s getting closer,” Rafa responded, eyeing him calmly.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  “Okay.”

  Rafa began creeping toward the lighter patches of shadow, where open grassland showed through the last few strides of tree. At the edge he paused, studying the sky.

  “It’s not over us right here,” he whispered. “That’ll give me a head start.”

  “Godspeed,” Chen whispered, her voice oddly strained.

  Rafa turned around. He said nothing, but the carved black hollows below his brows bored into her eyes meaningfully.

  Then he sprinted out into the open.

  * * *

  The pufferbelly was at least as alert and nimble as he’d feared. Rafa had scarcely covered ten meters when the sound of rending, thrashing saplings ceased. After a few seconds he risked a look back and saw it gliding rapidly after him, tentacles shooting in twos and threes in a quicktime rhythm to haul against the anchoring trees. Its pace made his stomach sink.

  The nocturnal air was cool and relatively calm, with only light, shifting breezes. He’d been hoping for a real wind on the theory that it would slow the pursuit—but the enormous creature behind him seemed possessed of an invisible means of propulsion, independent of tentacle power. Perhaps wind was not a barrier after all.

  At least it was chasing him. The others were out of danger for the moment. They could streak across the gap to the dark line of forest as soon as they saw the coast was clear.

  He ran roughly north, parallel to the horizon that was beginning to brighten. In a couple minutes he would be far enough away from the thicket to cut east himself, if the pufferbelly didn’t lose interest. What would the forest be like? It had looked thick and wild from the skimmer deck when they’d flown overhead days before. Would he be able to find Abbott and Chen again?

  A second backward glance and his mouth went dry. Impossibly, the bloated aerial jellyfish was gaining on him. His flashing feet, pumping at almost a dead sprint, were less than twenty meters from the nearest outstretched feeler. How could it move so fast?

  He zagged abruptly to the right, hurdling some low-lying brush with a grunt and nearly tripping on rocks loosely embedded in the sandy soil. Time to head for safety, if it wasn’t already too late. Clearly he had provided enough of a distraction to protect his companions.

  Zag again, across a shallow pond-sized depression and up the other side. Grimly he drew more speed from his exhausted body. Already the fatigue was beginning to wear in his thighs and shoulders. He’d never been a sprinter, never dreamed he’d have to go so fast.

  He burst through an especially thick stand of grass, ignoring the whipping blades across his hands and cheeks, and stumbled as the heel of his driving boot thudded into a small hole. His knee buckled, but he staggered and recovered in a heartbeat, skin crawling as outstretched tentacles snaked blackly out of the grass.

  A dozen more steps and he felt a sinuous coil encircle his waist. There was no warning, no crack of the whip; just a sudden band of steel that pinioned him around the middle at elbow height and yanked him to a halt, his arms crushed tightly to heaving ribs, his survival knife glinting uselessly in the light of rings and approaching dawn.

  He flailed with his feet, writhed wildly. So close to the tree line! Another tentacle wrapped around one jerking ankle. He stamped at it viciously, missed, stamped, missed again. Then the horizon spun and tilted crazily as he lifted off the ground. He caught a dizzying flash of dark, scaly underbelly, fanning tutu, pulsing mandibles, and whiff of animal scent that evoked wet greenery. Blo
od rushed to his head as he dangled upside down, back arched in protest.

  Oddly, his brain cleared, and the fear burned away like fog on a sunny morning. One corner of his mind wondered how long he would remain conscious, regretted in a detached sort of way that he’d be munched feet-first to prolong the pain. But such thoughts were a minor tangent, really. The feeling that consumed him was an ache for Julie.

  How bitter to die without a better farewell!

  He hung there, twitching vainly, for perhaps a minute before he realized that the pufferbelly was making no attempt to proceed with its meal. It seemed content to hold him at what passed for arm’s length. His head was beginning to pound, his eyes to bulge with the pressure of pooling blood. The constricting band around his midsection made it difficult to breathe. He fought back a wave of vertigo and shouted a hoarse, ludicrous threat to bolster his courage.

  The pufferbelly suddenly began to swell and retract its tentacles. Rafa was pulled up flush with the taut roughness of its belly, still upside down and rocking like a pendulum. His stomach recoiled at the contact with alien flesh. Static electricity crackled and coursed along his body, but he was too full of revulsion to wonder at its source. The dizziness grew worse and his vision began to fog. Then the ground fell away. Rafa’s last glimpse was the rapidly diminishing jots and tittles of brush and rock and grassland as he rose into the blue.

  He managed a final, faint “Julie” before he succumbed to blackness.

  29

  Agent Ray Gregory snapped the window of his den to the open position and breathed in the sounds of wind and the criss-crossing mesh of half a dozen layers of traffic and a hundred stories of bustling city nightlife. A stray gust detached some notes pasted in a haphazard manner to a cramped desk.

  He tossed his leather jacket, specked with dust across the shoulders, onto a spare chair, and settled into his seat with a sigh. Administrative baloney and paperwork were about as deadly dull as he could imagine, but they could only be postponed so long. He’d kept up the “out on an investigation” routine for almost two weeks running, but he knew if he called in again tomorrow with another supposedly urgent lead, his boss would only roll his eyes, put the case on hold, and demand the written reports that were now grossly overdue.