Viking

by Daniel Hardman

  31

  1291 laid her tiny burden down in the dusty weeds, feeling both frustrated and embarrassed. She’d been so eager to show the creature to her friends, so sure that they would congratulate her on a good night’s work.

  Instead they proposed to eat it! The dunces! Hadn’t they had enough fish and sunshine? Couldn’t they think about something besides their bellies? Here was an oddity unlike any they’d ever seen before, and their meager imaginations charted a direct course to food.

  Her prize had proved far too difficult to apprehend to waste it that way. After a serendipitous snack of crunchies and its initial retreat to the trees, she’d been summoned back to the pod by busybody adults, and by the time she returned in the morning, it was gone. Undaunted, she’d tacked into an easterly breeze and crossed a couple magnetic bands that day in pursuit—the creature certainly covered a lot of territory for an earthbound—then scouted patiently until she found the stand of diminutive saplings where it had bedded down for the night.

  She still didn’t understand why it would hide so carefully, yet continue to broadcast for all the world to hear. Didn’t it realize that anybody with half a mind could locate it? Well, perhaps not. Clearly the creature had a bizarre physiology, and behavior to match.

  Reaching in under the trees had proved a disaster; her tentacle still smarted from that mistake. But in the end she’d flushed her quarry and snatched it up before it could get away. It squirmed for a few minutes, but she’d held tightly until it gave up and went limp. Not dead—it still chattered away at full tilt, and she’d been careful not to crush or shock it—but stunned, perhaps.

  As soon as she was high enough, she broadcast a report of her quest and its triumphal outcome. The adults had harrumphed and scolded and ordered her to return at once—no surprise there—and the youngsters had hooted jealously and proposed a feast. As if there would be even a mouthful for any of them!

  1291 had been planning to return with her prize in tow; the pod’s reaction to her news made her reconsider. Her kind had no notion of pets or menageries, but they liked to study things, puzzle them out. The rhyme and reason of the strange creature’s speech was tantalizingly obscure—but she couldn’t carry it forever while they migrated, and she doubted it would tag along on the ground, even if she managed to feed it. Besides, it might disappear next time a companion felt peckish.

  So after only a few minutes airborne, she descended to nearly the same spot where she’d first apprehended her quarry, and let it sag to the ground in the first rays of sunrise. She half expected it to bolt the moment her tentacle retracted, but it just lay there, chattering away but sprawled motionless.

  She prodded it thoughtfully, but it didn’t stir.

  Well, maybe it played dead as a defense; she would move off a ways and see if it recovered.

  32

  Chen scanned in every direction in anxious vigilance while Abbott knelt to tug Rafa onto his shoulders. “He breathing?” she whispered. Her eyes flitted upward nervously.

  “Yeah. Can’t see anything broken or chewed on.”

  “Hurry.”

  Abbott grunted and rocked back on his heels, shaking his head reluctantly. “Too heavy.”

  “We’ll drag him, then.” They each hooked an arm and began to pull. Rafa’s heels dug twin furrows through the grass as they scrabbled back toward the line of forest.

  A hundred steps, Chen thought. Just a hundred. The pufferbelly was descending rapidly from its lookout position, tentacles outstretched. They had to make it.

  Rafa’s eyelids fluttered, and he twitched. In a moment Chen felt his biceps bunch and roll as he lifted his arms.

  “It’s okay, I can walk,” he groaned, his voice rough and guttural. They helped him stagger to his feet. He clamped palms to his head and swayed dangerously. Abbott glanced over Chen’s shoulder and jerked his head.

  “Come on, buddy. We’ve got to get you to the trees before we have company.”

  Rafa nodded, not looking up, and stumbled wobbly-kneed between them. Fifty steps. Twenty. Chen looked back and was relieved to see the pufferbelly drifting motionless, above and well behind them. Apparently it had concluded that it wouldn’t win this race, and was reconciled to observing their departure. She shuddered.

  They collapsed in a jumble at the base of a large conifer of sorts, a dozen steps into the fringe of the forest. Perhaps it was not deep enough to be totally safe, but Rafa looked unable to continue, and she and Abbott were scarcely better off. For a while nobody spoke; they were too busy fighting for breath and calm, swallowing in a vain attempt to renew the moisture in their parched throats.

  Finally Rafa fished through the pockets of his suit, looking for pain reliever. He fumbled for almost thirty seconds before remembering that it had been used up yesterday. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes, looking disgusted.

  “Thanks for coming for me.”

  Abbott folded his legs slowly, and sat up with effort. “We couldn’t tell if you were still alive or not, but we had to try to get you.”

  Chen chimed in. “We saw most of the chase. The pufferbelly forgot about us right away. We made a break as soon as it was gone. It was too busy trying to keep up with you to pay any attention. I don’t know how you managed to run so fast.”

  A ghost of a smile played across Rafa’s face. “Not fast enough. I don’t know how it moves, but it’s no slowpoke.”

  “We saw it pounce and thought you were a goner. But after a minute it started to climb, and it looked like it was still holding you. Abbott thought it was going to let go when it got high enough.”

  Abbott looked away—in embarrassment, maybe?—but Rafa only grinned wryly. “I guess that’d be one way to tenderize its meat. I would have been a mangled blob. Good thing I blacked out.”

  “Why did that happen?”

  Rafa shrugged. “It had me upside down. That’s no big deal for a few seconds, but when you’re whipping around like a yo-yo and can’t breathe properly and are already light-headed with thirst and fatigue, I guess it can happen. I don’t remember much after it took off.”

  “It went up maybe five hundred meters and just hung there. Waiting, watching the sunrise, who knows? We couldn’t see much, except that it hadn’t eaten you. Then after a while it came down again and dropped you in a heap and went off where it could keep an eye peeled without being too close.”

  “Maybe I was bait.”

  Chen felt the hair along her neck prickle. Her face must have reflected her horror, because Rafa grinned.

  “Anyway, that was a gutsy thing to do, coming after me. I’m grateful.”

  Chen smiled back and held out a hand as she rose. “Come on, lazy bones, I intend to be home tonight if it kills me.”

  Nobody laughed.

  * * *

  The hill country exacted a stiff toll for passage. Instead of steady forward progress, they were continually climbing over mossified tree trunks, scrambling up rocky defiles and trickling streams, and detouring around walls of vegetation too dense to penetrate. The leafy blanket overhead obscured the sun; they would have been lost in five minutes without compass and GPS. As it was, they had to make course corrections repeatedly.

  Within an hour they met the small river Rafa had seen on his map. It was dark with silt and fairly narrow—about a stone’s throw across, maybe—but the banks were steep, and the current looked strong and rapid.

  They stared at it for almost a minute before anyone spoke. Finally Chen cleared her throat.

  “I’m not much of a swimmer.”

  “You will be.” Rafa sounded grim.

  Abbott shrugged. “It’s not that big of a deal. I’ll get you across. There’s no rocks or rapids. Doesn’t look that dangerous.”

  “I’m not worried about the current.”

  They looked at Rafa, uncertain of what he implied. He was scanning the far bank, his expression inscrutable. “This isn’t lowland jungle, but we’re almost on the equator. On Earth, tropical rivers like this have
all sorts of interesting things in them: piranha, snakes, leeches, the odd crocodile or hippo...”

  Abbott took a hasty step away from the chiseled bank, but Rafa shrugged. “We have to cross, regardless. I guess there’s no point in waiting.” And without another word he half-slid, half-scrambled down and into the current.

  In five steps his shoulders disappeared into the murky water, and he began to stroke smoothly for the far shore. The flow swept rapidly downstream, but he was a strong swimmer. They watched with bated breath as he crossed the midpoint of the current. Now it seemed like there were ripples everywhere; any moment Abbott expected one to become a reptilian snout with carnivorous intentions.

  Finally Rafa’s shoulders heaved upward again, and he was stumbling into a knee-deep eddy, flicking muck from his hands. He turned around, looking relieved, and waved encouragingly. The splint had apparently come loose on his broken arm; he pulled at it gingerly while he watched their progress.

  Abbott and Chen entered together, Chen clutching tightly to her partner’s shoulder, her eyes wide with apprehension. As soon as their feet left the bottom it was obvious they would far overshoot Rafa’s position. Abbott was not all that amphibious himself; he had a real job to keep Chen’s chin up as she paddled.

  Unexpectedly his knee struck something solid and slippery. Chen felt it too; she screamed in terror and sank underwater to her eyebrows, then jerked out again, gagging and spluttering.

  A splash from Rafa’s position signaled that help was on the way. Abbott had stopped kicking, afraid he would further aggravate whatever he’d just touched. Was it his imagination, or had the object moved a little with the collision? Where was it now?

  Chen was panicked, her eyes wide, her fingers clawing. She dragged at Abbott, plunging him under in an effort to rise. He swallowed some water involuntarily, felt himself choking, and gave her a vicious, futile shove. He was up, then under again. Rafa knifed toward them with powerful strokes, but it seemed like an eternity before he slid an arm across Chen’s chest to hook her armpit and flip her onto his hip. For a moment she struggled, unwilling to complete the transit on her back. But Rafa’s arm tightened like a vise, and finally she went limp, except for ragged, hiccupy breathing and jerky efforts to supplement progress with her hands.

  Abbott coughed and sucked in great lungfuls of air, still fighting panic. Then his boot brushed something again, and he realized there was mud underfoot.

  They stumbled up the bank. Rafa was on hands and knees, having released his stranglehold on Chen. She looked more alert than he did, now. His head hung down, his shoulders were heaving, and his face looked pale. After a minute he joined his two crewmates, who had dropped onto a warty log, disturbing a family of two-tailed salamanders that chirped reproachfully as they wiggled down the eroded clay at their feet.

  “You look awful, Rafa,” Chen finally managed.

  “Hurt my arm again,” he murmured. Even through the thick sleeve, a pronounced bend between elbow and wrist was visible.

  “We’ve got to set that and get it re-splinted.” Chen drew her survival knife and began hacking at the branches of a nearby sapling, her fear fading as medical training took over. In the middle of the river, a man-sized turtle shell of sorts breached silently, then sank under the water again. It was gone by the time Abbott could raise a shaking finger to point it out. Rafa saw it, though; they exchanged a silent glance.

  A tug-o-war to straighten Rafa’s arm left all three of them panting. Rafa clenched his teeth and groaned dizzily, but after a moment the pain appeared to subside, and his expression cleared somewhat. He sat mutely while Chen bound on the splint. Then they let him rest for a few minutes before squelching wetly on into the waiting forest.

  The flora was green and alive with intense, almost stuffy background rustlings, like a forest on earth—but also strange enough to color their thoughts with a keen awareness of other-worldly atmosphere. The most common “tree” had a smooth lime trunk and massive fronds like a banana; it grew in clumps to a height of perhaps ten or fifteen meters. Scattered in and around these were lone pillars—the rearing trunks of massive conifers and gnarled celery-stalk rods eighty meters high. Clearings were rare and small and festooned with draperies of vine and finger-thick saplings. A machete would have eased progress substantially, but they made do with sticks and bare hands.

  As they walked, the scent of decaying leaves, wet chlorophyll and fungus filled the air. The loudest sounds came from the crunch of boots on the forest floor and the whip of disturbed branches and leaves. Occasionally they caught glimpses of denizens of the forest—most little squirrel- and mouse-like scurriers, but also a few featherless fliers and some raccoon equivalents that quickly vanished with a flick of brilliant orange tails.

  To pass the time, Abbott told funny stories about his childhood in Jamaica, and Chen questioned him in detail about his children. The fitful banter lightened their mood somewhat, and Rafa realized they were using the talk as a distraction from fear and fatigue. He did not join in.

  Chen had an additional strategy as well: she flirted. A few half-hearted comments were directed to Abbott, but mostly she focused on Rafa. At first he wasn’t sure he was interpreting her correctly—hadn’t he made his feelings clear enough?—but she became more brazen as the morning wore on. For some reason Abbott thought his reactions were amusing, and several times he coughed suspiciously after salacious double entendre from Chen met with studied non-expression.

  It all made Rafa edgy and annoyed. He had as many hormones as the next man—more, if Julie’s oft-repeated teasing was accurate—and for once he sensed a softness behind this woman’s posturing. She was less than half in jest.

  That aroused feelings that were better left buried. It had been months since he’d held his wife, and sometimes his thoughts lingered on private moments so tender and irrevocably lost that he thought he would burst with pain and longing. A divorce severed any loyalty to Julie—in theory it did, anyway—but even as an unattached male he wasn’t ready to embrace the random whims of passion. It didn’t feel right, morally or emotionally, even if it drove him crazy to resist.

  He stalked on in silence, moving a dozen paces ahead when Chen peeled off the top half of her biosuit to dry out. The thin layer of wet, white cotton that remained was almost worse than no clothes at all, and she knew it. Abbott laughed and winked at her.

  Except for a fleeting glimpse of zebra-like stripes across a clearing, there was no sign of larger animals. In a deliberate mental change of gears, Rafa wondered if this sort of habitat had any large carnivores like Earth’s grizzlies or jaguars—and if so, what he could do to protect the group in an emergency. So much about this planet was still a mystery; if he hadn’t understood the viking death toll before, it was plain now. He was glad they were all carrying tree limbs that could serve as bludgeons in a pinch.

  By noon they were thirteen kilometers closer to their goal, though Abbott claimed it was a cinch they’d covered twice that much ground. Nobody argued; they just sank wearily down to a crouch and gulped from water bottles they’d refilled at the first bubbling gorge they crossed. It had long since grown hot, and their suits clung to bodies slick with sweat. At least they weren’t in direct sun.

  After a short rest they pressed on, stubbornly maintaining and even increasing their pace in a desperate bid to win through by nightfall. More hills came and went, with the overall elevation rising gradually. The banana look-alikes gradually gave way to more conifers and celery-stalks. The terrain grew more vertical and rocky, but thinning vegetation between the mighty columns made progress somewhat easier.

  Dusk was fading into true night when they crested a final foothill and gazed down in relief at the dried mudslide and its precious connections to humanity. The burnished rings gave off enough light to cast angular shadows from the most exposed corners of the module. Small evidences of habitation—scattered tools, ankle-deep tracks through the mud, the imprint of a skimmer’s skids—nearly brought tears to Rafa’s ey
es.

  Abbott let out a whoop that echoed hollowly in the night stillness, and sagged into a meager trot. After thirteen hours of relentless march, all of them were beyond footsore. Chen was swaying with exhaustion, and Rafa half wondered whether her knees could take another descent right now.

  Given the catatonic state of the crew by shift-end, nobody was surprised that their approach provoked no stirrings from within the module—not at first, anyway. But as Rafa slipped on muddy boulders at the ragged edge of the slide’s path, he began to wonder about the lack of vehicles and heavy equipment. Surely they hadn’t moved everything back into the shattered hold.

  By then Abbott was at the door. Suddenly his posture filled with uncertainty.

  “It’s locked,” he called out. “And nobody answers when I buzz.”

  Chen looked puzzled. “You think they’re all out exploring? Our shifts weren’t following day and night cycles.”

  Rafa sat down in the half-dry dirt and swatted at some circling gnats, looking far calmer than his companions. “Maybe. Let me see what the scheduler says.” He fiddled briefly with the menus on his wrist, then looked up, frowning. “They should be sleeping for a couple more hours. Unless earthside changed the rotation.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “Maybe they didn’t make it back after the stampede,” said Chen.

  Rafa shook his head. “The surveying team was only half the crew. We’d still see some people here unless everybody else had problems at the same time.”

  “Now what?” Abbott said, trying to keep a tremor out of his voice. “Sit around and hope someone shows?”

  Rafa levered himself back to his feet with effort, making no attempt to wipe his dirty trousers clean. “Now we get in the module. There ought to be food and water in there. And a safe place to sleep.”

  “I’m going to snooze till kingdom come, but not before I get some calories in me,” said Chen.