Viking (34 page)

The motion of the branches as he cut disturbed a thumb-sized beetle that jumped onto
his wrist. He flicked it off in a shudder, but it clung long enough to leave a nasty
bite that immediately swelled and reddened.

Rafa retreated down the beach in the opposite direction from the bug, the berries
heavy and sweet-smelling in his hand, hoping that he hadn’t received a lethal dose of
venom or toxic bacteria. Many of the vikings he’d read about in public archives had
perished from just this sort of minor-sounding encounter. He fished out a tube of
antiseptic gel from a biosuit pouch and applied a generous dollop to the bite, then
forced himself to dismiss the concern. No point worrying about something he couldn’t
change.

The rain tapered off, leaving behind a gray curtain of cloud that lent a faint
metallic sheen to the rolling surface of the water.

Daylight was fading yet again.

Rafa was wide awake after his nap, and felt cheated out of foraging and exploration
time. How would circadian rhythms eventually adapt to such an abbreviated cycle? Would
nights ever provide more than a half-hearted nap? Would days ever seem long enough?

Sighing, he collected some driftwood from just beyond the scalloped slope of sand.
Most was soggy, but here and there a length of stick or branch had been buried and was
reasonably dry when unearthed. He had no tinder or kindling, and it took until full
nightfall, scrabbling sore-muscled and sloth-like, to collect a handful of spiky fronds
and other combustible forest detritus that had escaped the worst of the shower. By then
the buzzing gnats that he’d met the previous night were out full force, along with a
sort of intermittently glowing dragonfly that darted on gull-sized wings, snapping up
an evening meal in bite-sized increments.

Even with his fire kit, it was tough to get a blaze—but eventually a flicker rose,
gathered strength, and sent licks of smoke curling into the blackness overhead. The
wood crackled and popped with steam as heat spread to wetter sections and dried them
out. It was a cheerful sound, comforting and familiar, and coupled with the steady
crash of surf it brought tears to Rafa’s eyes. How many times had he sat like this with
Julie at beach bonfires, their toes buried in sand and their fingers entwined as
naturally as the overlapping waves?

What was she doing now?

There was a recording device on his wrist unit. Maybe he should save a few last
words, a sentimental goodbye from a man she’d never see again. If he didn’t ever find
the crew, perhaps someday they’d track his implants, locate his remains on this
solitary stretch of coast, and forward a message from beyond the grave.

Just thinking about it brought a swelling constriction to his throat and quickened
the trickle from his eyes.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes... thy sweet love remembered...
So much he wanted to say. But he was no bard; words didn’t trip lightly from his
lips—they emerged clumsy and inadequate and forlorn.

So instead he huddled speechlessly by the fire, his clean brown fingers clutching
alien sand, tears filling the corners of his mouth, eyes fixed unseeingly at the dark
expanse of lonely ocean.

After a time he attempted to sleep—not for the sake of fatigue, but to escape the
bitterness of self-pity and condemnation. It didn’t work. The thoughts were too
persistent, the glow from the fire too warm and uneven, the darkness too oppressive.
The arm with the bug bite was sore and itchy. It felt swollen and hot to the touch, all
the way past his elbow. Along the base of his neck, a severe headache began. He rolled
his neck stiffly, kneaded with his fingers, wondering where the symptoms would end.

Toward morning a throaty howl bugled from the nearby fringes of the forest and
raised the hair on the back of his neck. He tossed all his remaining fuel on the fire
and stirred it anxiously, expecting any minute to be attacked by sharp-fanged denizens
of the jungle. He was too afraid to gather more wood.

A minute later he saw—or imagined, at any rate—a pair of unbelievably wide-set hazel
eyes studying him unblinkingly from the shadows of the bushes. But the flames beside
him crackled and leapt, and the orbs silently winked out, leaving him to scan in fear
and dread until the first dreary streaks of dawn fingered their way into the sky.

By then Rafa was cramped and weary and feeling the renewed weakness of unrequited
hunger. The site of the beetle bite on his arm had become a massive boil that itched
fiendishly and oozed greenish pus from the center. The rest of the arm looked bruised.
The headache was a pounding abomination that had him seeing double with even the
slightest motion, and his stomach wrenched queasily. But his fire was mostly dead as
well, and the prospect of remaining in a spot where prowling predators might revisit
was too unnerving to contemplate.

He re-zipped his suit, pulled a smoldering branch from the fire to use as a crutch,
drew his survival knife, and crawled joltingly toward the water. Even having his back
to the forest for a few seconds was terrifying; he was relieved when he glanced back
with a hammering heart to see only empty beach.

Rafa was up to his elbows and belly in the waves when the background nausea he’d
been trying to ignore gave an especially urgent twist. No longer able to fight, he
heaved miserably, over and over again, not producing anything except a few mouthfuls of
acidic spittle streaked with blood. The pain in his head and neck surged with each
spasm, causing ripples of dizziness.

For a while he feared he would black out and drown, face-down in the water. But
finally the episode passed, leaving him panting. He crouched feebly, waited for the
rhythmic ebb to clear the vomitus away, and then swabbed his lips clean.

When the nausea faded, he splashed on again, until he was out a good thirty meters
from shore. The water was chest-deep and cool, and for the first time since his fall
Rafa could stand without serious pain. The ache in his ankle eased immediately. Even
the itch at his wrist felt more tolerable.

He set off perpendicular to the softly rolling waves, splashing with his arms and
shoulders and hopping carefully on his good foot. Though it wasn’t the fastest mode of
travel, it was less fatiguing and at least as efficient as crawling on hands and knees.
And it got him away from lurking dangers in the trees.

Within a few minutes the sun was completely above the horizon, and the wildness of
the coastal landscape was unmasked. The dim selvage that had seemed so foreboding and
monolithic in darkness broke into a wicker of olive and lime, punctuated by electric
blues and reds of exotic flowers. Overhead, flying lizards darted, on patrol for unwary
crustaceans and other scraps of food, and rings razored across the sky. The sand along
the shore shimmered against the turquoise at Rafa’s elbows.

There was a wind this morning, scudding between distant whitecaps and rippling the
stiller water of the cove, pregnant with humidity that would be oppressive when the
temperature rose.

As Rafa splashed awkwardly along, he wondered what would be waiting if and when he
ever found the viking camp.

At the module he’d reluctantly accepted Heward’s claim of technical problems after
the stampede. Not that he believed it—with all the fancy circuits and
telecommunications equipment he was carrying around, it strained credulity to think
Earthside could lose his signal or fail to find it again if they looked—but if that was
MEEGO’s story, there was nothing he could do about it.

He had simply passed it off as their way of whitewashing their own negligence.

But the fall from the skimmer was something else again.

The more Rafa thought about it, the more he was convinced it had not been a simple
accident. The supposed failure of stabilizers would be easy to fake for a skilled
driver and offered a convenient way for Heward to dump his
persona
most
non
grata
.

Rafa clenched his jaw angrily as he rounded the peninsula that formed the small
cove. He’d chosen retreat over savagery in his confrontations with Heward, but it had
earned hatred instead of peace. He was not by nature a vengeful man, but perhaps
eliminating Heward was the only way to save his skin. At the very least Rafa had to
watch him carefully.

So what about the unbroken static that answered Rafa’s attempts at communication?
Were his implants damaged, or was Heward behind that as well? Certainly he could quash
rescue operations—might he also have arranged another “technical failure” of some sort?
Or would that require the complicity of someone at MEEGO headquarters?

The latter seemed more likely, though Rafa could find no reason why Earthside would
deliberately abandon him.

Unless it was pure economics. Rafa had opted for salary over finders fee or a cut of
company profits. It seemed the least risky way to leave Julie with a hefty nest egg.
Perhaps by viking standards he hadn’t negotiated for much, but it was still twenty
times what he’d been making as a professor and coach, pro-rated by day, and he could
easily picture MEEGO accountants pleased to close out the account. No matter how much
they stood to make off Erisa Beta II, the steady drain of a paycheck like his could not
be pleasant.

Of course, such a motive would only be compelling if MEEGO felt it could afford to
lose more crew members and still achieve its mission objectives. And given the
attrition rate so far, that was a dubious gamble unless his employers knew something he
did not...

The washboarded sand continued to plume beneath Rafa’s boots as he crept steadily
westward along the shoreline. Sometimes the coastal slant was more pronounced, forcing
him to within a few meters of the beach; other times it grew broad and shallow,
dropping to waist level and making it tough to keep his balance on one foot. In several
places he swam a painful, clumsy sidestroke across inlets and deeper pockets of water
to avoid time-consuming detours for topography. His head continued to pound
monotonously, though the nausea remained in check.

The water was teeming with life. He saw a school of palm-sized rays, some eels, and
an aquatic bug that clung to seaweed until it felt threatened, then shot to the
surface, spread its wings, and flew off in search of safer pastures. The underwater
tableau was also dotted with brilliant shells and clusters of gently waving marine
plants.

Once he nearly stepped on an elongated turtle creature that had been lazing almost
motionless on the bottom. Its broad, soft shell was so well camouflaged that he didn’t
see it till the last moment. Then he lurched abruptly to the side and apparently made
enough noise to arouse it—it flicked off in a panicky cloud of silt, probably almost as
frightened as he was.

Rafa’s headache steadily intensified from the surface glare, and his vision began to
fuzz and distort. The sensation of swelling and irritation from the beetle bite spread
up beyond his shoulder.

Near noon he thought he saw a family of sleek animals that resembled seals in size
and shape, sunbathing on shore. They seemed scaly instead of furred, and they were big
enough to make him nervous, but Rafa pressed dizzily onward, and they paid no
attention.

All the while, Rafa was battling a creeping dread of the unknown. Whenever he saw a
fish he thought of piranhas and barracudas and moray eels and wondered what might be
lurking just out of sight; each time his boot sank to the bottom he thought of sting
rays; every glimpse of larger animals conjured visions of sharks and salt water
crocodiles.

And those were just the dangers he could imagine. What else might be out there?

After a time he reached an uneasy truce with his hammering heart. It was predicated
on a sort of devil-may-care boldness that bordered on anger. What could happen worse
than he’d already survived? Let Fate deal him another catastrophe and he’d either laugh
in its face or be mercifully dead. Either way, he refused to kowtow to fear.

It wasn’t the most soothing stance, but it staved off paralysis and steadied the
trembling of the long survival knife glinting far too weakly above his whitened
knuckles.

 His stomach was twisting emptily, his neck and forehead raw with sunburn as
Rafa rounded a rocky promontory—the most westerly point of a coastline that now jagged
decidedly south—and turned away from the streaming afternoon sunlight. Both legs were
aching with fatigue—one from monotonous pumping, the other from hours of flexing at the
knee to protect his damaged ankle. His shoulders were knotted dully, and his ribs
throbbed from stroking against the sea. The muscles at the base of his skull continued
to pulse unmercifully.

How far had he come? Six or seven kilometers, maybe, in around eight hours. There
was no way of knowing for certain how much further he had to go. From the way Heward
had talked, it might be as much as another twenty or thirty clicks.

Three more days at this pace. If he could keep moving.

Wearily he turned toward shore for a rest. The stony rise he was skirting sloped
steeply at water’s edge, leaving a narrow strip of broken rock to absorb the surf. It
was an isolated spot where he could rest, safely insulated and hidden from the broad
slab of beach and its arboreal backdrop.

Then he saw the beacon.

It rose thirty or forty meters on a graceful parabola of chrome, a miniature gateway
arch overlooking the ocean and capped by a beam sweeping out alternating flashes of
amber and violet. He’d have spotted it long before if not for the glare of frontal
sun.

The crushing loneliness, the fear, and the mists of abandonment disappeared in an
explosion of hope.

Completely forgetting his resolve to maneuver cautiously around Heward, Rafa
struggled landward, shouting at the top of his lungs. Eagerly he scanned the near edges
of the ridge, expecting any moment to see the familiar faces of crewmates peering down
at him in astonishment.