Viking (35 page)

Nobody came.

Everyone must be away from camp on assignments.

He flopped out of the water with a groan, limped across the slick slabs of
breakwater stone, and began a painstaking ascent of the broken rock above.

Despite its dampness, the jumbled surface provided numerous hand- and footholds. A
healthy climber would have been up in a trice—but Rafa had to grunt and wince and
scrabble for almost ten minutes, all the while fighting the searing separation of his
ribs and a renewed pinch in his broken forearm as he hauled his body skyward.

When he finally poked a sweaty, mud-streaked face above the ridgeline, he nearly
screamed in frustration and disgust.

No vehicles.

No barracks.

No crew.

Just rock-strewn beach and distant, faceless greenery. And the mute, indifferent
beacon.

The surge of hope that had powered his climb vanished as quickly as it came. Rafa
laid his head against the rock and closed his eyes tightly to suppress the tears. And
he prayed again, pleading for some escape from bleak despair.

But he couldn’t concentrate on inner conflicts for long, because the mental image of
the beacon kept intruding. There was a strangeness about it that brought turbulent
questions to his mind. Why had the crew taken time to build such a structure—and when?
Why had he never been aware of such a task?

He opened his eyes again and stared. Definitely odd. Unlike the ugly practicality
that characterized most mission equipment, the lines of the beacon were sleek and
graceful. Biting back a groan, he hauled himself onto the gritty shelf of stone atop
the bluff and crawled painfully forward, his forehead wrinkled in puzzlement. As he
approached, the scimitar shadow of the beacon swallowed his tousled hair and sagging
shoulders, and momentarily eased the sting of sun-reddened skin on his cheekbones and
nose.

He was within reach of the curving support legs, still blinking to adjust his eyes
to the merciful softness of shadow against overbright sky, when he saw lines of
delicate script standing out on the glassy metal.

He stopped crawling.

He stopped breathing.

Behind and below, an especially heavy surge of surf crashed, raining prickles of
salty mist on his raw neck and ears. But he took no notice.

The hair along the nape of his neck bristled instinctively.

Human hands had not embossed these words.

Julie and Satler sat silently when the clip ended. It had been the most dizzying and
chaotic to date, but its portent seemed obvious. They’d watched with bated breath as
Rafa dashed away from the sheltering trees, weaved frantically to keep ahead of the
weird balloon-like colossus, and finally flipped upside down in the grip of restraining
tentacles. They’d seen ground fall away and the pulsing jaws of the alien monster
approach. Then the clip ended.

Satler looked over uncertainly.
I’m sorry
seemed pitifully inadequate.

Julie met his gaze squarely, though her eyes were filled with tears.

What to say?
He’d originally called her out of a sense of guilt, not
certain how she’d react. A lot of vikings had next-of-kin that couldn’t care less what
happened. Having some acquaintance with Rafa, he should have known to expect better
from his wife. But he’d still been surprised and impressed with her level-headed
loyalty.

And—which came as a mild shock—he’d been a bit jealous. Romance hadn’t been all that
high of a priority up till now, except for one ill-fated engagement a couple years
earlier. He’d had the most innocent of intentions when he set up the face-to-face
meeting. But in person, Julie was charming and intelligent and attractive, and he found
himself longing for the kind of relationship that she and her husband obviously shared.
It was tempting, in fact, to abandon his original purpose and simply enjoy the excuse
for Julie’s company.

But he had too much respect for Julie to allow such a thing, especially now that he
knew her a little better. He’d suggested checking into hotel rooms in case they were
being followed—but immediately clarified that he meant two
different
places. And
he’d been careful to remain relatively detached.

All of which made it extremely awkward to extend a gesture of comfort, much as he
wanted to.

Lacking words, he stood and began to pace. “I guess I’ll call my hacker friend and
tell him to deactivate the feed from the satellite cache,” he finally said, more
gruffly than he intended.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Julie responded. “I’m not through, yet.”

Satler looked up, surprised at the strength of her reaction. “Julie, better be
realistic. You won’t find anything after that.”

Julie sniffed. “Realism has been a lousy strategy for me up till now.”

“I know what you mean...” began Satler.

“I don’t think so,” she said quickly. There was no anger in her voice, just an
introspective intensity. “I don’t think you do. The jury said it was reality that I’d
been betrayed by a vicious, cold-blooded murderer. I believed them. My mom said it was
reality that I needed to get on with my life and get a divorce. I believed her. MEEGO
said Rafa died in the stampede. I believed them. That makes me 0 for 3; I’m not going
to be quite so credulous anymore. Let somebody else carry the burden of proof for a
change.”

“Are you saying you think Rafa’s still alive, then?”

“I’m saying I’ll believe otherwise when I have to, but not before. Does that seem so
crazy?”

Satler sighed heavily. “No, Julie. It doesn’t.”

“Good. Then let’s check the rest of the clips. I noticed one that was about
forty-five seconds.”

Resolutely she turned back to the screen.

Rafa gazed at the script with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. He was only
an arm’s length away from something conceived, crafted—no doubt handled—by non-human
architects! For an instant his skin crawled with dread of the unknown builders, but the
feeling rapidly gave way to curiosity.

In the decades that terrans had roamed the stars, exobiology had moved from
speculation to science, but human longing for companionship found no reprieve. No
cosmic flag-waving ever signaled other explorers; no habitable planet held traces of
civilization. Intelligence, it seemed, was a very rare commodity. With the advent of
blinker ships, SETI enthusiasts had positioned hundreds of listening posts in likely
places. And after years of listening, not a single electromagnetic fingerprint had been
detected. Of course, it would be millennia before exploration of the Milky Way could
legitimately be considered “complete”—but science and popular opinion had gravitated to
theories of evolution that predicted only remote chances for sentience in the overall
scheme of things.

Hubris.

Hesitantly he reached out to touch the gleaming symbols. They ran in vertical lines
about as wide as his thumb, each glyph standing out in clean, glowing amber against the
cooler hues of chrome behind. The shapes were more complex than Latin letters, more
elegant. They reminded Rafa somewhat of Chinese, though circles and curves outnumbered
angular strokes.

As brine-wrinkled fingertips brushed the ridges, several lines of text lit up. A
disembodied voice spoke in a soft sing-song full of clicks and sibilants.

Rafa recoiled as if he’d been stung. Somehow his mind had already cast the arch as
an artifact—a quiescent historical footprint, like Chichén Itzá or the pyramids at
Giza—rather than a living, functioning device. Now he mentally shifted gears, ruefully
thinking of the sweeping apex light. If his head hadn’t been pounding so much, maybe
he’d have digested its significance better.

Well, if it had been dormant before, the construction slept no longer. It was awake
to his presence. Was that dangerous? Would he momentarily be visited or attacked?

He took a deep breath. Perhaps he
had
triggered a signal of some sort;
perhaps the script was his contemporary rather than a relic. But it did no good to
dread, and besides, even if the arch makers were listening, they couldn’t be doing it
from Erisa Beta II. A local civilization would have shown up on orbital scans. It would
have lit up the radio spectrum. It would have advertised itself in a hundred different
ways.

Still, the beacon was overlooked, even though it must have been here when our
satellites surveyed the area
, he thought.
What else did they miss?

Unconsciously Rafa shook his head. No: the arch must be an anomaly in an otherwise
empty world—a marker, a banner of sorts planted on foreign soil as one large step for
alien kind. Anything more obvious would have attracted attention from the
beginning.

On the other hand...

All at once MEEGO’s strange behavior on this mission made a twisted sort of sense.
Suppose there
was
something else—an outpost maybe, or a jungle-shrouded
city—possibly even a ship. And it had shown up after the company’s early surveys, after
initial permits had been issued... It would turn an ordinary viking mission on its ear.
Never mind the minor details, the training, or the death toll. Just get ink on the
documents that validate a claim to the planet, any way at any cost.

If that was it, no wonder their priorities were out of whack.

They’d never retain the claim, of course; sooner or later the company would have to
disclose their findings, and the government would step in and appropriate everything
under eminent domain. No court on Earth would let this sort of discovery stay in
private hands.

But the publicity alone would be worth millions. And who could estimate the value of
an exclusive, private analysis of alien technology, before regulation and bureaucracy
reared their ugly heads? How about a travel franchise? Even if claims to part of the
planet were annulled, MEEGO would probably end up running the only spaceport to the
hottest destination anywhere... A cutthroat capitalist could doubtless come up with a
hundred other lucrative angles.

It furnished a compelling explanation for the sudden move to the coast, even if it
raised a host of new questions. What had MEEGO found to send the vikings packing?

A wave of dizziness swept over Rafa, the combined result of fatigue, thirst, too
much sun, and the insistent, gut-wrenching pain from his head, ankle and ribs. He
closed his eyes wearily, curiosity sinking under a resurgent tide of physical concern,
wishing that the rain from yesterday afternoon would return. He’d depleted the water
bag hours ago, and without precipitation it would remain limp and useless on his belt
clip.

To make matters worse, the itch from his beetle bite was back with a vengeance, as
drying water on irritated skin produced a thin film of salt. His swollen forearm was
pulsing from the constriction of a once ample cuff; he slit the sleeve with his knife
and blinked in disgust at the pockets of pus that ran up beyond his shoulder and onto
his chest.

The urge to scratch was overwhelming. Without thinking he began scraping with the
blade of his knife, grimacing as blisters popped and dripped onto the sand. Each stroke
was torture, but the pain helped mask the itch, so he kept at it until the blade was
covered with blood and he could take no more.

Stupid
, he thought, as he lay back to rest.
That just spread germs
everywhere. And it’s going to be that much worse when you’re back in the water.
But at the moment his arm felt a little better.

As if unwilling to take a back seat, the glowing script issued a soft, insistent
tone. He sat up again. Now he saw that the block of text ended—if indeed the
foreshortened edge at the upper right corner was an “end”—with a patiently blinking
triangle.

A cursor of sorts. It wanted input.

Again his skin prickled. This monument or device or whatever it was supposed to be,
was far too alive, far too functional for his comfort.

He began to crawl away. Suddenly the prospect of wrenching with gritted teeth
through salty waves seemed almost inviting. Anything to put distance between him and
the disturbing arch. The sun would be down in another couple hours. If he pushed, he
might make two kilometers by dark. Rafa’s knees scuffled across the sandy rock, the toe
of his damaged foot lifted to avoid further injury.

After three or four meters, he felt a growing pressure on his head and shoulders,
thrusting back toward the center of the metallic parabola. The air at the points of
greatest resistance shimmered like heat waves over sun-baked tarmac. Rafa strained
ahead, panic rising.

The counter-force stiffened.

Five meters. He clawed and groaned and dug with his good foot in a sprinter’s
stance. Now the forward barrier was nearly as unyielding as a brick wall. Visions of
hapless, frantic animals caught in a trap crowded into his mind. He rotated onto his
back, still fighting, and pushed with bunched shoulders to take the strain off his
neck.

It was no use. Every centimeter became exponentially tougher than the last, and the
edge of the bluff still tantalized half a dozen meters away. He sagged. The inanimate,
invisible ram slid him back a few centimeters, until friction and repulsion achieved
equilibrium.

He retreated a couple meters and could sense no impulse toward the arch. A graduated
force field? Reaching outward, his hand encountered the beginnings of opposition at
about the same place as before. At least his prison wasn’t constricting.

The cursor still pulsed steadily.

Too worn and pessimistic to crawl the perimeter of the field, Rafa picked up small
stones and hurled them in various directions. No matter which angle he chose, the
projectiles lost forward momentum as if slowed by an unseen hand, and dropped back to
the sandy rock with an apologetic clatter. The boundary seemed to follow a constant
radius from the center of the arch.

For a moment he tasted defeat, face slumped bitterly. A lump rose in his throat.
Please, Lord, don’t let me die like a caged rat, wrung out from thirst and
exhaustion.
His heart thumped steadily, slowly in his chest.