Free Viking by Daniel Hardman Page A

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.”

9
    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