Free Viking by Daniel Hardman Page B

for utilitarian considerations. In a few days he’d be buried in this
muddy clay—if he was lucky—without so much as an “Alas, poor Yorick” over his grave.
And Julie would probably never even know.
    Abruptly he sprang to his feet, his hands clenching unconsciously, his jaw set.
    “What’s next?”
    There was a short pause while Dr. Satler flipped some toggles and reactivated the
uplink portion of his own connection.
    Hold on! I was just in the middle of a sandwich.
Satler’s voice sounded
thick and muffled, like his mouth was full.
    “Sorry. I just decided that a break is worse than being worked into the ground.”
    Satler’s voice was clearer this time, but it was slurred by a yawn and tinged with
annoyance.
You won’t be feeling that way at the end of your shift, I’ll tell you
that much. You’ll be lucky if you’re still walking.
    Rafa drummed his gloved fingers on his coveralls.
    All right. We’ve got plenty of samples to keep the DNA sequencer busy. It’s come
back with preliminary profiles on some of the bacteria, but running just the
interesting species of plants and animals will take hours. I’ve got a team crunching
through your visual feed, indexing everything and adding it to our master database.
Enough raw data on a small scale. Let’s see if we can fill in some of the holes in our
biosurvey. I’ve got a skimmer freed up for a couple hours.
    Rafa hoisted the bulky pack onto his shoulders and clomped back down the hill.
    The virtual noise came without warning, crescendoing exponentially like feedback
from a mispositioned microphone. No eardrum could have withstood the intensity of such
sound; the auditory centers of his brain were overwhelmed as they processed the
signal.
    Rafa pitched forward on his face, experiencing a powerful electrical shock from his
implants as he fell. For a moment he was too stunned to move; then he spat mud from his
mouth and staggered out of a prone position, gasping at the pain in his head. A wave of
dizziness sent him reeling.
    The initial overload subsided, and everything faded into a merciful silence that was
as absolute as anything Rafa had ever known. Then came a fleeting sensation of distant,
distorted buzzing, and the horizon curled itself up in a swirl of vertigo and
blackness.

10
    With the storm dispersing, it was easy for 1291 of pod 71 to detect the chatter that
a scout had reported the night before.
    It wasn’t random, like the static that crackled and sizzled between thunderheads.
And it was definitely more speech-like than the monotone siren parked in The Cold far
overhead, or the primitive squealers that had recently materialized near the mountains.
But as she sank through the cloudbank, she had to agree: if it was language, it was a
bizarre and mystifying sort that she’d never encountered before.
    Receptors perked, she shrugged off the lethargy induced by days of miserable weather
and reluctant babysitting. The smaller juveniles hadn’t been able to clear the front
and were forced to take the brunt of the storm at twenty thousand meters. Of course the
adults had remained at the same altitude to provide comfort and reassurance. It had
been a fatiguing chore.
    Now pods to the south and west were chatting happily in unbroken sunshine, their
photosynthetic skins pulsing with living green as they renewed energy reserves. Soon
her own group would be in the clear as well. Still listening, she quickened the pace of
descent at the thought of the three missing young ones. In all likelihood they were
simply off exploring, but each year the monsoons tore and grounded careless calves, and
she was anxious for their safety.
    Perhaps this was the keening of a semi-conscious, wounded child.
    But that seemed a dubious explanation. Although this speaker used basic speech
protocol, its IDs were pure fantasy. 171171971 of 13098973? There was no such pod—and
even if there were, it couldn’t be big enough to justify such a