Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (14 page)

George laughed out loud as a sudden thought came to him. Susan glanced at him suspiciously. “What?” she asked.

“I have just now realized the real reason why we are so much more content than other mated pairs,” George said, squeezing Susan’s hand. He gestured to the layer of mist that covered the floor of the corridor. “Here we are in the midst of full gas concentration, yet we are searching for a privacy chamber.” That was the other common side effect of too much gas—most Tenctonese completely lost the desire to couple under its influence. But the more George thought about it, the more he realized that he and Susan had never felt so constrained. Certainly their intimate times together were infrequent prizes in the mind-numbing routine of the ship, but on those rare occasions when their schedules overlapped at the same time a privacy chamber was available, it had never really seemed to matter what the concentration of the gas was.

They reached the branching intersection, and Susan stopped in the middle of it with a thoughtful look on her face. In all eight directions the corridors were deserted, almost eerily. “You’re right,” she said. “I never really thought about it before.” She gave a small cough—the first sign that the extremely high level of gas was finally beginning to have an effect on her.

George slipped his arms around Susan, knowing that within an hour at most the gas would take its toll on her. But an hour would be enough time for him to get her away from the highest concentrations.

He looked all around them, treasuring the feel of her within his arms. “It must be proof of our love,” he said. That certainly made sense. To couple without love was almost unthinkable as far as George was concerned. And no doubt those who had been assigned to each other by the Overseers, without a chance for love to enter their unions, shared that feeling—which might explain the jealousy that George so often felt directed at him and Susan. It might also be the reason why the birth rate on board was so low. Dropping precipitously, the Elders said.

“Proof of our love,” Susan repeated as she returned George’s hug at the same time she gazed up and down the empty corridors. “Either that, or the
sardanac
I’ve been slipping into your meatgrowth is finally beginning to work.”

George stepped back from Susan. She could joke about anything. But they had both long ago decided that
sardanac
—an artificial pheromone that could chemically bond any male and female—was not desirable or necessary for them. At least he hoped she was joking.

“Doesn’t this strike you as strange?” Susan asked.

“Sardanac?”
George replied, confused.

Susan shook her head with a sigh of exasperation. “No, Stangya. The corridors. The whole time we’ve been standing here there’s been absolutely no one in them.”

George shrugged. Now that they were beyond the watchful eyes of jealous others, the idea of finding a privacy chamber was seeming more and more like a good plan, particularly before the effect of the gas grew any stronger in Susan. “It’s mid-shift,” he said.

Susan frowned. “But still . . . there should be couriers, Elders, scavengers, off-shift workers . . . somebody. Even an Overseer.”

George once again looked down each of the eight corridors. Susan was right, but he could come up with a partial explanation. “With the gas levels so high, the Overseers don’t need to be in the corridors. The gas will make almost all the others stay where they are until they’re given orders to move.”

“All the others except for us,” Susan said with a preoccupied tone. “I wonder if it’s because we wanted to couple.”

George reflexively looked around to see if anyone else had heard her blunt statement. “Oblakah . . .”

“Oh, relax, Stangya. There’s no one here. But why? And if the Overseers don’t need to be in this section, where
do
they need to be?”

She was right again. This wasn’t normal. George tilted his head, straining to hear if there was anything wrong with the ship. Once, almost fifteen years ago on a deep range, a strange vibration had rumbled through the corridors, and the ship had violently translated into normal space hundreds of parsecs from any course-correction star. The lights and gravity had been out for almost an entire shift. During the nightmarish period of zero gravity all through the ship food-growth vats and sewage-processing units had emptied into the air-circulation system, which had taken more than a year to properly cleanse. The Overseers’ response had been to withdraw to other parts of the ship and then to flood the corridors with copious amounts of holy gas to place most of the Tenctonese into a state of near catatonia. Thousands had died of starvation and dehydration during that time. George, with his brother Ruhtra, had been one of only a handful who were still able to move about, groggy, though not completely incapacitated by the gas. And he could remember that almost twenty shifts had passed before the ship translated back into its superluminal mode and the Overseers returned to the corridors. Near the end of those twenty shifts, as the effects of the overdose of gas began to wear off, many of the Tenctonese had come to believe they had been abandoned by the Overseers to die in space. Some had welcomed that fate. To this day, as far as George understood, no one knew what had happened to cause such a near disaster. He listened apprehensively now in case it was to happen again.

But in the empty corridors the constant background vibration of the ship’s machinery was smooth and unchanged. There was, however, a noise of a different kind coming from one direction. George strained to hear it, to understand it.

Susan looked down the same corridor. She heard it, too. “Is it some kind of machine?” she asked.

The sound was regular enough to be mechanical in origin, but there was something more to it, something . . .

“It’s marching!” George said. His spots puckered. It was the sound of Overseers’ boots moving in perfect rhythm. Dozens of them. Perhaps a hundred.

He saw Susan rock gently from foot to foot, soothing the muscles of her feet. “Maybe we should go back to the light bay,” she said nervously.

George kept his eyes fixed on the corridor from which the sounds of marching came. He sought out Susan’s hand and held it tight. “Maybe we should,” he said.

The marching grew louder, then began to lessen again. Whoever—whatever—was moving through the corridors still thick with holy gas had shifted directions.

Susan and George took a step forward at the same time, not even conscious of what they were doing until they turned to each other, first in surprise and then in immediate understanding.

There was something unusual occurring nearby. Something that, judging by the gas concentration, the Overseers didn’t want anyone else to see.

Given such a situation, George and Susan moved as one. They had to know what was happening. Hand in hand they cautiously edged down the corridor. It was the only act of rebellion of which they were capable.

For now.

A
FTER TWO HOURS IN
Bryon Grazer’s company Sikes was already beginning to regret ever talking to the detective. True, Grazer knew more than Sikes ever would about computers, but the only topic the forensic accounting detective wanted to talk about was how the political structure of the LAPD would be changing now that Chief Williams had replaced Daryl Gates. “The old boys’ network of the past is on its way out, Sikes,” was the way Grazer had begun his lecture on the drive back to Sikes’s apartment. “The old loyalties are in disarray. Lines of communications are broken. In a way, the current conditions within the force resemble the start of the Wars of the Diodochi in 323
B.C.
” He had peered earnestly over at Sikes then. “You
are
familiar with the forty-two-year war of succession that followed the death of Alexander the Great, aren’t you?”

Sikes’s biggest mistake of the day was that he had confessed that he wasn’t all that familiar with the War of the Dahoozits, and Grazer had immediately set out to correct that shortcoming, spending the next hour in a nonstop detailed discourse that appeared to touch on everything from Babylonian toilet habits to the contradictory reports concerning the performance of Patriot missiles during the Gulf War. In retrospect, Sikes was amazed that one person could talk so assuredly in such an incoherent manner for so long. But at the time he had only wanted to scream and hit the steering wheel, which was his traditional method of dealing with the frustrations of driving in L.A. traffic. About the time Grazer began describing the spread of animal-grease rumors during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 Sikes even considered for a few satisfying moments what might happen if he screamed and then hit Grazer.

Remarkably, as the two men rode up in the balky elevator in Sikes’s Studio City apartment building, Grazer brought his entire surreal lecture full circle, comparing each of the LAPD’s assistant chiefs to one of Alexander the Great’s generals. “And, of course,” Grazer grandly concluded, “I don’t have to tell
you
who General Lysimachus compares to, because it is just
too
obvious.” He chuckled knowingly, and Sikes, on the brink of mental suffocation, joined in weakly just as the elevator chimed and the doors opened on his floor.

Grazer hesitated outside the elevator, clutching the late Dr. Petty’s computer to his chest, and sniffed the air. “What is that?” he asked. “Cabbage?”

Sikes had a sudden fear that he was about to be subjected to a seminar on Irish immigration and thus ignored the question, charging quickly down the L-hallway toward his apartment. The sooner he could get the computer set up and running, the sooner he could focus Grazer’s rambling intellect on the Petty case.

But when he turned the corner he realized that the evening was not going to get any simpler or better.

“Where have you been?” Victoria Sikes, née Fletcher, said angrily. She was waiting by Sikes’s apartment door, where it appeared she was in the process of writing a note on a piece of paper she had stuck over the security peephole.

Sikes froze at the corner and almost lost his grip on the cardboard box he carried, filled with stacks of Grazer’s floppy disks and the monitor for Petty’s computer. His eyes widened as he tried to remember what day it was. “Vic?”

His daughter, Kirby, stood behind his wife and waved at him, grinning. Except for her Guns ’N Roses T-shirt and three silver crosses dangling from her left ear, she looked to Sikes like the sweetest thirteen-year-old girl imaginable. Victoria, on the other hand, in her traditional severe business suit, looked as if she were ready to kill.

“Well?” Victoria said, placing her hands on her hips. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting?”

“Twenty-two minutes,” Kirby said. She grinned again at her father. “No big deal, Dad.”

Sikes felt trapped. He was delighted to see his daughter but didn’t know how he was going to handle working with Grazer if Kirby was supposed to spend the night. He was unnerved to see his wife, but as always Victoria’s presence made his heart flutter, as if it hadn’t been in communication with his brain since their honeymoon. “Um,” he stammered, “this
is
Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s Wednesday,” Grazer said as he came to a stop beside Sikes. “So, are you going to introduce me?”

“So what if it’s Wednesday?” Victoria demanded.

Sikes nodded at his wife and daughter. “Detective Bryon Grazer, this is my daughter, Kirby, and, uh, my wife, Victoria.”

“I didn’t know you were married,” Grazer said.

Of course not, Sikes thought, you’ve only known me two hours, and you haven’t let me say more than a dozen words.

“We’re separated,” Victoria said sharply. “Well, Matt, I’m waiting for an answer.”

Sikes thought feverishly. All his hopes for the future were riding on his determination never to screw up with Victoria and Kirby again. But from Victoria’s mood, he obviously had, and he didn’t know how.

“I thought,” he began cautiously, “I thought Kirby was coming for the
weekend.”
Every other weekend during the school year. That was the arrangement. Sikes was certain of it.

Victoria crossed her arms and sighed dramatically. “Oh, Matt. I
told
you I had to go to Bern tonight.” She looked at him accusingly. “The Oberth Pharmaceuticals account? Sound familiar?”

“That’s the company with the new sugar substitute, isn’t it?” Grazer asked. “An L-sucrose. Just as sweet as sugar. Can’t be digested, so no calories. With aspartame’s patent having run out they stand to break into a twenty-billion-dollar-a-year market with an initial eight percent penetration. Right now they’re shopping for a California-based advertising agency that—”

Sikes stared at Grazer in bewilderment. “How the hell do you know that?”

Grazer blinked innocently at Sikes. “I take a money management course at UCLA so I can handle my investments more efficiently. I highly recommend the course, detective.”

“You have
investments?”
Sikes asked incredulously. “On
our
salaries?”

“Don’t you?” Grazer asked as if he were genuinely puzzled.

“No, he doesn’t,” Victoria said. “Now open the door, Matt. My flight leaves in two hours.”

Sikes leaned down and placed the cardboard box on the worn floral print broadloom in front of his apartment door. As he straightened up to pull out his keys he could see that Victoria had been writing her message to him on a large yellow Post-it note. She always carried three different sizes of them in her purse. There had been times when he had thought she had intended to redecorate their apartment with them. The note began:
Matt, I’m not surprised that you have let me down again, but I can’t understand how you can continue to disappoint Kirby in this callous manner.

It was too much. Sikes’s hand began to shake, and he couldn’t get his key into the lock. He turned to Victoria. “Just
when
did you tell me that you were bringing Kirby over tonight?”

Victoria’s lips pursed in restrained anger. She reached into the large shoulder bag she carried and pulled out a thick Filofax. She leafed through it quickly, then ran a long red fingernail—her own, not an extension—across a handwritten entry. “Last Tuesday. Our phone call about Kirby’s summer school.”