Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (15 page)

Sikes thought back to last Tuesday. He and Victoria
had
talked. She wanted him to contribute a thousand dollars to send Kirby to some sort of scuba-diving summer school in the Bahamas. Sikes had suggested that he could take Kirby to Sea World instead, and she could use the rest of the money for clothes and schoolbooks. Victoria hadn’t been impressed. But had she mentioned anything about Kirby coming over on Wednesday?

Sikes finished replaying the conversation in his mind. “Vic, all you said was that you had to go out of town—to Switzerland—this week. That was it.”

Victoria shoved her Filofax back into her shoulder bag without taking her eyes off Sikes. “Matthew,” she said icily, “when I go out of town, who usually looks after Kirby for me?”

Sikes looked to the ceiling for guidance. “Nannies.” He looked to Kirby for support. “Right?”

“Yeah, right,” Kirby agreed, “I keep telling Mom I don’t need them. I mean, I’m almost old enough to have sex, and—”

Sikes’s breath exploded from him.
“Almost?”
he repeated. “Try eight years!”

“Oh, Daaad,” Kirby groaned. “Everyone’s doing—”

“Try
ten
years!”

Victoria placed her hand firmly on Kirby’s shoulder. “That’s enough, Kirby.” She glared at Sikes. “And in the past, when I’ve hired nannies, have I not always informed you that I have arranged for Kirby’s care? Well?”

“I guess,” Sikes said, feeling himself on the edge of a long slippery slope.

“And did I tell you that I had hired a nanny this time?”

“But you
always
hire a nanny.”

“Did
I, Matthew?”

Sikes shook his head, turning the door keys over and over in his fingers. He didn’t know how, but it was all his fault again.

“So you admit that you knew you were supposed to look after Kirby.” It wasn’t a question. Sometimes Sikes wondered how Victoria had decided on advertising and marketing and missed becoming a lawyer.

Grazer put the computer down on top of Sikes’s box by the door. “I think she’s got you there, Sikes.”

Sikes jabbed a warning finger at Grazer. “Don’t you start.”

“It’s all right, Dad.” Kirby came up to Sikes and gave him a hug.

But Victoria wasn’t about to let Sikes off that easily. “It’s not all right, Kirby. And don’t you dare think otherwise, Matt. If you’re going to continue to behave in this irresponsible manner, I don’t know—”

“Stop it!” Sikes exclaimed. He thrust his key chain into his daughter’s hands. “Kirby, you open up and show this guy where he can set up the computer.” He looked at Grazer. “Bryon, you go with Kirby.” Then he turned to Victoria. “But you, you come with me.”

“I said my flight leaves in two hours,” Victoria protested.

“I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

At the elevator Sikes stood in front of the call button so that Victoria couldn’t press it. “This will take less than five minutes,” he said.

“I’ve already given you twenty-two today,” Victoria said.

Sikes opened his mouth to respond but then realized that if he was to accomplish anything in the next few minutes, he couldn’t waste time. He took a deep breath. “Vic, are you doing it to me on purpose, or do you really hate me this much?”

Victoria didn’t have an immediate smart comeback, so Sikes knew he had broken the escalating progression of the argument. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

Sikes held up his hands to keep Victoria from interrupting. “I’ll admit I screwed up on figuring out that Kirby was going to have to come here while you’re in Switzerland. No, don’t say anything. You’re right, I’m wrong. But really, Victoria, even you have to admit that it was an understandable mistake. And now it’s taken care of. I showed up—twenty-two minutes late, for which I apologize—but everything’s okay. So why do you tear into me like that? Especially in front of Kirby.”

He could see her jaw tighten, but her tightly drawn back blond hair remained immobile, as perfect as if it had been sculpted in place. Finally she spoke. “This isn’t the first time you’ve screwed up, Matt.”

“No. And it won’t be the last. But I’m getting better, aren’t I? I mean, it’s not like when Kirby was born and I didn’t know what the hell was going on or what I wanted or . . . or anything.”

Victoria looked away for a moment, then grudgingly she said, “No, it’s not like when Kirby was born.”

He could sense she was calming down, becoming the Victoria who had forgiven him so often in the past. Until the day her patience finally ran out. He decided to take a gamble—a hard thing for him to do—and spoke the truth to her. “I
am
trying, Vic. And you know why, don’t you?”

She stared searchingly into his eyes. She had looked at him that way the first time they had met, and he had lost his heart to her in less than a single beat.
“Do
you know what you want?”

“More than ever,” Sikes said.

“Tell me.”

It was all or nothing. Like drawing a gun in a dark alley, looking for shadows. “I want you. And Kirby. Back in my life.”

“You had that once.”

“But I didn’t know it,” Sikes said honestly. “Like the song says. It wasn’t until you’d gone that I realized what I had.”

For an instant it appeared as if Victoria’s perfect composure might be cracking. Now it was her turn to have to look away. “We’ve had this conversation before, Matt. Why should I believe you this time?”

Sikes clenched his fists at his side. It would be so much simpler if she could just read his mind. He wasn’t like Grazer. Words did not come easily to him. “Because I’m trying. I’m really trying to get my life in order. To make Kirby proud of me. To make
you
proud of me.”

For a moment he saw a smile flicker on her lips. Then she looked away.

“What?” he asked.

She seemed embarrassed, but for the first time in this brief meeting he didn’t feel her fighting him, denying him. “I was just remembering you in your uniform. The day you graduated.” She looked at him, honesty in her eyes as well. “I was proud of you, Matt.”

Sikes fumbled at his back pocket and pulled out his badge case. He flipped it open and held out the gold shield inside like a child offering a painting to be hung on the refrigerator.

“Detective,” Victoria said, wonderingly.

“My first day,” Sikes explained, trying to keep the excitement from his voice, not willing to risk anything interfering with the sudden connection he felt he had made with her. “That’s what the computer’s for. It’s a lead in my first case. Me. A homicide detective.”

This time, when the smile came to Victoria’s lips, it wasn’t fleeting. “Congratulations, Matt. Really. It seems it was a long time since you took those tests. I didn’t actually realize that . . . well, that you’d finally made it.”

There was no undercurrent of sarcasm in her tone, and Sikes didn’t go looking for it. For him, making detective was the first step on a long road to personal rehabilitation—a road that ended with his family back together with him.

“That detective you were with,” Victoria said, “is he your new partner?”

The lie was out of Sikes before he even had time to think about it. “Yes,” he said. “Grazer’s helping me out on this one. He knows a lot about computers. He, um . . .” He was faltering, and he knew it. The last thing he needed to do now was to tell Victoria that he had a female partner. An
attractive
female partner. That was another mistake in his past he was trying to recover from—one that was never too far from Victoria’s thoughts, and for good reason. But Sikes knew he wasn’t going to be able to get away with it this time. He could never lie to Victoria without stumbling and stammering and that was exactly what was happening now. She was looking right at him, and she would know what he was doing. There was only one conclusion she could reach.

But again Sikes was wrong. There were
two
possible conclusions. And Victoria preferred the second.

She put her hands around his hand that held the badge case. “Oh, Matt,” she said, not a hint of reserve left anywhere in her. “I know what it means when you start sputtering like that.”

Sikes felt his insides turn to ice. He had almost made contact, and then he had blown it again. “You . . . you do?” he said, dragging his defeat out as long as possible. Who knew? Maybe the Big One would finally hit, and the building would collapse, and that would be the end of his struggle.

“Uh-huh,” Victoria said. Then, amazingly, she stepped closer to Sikes and gathered his hand to her chest and stared at him with her lips only inches from his. “I’ve always had that effect on you, haven’t I?”

Sikes’s throat was as dry as a Santa Ana wind. He tried to nod, but he seemed to have relinquished control of his body.

And then Victoria threw her arms around him, pressed her hands against the back of his head, and kissed him like their very first kiss, when the world had spun away from them, disappearing for hours.

Sikes felt his chest melt. His knees actually went wobbly. He kissed back, urgently, rapturously, matching her mood and her need moment by moment until he lost track of where he was and who he was, and even the smell of his apartment hallway vanished in the warm haze of Victoria’s perfume and the taste of her.

When it at last seemed to Sikes that he would no longer be able to breathe Victoria pulled slowly away, still perfectly in tune with him. Sikes breathed through his mouth. Each beat of his heart echoed in his ears. Victoria’s eyes were half closed. A small strand of hair had pulled away from her sleek chignon and danced softly against her forehead. Sikes reached out with an unsteady hand to brush the hair away. Victoria took his hand, kissed his fingers, and whispered throatily, “I’ll see you when I get back.”

She reached around him and pressed the elevator call button behind his back. She stayed there, pressed tightly to him, hands running up and down his back until the elevator chimed. Then she left, blowing him a final kiss just as the doors slipped closed.

“Oh, man,” Sikes said to the emptiness of the apartment hallway. “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man . . .”

He rubbed at his face and could smell Victoria’s scent still clinging to him. His entire body vibrated like the sweetest chord Springsteen had ever played. And all he could think was that he had done it. He had actually, finally, and incredibly won back Victoria.

He almost felt like dancing as he walked back to his apartment. He knew he still had extensive ground to cover with his wife. They had more to work out between them than anything a good dose of hormones could overcome—especially the matter about his
real
new partner, Angela Perez. But he knew he
would
be able to work everything out because Angie and his new position as detective and the Petty murder investigation—that whole jumble of potential barriers to his reconciliation with Victoria—were only minor, work-related details. Easily understood, easily dealt with.

After all, he told himself as he stepped into his apartment, it wasn’t as if the world were coming to an end any time soon.

“W
E
’
RE HEADING TOWARD
a water hub,” Susan said as they crept along the mist-filled corridor. George had never seen the gas concentration so high. Great purple gouts of it sputtered thickly from the overhead nozzles, falling like slow water into a hazy, violet-streaked white river that was almost up to their knees.

“Which one?” George asked. He could actually taste the gas now. A strange sweet flavor that others seemed to sense all the time but that he only noticed when levels were extremely high or when he returned from an off-ship tour of work. The taste had an almost physical component to it as well, as if it were making his tongue and nostrils vibrate. If he paid too much attention to the sensation, he felt he might forget to keep moving forward.

“By the main ’ponics sector,” Susan said. She coughed deeply, trying to mask the sound by holding both hands to her mouth. “I think.”

George took her arm. “This much gas can’t be good for us. We must go back.”

From the end of the corridor, where it opened out into the water hub, the ominous sound of marching was breaking up into a mad pattern of running and irregular thuds and impacts. Susan and George heard screams. “Almost there,” Susan said. She touched George’s hand, then moved on. He followed at her side.

Water hub was the name given to sixteen immense and puzzling cavities within the ship, each of which appeared to have been constructed to hold an enormous quantity of liquid. Baffle plates could be tightly sealed over each corridor entrance that opened into the hubs, and the bottom of each cavity formed a concave depression like an enormous bowl made from precisely curved segments of metal plating.

Overall, the hubs were circular, perhaps one hundred human yards across, and each extended vertically through at least ten levels of decks. At each level a wide metal-grille catwalk circled each hub’s inner wall, connecting up to twenty-four corridors. At evenly spaced intervals steep stairways connected the catwalks so that the hubs became the most convenient way of moving between widely separated areas of the ship, enabling workers to change corridors and levels in one central location. As far as George knew, the Elders had thus far been unable to determine what the hubs were originally intended to be. Some form of liquid storage seemed most probable. However, since the hubs were not arranged in a regular pattern throughout the ship, if each had been entirely filled with water, it had been calculated that the resulting asymmetrical stresses would interfere with course changes and the structural integrity of the hull.

Whatever the hubs were, they were further evidence to support the theory that the ship had originally been intended for purposes other than the transfer of Tenctonese slaves. Though what those purposes might have been, none could guess.

As George and Susan approached the catwalk that ringed the water hub at their level a sign on the wall confirmed that they were in the main ’ponics sector on deck fifty-eight. From the sounds that echoed out from the water hub’s center, it sounded as if whatever was going on was located two or three decks below. And whatever it was, it sounded bad. In addition to the clanging of Overseer boots on the catwalks George could hear the unmistakable sounds of fighting, of cries of pain, as if Tenctonese were being attacked with shock prods focused to their highest settings.