Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (43 page)

And he knew
what
the ship was now.

It was the Game on a larger scale. Nothing more. Nothing with meaning. Nothing that depended on the direction of Those Who Made the Ships, or thinking machines, or alien beings hidden in inaccessible chambers outside the cargo disk. Those stories were all vain attempts to give meaning to meaninglessness. But George finally understood how unnecessary those stories were.

There was no enemy here. Only mirrors.

Beyond the door the crowd screamed the name of the ship as the final discharge ended another round.

But the Game wasn’t over. It would never be over. Not while a single ship plied the dark ranges.

The door opened.

Ruhtra entered.

Dragged by two Overseers. His chest a gaping, glistening hole.

George sobbed his brother’s name.

Coolock tapped his prod against the bars. George was consumed by the ship’s emptiness. “I’ll kill you, you
kakstu!”
he shrieked, arms flailing for the grinning Overseer. “I’ll kill you!”

But Coolock bobbed his head just out of George’s reach, turning George’s rage into nothing more than a children’s game. “Who’s next to sit at the table?” he taunted. Then his eyes turned to black ice as he answered his own question. “You are, Stangya. You are.”

George lowered his arms. Coolock opened the cage. He waited outside as if uncertain what George might do.

But there was no uncertainty in George. Not anymore. He stepped out of the cage, his hands open at his sides. There was no need to attack the Overseer. There was only one need left.

The need to die.

Without even a shove from Coolock, George turned and walked to the Game chamber door.

Willingly he would face the
wojchek.
It was the only victory that was left to him. The only fate he deserved.

George Francisco stepped into the deepest chamber of the ship and prepared to die.

It was the only thing he had left to look forward to.

“D’
WAYN GAVE IT TO ME
,” Buck said.

Vornho stared at him skeptically, the circuitry key still in his hand. They were less than a hundred meters from the tunnel’s end and approaching quickly on the moving floor.

“She gave it to you? Just now?”

“Yes,” Buck said, stepping up the floor to try and block Vornho and what he was holding from the Overseers at the end of the tunnel.

“So what is it?”

“A circuitry key,” Buck blurted, the first thing to come to his mind. “For . . . for some privacy chambers. By the big ’ponics jungle on the top decks.”

Buck could see that Vornho wasn’t convinced but that he was intrigued.

“They’re just for Overseers she said. They can use them whenever they want. No waiting. Lots of
eemikken\.
And they keep female cargo up there. Real
poco,
she said. Just for the Overseers.”

Now Vornho
wanted
to believe Buck. But he still had one objection. “How come you got one and I didn’t?”

Less than fifty yards. “You were supposed to get yours from Coolock, D’wayn said. But he’s been too busy with the cargo.” Buck held out his hand. “Give it back to me, Vornho. Not everyone gets them, so she told me not to tell anyone else.”

Vornho brought the key teasingly closer to Buck’s hand. “Not even me?”

“They were going to take us up there
together,
blankhead. But you’re going to ruin everything! The females. The
eemikken\.
Everything!”

Vornho slammed the key into Buck’s hand, then said, “If you’re lying to me, Finiksa, I’ll peel your spots.”

Buck shoved the key under his scarf and wedged it between the clasps. “You’ll be too busy having
your
spots licked, mother hummer.”

Vornho laughed. He wiggled his fingers beside Buck’s ribs. “Eat salt!”

An Overseer grabbed Buck from behind and swung him off the moving floor to a solid deck. “Easy there, young Watcher. Next time ride the belt looking in the right direction.”

Vornho stepped off the moving floor between the two Overseers and as he looked up his mouth opened wide. Buck turned to see what his friend had seen. “Andarko,” he whispered.

He was on the bridge.

Buck had never seen an open space as large before. The bridge chamber stretched out farther than the food-growth chambers with room for a hundred vats. And the ceiling—Buck gasped—there
was
no ceiling. It was one vast transparent dome of what could only be the same material the hull’s portals were made from.

Stars shone all around him. Thousands of them. And forward, in the direction that the ship moved, one star was so large and bright that Buck could see a visible disk almost the size of his thumb tip. It cast long shadows all through the bridge.

“That must be the course-correction star,” Vornho said wonderingly. For once there was no hint of challenge in his voice. He sounded just like Buck.

“Can you see any planets?” Buck asked. He wasn’t sure what they might look like, but he wanted to know if the world Moodri had told him would be their target was in sight.

“Planets are too small to see,” Vornho said. “They’re at least a hundred times smaller than a star.” He stared all around. “Will you take a look at how big this place is?”

Buck followed along behind a stream of other Watcher Youth between two blue lines painted on the deck of the bridge. Unlike the decks in the rest of the ship, the floor covering here wasn’t made of metal but of something softer, with almost the same consistency as the moving floor in the tunnel that had brought them here.

The scale of the bridge was different, too. Buck could see a dozen Overseers operating equipment consoles similar to those he had seen in the power-plant chambers. But the consoles were at least twice the size they had been in the other parts of the ship. Here the Overseers had to climb up on small metal platforms that had been built before each one in order to reach the control surfaces.

Buck’s hearts sank. Would he have to climb up such a platform to use the key?

Near Buck were the sounds of children’s excited babble, but from all around came mechanical sounds, odd, almost musical beeps, and strange voices that made Buck think of talking machines. From time to time colored images moved across the transparent dome as if they had been projected there by a hand-held light—lines and circles and sine-script numbers that meant nothing to Buck.

“This is the most
eech ka
thing I’ve ever seen,” Vornho whispered. “Do you think we could ever work up here or anything?”

“Maybe,” Buck said. He was distracted by trying to look ahead of the crowd of other children, following the twin blue lines to see where they passed by the pink consoles of the stardrive. He couldn’t see them anywhere. “Vornho, do you see any pink consoles?”

Vornho glanced around. “Sure, right behind us.”

Buck shivered with fear. He had
already
gone past them. The stardrive consoles had been first on his right when he had entered the bridge, and he had been too caught up in staring through the ceiling dome to notice them.

A loud voice boomed through the enormous volume of the bridge. “All crew prepare for translation.”

Buck tried to push past the Watcher Youth gathered behind him.

“Where’re you going?” Vornho called.

“We’re not close enough to translate,” Buck said. Moodri had explained it to him. At translation they would be so close that the course-correction star would fill the portals.

“It’s the hard translation,” Vornho said as he followed after Buck, moving through the crowd of excited children. “Not the main one. It’s just going to be a bump to knock out the cargo and get things back to normal.”

“No,” Buck said to himself. Moodri had said others would be waiting to take control of the cargo disk once Buck had inserted the key. But though the bridge was shielded from the effects of translation, if the others waiting elsewhere in the ship were knocked out or killed, then no one would be able to control anything.

Buck stood on the edge of a blue line. The pink stardrive console was ten feet from him. Overseers stood on two platforms that had been built in front of it. They wore dark goggles over their eyes and stared up at the course-correction star as if reading whatever words and symbols were being projected on the dome. Between the two platforms Buck saw the one control surface that was not covered by a clear protective shield. There was a slot in it that his key would fit into. He could reach it without climbing on anything.

“Hey, Finiksa, what’s wrong?” Vornho said. There was real worry in his voice.

“Hard translation in thirty seconds,” the mechanical voice said.

Buck pulled the circuitry key from his scarf.

“You want to lose that?” Vornho asked in shock. “I thought you were supposed to keep it a secret.”

Buck didn’t even look at his friend. “Shut up, Vornho. Just shut up!”

Buck sprinted across the deck toward the console.

“Finiksaaaa!”

Buck ignored Vornho’s cry. He ignored the sound of Vornho’s feet running after him. He reached the console.

“Twenty seconds.”

The two Overseers on the platforms to either side looked down at him, ten feet over his head. One of them told him to get away before he hurt himself.

Vornho was at his side. “What are you doing?” He looked at the slot in the control surface, and Buck could see he immediately knew what would fit in it.

“Finiksa, what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

Buck began to speak. He had to tell someone. But then another voice called his name. He turned back to the path between the blue lines. D’wayn had just stepped onto the bridge from the moving floor. She waved to the boys, smiling.

“Finiksa, Vornho, come away from there. You’ll miss the show.”

“Fifteen seconds.”

“Finiksa,” Vornho said. “What
is
that thing? What will it do?”

D’wayn began to walk toward them. “Come on and join the family,” she said invitingly. “We can take better care of you over here.” She still smiled.

“Finiksa, don’t do anything stupid.” Vornho slapped his hand over the key slot. “I won’t tell. We’re friends. We can stick together, and no one will know.”

“Ten seconds.”

Buck didn’t know what to do. D’wayn was smiling at him. She had called him spotty head. Vornho was his best friend. And Moodri . . . where was Moodri?

Every time you look up at the stars,
his great-uncle’s voice said.

Buck looked up at the stars.

One was different.

It had a shape—a half circle, blue and white and almost too small to be seen. But it was there, and Buck saw it, almost as if someone had called out to him from it. Almost as if someone wanted him there.

“Five seconds.”

Buck turned to face Vornho. He shot his hand out, one finger stiff and ready, and he hit Vornho’s sensitive spot on his first try. Vornho doubled over in shock. Buck had never been able to do that before. Vornho’s hand came off the key slot. In the distance Buck heard D’wayn gasp aloud.

For an endless moment Buck held the key poised above the control surface, waiting. The fate of two worlds rested in the hand of a ten-year-old child.

But the child was not alone.

Fear no more, Finiksa.

Buck heard the message.

He plunged the key home.

It began.

DESCENT

B
EFORE THE SUN SET
, CNN had turned over its entire broadcast to live coverage of what it was now dramatically calling “The Voronezh Encounter.” Hastily assembled news crews reported live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the Astronomy Department at London University, the Pentagon, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, and an independent television studio in Orange County where two bearded science fiction authors who had written a novel about a giant comet hitting the earth endlessly explained the diiferences between comets and asteroids. Other than everyone agreeing that the Voronezh Object was damn unusual, no one else around the world had anything else to say because no one knew anything.

Except for those people in a tract house in an exclusive new subdivision in Topanga Canyon, halfway between Santa Monica and Malibu.

Sikes had spent most of the past few hours surreptitiously trying to stretch the ropes around his wrists and asking himself just how badly he wanted to be a cop.

The ropes hadn’t seemed to stretch a fraction of an inch, but he knew absolutely that being a cop was not a choice, it was a necessity. There was nothing else he wanted to be or that he
could
be. And that was the root of the dilemma he faced, one that even distracted him from the ongoing CNN reports.

The bottom line was that Sikes had finally realized that Amy Stewart and her uncle and their supporters were going to win this one. The asteroid or the spaceship or whatever it was was beside the point. The reality Sikes faced was that when morning came and that thing was on its way to being another question in a Trivial Pursuit game for the nineties, Sikes would face the choice that Commander Stewart had laid out for him: sign a security oath or go to jail.

And when that moment came, Sikes didn’t know what he would do.

The silent man with the .45 was Randolph Petty’s killer. Sikes knew that without a doubt. He had seen the smirk on the man’s thin lips when he had said as much to Stewart and his niece. He had seen the acceptance of his deduction in their eyes as well. But there was nothing Sikes could do about it.

He had thought about lying. He had thought about signing whatever the hell it was they wanted him to sign, waiting a week, and then going to the media. But he knew that the instant he brought up the threat of the National Security Oath the media would have to check their sources to confirm the story, and he’d be in the slammer. We’ve done it before, ex-Commander Franklin Stewart had said, and Sikes had no reason to doubt him.

For himself, Sikes was willing to risk a confrontation with whatever shadowy level of the government Stewart took his orders from. But for Kirby’s sake, he wanted there to be another way. Even if that way meant signing the oath, saying nothing, and letting Petty’s killer go free.