Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (49 page)

“So what? Now Angie’s in the hospital under observation for her concussion. Grazer’s got his chest wrapped because of the three ribs I cracked when I had to give him the Heimlich to keep him from choking on that damn sandwich he was eating when the concussion grenades went off. And Uncle Frank and his crew were better connected than we were. It happens. It’s a bitch, I know, but crooks do walk free from time to time. God bless America.”

“Well, it stinks!” Sikes said. His voice echoed in the small living room.

“Of course it stinks. No argument from me on that one. But that’s not supposed to make you give up like a kid who decides he doesn’t like the rules. It’s supposed to put you back out on the street to do a better job.”

Sikes went to slump back down in his chair, but Theo wouldn’t let him. “You can’t give up, man. I won’t let you.”

“I got beaten, Theo.”

“You think I’ve never been beaten, man? You think I’ve never come home and wanted to put my fist through the wall because some smart-ass gangster hired a better lawyer than the wet-behind-the-ears prosecutor I got stuck with? You think I haven’t seen dealers buy a judge or a killer walk because of a procedural error? Face it, Sikes. Every day we’re out on the streets we’re going to get beaten. That’s what it means to be a cop. But what it also means is that we don’t accept it. Every time we get beaten we go back out there and we win one. And maybe we win two. And maybe when we get our bloody pension we’ll be able to say, Well, I won some and Lord knows I lost some, but by God, I’m leaving this world a better place because I tried my best and I beat them more times than they beat me.”

Sikes didn’t say anything. He stared at the screen.

“You’re going to lose again, son. You’re going to lose worse than this one. But you keep at it, you’re going to win, too. And that’s what counts.”

Theo stepped away from Sikes. “You want to sit down and wallow, well, then, you just do that. But if you want to be a cop, you can come with me.”

“Out there?” Sikes asked. He looked at the screen.

“Out there,” Theo said.

Sikes pointed his remote at the television. It was running the only footage of the saucer that had been cleared by the Pentagon. Before it had exploded. Before they had come out of it. Sikes hit the sound.

There was static. Lots of static. It had been taken by two traffic reporters in a helicopter. The first one on the scene. “I’ve talked to the military,” one of them said, his voice barely audible over the crackling of the garbled transmission. “They’ve escorted it down. There appears to be a potential—” More static. The picture moved in. This was when it had begun. “It looks like a door is opening—I don’t think it is, I don’t think it is.”

But that
had
been the moment, Sikes thought. The first door had opened then. And everything had changed.

“It’s still just hovering,” the announcer’s voice said. Sikes could hear the excitement building in it. Moment to moment. “It’s got—”

More static. More crackling. The helicopter pilot broke in. “This is not a hoax. That thing is
real
out there. Gray in color . . .”

And then the picture had pushed in even further, and the tiny spots of living creatures leaving the saucer were seen for the first time.

In just one moment. Everything had changed.

“Out there,” Sikes said again. It seemed to make some kind of sense. He had lost the first round to Franklin Stewart. But that didn’t mean he’d have to lose another. And if ex-Commander Stewart didn’t want those creatures here, then Sikes made up his mind that
he
did want them. “Okay,” Sikes said as he reached out to grab his ex-partner’s hand and shake. “I guess that’s as good a place to fight for truth, justice, and the American way as anywhere else.”

Sikes went into his bedroom to find his uniform.

All it had taken was a moment, but he was a cop again.

It felt damn good.

T
HE FIRST NIGHT
they all thought they were going to die. And many of them did.

Real panic set in earlier in the first day when the disk exploded and the realization spread that there would be no more foodgrowth and no more water. Most of the Tenctonese had grouped together in those initial few hours, recreating the social organization of their dormitories, and had waited for someone to call them to food shift. But the Overseers had vanished, and there was no one left to give orders.

The resistance members were the first to understand what had happened to the Overseers. The hated black uniforms and tattoos had vanished with the disk, and now the Overseers walked among the rest of the Tenctonese, unseen. Here and there, in various huddled masses, individual Overseers were recognized, and as the course-correction star began to move toward the horizon many of the Overseers died—literally torn apart by the savagery they themselves had brutally cultivated in otherwise peaceful beings.

Other Overseers, sensing that the order of the ship was fast breaking down, continued to wield their most powerful weapons—not prods or cutters, but hunger, hate, and fear—as they incited several dormitory groups to self-destruction to reduce their numbers, by claiming that another dormitory group was made up entirely of Overseers.

By nightfall the fighting had begun in earnest, fueled in part by the competition for the first salvaged containers of foodgrowth that had been pulled from the enormous pile of wreckage that was the disk. The children cried. The stars emerged. An unthinkable battle raged—bare hands against scraps of metal and salvaged prods, slave against Overseer, slave against slave. And then, suddenly, all around, the alien horizon walls of flame had roared into life, ignited at a hundred places, forming an outer ring beyond which they could not go.

“We have been welcomed,” Moodri said as he stood upon the rock where the Elders gathered, far removed from the rubble of the disk and the greatest concentration of dormitory groups. He pulled his borrowed robe around his shoulders, wondering if the indigenous species of this planet intended the walls of flame to move inward.

“Welcomed to
am dugas,
it appears,” another Elder said beside him. She was Nanholt, older than Moodri, one of the three speakers of the council and an architect of the resistance. “Do you think they mean to burn us all?”

“Who can say?” Moodri replied. Thus far all the Tenctonese had seen of the indigenous species had been hundreds of flying machines—some hovering in place, others speeding by a few hundred feet from the ground, still others visible only by the trails they left high against the unnaturally blue sky. Even now, during the night, the flying machines were still at work, visible by the lights that flashed from them.

From time to time Moodri had also seen some of the hoverers descend from the night sky and shine a white beam of energy on groupings of his people. The first time it had happened his hearts had traded beats in horror as he thought an energy weapon was being used, but it turned out to be nothing more than a light, as if whatever flew the hoverer couldn’t see by the light of the stars.

Since that kind of limited vision seemed unlikely for an advanced species, Nanholt had suggested that perhaps the light beam
was
a weapon, but one that worked on the indigenous species and not on Tenctonese. A lengthy debate had followed, not helped at all by the rumors that came back to the Elders relating that the indigenous species was, variously, two-headed, no-headed, twelve feet tall, insectoid, capable of changing into smoke, and, most disturbingly, possessed black wrist tattoos in an alien language.

Moodri didn’t see much point in taking part in the ill-informed debate, however, especially without Vondmac’s clear and level-spotted input. They would be meeting the indigenous species soon enough, and the debate would be moot. In the meantime there was still the matter of the beacons. Though the resistance was certain that few, if any, such devices had been taken from the disk, by morning the disk’s wreckage would be swarming with scavengers. The resistance must be first to find the beacons and destroy them. Otherwise all that had happened would be for nothing.

The first beacon was brought to the Elders just before dawn. Moodri had been complaining to Nanholt that the shortness of the day and night cycle on this world made it impossible to truly appreciate one or the other in full. Nanholt, who had kept watching the walls of fire—which, thank the goddess, had not appeared to advance any closer through the night—had said that the Tenctonese would adapt quickly, as always. It was then that a young female was allowed to pass through the protective ring of resistance members who had positioned themselves around the Elders’ rock. She carried a crumpled gray tunic, and Moodri could see from the way she held it that there was something wrapped within.

The female unrolled the tunic for the Elders, and inside was a black steel cube, small enough to fit in a single hand. Moodri lifted the hateful thing and examined it. On the side, beneath a small aperture, a few lines of operating instructions were printed in sine script. But the aperture was dark, not pulsing with light. The beacon had not yet been activated.

Moodri passed it to Nanholt. She turned it over once in her hands, then placed it on the rock beside her. She nodded to the male and female who had been waiting. One pushed a small stone into the beacon’s aperture, wedging it forcefully into place. Then the other smashed a larger rock down upon the beacon, driving the small stone into the device’s inner workings.

It took ten blows, but the casing finally split. The rest was simple. In moments the beacon was nothing more than a harmless handful of shards and twisted metal. Nanholt brushed the remains into the sands of the desert. “That’s one,” she said.

Moodri looked out toward the rubble of the disk, more than a mile away. Already he could see shapes heading toward it in the starlight. And he knew that somewhere in that tangle of destruction three other beacons lay hidden.

“If the goddess is willing, we will have the others soon,” he said. “The Overseers appear to be keeping busy with the fomenting of violence, not planning for the future.”

Then he narrowed his eyes and squinted at far-off figures that appeared to be moving through the wreckage. He clutched the prayer stones around his neck in worry. The figures there did not appear to be moving like Tenctonese.

And though it was hard to be certain at this distance, some of them did not appear to have heads.

Buck had been found on the fifth day.

A young male with furtive eyes had seen Buck standing in line by a food station. Buck didn’t like the food, but it was better than what they tried to feed him on the second day.

On the second day, giant, thunderous, hovering machines had appeared all over the crash site, sending up giant clouds of dust from the planet’s deck—clouds that Buck first feared were more explosions. But the clouds were simply the result of the enormous wind the hoverers made, for whatever alien reason, and when they departed Buck saw that cargo pallets had been dropped from them.

Many Tenctonese had gone to the pallets right away, thinking that they would soon be instructed to move them somewhere. But there were still no Overseers. Then some had discovered the cracks in the pallets where crate sides had broken or the contents had spilled. The pallets held supplies.

There were containers of water and packages made from thin reflective metal covered with alien script. The word spread quickly: The hoverers were feeding the Tenctonese without requiring them to do work. It was a miracle, nothing less. Or else, some said bitterly, they had crashed during an alien religious festival when no work
could
be done. But soon enough the Tenctonese would return to being what they were meant to be.

Despite that fatalistic prediction, and others like it, a routine soon developed concerning the mysteriously provided supplies. Each time a pallet fell to the ground from a hoverer, a trio of Tenctons would appear, announcing that they were members of the resistance who had fought the Overseers. Buck suspected they were really Overseers themselves, though, because of the way they organized people into lines and made sure that each person got just the same amount of supplies as all the others.

After his first trip through a supply line, a young female showed Buck how to open his water container by using one of the big pieces of dirt on the ground to poke a hole in its side. The water tasted odd, but Buck saw that everyone else was drinking it with no ill effect, and his lips were cracked. By the time he had finished the entire container, he didn’t notice the taste at all.

The thin metal package was another problem, though. Buck used the large piece of dirt to poke a hole in it, then peeled the top part of the package away from the thick brown substance inside. It looked vaguely like meatgrowth, though it was much too dark, as if it had been burned in the crash. And when Buck smelled it, he began choking up the water he had swallowed. Whatever was in the package smelled like excrement. He threw it to the ground in disgust.

However, as he wandered the crash site that day, standing in line after line for more water, he realized that for every torn-open package discarded on the ground he saw other people eating happily from another. He soon figured out that different packages held different substances, and he guessed if he could decipher the alien script, then he would know what was in each.

He got together with a group of other children—none had a telltale scratch on the edge of a spot, though—and began to help them organize a list of what alien foodgrowth was good and what was bad.

The children gathered the empty metal packages from the refuse piles, carefully sniffed each one, then created three categories: Excrement growth, Acceptable growth, and Good growth. Sure enough, the children were quickly able to see a pattern in the odd, angular writing with which the packages were labeled. While most of the markings were the same from package to package, generally the largest symbols at the bottom of each package were different.

Buck’s favorites were the packages that carried the symbols: SPAGHETTI AND TOMATO SAUCE and GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH. In a pinch he could manage to eat the packages marked: HERSHEY CHOCOLATE and HAND SOAP, though he didn’t know why they had different symbols, because both had the same texture and taste, as far as he could tell. But the ones to avoid at all costs were any packages marked with, STEW, CHICKEN, or LASAGNA. One child who said she was a Watcher Youth and wasn’t afraid of anything actually managed to swallow a mouthful of STEW. It was almost as if her stomach had exploded, so quickly had she vomited.