Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (52 page)

But the sound of its power plant had slowly come closer, and in the end T’ksam had decided that it would be better to deal with the
sold’yurz
on his own terms. That was why Buck was with him, he had explained, because children could prove to be useful distractions. He told Buck to hide behind a small rise on the desert floor. Then T’ksam had stood up, waved his arms, and called out to the aliens to bring them near.

The sound of the vehicle made Buck’s ear valleys hurt. He could smell the stench it put out—as bad as the smoke, that blew in from the wall of fire. Then the sound changed, dropping off.

Buck beard an alien voice. But what it said was only meaningless gibberish. They sounded like animals.

T’ksam appeared to be responding to them.
“Help yez. Help help hurt,”
he said. Nonsense sounds.

The aliens replied. Buck heard the sound of metal slamming against metal, then footsteps in the dirt.

“Finiksa!” T’ksam called out. “I’ve told them you’re injured. They’re going to come over the rise to look at you. Just lie still and moan. But don’t stand up until I tell you.”

Buck grabbed handfuls of dirt in his hands as if trying to dig through the desert. He prayed to Andarko that the creatures would not be able to touch him.

The footsteps came closer. More alien words.
Kid
seemed to be the one they used the most.

Buck felt something touch his shoulder. He stiffened in horror. An alien being was trying to turn him over. Buck moaned without even remembering his instructions from T’ksam. He felt himself lifted and turned and—

Buck screamed.

He stared up into two hideously disfigured faces, and he shrieked like the workers who had been recycled alive.

They had no brains.

Their heads were crushed down into nothing more than what lay behind their faces, as if some mad killer had hacked off their skulls with Tagdot’s knife.

They had no spots.

It made them both featureless, as if they were engineered food animals with no separate identity.

Buck shook with terror. The aliens were crouching over him as if they planned to eat him. One of them spoke to the other.
Kid
this,
kid
that. Buck covered his eyes with his hands, spilling dirt into them. He drew his arms and legs up to protect himself. One of the creatures grabbed at his shoulders, trying to pull him toward it.

With his eyes still screwed tightly shut, Buck howled, he kicked, he thrashed and punched at the monster. He felt the hands fall away. He looked up.

T’ksam stood behind one of the
sold’yurz.
And in one half of a heartsbeat he braced his hands against the creature’s face and chin and spun its head until something crunched, as if there were no muscles in its neck at all.

T’ksam grinned and held out his hands as the creature dropped lifeless to the desert floor. The other monster saw what had happened and jumped to its feet.

“Now, Finiksa!” T’ksam shouted.

His conditioning was stronger than his fear, and Buck leapt to his own feet.

The
sold’yurz
had some sort of prod with a flattened handle, and he swung it at Buck, smashing the boy’s upraised arm and face. Buck fell back as quickly as he had risen, not even feeling the impact in the shock of the blow.

The
sold’yurz
spun back to face T’ksam, but the Overseer had already changed position. He rained a flurry of punches across the creature’s chest until it fell down on its back. Then T’ksam dropped to his knees on the
sold’yurz
’s chest, making its breath explode from its body. The Overseer leaned forward and wrapped his arms around the alien’s neck, and once again there was a crunch.

T’ksam leapt back onto his feet and brushed the dirt from his tunic and trousers. “What did I tell you?” he said to Buck. “It’s as if they’re made of crystal.”

Buck seemed to hear two of every word T’ksam said. He tried to push himself up from the ground, but his left arm had no strength. He looked at it. It was bent as if he had another wrist in his forearm. His face began to throb.

T’ksam was beside him. “You’ll be all right,” the Overseer said. “A broken arm is a good wound to take from your first battle. Your family will be proud of you.” He prodded the sorest parts of Buck’s face. “Too bad,” he said. “It won’t even earn you a scar of valor. Maybe next time.”

He stood up and held out his hand to Buck. “If you want, you can examine their vehicle. It’s very primitive. I’ll hide their bodies.”

Buck almost fainted with pain as T’ksam pulled him to his feet. He stared down at the bodies of the dead aliens, fascinated, catching his breath. If he didn’t look at the creature’s horribly misshapen heads, they weren’t all that different from Tenctonese. By their body shapes, one even seemed to be a male and the other a female. He wondered what their
binnaum-ta
looked like.

T’ksam walked over to their vehicle and came back with what turned out to be a folded shovel. Buck realized that the creatures were dressed in uniforms—oddly patterned in desert colors, but clearly a standard system of dressing. He wondered if these were this world’s Overseers. If so, the slaves must be incredibly feeble.

“You go lie in the sun,” T’ksam said kindly. “I’ll get you back to a medical specialist before you know it.” Quickly he began to dig a hole behind the rise. Within minutes there was no trace of the bodies. Buck wondered if he should say a blessing to Andarko and Celine so the
sold’yurz
could find their way past the wall. He didn’t know if Andarko and Celine could guide the
serdos
of monsters, but in the end he decided it couldn’t hurt to ask. The
sold’yurz
had died doing their work. That had to be good for something, even on an alien world.

Buck looked up at T’ksam. His arm and face throbbed painfully with each double beat. “When they came, were you speaking their language?” he asked.

T’ksam helped Buck walk to the rumbling vehicle. Its power plant was still in operation. “I know a few words. Already we’ve had representatives speaking with these creatures’ leaders, correcting the lies that the cargo is attempting to spread.”

Buck sat in one of the vehicle’s chairs. It was surprisingly more comfortable than anything on the ship. “Do you know what the name of their world is?” Buck thought that it was important that he know that. He wanted to be able to include the name in his prayers.

“I think it translates as dirt,” T’ksam said. “This area we crashed on seems to be part of a tribal tract called
Kwarnn’teen.
At least, they keep telling us that’s where we are. Odd-sounding language, isn’t it?”

Buck started to nod but stopped. His face felt as if it were catching fire. T’ksam sat in the vehicle’s other chair. There was some sort of large valve-release wheel in front of him. He pulled his ring out of his tunic and checked the direction of the beacon they had been tracking. Then the Overseer pushed a lever between the seats, and there was a horrible grinding noise. Buck tensed. His arm blazed with fiery pain. And then the vehicle lurched forward.

T’ksam laughed. “It works just as I was told it works. They have no sense of security.” He used the valve-release wheel to alter the direction of the vehicle, then tapped his foot back and forth along the vehicle’s floor in front of his chair. He hit a part of the floor that sounded different to Buck, and the vehicle slowed. He hit something else, and the vehicle sped up.

“That’s the one,” T’ksam said. Then he pushed his foot down, and the power plant roared, and the vehicle moved away from the desert toward a nearby range of small hills. He sang a Watcher’s song of victory.

Buck didn’t join in. He stared out the vehicle’s window without seeing the desert beyond. As the world spun around him in pain, all he could see was the creatures’ faces as they had lain dead. In his growing delirium, each one of them looked just like Vornho.

There was something wrong, Buck knew. Something terribly wrong. But he couldn’t tell if what was wrong was something in this alien world or something within himself.

Perhaps there is no answer, he heard someone say. Perhaps that is a choice to be made and not a question to be answered.

Buck stared at T’ksam. The Overseer had said nothing.

Buck felt tears fall from his eyes. It took him a long time to realize they were not because of pain.

He thought about choices until he passed out.

S
IKES GRIMACED AS
the wheels of his Humvee slipped sideways in the desert sand. It was like driving in snow. And he hated driving in snow. That’s why he had left Detroit in the first place.

“Easy there, son,” Theo said from the back. “We got nowhere to go, and we don’t have to get there fast.”

Sikes swore as he brought the balky vehicle back on track. There was sweat dripping down his forehead and his nose in the desert heat. Driving in snow and sweating. What could be better? “We’re chauffeurs, Theo. We’re nothing but goddam chauffeurs for a bunch of men from Mars.”

“No, not men from Mars,” Miss Laurie said from the passenger seat. Sikes could hear the smile in her voice. She was
always
smiling. “I myself, female from Tencton. Not male. Don’t know Mars.”

Sikes turned to look at the tall, slim alien at his side, listening to English tapes on a Walkman. Her head was swollen up like a sponge that had been dipped in water. Her scalp was balder than Sinead O’Connor’s, and it was covered in hundreds of squiggly-looking freckles. But she had a nice smile, he could give her that. Nice smile and a chipper attitude that made him want to punch the roof and the steering wheel at the same time.

He felt Theo’s hand pat his arm. “You let me know when it’s my turn to drive.”

“Yeah,” Sikes said. “Another half hour and you can take us in.”

He kept driving across the desert. Looking for stragglers, the official word was. That was the assignment they had been given. Not important enough for the army guys. Just drive through the desert looking for stragglers—Tenctonese who had strayed so far away from the crash site that they were outside the ACP. Sikes had never had a more boring job in his entire life.

So far, in three days of duty, he and Theo—and their ever-smiling Tenctonese observer, Miss Laurie—had rounded up fifteen aliens. Sikes knew that something funny was going on because a few of them sure hadn’t been on their own out in the desert since the first night. Most of them looked well fed. A few even wore the orange jumpsuits that had been provided to replace the gray rags they had arrived in. The stragglers’ condition told Sikes that the blazing pits of oil and gas hadn’t been completely effective in keeping the Tenctonese in the quarantine zone, and the new fencing that was going up to replace the fire pits wasn’t doing much better.

“You know,” Sikes said for the fifth time that day,
“nothing
out here is what they say it is. The military has gotta be stringing us along again. They got some kind of hidden agenda going on here.”

He heard Theo sigh from the backseat. “Kid, the government wants the spaceship. That’s all it comes down to, and you can’t blame them. They don’t want anyone sneaking
out
of the area with any pieces of advanced technology, and they don’t want spies sneaking
in.
It’s as simple as that.”

“Naah,” Sikes said. “There’s more to it than that. I can smell it, and it
stinks.”

From the corner of his eye he saw Miss Laurie smile at him and then cover her mouth as she laughed.

“Smell it,” Sikes said to her again. “You like that, huh? You think that’s funny?”

Miss Laurie waved her hand in front of her nose.
“Lee p’sh
—you say: on ship. Everything all time smell
son.
Very very
son.
Like
monk.
You know
monk?”
She looked at the roof of the Humvee and made a grasping motion with her free hand. “Shitty.
Kwen,
that right.
Monk.
Shitty. Bad all time.” She gave Sikes her smile again. “Down here, smell so good. All time good. Breathe deep. No
monk.
You . . . humans complain bad smell. We think good. You think bad. We laugh. Funny.”

“Hilarious,” Sikes said flatly.

Miss Laurie went back to her Walkman. In the three days Sikes and Theo had been driving her around the Mojave, she had progressed at the rate of a full grade of English each day. At the rate she was going, she’d be speaking better English than Sikes inside of a week. Apparently they were all like that. Their brains were also like sponges. Soaking up everything.

Miss Laurie suddenly pointed over to the left. “There,” she said urgently. She took her job seriously, as if work was the most important thing in her life.

Sikes looked in the direction she pointed. Desert. Nothing but desert.

“Two
Tencton-ta. Hend
miles.”

Theo held his hand out for Sikes, spreading his fingers. “That’s five miles, kid.”

“I don’t see a thing,” Sikes said. He pulled off his sunglasses. Still nothing but superheated glare.

“You know better than that,” Theo said, “if Miss Laurie here says she sees two of her people five miles away, then she sees two of her people.”

Sikes sighed and changed the heading of the Humvee until Miss Laurie told him they were traveling straight for them. Of course, it had to be over the roughest part of the desert floor, making the vehicle shake like a Piper Cub in a thunderstorm.

How their Tenctonese observer got the name Miss Laurie, Sikes didn’t know. All the Tenctonese who were working with humans had been given human names, mainly because humans weren’t as fast to learn Tenctonese pronunciation as the Tenctonese were to learn English. It also made it easier to write reports. The human names were given to the Tenctonese by the people they worked with, and it had quickly become clear that the Tenctonese treated their human names as some kind of status symbols. Apparently there was a Tenctonese male working in the engineering section who had been given the name Rover because of his eagerness to please. Even when it had been explained to him what the name actually meant, he hadn’t wanted to give it up. In the Tenctonese culture, the briefing officers had told Sikes, names were extremely important and were not given or treated lightly.