Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (56 page)

Buck shrugged. “The day Moodri took me to the sea. He walked into it, and the salt water . . . it didn’t do anything to him. It made me remember him reaching into the recycler and . . .” Buck covered his eyes. “Every day after that he helped me remember more.” He looked up at his father. “He still does. Every time . . . every time I look up at the stars.”

George took his son into his arms, and for a moment they cradled Vessna between them. “I know,” George said softly. “I know.” He thought of Ruhtra. There were still some doors to be stepped through.

Buck tried to smile at his father. “Until now I never knew why you wanted to be a policeman.”

“I have never forgotten that day,” George said. His spots constricted just thinking about it.

“Do you know who it was? The human who threw you the beacon?”

George gave a small laugh. He dropped his voice. “Back then, when everything was so new, they all looked alike to me.”

Buck took his father’s hand. “I still have the pebble Moodri gave me.”

George nodded. “And we still have the dreams, don’t we?”

Buck glanced over at the window into the isolation room. “And the nightmares.”

Hope as well as despair, George thought. Stars as well as the darkness.

It was simply a question of where one chose to look.

He stood up. “Matthew will be here soon. He will help us. For every Purist scum who tries to do us harm, there is another human who will stand at our side.” He went to the window. Buck moved to stand beside him, Vessna secure in his arms.

They stared through the window together, their reflections blending with Susan’s and Emily’s until they were a single image. George touched the glass with his fingers, but he no longer heard the vibration of the stardrive, he no longer felt the chill of space.

He stared through the window and he no longer thought of staring through the portals of the ship. Not now. It was no longer the time to look into the past. It was time to look into the future.

And there
will
be a future, he thought.

It was the only choice worth making.

And he made it.

T
HE RED
C
ARRALO RUSHED
smoothly through the night along the rain-wet streets of the city. There was little traffic now. They were almost at the medical center.

“I never knew you worked at the camp,” Cathy said. She had said very little as Sikes had told his story.

“I didn’t work there after that,” Sikes said. He was surprised by how light he felt, as if he had unburdened himself. He decided he had. He didn’t want to have any secrets from Cathy. Not anymore. “The army wanted to court-martial me for throwing that thing into the crowd. There wasn’t a whole lot that came off the ship intact. But because I was a cop, they couldn’t touch me. So they sent me home. To the hospital, actually. Two months for cracked ribs and . . . all sorts of other junk.”

Cathy’s voice seemed to fail her. “Did you . . . did you hate us because of what you saw, because of what happened to you?”

“No,” Sikes said. “No. I guess I was . . . disappointed more than anything. Here you were, aliens from another world, and when you got right down to it, you were exactly like us.”

Sikes saw Cathy force a smile as she spoke. “Well, maybe not
exactly
like you.”

Sikes knew what she was trying to say and wouldn’t accept it. “No, Cathy. I mean it. More than ever. Exactly like us.” He felt his cheeks burn. “In . . . in all that ways that matter, I mean.” He locked his eyes on the road. He couldn’t believe what he had just said.

From the sound of her, Cathy couldn’t either. “Did you really fall in love with . . . with that astronomer so quickly?”

Sikes shook his head. He had figured that one out long ago. “That was my subconscious coming to my rescue. There Victoria was, finally saying that she was willing to try getting back together with me, and whammo, something in the back of my brain said “no way” and opened my eyes to the . . . uh, possibility of other involvements. Happens all the time. Victoria and I weren’t meant for each other.”

“You feel attracted to females that strongly, that quickly,
all
the time?” Cathy asked with an odd catch in her throat.

Sikes chewed his lip. “Only . . . only when I’m getting into something I . . . I shouldn’t be getting into. It hasn’t happened for a long time, Cathy.” He tensed as he said his next words, like going over that first hill on a roller coaster. “Not since I met you.”

The tension was back in the car. Sikes could feel it pressing him into his seat. What more did she want from him? What more could he say?

“Maybe you’re right,” Cathy said slowly. “Maybe we are the same.”

“We just get confused in different ways. That’s all,” he said. The turn to the medical center was coming up. They were almost there.

Cathy’s voice was like a whisper. “We’re all lost in different ways, too,” she said.

Sikes made the turn. “Just trying to find our way home.”

“Do you think we will, Matt?”

Sikes didn’t know if she meant humans and Tenctonese or just the two of them. He wasn’t brave enough to ask.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I hope so.” On a sudden impulse he reached out his hand and brushed his knuckles lightly against her temple.

At once Cathy’s hand came up to touch his. “So do I,” she said.

The medical center was before them. And whatever happened next, Sikes knew, their story wasn’t over.

It was just getting started.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens are Emmy-nominated scriptwriters,
New York Times
bestselling novelists, science writers, and designers of interactive educational software. In the six years they have been a writing team, they have written six novels, including two “classic” Star Trek novels—
Memory Prime
and
Prime Detective
—and the ongoing fantasy adventure series,
The Chronicles of Galen Sword.
In addition to writing episodes for the animated TV series
Batman
and
The Legend of Prince Valiant,
they have written numerous teleplays, one of which was nominated for a 1991 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Children’s Special and was awarded a 1990 Scott Newman Center Drug Abuse Prevention Award. The Reeves-Stevenses live in Los Angeles.