V_The 2nd Generation

by Kenneth Johnson

  But Bryke knew better. With her finely honed instincts and long experience as a warrior she knew that there had been no choice. Not under these very precarious circumstances.

  Kayta and Bryke were bathed in the low radiant blue light from the glowing sphere on the table. Kayta noticed that Bryke's breathing was somewhat difficult. "Is it the altitude?"

  Bryke shook her head negatively. "The bad air." Then she indicated the orb. "Can you communicate with him?"

  Kayta nodded and with her slender fingertips made a further adjustment to the ball. The blue glow within it began to pulse. As Kayta continued to fine-tune the device, Bryke spotted a fat black beetle crawling up onto a corner of the table. She popped it into her mouth and washed it down with a nearby glass of water.

  Kayta raised her eyebrows and cautioned, "I told you: it's not a good idea to drink the water."

  Bryke, exuding a quiet confidence, held Kayta's eyes and purposefully took another sip. Kayta smiled at her comrade's quiet bravery and then she focused on an electrostatic image that was forming in midair above the blue sphere. It crackled with energy and flashed with high frequency interference. Then it slowly resolved itself into a holographic image of a man.

  He was nude. His skin had the same peculiar sheen as theirs and was as hairless. The very short hair on his head was brushed forward in a style similar to ancient Romans. His nose was also Roman. His face had a sturdy squareness to it with a particularly strong jawline. An old thin scar ran along the right side of his jaw from his ear almost to the tip of his chin. There were several other long-healed scars evident on his torso, including a deep one some twelve inches long on his left thigh that Bryke remembered him receiving. His eyes were amber and had a particularly piercing quality, yet Kayta had many times seen them alight with humor. He was a commander much to be admired.

  He was standing in what appeared to be a shadowy, natural cavern. Flashes of strange data could occasionally be seen on illuminated crystalline sections behind him.

  Kayta spoke to the ephemeral image, "Ayden? Are you receiving this transmission satisfactorily?"

  After a brief pause, suggesting that some time was taken in the message reaching him, the man responded, "Yes, Kayta. I presume you and Bryke have achieved the initial objective?"

  "Phase one is accomplished, sir. Although"—she was thinking of the three men—"there was some collateral damage, I'm sorry to report."

  "That is sometimes unavoidable, I know," he said in a lower voice but with the resolve necessary in a seasoned military leader. "Are the conditions as we expected?"

  "I should say that all the gravitational and biological aspects are nominal. Atmospheric is . . ." Kayta paused and glanced at Bryke questioningly. The pink-eyed woman sniffed and made a slightly sour expression, but nodded that she could live with the circumstances. That prompted Kayta to continue. "We feel that atmospheric is acceptable."

  "What about the geopolitical aspects?"

  Bryke spoke softly, "Our initial impression is confirmed. If we proceed with utmost stealth this is by far the best opportunity we've ever had."

  Ayden said nothing immediately. His amber eyes grew distant and thoughtful. He turned slightly away from them. Bryke and Kayta exchanged a private glance. They both knew well what Ayden was doing. They had often seen him walk away from a strategy session and pace quietly with his head down. Sometimes an hour would pass during his contemplations. They knew that he was considering all aspects of a situation, all the possible permutations and pitfalls, before speaking.

  In this case nearly a full minute passed before he looked back toward them and said, "Very well. I'll leave immediately to join you. Find someone who can lead us where we need to go."

  2

  THE DESERT SUN WAS WARM ON HIS SCALES. IT FELT WONDERFUL, radiating deeply inward to heat his naturally cold blood. With his leathery lids tightly closed he turned his reptilian face directly toward the hot, bright sun and then became motionless. This was paradise.

  But after a moment he began to sense something, some extremely faint vibration disturbing the hot air. He opened one of his beady, bulging eyes and rotated it to look out across the flat scrub desert country that was dotted with sagebrush, mesquite, and an occasional cactus. Something was definitely coming and he knew better than to remain lying there in spite of how much he was enjoying the warmth of the sun and the lovely flat rock beneath him. He couldn't take a chance on being that exposed, so the big iguana wiggled off the top of the rock and crawled underneath.

  Peering out he saw something streaking toward him very low over the empty desert wasteland. Though he didn't know what to call it, he had certainly seen many of them over the years.

  The sleek Visitor fighter was doing well over a thousand miles per hour, about Mach 1.5, so when it flashed past the iguana there was a silent moment before the sonic boom caught up and exploded thunderously over the barren desert.

  The interior of the narrow craft, however, was extremely quiet except for the measured breathing of the pilot and the wounded Visitor female, Sarah, who sat behind in the rear seat. She glanced down at the third individual inside the craft, who was lying on the floor and not breathing at all.

  A pool of his green blood was coagulating beneath his head. Part of the false human skin had been torn away from his face during the earlier fight and his true reptilian features were exposed beneath. Like all Visitors his real face was thickly scaled, with heavy hairless brows. He had no nose in the human sense, but rather a broad flat lump with wide nostrils. The mouth was also wide and virtually lipless. It had gaped open when he died. Inside the mouth Sarah could see the sharp-pointed teeth and long forked tongue common to the Visitor race, like her own. She also saw that the human-looking contact lenses had been knocked from the creature's eyes revealing yellow vertical irises beneath. They had dilated wide in death and were staring blankly up at her.

  A stab of pain from her pulse wound caused Sarah to look away and try again to master her discomfort. It was becoming increasingly difficult. The green bloodstain on her shirt had been slowly growing over the last two hours. She was wearing what had become the primary Visitor garb: dark pants and ivory shirt with subtle rank stripes on the collar. Commandant Diana had decided more than a decade earlier that the Visitors' standard uniforms presented too strong a military image. She had given much thought to the matter and for public relations reasons had adopted this more casual dress, except for the Patrollers, of course. Those troopers remained uniformed as militarily as ever. Their orange jumpsuits with their black, quilted armor vests, broad black utility belts, jackboots, and dark-visored combat helmets emphasized their martial status and made them a feared and forbidding force.

  Sarah drew another long breath, but it hurt very badly. She looked around for something to distract her and caught her own reflection in the weapon-ranging screen on the side instrument panel. She looked to be in her late thirties by human standards. She had seen this face for so long that she almost thought of it as her real face, yet now she remembered the day she had chosen it to be fitted over her own reptilian features. That was so long ago, nearly twenty-five years earlier, during the initial journey of the Visitor Armada from their home planet orbiting Sirius. That was before Sarah had met the humans and grown sympathetic to their cause.

  But long before meeting the humans Sarah had begun to lose respect for her own Commandants and particularly the distressing direction in which the Visitor Leader was taking their society. The Leader was a charismatic, who had been swept into power after years of war and corrupt government had left their planet disorganized and vulnerable. The Leader's stirring orations and calls for strict, healthy discipline had struck a chord with the masses, including Sarah at the time, and strengthened the people's confidence. The Leader had reshaped their society into a tightly structured, aggressively militaristic world. Opposition to the Leader was dealt with at first by false diplomacy but then more and more swiftly by disappearance, unfortunate accidents, and fi
nally outright assassination. The Leader had ultimately become the sole and supreme authority, who was determined to conquer other worlds and civilizations and then absorb them.

  The Leader had not yet deigned to visit the expedition to Earth. Commandant Diana was in charge of the Earth-side operation and was carrying out her mission in the style dictated by the Leader: with a disarming smile and an iron fist.

  There were a number of Sarah's fellow Visitors who secretly felt as she did, that the Leader's totalitarian rule and growing ambitions were ill-conceived and morally wrong. None spoke of their concerns aloud, however, except in extreme secrecy. Retaliation for any whisper of treason was lightning fast, horrifyingly brutal, and ultimately lethal. Yet Sarah knew that in spite of the prospects of prolonged torture and death, there were others like herself who were willing to take the risks. In spite of the fact that Commandant Diana and her minions had cracked down ever harder over the last few years, in spite of the huge setback known as the Great Purge in 1999, when so many of Sarah's human and Visitor comrades had been betrayed and imprisoned or murdered, Sarah and others were trying equally hard to bring new recruits to the cause of Resistance. The young human piloting the fighter was the newest recruit and Sarah felt he might perhaps turn out to be one of the best.

  Sarah gazed at the back of his sandy-blond head in the pilot's seat in front of her and recalled the first time she'd seen Nathan. Eleven years earlier he had been a rather solemn and angry youth of fifteen. He'd been recently orphaned and had eagerly joined the Teammate unit that Sarah helped to oversee on the Big Island.

  The Teammates were a quasi-military organization that had been created by Diana shortly after the Visitors' arrival. Originally called The Visitor Youth and designed to draw in exactly such disenfranchised young people as Nathan, the Teammate mission had been quickly and considerably expanded by Diana. She now required all physically fit humans to serve at least part-time.

  The Teammate unit became a family of sorts for the friendless boy. Sarah had sensed Nathan's particular loneliness. She also divined his keen insights and raw native intelligence. She had taken Nathan under her wing. Over the years Nathan had come to look upon Sarah as more than just his Teammate leader, she was also something of a mother figure. They had grown very close. Sarah was surprised to discover how much genuine love she could feel for someone not of her own species.

  Over those same years, Sarah's loyalty to the Visitor mission and its commanders had continued to deteriorate. She kept her dissatisfaction most private, however, and had never shared her growing sentiments with Nathan. Partly she held back out of a desire to protect him from any harm that might come to them if her feelings became known, and partly because she feared that Nathan himself might reveal her secrets and denounce her. Informing was a common occurrence among passionate Teammates such as Nathan. Many Teammates became informers within their own families, condemning their own relatives, even their own siblings or parents. If a loyal Teammate discovered that relatives had been working against the Visitors or, most damning of all, actively colluding with the Resistance, reporting them was demanded and grandly rewarded.

  Sarah knew that Nathan harbored a virulent anger toward the Resistance. She knew his burning reasons for that feeling, the murder of his parents. She knew that his intense personal loathing for the Resistance had driven Nathan to become one of the most ardent soldiers against their cause. He had fought and captured many of them and had risen swiftly within the Teammate organization.

  But when the Resistance was weakened by the Great Purge, when Visitors sympathetic to their cause were increasingly discovered and killed, Sarah realized that they needed all the help they could get. She knew that Nathan could become a powerful adjunct to the Resistance Allies—if she could convince him to change his allegiance.

  On this day aboard the Honolulu Mothership she had finally been forced to chance it. If he had informed on her it could have meant the abrupt end of her life. But upon seeing what she had shown him, Nathan's astonishment and his comprehension of what it meant had been instant. It was as though he'd been struck by lightning. He told her he likened it to a key story from Hawaiian history.

  In 1779 the natives welcomed the English explorer Captain James Cook, believing him to be their returned god Lono. They worshipped Cook as a god, though he and his men sometimes treated them brutally. Then one day during a fracas at Kealakekua Bay an angry native struck Cook and the islanders heard the captain groan. They were astonished. Gods did not groan. As they began to prod him they instantly realized he was as mortal as they. It was a cataclysmic revelation. The whole basis of their deepest beliefs suddenly crashed down around them and in their unbridled fury they literally tore the man to pieces.

  That was how Nathan now felt about the Visitors. Sarah's instincts had proven to be exactly right. She had indeed turned him to the Resistance cause and now there could be no turning back.

  Though they were skimming only fifty feet over the desert to avoid detection, Sarah had complete confidence in Nathan. He was flying with enormous skill. He had learned to pilot a Visitor fighter during his years working alongside them. Though Nathan had deserted hours ago when he and Sarah stole the fighter, he was still wearing his Teammate uniform of dark blue cords and blue chambray shirt with his three rank stripes on the collar. He had nearly lost his blue uniform baseball cap during his struggle with the Visitor ground crewman who lay dead at Sarah's feet.

  Sarah had hoped to win Nathan over by showing him what was hidden aboard the Hawaiian Mothership, but she was unprepared for the vehemence of his reaction to what he saw and his fierce determination to take immediate and violent action. Had he not been quite so impetuous and rash they might have slipped away quietly or at least escaped without her being shot. Still, she was happy to have opened his eyes to the truth.

  The radio in the fighter crackled. The voice had the peculiar sonorous resonance common to all Visitors, "Honolulu Six one niner, this is Flagship. We show no flight plan for you."

  Sarah drew a concerned breath. "Uh-oh."

  Nathan was unfazed. "Stay cool, Sarah." He looked back at her. "How you doing?" She saw that the wound on his left cheek was still damp with blood and the bruise on his jaw had spread, but that his warm brown eyes were as alight and intense as ever. His face had the native Hawaiian roundness, smoothness, and perpetual Polynesian tan of his father while his mother's English-Danish heritage had lightened his hair toward blond and provided him with a thin, straight nose.

  "I'm all right," Sarah lied and Nathan knew it. One glance at how the size of the green bloodstain on her shirt had increased told him that he had to get her medical help very quickly. Nathan's feelings for Sarah ran deep and true, flowing as they did from all the mentoring, special attention, and care she had given him over the years. But in the last six hours his admiration and love for her had taken a quantum leap because of the dangers she had undertaken in his behalf. He would save her life or die trying.

  The radio voice spoke again, this time more emphatically, "Six one niner, Flagship. Repeat: we show no flight plan for you. Please activate your transponder immediately."

  "They're on to us, Nathan," Sarah said quietly.

  But his confidence unshaken, he grinned tightly back at her. "Hey, we've ducked 'em for two hours. We're almost to the coast."

  He looked ahead through the tinted cockpit window, ignoring its numerous transparent superimpositions of flight data and targeting statistics. Brown, scrubby desert vegetation was flashing past beneath him. Ahead some forty or fifty miles he could see a range of low mountains that rose over a thousand feet. Between the two most prominent mountains there was a gap almost two miles wide. Stretching between the two mountains across the deep dry valley was a massive yet graceful suspension bridge.

  Nathan smiled. "I can already see the Golden Gate."

  His fighter was approaching from the west toward the city of San Francisco. The desert he had been flying over stretched westward behind them t
o the horizon. The desert had once been part of the Pacific Ocean.

  The staticky Visitor voice on the radio was commanding now. "Six one niner, slow to two hundred. Climb and maintain three zero and await escort. You're in violation of regs."

  Nathan muttered darkly to himself, "I got your fuckin' regs."

  Something over the city had caught Sarah's eye. "Nathan—look there!"

  His voice was clipped. "I see 'em, Sarah."

  Two Visitor fighters similar to the one Nathan was flying had dropped from one of the myriad landing bays on the bottom of the sixteen-mile-wide Mothership, which was equal in size to the hundreds of others like it around the world. Dish-shaped, with a thickness of over two miles at its center, the Mothership's surface was composed of thousands of overlying panels that resembled scales. There were hundreds of view ports and massive access hatches in addition to the scores of gaping landing bays. This particular Mothership was unique in that it was the Flagship of the Visitor Armada. It hung four thousand feet in the sky dominating San Francisco like an ominous dark cloud and casting its huge shadow across the city and the people below. The two fighters were streaking down from it toward the Golden Gate to intercept Nathan.

  Sarah chewed her lip nervously. "They're Class Fours."

  Nathan had already noted that. They were the newest fighters, about five feet longer than the older twenty-five-foot Class Two that he and Sarah were in. The Fours still maintained the basic curved wing design that was a cross between a delta wing and the cowl of a king cobra snake. Even sitting on the ground or in a landing bay they had a very menacing appearance. In the air they were as deadly as they looked. Nathan and Sarah were both aware that the Fours were also faster and more maneuverable than their Class Two. Nathan knew he was facing a serious challenge.

  The pilot in the lead interceptor was a female Patroller, a flight leader named Gina. Her false human face gave her the appearance of a striking Asian woman about thirty years of age. Her face was slightly more round than oval; her almond eyes were dark and quite sharp. She was a seasoned pilot, confident of her proven ability to bring down any combatant. She was a top gun killer.