V_The 2nd Generation

by Kenneth Johnson

  "Very strong, among other things," Margarita interjected.

  "Extraordinary strength is natural to insects," Robert said. He'd been studying the three. "Like your hardened skin . . . an exoskeleton?"

  "Of sorts, yes," said Kayta. "We each have that in varying degrees. Which makes us each look different."

  Gary was staring at something. "Uh . . . I'd say there're some other differences, too." They followed his amazed glance to Bryke who was scratching her back. Her shoulder and elbow joints were hinged entirely backward.

  They all stared for a silent moment. Then Ysabel said, "Just a wild guess: you folks were responsible for that weird husk?"

  Julie noticed Ayden glance at Bryke with mild annoyance, as he acknowledged, "Yes."

  IN DIMLY LIT HANGAR BAY TWELVE ABOARD THE FLAGSHIP AT THAT same moment, two dried husks were being laid on the flight deck. One was the burly, mustachioed Teammate and the other a Visitor Patroller whom Bryke had downed at Hunter's Point. Shawn and Martin stood by as Diana surveyed them with some recognition. She poked at one with her booted foot as she addressed the Visitor doctor, "Nothing from Earth can cause this?"

  Eric shook his head. "Nothing we know of, Commandant."

  Two Patrollers brought the grungy reptilian guard who had been stationed at Donovan's cell. Diana turned her sloe eyes to him. "You let my prisoner escape?"

  The frightened guard protested, "It was a dreg did it, Commandant! I swear."

  "Which dreg?"

  "Forgive me, Commandant, but they all look alike. I'm not sure which it was." Then he noticed two half-breed janitors who were cleaning a smelly mess beneath a nearby shuttle, "Could've been one of them! Yes! I think it was one of them!"

  "No, it wasn't," Martin spoke up, "those two only work the hangar bays."

  Shawn looked disdainfully at the guard, then at Diana, "He obviously has no idea which dreg it was, Commandant."

  Diana didn't even glance at the Patrollers holding the guard. "Kill the fool. Slowly."

  "No! Please, Commandant," the guard pleaded desperately and continued to protest his innocence as the Patrollers dragged him away. Diana was already looking back down at the bizarre husks. Martin thought that her expression indicated she had knowledge of what had caused them.

  THOUGH RUBY'S WRIST HAD THE TOUGH LEATHERY SKIN INHERITED from her reptilian father, the handcuff was chafing her. The other end of the handcuff was secured to the arm of the wooden bench she was sitting on in the police station. Nathan had been mistaken. Ruby had not escaped at Hunter's Point. She had been captured and brought north to the Parnassas Station at the southeast corner of Golden Gate Park, a clearinghouse for those suspected of Resistance involvement. The twelve-year-old was worried, but with her innate bravado she was carefully observing the bustling police squad room trying to formulate an escape plan. So far she was batting zero.

  Then her stomach dropped when she heard the stern black Patrol captain's deep voice. "Bring her in for interrogation." She looked around sharply and realized he was talking about someone else. She saw that it was terrified Harmy who was being led through the fluorescent haze into a forbidding anteroom.

  BY MORNING JULIE WAS GETTING VERY WORRIED FOR HER DAUGHTER and having trouble keeping her mind on X-rays of the Zedti that she and Robert Maxwell were examining. She grew expectant when she saw Ysabel coming, but the older woman shook her head and waved negatively, clicking the thin bracelets on her wrist. "No Ruby yet. But everybody's looking."

  Robert couldn't think of any comforting words that Julie would believe, so he tried to refocus her on examining the X-rays. "They are definitely not Visitors."

  Gary was nearby, sipping coffee, but his eyes were unsettled. "So why do I feel just a tad uncomfortable?"

  "Because they're very unemotional," Margarita said as she and Street-C brought some breakfast burritos to Julie and Robert. Everyone had been up all night.

  "Yeah. Talk about chillin'," said Street-C.

  "That'd be consistent with their physiology," Julie said. "There's no sentiment in the lives of insects."

  Kayta spoke up from a short distance away where she had been examining their human medicines. "Yes. We Zedti experience less emotion than we have observed in humans." They turned to her and Kayta glanced downward, shyly. "Forgive me. Often I overhear without meaning to."

  "Hey," Nathan quipped, glancing at Margarita, "a lot of us have minimal emotion."

  Margarita ignored his barb. "Please tell us more, Kayta."

  In a gesture designed to emphasize the interconnectivity of her people, the blond Zedti raised her hands before her and interlaced her fingers. "Our strongest individual desire is to work for the good of our society."

  Blue, who had been keeping a weathered eye on the three newcomers, drifted closer. "Sounds kinda communist, huh?"

  "It's the Hive Mentality," Robert clarified. "Let me tell you: if ants were bigger, humans would've been gone long ago."

  Nathan had been thinking. "You said you came from the star we call Altair? That's about sixteen light-years away, right?" Kayta nodded affirmation. "So Julie's distress call took sixteen years to reach you."

  "It did," Ayden's voice was authoritative, "we then came immediately."

  Dark-skinned Bryke had joined them. "No one should have to live under such tyranny." The others looked at her with some surprise. Her voice was much softer than her warrior's demeanor suggested.

  "Bryke piloted us here in four years," Ayden said.

  Nathan's face scrunched curiously. "Faster than light speed?"

  "Utilizing what you would call wormhole technology," Bryke explained.

  Julie asked the obviously key question, "And you're an enemy of the Visitors? You've defeated them before?" She noted that Bryke's pink eyes looked away, perhaps from a bad memory.

  Ayden confirmed for Julie, "Yes. But at enormous cost to our people."

  "Their Leader is ruthless," Kayta said. "With an enormous ego and a deep hatred of the Zedti because we defeated them. Barely."

  Ysabel was beginning to suspect something. "Are you afraid Earth's just a stopover on their way back to smack you good?"

  "We do have intelligence that they may be planning just such an attack, yes," Ayden acknowledged.

  Street-C's eyes narrowed as he got Ysabel's drift. "So y'all ain't just come to help us."

  Kayta clarified, "If we can stop them here, both you and we would benefit."

  "But to do that we need your help," Ayden said. "We must discover their exact plans, strategy, and weaponry."

  Margarita had been studying the three Zedti. "We know they're creating eye coloring like yours, human-sounding voices, and a sheen like your skin has."

  "Obviously to infiltrate our outposts," Ayden reasoned. "To undermine our security en route to attacking our home planet."

  Julie had picked up on Margarita's line of thinking. "And they'd need those pheromone injections—"

  "Or the Zedti could sniff out spies," Robert agreed.

  "Yes," said Kayta, "from our previous encounter we've learned to never underestimate their treachery. We narrowly defeated them before."

  Bryke was resolved. "But we're determined to stop them permanently this time."

  Nathan looked at her. "So how many of you are here?"

  Ayden answered, "Just we three."

  "Three?" Blue blinked, frowning.

  Street-C groaned, "Shit, man, that ain't gonna do no good."

  Then Ayden continued. "But our fleet is standing by."

  Street-C immediately reversed attitude, "Fleet! Yeah! Now that's what I'm talkin' about. Where are they?"

  "Marshaled behind the planet Saturn to avoid detection," Ayden explained. "We have 177 warships. Kayta will call them in once we learn everything you know." He looked directly at Julie. "Will you share all your information with us?"

  The freedom fighters grew silent, weighing the situation. Julie remembered the Visitors' arrival twenty years earlier when they also had professed to need "our he
lp." Blue and the others were equally wary. Nathan saw that Margarita was rubbing the back of her forefinger against the tip of her nose as her keen eyes flicked from one Zedti to another. Nathan knew she was pondering the same critical question that was worrying all of the Resistance members: could these aliens be trusted?

  And, as she had for twenty years, Julie felt unequal to the grave responsibility thrust upon her as all of her compatriots' eyes eventually looked to her to make the call.

  IN EMMA'S CONDO EARLY THAT SAME MORNING, SAN FRANCISCO'S mayor was surprised when Emma greeted him with a deeply romantic kiss. She ran her fingers through his thick dark hair. Then, as her moist lips grazed along his cheek, Mark whispered, "I thought you'd invited me to have breakfast."

  "We'll get to that," she purred, easing off his suit jacket. She was wearing a thin, lavender silk robe and when he put his arms around her he could feel the warmth and smoothness of her tawny skin beneath it. Under the silk she was wearing nothing. She kissed him again.

  "Mmm," he hummed, "I guess you have missed me."

  "When I saw you again . . . all those important Visitors courting you"—she was loosening his tie—"I suddenly remembered what a prize you are."

  "Ah . . . the lure of power . . ." Mark said lightly and with humor. "Let me tell you, it's not all it's cracked up to be."

  "You let me be the judge of that," she said and kissed him deeply again. He responded as her robe slipped away, and his hands glided down over her bronze curves. Emma glimpsed herself in a mirror over his shoulder. She was truly fond of Mark and felt a stab of guilt about her new career as a Mata Hari.

  THE BROAD VIZ SCREEN ON THE WALL OF THE DARKENED FLAGSHIP conference room was displaying multiple views of Earth's greatly diminished oceans. At the top of North America, Hudson Bay had vanished along with all the bays and basins that had held less than a thousand feet of water. To the north and east to Greenland all of that water was gone. The east coast of Canada had swelled outward to include all of Newfoundland. The formerly prime fishing grounds of the Grand Banks were high and dry. The great harbors of Boston, New York, and Norfolk were empty, as was the entire Chesapeake Bay. The rivers that flowed into them—the Charles, the Hudson, the Potomac, the Delaware, and others—had all diminished and now snaked out shallowly across the arid land. Along the entire former Eastern Seaboard of the United States there was dry land for at least two hundred miles eastward to the precipitous slope of the continental shelf. From there steep cliffs slanted down over a thousand feet before reaching the new level of the sea.

  The Gulf of Mexico had shrunk to half of its size, enlarging the Mississippi Delta. The great muddy river now did not reach the Gulf until it had traveled an additional 120 miles south of New Orleans. The Florida peninsula had widened on either side and from space it looked swollen. The Florida Keys and the Bahamas were no longer isolated islands but part of the mainland.

  On the Pacific side of North America, from the Bering Straits to the Aleutian Islands a broad land bridge had formed between Russia and Alaska as it had existed during the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, though never this low. All along the western United States dry land now extended outward for several hundred miles. Puget Sound was empty and the great ports of Vancouver, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego were as waterless and arid as San Francisco's former bay. At Portland, the Columbia River fanned out westward into a wide, shallow delta and was mostly absorbed into the parched ground before it could reach the new edge of the Pacific Ocean.

  The continent of South America had likewise grown, particularly on its southeastern side where the continental shelf was now dry land all the way east to and beyond the Falkland Islands.

  The water in the deepest abyssal plains of all the oceans, normally from five to seven thousand feet deep, had diminished by more than half. Africa, which possessed the narrowest continental shelf, now had steep cliff sides that plunged two thousand feet and more down to the waters that remained in the Angola Basin to the west and the Somali Abyssal Plain on the east.

  The northern two-thirds of the Adriatic Sea that had previously separated Italy from the Balkan Peninsula was dry. The Red Sea had become a new section of the Arabian and Egyptian deserts. The Mediterranean and Black Seas had shrunk to half their normal size. The North Sea, English Channel, the Celtic and Baltic Seas had simply disappeared. Scandinavia and the former British Isles were now entirely linked by land to Western Europe and Holland's dikes now held back only the wind.

  The Indian subcontinent had grown by nearly a third and connected itself to Sri Lanka. The Indochinese Peninsula now continued far to the south encompassing Sumatra and Borneo. The East China Sea and the Yellow Sea were also dry beds connecting the Chinese mainland to Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Proportionately, Australia had grown most of all, increasing its size by fully half. The living coral of its Great Barrier Reef, left exposed to the intense sunlight, had dried out and died.

  Transportation by sea had thus been severely hampered because the worldwide ports were now either well inland or much farther above sea level than they had ever been in human history. In spite of new facilities, which the Visitors had helped construct to connect the ports with the ever-diminishing oceans, commerce by sea had become difficult at best. Transport was made even more arduous because of the closing of the landlocked Panama and Suez Canals.

  Diana proudly pointed out to Jeremy all the statistics and the vast quantity of water that had already been taken up and, using Visitor technology, had been compressed for storage aboard the Motherships. Many of the gigantic vessels had already quietly departed for their home planet.

  Jeremy was thoroughly unimpressed. "It's simply not happening fast enough to suit our Leader. Hence, my new creation." He nodded for Shawn to switch the viz screen to show the recently arrived, thirty-mile-long, segmented spacecraft, which was now in a low orbit around the Earth. "I suppose that here they would refer to it as 'Visitor 2.0.' " He smiled with mild self-amusement.

  Diana's stony expression did not change, however, as she watched the individual vertebraelike segments of the massive craft beginning to separate and divide off from the elongated ship. "Each segment is a plug-in for a Mothership which will greatly accelerate water collection and compression," he explained with self-satisfaction. "Our work here will thus be finished not in years, as under your plan, but weeks. Which, of course, will allow us to commence our attack against the Zedti." He sat down comfortably into one of the conference room chairs and stretched his arms expansively. "I must say, our Leader was extremely pleased."

  Diana was not. But she contained her ire as she stared at him and considered her best countermoves.

  EMMA AND MARK LAY BESIDE EACH OTHER, NAKED IN HER BED. IF people still smoked, they would've been. They were snuggled closely and the mayor was talking softly: "Oh, they've done remarkable things for us, of course. But I still have . . ." His voice trailed off. Like everyone, Mark was wise enough to take care when speaking about the Visitors in any way that might be considered critical. In his position as San Francisco's mayor he had to exercise particular caution.

  But Emma was anxious to keep him talking and gently coaxed him, "Still have what?"

  He glanced at her. It was so good to be lying close to her again. He loved her perfume with its subtle rosy fragrance. They had become lovers several years after the death of his wife, drawn together at first merely as people with celebrity often are. They had quickly found that they shared many common sensibilities and the same understated humor. Mark had been very disappointed when Emma drifted away and he was glad that she had now decided to renew their closeness. Their lovemaking was both very comfortable and very inventive. He greatly enjoyed their renewed intimacy and was convinced that she also did.

  Emma, in fact, truly did enjoy it. But she also had a mission now and prompted him again, "You still have what?"

  "Some ambivalence, maybe. The whole anti-Sci thing troubled me from the beginning and . . ." Again he hesitated, weighing a dec
ision. Then he finally said, "Can you keep a secret?"

  Emma's pulse rate increased slightly, but she maintained her casual manner. "Of course."

  "I've been able to sneak a little humanitarian aid to scientists and their families. I set up a hospice in an old blimp hangar over on Treasure Island to provide them with some medical assistance."

  Emma blinked. "You did that?"

  Mark was surprised and a bit concerned that she knew of it. "You heard about it? How?"

  "I . . . have a masseuse who's married to a Sci. She told me."

  "Well, it's not much, but it's something. If you're interested, maybe you could go by there sometime. I'm sure it'd bolster the spirits of the patients." Then he had second thoughts and quickly backpedaled. "But of course, I wouldn't want you to do anything that might seem inappropriate to you or compromise your position with the Visitors."

  Before she could answer, his cell phone rang. As Mark sat up to answer, Emma studied him. This unforeseen information had furthered her new awakening of caring for him. Simultaneously Emma felt all the more guilty for spying on him.

  Mark held his vid phone in front of him as he clicked on the tiny viewer. The Visitor Patrol captain's face appeared. He was seen in the rear of a moving vehicle. "Mr. Mayor . . . I was on the way to our meeting, but I'm afraid I'll have to postpone it."

  "Not a problem. Nothing too serious, I hope?"

  In the car, the mayor's face was on the vid phone of the captain who had also glimpsed half-naked Emma on the bed behind Mark. The captain struggled to speak while he was so distracted. "Uh, no, sir . . . Actually very good: I was just informed that we've caught Juliet Parish's little dreg bitch. I'm going back to interrogate her."

  In the bedroom Emma overheard and turned away to hide her alarm.

  AT THE PARNASSAS POLICE STATION BOOKING DESK, WILLY WAS TRYing to stay cool as he watched a crew-cut SFPD sergeant checking the paperwork Willy had presented. A Visitor-Asian half-breed edged past to empty the sergeant's trash. Finally the sergeant stamped the papers. "Looks in order. I'll go get her." He went off, passing a Teammate unit that was heading out on patrol. Willy was stunned to see that among the unit was his half-breed son Ted who was now wearing a Teammate uniform.