Sikes fumbled at his back pocket and pulled out his badge case. He flipped it open and held out the gold shield inside like a child offering a painting to be hung on the refrigerator.
“Detective,” Victoria said, wonderingly.
“My first day,” Sikes explained, trying to keep the excitement from his voice, not willing to risk anything interfering with the sudden connection he felt he had made with her. “That’s what the computer’s for. It’s a lead in my first case. Me. A homicide detective.”
This time, when the smile came to Victoria’s lips, it wasn’t fleeting. “Congratulations, Matt. Really. It seems it was a long time since you took those tests. I didn’t actually realize that . . . well, that you’d finally made it.”
There was no undercurrent of sarcasm in her tone, and Sikes didn’t go looking for it. For him, making detective was the first step on a long road to personal rehabilitation—a road that ended with his family back together with him.
“That detective you were with,” Victoria said, “is he your new partner?”
The lie was out of Sikes before he even had time to think about it. “Yes,” he said. “Grazer’s helping me out on this one. He knows a lot about computers. He, um . . .” He was faltering, and he knew it. The last thing he needed to do now was to tell Victoria that he had a female partner. An attractive female partner. That was another mistake in his past he was trying to recover from—one that was never too far from Victoria’s thoughts, and for good reason. But Sikes knew he wasn’t going to be able to get away with it this time. He could never lie to Victoria without stumbling and stammering and that was exactly what was happening now. She was looking right at him, and she would know what he was doing. There was only one conclusion she could reach.
But again Sikes was wrong. There were two possible conclusions. And Victoria preferred the second.
She put her hands around his hand that held the badge case. “Oh, Matt,” she said, not a hint of reserve left anywhere in her. “I know what it means when you start sputtering like that.”
Sikes felt his insides turn to ice. He had almost made contact, and then he had blown it again. “You . . . you do?” he said, dragging his defeat out as long as possible. Who knew? Maybe the Big One would finally hit, and the building would collapse, and that would be the end of his struggle.
“Uh-huh,” Victoria said. Then, amazingly, she stepped closer to Sikes and gathered his hand to her chest and stared at him with her lips only inches from his. “I’ve always had that effect on you, haven’t I?”
Sikes’s throat was as dry as a Santa Ana wind. He tried to nod, but he seemed to have relinquished control of his body.
And then Victoria threw her arms around him, pressed her hands against the back of his head, and kissed him like their very first kiss, when the world had spun away from them, disappearing for hours.
Sikes felt his chest melt. His knees actually went wobbly. He kissed back, urgently, rapturously, matching her mood and her need moment by moment until he lost track of where he was and who he was, and even the smell of his apartment hallway vanished in the warm haze of Victoria’s perfume and the taste of her.
When it at last seemed to Sikes that he would no longer be able to breathe Victoria pulled slowly away, still perfectly in tune with him. Sikes breathed through his mouth. Each beat of his heart echoed in his ears. Victoria’s eyes were half closed. A small strand of hair had pulled away from her sleek chignon and danced softly against her forehead. Sikes reached out with an unsteady hand to brush the hair away. Victoria took his hand, kissed his fingers, and whispered throatily, “I’ll see you when I get back.”
She reached around him and pressed the elevator call button behind his back. She stayed there, pressed tightly to him, hands running up and down his back until the elevator chimed. Then she left, blowing him a final kiss just as the doors slipped closed.
“Oh, man,” Sikes said to the emptiness of the apartment hallway. “Oh, man, oh, man, oh, man . . .”
He rubbed at his face and could smell Victoria’s scent still clinging to him. His entire body vibrated like the sweetest chord Springsteen had ever played. And all he could think was that he had done it. He had actually, finally, and incredibly won back Victoria.
He almost felt like dancing as he walked back to his apartment. He knew he still had extensive ground to cover with his wife. They had more to work out between them than anything a good dose of hormones could overcome—especially the matter about his real new partner, Angela Perez. But he knew he would be able to work everything out because Angie and his new position as detective and the Petty murder investigation—that whole jumble of potential barriers to his reconciliation with Victoria—were only minor, work-related details. Easily understood, easily dealt with.
After all, he told himself as he stepped into his apartment, it wasn’t as if the world were coming to an end any time soon.
C H A P T E R 8
“WE’RE HEADING TOWARD a water hub,” Susan said as they crept along the mist-filled corridor. George had never seen the gas concentration so high. Great purple gouts of it sputtered thickly from the overhead nozzles, falling like slow water into a hazy, violet-streaked white river that was almost up to their knees.
“Which one?” George asked. He could actually taste the gas now. A strange sweet flavor that others seemed to sense all the time but that he only noticed when levels were extremely high or when he returned from an off-ship tour of work. The taste had an almost physical component to it as well, as if it were making his tongue and nostrils vibrate. If he paid too much attention to the sensation, he felt he might forget to keep moving forward.
“By the main ’ponics sector,” Susan said. She coughed deeply, trying to mask the sound by holding both hands to her mouth. “I think.”
George took her arm. “This much gas can’t be good for us. We must go back.”
From the end of the corridor, where it opened out into the water hub, the ominous sound of marching was breaking up into a mad pattern of running and irregular thuds and impacts. Susan and George heard screams. “Almost there,” Susan said. She touched George’s hand, then moved on. He followed at her side.
Water hub was the name given to sixteen immense and puzzling cavities within the ship, each of which appeared to have been constructed to hold an enormous quantity of liquid. Baffle plates could be tightly sealed over each corridor entrance that opened into the hubs, and the bottom of each cavity formed a concave depression like an enormous bowl made from precisely curved segments of metal plating.
Overall, the hubs were circular, perhaps one hundred human yards across, and each extended vertically through at least ten levels of decks. At each level a wide metal-grille catwalk circled each hub’s inner wall, connecting up to twenty-four corridors. At evenly spaced intervals steep stairways connected the catwalks so that the hubs became the most convenient way of moving between widely separated areas of the ship, enabling workers to change corridors and levels in one central location. As far as George knew, the Elders had thus far been unable to determine what the hubs were originally intended to be. Some form of liquid storage seemed most probable. However, since the hubs were not arranged in a regular pattern throughout the ship, if each had been entirely filled with water, it had been calculated that the resulting asymmetrical stresses would interfere with course changes and the structural integrity of the hull.
Whatever the hubs were, they were further evidence to support the theory that the ship had originally been intended for purposes other than the transfer of Tenctonese slaves. Though what those purposes might have been, none could guess.
As George and Susan approached the catwalk that ringed the water hub at their level a sign on the wall confirmed that they were in the main ’ponics sector on deck fifty-eight. From the sounds that echoed out from the water hub’s center, it sounded as if whatever was going on was located two or three decks below. And whatever it was, it sounded bad. In addition to the clanging of Over
seer boots on the catwalks George could hear the unmistakable sounds of fighting, of cries of pain, as if Tenctonese were being attacked with shock prods focused to their highest settings.
George turned to Susan. As yet they were not close enough to the end of the corridor to see what was going on below their deck, or to be seen themselves. There was still an opportunity to go back.
“We have to look,” Susan said. Her voice was full of fear, but she would not shirk her duty to the others.
“I know,” George said. Each Tenctonese was honor bound to report to the Elders about unusual activities they encountered on the ship. The Overseers would never provide such reports, and eyewitness accounts were the only weapon the Elders had against the terror of unchecked rumor.
“Let me go first,” George said. They were ten feet from the corridor’s end. Wafts of holy gas cascaded past the opening as if rushing down from the decks overhead.
But Susan would not let George face danger by himself. “You go to the right,” she told him. “I’ll take the left.” That tone was there again. No argument.
When each was at one side of the corridor, a foot from the opening, they looked at each other once more, then carefully leaned forward to peer out to the catwalk. George instantly saw their chance. “Over there,” he whispered, and he pointed far left to where a group of about twenty workers huddled at the catwalk railing, staring into the center of the water hub. Even twenty feet from them, George could tell from the workers’ blank expressions that they were almost comatose from their exposure to the gas. If he and Susan could join their group, any Overseer that might happen to see them would think they were similarly affected. Susan nodded once, instantly understanding George’s plan. Quickly they moved against the smooth curved wall of the hub to join the group of gassed workers.
From the carryall sacks the workers wore slung around their necks George knew that the work team was a scavenger group that patrolled corridors looking for abandoned material that could be recycled. George guessed they had been inadvertently exposed when the gas had begun pouring forth, and that no Overseer would question their docile presence. Susan must have reached the same conclusion, because she slipped off the sack of the worker closest to her and handed it to George. “Your disguise,” she said, then she took another sack for herself. The two workers did not seem to notice Susan’s actions.
Moving through the clump of workers was almost like stepping around the bodies in the light bay. George and Susan made their way easily through the unresponsive group until they both stood at the railing’s edge.
“Act like the gas has gotten to you,” George whispered as he let his face go slack and his shoulders droop.
“That won’t be difficult,” Susan said. George saw her slump as well, imitating the stance of the truly affected workers around them. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Neither had George. The water hub was like a giant drain into which hundreds of streams of purple gas emptied. He could see the jets flowing through the open metal of the catwalks, pouring in from the entrance of each corridor that ran into the hub. Some of the jets appeared to glow, luminous with the corridor lights that shone behind them. A small pool of whitening gas was even beginning to form in the curved bottom of the hub eight decks below.
Past the falling ribbons of holy gas, on every catwalk level there were scattered knots of Tenctonese workers seemingly frozen in place, completely overwhelmed by the gas. Eight-person squads of Overseers marched around them on the lower levels, obviously preventing anyone from the lower decks from entering the hub itself. George guessed that the lower-level decks hadn’t yet been gassed, or had not been gassed with the same high concentrations. The Elders had long known that since the holy gas was heavier than air, the Overseers typically released it in the uppermost decks first, letting it settle through the rest of the ship under the influence of whatever generated the artificial gravity field.
But George wasn’t concerned with the Overseers’ tactics. He was more interested in their intent and wondered why they had gone to such trouble to keep this particular hub clear. Especially since the only thing going on was the disturbance on the catwalk directly beneath George and Susan on level fifty-seven. That’s where the disturbance was still in progress. George had never seen anything like that, either.
Off to the right on the catwalk below and across from them a squad of eight Overseers had formed a half circle around a huddled group of five workers who crouched with their backs to the hub wall. George was amazed that the captive workers seemed to be ready for a fight, shouting at the Overseers and making feints—as if they, too, were unaffected by the gas.
A few feet over from the Overseer squad an actual fight was still underway. Two Overseers were sprawled on the catwalk. One had a shock prod shoved deeply in his mouth, and every few seconds the device discharged as if it had been focused on automatic. The body twitched each time the blue sparks arced out from the prod’s handle, and pink blood frothed furiously from the body’s mouth. In between discharges the body lay so completely still that George realized with a gasp that the Overseer was dead. The other fallen Overseer was still breathing, though there was a deformation in his skull that George could see even from his distant vantage point.
Near the bodies six other Overseers tried to subdue three struggling workers. Each of the workers wore shimmering gray membrane suits—one-piece skintight coveralls of synthetic iridescent material intended to insulate the skin of those who worked underwater in the sewage-purification chambers. Though why three water workers would come under Overseer attack on the fifty-seventh level was a question George couldn’t answer.
Then George heard a sharp command ring out, strangely muffled by the cloaking presence of the mist, but quite clearly an Overseer code word. Instantly the six Overseers who fought with the water workers jumped back. The water workers hesitated, as if unsure whether they should take the opportunity to try to press the attack or to escape. But the choice was quickly taken from them as a startlingly thin blue beam of light sliced open the middle worker’s chest with a hissing explosion of vapor. The middle worker collapsed without even having time to scream.
“Celine!” Susan gasped. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” George whispered in reply without moving his lips or turning his head. Though the only weapons the Overseers were ever seen to carry were their prods, the ship was full of rumors of other, more frightening weapons the Overseers kept hidden so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. “It looked like a mining beam. But it was so small.” George had seen crackling blue mining beams carve twenty-foot-wide tunnels from solid rock with huge explosions of dust and debris, but those beams were twenty feet wide as well, generated by machines that were even larger.
The two remaining water workers seemed as shocked as George and Susan were, and they slowly stepped back until they reached the hub wall and raised their hands over their heads. Then a new group of four Overseers came into view, approaching the workers. But as the new group stepped into a clear area between two falling streams of gas George saw that only two of the four were Overseers.
One was a tall male with a heavily lined face. He carried a metal rod connected by thick wires to a heavy backpack, reminding George of his own molecular probe. The second Overseer was a female, shorter than the first but, judging from her well-fed size, of equal mass. The other two figures with them were much smaller—only children, two males clad in gray tunics and trousers and not Overseer uniforms. But both wore the repellent black scarves of the Watcher Youth, which meant that someday they would be Overseers.
The tall Overseer with the metal rod appeared to be talking to one of the two boys as he gestured to the water workers. The boy nodded quickly, then the female Overseer pushed the children to the catwalk so they were well out of the way.
The male Overseer pointed his rod at the closer of the two water workers, and George realized that the small device was the beam weapon even as a second lan
ce of light blasted the arm from the rebellious worker. Her instant shriek of agony echoed through the water hub as she crumpled to the catwalk deck, leaving a jagged spray of pink on the wall behind her. Before that first cry had faded her moans joined it.
Beside him George could hear Susan praying, her words stumbling over each other in her fervency. On the catwalk one of the two children turned away from the bloody scene and stared down into the gas-filled abyss of the hub as if looking for a way to escape. And on the child’s head the distinctive brushstroke spot of the Family: Third Moon’s Ocean was like a beacon. Susan stopped praying in the same instant that George recognized the child’s complete cranial pattern and felt his hearts trade beats.
“No,” Susan whispered.
The child in the traitorous scarf was their son. Buck.
C H A P T E R 9
KIRBY WAS NEVER ONE to let a mouthful of Doritos get in the way of her passing on advice to her father. “Why doncha jus’ call ’er?” she said, then went back to noisy crunching.
Sikes looked over at his daughter. She was sitting on one of the mismatched wooden chairs, hunched over his dining room table. The smoked glass panel on top of four fat black cylinders wasn’t really a dining room table, but then his apartment didn’t have a real dining room, so everything worked out. “Why don’t you finish your homework?” he suggested. “And go easy on those things.”
“Why?” Kirby asked, giving the word two syllables as if she had been brought up in a shopping mall.
“You’ll spoil your dinner.” Even as he said it Sikes couldn’t believe he had actually stooped to something so lame.
“Yeah, right, Dad. Doritos are really going to kill my appetite for Domino’s pizza. Gotta keep my food groups in balance, right?” She rolled her eyes and defiantly took another handful of the chips from the split-open bag in front of her.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 12