Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

“They’re going to kill him,” Susan wailed as they ran. “We have to go back.”

  “They won’t kill him!” George said, clamping his fingers around Susan’s arm with the solidity of hull metal. “Didn’t you see what he was wearing?” In the distance he could hear the clang of booted feet on the water hub’s catwalks. He had heard the tall Overseer give the orders. A squad was coming for them.

  “Not our son,” Susan sobbed, each word resonating with the rhythm of her running feet. “Not Finiksa.”

  “He wears the black scarf of the Watcher Youth Brigade,” George said bitterly. “Our own son is as good as being an Overseer himself.”

  “No,” Susan said. “They must have forced him to wear it. They—”

  “He was present for an execution,” George said, his words coming between gasps for breath. He knew he was being cruel, but he had no choice. Susan had to accept the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Once again they had lost a child to a horrible fate.

  “But the female Overseer, she was going to use her prod on Finiksa. He couldn’t be one of them.”

  George skidded to a stop in the corridor, sending billows of white gas roiling ahead of him. He grabbed both of Susan’s arms and pulled her close.

  “It’s their way!” he snapped at her. “They take our own children from us. They turn them against us. Just as they turn the stories of our own past against us. Whatever we have that’s good they take from us and pervert.”

  Susan’s face was streaked with tears. “Then what can we do?”

  The word tore at George’s hearts even as he spoke it. “Nothing!”

  He felt Susan sag against his grip. “Stangya, no . . .” She began to cough again. The gas was strong within her.

  “He’s gone, Oblakah. We have to let him go or else they will kill us, too!”

  “Then let them kill me. Let them—”

  “Shhh!” George pleaded. He pulled Susan to him and held her tight. He listened carefully. There was running in the corridor, coming up on them quickly. George made his decision. He hugged Susan a final time, then pushed her away from him. “You go on. I’ll hold them off here. Try to get back to the light bay and—”

  “I’m not leaving you,” Susan said. Her eyes were unsteady, unfocused. Another few minutes of exposure to the holy gas and she would be powerless to reject any suggestion George could give her. But for now she was still fighting, still refusing to give up control of her life.

  “Oblakah, you must. Otherwise . . . they’ll have won everything.”

  “They already have.”

  The running grew louder. Any moment the Overseers would be close enough to see their quarry through the mist. Then it wouldn’t matter how fast George and Susan could run. The ship was a closed space, and their capture would be inevitable. There was only one thing George could say.

  “Oblakah, listen to me: They haven’t won. They’re nowhere close. There’s a rebellion on board. Do you understand? Some of us are fighting back!”

  Susan reacted as if she’d been slapped. “No. That’s impossible.”

  “Go now! Get to safety. Then contact Moodri. He’s involved somehow. Or at least he knows about it.”

  George could hear shouts among the running.

  “Moodri?” Susan’s eyes were wide. “Moodri’s talking of rebellion?”

  “Oblakah, please go! I don’t want you to die.”

  Susan tried to take a step away but faltered. “I can’t. I can’t leave you.”

  A new sound filled the corridor. Another pair of running feet. This time coming from the opposite direction. They were surrounded. There was no escape.

  “Andarko,” George cried. He had no other words. He pulled Susan close to him, wrapping her in his arms as if to protect her from everything. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “So sorry.”

  A powerful hand fell on his shoulder. It was over. George turned to face his captors, determined to take as many of them with him as he could.

  “Stangya! Oblakah! This way!”

  George’s mouth fell open. “Ruhtra?”

  George’s brother aimed a small black device down the corridor toward the sound of the approaching Overseers. A red light glowed on the object. “Eight of them. Fifty meters and closing.”

  “What is that? Where did you come from?” George hadn’t seen his younger brother for years. He hadn’t even been sure that Ruhtra was still on the ship. Yet here he was now, dressed in slave’s tunic and trousers but with an odd belt from which mysterious objects dangled, and wearing a intership communications headband and microphone. George was too shocked to do anything more than stare.

  But Ruhtra understood the situation even if George didn’t. “Come with me or be recycled!” Then he turned and ran back into the mist.

  George didn’t hesitate. He took Susan’s hand just as she took his, and they both ran after Ruhtra.

  They only had to go ten feet. George stared up in amazement. A ceiling plate was open, hanging down like a hatchway. Ruhtra was already up inside the opening it led to. He held out his hand. “Oblakah first.”

  Susan leapt for the opening eight feet overhead, hooked her hands inside, then disappeared inside as Ruhtra lifted her. “Now you!” Ruhtra called out.

  George jumped. The edge of the opening was rough under his hands, as if it had been imperfectly cut. He pulled himself up partway, then felt Ruhtra and Susan latch onto the waistband of his trousers and haul him up the rest of the way.

  They were crowded into a small access tunnel, four feet by four feet. Ruhtra pushed by George, reached through the ceiling opening again, then pulled up the hanging ceiling plate. He locked it shut with a latch, bringing total darkness just as George heard the thundering feet of the Overseers pass by below.

  For long moments George sat in the tunnel gasping for breath, hearing Oblakah catch hers. Then he heard a small click, and Ruhtra whispered, “Protein retrieved.”

  George stared into the darkness in the direction from which his brother’s voice had come. Protein retrieved. Even George knew it was a code, like the indecipherable commands the Overseers shouted to one another. He felt a sudden chill of anticipation as he realized that he might at last have come into contact with a group organized like the Overseers, but working against them.

  “I have a thousand questions for you, Ruhtra,” George whispered into the darkness.

  A small red light appeared in the darkness. Ruhtra’s face was dimly lit beneath it. “Then move quietly and follow me,” Ruhtra commanded, “and I shall try to answer them.”

  Ten minutes later they came to an intersection node in the access tunnels that was large enough for them to stand in. Seven other tunnels led out of the node at different angles, and beside each opening a single yellow light glowed. Something was written beside each light, but George couldn’t see clearly enough to read any of the markings.

  “We’ll be safe here for a few minutes at least,” Ruhtra said. He moved carefully over to George—the floor of the intersection node was covered with thick bundles of cables and pipes—and embraced his brother tightly. “I thought you had been off-loaded on Antagonus. I thought I would never see you again.”

  “Nor I you,” George said. The emotions of the day were threatening to overwhelm him. To find his son and realize he was lost all in the same instant. To face certain death at the Overseers’ hands and then to be saved by a brother he had thought was gone forever. George felt a sob rising within him. It had been so long since he had allowed himself to feel sorrow or sadness, because he knew that would proclaim the ship the final victor. But now, with Ruhtra’s presence, with Moodri’s hints, with the discovery of a network of tunnels in the ship of which it appeared the Overseers had no knowledge, sorrow and sadness seemed finally permissible because each feeling held the promise of hope.

  George held his brother at arm’s length, drinking in the sight of him. Ruhtra’s face had aged dramatically in the time since they had last seen each other, yet his still-famili
ar features brought back strong memories of their days with their parents in the dormitory, before the Overseers had come for George.

  But that was the past. It was the present that was important now. And the future.

  “Is there a revolt?” George asked.

  Ruhtra looked pained. “Please, Stangya. I can’t answer that. Even if I knew what the answer was.”

  George was momentarily confused. Ruhtra slipped from his grasp and went to Susan. She was sitting on a thick bundle of pipes that snaked from one tunnel into another. She had wrapped her arms around her legs and was rocking slowly back and forth, staring blankly ahead of her.

  “The gas has taken her,” Ruhtra said as he crouched to look into Susan’s expressionless eyes. “Has she no more eemikken she can take?”

  “Eemikken?” George said. “Only the Overseers take that.”

  Ruhtra stood up and stretched. His various implements clinked against one another on his laden belt. “No,” he said. “The Overseers dispense eemikken lozenges to those whom they wish to reward or to coerce, but their own ability to resist the gas is linked to their tattoos.” Ruhtra idly traced a finger around his own bare wrist. “Some sort of dermal transference, the Elders say. High dosage of the antidote to the holy gas released through the skin at a constant rate.”

  “I did not know that,” George said. “But what of me? I have taken nothing, but the gas has yet to affect me.”

  Ruhtra smiled—an expression seldom seen upon the ship. He pointed a finger at the trident-shaped spot above his temple. “That’s because you’re like me,” he said. “Family: Third Star’s Ocean. Most of us are resistant to the gas, except to very high doses, of course. There are other families as well. I’ve heard an entire tribe was resistant, and they were among the first to be off-loaded.”

  George traced his own trident-shaped spot, just like Ruhtra’s, almost identical to their father’s. And to Moodri’s. “Resistant?” he repeated. That would explain so much.

  “But trust me, Stangya, if ever there are Overseers around, act as if you have accepted the release of the gas.” Ruhtra read the question in George’s eyes. “For a long time, the Elders say, the Overseers have refused to believe that any of us could be resistant. But as the generations have passed, and the Overseers have been mating the best workers with the best workers, they have strengthened this capability within certain families.”

  “Oblakah was right,” George said. It made perfect sense. In a gas-dulled work force the best workers would naturally be those who were most able to withstand the effects of the gas. And like George and Susan, those who were most resistant were more able to couple and more likely to bring forth podlings who in turn would share both their parents’ resistance. George wanted to laugh. It was such perfect justice. “The Overseers have been breeding the very workers who will rise up against them!”

  Ruhtra smiled but held two fingers to his lips to signal for silence. “It is not quite as simple as that. They’re beginning to suspect what is happening. They are trying to reformulate the gas. Break apart breeding couples who show resistance.”

  George looked at Susan. He knew why she would not abandon him in the corridor as the Overseers neared. He would never abandon her, either. “Let them try,” he said fiercely.

  Ruhtra put his hands on George’s shoulders. “This is not your fight, Stangya.”

  George felt the sting of quick anger. “This is every Tencton’s fight.”

  Ruhtra’s gaze bored into George with the power of the Overseers’ cutting beam. “Listen carefully, Stangya. You don’t even know if there is a fight.”

  “Ruhtra, how can you say that? How can—”

  “Keer’chatlas,” Ruhtra said. And that one word explained everything. Strength through weakness. Victory through division. A network of spies and cells impervious to betrayal. A network of hope.

  George paused. “Then there is a revolt.”

  Ruhtra dropped his eyes. “If there is, I do not know it.” He drew his hands back. “I receive my orders. I do what I am told. Why I do it, for whom I do it, I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I cannot betray anyone when I am caught.”

  “No one will catch you,” George said vehemently, with his newborn hope.

  But Ruhtra did not respond to George’s conviction. “I am frightened, Stangya. I started out reporting on the Overseers’ movements. Like you, I could move through heavy concentrations of gas. Then an Elder instructed me in how to defeat the locks on certain equipment bins.” He looked down at his belt and ran his hands over the devices that hung from it. “Now look at me. Possession of any one of these is grounds for instant death.” He looked back at George, and the fear he felt was clearly evident in his haunted eyes. “There’s no going back for me, Stangya. It’s like sliding down the recycler chute or facing the sixth nozzle in the Game. My capture is inevitable.”

  “But why?” George protested. “With keer’chatlas you are protected. Someone must be planning everything, organizing everything. You can’t expect defeat, or that is what you will earn.”

  Ruhtra shook his head at George’s naiveté. “Keer’chatlas is breaking down. There are too many activities going on at once. Too many raids. Too many killings. The pace has increased ever since the last translation.”

  George’s mind reeled. Raids? Killings? What was going on in the ship? Why did no one know? “The last translation? That was when Moodri came and—”

  Ruhtra pressed his hand against George’s mouth. “Please!” he said. “Tell me nothing.” His hand trembled against George’s lips. “I did not choose this. I am not some chekkah born and bred for battle. I dream of Tencton’s purple fields of grass, of farming beneath three moons, of feeling my podlings kick within me, full of life.” Tears fell from Ruhtra’s eyes as he bared the secrets of his serdos to his brother. “And I shall have none of that, Stangya. None of that.”

  George took his brother’s hand in his. “None of us will ever have the dreams we cherish unless some of us fight for them.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Ruhtra pulled his hand from George’s grip. “You will have to take Oblakah and leave,” he said. “The Overseers know that the incident at the water hub has been witnessed. They will be searching for likely suspects.”

  “What was the incident at the water hub?” George asked. “And why was my son there?”

  Ruhtra blinked in surprise. “Finiksa? You saw Finiksa in the hub?”

  “In a Watcher scarf.”

  A bleak look came into Ruhtra’s eyes. “They take everything from us, don’t they?”

  “Only if we don’t fight them,” George said. “Do you know why there were Watchers present? Do you know what the Overseers wanted?”

  “No, Stangya. And you don’t want to know either. My assignment was only to ensure the safety of workers from another cell. By the time you and Oblakah made yourselves known those workers had completed their assignment, and I was told to help you escape.”

  “By whom?”

  Ruhtra tapped the small device that extended down from his communications headband to cover an ear valley. “By whoever talks to me through this. I don’t know. I can’t know. And I don’t want to know.” He turned away from George and went to Susan, gently compelling her to stand up. She was completely under the spell of the gas and complied at once.

  Ruhtra pointed to a dark tunnel crowded with pipes. “Take this tunnel straight through past three intersections. You’ll find a wall hatch that opens into a garbage sorting chamber. You’ll only be a few sectors from your dormitory. Go there immediately before the search reaches it.”

  “How do you know where our dormitory is?” George asked as he guided Susan to the tunnel entrance. There were so many other questions he longed to ask his brother, but Ruhtra was signaling them to hurry to obey him.

  “I don’t know,” Ruhtra said. He tapped his earpiece again. “He knows.”

  George crouched by the tunnel. “I want to help, Ruhtra. Tell h
im I want to join the revolt.”

  Ruhtra tried pushing George on his way. “They don’t want you, Stangya.”

  George felt the acid wash of long-suppressed frustration and resentment move through him. “Why?”

  The answer strained at Ruhtra’s lips.

  “I know you know,” George said. “Tell me!”

  Ruhtra shoved George into the tunnel. “In case of defeat, the Elders will not risk losing entire families,” he said quickly, regretfully. “One from each line must be spared.”

  George stared at his brother. If what Ruhtra said was true, then everyone else from the union of Family: Heroes of Soren’tzahh and Family: Third Moon’s Ocean was involved in the revolt—except for George.

  He looked at the wall, trying to find a place to rest his hand for balance. He saw one of the signs that was mounted beside a tunnel entrance light. It was faded and smudged and not written in the sine script of Tencton’s major language groups. It was alien.

  “Everyone else in our line is involved?” George asked. Fighting their own kind in an alien construct, he thought. Was this what tens of thousands of years of Tenctonese history had come to?

  “Go now,” Ruhtra said. He stepped back from the tunnel entrance, away from the light. “Dream of Tencton for me.”

  George heard Ruhtra’s soft footsteps rush away.

  Everyone else in my line, he thought with a sudden chill. Ruhtra, and Moodri, and—he gasped in horror as he realized the full meaning of what his brother had said—Finiksa.

  The very revolt he dreamed about seethed around George, and he knew now that he had been deliberately kept from learning anything about it.

  But now that he did know, nothing could stop him from joining. No matter what Moodri said, no matter what Ruhtra said, George made up his mind that nothing could keep him from fighting for his people, his family, and his son.

  He ran through the tunnel with Susan, and his hearts hammered with new purpose.

  For George Francisco, the revolt had finally begun.

  C H A P T E R 1 2

  SIKES ALWAYS FELT NERVOUS when he was on academic grounds. From his long stretches of permanent detention back at Belmont High to his abortive semesters at college when he was struggling with a new marriage, a new baby, and trying to find some direction in his life, school had never been a pleasant experience for him. And even now, driving slowly along the winding roads of UCLA on official police business, he felt his stomach tightening up just as if he had been called to the principal’s office for smoking in the bathroom, or to the dean’s office to explain his grades.