Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Susan blinked rapidly. The Overseer’s hand was tight against her throat. She looked at George, and he could see in her tear-filled eyes that she did not know if the answer T’ksam demanded would lead to George’s betrayal.

  “It’s all right, Oblakah,” George said softly. They had already discussed what they would do if the Overseers came for them. They had made each other promise to feel no shame in giving in to whatever cruel demand was made, provided that at least one of them could survive to protect little Dareveen, safe for now in the care of her day crèche.

  “Who?” T’ksam said, shaking Susan like a coska trapped in the jaws of a predator.

  “Stangya,” Susan whispered. “He’s my mate, Stangya.”

  The Overseer threw Susan forward so she fell over George, and her face slammed into the metal wall behind him. George swept his arms around her and swore to her that nothing would make him release her again.

  “Staaangyaaa,” T’ksam said, insultingly drawing out each syllable. “Family: Cowards of Soren’tzahh. Family: Third Moon’s Cesspool.” He twisted the focus knob on his prod to click it to a dangerously higher setting. Behind him the female Overseer drew her own prod from her tunic. “You didn’t spend a full shift in the light bay last cycle, Stangya,” the Overseer said. “Where did you go?”

  George prayed to Andarko that his anger would mask the sudden fear in his hearts. Somehow the Overseers must have already guessed that it had been he and Susan who were in the water hub calling out for Buck. But how? Could it have been Buck who betrayed them? The young Watcher turning in his own parents? Andarko knew that had happened before on the ship. The Overseers stole children as easily as they stole lives and hope.

  “What is your problem, cargo?”

  “The gas,” George blurted out desperately. “The holy gas of obedience,” he said. “It was so strong. I can’t . . . I can’t remember.”

  T’ksam’s reaction was instant. In a vile act of sexual aggression the Overseer jammed his prod against the small of Susan’s back and fired it. Susan screamed and twisted in pain, and George swung out vainly to grab the prod. But T’ksam avoided him easily.

  “Try again,” the Overseer said menacingly. “The blessing of the holy gas took a long time to filter into the light bay, and we have a hundred eager witnesses who saw the two of you leave before the shift was over.”

  “We came here,” George said plaintively. “At least, we wanted to come here. To look . . . to look for a privacy chamber.”

  T’ksam’s eyes took on a fixed and icy stare. “Wanted to do a little spot licking, did you?” He used the tip of his prod to force up the back of Susan’s tunic to expose her smallest and most delicate spots.

  Tears fell from George’s eyes. “Please, don’t . . .”

  “Just who do you think you are, cargo? Please this. Don’t that. I see no tattoo on your wrist.”

  George tried to pull down Susan’s tunic, but T’ksam knocked his hand away with the prod, then reached out with his hand and wrenched at the tunic’s cloth so that it ripped apart and exposed the length of Susan’s back. He held his prod tip inches from Susan’s spine, just above the waistband of her trousers.

  “Not so fast, Stangyaaa. Maybe I want to do a little spot licking of my own.” He pushed Susan’s body closer to George.

  “I answered your questions!” George pleaded.

  T’ksam turned to his female partner. “I don’t think this cargo’s been breathing his holy gas,” he said. The female glanced at George, then slowly drew another object from her tunic. It was a short metal cylinder that ended in three long needles. George had seen devices like it in the infirmaries.

  “Stand up,” T’ksam commanded George.

  Carefully George began to slip out from behind Susan. With his movement Susan winced in pain, her body still convulsing from the shock to her back.

  “I said stand stand stand!” The Overseer grabbed at George’s arm and pulled him forcefully from the sleeping platform, throwing Susan to the deck, where she curled into a defensive position, weakly holding the ruins of her tunic to her chest.

  “Why do you do this?” George asked. “We’ve done nothing.”

  T’ksam twisted George’s arm to push back his gray tunic sleeve. Then, before George could know what was to happen, the female stabbed his forearm with the cylinder’s three needles.

  “Andarko!” George gasped as he tried to pull back. But the Overseer held him firmly as the needles drove home.

  Then, just as savagely, the female ripped the needles out from George’s flesh, leaving three bloody gashes. She began to adjust the control dials on the cylinder’s side. T’ksam released George’s arm and reached for his prod.

  George clutched his forearm to his chest, gasping for breath with each throb of fiery pain.

  T’ksam waved his prod back and forth in front of George’s eyes, slowly. “So, Stangya, how much eemikken did you take last cycle?” he asked.

  “I’ve never had eemikken,” George said through clenched teeth. “It is forbidden to cargo.”

  “Yet in this past cycle, when the blessing of the holy gas was at its peak, you were seen in the water hub in the ’ponics section.” The Overseer held the prod directly over George’s forehead. “Explain that, cargo!”

  “We were not in a water hub last cycle,” George said jerkily. “I told you: We came here looking for a privacy chamber. But by the time we got here, all we could do was sleep.” George knew that all he could do now was to rely on the portion of his story that was true to convey his conviction to the Overseer. Susan and he had left the light bay in search of a privacy chamber. By the time they had reached the dormitory the gas had robbed them of all ability to do anything other than sleep. The fact that they had been in the water hub earlier, pursued by Overseers, then rescued by Ruhtra, was not something that George dared think about right now. And because these two were still interrogating them, George knew that the other Overseers were not yet certain who had been in the water hub after all. Perhaps there was still a chance for survival.

  The needle device made a musical tone. The female Overseer stared down at it, frowning. “Nothing,” she said. “Not a trace of eemikken. Only normal gas by-products.”

  T’ksam took the device from her hand and used his thumb to readjust its controls. Again the musical tone came forth. He looked coldly at George, then handed the device back to the female. “Do his mate,” he said.

  George began to turn toward Susan in an instinctive attempt to protect her. But T’ksam brutally rammed his prod into George’s gut and fired, sending him moaning to the deck. He lay there within the thick mist, shaking with futile rage as he heard Susan scream when the needles gouged her flesh.

  With a curse George drew his arms beneath his chest, and he tried to push himself up, to rise again in Susan’s defense. But the boot of the Overseer crashed down on his neck, pinning him helplessly on the cold metal floor. The cold, rough-ribbed texture of the deck plates dug into his face.

  Trapped, George tried to pray, but all he could think of, all he could imagine were the names his people had given the ship—that which had no name, that which had thousands.

  Susan shrieked as the needles were ripped from her skin and George was bound in lesh, feeling his flesh bubble in waves of salt water.

  Susan sobbed as T’ksam adjusted the device’s controls, and George tried to move one final time, beyond conscious thought in his rage and his grief. But T’ksam’s heel bit deeper into his neck, grinding bones and stretching ligaments beyond their imagined limits. George’s hands splayed out against the unyielding metal deck. He began the long fall into the endless black pit of am dugas, swept away by the curse of the wask’l reckwi—to be dead yet forever conscious of his fate, beyond even the rescue of Celine and Andarko.

  Then, in the far distance, from without his inner darkness, George heard a musical chime, the same as before, and after a moment the pressure of T’ksam’s boot was miraculously gone. Next George
heard the Overseers footsteps clank away.

  His tear-filled eyes opened slowly. Recklessly he lifted his head, half expecting to feel the prod hit him again for having fallen for the trick. But there was nothing—no final punishment, no Overseers, no sound other than the faint crying of his mate and the constant far-off thrumming of the ship’s power plants.

  George sat up. The back of his head was sticky with blood. His forearm pulsated with angry pain. His stomach cramped with the aftershocks of the prod’s assault, making it difficult to draw a full breath. But nothing stopped him from dragging himself across the corridor floor to be beside his wife.

  Susan’s arm was awash in blood. Her head slumped onto her chest. She could no longer even hold the shreds of her tunic to her, and her pale flesh was exposed.

  It was all George could do to place his hand over Susan’s. Beyond that he could only sit beside her. Hearing her breathe. Hearing his own ragged breaths.

  The soft white river of gas eddied around them.

  Neither moved.

  And after a few minutes, when the Overseers did not return, other Tenctonese finally dropped to the floor from their sleeping platforms and began to shuffle along the dormitory corridor.

  They were sonah, without sense of self or direction, and none stopped for George and Susan. The bloodied, semiconscious couple leaning half against each other, half against the wall, quaking with fear and pain and exhaustion, were nothing new to the dormitory or the ship.

  The Overseers had come. The Overseers had left. If there was a purpose to the Overseers’ actions, no one knew or wanted to know. For to look too deeply into the meaning of anything that happened on board the ship was to risk discovering that there was no reason for any of it.

  In a daze George watched the legs and feet of the others from his dormitory as they flowed past him and Susan in both directions. He was barely conscious of the others’ presence and never once thought that any one of them should stop and offer help.

  He was alive. Susan was alive. The ship moved on. What more was there? What more could he expect?

  But a new realization was also entering George’s mind, the idea that somehow a final step had been taken, a final barrier had been breached.

  This will end, George thought suddenly, startled by the new lucidity of his mind. One way or another, through revolt or oblivion, this will end.

  For the first time in thousands of cycles George felt the sweet touch of peace as he realized that his future was no longer uncertain.

  He had lived with fear too long. He had seen his mate brutalized too often. He had lost at least one child to evil and would not risk having the same fate snare a second.

  His breath caught in his throat. In an organized revolt if he could, on his own if he must, George realized that he would no longer submit to the Overseers.

  He was going to fight back, and he knew he could win because he had nothing left to lose.

  One way or another, the end of this life was near.

  It was an overwhelming thought, and despite his pain George lifted his head and laughed tremulously.

  After more than sixty years on board the ship, he finally had something to look forward to.

  C H A P T E R 4

  THIS TIME BUCK AWOKE suddenly, with no dreamlike transition. He was immediately aware of a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  “Moodri?” he asked, his voice still thick with sleep.

  Urgently a female’s voice whispered, “There is no Moodri here. Don’t speak of him again.” The gentle hand squeezed his shoulder sharply for added emphasis.

  Buck tried lifting his head to see to whom he spoke. There was little pain left in him. Vaguely he remembered Moodri pushing at odd areas along his neck and across his shoulders. The residual pain from the Overseer’s shock prod had vanished with that touch, back when . . . when . . . Buck couldn’t remember when Moodri had come to him. Nor did he know where he was or what had happened after D’wayn had shocked him.

  “Who are you?” he asked of the tall female who leaned over him. Her spots were small and myriad, an elegant pattern considered by some to be a sign of great beauty. For a moment Buck forgot that he had even spoken and simply stared dumbly up at her.

  The female, plainly garbed in the ship’s standard gray uniform, didn’t appear to notice her effect on Buck. Her manner was abrupt, businesslike, unsmiling. In less than a month she would be given a new name to go with her new home, but for now Cathy Frankel gave Buck the name she had been born with. “I am Gelana. A cargo specialist.”

  That explained it. Cargo specialists were charged with maintaining the proper functioning of the cargo. Buck realized he must be in one of the ship’s infirmaries.

  “Where’s Moodri? When—”

  Instantly Cathy placed her hand over Buck’s mouth and glared at him. She turned to speak to someone out of Buck’s line of sight. “He’s still confused,” she said. “Still incoherent.”

  The black form of an Overseer pushed her aside. It was Coolock.

  “He looks fine to me,” Coolock said. He peered intently at Buck, his small eyes dark and unreadable in the shadows from the bright overhead lights. “Are you fine, Watcher Finiksa?”

  Buck had been trained well in the Watcher Youth Brigade. At once he moved to jump off the infirmary sleeping platform and stand in readiness. But as he struggled to sit up, he felt the infirmary wheel around him, and he began to fall forward off the platform.

  Cathy caught him. She held him steady on the platform. “What setting did you use?” she asked. Her voice sounded angry.

  “The appropriate setting,” Coolock said. “We always use the appropriate setting. Now let go of him.”

  Cathy released her grip on Buck. Confused, Buck saw another message in her eyes but didn’t know what it meant.

  “You may remain sitting for now, Watcher.”

  Buck swallowed to relieve the dryness of his throat. “Thank you, Overseer.”

  “Though when I am finished my questions I might require you to walk over there.” He pointed with his prod to the other side of the cluttered, blindingly lit infirmary.

  Buck looked in the direction the Overseer indicated, past a central work area filled with physical treatment harnesses and haphazardly stacked healing devices. His body stiffened in fright. Coolock was pointing to a medical recycler—a large, transparent tub of bubbling salt water in which medical waste and corpses were disposed. He turned back to the Overseer in horror.

  “Who called to you in the water hub?” The corner of Coolock’s mouth twitched as he waited for an answer.

  Buck turned to Cathy, but the cargo specialist looked away.

  “You have been asked a question, Watcher. Report.”

  “I . . . I don’t know who it was,” Buck stammered.

  “They called you by name!”

  Buck fought his fear to keep his head up. “I don’t know.”

  “He’s just a child,” Cathy said. “The prods disrupt memories. There’s a chance he’ll never remember what happened just prior to the shock.”

  Coolock turned his head sideways, not enough to see Cathy, just enough to indicate that he barely recognized her presence. He closed his eyes. “Have I asked for your opinion?”

  “No,” Cathy said.

  Coolock looked at Buck again. “Let’s try an earlier memory. Why did you try to stop Vornho from cutting the water worker?”

  “D-did I?” Buck asked. He tried to remember but could draw on nothing.

  Coolock stepped forward until he loomed over the boy. His voice was as icy as a portal exposed to space. “You know there is no room for defective cargo on this ship, don’t you? Are you defective, Watcher?”

  Buck’s neck ached as he looked straight up at his tormentor. He almost seemed to see a flash of light from somewhere, like a reflection thrown from a spinning crystal. There was something familiar about it. Something that tugged at his memory. “The water worker,” he began uncertainly.

  “This shi
ft is almost over,” Coolock said. “Neither of us has much time.”

  Buck tried to make sense of the sudden visual images that came to him. Something about—“The membrane suit!” he said excitedly.

  “What about it?”

  “It was tight,” Buck said.

  “They are designed that way.”

  “But on his side, about here”—Buck reached around and grabbed his own back just under his ribs—“there was something under the suit.”

  For an instant Coolock’s cruel gaze lessened. “What was under his suit?”

  Buck closed his eyes and saw everything with perfect clarity, almost as if a picture had been drawn on his mind. “I wasn’t sure, Overseer. But it was long and blocky, as if three cylinders had been melted together.” Then it all came back to him. His words fell over one another in his eagerness. “And I couldn’t be sure exactly what it was, but the others didn’t have it, and I didn’t think Vornho could see it, and then I remembered the clearing charges that we saw in the power plant stations, the ones they use to clean the concentrates out of the fuel-cell pipes.”

  Coolock studied Buck. “You jaw the clearing charges strapped to his back under his suit?”

  “I wasn’t certain, Overseer. But I was worried that if they were clearing charges and if the cutting beam hit them, then they might explode, and . . . so I tried to stop Vornho so the worker could be searched first.”

  Coolock stared at Buck without blinking. He slowly ran his tongue over his teeth. “Did you see the worker explode when the beam hit him?”

  Buck’s eyes fluttered as he sought another image from the past but found nothing. “I’m sorry, Overseer. I . . . I don’t remember an explosion. I remember Watch Leader D’wayn calling my name—no! That was one of the scavengers on the next level! It was one of the scavengers who called me. And then . . . then . . .” He remembered the final detail. “The water worker ran past me and jumped over the railing, and . . .” He faltered. His words slowed. “And Watch Leader D’wayn shocked me before I had a chance to explain what I had seen.”