Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “Planets are too small to see,” Vornho said. “They’re at least a hundred times smaller than a star.” He stared all around. “Will you take a look at how big this place is?”

  Buck followed along behind a stream of other Watcher Youth between two blue lines painted on the deck of the bridge. Unlike the decks in the rest of the ship, the floor covering here wasn’t made of metal but of something softer, with almost the same consistency as the moving floor in the tunnel that had brought them here.

  The scale of the bridge was different, too. Buck could see a dozen Overseers operating equipment consoles similar to those he had seen in the power-plant chambers. But the consoles were at least twice the size they had been in the other parts of the ship. Here the Overseers had to climb up on small metal platforms that had been built before each one in order to reach the control surfaces.

  Buck’s hearts sank. Would he have to climb up such a platform to use the key?

  Near Buck were the sounds of children’s excited babble, but from all around came mechanical sounds, odd, almost musical beeps, and strange voices that made Buck think of talking machines. From time to time colored images moved across the transparent dome as if they had been projected there by a hand-held light—lines and circles and sine-script numbers that meant nothing to Buck.

  “This is the most eech ka thing I’ve ever seen,” Vornho whispered. “Do you think we could ever work up here or anything?”

  “Maybe,” Buck said. He was distracted by trying to look ahead of the crowd of other children, following the twin blue lines to see where they passed by the pink consoles of the stardrive. He couldn’t see them anywhere. “Vornho, do you see any pink consoles?”

  Vornho glanced around. “Sure, right behind us.”

  Buck shivered with fear. He had already gone past them. The stardrive consoles had been first on his right when he had entered the bridge, and he had been too caught up in staring through the ceiling dome to notice them.

  A loud voice boomed through the enormous volume of the bridge. “All crew prepare for translation.”

  Buck tried to push past the Watcher Youth gathered behind him.

  “Where’re you going?” Vornho called.

  “We’re not close enough to translate,” Buck said. Moodri had explained it to him. At translation they would be so close that the course-correction star would fill the portals.

  “It’s the hard translation,” Vornho said as he followed after Buck, moving through the crowd of excited children. “Not the main one. It’s just going to be a bump to knock out the cargo and get things back to normal.”

  “No,” Buck said to himself. Moodri had said others would be waiting to take control of the cargo disk once Buck had inserted the key. But though the bridge was shielded from the effects of translation, if the others waiting elsewhere in the ship were knocked out or killed, then no one would be able to control anything.

  Buck stood on the edge of a blue line. The pink stardrive console was ten feet from him. Overseers stood on two platforms that had been built in front of it. They wore dark goggles over their eyes and stared up at the course-correction star as if reading whatever words and symbols were being projected on the dome. Between the two platforms Buck saw the one control surface that was not covered by a clear protective shield. There was a slot in it that his key would fit into. He could reach it without climbing on anything.

  “Hey, Finiksa, what’s wrong?” Vornho said. There was real worry in his voice.

  “Hard translation in thirty seconds,” the mechanical voice said.

  Buck pulled the circuitry key from his scarf.

  “You want to lose that?” Vornho asked in shock. “I thought you were supposed to keep it a secret.”

  Buck didn’t even look at his friend. “Shut up, Vornho. Just shut up!”

  Buck sprinted across the deck toward the console.

  “Finiksaaaa!”

  Buck ignored Vornho’s cry. He ignored the sound of Vornho’s feet running after him. He reached the console.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  The two Overseers on the platforms to either side looked down at him, ten feet over his head. One of them told him to get away before he hurt himself.

  Vornho was at his side. “What are you doing?” He looked at the slot in the control surface, and Buck could see he immediately knew what would fit in it.

  “Finiksa, what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  Buck began to speak. He had to tell someone. But then another voice called his name. He turned back to the path between the blue lines. D’wayn had just stepped onto the bridge from the moving floor. She waved to the boys, smiling.

  “Finiksa, Vornho, come away from there. You’ll miss the show.”

  “Fifteen seconds.”

  “Finiksa,” Vornho said. “What is that thing? What will it do?”

  D’wayn began to walk toward them. “Come on and join the family,” she said invitingly. “We can take better care of you over here.” She still smiled.

  “Finiksa, don’t do anything stupid.” Vornho slapped his hand over the key slot. “I won’t tell. We’re friends. We can stick together, and no one will know.”

  “Ten seconds.”

  Buck didn’t know what to do. D’wayn was smiling at him. She had called him spotty head. Vornho was his best friend. And Moodri . . . where was Moodri?

  Every time you look up at the stars, his great-uncle’s voice said.

  Buck looked up at the stars.

  One was different.

  It had a shape—a half circle, blue and white and almost too small to be seen. But it was there, and Buck saw it, almost as if someone had called out to him from it. Almost as if someone wanted him there.

  “Five seconds.”

  Buck turned to face Vornho. He shot his hand out, one finger stiff and ready, and he hit Vornho’s sensitive spot on his first try. Vornho doubled over in shock. Buck had never been able to do that before. Vornho’s hand came off the key slot. In the distance Buck heard D’wayn gasp aloud.

  For an endless moment Buck held the key poised above the control surface, waiting. The fate of two worlds rested in the hand of a ten-year-old child.

  But the child was not alone.

  Fear no more, Finiksa.

  Buck heard the message.

  He plunged the key home.

  It began.

  P A R T T H R E E

  DESCENT

  C H A P T E R 1

  BEFORE THE SUN SET, CNN had turned over its entire broadcast to live coverage of what it was now dramatically calling “The Voronezh Encounter.” Hastily assembled news crews reported live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the Astronomy Department at London University, the Pentagon, the Moscow Academy of Sciences, and an independent television studio in Orange County where two bearded science fiction authors who had written a novel about a giant comet hitting the earth endlessly explained the diiferences between comets and asteroids. Other than everyone agreeing that the Voronezh Object was damn unusual, no one else around the world had anything else to say because no one knew anything.

  Except for those people in a tract house in an exclusive new subdivision in Topanga Canyon, halfway between Santa Monica and Malibu.

  Sikes had spent most of the past few hours surreptitiously trying to stretch the ropes around his wrists and asking himself just how badly he wanted to be a cop.

  The ropes hadn’t seemed to stretch a fraction of an inch, but he knew absolutely that being a cop was not a choice, it was a necessity. There was nothing else he wanted to be or that he could be. And that was the root of the dilemma he faced, one that even distracted him from the ongoing CNN reports.

  The bottom line was that Sikes had finally realized that Amy Stewart and her uncle and their supporters were going to win this one. The asteroid or the spaceship or whatever it was was beside the point. The reality Sikes faced was that when morning came and that thing was on its way to being another question in a Trivial Pursui
t game for the nineties, Sikes would face the choice that Commander Stewart had laid out for him: sign a security oath or go to jail.

  And when that moment came, Sikes didn’t know what he would do.

  The silent man with the .45 was Randolph Petty’s killer. Sikes knew that without a doubt. He had seen the smirk on the man’s thin lips when he had said as much to Stewart and his niece. He had seen the acceptance of his deduction in their eyes as well. But there was nothing Sikes could do about it.

  He had thought about lying. He had thought about signing whatever the hell it was they wanted him to sign, waiting a week, and then going to the media. But he knew that the instant he brought up the threat of the National Security Oath the media would have to check their sources to confirm the story, and he’d be in the slammer. We’ve done it before, ex-Commander Franklin Stewart had said, and Sikes had no reason to doubt him.

  For himself, Sikes was willing to risk a confrontation with whatever shadowy level of the government Stewart took his orders from. But for Kirby’s sake, he wanted there to be another way. Even if that way meant signing the oath, saying nothing, and letting Petty’s killer go free.

  At least I could still be a father to my daughter, Sikes thought. At least I could keep being a cop and lock up other killers.

  But what kind of a cop lets a killer go free?

  Sikes didn’t like the answer to that one. He wanted to talk it over with someone—Angie, who had finally come to and was even more pissed off than Sikes had been, or Theo, probably wearing his chains and hanging out at another strip show. Sikes would even settle for attempting a conversation with Bryon Grazer. But Stewart wasn’t allowing anyone to talk anymore, except to request an escorted trip to the bathroom.

  Four hours into “The Voronezh Encounter,” CNN switched back to a bleary-eyed astronomer at the University of London for the third time in an hour. Amy went into the kitchen. Sikes, Angie, and Grazer sat like the proverbial three monkeys on the navy-blue couch, while Kirby, to Sikes’s relief, had curled up in the recliner and fallen asleep from exhaustion.

  On television the sleepy Dr. Robin Kingsburgh repeated what she had said twice before about the escape velocity of the sun and the fact that, given the speed at which the Voronezh Object was traveling, it could not be from our solar system. In any event, she added, its speed meant it would not be staying here. Her expression conveyed the impression that she would not be staying either if her interviewer did not come up with a new question to ask.

  Sikes sensed the excitement over the object was already dying down. “Hey, Uncle Frank, see if there’s a basketball game on,” Sikes said, just to bother Stewart. “No one’s said anything new for the past hour.”

  “Good,” Stewart said. “That means no observatory has managed any worthwhile observations yet.”

  Amy came out of the kitchen with a large platter stacked with bread, some kind of sliced meat, and a jar of mustard.

  “Gee,” Angie muttered, “just like a regular evening at home.”

  “You don’t have to eat anything.” Amy put the platter down on the broadloom in front of the sofa. She used a plastic knife to spread mustard onto two pieces of bread and added a stack of mystery-meat slices to make a sandwich. She held it up in offering. “Anyone?” she asked.

  “Well, if no one else wants it,” Grazer said.

  Amy stuck the sandwich in his cuffed hands and ignored his request for a napkin.

  “What do you do after this?” Sikes made himself ask her.

  “Go back to the university,” she said. “Finish my Ph.D.”

  “Kill a few more astronomers,” Angie suggested.

  Amy stood up. “I’m not going through all that again. People like you should be thankful there’re people like me taking care of the important things in life.” She went back to sit in a chair by her uncle. The blond killer with the .45 remained at the back of the room so that Sikes couldn’t see him without turning his head.

  CNN went back to Orange County and the science fiction writers, who enthusiastically described what an incoming alien spacecraft might look like and how the Voronezh Object did not fit any of the characteristics they would expect.

  Stewart laughed scornfully at the screen.

  The science fiction writers began talking about the alien spacecraft they had described in another of their books about an invasion of Earth.

  “Hey, Uncle Frank, you must’ve read that one,” Sikes said as the cover of the book went up on the screen. “No wonder you’re worried. Giant elephants from Mars would scare anyone.”

  Stewart turned around in his chair. “Detective Sikes, would you prefer to be gagged or simply beaten unconscious?”

  “How about letting me use the phone to call CNN so they can get your perspective on the object?” Sikes said. “Set those sci-fi guys straight.” Stewart got up, just as Sikes had hoped he would, and Sikes glanced at the sandwich platter, fixing the position of the plastic knife in his memory. If he could just provoke Stewart enough to have the man slap him the way he had slapped Grazer, then he could fall off the couch and grab the knife and maybe saw through the ropes before morning.

  Stewart stood by Sikes again, almost within arm’s reach. “You’re all going to be released in the morning,” he said coolly. “Whether your captain sends you home or to the hospital is your choice.”

  Sikes adjusted his position on the couch. He knew just what to say and was glad that Kirby was asleep. “So where are you and your niece going to go after this?” Sikes asked. But before he could finish the insult that would guarantee Stewart’s attack, a car drove up outside.

  Everyone but Grazer looked to the curtained windows. Grazer was concentrating on his sandwich, being very careful not to drip mustard on his rumpled suit. Headlights sprayed across the living room, then stopped.

  Stewart turned quickly to the killer and nodded to the front door. Amy turned off the television with the remote. The killer walked noiselessly across the room, smoothly taking his automatic from his holster. Stewart moved into the kitchen and reappeared a second later, holding another .45. Sikes decided this was not the moment to jump for a plastic knife.

  The doorbell rang. It was loud in the half-empty house.

  Stewart shook his head at the killer by the door. Then he pointed his gun at Kirby and held his finger to his lips. The message was clear.

  Sikes wanted to feel his hands close around Stewart’s throat. But he could do nothing.

  From outside a muffled voice shouted, “Yo! It’s Domino’s. The thirty-minute guarantee don’t count if you keep me waiting out here!”

  Inside no one moved except for Angie and Sikes, who exchanged a look. Sikes saw it in her eyes as well. They were about to find out if there were or were not coincidences in police work.

  Someone pounded on the front door. “Yo! Your pizza’s getting cold!”

  No response. Sikes braced himself. He could feel Angie tense beside him. Grazer’s cheeks bulged with sandwich.

  “Yo, man! I am telling you I am sick of this shit! You don’t pay me for this pizza, I am calling the police! I swear to God I am!”

  The killer moved cautiously to the curtained window. He moved the edge of it back with the barrel of his gun and peered outside. He looked across at Stewart and shrugged his shoulders, mouthing something Sikes couldn’t make out.

  Stewart motioned angrily at the door. The killer went to it, put his hand on the doorknob.

  Sikes held his breath. Angie held hers. Grazer pushed the last of the sandwich into his mouth.

  The killer opened the door, keeping his gun hidden.

  A delivery man in Domino’s red, white, and blue stood on the porch, holding three pizza boxes stacked together. “About time, my man. I was just about to eat—”

  The killer grunted and fell twitching to the ground, trailing taser wires from his chest.

  “Down!” the Domino’s man shouted.

  Stewart dropped to one knee and swung his .45 up. Sikes leapt from the
couch and aimed himself at Kirby. All over the house windows shattered. The concussion grenades went off a heartbeat later.

  Sikes hit the floor at Kirby’s feet but didn’t feel the impact. His ears were ringing so badly that he couldn’t tell if a shot had been fired or not. But he could see Kirby’s legs trembling. That was a good sign, he told himself. Then he threw up. His body felt like jelly. The house smelled of cordite. He had a black dot at the side of his vision that was worse than anything a flash camera could give him. But he was alive.

  He tried to roll away from what he had done to the broadloom. Several pairs of black-trousered legs ran past him, then returned. He felt someone lifting him into the air. Maybe someone was speaking to him, he couldn’t be sure.

  Strong arms turned him around.

  Theo.

  Sikes’s ex-partner spoke silently, not making sense over the explosions that were still going off in Sikes’s eardrums.

  “Kirby!” Sikes yelled. “Kirby!” He felt no sound come from his mouth.

  Theo helped him turn around. A tall man in black clothes and a heavy flak jacket cradled Kirby in his arms. Kirby looked at Sikes and smiled, tears running from her eyes. Sikes lurched for her, checking her clothes for signs of blood.

  He didn’t see anything.

  He held out his hands to her. Theo grabbed the ropes and sliced into them with a combat knife. The ropes fell to the ground. Sikes took Kirby from the other cop. She pushed her head into his shoulder. He carried her out.

  The cold air tasted like freedom.

  He looked up to the night sky to give thanks.

  The stars were waiting for him.

  C H A P T E R 2

  THE SHIP SCREAMED.

  Buck felt the howl of its dying run through his body.

  He had no idea what furies he had unleashed. He only knew what Moodri had told him—the stardrive will be activated out of sequence, before the other systems are ready for it. The ship cannot survive the strain. Automatic mechanisms will ensure that the most important part of the ship survives. The cargo disk will be jettisoned.