Theo muttered something Sikes didn’t bother to try to interpret, then he went back to the kitchen.
Back on the television, where the really important things in life were taking place these days, as far as Sikes was concerned, other than long, wavering telephoto shots, there wasn’t much to see. The military had virtually sealed off a two-hundred-square-mile stretch of the desert before the second night had come. Most of the correspondents on the news shows had concluded that the reason the military had been able to move into action so quickly to secure the area was that they had drawn up contingency plans for just such a scenario. Barracks for the National Guard were already being built on the third day. More damningly, Wolf Blitzer reported from the Pentagon that within fifteen minutes of NORAD determining that the most likely touchdown spot was the Mojave Desert, B-52s carrying nuclear weapons had been scrambled, and they had been continually overflying the quarantine zone ever since. That had been one of the last reports Blitzer had filed from the Pentagon. After the fourth day the news reports had dried up completely. The only substantial break had come on the sixth day, when it was obvious some sort of explosion had occurred inside the quarantine zone, and a Pentagon spokesperson had confirmed that an army Sikorsky transport helicopter had been lost due to mechanical failure. Fourteen people had died in the crash, but their names would not be released. They had not been military personnel.
Sikes could hear Theo doing something in the kitchen but didn’t care to know what. He flipped through the channels. One of the locals was showing the demonstrations at the United Nations. They had been going on ever since the world had finally figured out that the United States was not going to let representatives of any other country get within a hundred miles of the Mojave. Some of the protesters carried signs calling for the things in the desert to be nuked. Some carried messages of peace for our space brothers. There were a lot of fistfights.
Sikes changed the channel. Another station was running an interview with two women who claimed that the things in the desert were the result of alien/human breeding experiments, just like the experiments they had been subjected to when they had been abducted by large-headed monsters covered with spots and taken to the very same spaceship that had crashed in the desert. They were quite clear on that. They all recognized the spaceship as the exact one they had been beamed up to. Sikes had seen the interview before. He didn’t turn on the sound and kept flipping.
Elsewhere an evangelist held up drawings based on the home video footage showing that what most people thought were spots on the creature’s heads were actually the horns of Satan. Across the bottom of the screen ran the chapter and verse citations for Bible passages that described how Satan would send his demons to the Earth in fiery disks. The evangelist said that the Apocalypse was near and that, the creatures should be destroyed at once. Sikes kept flipping.
A retired military officer outlined for an interviewer, with helpful diagrams, how a possible attack on the space encampment might proceed once the army had established that the aliens’ intentions were hostile. And their intentions could not be anything but hostile, the retired officer insisted. By destroying their transport vessel, the creatures were clearly announcing that they were on a suicide mission—possibly the precursor to a main invasion fleet that even now could be assembling on the other side of the moon.
Sikes had seen it all. Heard it all. He had watched television for a week and knew all the players. He kept hoping that someone would be able to break through the quarantine zone and manage to snag an interview with one of the things itself. He was tired of hearing people speak. It was all useless garbage anyway. Nothing mattered anymore.
He flipped back to the channel that was running the home video footage in slow motion while a zoologist drew Xs on the screen to show how the creatures’ joints and musculature might work. Theo came in carrying two plates. Sikes sniffed the air.
“I’m surprised you can smell anything,” Theo said. He dropped the plate on Sikes’s lap. Sikes was wearing gray boxers and his favorite, worn-out gray Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. Now he was also wearing a bit of the peanut butter on stale bagels that Theo had dished up.
Sikes picked up one of the bagel halves. One of the creatures had its face frozen on the screen. “Boy,” Sikes said, “don’t you think they’re wishing they came down someplace else?”
Theo pulled up a hassock and sat on it, facing Sikes and not the television. “I figure they came to the right place, all right. Though I tell you, when they started showing those first shots of all those poor saps swarming out of that thing, I was real pissed off.”
Sikes rolled his eyes. “Let me get this straight. We lose a perfect collar, we get suspended, we let a cold-blooded murderer walk free while the captain reams us out in front of the killer, and you get pissed off because a UFO crashes in the desert?”
Theo patted his chest. “Hey, I spent my entire youth waiting for the saucers to land. I was out there in my backyard just praying for them to come down and get me. Yessir. Let’s have a visit by advanced beings. Let’s get the cure for cancer, the secret of living in peace, free energy, no more hunger.” He shrugged. “I mean, that was the whole spiel back then. If they managed to get here in their saucers, then they had to be advanced, right? So anyway, there I am at home, watching the tube like everyone else, waiting for these super-advanced beings to come forth and plant their flag and take care of all of us—and what the hell do I see when we get our first good look at them?” Theo shook his head. “They were white, Sikes. No offense, but goddamn every single one of them was white.” He smiled again. “But then another couple of days go by, and it becomes obvious they don’t know what the hell they’re doing here, and that makes me feel better. I figure the way those guys look, they must be from the bottom rung back where they come from, and they just stole that saucer from somebody else, that’s all.”
Sikes licked peanut butter off his teeth. He hated peanut butter. But he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “Saucer theft, hmmm? I wonder if we could book ’em for it.”
Theo stared at him in silence. After a while Sikes stared back. “What?” he asked.
“Well,” Theo said, “could be you and me are going to be able to find out the answer to that question.”
Sikes didn’t understand.
“We’re off suspension,” Theo said. “Orders straight from Willie Williams himself. All vacations canceled. All disciplinary suspensions not involving firearms also canceled. For the emergency.”
“What emergency?” said Sikes. “Whenever they get around to talking about something other than that thing in the desert, all they say is that the crime rate in Los Angeles is lower than it’s been since the night they started bombing Baghdad. Everyone’s staying home to watch the news.”
“Not us,” Theo said. He nodded at the screen. “We’re going out there.”
“The Mojave?” Sikes was more awake than he had felt in days.
“Every police force in the state has been asked to contribute personnel to the AQF. That’s the Alien Quarantine Facility. The captain said he sure as hell doesn’t want us on the streets, so he ‘volunteered’ us.”
“I’m not going out there,” Sikes said.
“We don’t have a choice, son. Besides, it’ll look good when we come up for our review hearing.”
Sikes slammed his fist on the arm of his easy chair and made the beer cans on the floor rattle. “I am not going to any review hearing, Theo. The fix is in. I know it.”
“So what are you going to do? Quit on me?”
“Damn right.”
Theo stood up, cracked his neck with a roll of his shoulders, then walked over to Sikes and picked him out of the chair by a fistful of Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. “Do I have your attention?” he asked.
“It’s all a crock,” Sikes said. “Put me down.”
“So you can go back to rotting in this pisshole? I don’t think so.”
Sikes pulled Theo’s hands off his shirt and stood looking as if he belong
ed out in the desert with the other frightened, bedraggled creatures. “Don’t you get it, Theo? We had them. Amy, Uncle Frank, Petty’s killer. You and me and Angie and even Grazer—we worked together. We broke the case. We made our arrests. And we had the evidence.”
“So what? Now Angie’s in the hospital under observation for her concussion. Grazer’s got his chest wrapped because of the three ribs I cracked when I had to give him the Heimlich to keep him from choking on that damn sandwich he was eating when the concussion grenades went off. And Uncle Frank and his crew were better connected than we were. It happens. It’s a bitch, I know, but crooks do walk free from time to time. God bless America.”
“Well, it stinks!” Sikes said. His voice echoed in the small living room.
“Of course it stinks. No argument from me on that one. But that’s not supposed to make you give up like a kid who decides he doesn’t like the rules. It’s supposed to put you back out on the street to do a better job.”
Sikes went to slump back down in his chair, but Theo wouldn’t let him. “You can’t give up, man. I won’t let you.”
“I got beaten, Theo.”
“You think I’ve never been beaten, man? You think I’ve never come home and wanted to put my fist through the wall because some smart-ass gangster hired a better lawyer than the wet-behind-the-ears prosecutor I got stuck with? You think I haven’t seen dealers buy a judge or a killer walk because of a procedural error? Face it, Sikes. Every day we’re out on the streets we’re going to get beaten. That’s what it means to be a cop. But what it also means is that we don’t accept it. Every time we get beaten we go back out there and we win one. And maybe we win two. And maybe when we get our bloody pension we’ll be able to say, Well, I won some and Lord knows I lost some, but by God, I’m leaving this world a better place because I tried my best and I beat them more times than they beat me.”
Sikes didn’t say anything. He stared at the screen.
“You’re going to lose again, son. You’re going to lose worse than this one. But you keep at it, you’re going to win, too. And that’s what counts.”
Theo stepped away from Sikes. “You want to sit down and wallow, well, then, you just do that. But if you want to be a cop, you can come with me.”
“Out there?” Sikes asked. He looked at the screen.
“Out there,” Theo said.
Sikes pointed his remote at the television. It was running the only footage of the saucer that had been cleared by the Pentagon. Before it had exploded. Before they had come out of it. Sikes hit the sound.
There was static. Lots of static. It had been taken by two traffic reporters in a helicopter. The first one on the scene. “I’ve talked to the military,” one of them said, his voice barely audible over the crackling of the garbled transmission. “They’ve escorted it down. There appears to be a potential—” More static. The picture moved in. This was when it had begun. “It looks like a door is opening—I don’t think it is, I don’t think it is.”
But that had been the moment, Sikes thought. The first door had opened then. And everything had changed.
“It’s still just hovering,” the announcer’s voice said. Sikes could hear the excitement building in it. Moment to moment. “It’s got—”
More static. More crackling. The helicopter pilot broke in. “This is not a hoax. That thing is real out there. Gray in color . . .”
And then the picture had pushed in even further, and the tiny spots of living creatures leaving the saucer were seen for the first time.
In just one moment. Everything had changed.
“Out there,” Sikes said again. It seemed to make some kind of sense. He had lost the first round to Franklin Stewart. But that didn’t mean he’d have to lose another. And if ex-Commander Stewart didn’t want those creatures here, then Sikes made up his mind that he did want them. “Okay,” Sikes said as he reached out to grab his ex-partner’s hand and shake. “I guess that’s as good a place to fight for truth, justice, and the American way as anywhere else.”
Sikes went into his bedroom to find his uniform.
All it had taken was a moment, but he was a cop again.
It felt damn good.
C H A P T E R 7
THE FIRST NIGHT they all thought they were going to die. And many of them did.
Real panic set in earlier in the first day when the disk exploded and the realization spread that there would be no more foodgrowth and no more water. Most of the Tenctonese had grouped together in those initial few hours, recreating the social organization of their dormitories, and had waited for someone to call them to food shift. But the Overseers had vanished, and there was no one left to give orders.
The resistance members were the first to understand what had happened to the Overseers. The hated black uniforms and tattoos had vanished with the disk, and now the Overseers walked among the rest of the Tenctonese, unseen. Here and there, in various huddled masses, individual Overseers were recognized, and as the course-correction star began to move toward the horizon many of the Overseers died—literally torn apart by the savagery they themselves had brutally cultivated in otherwise peaceful beings.
Other Overseers, sensing that the order of the ship was fast breaking down, continued to wield their most powerful weapons—not prods or cutters, but hunger, hate, and fear—as they incited several dormitory groups to self-destruction to reduce their numbers, by claiming that another dormitory group was made up entirely of Overseers.
By nightfall the fighting had begun in earnest, fueled in part by the competition for the first salvaged containers of foodgrowth that had been pulled from the enormous pile of wreckage that was the disk. The children cried. The stars emerged. An unthinkable battle raged—bare hands against scraps of metal and salvaged prods, slave against Overseer, slave against slave. And then, suddenly, all around, the alien horizon walls of flame had roared into life, ignited at a hundred places, forming an outer ring beyond which they could not go.
“We have been welcomed,” Moodri said as he stood upon the rock where the Elders gathered, far removed from the rubble of the disk and the greatest concentration of dormitory groups. He pulled his borrowed robe around his shoulders, wondering if the indigenous species of this planet intended the walls of flame to move inward.
“Welcomed to am dugas, it appears,” another Elder said beside him. She was Nanholt, older than Moodri, one of the three speakers of the council and an architect of the resistance. “Do you think they mean to burn us all?”
“Who can say?” Moodri replied. Thus far all the Tenctonese had seen of the indigenous species had been hundreds of flying machines—some hovering in place, others speeding by a few hundred feet from the ground, still others visible only by the trails they left high against the unnaturally blue sky. Even now, during the night, the flying machines were still at work, visible by the lights that flashed from them.
From time to time Moodri had also seen some of the hoverers descend from the night sky and shine a white beam of energy on groupings of his people. The first time it had happened his hearts had traded beats in horror as he thought an energy weapon was being used, but it turned out to be nothing more than a light, as if whatever flew the hoverer couldn’t see by the light of the stars.
Since that kind of limited vision seemed unlikely for an advanced species, Nanholt had suggested that perhaps the light beam was a weapon, but one that worked on the indigenous species and not on Tenctonese. A lengthy debate had followed, not helped at all by the rumors that came back to the Elders relating that the indigenous species was, variously, two-headed, no-headed, twelve feet tall, insectoid, capable of changing into smoke, and, most disturbingly, possessed black wrist tattoos in an alien language.
Moodri didn’t see much point in taking part in the ill-informed debate, however, especially without Vondmac’s clear and level-spotted input. They would be meeting the indigenous species soon enough, and the debate would be moot. In the meantime there was still the matter of the be
acons. Though the resistance was certain that few, if any, such devices had been taken from the disk, by morning the disk’s wreckage would be swarming with scavengers. The resistance must be first to find the beacons and destroy them. Otherwise all that had happened would be for nothing.
The first beacon was brought to the Elders just before dawn. Moodri had been complaining to Nanholt that the shortness of the day and night cycle on this world made it impossible to truly appreciate one or the other in full. Nanholt, who had kept watching the walls of fire—which, thank the goddess, had not appeared to advance any closer through the night—had said that the Tenctonese would adapt quickly, as always. It was then that a young female was allowed to pass through the protective ring of resistance members who had positioned themselves around the Elders’ rock. She carried a crumpled gray tunic, and Moodri could see from the way she held it that there was something wrapped within.
The female unrolled the tunic for the Elders, and inside was a black steel cube, small enough to fit in a single hand. Moodri lifted the hateful thing and examined it. On the side, beneath a small aperture, a few lines of operating instructions were printed in sine script. But the aperture was dark, not pulsing with light. The beacon had not yet been activated.
Moodri passed it to Nanholt. She turned it over once in her hands, then placed it on the rock beside her. She nodded to the male and female who had been waiting. One pushed a small stone into the beacon’s aperture, wedging it forcefully into place. Then the other smashed a larger rock down upon the beacon, driving the small stone into the device’s inner workings.
It took ten blows, but the casing finally split. The rest was simple. In moments the beacon was nothing more than a harmless handful of shards and twisted metal. Nanholt brushed the remains into the sands of the desert. “That’s one,” she said.
Moodri looked out toward the rubble of the disk, more than a mile away. Already he could see shapes heading toward it in the starlight. And he knew that somewhere in that tangle of destruction three other beacons lay hidden.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 38