Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (16 page)

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 lance 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.

K
IRBY 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.

Sikes sighed and looked back at Grazer. The earnest detective was sitting at the opposite end of the table, squinting at the hieroglyphics on Petty’s computer screen, typing madly. Then Sikes heard an amplified rendition of phone tones, then ringing, then a bizarre electronic rushing sound. Grazer sat back. “Good,” he said.

“That’s good?” Sikes asked as the sound cut out. Grazer had been going at it for half an hour so far, connecting the computer to Sikes’s phone line and then loading his own software onto the computer’s blank hard disk.

“Of course it’s good. That means we’ve connected with the service.”

“Why don’t you just phone her?” Kirby asked again.

“Because she’s in Australia,” Sikes explained for the fifth time.

“Big woo,” Kirby said. “That’s only three bucks a minute after six o’clock. Can’t the department afford that?”

Sikes eyed her suspiciously. “How do you know how much it costs to phone Australia?”

“Dad-dee,” Kirby groaned.

“Okay, here’s the directory,” Grazer announced. “What’s his full name?”

Sikes looked down at one of the scraps of paper he had been forced to use instead of his notepad. “Petty. Randolph Ramey.”

Grazer typed. “Petty, R.R., in Los Angeles,” he said as the words on the screen changed. “Got it. Write this down: 712436,17.”

Sikes wrote it down. “What is it?”

Grazer sighed this time. “It’s his address, Sikes. For sending messages in the mail system.”

Kirby stretched out over the table and slumped her head onto one hand. “Mail? This is the nineties, guys.”

Sikes sighed. Somehow Kirby had been more fun when her questions had had more to do with how Santa managed to get into an apartment that didn’t have a fireplace than with how police procedure operated. “Here’s how it works,” Sikes began. “The guy who used to own this computer was murdered last night.”

“Gross,” Kirby said.

“Now, it might be just a random robbery and shooting,” Sikes continued, “but there’s a chance that the guy’s computer disks were stolen and someone erased his hard drive at the same time.”

Kirby straightened up. “Hey, I know how to recover stuff from a hard drive. You see, it’s not really erased until—”

“I
know,”
Sikes said. But he wondered how Kirby did. She seemed to possess a great deal of information that was inappropriate for a thirteen-year-old. “But whoever blanked this guy’s disk
did
erase everything by, uh . . .”

“Random overwrite. Three times,” Grazer said without looking up from the keyboard.

Kirby nodded sagely. “That’ll do it. But E-mail still seems like a slow way to get his daughter when you could call her on the phone.”

“We don’t want to get in contact with his daughter. At least not yet. What we’re . . .” Sikes gave up and reached for the Doritos bag. “Bryon, explain it to her.”

“The daughter called the police and asked them to look in on her father when he didn’t send her an electronic letter at the regular time,” Grazer said. He typed something more on the keyboard, and then the screen blanked. “So, according to department procedure, we have to automatically consider anyone who reports a crime to be a suspect. Until we can specifically rule her out.”

“But how could she murder him? You said she’s in Australia,” Kirby reminded him.

Grazer shook his head. “Listen carefully.
She
said she was in Australia when she called. She may live in Australia, but she could have made that call from anywhere.”

Sikes added, “We’ve already asked Immigration to look for her passport number on recent admissions to the country. Can’t take anything for granted.”

Kirby sat up and moved her chair closer to Grazer’s end of the table, her interest increasing. “Cool. So you think the daughter really could have killed her own father?” She smiled winningly at Sikes.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Sikes said. “We just can’t rule out anything at this time.”

“So the computer mail . . .” Kirby prompted.

“Before we talk to the daughter,” Grazer said, “I thought it would be a good idea to see if we can find out what she and her father exchanged letters about every day. Maybe they were arguing about his estate or something else that might give her a motive.”