Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (21 page)

“I’m, ah, Detective Sikes, LAPD?”

She looked at what Sikes held in his hand. After a moment all his credit cards fell from it and clattered on the floor.

“Uh, wrong pocket,” Sikes said. He found his badge folder and brought that out, then squatted down to gather up everything that had fallen from his wallet.

Amy Stewart leaned back in her chair. Her smile grew broader. Two credit cards fell out of Sikes’s hand.

“First day?” she asked.

Sikes decided her low, husky voice was as striking as her appearance. “Almost,” he mumbled.

“Well, I don’t drive. I have a green card. And I’m sure the statute of limitations has run out on any major felonies I’ve committed, so what can I do for you?”

Sikes got to his feet and jammed his wallet and its debris into an outside pocket on his sports jacket. He’d worry about sorting it out later. “I’m, uh, I’d like to ask you a few questions. If that’s all right?”

Without consciously looking for it, Sikes noticed a small flicker in her eye. Maybe it was a tic. Maybe it was a hidden reaction to the idea of answering questions for the police. He tried to discount it. But it
was
exactly what the textbook said he was supposed to be looking for.

“About what?” she asked. Her voice was as easy as before. No sign of tension.

“About who,” Sikes said. He pulled out his notebook and pen to give his hands something to do. “Randolph Petty. You exchanged some—”

Amy Stewart pushed her chair back with noisy force and got to her feet. “Who are you really?” she demanded.

Sikes stepped back from her. The astronomy student was surprisingly tall, almost his height. “I told you. Matt Sikes. I’m a detective.” Hold on, he thought. This isn’t supposed to be happening. I’m supposed to put
her
on the defensive.

Amy Stewart held out her hand. “Give me that badge again.”

Sikes was over the impact of her appearance. Warily he opened his badge case and gave it to her. She studied it intently, looking from the ID photo to Sikes and back again. She handed the case back to him.

“Where’s Dr. Petty?” she asked.

Sikes took the case and returned it to a pocket. “That’s what I want to talk with you about. I’ve got some bad news.”

She swayed slightly.

“Dr. Petty was killed two nights ago,” Sikes said, as gently as he could. There was never an easy way to say such a thing.

She stumbled forward.

Sikes grabbed her. He felt her tremble along the length of him, and the shock of her was as if he had been tasered. Their faces were inches apart. He could smell a scent rich and herbal coming from her hair. He guided her back to her chair, bending over her as he carefully lowered her to it. She gripped the arms of her chair, and Sikes felt her strength return. Regretfully he let go of her and stood back. He could still feel her against him. Sweat formed on his brow.

“Are you . . . are you okay?” Sikes asked. His voice was unexpectedly dry, as if he and not Grazer had done all the talking last night.

Amy Stewart gazed around the small room as if she had been sucker punched. “How?” she finally asked.

Sikes found a second chair, moved a stack of books from it, sat down, and told her.

When he was finished she tensed as if she were fighting back tears. Sikes told himself that he must remain emotionally detached from her—she could be a source of a motive in a murder case. But her obvious distress was getting to him. Unless she’s faking it, Sikes cautioned himself. That possibility was enough to shock him back into being a detective. He began to watch her more closely.

“So why did you come to me?” she asked. Her taut fingers were like claws on the arms of her chair. She didn’t look at Sikes.

Sikes reached into his jacket and brought out five folded pieces of letter-sized paper—the printouts he had made at the station house of the letters Grazer had saved to floppy disk. “These,” Sikes said. “Your last computer letter to Dr. Petty and his reply to you.” He offered the pages to her.

But the astronomy student had no interest in looking at them. “So you’ve come to me because I might have been . . . one of the last people to talk with Dr. Petty?” Her voice ended on a rise, as if that’s what she
hoped
had brought Sikes to her.

“No,” he said, studying her. “It’s because I think that the material you and Dr. Petty mention in these letters might have been the motive for his murder.”

Amy Stewart’s face fell forward into her hands. “That’s impossible,” she said in a muffled voice. “How could . . . how could
anyone
do that? For
what?”

Sikes forced himself to remain sitting. She might be a suspect, he kept telling himself. This might be an act. But he wanted reach out to comfort her.

“I was hoping that’s what you could tell me,” he said, allowing her time to regain her composure. He glanced through the printouts, reading the phrases he had underlined. “Your letters say something about ‘the material.’ How critical it is. How important it is that the original computer records be protected so others can verify them. How cautiously you will have to proceed to publish this information.” He flipped a page. “You seem quite upset that Dr. Petty hasn’t responded to you as quickly as he said he would. You keep stressing how significant ‘the material’ is.” He flipped over two more pages. “And then Dr. Petty sends you back a quick note saying he has passed along ‘the material’ as he said he would and has arranged a meeting to discuss it”—Sikes looked up from the printouts and found Amy staring intently at him—“on the night he was murdered.”

Amy said nothing.

Sikes asked her the question. “Ms. Stewart. What is ‘the material’?”

Amy looked up at him and bit her lower lip. Her cheeks seemed flushed.

Sikes tried again. “Is it something valuable enough that Dr. Petty might have been killed for it?”

A breath escaped her.

“Ms. Stewart, please. If Dr. Petty
was
killed for something he got from you, you might be in danger, too. You have to tell me what it is.”

Amy Stewart stared at Sikes in apparent indecision. He was caught by the intensity of her gaze. He had no explanation for the way she was making him feel. He had no desire for it. But he also couldn’t stop it.

“Can you tell me?” Sikes asked, not certain if he knew to what the question referred.

“Better than that,” Stewart said finally. “I can show you.”

Thanks to his Uncle Jack, Sikes could recognize all of the constellations and knew the names of hundreds of stars, but the dense star field on the computer screen was a mystery to him. He couldn’t find a single familiar pattern.

“I don’t recognize anything,” he said.

Amy turned to him with a look of surprise. She had left her office for a few minutes—leaving Sikes nervously wondering what kind of idiot he would look like if she didn’t return—to wash her face, she said. But Sikes could still see the turmoil in her face. The old guy had definitely meant something to her.

“Why would you expect to?” she asked.

Sikes felt foolish. The words had slipped out of him. He’d forgotten he was just an amateur who only looked at the stars through a pair of binoculars these days, and lately only when he could persuade Kirby that there was something worth seeing. Amy Stewart was halfway through her Ph.D. in astronomy and physics. Who was he trying to kid?

“Well,” he said in a voice that was awkward and stumbling once again, “I know a bit about . . . where things are and that.”

Amy studied him for a few moments, then looked at her computer monitor. The image was high resolution, almost as clear as a large film transparency. No wonder the screen is so big, Sikes had thought when the first star field had come up and he realized the detailed work it was used for.

Amy pointed to a large glob of white, bristling with spikes of light and ringed by a halo, that Sikes recognized as a low-magnitude star that had been too bright for a long exposure. “This is Bellatrix. Is that any help?”

Sikes stared at the screen, trying to figure out if the orientation of the field was standard. He pointed to a second overexposed star on the opposite side of the screen. “Betelgeuse?” he asked.

“Very good,” Amy said, clearly surprised.

Sikes traced his finger across the screen, drawing the constellation’s imaginary link lines. “So this is the top half of Orion.” He pointed below the screen. “Alnilam and Rigel are way down here, and right about where this keyboard is, that’s where the nebula is.” He now knew why such a familiar constellation had looked so odd—there were too many stars. “So all the other stars in there, they’re magnitude six or dimmer. Stars not visible to the naked eye.”

Amy stared at Sikes again and tapped her finger against the side of her keyboard.

“Is something wrong?” Sikes asked.

“How did you get assigned to investigate Dr. Petty’s death?” There was a definite edge of suspicion in her voice.

“My partner’s name was next on the rotation,” Sikes said, trying to understand her sudden change in mood. Sitting so close to her, two chairs pulled up to her narrow desk, it was easy to pick up on her feelings. And her perfume. And the heat of her body so near his. “Why?” he said, making a heroic effort to sound unaffected.

Amy hesitated. “I don’t know. An astronomer dies. The officer assigned to investigate knows astronomy. Seems like an odd coincidence to me.”

Sikes realized that now
she
was watching
him
for a reaction. He tried to think of a question that Angie might ask. “Do you have some reason for thinking that it’s not a coincidence?”

Amy thought that over. “I’ll show you what I’ve got here. Then you can tell me.” She turned to the screen. “This is a plate taken six days ago as part of an asteroid mapping project.”

“Dr. Petty had an asteroid named after him,” Sikes said. “I saw the certificate in his house.”

Amy flinched, and Sikes decided not to interrupt her again.

“It was his specialty,” she said after a moment. “Deep-space tracking. He developed most of the search algorithms and observation techniques used in the field today.” She typed something on her keyboard, and the star field shrank to about a quarter its original size and slid up to the left-hand corner of the screen. “Since he retired, Dr. Petty was part of an unofficial group of astronomers and space researchers who lobbied for the creation of Spacewatch—an automated asteroid tracking network to identify Earth-crossers.” She glanced at Sikes. “You understand ‘Earth-crossers’?”

“Asteroids that, um, cross the Earth’s orbit?” Sikes guessed.

Amy nodded. “Back in eighty-nine one missed us by about a hundred million kilometers.” She eyed Sikes. “At the speed it was traveling, that meant it missed us by about a day.
One
day. It was somewhere between one hundred to four hundred meters across, but if it had hit, it would have been like a thousand-megaton bomb. Flatten everything for a hundred and fifty miles. Could have taken out any city on the planet. Tens of thousands dead, if not millions.”

Sikes whistled silently.

“So far we’ve got good data on about a hundred of them. But the best guess is that there could be at least a thousand. And for all that, there’s only one observatory doing any crucial work in the field. Kitt Peak’s got a thirty-six-inch Newtonian and a CCD camera. If we had three more telescopes around the world, we could probably track ninety percent of the Earth-crossers in a decade. And it would only cost about two million a year. Less than the cost of a science fiction movie for the whole ten-year effort.” She typed again, anger evident in each keystroke. A second small star field appeared on the screen, opposite the first.

And then Sikes’s stomach tightened. He realized that Amy was going to put two almost-identical star fields on the screen. He knew enough to understand that by flipping rapidly from one star field to another and back again, the parts of the fields that were different would appear to move back and forth like the cartoons in the small flip books Kirby used to play with. Sikes’s mind raced. An astronomical discovery? Earth-crossers? Important information worth someone’s death?

“You’ve found something, haven’t you?” Sikes asked, leaning forward.

“That’s the understatement of the century.”

On the screen, in response to Amy’s commands, the two star fields reversed to make each point of light a black dot against a white background. Then both fields expanded again to overlap and fill the screen until it appeared there was only one field on display.

Sikes put his hands on the edge of the desk. He had just gotten used to the idea that the United States and the late Soviet Union weren’t going to nuke all life off the planet. But what if something else was about to?

The computer screen began to flicker. Sikes watched it intently. And after a few moments he found it—a small black dot that jumped back and forth, back and forth, like the tolling of a bell.

Sikes touched the image on the screen. “Is that it?” he asked.

Amy nodded. “Speckle data tells us it’s about five kilometers across.”

Sikes swallowed. If four hundred meters could equal one thousand megatons, then what would
five kilometers
do to the world? “And . . . and it’s coming for us?” All he could think about was Kirby. She was only thirteen. How could he have brought a child into a world about to be—

Amy shook her head.

Sikes blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

Amy leaned back in her chair. “On its present trajectory it will just graze the sun, but it’ll miss us. Comfortably. Won’t come anywhere near the Earth.”

Sikes sagged in his own chair. “Then what’s the big deal? I mean, the way you were talking, I thought I was looking at doomsday coming for us or something. What’s so important about one more asteroid?”

Amy took Sikes by surprise and put her hand on his arm, as if to anchor him in place.

“I mentioned the Spacewatch program only to let you know how I happened to come upon the data. But this isn’t an asteroid.”

Sikes stared at her blankly.

“From its size and shape, the spectrum it’s emitting, and its speed,” Amy said, “this object is inescapably artificial.”