Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (24 page)

For Matt Sikes, everything he had been struggling to comprehend fell into place with the brutal force of a hurtling asteroid plunging from the sky with the power of a thousand-megaton bomb.

It was his first murder case, and he was suddenly afraid that it would also be his last.

G
EORGE
F
RANCISCO AWOKE
to the cold pressure of a shock prod against his ribs, just at the edge of the sensitive nexus of nerves in his underarm. Instinctively he froze.

But the prod pressed deeper. “Up, cargo!” The rough voice could only be that of an Overseer. George instantly sat up. “On your feet!”

George coughed as he swung his legs over the side of his sleeping deck. The deck was nothing more than a narrow ledge in a stack of three, without privacy or comfort—one of hundreds of inset platforms that lined the dormitory’s dimly lit, narrow, and claustrophobic corridors.

The Overseer cracked his prod across George’s knees, but George barely noticed the pain of the sharp blow. The holy gas of obedience had been kept at its exceptionally high levels all through the sleep shift. Resistant or not, the buildup of waste products from having breathed so much of it was making George’s head feel as if someone were gouging his spots out one by one and filling the holes with sodium chloride.

With great effort George managed to stand unsteadily, stealing a quick glance at the tormentor before him.

His hearts sank. The Overseer was T’ksam. Though scarcely out of his twenties and with but a single silver badge of rank on his black uniform, T’ksam was rapidly developing a reputation for mercilessness even amongst the older, more brutal Overseers. George kept his head down and prayed he would survive this encounter.

As George waited for whatever demand might follow, he dared a fast look down the dark and silent dormitory corridor. It was oddly empty of other Tenctonese. Generally there was a constant ebb and flow of workers on sleep shift, forlornly trying to engage in some form of social interaction during the few hours free from labor. But the low-lying mist was still unusually heavy—though the gas had oxidized enough to turn completely white—and from the sounds of retching that echoed from the long line of sleeping platforms George knew that others were having as much difficulty as he was in dealing with the effects of the gas.

“Is this your husband?” T’ksam’s harsh voice said.

George couldn’t help himself. He had to risk raising his eyes to the Overseer, fearing what he might see. And he saw T’ksam’s hand gripping Susan’s neck as he shoved her forward.

“Is this your husband?” the Overseer said again, giving Susan’s head a violent shake.

George’s hands trembled at his sides, but he forced himself not to react. He knew there was no action he could take that would not result in an instant sentence of death. Susan was obviously even more affected by the shift-long exposure to gas than he was, her eyes half closed, a thin line of drool sliding from her open lips. A female Overseer stood behind her, holding Susan up by her arms. The second Overseer was also a child to George’s eyes, and she smirked at him as she saw him struggle to subdue his helpless fury.

T’ksam yanked Susan back against him and used his powerful fingers to roughly open her eyelids, not caring that the handle of his prod scraped at the fragile skin on her forehead. The profane words of the sine-script tattoo that darkened his wrist were all the more obscene so close to Susan’s beauty.

Susan cried out in pain, and her hands jerked up to try and push the Overseer’s hand from her face.

“Don’t,” George said. One minute word of protest escaped from the immeasurable sea of rage that churned within him.

The Overseer smiled like a podling with a pouch of
tadlin-ta.
“What did you say, cargo?”

He knew what he risked, but George could not remain silent. “Look at her. She is barely conscious.”

“And what concern of yours is that?” T’ksam said.

George did not back down. “She is my mate.”

“Good,” the Overseer said. “Then perhaps this will make her wake up.”

Even as the prod’s dreaded tip descended for him George heard it clicking into focus. The shock made him grunt in pain and threw him back violently against his sleeping platform, smashing his head against the sharp edge of the platform directly above his own.

George’s entire body shook with the after-effects of the prod. His vision blurred. Both Overseers pushed Susan’s limp body closer to him again. “Who is he?” T’ksam demanded of Susan.

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.