Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon

by K. W. Jeter

  He hung up the phone and turned to George. “They dug out the records on that cellular phone, the one that was found on Parris’s boat. Several calls were placed to the same number the day before he was killed—they’ve been traced to a warehouse in East L.A.” He zipped up his jacket. “I’m heading out there.”

  George stopped Sikes by grabbing his arm. “Matt, I’m no help here. I’m coming with you.”

  Sikes hesitated, then nodded. “All right . . .” George could see in Sikes’s eyes a certain pleasure in having his partner back working with him.

  Ahpossno waited alone in the lab. When he had gotten back to the hospital, he had quickly ascertained that Cathy, the Tenctonese female he had targeted, was busy with the stricken slaves. That was no problem—he knew she would return here eventually. And time was a matter of relative importance. If it was running out for the woman and child in the security unit, that was still only the fate of two individuals. He had to be concerned with the health of the entire slave population that was to be recovered for their masters.

  He heard footsteps coming down the corridor. Cathy appeared in the doorway, carrying a wire basket; sealed glass cylinders, containing samples of pink Tenctonese blood, rattled in the basket’s slots.

  Her eyes widened in surprise when she saw him standing there. “I wondered what happened to you . . .”

  Ahpossno said nothing. He merely pointed toward the device resting on the workbench.

  She set down the basket. Stepping close to the bench, she ran her hands tentatively over the device. The black metal cube was roughly a half meter in its dimensions on all sides. The gauges and other readout screens were marked in Tenctonese. An expression of stunned amazement formed on Cathy’s face as she studied the object.

  “Where did you get this?” Her fingertips traced across a computerlike keypad. A row of lights flashed on above the keys.

  “I keep it . . .” The human words came a little faster than before. He’d had more time for analyzing the language; he’d listened to the radio all the way to and from the desert. “From the ship . . . after the crashing . . .”

  Cathy bent down to examine the device at eye level. “I never saw such advanced equipment. There were stories, and some documents found in the ship’s wreckage, about things like this.” She shook her head. “I never thought I’d get my hands on one of them.”

  “It was part of the medical equipment aboard the ship. Its use was intended only for the Overseers,” Ahpossno rested a hand on top of the device. “Will it help you?”

  “Yes . . . oh, yes!” She straightened up, the look of excitement in her eyes changing to one of intrigue, curiosity . . . and suspicion.

  “You do not trust me.” He had seen the change in her gaze. “I am different.”

  She nodded slowly. “Yes . . . you are.”

  “Because I am alone—in the desert—since the crash.”

  “Six years?” She looked at him incredulously. “You stayed in the desert?”

  “I hide from the Overseers. I am afraid . . .”

  “All this time? You didn’t know we were free?”

  Ahpossno shook his head. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know how such things could be . . .”

  Cathy touched his shoulder. [“I’m sorry.”] She suddenly frowned. “What’s this?”

  Her fingertips moved up to the side of his neck. Ahpossno tensed, but didn’t move away from her. In the shiny chrome surfaces of the lab equipment, he could see her examining the scarlet rash that had appeared on parts of his skin. He had become aware of it, the itching and slight irritation, while driving back into the city.

  “That’s odd,” said Cathy. “Many of us had a rash like this when we first landed here.” She seemed puzzled. “Why would you get it after six years . . . ?”

  Beneath her line of vision, Ahpossno tightened his hand into a lethal fist. His plans had not included the possibility of being exposed by something as small as this. If this Cathy, the individual who had perceived it, had to be eliminated, that was regrettable; he would have to alter his plans, find another contact point.

  “I know . . .”

  He bent his arm, bringing up his fist. A quick blow to the nerve center above her ribs; that would be all that was required.

  “The air in Los Angeles; that must be it.” Cathy smiled at him. “I mean the saline content, not the pollution. We’re much closer to the ocean here. You must be reacting to it.” She turned away, searching through the clutter at the back of the lab bench. “It’s not serious. I’ll give you some ointment that should take care of it.”

  Ahpossno relaxed his fist. The need for her death had passed, at least for the moment.

  The relief he felt surprised him. He pushed the emotion away, a thing of weakness.

  C H A P T E R 1 9

  “COME ON, SNAP it up!” Guerin stood in the middle of the warehouse, watching the flurry of activity around him. Hand trucks stacked with crates rolled toward the door and the vans waiting outside; some of the white-coated Purists, the lab technicians, carried the more delicate equipment in their arms. “We don’t have all day!”

  The interior of the Purist operations headquarters was being stripped. Everything that the high-ceilinged space had come to hold in the last few weeks was being loaded for transport to their alternate sites. The breaking up and dispersal of activities, the formation of cells, with access on a strict need-to-know basis, would make detection considerably more difficult. During his career with the U.S. military, Guerin had been instructed, by masters of such knowledge, in the characteristics of subversive organizations. He knew what types of groups survived underground, and which, through their own sloppiness, were laid open by police surveillance and crushed. The schooling had been elaborate and thorough; the techniques came in handy, even if he was applying them now in ways that wouldn’t have met with official approval.

  “Watch that . . .” One of the younger Purists had nearly toppled his load, running the hand truck over a loose electrical cable. A box full of glassware rattled at the top of the stack as the kid hurriedly clamped his hand on top of it. “Careful,” said Guerin in a softer voice. He gave the kid a cold smile, the grisly effect of which he had known for a long time. “You could get hurt that way.” The kid scooted with the truck, toward the warehouse’s hiked-up metal door, as though Guerin had singed the seat of his trousers with a flamethrower.

  “Don’t give the kid a heart attack.” One of his lieutenants stood beside Guerin. The gaze behind the reflective sunglasses watched the scene. “The young ones can come in pretty useful sometimes.”

  “That’s because they’re ideologues.” Guerin glanced over at the other man. “They really believe in what they’re doing.”

  “Yeah . . .” The lieutenant shook his head. “Sometimes I think about when I was that young and stupid . . . long, long time ago . . . back when I believed in all kinds of stuff. You know what? Sometimes I get a little sad, thinking about the way I used to be. And the way I am now.”

  “So don’t think about it.” He didn’t have time for that kind of sentimental crap. “You don’t survive in an operation like this by believing stuff. You survive by getting things done. And watching out for your own ass.”

  “Yeah, I saw your CYA tactics.” There was a note of grudging admiration in the lieutenant’s voice. “A birthday party for our Miss Bryant—that was really . . . sweet of you.”

  “She comes with the territory. It pays to keep her buttered up. And she’s the one that brings the money in, anyway—she’s got fund-raising down to an art.” Guerin shrugged. “She probably couldn’t do that if she didn’t believe in all the stuff she says.”

  “And you don’t believe it, huh? Way deep inside you, isn’t there something that just crawls and burns when you see one of these parasites walking down the street, like he’s got a right to be there at all?”

  “I could give a shit.” Guerin turned and saw his own emotionless face reflected in the other man’s shades.
“Tell you what—you go back and read about the Nazis and how they put together the Third Reich. And you’ll find that, yeah, they had a psychopath front man with a hair up his butt on the subject of Jews; the other guys at the top, like Goering and Goebbels, they didn’t particularly care one way or the other about them. They just found it useful to have an enemy, somebody you could hate, somebody you could kill. That’s how you appeal to people’s emotions; that’s how you get power over them.”

  “You’re a cold sonuvabitch, Guerin.” The lieutenant smiled. “I like the sound of what you’re saying, all right.”

  “So figure out the rest on your own. There’s no way that three hundred thousand parasites, some of ’em in pretty high positions, can get bumped off without there being some major shake-up afterwards. Darlene Bryant’s dreaming if she thinks everything is just going to go back to the way it was before they got here. It’s all going to hit the fan. There’ll be people—humans, I mean—calling us murderers, and there’ll be others calling us saviors. That’s the kind of situation that can be capitalized on. If you’re ready for it.”

  “And you will be, huh?”

  A crash of breaking glass interrupted before Guerin could reply. The warehouse was almost completely bare now, with the last of the lab equipment being trundled out. A set of beakers and test tubes lay shattered, a viscious fluid leaking out onto the concrete floor. One of the young Purists looked up apprehensively at Guerin.

  “Ah, just leave it.” Guerin gave a dismissive gesture toward the mess. “Get your ass out to the vans—we’ve got to hit the road.”

  He and the lieutenant walked outside. The vans’ cargo doors were being slammed shut, engines starting up.

  The lieutenant glanced back at the vacated headquarters. “So how come we had to get out of here so fast?”

  “Just a matter of informers.” Guerin pulled open one of the driver’s-side doors. “Like fleas on a dog; you gotta figure they’re always there. The police have got somebody snooping around on us; we’ve got ones that let us know what the cops are up to.” He climbed behind the steering wheel, slammed the door, and leaned his elbow out the window. “Let’s just say ours are a little better-placed, a little closer to the center, than theirs.”

  He put the van in gear and circled it around on the street in front of the warehouse. The others followed, a caravan heading to a new home.

  They were too late.

  “Must’ve known we were coming.” Sikes scanned across the empty space beyond the rolled-up metal doors. “Anybody who was here is long gone now.”

  Out front, they left the two unmarked cars, his and George’s, and the one in which Zepeda and her partner, Petrosian, had arrived on the scene. The call records from the late Richard Parris’s cellular phone had brought them to this address in one of the city’s grungier industrial zones. Two uniformed cops from a black-and-white patrol unit had already sealed off the building’s entrance with yellow tape.

  “They must’ve been using this place for a lab.” Zepeda pointed to one side of the space as they walked inside. “Looks like they put in some heavy-duty electrical lines.” She glanced up at the high windows. “Housings for some kind of air-filtration equipment—pretty slick operation.”

  George poked inside a fifty-five-gallon drum filled with trash. He sniffed at a grease-spotted sack from a fast-food chain. “They were here not very long ago.” He dropped the bag back into the drum.

  As they walked farther inside, something on the floor caught Sikes’s attention. He held George back with a hand to the chest. “Stay right here, George—”

  “What is it?” George tried to step past Sikes’s arm.

  “I said, stay here!”

  He froze in place as Sikes pointed to a test tube lying broken in a small pool of liquid.

  “Bet you a carton of vintage milk—” Sikes stepped forward and knelt down by the glass pieces “—this is the bacteria in question.” He used a pen to take a sample, sealing it inside a plastic evidence bag.

  “Hey, Sikes . . . George . . . come here . . .”

  They turned and saw Zepeda pulling apart a battered metal desk and filing cabinet that had been shoved together; all the empty drawers hung open. She fetched up something from the narrow space between the two pieces.

  “Take a look at this.” Zepeda unfolded a map and held it up for them to see.

  George quickly recognized the features. “It’s a map of L.A.”

  “More than that . . .” Sikes pointed to the lines and coordinates superimposed on the area. “It’s an aviation map. The kind used by pilots.”

  Zepeda’s gaze watched both of them as they considered the implications of that fact.

  The little girl had been brought to one of the security unit’s examining rooms. She sat on a padded table, dangling her bare legs, as Ahpossno bent down and looked into her eyes. On the other side of the room, Cathy studied Emily’s chest X rays on a wall viewer; the dark shapes of the double heart were clearly visible.

  “Watch my finger . . .” Ahpossno held up a single digit and moved it slowly across the girl’s line of sight. Her eyes tracked the motion with no difficulty. [“Good.”] He slid his hand under the shoulder of her hospital gown, and felt the curve of her neck. “Is there pain?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  He touched below her ear valleys. “Here?”

  “No . . .” Emily broke into laughter. “It tickles.”

  The word puzzled him; he hadn’t heard it before. [“What?”]

  “It tickles.” She translated into Tenctonese: “Dugga.”

  “Oh.” The word unexpectedly delighted him. “Tick-kels . . .”

  He could sense Cathy watching him and his handling of the child. It presented no problem for him to be gentle with such a young thing. The medical training he had received for his mission, in anticipation of the need to assess the slaves’ state of health, had stressed the pragmatism of being gentle with children; one could not order them about like their parents, and still expect adequate responses. Plus, in this instance he was aware of the favorable impression it made upon Cathy. He was that much further along in winning her total confidence.

  Cathy stepped over to the examining table and affectionately rubbed Emily’s head. “Your X rays are fine. Like a champ.”

  The child winced, squirming in discomfort.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Emily sat up straight. “My back’s sore . . .”

  Ahpossno felt below her shoulder blades. “Her mata gland . . .”

  “It’s a little swollen.” Cathy examined the area, letting Ahpossno’s hand guide hers to the spot. “Probably from the fever.”

  He felt a minute tension in Cathy, as if she had suddenly become aware of the touch of his hand. He pulled away, stepping back from the table. “You are very strong,” he said to Emily. “Chatlasam.”

  “But my mom . . .” A cloud passed over the child’s face. “I’m worried about her.”

  Cathy put her fist against Emily’s temple. “She’s going to be fine.”

  “Truth.” He heard footsteps in the corridor outside; he stepped close to the doorway. “Much is being done . . .” He glanced surreptitiously past the edge. Farther down the corridor, close to the isolation room, he saw the human police detective Sikes walking at a quick pace; behind him, the security unit’s double doors swung shut, the guard still posted beyond them.

  There was another, standing at the window that looked into the isolation room. A Tenctonese, the zabeet with the human name of Albert Einstein. He had returned with the small domestic fowl that he had apparently brought before. The bird sat upon a folded newspaper at his feet.

  Ahpossno could hear the words that passed between the two.

  “Where’s George?” The human’s voice had a rasp of anxiety in it.

  He listened with greater interest. It had been several hours since the two police detectives, the human and the Tenctonese, had left the hospital. Ahpossno had been able to
pick up enough to figure out the nature of their errand. They’d had some kind of information about the humans—the ‘Purists’—who’d developed the infectious bacteria. Information of that sort was of value to his own mission.

  Albert nodded toward the window. “In there—with Susan.” He shook his head. “All the plants—all the animals—nothing helps.” He knelt down and picked up the chicken, then stood and moved slowly away, shoulders slumped.

  “I’ve got to get back to the lab . . .”

  Cathy’s voice; Ahpossno brought the focus of his attention back to the examining room.

  “Maybe you could take Emily back to see her mother.”

  “Of course.” He helped the child jump down from the table, then took her hand. “Come, little one.”

  They walked together toward the isolation room. The human Sikes didn’t see them; he remained gazing into the window.

  “You must be proud of your father.” Ahpossno lightly squeezed the girl’s hand. “The police fight the Overseers . . . yes?”

  “No . . .” A shake of the head. “They don’t let them do that here.”

  “But he must know who they are . . .”

  “A lot of ’em, yeah.”

  Inside his head, he logged that datum with the rest that he had learned since his arrival on this planet. The whole picture was slowly assembling. He had been right to be cautious; the situation, the interaction between the escaped slaves and the native species, was more complicated than he had initially expected.

  Emily’s face lit up when she recognized the figure standing farther down the hallway. “Matt!” She pulled her hand free from Ahpossno’s grasp and ran ahead.

  “Hey, puddin’—” Sikes playfully knuckled her forehead; she had thrown her arms around him, hugging him tight. “How ya doin’?” He raised his gaze from her face, and looked with hostile suspicion at Ahpossno.

  “I’m fine. But I want to see Mom.” She let go of him and went into the isolation room.