Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “I can drive, if you’d like.”

  “I’m okay,” Sikes said. His hands were tight on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the brake lights of the car a block ahead. Until now he and Cathy had said little to each other, ever since the odd radiance of the aurora borealis had flickered across the clearing night sky. An extremely rare event this far south.

  As rare as an alien spacecraft crash-landing in the desert.

  Every time Sikes looked up to the skies these days, everything up there seemed to have something to do with the Newcomers. Spacelab arcing by overhead, testing its communication laser; he had watched it from the roof of his building with Cathy. The night had been so cold, yet he had been gripped by a warmth he had been terrified to acknowledge. Spacelab was home to the first Tenctonese astronaut to return to space. Sikes had held Cathy close. The world had changed so much in six years. His hand had lightly glided over the perfect smoothness of her skin. Lasers flashing through the night. Brilliance against darkness. Their lips had met. The taste so different, the heat of her breath, the stars circling. Even the damn aurora tonight probably had something to do with the Newcomers. Everything in the world was caught up with the Newcomers. Everything in Sikes’s world was contained in Cathy’s eyes, in Cathy’s lips, in Cathy’s arms.

  Sikes wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and kiss her again. To gather her tightly in his arms and mold himself to the secret ridges and curves hidden by her clothes and flesh. He wanted to tell her that no two people were ever alike. But that two lovers were always the same.

  Two worlds, two lovers, two hearts—no, three hearts beating as one. He laughed at himself, breaking the tension that filled the car.

  Sikes couldn’t pull over. Sikes couldn’t kiss Cathy. Because the truth was he was afraid of her, just as he had always been afraid of the Tenctonese, ever since he had met them, long before George, from that first time, in the desert. The desert . . .

  “What is it?” Cathy asked. Her voice was brittle now. Tension surfacing. She didn’t understand his laughter.

  “Nothing,” Sikes said. He looked at her. His heart ached for her. She frightened him.

  Cathy looked into his eyes, and Sikes had no idea what she saw. But he could guess what she felt. The rain on her face made her look as if she were crying. Her expression said the same.

  “They’ll be okay,” Sikes said, looking away, pretending that the tension between them was the result of their shared concern for Emily and Susan, victims of a Purist plot to kill prominent Newcomers.

  “It’s not them,” Cathy said. Her hands picked at the shoulder strap of her seatbelt. She looked ahead. “It’s everything . . . everything about this world.”

  Sikes couldn’t stand to hear anyone, even Cathy, descend into self-pity. He had done it too often himself and knew now, from the clear and perfect vantage point of hindsight, that it had simply been a way to drive his wife and daughter away from him. Besides, Cathy wasn’t the type to feel sorry for herself. She was building walls. Deliberately. Just like a human.

  “Look, Cathy, things are bad. I’ll give you that. But what happened to Susan and Emily, and Judge Kaiser and Dr. Bogg, for that matter, are just isolated incidents. Sooner or later the same thing happens to every minority, everywhere on Earth.” He tried to smile but failed. “It goes with the territory.”

  Cathy watched the road. “Where we come from, we weren’t the minority.”

  But you were slaves, Sikes wanted to say. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to hurt her.

  Cathy sighed then. If she had been human, Sikes might have thought he had heard the prelude to tears needing to be released. But he couldn’t be sure what that ragged, trembling sound might mean coming from a Tenctonese. Then, without knowing why, he wondered what Cathy’s face looked like when she made love, how or even if her eyes closed, how he could possibly know what she might mean by any expressions she might make, how he could possibly know how to please her.

  It’s impossible, he told himself, shaking his head to drive the questions and the images from his mind, to think instead of all the traffic shortcuts that lay between home and the medical center. He had watched the “educational” tapes Cathy had lent him of Tenctonese lovemaking, videos made for her comparative sexuality courses at UCLA. Beyond the superficial sameness of gross body structure—what some experts thought might be the result of random though convergent evolution—Tenctonese did not look human, did not act human, were not human. And after watching the tapes forward and backward and in slow motion and freeze frame, Sikes couldn’t see how a human male and Tenctonese female could ever even attempt to perform some hybrid blending of their species’ respective acts of love without the human breaking his neck, besides other parts of his body.

  Cathy sighed again.

  He had to face facts. He actually feared involvement with Cathy. To make some form of love with her could be life-threatening. Yet her unhappiness was cutting through him, robbing him of his better sense. He reached out to hold her hand. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, and he realized that he would do anything—anything—to make certain that she would be okay, for as long as he was able.

  Cathy looked out the side window at the dark stream of locked and grilled storefronts they passed. “Oh, Matt. I don’t know anymore. Nothing’s right. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is how we hoped it would be.” The sigh again. “Sometimes I . . . I don’t think we made the right decision to come here.”

  Above all else—confusion, fear, and heartache—Sikes was a cop, and he heard the one word in her statement that didn’t belong.

  “Decision?” he repeated. “I thought you guys crash-landed here when your ship went kablooie.”

  Sikes felt her hand tense beneath his.

  “Cathy,” he said, “your ship did crash-land, right?”

  She squeezed his hand once, then slipped hers away. “Yes, Matt,” she said. “The ship crash-landed here.” She took a breath. If she had been human and a criminal, Sikes would have bet a week’s worth of doughnuts that a confession was going to follow. “Because it was made to crash-land here.” She looked at him, waiting for his reaction.

  Sikes’s only reaction was to wrinkle his brow in confusion as he expertly shifted gears to swing around a slow-moving van on the wet road before them. “What are you saying? That there was a mutiny or something on board?” The official reports were still no different from what had been on the news at the time. The Newcomers’ slave ship had had trouble with its main engines as it was performing some sort of close approach to the sun to store up . . . whatever. Sikes couldn’t remember. But the engine problem had led to the Newcomers’ ship coming apart just past the moon, with the cargo-disk section being jettisoned and coming in to a rocky landing in the Mojave Desert. Yet Cathy had just implied that that story was wrong.

  “No, not a mutiny,” Cathy said evenly.

  That’s better, Sikes thought. He didn’t need his fragile world rearranged again.

  “We were slaves,” Cathy continued, “not crew.” She took another breath of confession. “It was a revolt.”

  The car slowed as Sikes turned his head sharply to stare at his passenger. “A revolt? No shit? I mean, I remember once you said something about some of you trying to organize a revolt . . . but with the holy gas and the Overseers and everything else, you guys actually managed it?”

  “With the holy gas, the Overseers, and everything.” Cathy kept staring out the window.

  “How come nobody knows about it? Yow!” Sikes wrenched at the wheel as he narrowly missed another oncoming vehicle. George had told him more about Tenctonese history than he ever wanted to know, but his partner had never breathed a hint about there having been a revolt on the ship.

  “There’s so much we don’t talk about. So much we don’t . . .” Another soft sigh. “It’s not something many of us even know about.”

  “But you know about it?”

  “I know about it.”

  Sikes narrowed his eye
s, almost as if he were trying to see a new image of Cathy. “Because you were part of it?”

  Cathy nodded. “I almost wasn’t.” There was such sadness in her words. “But at the end, when they needed me—yes, I was.”

  “They? Who were they?”

  Cathy shrugged. “We have a word. Keer’chatlas.”

  Kirsch chitlins, Sikes heard. It sounded like something George would have for lunch.

  “It’s hard to describe,” Cathy said. “Strength through weakness. Safety through division.”

  “Compartmentalization,” Sikes said. He understood. “Like spies in a network of cells. If you don’t know who you’re reporting to, then you can’t turn them in if you’re captured and . . . well, questioned.”

  “Keer’chatlas,” Cathy said softly. “No one knew who was in charge. No one knew if it all wasn’t a plan by the kleezantsun just to lead us on, to keep us busy and confused, to find out who the troublemakers were and . . . deal with them.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Sikes said, trying to break the inexplicable spell of remorse Cathy was weaving around herself. “Hey, it worked. You brought the ship down.”

  “Down to Earth,” she said bitterly. “In the end I had no choice. We had no choice. We were desperate. We were frightened. We knew exactly what we could expect if we stayed on board.” She stared down at her hands, now folded motionlessly in her lap. All life seemed to have gone from her. “We just didn’t know what to expect down here.”

  Sikes reached out for her again to break her mood. “Cathy, listen, I—”

  She looked up suddenly and didn’t let him finish. “It must have been just as big a shock and surprise for you humans, mustn’t it? Waking up one day to find that a starship was landing, a whole ship filled with aliens?”

  Sikes hated it when people changed the subject.

  “Well,” Cathy said, “am I right? How surprised were you when you heard what had happened?”

  She looked over at him. He guessed she meant her expression to be a mask over her true feelings, but there was something in her she couldn’t hide. Not from him. And what was to be a mask became instead the fragile, hopeful, nervous smile she had given him that night on the roof. Brilliance against darkness. Their lips touching . . .

  He could keep no secrets from her.

  “Matt?” she asked hesitantly, as if sensing the turmoil within him, the decision he had reached. “How surprised were you?”

  It’s time, he told himself. If anything is ever going to come of this—of us—then it’s surely time.

  He took a breath then, and any other cop would know what was going to come right after it. His confession.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” he said, the words sticking in his throat.

  Cathy blinked as if he had spoken in a language she had never heard before. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I knew the ship was coming.” Sikes drove through the night, thinking of the desert, the first time. The fear.

  “That . . . that’s impossible,” Cathy said.

  Sikes shook his head, eyes on the road, seeing the streets of the city as they had been six years ago. November, he remembered. A week after Halloween? Maybe a bit later. “I wish it had been impossible,” he said, and he meant it. Maybe things would have been different right now if things had been different back then. Before the desert. Before Sam. The first Sam.

  Cathy was uncertain. This time her hand sought him, touching his arm as softly as sunlight. “How,” she asked quietly, “how did you know?”

  Sikes shifted in his seat. Even with the shortcuts he knew they were still a long way from the medical center. There would be time.

  He took another breath of confession.

  “It was my first case,” he began. “My first day as detective.”

  And the years unrolled as quickly as the waiting city flew by.

  C H A P T E R 3

  MATTHEW SIKES COULD SMELL the body already—sweet corruption and foul bodily wastes lightly blended and delicately mixed in the overheated confines of the gleaming white Continental parked too long in the morning sun. He felt what had passed for his breakfast begin to rebel within him, and he quickly turned away, bent over the fluttering yellow band that said POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, and splashily anointed the asphalt of the uppermost parking level with the fruits of last night’s celebrations.

  Sikes could hear the other cops at the scene snickering. He saw the bright flashes of the crime photographer’s camera as she captured a few candid snaps of Sikes’s first case, no doubt destined to find their way into the locked trophy case back at the station house. And Sikes knew that his pals, his friends, his oh-so-supportive coworkers, had done this to him on purpose.

  It was his first day on the job as Detective Three, and it had begun with him barely able to wrench his eyes open and keep his thoughts in order. His radio alarm that morning had buzzed so long and loud that old man Booth had started pounding on the wall from next door. Gotta move out of here, Sikes had thought as he had slowly pushed himself out of his bed—a bed that had been giving him a good old-fashioned E-ticket ride four hours earlier when he had stumbled in from the party at Casey’s to try to get some sleep for the big day.

  In the shower he had alternately scalded and frozen himself under the weak spray of the water-miser shower head, trying to make his shaking hand find the magical temperature balance on the single faucet control. I really got to move outta here, he had thought then, a bit more coherently. And by the time he had managed to force down his breakfast—a partially defrosted bagel swallowed only with the help of incompletely mixed orange juice that left little frozen globs of concentrate at the bottom of the glass—he at least had been alert enough to remember to put on his civvies and not one of his uniforms. The uniforms were history, six years of it, and as far as he was concerned they could stay wadded in the tomb of their laundry bag for the next thousand years. Sikes had finally achieved his dream of being a detective, even though his friends had made certain he would not enjoy the day.

  Then again, Sikes thought as he made his way to his car that morning, they made certain that I’ll never be able to forget this day, either. His 1984 Mustang SVO hesitated slightly as he tried to start it, almost as if it, too, had spent six hours in Casey’s the night before, drinking toast after toast to the next stage of his career.

  Yet eventually the Mustang had started, just as Sikes had managed to do, even if the purring echo of the car’s finely tuned five-liter engine had sounded much better than Sikes had felt. Though he had worked hard not to admit it to himself. The old-timers had solemnly told him that whatever went down on his first day as detective would set the tone for everything else that would happen to him in the years to come, and Sikes had been damned if he was going to start out by calling in sick.

  At least I’ve only got a quiet day of paperwork ahead of me, he thought as he made his way out of the underground parking garage of his bland and characterless Studio City apartment building that morning after the Casey’s blowout. I’ll just sit at my desk, filling out all my first-day forms, drinking coffee till it’s quitting time. Maybe even check the rental ads in the Times for a nice loft somewhere. And then I can go home and die in peace.

  It had been a comforting plan for a hugely hung-over Detective Three to have for his first day on the job. Unfortunately, he had not thought to check that plan with Dispatch.

  Sikes’s first call for his first case on his first day had crackled over his car radio when he was all of ten minutes away from the station house. He had had the personal radio installed two days ago at the police garage, and he regretted that eager act of jumping the gun as soon as he heard the first electronic squawk warble out from the dash. But thirty minutes later he was standing on the top level of another parking garage, this one on La Cienega across from the Beverly Center where West Hollywood, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills pinched in to share their borders. And he was staring through his dinged-up Ray-Bans at his first body, wondering
how uncool it would be to hold his nose. As things had turned out, his stomach had made sure that he kept his hands well away from his face until he was finished vomiting.

  As Sikes stood up again, surprised by how much better he felt now that he had given in to what his body had been telling him to do since five o’clock that morning, his new partner came up to him. She punched him on his shoulder, handed him a thick wad of Dunkin Donuts napkins, and said “Welcome to Homicide, Sikes.” Then Detective Two Angela Perez laughed, and her perfectly straight and even white teeth were almost as blinding as the mirrored aviator shades she wore. “Quite the party at Casey’s, I understand.”

  Sikes took the napkins and wiped his mouth clean. “I was set up.” He swiped at his tongue, too, trying to get rid of the sour orange juice taste he feared would be with him forever.

  Angie pushed down her glasses and looked over the frames at Sikes. “You going to be okay?” Her large, dark eyes studied him. Their deceptive softness had led more than one cornered adversary to gamble that she would lack the guts to pull the trigger.

  Sikes relayed the question to the rest of his body and waited for everything to report back. “It’s just the . . . the smell . . . you know?”

  Angie pushed her glasses back up with a single finger. “Oh, yeah, Sikes. I’ve been doing this gig for ten years. I know all about the smell.” She took a clean napkin from him and wiped at a corner of his mouth. “Now you know why coroners smoke those big cigars.” Then Angie nodded over at the Continental, parked all by itself, straddling three sets of lines that marked the asphalt into parking spaces labeled COMPACT ONLY. “Enough of the small talk,” she said. “Time to work.”

  Sikes walked back to the victim’s car with his new partner. He had met her six months ago when he had been the first officer on the scene for a robbery and shooting in a parking lot behind Mann’s Chinese. She was quick, thorough, and—unlike a lot of the detectives he had worked with while in uniform—in her written reports she had given him full credit for the way he had secured the scene, found the shell casings, and canvassed the parking-lot attendants. That report had earned Sikes a commendation, and that commendation, in turn, had lifted his spirits enough that he had gone into his detective exams without his traditional feeling of examination panic. As far as he was concerned, that change in attitude had made all the difference, and he had aced both the written and the orals.