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.”
“Artificial?” Sikes said. “You mean like manmade?”
“Oh, God, no.” There was some odd combination of regret and determination on Amy’s tense face that Sikes felt he was finally on the brink of understanding. “Whoever built this thing,” she said, “I guarantee you they’re not human at all.”
P A R T T W O
CORRECTION
DESCENT MINUS 4 STANDARD DAYS
AND COUNTING
C H A P T E R 1
BUCK FELL. FIELDS OF BLUE lay beneath him. He didn’t know what part of the ship he saw. There were stars in the field. Thousands of them. Calling to him.
Finiksa.
He fell to the blue fields. To the stars scattered through them. Somewhere deep within him he knew he fell to Tencton, the home he had never seen. He didn’t want to stop. But the voice was insistent.
Finiksa. It is not your time.
The stars drifted through the fields, caught in the same effortless current that drew Buck down. They called to him just as the voice did.
All things come from the Mother. All things return to the Mother. Your time will come, Finiksa. But your work is not done.
Buck opened his eyes, and the stars vanished from his knowing.
“I have no work,” he said, surprised by how his throat hurt and his lungs ached. “I’m just a boy.”
“We are all children.” The voice spoke to him in words this time, not as feelings in his mind. He recognized the voice.
“Uncle Moodri,” Buck said.
The Elder’s slight though comforting hand gripped Buck’s firmly. “You are not alone,” Moodri said in soothing tones.
Buck’s voice was a weak sigh. “It was . . . so beautiful.”
“And it will always be there for you. No need to rush.”
Buck realized the sleeping platform he lay upon was wider than the one in his crèche. He knew that Moodri would never risk visiting him in the crèche, either. So he must be somewhere else. He tried to lift his head to see where he was, and stars of a different kind burst before him as his neck cramped in pain.
Buck moaned, and both of Moodri’s hands pressed gently on his shoulders. “Do you remember what happened?” his great-uncle asked.
Buck closed his eyes. He remembered the water hub. The billows of holy gas, more than he had ever seen. Watch Leader D’wayn had found him and Vornho. Another Overseer—Coolock—had been with her. They’d been on level fifty-seven. Something about water workers. Something Vornho had said about the flow being diverted and—
“Vornho was going to kill someone!”
As Moodri’s hands pressed harder it seemed the strong fingers found places to push that eased the sudden panic that welled up in the boy.
“But he did not,” Moodri said. “Do you remember why?”
Buck opened his eyes again. The lights above him were brighter than usual. The bed was softer. He tried moving just an inch to find Moodri. “I tried to stop him.” And with those words Buck knew he was marked for recycling. He had dared defy the Overseers. Only one punishment was possible.
“What happened then?” Moodri asked.
Buck struggled to remember. The realization that Vornho was going to kill without justice. Coolock’s rage. D’wayn raising him high . . . and then what? Dimly he recalled seeing . . . seeing . . . “Celine and Andarko came from the mist and saved me,” Buck said. His voice filled with awe as he grappled with the implications of his vision. “Celine and Andarko.” Against the pain he rolled his head to Moodri and with a shaking hand reached out to grip his great-uncle’s white robe. “Uncle Moodri! I saw them! I saw Celine and Andarko, and they . . . they saved me from the Overseers!”
Through the black explosions that obscured his sight Buck could see Moodri’s loving smile like a blessing.
“I . . . I know you don’t believe in them,” Buck added as he remembered the Ionian robes his great-uncle wore, “but I did see them.”
Moodri’s finger lightly pressed against a point between Buck’s eyes, and the boy’s sight cleared of black stars and pinwheels. “All things come from the Mother,” Moodri said, “even Celine and Andarko.”
“Then you believe me?” Buck asked.
“Never look to others for what you know is true within your own two hearts.” Moodri touched his knuckles to Buck’s temple. “I know what you saw, and what you saw is true. For you.”
Buck looked past his great-uncle at the bright ceiling lights, thinking about those words. “So . . . what I saw might not be what I think I saw?”
Moodri laughed. “You are your father’s son, Finiksa.”
“My father?” Buck asked. “Andarko!” He tried to sit up. Waves of pain shot out from his forehead down his arms and his back. “And Celine! Celine was my mother! They were there, Moodri! My parents were on the level above me! And they saved me!”
Gently Moodri eased Buck back against the unusual bed he lay on. “For now you mustn’t think of them. But soon, Finiksa, I promise that you may.”
“Why?” Buck asked. His body thrummed the way it had when his Watcher Brigade had toured the power plants. But it was not a physical vibration this time. It was the afterimage of pain. “I was shocked by an Overseer’s prod, wasn’t I?”
“Focused very high,” Moodri confirmed. He leaned forward so that Buck could see him without having to move again. “You understand the danger you are in?”
“I acted against the Overseers.”
“
Exactly,” Moodri said. “And just as Celine and Andarko saved you in the water hub, soon you must save yourself.”
Buck was confused. “But you said it wasn’t Celine and Andarko. You said—”
“I said nothing, Finiksa.”
Buck sighed. He was used to this. Everything Moodri said, everything he did was a lesson to be studied. “How do I save myself, Uncle?”
Moodri smiled again. “Listen carefully. The Overseers will come for you soon. They will question you. They will demand to know why you tried to stop your crèche mate from cutting the worker. They will demand to know who called to you from the catwalk. And you will have to answer them.”
Buck closed his eyes in despair. He had tried to stop Vornho because he had said the prayer for guidance and knew that what Vornho wanted to do was wrong. He knew he had seen his parents on the catwalk, though as a Watcher he was to have no family but the Overseers. “They will recycle me.”
“Not if you give them the right answers,” Moodri said.
“What answers?” Buck asked. He opened his eyes again, but Moodri and the bright lights were nowhere to be seen. Instead Buck saw a gleaming crystal, no larger than a child’s fingertip, spinning above his head as if dangling from a cord held by an impossibly distant hand. The crystal sent out brilliant streamers of light into space. He couldn’t stop looking at it.
“Listen well, Finiksa. Remember what you truly saw.”
The streamers of light swallowed Buck whole, and he fell again.
C H A P T E R 2
IN THE END, AFTER HE had listened to all the evidence and carefully weighed the pros and cons, Matt Sikes had no choice when it came to making his decision: Amy Stewart was as crazy as she was gorgeous.
“You’re looking at me as if you don’t believe me,” Amy said. She sat in her chair by her computer, loosely dangling her large red-framed glasses from one hand as she leaned back against her desktop looking exhausted. There had been a spark of something vibrant in her when Sikes had first seen her that had not returned once he had told her about Petty’s death. He regretted its passing.
Sikes had pushed his chair back to the other side of the tiny office after he had looked at all twenty-four astronomical plates Amy had displayed on her computer. Then he had listened for more than thirty minutes as the astronomy student had painstakingly laid out all the technical observations and logical conclusions that had led her to believe that the rapidly moving point of light she had photographed with her own experimental asteroid tracking system was some sort of UFO made by second cousins to Mr. Spock. Sikes had stopped making notes after the first ten minutes. He could see no point in following this line of inquiry.
“You’re right,” he said, though he didn’t like the frown that creased her face. “I can’t believe you.”
“Did you hear anything I said?”
“Every word.”
“Do you think I’m making it up?”
Sikes had already asked himself the same question. “No,” he said. “At least not the photographs.”
Amy straightened up in her chair and crossed her arms. “So my analysis is wrong?”
“You’d make a good cop,” Sikes said, admiring the way she was directing their conversation.
“Don’t change the subject. If you accept the plates as real, then your argument is with my interpretation of them. Correct or incorrect?”
“Correct, I guess,” he admitted, though he couldn’t think how she was going to make him accept what couldn’t possibly be true.
Amy looked up at the ceiling. The old acoustical tiles there were dingy gray and marked by orange-rimmed water spots, in discordant counterpoint to the thousands of dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art machinery on her desk. “Look, I have an object approximately five kilometers across with a mass of approximately nine-times-ten-to-the-sixth tonnes. That indicates it’s either made of something with the overall density of balsa wood or that it’s mostly hollow.” She lowered her gaze and stared at Sikes as if daring him to disagree with her.
Sikes took the dare. “So maybe it’s a comet nucleus,” he said. He had read all about them before he had taken Kirby out to the desert to look at Comet Hailey. Most comet nuclei were thought to be masses of ice and dust, he remembered. Nowhere near the density of an iron-nickel asteroid.
Amy jammed her glasses back on. “Pardon me. I forgot. You’re the detective who thinks he’s an astronomer.”
“Well, could it be a comet?” Sikes asked.
Amy lifted an invisible eyebrow. “All right, Galileo, let’s use the scientific method, then.” She held up three fingers, just as his partner, Angie, always did. “First, is its mass over volume consistent with known cometary nuclei? No. Still not dense enough.” She folded down one finger. “Second, could it be a looser collection of dust and ice than we have seen before? Sort of like an interplanetary whirlwind? Again, no.” She folded down a second finger. “It’s cleanly occulted three stars so far, and in each case the spectrum drop-off has been laser sharp. Whatever’s passing in front of those stars has a solid edge.” As she folded down the last finger Amy leaned back with a sigh and stated her conclusion. “It’s got a solid shell. It’s got a hollow interior. It’s not a comet.”
Sikes decided he might as well get into this. “Okay, if it’s solid, then maybe it’s one of those, uh, other kind of asteroids.”
Amy frowned. “Other kind?”
“You know,” Sikes said. “The ones that aren’t made of metal.”
“Ah,” Amy said. “You mean carbonaceous chondritic asteroids.”
Sikes grimaced at all the syllables. “Do I? Are they the ones that aren’t iron?”
“That’s right, but wrong again,” Amy said. “The object has too little mass to be one of those, either.” Amy shifted in her chair and made it creak alarmingly. Except for the computer, Sikes realized that everything else in the office was on the brink of falling apart. “Look, it’s not just this thing’s mass or size that makes it wrong. There’s its albedo.” She paused and looked at him questioningly.
“Ah, its brightness, right?” Sikes said.
“Close enough. The fact is, I’m not just basing everything on the plates I showed you. I’ve run polarimetric analyses on it, comparing its albedo with known polarized samples. I’ve done a radiometric observation to look at it in infrared. I’ve cross-correlated everything, and it’s all wrong. It’s reflectance is wrong. Mass. Size. It’s covered with infrared hot spots, radiating unevenly.” She rolled her shoulders dejectedly as if there were nothing more that could possibly be said. “It is not a natural object. It’s as simple as that.”
Sikes thought back to the arguments he had had with his Uncle Jack, long before Jack had shipped out that last time without telling his nephew, shattering forever a young boy’s faith in all adults. During his last summer with Uncle Jack, when Sikes had been almost thirteen years old, they had had long discussions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Jack, Sikes remembered, didn’t doubt that life existed elsewhere in the universe. But he wasn’t convinced that any of the stories of UFO sightings or crashes were true. Sikes, on the other hand, full of the enthusiasm of a child eager to know more than an adult, fervently wanted to believe in such things. So over that summer Jack had led him through a long and logical examination of the study of UFOs. They had read all the books together. Discussed them endlessly. Years later Sikes had used his uncle’s rigorous outlook on the nature of scientific investigation to survive his academy classes on evidence and deduction.
But most of all from that last magical summer Sikes remembered Uncle Jack’s favorite argument-ending statement. It worked just as well now as it had then, too.
“Just because I can’t say what it is,” Sikes said to Amy, “doesn’t mean that your conclusion is automatically right.” As he waited for Stewart’s reply he wondered when he had lost his boyhood desire for UFOs and aliens to be real. About the time I went back home to my father for the last time, he thought. UFOs
were just another dream of childhood that had been beaten out of him by his father’s drunken rage. Sikes cleared his throat. He decided he had remembered enough about the past for the moment. Despite the occasional letters his uncle still sent, Jack was out of his life forever.
“I think you understand what I’ve got here,” Amy said urgently, as if it mattered to her that he did. Sikes felt pleased that she still wanted to prolong their discussion, even if he was no longer sure that it was giving him anything useful for his case. “Science can never say what something is, it can only say what something isn’t. We look at a phenomenon. We describe a hypothetical set of circumstances that might allow for that phenomenon to exist. And then we try everything we can to chip away at those circumstances. If they can’t stand up to our scrutiny and they fall, good. That’s how science gets better, more detailed, and more insightful. But if the set of circumstances withstands our scrutiny, then we have a powerful piece of information we can use to create new hypothetical sets of circumstances to explain other phenomena.” She looked behind her and tapped the screen where the final plate was still displayed. “Every question you’re asking me I’ve already asked myself. And I’ve ruled out everything natural.”
“It’s a big universe,” Sikes said, feeling foolish for refusing to accept her word. Though not as foolish as he would feel if he did believe in spaceships. “There’re bound to be millions of things out there that we don’t know anything about.”
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 17
