Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (19 page)

“Vornho!” Buck cried. “Don’t! He’s—”

“Silence!”
Coolock’s rage was as sudden as the cutting beam Vornho fired.

“Little fool!”
D’wayn shouted as Buck heard her prod click into focus and begin to hum.

Vornho’s cutting beam aimed wild, crackling uselessly against metal, not flesh.

D’wayn’s prod slammed into Buck’s shoulder, sending him against the railing with a gasp of pain. He looked up to see the prod beginning to descend on him again, this time going for his forehead.

“FIIINIIIKSSAAA!”

The prod stopped in its descent as the deafening cry filled the water hub. Buck, D’wayn, Coolock, and even Vornho whirled to see from where the cry had come.

Buck slumped against the railing and looked out across the water hub’s void. There! On the next level of catwalk above them among a group of gas-stunned scavengers, Buck saw two figures leaning over the railing. One waved frantically down at him. Through the violet mist of the gas they were hard to make out. A male and female he saw. Like paintings of Celine and Andarko ascending from the pit of
am dugas.
But who were they really? And why had—

A blue beam sliced through the air above Buck’s head, angling up to explode in gouts of sparks against the next level’s railing. Buck saw the two figures above jump back, the male pulling on the female’s tunic as if to stop her from attempting to leap through space for Buck.

Behind him Buck could hear Coolock shouting orders to the other Overseer squads that were in the hub, telling them to seize the two slaves on level fifty-eight. The beam kept slicing back and forth. Buck saw a half dozen inert scavengers collapse in sprays of vaporized blood as the beam ripped through them.

Then Buck felt himself lifted painfully by one arm. D’wayn held him so his feet scraped against the catwalk. She held the sparking tip of her prod inches from his face. “Who were they?” she hissed. “How did they know you?”

Buck couldn’t talk. He didn’t know. The prod tip came closer.

Then there was another scream, the pounding of metal, Coolock shouting in anger. Buck twisted his head in time to see the third water worker burst across the width of the catwalk and flip over the railing and plunge down through the layers of holy gas and—

—Coolock’s beam caught the worker in his back—

—the worker vanished in an enormous eruption of flame unlike any other effect of the weapon Buck had seen.

Then Buck felt the explosion’s shock wave rip him from D’wayn’s one-handed grip. His ear valleys rang with the metallic reverberations of the blast. He had no idea what had happened. No clue to whom the male and female had been. Nor why a worker would choose to defy the Overseers by suicide.

All he knew was that D’wayn now towered over him, slowly lowering her prod to his head with a ferocious expression of rage distorting her quivering round face.

Then the prod made contact, but instead of the crackle of pain Buck’s last sensation was of his great-uncle’s voice telling him to be at peace because there was nothing left to fear.

G
EORGE DRAGGED
S
USAN
back through the gas-filled corridor, away from the catwalk, the scavengers, and their son.

“They’re going to kill him,” Susan wailed as they ran. “We have to go back.”

“They won’t kill him!” George said, clamping his fingers around Susan’s arm with the solidity of hull metal. “Didn’t you see what he was wearing?” In the distance he could hear the clang of booted feet on the water hub’s catwalks. He had heard the tall Overseer give the orders. A squad was coming for them.

“Not our son,” Susan sobbed, each word resonating with the rhythm of her running feet. “Not Finiksa.”

“He wears the black scarf of the Watcher Youth Brigade,” George said bitterly. “Our own son is as good as being an Overseer himself.”

“No,” Susan said. “They must have
forced
him to wear it. They—”

“He was present for an execution,” George said, his words coming between gasps for breath. He knew he was being cruel, but he had no choice. Susan
had
to accept the truth, no matter how painful it might be. Once again they had lost a child to a horrible fate.

“But the female Overseer, she was going to use her prod on Finiksa. He
couldn’t
be one of them.”

George skidded to a stop in the corridor, sending billows of white gas roiling ahead of him. He grabbed both of Susan’s arms and pulled her close.

“It’s their
way!”
he snapped at her. “They take our own children from us. They turn them against us. Just as they turn the stories of our own past against us. Whatever we have that’s good they take from us and pervert.”

Susan’s face was streaked with tears. “Then what can we do?”

The word tore at George’s hearts even as he spoke it.
“Nothing!”

He felt Susan sag against his grip. “Stangya, no . . .” She began to cough again. The gas was strong within her.

“He’s gone, Oblakah. We have to let him go or else they will kill us, too!”

“Then let them kill me. Let them—”

“Shhh!” George pleaded. He pulled Susan to him and held her tight. He listened carefully. There was running in the corridor, coming up on them quickly. George made his decision. He hugged Susan a final time, then pushed her away from him. “You go on. I’ll hold them off here. Try to get back to the light bay and—”

“I’m not leaving you,” Susan said. Her eyes were unsteady, unfocused. Another few minutes of exposure to the holy gas and she would be powerless to reject any suggestion George could give her. But for now she was still fighting, still refusing to give up control of her life.

“Oblakah, you must. Otherwise . . . they’ll have won everything.”

“They already have.”

The running grew louder. Any moment the Overseers would be close enough to see their quarry through the mist. Then it wouldn’t matter how fast George and Susan could run. The ship was a closed space, and their capture would be inevitable. There was only one thing George could say.

“Oblakah, listen to me: They haven’t won. They’re nowhere close. There’s a rebellion on board. Do you understand? Some of us are fighting back!”

Susan reacted as if she’d been slapped. “No. That’s impossible.”

“Go now! Get to safety. Then contact Moodri. He’s involved somehow. Or at least he knows about it.”

George could hear shouts among the running.

“Moodri?” Susan’s eyes were wide. “Moodri’s talking of rebellion?”

“Oblakah, please go! I don’t want you to die.”

Susan tried to take a step away but faltered. “I can’t. I can’t leave you.”

A new sound filled the corridor. Another pair of running feet. This time coming from the opposite direction. They were surrounded. There was no escape.

“Andarko,” George cried. He had no other words. He pulled Susan close to him, wrapping her in his arms as if to protect her from everything. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to her. “So sorry.”

A powerful hand fell on his shoulder. It was over. George turned to face his captors, determined to take as many of them with him as he could.

“Stangya! Oblakah! This way!”

George’s mouth fell open. “Ruhtra?”

George’s brother aimed a small black device down the corridor toward the sound of the approaching Overseers. A red light glowed on the object. “Eight of them. Fifty meters and closing.”

“What is that? Where did you come from?” George hadn’t seen his younger brother for years. He hadn’t even been sure that Ruhtra was still on the ship. Yet here he was now, dressed in slave’s tunic and trousers but with an odd belt from which mysterious objects dangled, and wearing a intership communications headband and microphone. George was too shocked to do anything more than stare.

But Ruhtra understood the situation even if George didn’t. “Come with me or be recycled!” Then he turned and ran back into the mist.

George didn’t hesitate. He took Susan’s hand just as she took his, and they both ran after Ruhtra.

They only had to go ten feet. George stared up in amazement. A ceiling plate was open, hanging down like a hatchway. Ruhtra was already up inside the opening it led to. He held out his hand. “Oblakah first.”

Susan leapt for the opening eight feet overhead, hooked her hands inside, then disappeared inside as Ruhtra lifted her. “Now you!” Ruhtra called out.

George jumped. The edge of the opening was rough under his hands, as if it had been imperfectly cut. He pulled himself up partway, then felt Ruhtra and Susan latch onto the waistband of his trousers and haul him up the rest of the way.

They were crowded into a small access tunnel, four feet by four feet. Ruhtra pushed by George, reached through the ceiling opening again, then pulled up the hanging ceiling plate. He locked it shut with a latch, bringing total darkness just as George heard the thundering feet of the Overseers pass by below.

For long moments George sat in the tunnel gasping for breath, hearing Oblakah catch hers. Then he heard a small click, and Ruhtra whispered, “Protein retrieved.”

George stared into the darkness in the direction from which his brother’s voice had come.
Protein retrieved.
Even George knew it was a code, like the indecipherable commands the Overseers shouted to one another. He felt a sudden chill of anticipation as he realized that he might at last have come into contact with a group organized like the Overseers, but working
against
them.

“I have a thousand questions for you, Ruhtra,” George whispered into the darkness.

A small red light appeared in the darkness. Ruhtra’s face was dimly lit beneath it. “Then move quietly and follow me,” Ruhtra commanded, “and I shall try to answer them.”

Ten minutes later they came to an intersection node in the access tunnels that was large enough for them to stand in. Seven other tunnels led out of the node at different angles, and beside each opening a single yellow light glowed. Something was written beside each light, but George couldn’t see clearly enough to read any of the markings.

“We’ll be safe here for a few minutes at least,” Ruhtra said. He moved carefully over to George—the floor of the intersection node was covered with thick bundles of cables and pipes—and embraced his brother tightly. “I thought you had been off-loaded on Antagonus. I thought I would never see you again.”

“Nor I you,” George said. The emotions of the day were threatening to overwhelm him. To find his son and realize he was lost all in the same instant. To face certain death at the Overseers’ hands and then to be saved by a brother he had thought was gone forever. George felt a sob rising within him. It had been so long since he had allowed himself to feel sorrow or sadness, because he knew that would proclaim the ship the final victor. But now, with Ruhtra’s presence, with Moodri’s hints, with the discovery of a network of tunnels in the ship of which it appeared the Overseers had no knowledge, sorrow and sadness seemed finally permissible because each feeling held the promise of hope.

George held his brother at arm’s length, drinking in the sight of him. Ruhtra’s face had aged dramatically in the time since they had last seen each other, yet his still-familiar features brought back strong memories of their days with their parents in the dormitory, before the Overseers had come for George.

But that was the past. It was the present that was important now. And the future.

“Is
there a revolt?” George asked.

Ruhtra looked pained. “Please, Stangya. I can’t answer that. Even if I knew what the answer was.”

George was momentarily confused. Ruhtra slipped from his grasp and went to Susan. She was sitting on a thick bundle of pipes that snaked from one tunnel into another. She had wrapped her arms around her legs and was rocking slowly back and forth, staring blankly ahead of her.

“The gas has taken her,” Ruhtra said as he crouched to look into Susan’s expressionless eyes. “Has she no more
eemikken\
she can take?”

“Eemikken\?”
George said. “Only the Overseers take that.”

Ruhtra stood up and stretched. His various implements clinked against one another on his laden belt. “No,” he said. “The Overseers dispense
eemikken\
lozenges to those whom they wish to reward or to coerce, but their own ability to resist the gas is linked to their tattoos.” Ruhtra idly traced a finger around his own bare wrist. “Some sort of dermal transference, the Elders say. High dosage of the antidote to the holy gas released through the skin at a constant rate.”

“I did not know that,” George said. “But what of me? I have taken nothing, but the gas has yet to affect me.”

Ruhtra smiled—an expression seldom seen upon the ship. He pointed a finger at the trident-shaped spot above his temple. “That’s because you’re like me,” he said. “Family: Third Star’s Ocean. Most of us are resistant to the gas, except to very high doses, of course. There are other families as well. I’ve heard an entire tribe was resistant, and they were among the first to be off-loaded.”

George traced his own trident-shaped spot, just like Ruhtra’s, almost identical to their father’s. And to Moodri’s. “Resistant?” he repeated. That would explain so much.

“But trust me, Stangya, if ever there are Overseers around, act as if you have accepted the release of the gas.” Ruhtra read the question in George’s eyes. “For a long time, the Elders say, the Overseers have refused to believe that any of us could be resistant. But as the generations have passed, and the Overseers have been mating the best workers with the best workers, they have strengthened this capability within certain families.”

“Oblakah was right,” George said. It made perfect sense. In a gas-dulled work force the best workers would naturally be those who were most able to withstand the effects of the gas. And like George and Susan, those who were most resistant were more able to couple and more likely to bring forth podlings who in turn would share both their parents’ resistance. George wanted to laugh. It was such perfect justice. “The Overseers have been breeding the very workers who will rise up against them!”