Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (38 page)

Sikes tried again. “How long did it take to get here?”

Kirby looked pained. “I don’t know,” she said pitifully. “I thought they were going to kill you. I thought—”

“Shhh, Kirby, shhh,” Sikes said urgently. “We can get out of this, but I’m going to need your help. How did they get us here? What did we go in?”

“A van,” Kirby said.

The door clicked open.

“A Chevy Magic Wagon, actually,” Amy Stewart said, standing in a halo of bright light from the hallway beyond.

It immediately struck Sikes as odd that he wasn’t surprised by Amy’s presence, but he wasn’t. There was an outside chance that she had been kidnapped, too, he conceded. But somehow he doubted it. “Did you kill Petty?” he asked. It seemed to be the only reasonable thing to say.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but no, Detective Sikes, I didn’t. You could say Dr. Petty was responsible for his own death.”

Sikes heard the unspoken qualification in her husky voice. “But you pulled the trigger, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t have time,” Amy said calmly. “I was too busy doctoring his computer mail records to give myself an alibi.” She almost smiled as she saw Sikes’s mystified reaction. “Come on, detective. If a two-bit hacker like Grazer can get into the system, why couldn’t I?”

The full implication of what she said didn’t hit Sikes for a good five seconds. “How do you know about Grazer?” he asked.

Amy stepped out of the way so another figure could enter the room—a blond man in black pants and a black sweater. The only thing Sikes could see clearly was the .45 automatic he wore in his shoulder holster.

“Why don’t we go downstairs?” Amy said pleasantly. “And we can . . . what do you people say? ‘Close this case’?”

Sikes stared at her as if ignoring the circumstances. “Does that mean you’re ready to give up?” he asked.

“No,” Amy said. “It means you are.”

As Sikes cautiously walked down the broadloom-covered stairs of what turned out to be a large and mostly empty new house, he saw how Amy Stewart had come to know about Grazer.

Grazer was sitting on a navy-blue couch in the living room at the bottom of the stairs. He was wearing handcuffs and a frown, and his three-piece suit was torn and in disarray. On the other end of the couch Angie Perez’s body was slumped sideways, unconscious. A thin trickle of blood had dried near her hairline. She wore handcuffs as well.

Sikes felt his legs threaten to give way. Three cops and a teenage girl taken right off the street—not the sort of crime any rational person expected to get away with. Either he and Angie and Grazer had to fight their way out of here—wherever here was—or they were going to be killed. It was as simple as that.

Sikes’s hands were still tied, and the silent blond man with the shoulder holster pushed him onto the couch between Grazer and Angie. Kirby was motioned over to what could only be a La-Z-Boy recliner at the end of the couch. Other than the couch, the recliner, and a few chairs, the only piece of furniture Sikes could see in the room was a tall cabinet of smoked glass and navy lacquer that held a large television and a stereo. He felt he was in a showroom of some kind and not a house after all. The living-room windows were as heavily curtained as the one in the upstairs room.

“They got me in my garage,” Sikes told Grazer.

Both men looked around to see if they were going to be told not to speak. But neither Amy nor the blond gunman said anything.

“We got it at the Denny’s down from the station house,” Grazer said. “Angie got hungry.” He sounded as if he were a four-year-old whining.

Sikes turned to his partner. She was out, but she was breathing regularly. “Looks like Angie put up a fight,”

“She was warned not to,” Amy said.

She stood by the television cabinet. CNN was on, the sound off. There was no sign of the idealistic young student Sikes had interviewed at UCLA. He had a feeling he knew why: It had all been an act. Every word of it.

“Are you going to tell us what all this is about before you kill us?” Sikes asked, then he instantly wished he hadn’t because of the look on Kirby’s face.

“We’re not going to kill anyone,” Amy said. She looked at Kirby. “Don’t worry. Your father’s being an alarmist.” She stepped back to shout through an open doorway that Sikes guessed led to a kitchen.

“Uncle Frank, could you bring out some paper towels or something?”

A moment later the mystery man from the photograph in Amy’s office walked into the room—ex-Commander Franklin Arthur Stewart, late of Naval Intelligence. In person he had the same indefinable features and skin color that Amy had, combining the heritage of three or four different racial groups, Sikes guessed. He was dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a light blue sweater, far removed from anything military. He carried a roll of white paper towels.

“The girl could use them,” Amy said, pointing to Kirby’s sticky face.

“Awfully kind of you, Uncle Frank,” Sikes said derisively.

Stewart tore off a handful of towels and gave them to Kirby. Kirby vigorously wiped at her face with them, using both tied hands together.

“So what’s next?” Sikes asked. “Some chips and dip and then you send us home?”

“Something like that,” Amy said. She looked at the television, then checked her watch. A commercial was playing.

Sikes looked at Grazer. “I give up. Do
you
know what this is about?”

Grazer made an elaborate shrug. Then he spoke loudly. “No. But it doesn’t matter. As soon as we didn’t show up for our five o’clock meeting with the captain, APBs would have been put out on all of us. It’s just a matter of time before—”

“Save it, Detective Grazer.” It was the first thing Franklin Stewart had said. “There are no APBs going out on you. And your captain knows why you missed your meeting.”

Sikes could almost hear Theo Miles explaining how all the pieces were fitting together. If this guy’s people had managed to get through to the captain, then their power had to come from a higher source.

“So how are things at the Pentagon these days, Commander?” Sikes asked.

Stewart had the decency to look amused. “I wouldn’t know. I work for the Fuller Institute these days. There’s no official connection between it and any government agency.”

“Except through a bank account in Switzerland?” Sikes challenged. “Or is that passé now? Do you run your money through the Cayman Islands with the drug runners and the other scum?”

Stewart had stopped smiling. “That’s quite an attitude you have, detective.”

Knowing that he had struck a nerve, Sikes was just about to respond with another attack when Grazer stepped into it.

“What do you expect him to have, talking with the kind of animal that would shoot an old man in cold blood?”

Stewart coolly walked over to Grazer and slapped him so hard the forensic accounting detective fell against Sikes.

“Not bad, Bry,” Sikes muttered. “But Uncle Frank didn’t kill Petty.” Sikes nodded over at the silent blond man with the .45 in his shoulder holster. “Motormouth over there did it.”

“Yeah?” Grazer said. The left side of his face was blazing red from the blow.

“Please don’t stop, detective,” Stewart said conversationally, as if he hadn’t just hit Grazer.

Sikes shrugged recklessly. As long as they were talking they’d stay alive, even if they did have to take a few knocks, “It makes perfect sense to me, Uncle Frank. You’re the connection to the military. Amy’s the brains behind the photographs. And Mr. Happy over there is the government killer. Amy couldn’t do it. You were too smart to do it. So you brought in a specialist from Washington. I guess work has been scarce since the good old days in Nicaragua.”

Stewart regarded him steadily as if they were predator and prey. “Fascinating. A specialist from Washington to do what?”

“Kill Randolph Petty.”

“And why would I want that?”

“Because of the photographs.”

Stewart walked back to stand beside Amy. “The photographs. I see. And did I have Petty killed because the photographs were mine and I wanted them back? Or because they were Petty’s and he wouldn’t give them to me? Or because they were someone else’s and he was going to give them to yet another someone?” Stewart took a remote control wand from the top of the television. “You see, I know how your business works, detective. You have a crime, to be sure. But you have no motive. And without a motive you have no suspect. And without a suspect . . . well, you understand.”

“I
saw
the photographs,” Sikes said. He suddenly wondered if his captors had any intention of killing anyone. Maybe they thought they could stonewall the whole case. Maybe Theo Miles had been right about everything.

Stewart didn’t seem to be worried. “But photographs of
what,
detective?” He went over to a small chair and sat down to face the television. “All you saw were a few screens of computer data. Enough to make you
think
you had seen the real thing for . . . for afterwards.”

“Afterwards? After what?”

“After the danger has passed,” Stewart said. He checked his watch as well. “Ah, here we go.” He pointed the remote at the television and the sound came up just as CNN began its science and technology report.

“What danger?” Sikes asked.

But Stewart said nothing. Instead he gestured to the screen as if Sikes would find his answer there.

He did. The lead story concerned a report from astronomers in Russia who had announced the discovery of the fastest-moving object in the solar system—a large asteroid almost five kilometers in length that would intersect Earth’s orbit within the next twenty-four hours. The report said that the asteroid would easily miss the Earth at a distance of several million miles, and at the rate it was traveling it would actually leave the solar system. Indeed, there was some speculation that given its speed, the asteroid had originated outside the solar system, and the Russian astronomers were urging that all observatories train their instruments on the asteroid in what might be an unprecedented opportunity to study something from beyond our own sun’s influence.

“They don’t know what it is, do they?” Sikes said.

“No,” Amy answered. “And they won’t until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

Stewart killed the sound as the news went on to another story. He looked at Sikes and scratched at his chin. “Have you ever seen a space probe, detective?”

“Like a satellite or something?” The chattier Franklin Stewart became, the better Sikes liked it. True, the blond with the .45 was still keeping them covered, but Sikes was beginning to hope that they might all survive this encounter yet.

“That’s right,” Stewart said. “A Voyager, for instance. Or Galileo. Or the Vikings. Most of them could fit into this room. And the better we get at making them, the smaller they’re becoming. We keep cramming more intelligence into smaller computer chips. We make instruments more sensitive and crowd more of them together.” He stood up and handed the remote to Amy. “The advantage being that the less massive a probe is, the less energy it needs to get where it’s going, so the cheaper it is for us to launch it. It’s an evolutionary line, so to speak. The smarter we are, the smaller we make them.” He stared fixedly at Sikes. “Except for one particular class of spacecraft.” He stopped as if he expected Sikes to continue for him.

But Grazer did instead. “The space shuttle.”

“Very good, detective.”

For a moment Grazer perked up at the praise until he remembered its source. He slumped against the back of the couch.

Stewart continued. “The space shuttle and the space station. Two of the largest, most cumbersome and complex objects ever built by humans. And you know why?”

This time Sikes answered. “Because they have to keep humans alive in space for long periods of time. Jesus Christ. You think there’s somebody on that thing, don’t you?”

Amy tapped the remote against her open palm. “No, we
know
that there’s somebody—or
something
—on board that craft.”

“It’s the only possible explanation for its configuration,” Franklin Stewart added. “It’s huge. It’s hollow. You don’t need empty space for scientific instruments. But you do need enormous amounts of space to maintain life.”

“You have to grow food,” Amy said. “You have to be able to recirculate and replenish your atmosphere. You need room to exercise. Room for privacy—if
they
need such a thing.” She shuddered.

“There can be no doubt that that thing is inhabited,” Franklin Stewart concluded.

For a moment everyone in the room was silent. Then Kirby said, “You mean an honest-to-God spaceship is coming here?” Sikes couldn’t remember when he had heard more excitement in her voice. Not since she was a little girl waiting for Santa Claus, he decided.

“I still don’t get it,” Sikes said. He had to keep the two talking until he could figure out how to disarm blondie and get Kirby and Angie out of here safely. Thank God Grazer wasn’t complicating things and was letting him take the lead. It looked as if Angie had been wrong. Grazer could keep quiet sometimes. “So there’re a bunch of little green men passing by. What’s wrong with anybody knowing? Why not say hello or something?”

Franklin Stewart gave Sikes a condescending look. “You don’t know anything about history, do you, detective?”

Without thinking Sikes nodded at Grazer. “He does.” Then held his breath. Once unleashed, Grazer could provoke Stewart into shooting them all just to shut him up.

Stewart addressed Grazer. “Very well, can
you
think of a single instance in human history when one society has made contact with a more technologically advanced second society and
survived?”

Grazer chewed his lip for a moment. “You know, Sikes, he might have a point.”

“Of course he has a point,” Amy said. “Look at Native North Americans. They thrived on this continent for centuries. And now, five centuries after Columbus, they’re a footnote to history. Decimated by war. By disease. Their land gone. Their culture something to be gaped at in museums and gift shops.” She pointed the remote control at Sikes. Her face seemed pinched and tight to him now. He wondered why he had ever found her so attractive. “Do you want that to happen to an entire species, detective? Your
own
species? Do you actually want to attract the attention of beings so advanced they can move nine-times-ten-to-the-sixth tonnes from star to star? Would you care to guess what this planet might look like a single century after any first contact like that? What would happen to our science? Our religions? Our cultural heritage?”