Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (51 page)

Not knowing what to expect, George took his first step into an alien artifact.

It was a long white room, blazing with light. It had a harsh smell. He heard the alien music playing outside.

He heard the line they had been discussing.

“Ellay izza grey’tbig free-ay.”
He could almost feel the immense spirituality that underlay it now.

His senses were overloading in the strange environment. He squinted until his eyes could adjust to the light. He heard podlings squeaking and realized that the room was lined with rows of podling nests. How nice, he thought. The aliens have provided for our children. Someone at the end of the room looked back at him.

“Stangya?”

His spots threatened to lift from his skull as he recognized the sweet voice calling to him.

“Stangya!”

And Susan was running into his arms, and he held her and lifted her against this world’s gravity, and the alien music played, and the podlings cried, and little Dareveen squealed in her nest, and for one brief, irrational moment George Francisco felt as if he had come home.

Neither he nor Susan would ever forget Cathy Frankel for the kindness she had done them. And forever after, whenever they heard Dionne Warwick sing their song, they would sigh and remember what it was like to have their dreams come true.

For the very first time in their lives.

S
IKES HAD BEEN WORRIED
that because he had never gotten around to having all his old uniforms cleaned, he was going to look scraggly on patrol in the AQF. But after three days in the desert even Theo’s uniform—a good two sizes too small for the stomach he had grown as a detective—looked as good as anyone else’s.

“Come on, admit it,” Theo said as they walked from the police barracks to make their six o’clock call for breakfast. “When you were watching all that Desert Storm shit on TV, part of you wanted to be out there, didn’t it?”

Sikes fiddled with his hat, trying to make sure that it wasn’t making his hair stick out over his ears to make him look like the cops who had arrived from Bakersfield. Mayberry was more like it. “At least in Desert Storm some of the soldiers got to
do
something, Theo. All
we’ve
been doing is standing around getting tans and searching trucks.”

Theo held out his hands and studied the backs of them. “This is about as tanned as you can get, son. Guess that means we’ve got to be promoted to something new.”

“Yeah,” Sikes said as they joined the depressingly long line leading into the mess tent. “Like searching trucks
and
cars. Oh, boy, I can hardly wait.”

It took them almost half an hour to make their way to the front of the line. When they got there, breakfast looked like it was something that had been brought up from the
Titanic.
Kirby had made better food for him when she’d been five years old.

As quickly as they could, Sikes and Theo left the hot and foul-smelling mess tent and sat outside with their trays on the hood of a Humvee painted basic olive drab. All the desert-camouflaged units were out at the ACP—that was the military’s way of saying Alien Containment Perimeter. Also known as a big blazing ditch of gas and oil.

At least the wind wasn’t blowing the smoke toward the camp this morning, Sikes thought. So far. He decided he missed his own place, as small and as noisy as the apartment was. Maybe he wouldn’t move after all. Who knew?

He gave up on his breakfast. “I thought we came out here so we wouldn’t be punished.”

Theo mechanically shoveled down what Sikes hadn’t eaten. “This is a lot better than any Internal Affairs interview I ever had. Count your blessings, son. With luck we’ll be out here long enough that Franklin Stewart’s buddies’ll forget to send us those Security Oaths. Why don’t you just try and let the whole thing blow over?”

“Let a murder case blow over. I’m supposed to feel good about doing that?”

Theo put his now completely empty tray on the hood beside him. “You’re just a rook, and you don’t need to start out with anything like that mess on your record. Trust me.”

Sikes could tell there was more that Theo was thinking that he wasn’t saying. He wondered what trouble was listed on his ex-partner’s own lengthy record. He wondered how many Internal Affairs interviews Theo had been part of and why. But like seeing him put too much money on the waiter’s tray in the strip club, Sikes decided he didn’t want or need to know the answer. If it was the wrong one, he didn’t know if he could handle it.

“You two Sikes and Miles? LAPD?” That question came from a young sergeant with the letters MP emblazoned on her helmet. She carried a metal clipboard and a pen.

Sikes and Theo hopped off the Humvee. “That’s us,” Theo said. He adjusted his tie. It helped hide the way the fabric stretched around the buttonholes of his blue shirt. Sikes straightened his gleaming silver badge. He missed his detective’s gold shield, too.

The sergeant made two checks on her clipboard. “Okay. Get over to Tent Fifteen by oh seven hundred hours.”

“Tent Fifteen?” Sikes repeated. That was in the next layer of the camp that had been constructed. So far he and Theo had been restricted to duty in the outermost layer, searching the vehicles that drove in and out for anything that might have come from the crash site. There were supposed to be five layers to the camp, just like the Pentagon. Everyone was laying bets about what was in the centermost layer, but so far no one had any hard data.

“You got a briefing,” the sergeant told them. “Looks like you two boys are moving inside.”

Twenty minutes later Sikes and Theo were sitting in uncomfortable folding metal chairs along with fifty other police officers in a large double-walled tent. Sikes recognized two of the others from having worked with them. Everyone was in uniform. The military had insisted on that. The innermost layers of the camp were strictly off-limits to civilians.

A man walked onto a raised platform at the front of the tent at precisely seven o’clock. He had silver hair and wore a black uniform with three gold strips on his sleeve. “Naval Intelligence,” Sikes whispered to Theo.

“Thought I recognized the stink,” Theo said.

The commander on the stage wasn’t Franklin Arthur Stewart, but he might has well have been. Sikes knew without a doubt now that this had been the military’s show from the beginning. None of the staggering amounts of equipment that had been assembled in the Mojave in the past ten days had come out of nowhere. Somewhere, somehow, the Pentagon had been ready for something like this. Sikes suddenly remembered he’d forgotten to ask Grazer what Stewart had meant when he said they’d known all about what might happen since “Roswell.”

Without preamble the naval commander began to speak. “This is a preliminary briefing to bring you people up to speed about what’s been going on inside the ACP. The information you will receive is privileged. Any attempt to disseminate this information before you have been given official authorization will result in your being incarcerated by the military police until such time as this emergency is declared to be over. You will sign letters agreeing to these terms upon your exit from this briefing. Am I understood?”

A sprinkling of gung-ho types chorused back a few “Yes, sirs!” Sikes sank lower in his chair and moaned. They were everywhere.

“Hush up,” Theo said. “This should be interesting.”

“I guess,” Sikes grumbled.

“Ten days ago, as you are aware, what is presumed to have been a spaceship of nonhuman design and manufacture crash-landed in the desert approximately ten miles from this location. Over the course of approximately five hours, between two and three hundred thousand alien beings evacuated that ship, which subsequently exploded. We do not know the cause of the explosion at this time.

“The aliens, despite the reports you might have heard to the contrary,
are
intelligent. They possess a complex spoken
and
written language, and great strides are being made in creating a workable translation dictionary. They also exhibit extremely complex social and familial behaviors, accompanied by clear evidence of religious beliefs, including, we believe, some kind of belief in an afterlife. I say this to remind all of you that what we are dealing with out there are not, repeat
not,
dumb animals or supernatural beings. We have every reason to believe that their culture is at least as complex and meaningful to them as any Earth culture is to us.”

The commander walked back and forth as he talked, waving down a few raised hands by saying, “You will have a chance to ask questions at the end of this briefing. Now, on to what we
don’t
know about them.

“First of all, there is the matter of the fighting that broke out on the first night after the crash. We still don’t know what that was about. We are having limited conversations with a few of the aliens”—more than a few “ahhs” went through the audience at that—“and as our facility with each other’s language improves, we hope to learn the details.

“For now, however, we have concluded that there are at least two factions among the aliens, with great animosity between them. Our current theory is that one faction was the prisoner of the second. Whether this means that one faction is made up of criminals or prisoners of war we do not know. For now, however, the aliens have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to organize themselves, to use the supplies that we have provided for them, and to police themselves. Incidents of fighting dropped off dramatically about the fourth day, when we finally determined what their dietary requirements are.” He gazed over his audience. “Are there any questions?”

“What
are
their dietary requirements?”

“That is classified information at this time.” There was a sound of general puzzlement from the audience. “The aliens have not brought a food supply with them,” the commander said. “We have taken it upon ourselves to feed them. Some of what they eat is not found in the normal chain of food supplies, and early disclosure of what those foodstuffs are could lead to hoarding and result in increased cost to the taxpayer.” He stared intently at the audience. “You are not military personnel, so I will forgive you your outburst this time. But when we say some information is classified, rest assured that we have a good reason for keeping it that way. Next question.”

“What do you call them?” came one.

“As I said, their language is complex. They appear to have many terms by which they refer to themselves. The one that most of them seem to agree upon is, as close as I can say it,
Tencton-ta.
We have begun to call them Tenctonese. The term also works for the name of their language. Anyone else?”

“What are they doing here?”

The commander shrugged. “It appears something went wrong with their vehicle. As you know, the vehicle that crashed here was actually just a small part of what people originally thought was an asteroid traveling toward the sun. That other section of the vehicle appears to have been destroyed in space. The vehicle that landed here could very well be like a lifeboat. As of oh two hundred hours today a secondary containment perimeter was set up around the crash site itself, and a great number of experts are going through the wreckage. We hope to know more about it soon.”

“Do you know what planet they’re from?”

“No,” the commander said. “Its name, we presume, is Tencton, but it’s not located in our solar system.”

“Are there any more of the vehicles out there?”

“That’s classified.”

Stunned silence. Then, “How long are they going to stay here?”

“That’s classified.”

“Can they ever go back to wherever they came from?”

“Classified.”

A few of the cops in the audience began to laugh at the repetition.

Someone yelled, “What are
we
doing out here?” There was more laughter. Even the commander broke down and smiled.

“Each one of you has been selected because your service record indicates that you have experience dealing with members of cultures other than your own.”

Sikes turned to look at Theo. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

Theo chuckled. “It means you’re a cop in L.A., son.”

“And now,” the commander continued, “your government asks you to put that experience to work in a way that very few of you might have imagined.”

“We’re going to
work
with those things?” someone shouted.

The commander seemed to ignore the question. “Right now this camp supports a classified number of specialists. But that number is in the hundreds, and it’s growing every day. Our best people in engineering, physics, computer science, linguistics, mathematics, medicine—you name it—they are all being paired with what we hope are their equal numbers from among the Tenctonese. That demand on our available manpower, combined with support duties for ourselves and especially for those within the ACP, is quite frankly a strain on available specialist personnel. Therefore you officers have been asked to take over all nonspecialist duties requiring contact between humans and Tenctonese.”

No one said anything. It was the phrase “humans and Tenctonese” that had done it.

“Are
we going to work with them?” a familiar voice called out.

The commander seemed to lose his military bearing for a moment. “Off the record, gentlemen and ladies, it appears we have no choice.”

“I know what that’s like,” Sikes muttered.

There were air-conditioned buses outside the tent to take the police officers to their staging area. But the staging area wasn’t where the officers expected it to be.

The buses drove them away from the camp, across the desert, toward the wall of fire and the waiting Tenctonese.

T’
KSAM MOTIONED TO
B
UCK
to stay down, and Buck had no difficulty in obeying. He ground his body as tightly as he could into the dirt of the new world, wishing he could pass straight into it.

Both he and T’ksam had heard the approaching
sold’yurz
ground vehicle many minutes earlier, but it had been miles away at the time, giving no indication that it would come anywhere near them.