Alien Nation #2 - Dark Horizon Read online

  On July 31, 1991, the final episode of ALIEN NATION™, “Green Eyes” aired, ending the series with a blockbuster finale and an exciting cliffhanger. In “Green Eyes” the Newcomers were faced with a deadly new bacteria created by a ruthless group of humans called Purists, who were determined to rid the Earth of the alien Tenctonese. As the story closed, all of the ALIEN NATION characters were in crisis, and the Francisco family was infected with the bacteria, facing certain death. This story was never resolved . . . until now.

  DARK HORIZON was a two-hour ALIEN NATION script commissioned by Twentieth Century Fox. The story would have resolved the cliffhanger and kicked off ALIEN NATION’S second season. With the final cancellation of the series, the script was put away and fans were left with their questions unanswered.

  Pocket Books is now proud to present a novelization by critically acclaimed science fiction author K.W. Jeter, of the entire action-packed story that began with “Green Eyes” and ended with “Dark Horizon.” As the story opens, George Francisco and Matthew Sikes stand watch over George’s family, while the Earth faces a new threat. A ruthless Overseer has come from space to recover the Tenctonese slaves, and he will stop at nothing to see that the Newcomers—as well as the entire human race—are enslaved forever . . .

  “When Matthew Sikes

  Looked Up, a Vision

  Came to Him . . .”

  Looking at the nurses’ station, he saw that all the Newcomers were gone.

  There were none of them left in the hospital, or out on the street, or down at the police station.

  They were all dead, murdered by a weapon you couldn’t even see, taken away and buried, or their ashes strewn across the desert, the first of this new world that they’d ever seen. All gone, taking with them their funny-sounding talk, their strange ways, the weird stuff you couldn’t believe they’d actually eat. All of that—gone.

  They were all gone, and Sikes felt his heart, the single one inside his chest, break with loneliness.

  Alien Nation titles

  #1: The Day of Descent

  #2: Dark Horizon

  Published by POCKET BOOKS

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1993 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

  ALIEN NATION is a trademark of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-73600-0

  First Pocket Books printing August 1993

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  This one’s also for Lydia & Arthur, and Brynne

  & Michael, and—are they still here?—Judith &

  Gar.

  C H A P T E R 1

  DOORS WERE FOR secret things. And here there were no doors.

  Even his eyes—he kept them open, the eyelids drawn partway down, a warrior’s cold, hard gaze. That saw all, judged all, condemned all. To meet the gaze of the Chekkah—to find oneself pinned by that unblinking scan—was a prelude to one of two things. Obedience . . .

  Or death.

  Ahpossno thought, and did not think, upon these things. They had been engraved so long ago upon his hearts that they whispered in the slow, measured pace of his respiration, the tide of blood into his tensed, coiled muscles. A Chekkah did not sink into the weariness and ease of lesser, weaker creatures. A knife does not lose its killing edge. It stays ready. Even in his meditations, the deep, wordless handling of his vows and disciplines, heavy as black stones worn smooth by constant touch—even here, at the still center of his being, he was ready to strike with the cold fury of the Chekkah. The meditation was but the honing of the knife.

  This place, this nonplace . . . Ahpossno could see, to the side of his unwavering gaze, his commanding officer mount the catwalk that led to this bank of personal chambers. The networks of pipes and bundled wires, the unadorned guts and workings of the mother ship, mazed behind the officer, in fluorescent glare and hard-cut shadow. No doorways, no means of hiding things between one warrior and another, interfered with the officer’s progress through the ship’s bowels. The metal heels of his boots rang dully upon the catwalk’s grid, the echoes dying slowly in the vast enclosure.

  Ahpossno remained amidst his dark nonthoughts. The approach of his commanding officer had been noted and placed in the appropriate rank in the hierarchy of his concerns. He knew already why the officer was heading this way, and of what he would wish to speak; the officer had come before—tiresomely, to Ahpossno—and spoken always of the same thing. The mission, Ahpossno’s mission, in the place—a real place, a planet of dirt and water and sky unbounded by curved metal—towards which the mother ship moved through the greater darkness and the hard, unblinking gaze of stars.

  The officer’s stride sounded, metal against metal, only a few meters away. There was still time—the nontime of perfect concentration—to hold in meditation, the weapons of mind and muscle and nerve poised and ready. For the Chekkah, a millisecond was equal in value to a lifetime. Ahpossno had executed slaves with the single prescribed blow to the axilla, both as a training exercise and as punishment for those who had been so foolish as to entertain thoughts of rebellion. He had knelt over the dying ones and seen, in the last fading of consciousness in their eyes, the blossoming of wisdom in an instant that others took all their lives to truly realize. That they were nothing, less than nothing, a smear of grease to be wiped from the hands of their Overseers.

  So much could be learned in such a small piece of time . . . Ahpossno focused his absence of thought upon the dark center inside his skull, darkness as infinite as that outside the walls of the mother ship.

  “Son of blood.”

  The officer stood in the opening of the cubicle. No door. Ahpossno brought himself back from his meditations, to this specific place and moment, a small reality separate from the greater one.

  His gaze met that of the officer. The slight narrowing of his pupils, as though a new light source had appeared in his vision, was all the salute required by military etiquette.

  He returned the greeting. “Your brother.” Many cycles ago—in the unknowing, limited measure of time—he would have said Your child to even the lowest in rank. That had been when he had been nothing, a soft and weak thing scrambling to survive the first circles of the Chekkah training, which left most dead, or broken in their bodies and minds and wishing for death. He had survived, and had moved through the narrowing circles, to the still darkness at the center. He had become a hard thing that could call itself brother to all other Chekkah.

  “You have maintained your course of preparation.” A statement, not a question.

  Ahpossno remained seated on the cubicle’s bare pallet, his hands resting in the meditation position above his knees. “Preparation never ceases.” Perfect readiness. The honed knife.

  “Such is truth.” The officer acknowledged the catechism phrase, one of the first wisdoms a child would learn. His posture relaxed slightly inside his insignialess shipboard uniform. Formalities were now to be dispensed with. “I have some more information that you should find useful.”

  Behind the mask of his face, Ahpossno regarded with distaste the minute shift in the officer’s posture and muscle poise. The dulling of the knife blade. “I am eager to hear.”

  “We have progressed much closer to our destination—”

  The fool. Ahpossno’s tongue curled
in the bitterness of his own saliva. Of course the ship had come closer, he merely had to touch the bare metal of the cubicle’s walls, and he could feel, through the insulating layers of bulkhead and armor, the fine vibration of the ship’s exterior engines, the seethe and dissolution of particle and energy, reaction and thrust. He had felt in the pit of his stomach the drop and yaw of the navigator’s leaps, the motionless change that annihilated the great spaces between stars. Did this officer think it would come as news that the ship had not been stationary all this time?

  He held his anger concealed, and let the officer’s words tick on.

  “—close enough that our data analysts have been able to start forming a profile of the specific planet.”

  “I believed we had enough information already.” Ahpossno concealed as well the level of his interest in the officer’s statement. “Enough to initiate this mission.”

  “Yes, of course.” The officer turned his head to profile, gazing along the walkway outside the row of cubicles. The pattern of his spots was marred by a ragged, three-rowed scar that ran across the curve of his skull. Was he trying to impress with this souvenir of a ritual duel, a reminder of his younger days in the brotherhood? Ahpossno had fought more than one such duel—they were stupid things, of adolescent heat and pent-up tension—and had come away from them unscarred, his opponents dropping their rakedaggers to stanch the flow of their own milky pink blood from their ripped temples and eye sockets. The officer brought back his level gaze. “That the planet is capable of sustaining life—Tenctonese life—that was established soon after the slave ship made its accidental landfall there. Oxygen and water sufficient for our metabolism are in abundance. With that datum it was assumed that life-forms indigenous to the planet were of such variety and quantity to sustain most, if not all, of the slaves that survived the landing.”

  “Was that assumption in error?”

  “No—the ship is now close enough for a more detailed spectrographic analysis of the destination planet’s atmosphere. Methane gas and other biological indicators would support the conclusion that the slave ship’s population found conditions not only sufficient for survival, but for flourishing. There is the reasonable expectation that in evacuating the planet, we may have to transport numbers greater than the slave ship’s original cargo.”

  “A difficulty much to be desired.” Ahpossno allowed his face to register a degree of satisfaction. “Our masters will be pleased with this bonus. To retrieve such a number more than justifies this mission.”

  “It’s not as simple as that.” A nervous tic, a sign of weakness, appeared in the commanding officer’s physical form; the thumb of one hand rubbed against the knuckle of a finger. Ahpossno, without shifting the direction of his gaze, noted this failure, the partial triumph of the shifting universe over a warrior’s equanimity. “The spectrographic analysis also shows atmospheric elements—elevated levels of carbon dioxide, some simple hydrocarbons, plus rarer factors, both radioactive and inert—consistent with a relatively high state of technological development.” The ball of the thumb dug harder at the knuckle. “The slave ship landed upon a planet with a native intelligent species.”

  “All the better.” Ahpossno anticipated and savored the praise that would soon come. “Not only shall the lost slaves and their progeny be returned to our masters, but another race will be put under the yoke of proper servitude. The masters always require more clever hands to do their bidding.” Warmed by such pleasant thoughts, he idly wondered if the planet’s native species had hands at all. Perhaps they had some other form, not Tenctonoid at all, perhaps not even vertebrates. Tentacled creepers, blind worms. It didn’t matter. Technology meant intelligence, which meant some sort of brain and nervous system. And that meant the creatures could feel pain, and through pain, fear. The lash would be applied—all the manifold varieties that the masters’ cleverness had devised—until obedience was as much a part of the new slaves’ nature as their own breathing.

  So it had been with the Tenctonese. For all except those, such as the Overseers, who had found that it was a sweeter obedience to be the lash itself. And beyond those, the Chekkah, the cutting tip of the lash. To be strong, and feared, and still beneath the inescapable yoke—that was the transformation for which the Ahpossno-child had staked his worthless scrap of life.

  “There have been problems before, with such . . . contaminations.” The officer’s voice had softened, his gaze drifting back to the empty corridor. “Other species do not know the way of submission. How could they, when they are unaware of the masters’ glory? These ignorant ones have delusions, fanciful notions of their worth and independence. Toxic, soul-destroying ideas. Tenctonese who have been exposed to such influences . . .” The officer’s face tightened, as though the stench of excrement had penetrated the mother ship’s recycling filters. “There have been . . . reversions. To the old ways. Disobedience; rebellion. The old sins.”

  “That is why the masters have the Overseers.” Ahpossno was repelled by the officer’s show of emotion. “To apply the lash. To correct the errant ones.”

  “Such ideas are strong. Even to death . . . and perhaps beyond.” The smallest trace of awe had entered the officer’s voice. He spoke as one who had looked into the greatest of all evils, a mad sickness that could engulf the purifying dark itself. “In some instances, all methods of reestablishing command and obedience have failed.”

  He felt the links of his spine tighten and lock, a rod of steel. “Did the methods fail—” he regarded the officer with narrowed eyes “—or did the will of the Overseers fail?”

  A murmur; “What does it matter? . . .” The officer met Ahpossno’s gaze. “There was no recourse, except . . . annihilation.”

  None of this was news to him. A cancer that needed to be cut out—then the knife of the Chekkah was a scalpel. And such cancers could spread quickly. Even the most obedient Tenctonese had their network of whispers, words passed from one to another, the lies and bad ideas transmitted just like any other contagious disease.

  Annihilation meant loss, though. The masters frowned upon such uneconomic measures, however necessary.

  Pain and its dark sibling fear were better than such empty surgery. And these the Chekkah bore in their swift hands.

  “Greater glory, then.” Ahpossno felt ennobled by his own words. “The success of this mission will be a bright ornament on our wrists.” He lifted his hand and extended it, palm upward, to show the writhing blue and red of the Chekkah tattoo upon the pale flesh. Sections of the serpentine design had been inset with gold metal, shiny as polished mirrors, deep as though the skin opened onto fragments of a sun. The gold segments were service marks, hard-won emblems of previous campaigns. If a Chekkah lived long enough, displayed his proper cruelty without stint, he could end with the blue and red turned completely to gold, millimeter by millimeter.

  There was no greater honor. And when such an old Chekkah died, his own hand guiding the twin-bladed knife into his breast, and his body consumed so his brethren could ingest the wisdom held inside his skull, the courage knotted in his abdomen, then the gilded tattoo was flensed away from the holy corpse, preserved, and hung from the regimental altar. This ship had such a treasure, a ragged pennant curling with age, the name of the Chekkah who had borne it now forgotten, as it should be. Ahpossno had gone alone into the sanctuary, and in the darkness pressed the strip of skin, with its interlacing metallic design, to his brow and then his lips, tasting the virtue of the illustrious dead. To do so was superstition, not a proper part of the Chekkah faith, but it was common enough among those preparing for a mission. The dead blessed, and brought steel and ice into the warrior’s hearts . . .

  The officer stood outside the cubicle, with no visible change in his posture. He gazed upon Ahpossno’s tattoo, a double to the one beneath the sleeve of his own uniform. “Such is truth—” the officer spoke slowly “—a great honor.”

  No change that could be seen by the eye, but Ahpossno’s nostrils traced the
acrid molecules of fear, the air of the small space tainted by the officer’s exhalation. The fear of the mission’s failure, and the displeasure of the masters and the reprimands that would follow. A small lash made slaves tremble; how awesome was the one that turned Chekkah steel to cowering, pain-ravaged flesh.

  The officer was afraid; that was one weakness. And he had failed to conceal it, had let his body become a soft thing that leaked the spoor of such dishonorable emotion; that was an even greater weakness.

  Ahpossno folded his extended hand into a fist. Sinew tautened beneath the intricate blue and red.

  The officer’s gaze lifted from the Chekkah tattoo, and was caught and held by the darkness behind Ahpossno’s eyes. The officer could see that he had betrayed himself. Ahpossno turned the officer around in his mind, like holding the other’s Serdsos, the material image of the soul, in his hands. Perhaps, he reflected, the officer had come here not to tell him of the analysis of their destination—though that was valuable information, data he would have to incorporate into his preparations—but seeking an ally, someone to help him prevail against the council of superiors. Abort the mission, retreat from the specter of ignominious failure; advise that a larger, more heavily armed force be sent, one that could exterminate the contaminated slaves and the planet’s native population with distant fire, leave sterile cinders behind, all toxic notions reduced to ashes in the mouths of blackened skulls . . .

  Ahpossno wondered how long ago the commanding officer had known about the destination planet’s conditions, the presence of indigenous sentient life—the contaminators. From the outset of the mission? Fearful things were given to lying and concealment. Whisperings and maneuvers in secret, strategems rather than good hard wrath and the purifying spill of blood over the hilt of a dagger.

  “A great honor,” repeated the officer. “If one succeeds.”