Alien Nation #4 - The Change Read online

  “This story is not going to break,” Lipscomb said. “All we have here is a simple spin problem. Damage control; perception polishing.”

  FBI Agent Paul Iniko sat stone-faced in the Spartan conference room as Morton Lipscomb, the appointee of the Director of Central Intelligence, looked around the white-painted room for effect. The effect didn’t appear to be what the well-groomed fellow from the CIA obviously wanted.

  How does one put a good face on a couple of massacres? Especially when the disasters had been made possible by an ambitious scientist in bed with an ambitious intelligence community, both of them drooling over the possible applications of Niyezian neural control technology?

  The possibilities were towering. For a suffering world, most kinds of mental illness could be simply programmed away. Many of those that were genetic in origin could be patched over by activating the full potential of other portions of the brain. Many physical ailments could be eliminated, as well. The power of the mind had never been in doubt. Control of that power had been the stumbling block, and neural transmitters modified not to turn humans into homicidal maniacs might be the answer. And the scientist would get the credit, the fame, the Nobel Prize, the adulation of a suffering earth.

  The intelligence community was thrilled at the prospect of no longer having to explain to oversight committees why there were no agents of a particular type in a particular hot spot when, with a little shuffle at a diplomatic function, the intelligence chief of the aforementioned hot spot could become an instant, unsalaried, and totally reliable operative of the CIA.

  So, why not supply Maanka Dak with everything he needed to reinvent neural controllers? Even better, have the scientist set up a top secret research station nearby with a batch of the controllers and some of the implantation instruments recovered from the ship. Dak needed the information, supplies, and instruments for his work, and after all, he had promised to be a good boy and work for the advancement of science, the security of the American way, and the betterment of all mankind. And everybody thought that everybody else was keeping watch on Maanka Dak, except Tom Rand. He knew watching Maanka Dak was his job. Curiously enough, however, Warden Rand was, for security reasons, the only one cut out of the loop.

  So Maanka used his crude implant to bust out of China Lake. Then he obtained a computer that could do the things he required, and he tracked down the location of the secret research station and stole the implants and instruments. This gave him the ability to place any Tenctonese under permanent control and any human under temporary control, as long as he was willing to risk the consequences of that minor side effect of the subject becoming a homicidal maniac. Courageous researcher that he was, Dak appeared more than willing to take such risks.

  Everyone had come to the operation with an agenda: power, career, fame, patriotism, getting one for the gipper. They all assumed, of course, that Maanka Dak had an agenda as well. Their mistake was assuming that Dak’s agenda was freedom, rehabilitation, and the pursuit of happiness through service to his fellow beings, not to mention quite a few bucks. What no one understood, though, was that Maanka Dak’s only agenda was vikah ta.

  Now, nightmares and massacres later, the information was becoming known and understood outside of the loop, and there was nothing in place to quash it. Their only hope appeared to be that the truth revealed such depths of stupidity and cupidity in high places that no one would want to believe it. In an age forged from Watergate, ’Nam, Iran-Contra, the S&L and BCCI scandals, and institutionalized check kiting in the House of Representatives, such hopes were a vapor in Hell’s mouth.

  SNAFUBAR.

  To Iniko, acronyms had always seemed a mindless human endeavor. They were on a level with puns and reciting baseball statistics. SNAFUBAR, however, was an identification of this operation made by the finger of the universal spirit itself. The truth will out, of course, everybody knows. The Washington spin doctor simply wants to make certain that once out, the truth lies like a bastard.

  Collins, although he represented the Bureau of Prisons, was neither a criminologist nor penologist. Neither Rittenhouse from NSA nor Lipscomb from CIA were agents, cryptologists, or analysts. Instead, all three were professional public relations advisors; spin doctors; handlers; conniving, double-dealing, lying bastards.

  Part of Paul Iniko’s mind avoided asking himself what he was. He knew, and that knowledge was making his head ache. He looked up at Lipscomb with that same stone face and asked, “How exactly does one go about correcting the spin on a prison break and murder of a warden assisted by the federal government that has by last count resulted in over thirty deaths in two separate mass killings?”

  Lipscomb flushed slightly, immediately grinned, and leaned back in his chair, his fingertips pressed together. “Now Agent Iniko. How helpful it is to have you wade in at the appropriate moment and smack us in our faces with your fucking guilt brush.”

  “I apologize. I hadn’t intended on wrinkling your serenity.”

  “Look, pal, I feel bad about all the people—the Newcomers too—who were killed in that crazy mess at the fast food restaurant and that agency over on Wilshire. I’m sorry for them and I feel the pain of their families and loved—”

  “You’re not on camera, Mort,” Rittenhouse interrupted. “Give the poor dead dog a rest.”

  Lipscomb’s face went bright red. “I do care!” he protested. “I’m not some kind of super insensitive monster.”

  “Of course not,” Collins said, “although you did manage to squash that story about those CIA supplied weapons the Stavropol Front used to kill all those civilians.” He turned to Rittenhouse and raised his eyebrows. “How many deaths was it? Six, seven thou?”

  “More like ten. How’d you find out about it? It’s not like the Bureau of Prisons was in the loop.”

  “There are no secrets,” Collins answered. “Especially inside the Beltway.” He glanced at Lipscomb. “Now, Mort, you were about to tell us all about how you felt the pain of all those dead Ukrainians.”

  “As you well know, there was nothing we could’ve done about that, all right? Wallowing through the blood, corpuscle by corpuscle on prime time, wasn’t going to bring them back, was it? Would bringing down the administration bring them back? No.”

  “But you felt their pain,” Iniko added.

  “I am not about to take this from a fucking goddamned Overseer, Jack! I heard what you bastards did on that ship! Torture, oppression, killing off the old, the diseased, the malcontents. But you’re going to tell me you were one of the pilots, right? You were down there in navigation playing with your calculator, or below decks shoveling goddamned coal!” When he noticed the spittle flying from his mouth, Morton Lipscomb calmed himself through sheer willpower and lowered himself to his chair.

  “No,” Iniko answered. “I wasn’t a pilot. The ship didn’t have pilots. That would’ve provided too tempting an opportunity for someone to rebel and take the ship where it wasn’t supposed to go.”

  “That doesn’t invalidate the point,” Lipscomb insisted.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “So what did you do, Iniko?” Lipscomb reached out and tapped the tattoo around Paul Iniko’s left wrist. “Give us the skinny, boy. We want to know.”

  “I don’t,” Rittenhouse said. Turning to Lipscomb, the man from NSA said, “Chill out, Mort. We’ve all been and done things we don’t want our grandkids to find out about. Easy does it. We’ve got big things to decide on here if we want to find our limos in the garage when we get back to old foggy.”

  “Go ahead,” Lipscomb said to Iniko, ignoring Rittenhouse. “What did you do, man? What did you do, Overseer? What was your contribution to slavery and oppression?”

  The conference room was dead silent, save the quiet hiss of the air circulation system. Collins and Rittenhouse looked embarrassed, and Morton Lipscomb looked as though he could eat live boar, hair and all. Iniko looked down, and where his hands were clasped on the edge of the table, he saw the Overseer’s mark
surrounding his wrist. There, centered upon the back of his wrist, were the four letter dots that had marked him for what he was to be from the moment of his choosing. He could remember treasuring those marks, the fierce pride he had in being a charkah. Later came the shame; later came the pain.

  “I did for the creators pretty much what I do now for the bureau,” answered Paul. “I was a charkah; a watcher.” He smiled thinly for the first time. “In other words, I was a police officer.”

  “Police officer?” Collins repeated. “I didn’t think Newcomers needed cops; at least, not on the ship. Didn’t they design and engineer you people to obey the rules?”

  “Just like the American educational system,” Rittenhouse said, “and with about as much success.”

  “Persons change,” Paul Iniko said, “and rules change. Our rules changed a lot, especially after we left Itri Vi.”

  Rittenhouse snapped his fingers, pointed at Iniko and said, “That’s why the local field office picked you. You know all about these neural transmitters.”

  Iniko shook his head. “No. I have no specialized knowledge concerning Niyezian neural control technology. I was a watcher, not one of the punishers. I fear the reason why I was picked to assist you three gentlemen is no more complicated than that the director dislikes the odor of feces on his fingers.”

  “Feces?” Lipscomb repeated.

  “I think he’s talking about you, Mort,” Rittenhouse said.

  Before the man from the CIA could explode again, Paul Iniko interrupted. “The director, I believe, wants nothing to do with what we’re doing; in fact, he wants no official bureau recognition of even the existence of this problem. When all of this lands in a committee cesspool, the FBI simply knew nothing about it, Agent Iniko acted on his own. We can toss him to the dogs with no loss. He’s an Overseer, you know. Then everyone goes home with clean-smelling fingers.”

  “Except you,” Rittenhouse said.

  “As I said, no loss.” He nodded toward Rittenhouse and raised his eyebrows. “And thus the spin is adjusted.”

  Lipscomb shook his head. “Look, this is not going to wind up in front of any damned committee. Maanka Dak, as far as we know, only killed Fangan and that construction equipment salesman.”

  “Brick Wahl,” said Iniko.

  “What?”

  “His name was Brick Wahl.”

  “That figures. Very well. As I was trying to say, a good case could be made that Sing Fangan killed Mr. Wahl. Enough of a case, at least, to muddy the media waters.”

  “What’s your point?” Rittenhouse asked.

  “The point is, maybe Maanka Dak is simply a fellow who made a daring escape from our nation’s newest federal penitentiary. He even might have stopped the murderous rampage of his fellow escapee, which means by the time everything is sorted out, the—”

  “By the time everything is sorted out,” Iniko interjected, “Maanka Dak turns out to be some sort of bloody folk hero and the local cops nothing but a bunch of insensitive louts straight out of Nottingham, condemned by the media for gunning down Rubberhead Hood. And we’ll have to make certain the sheriffs men gun down old Rubberhead, won’t we? We don’t want any embarrassing testimony coming out in any old nasty trial before King Richard, do we?”

  “Iniko,” said Lipscomb. “I think you’re losing your grip.”

  “It’s even more likely, Lipscomb, that I am about to lose my lunch.”

  “My, aren’t we delicate for a graduate of Simon Legrees R Us? I didn’t think you Overseers were terribly concerned with trivialities such as right and wrong.”

  “We had a very strict code of right and wrong. Much of it is not your code, and much is no longer mine. When it was mine, however, I abided by it. One thing we never did was to place murder aside simply to cover up a blunder.” A mask seemed to fall upon Paul Iniko’s face as his eyes focused on a point in space.

  “Asshole,” Lipscomb muttered.

  “Gentlemen,” Collins broke in, “we might get more done more quickly if Agent Iniko went somewhere else until we’ve decided what we’re going to do.”

  Rittenhouse reached out a hand and placed it on Iniko’s shoulder. “Look, Paul, maybe he’s right. What we do is sort of like making sausage in the jungle. The results look, smell, and taste just great, but you don’t want to take too close a look at the manufacture or pay much attention to the bacteria count. You especially don’t want to swallow it whole. Know what I mean?”

  “Sausage.” Iniko looked around the table, smiled thinly, and nodded as he placed his hands on the edge of the table and stood up. “Yes, I think I know what you mean. You’re right, of course. I’ll leave you gentlemen to your sausage making.”

  Iniko walked briskly from the room, paused at the security post at the end of the hall, and went to the glassed-in gallery that looked out upon the China Lake facility’s exercise yard. It was a huge space, grassed in and equipped with a running track, weightlifting area, tennis and volleyball courts. A high wall surrounded it, but there was no barbed wire, no towers bristling with armed guards. Everywhere Paul Iniko had visited within the China Lake facility had shown him Thomas Rand’s care for his prisoners. Not just prisoners, Tenctonese in general, humans in general, everyone in general. Thomas Rand cared. He didn’t look at hair or lack of it, accent, color, past, or anything. He knew the flower and the weed for what they were. He had opened that window of his mind long before the Tenctonese came to earth.

  At the quarantine camp when Rand had come to talk to his group about law enforcement, Iniko’s group had been special, segregated from the rest for its own protection; Overseers. It had made no difference to Warden Rand. He believed that men, women, and children were creatures sacred to the universe, valuable segments of life who had earned the right to be cherished, nurtured, healed, and applauded. Overseers, even Vuurot Iniko, had spent their lives as the “chosen.” Hence, the human who regarded them as special hadn’t registered at the time. In the years that had passed, however, Iniko had come to realize what a very special human being Tom Rand had been.

  The Overseers, by and large, had no interest in law enforcement. There was a world of opportunity out there, and the newness of that fact had overwhelmed them. Iniko, however, had been interested. There were moments as a watcher that had captured him more strongly than any drug could have done. There were crimes on board the ship, mysteries, puzzles. Who did it? How was it done? How was it to be proven? Those were the things that had captivated the charkah.

  Others processed the accused; others punished the convicted. He had been insulated from it all on the ship. It had kept the puzzle-solving function clean and fascinating. Tom Rand offered him those puzzles again, and Iniko had accepted.

  None of the other Newcomers who had expressed interest in law enforcement were Overseers. The ones who had decided to try out for the few openings that had been made available through Warden Rand’s intervention wanted nothing to do with an Overseer, reformed or otherwise. It was Tom Rand who had suggested the FBI and offered to make the arrangements. Iniko would have to go to college, law school, and the bureau academy in Quantico. A lot of work, yes, but he would become a part of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agency in the world. The bait had been irresistible.

  Tom Rand would’ve made a fortune in sales, Iniko thought, because he believed the company lies with all his heart. Iniko sadly shook his head. Tom Rand had his naive areas, and his perception of the FBI had been one of them.

  We need to show the media the FBI is affirmative-oriented.

  Stick Iniko in front of the camera. A picture of one rubberhead is worth a thousand slags on the payroll.

  TV ambush investigators are dropping on the San Francisco office to count colors, sexes, and preferences.

  Send Iniko. Once they see the S.F. office has a rubberhead on the staff, they’ll back off. Yeah, it’s the same slag that was on the air in Washington, but it won’t make any difference to the media. They all look alike, right? Be sure to
change his tie, though.

  For his first two years after graduating from the academy, Paul Iniko had spent most of his time assigned to public relations, with an occasional assignment elsewhere when it was necessary to show congressional types the bureau’s token Tenctonese. He had taken on the name Paul at the suggestion of the bureau’s own spin doctor.

  “Believe you me,” he had said, “if the crooks, drunks, and doddering old farts on that congressional committee can look at you and call you Paul or Harry, they’ll listen to whatever you have to say. But if you come at them with some kind of Kunta Kinte, Darth Vader handle like Vuurot, all they’re going to think is, ‘This boy ain’t tryin’ to get along.’ Try to get along, Kunta, and they won’t chop off your damned foot.”

  Puzzles.

  Where had all the puzzles gone?

  The only assignments he had been given other than showing his bald head before a camera or a committee had involved two separate hostage incidents. Both hostage takers were eventually gunned down. In both cases, by the time Paul Iniko had been called in, there was nothing left to solve, nothing left for him to do, except watch. The man with the gun would have to be taken out, he is Tenctonese, and we needed a bald head among the shooters just to show that the execution wasn’t racially motivated. Once the perp was perforated, it was back to public relations.

  Down in the exercise yard there was a familiar face among the humans and Tencts. Iniko frowned as he tried to bring back the context of the ship, and place that face within it.

  Jarak Ati.

  Murder.

  On the ship, Jarak Ati had slain another slave to obtain his position. Nothing complicated, it was strictly premeditated murder for gain. Early riana, Ati had called it when he eventually confessed. No remorse, no guilt, not even a fear of punishment. Jarak Ati had been a bad piece of engineering. He was part of the evidence that should’ve sent the creators back to their drawing screens. And here he was again, in prison, for the commission of some serious crime. One didn’t get sent to China Lake for jaywalking. Jarak Ati was a criminal, plain and simple. There was no society that had yet been invented in which Jarak Ati would not be a criminal.