Kyle Valenti opened his engine up on the highway outside of Roswell and severely bent the laws of physics. What was the point of being the sheriff's son if he couldn't test any boundaries? He suspected the deputies regularly gave him a pass—just as he knew his father would not. It made the game more interesting.
He liked to feel the dry, desert air whipping past his head. Its scream drowned out all thought of school, the team, Liz Parker—
He gunned the engine higher and the night fairly shrieked. His lips spread in a feral grin and his hands curled tighter on the wheel.
The last shades of purple were shifting into black and the sky was alive with stars. Alive, now that was an apt word, considering this was Roswell, New Mexico, the armpit of the universe. Aliens seemed to flock here like gnats, to hear the tourist line, ever since the '47 crash.
It was a hard rep to live down on the Varsity circuit.
It did not help that his dad believed every word of it, to Kyle's mortification.
Why couldn't his dad be an ordinary dad—or even an ordinary sheriff? Why did he have to go around chasing little green men—and Max Evans? What did he see in that dweeb anyway?
For that matter, what did Liz see in him? Kyle stomped the pedal to the floor and watched the scenery streak by to stroboscopic flashes in his high beams.
No sense torturing himself. Plenty of other fish in the sea. Or Lizards in the desert, his hind brain put in for his benefit. Max and Liz deserved each other. He'd never seen a sappier pair of love puppies. It made him want to puke.
Far toward the horizon a set of headlights approached and Kyle reluctantly dimmed his brights. He hated sharing his road, even for short interludes. He liked to think this stretch of night road at least was all his. Not much traffic came this way even in the daylight. Just another forgotten blue highway shunted aside by the interstate.
The rickety pick-up whipped past in an indistinct greenish blur and he hit the high beams, safely cocooned again in his light bubble. Like a space ship.
The night sped by, taking him light-years from Roswell and home, his only companion a shooting star.
"Did you see that?" Isabel leaned forward from the back seat of the jeep to shout into Max's ear. She pointed at the trail still faintly glowing against the night sky.
"Yeah," said Max, and Michael nodded agreement from the passenger seat.
"Over there!" Michael said, directing Max toward a slant-wise outcropping of flat rocks in the distance. Not far off their original course for tonight.
"What do you think it was?" Isabel asked her brother. "A signal from Nasedo?"
Max schooled his face before he answered. No point raising anybody's hopes about the mysterious and absent fourth alien. If he even existed.
"Probably just a shooting star. Another meteor, Isabel." The desert was littered with them. Space junk. They'd collected dozens of curious if useless pieces in the time they'd been coming out here to look for evidence of The Ship.
They thought of it in capital letters. The Ship—their ship—the one that had brought them to earth all those years ago, only to crash, marooning them. Ever since they broke out of their hibernation pods and found their way into human society as wayward waifs, they had been trying to find some explanation for their existence. They had never been able to find the pod chamber again, if they had ever known where it was at all. Their memories began with only vague snatches of that night.
Max and Isabel had been lucky. A kindly childless couple, the Evans', had found them wandering in the desert and taken them into their home and their hearts. Michael had hung back, and his introduction into the human community had not run as smoothly—then or since. But however the outer world classified them, to each other they were family. And as far as they knew for sure, the only ones of their kind on the planet.
"It might be a ship," Michael said, quick to jump to conclusions as usual.
"It's just another rock, Michael," Max said, picking out a track that would take them closest to the likely land fall.
Michael gave him a sour expression. "You say that like you don't want it to be a ship."
"He doesn't want to be disappointed," Isabel spoke for her brother. "He's just as anxious as we are."
"It's just a rock, Isabel," Max replied patiently. He would not get his hopes up.
Michael snorted. "Your mind has been off task ever since you saved Liz's life at the Crashdown Cafe," he said. "Admit it, Maxwell. You'd like to stay here in Roswell and forget all about going home."
"This is home, Michael," Max replied, refusing to rise to the tired old bait.
"Cut it out, you two," Isabel said. But even Isabel could see that her brother was seriously distracted by Liz Parker. He had always had a thing for her, but it wasn't a problem until the day he exposed their secret by healing her fatal gunshot wound. From that moment, Max had been pulled in two directions, and even Isabel didn't know which would win out in a showdown. She wasn't anxious to put it to a test.
Their mission for the night altered by this new development, Roswell's only resident aliens made for the newest crash site with all due speed.
The automatic controls of the insertion capsule malfunctioned somewhere over Albuquerque and Silphi was forced to pilot the pod in on her own. Her piloting skills were a little rusty, but after all it was like riding a glide-bike. Once you learned how, you never really forgot. She managed to miss the town outright, and her only mishap was a bump on the noggin, for which she was developing a whopping headache.
So much for a stress-free field assignment. She was going to spend half her time just getting to the alternate pick-up coordinates, and the other half wishing it was already over.
And to top it off, she had to land at Roswell! She'd never live that one down. Of all the xeno-studies green horn stunts to pull, that had to be the worst. No one came to Roswell. You were supposed to give it a wide berth.
Well, it couldn't be helped now. Here she was and here she'd stay, if she didn't get a move on pretty quickly. The place would be overrun with tourists and ufologists in no time.
Silphi shouldered her field kit, pocketed the emergency recall signal disc and climbed out of the capsule. Once her heat signature could no longer be detected, the capsule self-destruct program took care of the physical evidence. Her life pod was reduced to its constituent mineral components, quite resembling a meteorite slag.
Not that it would fool a crash reconstruction expert for a second, but luckily this planet didn't have any as yet. Earth was classified for xeno-cultural and anthropological studies only. First Contact was strictly proscribed. Earth might not be ready for decades yet, the way it was going.
Silphi had no inclination for that branch of her field. She was not one to push herself forward into the limelight. Let the publicity hungry have their fun. She was content to observe and collect obscure cultural data on pre-contact planets.
Of course there were always the occasional unforeseen circumstances, such as now. That's why contingency plans were invented.
Silphi dabbed at the cut on her forehead with a medipad and downed a couple pain killers. In shorts, sandals and camisole, she was sadly underdressed for a trek through the desert. What didn't freeze in the rapidly cooling night would be fried by midday. Just another fun-filled field trip to the back of beyond.
The things she did to advance her academic studies...
Kyle came to the end of the road— or at least as much of it as he was willing to traverse tonight. The rocky outcropping he'd been aiming for loomed just ahead on the right. There was someone there ahead of him.
Max Evans. Kyle started a slow burn before he recognized the girl with him as his sister, Isabel, and not Liz. So that third figure skulking around the rocks must be that Garin kid. It was unnatural the way those three palled around all the time. Maybe he should clue Liz into the possibilities. But then the image that arose in his mind of the four of them almost made him miss the turnoff.
Kyle wheeled to a halt in a spray of rocks that pinged off the side of Evans' jeep. Some of them must have hit Evans in the ankles, but he didn't flinch, damn his cool demeanor.
Isabel scowled at him. "I'd have those brakes looked at, Kyle," she said sweetly in a voice that made him shiver.
"What are you doing out here?" he demanded in imitation of his father's best interrogation tone. It usually worked to get him a seat at the lunch table or a better parking spot.
But Evans was either immune or too used to being accosted by the real McCoy, as his father's current favorite teen target. He just continued to stare at Kyle in that unnerving way of his, just inviting a smack in the kisser.
"It's still a free country, Kyle," he answered placidly.
Kyle got out of his car and advanced on the guy who'd stolen his girl.
"Ah, we're rock hunting," said Isabel, coming around the jeep to stand beside her brother. "We thought we saw a meteorite just now. It came to earth somewhere nearby."
Kyle looked around in spite of himself. "Oh yeah?" He'd seen something like that earlier. "I didn't know you were so interested in space stuff." Liz liked space stuff, he remembered. Maybe he shouldn't have laughed at her for it. They could have been out here—alone—looking for space rocks...
Garin was kicking at something, digging at it with his boot and they wandered over for a better look. Nothing but a slaggy lump of metallic rock.
This was boring, even by Evans' standard. What did he have that Kyle didn't have? Besides Liz, of course.
"I'm outta here," he said, losing interest in a face off with his nemesis. Let him get the guy in a head lock on the practice mat, though, and things would be different. He couldn't hide behind his sister then.
"Play with your rocks if you want to," he called in a parting shot, getting back into his car. He pulled out of the turn-around in a scree of gravel.
It felt very satisfying.