Strangers From the Sky (10 page)

Further,
Enterprise
’s diurnal rhythms had been tied in with the Admiralty upon departure. It was morning where Jim Kirk was as it was “morning” aboard
Enterprise
. The admiral would still be sleeping.

(“Sleeps like a baby,” McCoy had observed once, having kept the vigil over a recuperating Kirk yet another time.

“A sign of a clear conscience,” Spock had suggested dryly, having kept the same vigil, though not for medical reasons.

“Or no conscience at all,” Kirk had shot back, yawning, embarrassed at all the attention, grinning at both of them.)

The bosun’s whistle sounded yet again. Mr. Scott was nothing if not punctual. Spock roused himself into full command mode, grateful that whatever troubled his captain was at least held at bay by sleep.

“
No, don’t go! Please, no!
”

Jim Kirk shouted himself awake. He was sitting bolt-upright in bed, clutching at something that was no longer there, some fragment of the nightmare that had jolted him from sleep. It was gone. A sudden attack of vertigo made him lie back against the pillow.

When his head cleared he glanced at the time: 0631. He didn’t have to get up for another half hour, but any attempt to go back to sleep would be a joke. He sat up gingerly, wondering why the light was so strange. A mournfulness of foghorns from the bay below gave him his answer.

The penthouse was well above the fog line; Kirk could have stepped out onto the balcony and let a dazzling morning sun warm his face as he contemplated a world lost in cottony opaqueness below him. He did exactly that for a few minutes until the undulating whiteness brought a return of the vertigo and a touch of nausea.

So much for breakfast, he thought wryly as the glass wall to the balcony slid shut behind him. McCoy and his damned diets! To hell with green leaves!

Green. Oh, God, green! Green blood, Vulcan blood—everywhere. The nightmare came back to him in flashes. He could hear himself talking to T’Lera, to Tatya, saw himself as part of the horror that had caused the Vulcans’ deaths, heard a voice—goading him or only warning him?—that he “could not do it alone.” What in God’s name did it mean?

Kirk sat on the side of the bed for a moment, thinking, mentally backing away from the impressionistic chaos of his nightmares and trying to find a different perspective.

Why was he rewriting history in his dreams, a history he knew had turned out reasonably successfully, but which he persisted in dreaming as a disaster, with himself as the causative factor? And who was the woman with the blond hair and the voice of doom?

She was always present in the recurring death dream, first as a disembodied voice, later as a shadowy female figure. Elusive, always just out of reach, poised on the edge of memory, she was nothing more than a flash of pale hair, a tattoo of bootheels, a single phrase repeated over and over in a voice Kirk was certain he ought to recognize. He never saw her face. Whenever he turned to reach out for her, she was gone.

He picked up
Strangers
, intending to search for her, but hesitated. Maybe he didn’t want to know. He started flipping pages.

If you’d gotten this on disk, you old dinosaur, he chided himself, using McCoy’s phrase, running one broad finger down the index on the odd chance that the word “blond” would pop out at him, you’d be able to code in that one word and the computer would present you with a list of every character in the book by hair color. Now, without a name or anything else to go on, you’ll have to skim through the entire thing hoping to find her….

He slammed the book shut. Or hoping
not
to find her, he thought, because if he came to know her as intimately as he knew the others, he might never sleep undisturbed again. His nights would be daubed with Vulcan blood and echoing with her voice for the rest of his life.

Kirk shoved the book in the drawer of the nightstand as if it might bite him, considered locking it in like a poisonous snake except that he was beginning to look foolish even to himself. He felt as if he was regressing into a wild-eyed boy hiding in the cornstalks. He realized he was sweating, out of breath as if he’d been running. In the dream he had been. The blood, the shouting, his fault—

I have to know, he thought.

He pulled the book out of the drawer and began to read again.

“Are you sure you’ve eaten enough? Are you sure it’s all right?”

“It is—quite sufficient. Thank you, Tatiana.”

She tried not to wince whenever he used her full name. At least he didn’t know enough to add the patronymic; that would have driven her crazy.

He had made a meal of the bean curd and the steaming rice, cutting the dates and dried apricots she’d scrounged up into smaller morsels and adding them to the mixture, remarking on each item as he ate.

“We, too, cultivate a number of glycine species. The
dactylifera
and
prunus armeniaca
are also familiar,” he reported solemnly. It was to pale-eyed T’Syra, geographer and botanist, that he owed his knowledge of Earth’s flora. Hers was yet another spirit to whom he would do homage. “But this species
oryza sativa
—rice?”—Yoshi nodded, dumbstruck at the extent of the young Vulcan’s knowledge—“is unknown to us.”

“Maybe because it has to be grown in water,” Yoshi suggested. “If, as you say, your planet is mostly desert…”

The human was hungry for details, plied the Vulcan with endless questions. He had dredged up the few astronomy books he owned and Sorahl had shown him the precise location of his world, using his navigator’s skills to sketch enlarged-scale starmaps from the perspective of both worlds.

Tatya simply watched, speechless. She could not take her eyes off the young alien, memorized his every gesture, watched the movement of his long muscles beneath the thin sweater Yoshi had lent him, poured him endless cups of tea, which he drank hot and strong and without any sweetener.

“Species
theraceae
,” he observed between sips. In a human it might have been showing off. “Specifically
camellia sinensis
, I believe. We cultivate similar varieties on Vulcan, though we prefer the use of herbs.”

“We drink herb tea also,” Tatya said excitedly. “I just didn’t have any on hand. When the Whale gets here I’ll order whatever you—”

She stopped herself, horrified. What was she thinking of? She saw fleeting panic on Yoshi’s face, saw that Sorahl was watchful, waiting, but did not ask her what she meant.

“You must be tired,” she said quickly. “You really should rest.”

“I cannot,” the young Vulcan demurred. “I must keep the watch for T’Lera.”

He did not elaborate, and they did not dare ask. There were so many other questions to ask first.

“It’s amazing,” Yoshi said, holding his long hair out of his eyes, watching the rain sheeting against the port, the grumbling flare of distant lightning. Tatya, exhausted, dozed in the beanbag chair, but the two males were beyond sleep. “Your ships have been out there, watching us, for how long?”

“Savar my grandfather was witness to your last two world wars,” Sorahl said, watching Yoshi’s eyes widen.

“But you’re talking over a hundred—You said he was with you on this voyage. How old—”

“At his death he was 221.4, as measured in your years,” Sorahl said softly. This memory, too, was part of him. “While he did not expect to survive the voyage, neither did he expect to meet death as he did.”

“Your people live much longer than mine,” Yoshi observed. It was yet another difference he must adjust to. But there was more here, some larger concept he was too fatigued, too wired up, to grasp. He sat beside Sorahl again, drawn to him. There was no longer any fear, and the strangeness diminished with each passing hour. In the dim light of a single lamp, all his human eyes could tolerate this long without sleep, they might have been brothers. Except for those ears, and a thousand nuances of cultural difference they’d only begun to explore. “And you say it was an accident that brought you here? You had orders to self-destruct rather than be seen? I don’t understand.”

“It was to avoid the situation which, because of our presence, now exists,” Sorahl said. He too experienced the kinship, beyond the logic of biology or accident of birth, belonging more to the realm of IDIC, to a diversity so all-encompassing as to become similitude. “We did not wish to frighten, to create controversy. It would seem we have done both. How soon do you estimate your authorities will come for us?”

Yoshi flinched. A human might have bargained, threatened, pleaded for his mother if not for himself. There was none of that here. Another difference between them.

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll think of something,” he said vaguely, not half believing it. At least if they kept talking he could put it out of his mind for a few more hours, and maybe by some miracle he would come up with something. “Tell me how it happened. The accident. It’s important.”

Sorahl understood. The human still required reassurance that these aliens, these century-long watchers, meant them no harm.

“Our scoutcraft are equipped with four retro-thrusters,” he explained. “They are designed to work in tandem, so that as many as one on either side can malfunction without radically impairing ship’s function. However, if two on the same side malfunction, and the odds against this are approximately 4,323.6 to one…”

“Retro Three on blue line,” Helm T’Preth had reported, sealing their doom with a whisper. “Downspiral estimated in nineteen seconds—mark.”

The downspiral alone need not have necessitated self-destruct; these small scoutcraft were incredibly maneuverable and could coast unscathed through atmosphere to touch down on land or water. Given a more favorable position they might have come to Earth in some obscure spot, repaired their retros, and departed unseen. But they were in the most cluttered of the satellite lanes and would soon be visible to any of half a dozen tracking stations. It was precisely this set of circumstances that Savar’s Prime Directive had provided for, and every member of the crew was aware of it.

Sorahl, beside T’Preth at the helm as she made her announcement, would remember her utter calm all his days.

“Acknowledged,” T’Lera said simply, sitting back in her chair. “Stop engines.”

T’Preth did so. All was silence. A dozen hands ceased their tasks and folded themselves into waiting configurations. A dozen eyes sought those of their commander, and the message in all was the same. T’Lera’s eyes sought Savar’s.

“We are prepared.”

It should have been simplicity itself. T’Lera had merely to activate the self-destruct timer and signal to Savar to open the airlock. The sudden outtake of oxygen would implode their lungs instantly, even as the scoutcraft itself imploded, literally turning itself inside out with a minimum of visible “flash,” reducing itself to fragments so small that should any survive the atmosphere, they would reach Earth as unidentifiable bits of charred metal.

It should have taken less than the nineteen seconds T’Preth had bequeathed them, except that for reasons as inexplicable as the failure of two tandem retros (and, with the loss of the craft, forever indeterminable), the self-destruct mechanism also failed, locking in midcountdown and refusing to respond to override.

“
Kaiidth!
” T’Lera said, as if it were nothing, though for her and one other it would mean the greatest sacrifice a scoutcraft’s crew could make. “
T’Kahr
Savar, implement manual.”

“Affirm, Commander,” Savar said immediately. If his voice quavered, age was the cause and not emotion. He slid the pressure bolt on the airlock; the slightest outward pressure would unseal it. “At your command.”

Ten eyes now looked to T’Lera; Savar alone had turned his eyes inward. As the physically weakest link in the chain, as the motive force behind the Prime Directive, it was doubly logical that he be the first to commit himself to the void beyond the airlock. Of the others, one must remain to assist the commander in destroying her vessel. They waited for T’Lera to choose.

“Status, Helm?”

“Orbit decaying, Commander. Downspiral commencing.”

Screens had gone dark and could not be brought back up; whoever operated the craft from here on must fly blind, on instruments only, and half of them were frozen by the aborted countdown. T’Lera allowed herself the space of a breath, and chose.

There was a certain logic by which she might have selected T’Syra to remain, for they were lifelong companions and could read each other’s thoughts. But by what right separate the pale-eyed one from her bond to Selik, even for a moment? No. Far-searching eyes sought pale eyes, and the choice was made in silence. T’Syra joined Selik and Savar at the airlock.

Stell also moved, not needing T’Lera’s command. His usefulness had ended with the retro shutdown, and if T’Lera required T’Preth to remain, he would do what he must without her.

But with a glance T’Lera released T’Preth to join her consort. Sorahl, seeing that the choice had fallen to him, tried to interject. He would willingly give his life that any one of these might have a few moments more.

“Commander—”

“
Kroykah!
” T’Lera hissed without looking at him. “Terminal implement—now!”

She had flung herself into T’Preth’s chair as the downspiral became more pronounced, locking her seat restraint and Sorahl’s with a single motion. Sorahl hesitated for a heartbeat before reaching down two oxygen packs and handing one to his mother.

Neither looked back. Sound told them everything. With a violent sucking rush three hurtled into the void: the frail Savar, steeled by his conviction, the noble Selik, embracing the universe with outstretched arms, while beside him—

T’Lera felt the link with T’Syra snap with a pain that was physical. Her son heard her gasp and dared not witness, stayed riveted to his instruments, honoring her privacy.

For himself, he desired to make some brief farewell to the two who still remained, but to divert them from their task or himself from his was not only illogical but dangerous. His duty consisted of one thing only, to find a place in one of Earth’s vast oceans where two Vulcans and a scoutcraft could disappear without a trace.

“Hold!” T’Lera cried, her voice muffled by the oxygen mask.

She need not have spoken. The powerful Stell, his hands literally frozen to the airlock mechanism (it was very cold in space) knew intimately every conceivable sound a craft could make. He too had sensed the dying impulse flux in Retro Three, the one nearest the airlock. If it fired under these circumstances the craft would flare up like a comet—immaterial to its inhabitants, committed to death at any rate, but making it far too visible from the planet below. By main strength—a mere accident that he was the strongest of the seven—Stell wrenched the pressure bolt shut, but too late.

T’Preth screamed; Stell was permitted a single hoarse cry. The pain of becoming a living torch was more than even a Vulcan could shield against in time. The impulse flux, feeding on the outrushing oxygen, had hurled a roaring tongue of flame through the closing airlock, immolating them both. Their charred, still-smoking bodies fell backward into the craft like so much dead wood.

T’Lera closed her eyes and thought a mourning chant. There was nothing else she could have done.

Sorahl, who was yet young and lacking in the full mastery of the Vulcan, whose own life was measured in minutes, gripped the controls to keep his hands from shaking.

Retelling the tale, Sorahl saw that they were shaking still. Summoning all of his control, he made them stop.

“The reentry heat must have been ferocious,” Yoshi said after a time. “We saw what was left of your ship.”

“We are more acclimated to extremes of heat,” Sorahl said quietly. His burns spoke for themselves. “And the oxygen packs spared our lungs.”

“And you managed a controlled splashdown through all of that?” Yoshi asked, wondering if he would have had the courage. “Fantastic!”

“It was thought your Pacific Ocean would provide the optimum place of concealment,” Sorahl explained. “Owing to its vastness and sparsity of population. We could not know that the locus of our splashdown would coincide so precisely with the boundaries of your station.”

“Kismet,” Tatya said drowsily, shaking off sleep and pulling herself out of the beanbag chair. She had been silent so long the others might have forgotten about her.

“I beg your pardon?” Sorahl gave her his full attention, although he seemed to do that with whoever was speaking.

“Karma. The power of fate,” she explained lamely, wondering what kind of rumpled mess she must look to this stranger. She didn’t usually bother about her looks, but suddenly it was important. “Different words for the same concept. It means there’s a purpose to your being here. Some kind of pattern. Everything you’ve told us, all those instrument failures and bizarre coincidences, mean there’s some special reason you were brought here, to us.”

“Tatya, for crying out loud—”

“Perhaps so,” Sorahl said not unkindly, though he might have argued the issue. “Though I for one do not subscribe to such fatalism.”

“His grandfather and the rest of the crew died for that ‘special reason’!” Yoshi snapped. “You’re talking nonsense! If it was just to spare us the truth,” he said to Sorahl, “you could have trusted us. Most people on Earth believe we’re not alone out here.”

“Yet confronted with such truth, your response is at best ambivalent,” Sorahl observed, remembering his own insistence upon contact. His mother had been correct. Theory was one thing, practical application quite another. “Even now you are uncertain what action to take.”

“See?” Tatya said off Yoshi’s chagrin.

“What will you do now?” Yoshi asked, disturbed that his uncertainty was that obvious. “We’ve seen you, talked to you. You’ve shared a meal with us. We can’t exactly pretend you don’t exist.”

“That will be for my commander to decide,” Sorahl said quietly, looking down at his hands.

As if on cue, there was a noise from the sleeping room—a hoarse, strained gasping that to Tatya’s practiced ears sounded like someone suffering from lobar pneumonia and struggling for breath. She moved toward the sleeping room, but Sorahl was ahead of her.

He had to wake his commander from the healing trance. “Permit me,” he said, not quite touching Tatya’s arm. Tatya nodded, but followed him anyway, curious.

In the pink light of a rain-washed false dawn, T’Lera writhed on the alien waterbed, her head thrown back, fists clenched, gasping. Sorahl moved over her like a shadow and struck her, hard.