Strangers From the Sky (15 page)

“You can tell me different, Yoshi. No human could’ve survived that crash. If they’re so much like us, how did they?”

“From what Sor—from what one of them told me, they’re more adapted to heat than we are. And they have this ability to heal themselves; I don’t understand it completely, but it’s some kind of mental process…”

He stopped, remembering how the healing had frightened him even after he’d grown accustomed to Sorahl’s presence over a number of hours. Trying to explain it to someone who had not seen the Vulcans, could not know the magnetism, the centeredness they projected—

Yoshi shrugged, defeated.

“I don’t know how to convince you we’re all right, Jason. You want Tatya to come out too, so you can see? But I can’t let you in. Not without certain—assurances.”

Standing by the port in the other room, Tatya watched and listened, saw Jason Nyere secure the boat and, with surprising agility for a man his size, swing himself up to where Yoshi had finally calmed down enough to sit on the dock. Assured by the relaxed curve of their backs that the two men would go on talking for some time, assured by the quiet murmur from the bedroom that her alien guests were similarly engaged, Tatya decided to take the law into her own hands.

She sat at the comm screen and punched in a call to her favorite aunt, who incidentally happened to work for a news cooperative in Kiev.

“
Tante
Mariya?” she interrupted the usual exchange of pleasantries, lapsing into rapid Ukrainian in case anyone was listening. “Listen, I have a story to tell you. A scoop. But you must promise me you’ll sit on it until—unless—something happens to me or Yoshi….”

“Assurances,” Jason repeated, pleased that Yoshi seemed unthreatened by his presence. “And what might those be?”

Yoshi inhaled sharply, as if he’d been rehearsing this in his head for hours; he probably had.

“For starters I need to know what your orders are in regard to—what Tatya and I recovered yesterday.”

Nyere chuckled softly. He’d never have thought the younger man capable of such temerity. These aliens must be something remarkable indeed to evoke such protectiveness.

“You know I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

“I know.” Yoshi grinned for the first time. “But you will anyway. Because you’re my friend. And because otherwise I’ll stall you under Right of Salvage.”

Nyere shook his head in amazement.

“You’ve got this all thought out, haven’t you? Well, I’ll tell you: you can count on the first only up to a point,” he cautioned the younger man. “And the second doesn’t apply to human—” He stopped himself, realized how foolish it sounded, didn’t know how to make it right. “You know what I mean, Yoshi. Whoever they may be, they have as many rights as we do.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to say, Jason,” Yoshi said emphatically. “I don’t want to see these people hurt.”

“Neither do I, son,” Jason Nyere tried to convince him. “Neither do I.”

Tatya had scarcely begun her breathless tale to her aunt when a shadow presence cast itself over her like a physical chill. She jumped, looked up from the screen to see T’Lera. The Vulcan had not touched her, yet Tatya felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees. She murmured something to her aunt about putting her on hold, and the screen went to snow.

“W-what is it?” she asked the alien presence in a voice smaller than any she’d known she possessed.

“You have communicated our presence to others.” It was not a question. T’Lera did not need to understand the language Tatya spoke to understand her purpose. “It would have been preferable had you not done so.”

“It’s insurance!” Tatya said fiercely, finding her voice. “Somebody has to make sure none of us disappears or ‘forgets.’”

“Is that a likely outcome?” the Vulcan wanted to know.

“You see that ship out there?” Tatya demanded. “Did you suppose they came all this way just to exchange greetings?”

“If it is their purpose to remove what they consider a threat to your people…” T’Lera began.

“Over my dead body!” Tatya said, not for the first time. A sudden burst of interference from the comm screen made her pounce on it, but too late. It went suddenly dead. No question in her mind who was responsible for that.

She glared at
Delphinus
. “They’ve been listening in,” she seethed. “And they’ve cut me off!”

Melody Sawyer had been so absorbed in taking infrared readings on the agrostation she’d forgotten all about monitoring communications.

“What’re they doing now, Henry?” she called to Moy over the intercom. She’d closed the spectrography booth off from the rest of the bridge. She was alone except for Lieutenant Patel, the scanner tech; she could hear her boots on the metal decking as she made her morning rounds.

“Just sitting, sir,” Moy reported from the starboard rail, where he was leaning on his elbows to keep the binoculars steady. “Just the captain and Yoshi sitting out there shooting the breeze. Doesn’t seem to be any worry about radiation. Wonder why they don’t go on inside?”

“Don’t wonder, Moy, just report,” Melody snapped. “See anyone else over there? Has Tatya turned up at all?”

“No sir—” Moy started to say, but Sawyer had begun to curse and cut him off.

She lunged out of the spectro booth and clear across the bridge to the dead comm screen, nearly knocking little Patel flying in her haste. She’d shut the screen down herself when she hit the sack around 0200 last night; God knew how much activity she might have missed in those few hours.

“Sorry, Reeta,” Sawyer called over her shoulder, homing on Agro III’s band. “Didn’t mean to mow you down.”

“No harm, sir,” Patel replied, but Melody never heard her. She was mesmerized by the conversation between Tatya Bilash and a handsome Slavic-looking woman in what sure as hell looked like the city room of a major news service.

“What the hell language is that?” Melody demanded of no one in particular. Reeta Patel, thinking the first was addressing her, puzzled over it.

“None I am familiar with, sir. Perhaps something Slavic?”

“Never mind!” Sawyer barked. “I know what she’s up to. Hellfire, if I cut her off, her contact’ll get paranoid. If I let her spill the whole thing—damnation, where’s my head?”

She saw the sender’s half of the screen go to hold, saw the unidentified newswoman relax at her desk, waiting, and seized her chance. She hit the intercept, grinning evilly as the entire screen blanked. Tatya would probably assume it was a malfunction.

But Tatya was not so easily fooled. She was on Melody’s frequency within seconds.

“Get out of the way of the screen!” she’d ordered T’Lera without thinking, then realized to whom she was speaking. T’Lera was not one to whom one gave orders. “I’m sorry! Move away from the screen, please! I know what I’m doing.”

Her logic of no use, T’Lera complied.

“Agro III to
Delphinus:
come in, please!” Tatya called tightly, fighting to keep the fury out of her voice. “Agro III calling
Del
—”

“
Delphinus
here.” Melody Sawyer’s voice went from molasses to icicles. “Not smart, Bilash. Don’t do that again.”

Tatya opened her mouth, but Sawyer cut her off.

“Listen up,” she said, leaning into the screen for emphasis. “Your contact hails back, you tell her everything’s all right. You speak to her in Standard, and you make sure she goes away happy, or I’ll by God take this fish under that weed and on top of you like the one that ate Jonah. Do you copy?”

She didn’t expect acknowledgment, flicked off at once. Had she waited a second longer she’d have learned all the Ukrainian she’d ever need.

“You talk to your—guests,” Jason Nyere told Yoshi, neither of them aware of the
Sturm und Drang
raging over the airwaves around them. “Tell them I’m under orders to observe them. That I have to have them checked out for contamination. If they’re interstellar, they’ll understand that. Tell them it’s what I have to do.”

Yoshi hunched his shoulders, nodded miserably.

“Jason, I’m scared!”

“I know you are.” The older man squeezed his shoulder paternally. You think
you’re
scared! he thought. Your part of this is a cakewalk compared to what I have to do!

Captain Nyere lowered himself into his ship’s skiff and started its small purring motor. He looked up at the young agronomist one last time.

“Don’t fight me, Yoshi. You think I’m soft, and you’re right. The worst I’d do is requisition your supplies and starve you out. But my superiors might not be as patient as I am. Whoever replaces me is bound to be someone who prefers more—direct action.”

“Captain’s on his way back, Commander!” Ensign Moy called over the intercom to Sawyer, who’d holed up in Spectro again, leaving the bridge to a bewildered Lieutenant Patel.

“As you were, Moy,” Sawyer barked, all calm, cool, and collected again. “And lose the binoculars, will you? I get four body readings on the infrared, Captain suh,” she announced as soon as she heard Nyere’s boots on the bridge behind her. “And two of ’em are real weird!”

Nyere glanced reluctantly at the monitor.

“I gave no order for infrared.”

“I know you didn’t,” Melody snapped back. “But you got it anyway. What’re you planning to do now?”

“Aside from slapping you in the brig for insubordination? Not a damn thing!”

Jason Nyere had begun to sweat again. He wiped the cold trickle from his temple and tried to tear his eyes from the infrared screen. They were different, Yoshi had said. Different but somehow similar. Better, different, indescribable. Within the hour, Jason Nyere would find out for himself.

“Turn that damn thing off, will you?” he growled at Melody, as transfixed as she by the alien body readings moving about on the monitor, but suddenly protective of their privacy. Monitoring the station’s communications before they’d known what they were looking for was one thing, but now—“Pack the counters and the scanners and go powder your nose. We’re going visiting.”

Some instinct nagged at Sawyer to tell him about the comm leak to Kiev, but she ignored it. She was confident she’d scared Tatya but good, and Jason had enough on his mind.

“Yessuh, Captain suh!” She was on her feet at once.

“Oh, and Melody?” Jason called after her. “Leave the pearl-handled Colts at home, okay?”

Melody started to squawk.

“Don’t protest, dammit!” Nyere said. “That’s the price of admission. The hardware stays here or you do. Which is it?”

Muttering, Melody clattered down the stairs. Jason intercepted her a second time, coming out onto the stairs so Patel wouldn’t hear him.

“How’s your offduty wardrobe?”

It was an odd question.

“Shirts and jeans mostly. Tennis stuff,” Melody replied. “You know the kind of thing I wear. Would’ve packed my crinolines, but didn’t think I’d be needing them this time out, Captain suh. Why?”

Something about the situation was beginning to tickle Jason Nyere, lighten the load that had been pressing him between the shoulder blades since this time yesterday. The thought of the thousand little ordinary details that would have to be gotten through in order to accept these aliens on any terms…

“Well, considering that they lost everything when their ship sank, and all they have left is the uniforms on their backs,” he began, as if it were elementary that “they” could wear human clothes without extra heads or limbs getting in the way. “Yoshi says the male’s about his height, but I gather the female’s closer to your size than Tatya’s.”

His hands involuntarily formed melon shapes at chest level, and Melody burst out laughing. Tatya was on the generous side.

“Sexist swine!” Melody snorted, before the impact of what he was saying truly hit her. “One of them’s a female?”

Jason nodded as if to say, How about that?

“Commander of their ship, as a matter of fact. Why, Melody, I thought you knew the facts of life. If there were no little green women, where do you suppose the little green men come from?”

“Petunias.” Melody sat on the cold metal steps and looked up at him, shaking her head. “Was it Sagan who said they’d look like petunias?”

“He only meant they probably couldn’t crossbreed with us,” Jason said after he’d figured out what she was babbling about. “Come on, Sawyer, don’t fold on me now. Throw some things together and meet me at the boat in fifteen minutes.”

“Sure thing,” she said vaguely as he passed her on the steps. Twenty-four hours ago she hadn’t believed in little green men. Now she was being asked to make up a Goodwill box for them. “Petunias!” she said, again, incredulous. “The whole thing’s impossible!”

He’s impossible! Tran Van Ky thought, holding her breath as her commanding officer loomed over her comm console.

“There has been no response to my transmission as yet?” Spock asked his communications “officer.”

Tran tried to keep her voice from quavering, wondered if this was yet another test.

“Negative, sir,” she managed crisply.

She’d wondered two days ago at Captain Spock’s sending a coded personal message to a private transceiver on Earth at his own expense rather than using ship’s normal frequency like everyone else. Either this was an extremely personal message, or it was yet another challenge to Tran’s abilities, like everything else on this voyage.

There had been one shift where the computer fed her several dozen incomings of all classifications simultaneously, without bothering to inform her it was only a drill. Tran had fielded every last one of them in the proper order without screwing up or losing her cool and the captain had noted her down for a commendation, one of only three he’d given to the entire class all year, but Tran swore she’d aged six years in as many weeks and wondered if it was worth it. Whatever else they might be, training cruises with Captain Spock were never dull.

“Interesting,” he was saying now, hovering behind her comm station in a way that always made her distinctly nervous. “Opinion, Mr. Ky?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” she said, treading eggshells. “The turnaround time is less than a day at this distance, and even if there was no one at the receiving end, there should at least have been a computer answerback. Unless that transceiver is no longer operative. That’s the only answer I can come up with, sir.”