Strangers From the Sky (25 page)

“Then she’s as crazy as you are!” the blonde snarled, sliding the pressure bolt on her automatic back and forth with an ominous click.

“I’ll tell Easter myself,” Aghan said importantly, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his fatigues as if that made him more presentable. He headed for the one room in the bunker with a door that closed. “If he can’t use it, maybe Racher will. Racher always pays.”

Aghan’s computer tampering was child’s play compared to what was going on in the sub-basement of a data storage complex in Alexandria.

“Lucky I knew about this place,” Jim Kirk remarked, hovering over Lee Kelso’s shoulder, watching Kelso ply the keyboard as if he had all the time in the world. “I’ve spent some wonderful hours in the museum down the road. Lee?”

“Working on it, Captain,” Kelso reported, unperturbed.

Kirk rubbed his hands nervously, forced himself not to pace lest he come within range of the security cameras. He was calmness itself compared to Parneb who, having traded his turban and
djellaba
for clothing more suitable to night stalking, stood tearing at his sparse hair in his distress. Elizabeth Dehner needed no tricorder to know that his pulse was running amok.

“Come on, baby!” Kelso coaxed the computer. “You can override that, sure you can! Atta girl!”

Footsteps down the supposedly deserted corridors made all but Kelso jump, but it was only Mitchell, checking up on the security guards he’d put out of commission to get them in here.

“Sleeping like babies,” he reported. “And I managed to temporarily kill the cameras from here to one of the underground exits. They’re on a timer, though. More than ten minutes and they’ll trigger an alarm at police HQ.”

“Come on, Lee, hurry!” Kirk urged futilely; Kelso the hacker was not to be hurried.

Parneb watched in utter amazement. The ease with which these future sorcerers had breached the most advanced security system this century could produce both delighted and frightened him.

“Gentlemen, if you please! If we are caught—”

“Don’t sweat it,” Mitchell reassured him. “We’re the ones who’d have to face the music. You can always disappear.”

“Here we go, people!” Kelso announced, punching one final button with a flourish.

Three separate printers went into simultaneous chattering action around the room. As each one completed its contribution to the creation of four sets of false identities to cover four displaced time travelers, Kelso scurried from printer to printer retrieving his creations, gleeful as a child.

Parneb had told Kirk everything he knew about the agrostations, AeroNav, the way things worked in this century. Kirk had taken it from there.

“We’ve got to get to the Vulcans. We’ll need all our training, all our skills, to pass ourselves off as doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs—whatever it takes to get to where they’re being held.”

“What then, Captain?” Elizabeth Dehner had wanted to know, questioning the end if not the means.

“That depends on what we find when we get there,” Kirk replied grimly, holding contact with those cool gray eyes, for emphasis. “Humans are humans; they can’t have changed that radically from our time. We’ll need you to read the situation, recommend the solution least traumatic to all parties concerned. I know it’s vague…”

“Understood, Captain.” Dehner nodded, glad to have some part in the escapade at last. No one would know how much the thought of that responsibility frightened her. “As Mr. Mitchell would say—piece of cake!”

Kirk smiled faintly, admiring her cool.

“It’s best if we split up,” he instructed his troops. “We’ll literally be scattered around the globe in order to do what we have to do. I don’t need to remind any of you of the Prime Directive, of how essential it is that we do nothing to change the course of history.”

“That means hands off the girls, Mitch!” Kelso had quipped, and Mitchell had just looked pained. Kirk ignored them both.

“We’ll keep in communication constantly and arrange a rendezvous once we’re all in place. We will also monitor what’s going on around us. Any indication that the common man is getting wind of this thing, and what his response is. Parneb, we’ll need currency from several regions and in several denominations, credit cards, travel accommodations…”

“
Malesh!
” Parneb sighed. “I would not be Egyptian if I did not have certain—connections. I will do what I can.”

He had vanished into the twilight, returning with the necessities and a car to take them to Alexandria. On the road, Kirk had outlined to Kelso exactly what he wanted in the way of IDs. Getting past the guards had been almost too easy, and Kelso had gone right to work.

“All set!” he announced now, collating and distributing his works of art as they came out of the printers. “Each of you will find a set of identity papers, letters of reference, degrees and/or credentials where applicable, an updated planet-wide passport, and sundry other items. Captain…”

He handed Jim Kirk the first set.

“Colonel James T. Kirk, Ground Forces Intelligence, Americas Base. Thought I’d let you keep your real name; you’ll have enough else on your mind,” Kelso explained. “Besides, it’s a cover name, and the average intell-agent changes that every other Tuesday, so I’ve left your file open in case you need to change it. All you do”—he demonstrated—“is stick your ID into any computer of this type—even an automated bank teller’ll do it—punch in this code, which I trust you’ll commit to memory, and the new name. I’ve laid in three backup files so you can be up to three other people.

“Now,” he went on, leaving Kirk to marvel at the authentic look of his forgeries. “Mitch, I had a little fun with yours. ‘Comrade Engineer Jerzy Miklovcik…’”

“‘Assigned Gdansk Shipyards, Strategies Div,’” Mitchell read. “Very impressive, Lee. I like these.”

“And you’ll find a standing-orders file in the machine that you can alter for anywhere on the globe, using the same procedure as the captain,” Kelso pointed out a little smugly.

“These are all fictitious?” Kirk wanted to know, fingering his papers thoughtfully before secreting them in various jacket pockets.

“All except our lady psychiatrist,” Kelso explained. “We agree the PentaKrem probably wants a shrink to give the Vulcans a going-over, and whoever they pick is going to have to be pretty thoroughly vetted. So I tried to find a real shrink who was security-cleared and at least temporarily out of reach. That’s what took me so long. However…”

He handed Dehner her papers with a flourish.

“Dr. Sally Bellero, former Assistant Head of Psychiatry at University Hospital, Marsbase, presently on leave of absence in her home town of Tezqan, Peru. There really is such a person stationed on Marsbase, and as luck would have it she’s written several papers on space psychology and the parameters of possible alien intelligence. I figure even if they question your credentials, the turnaround from Mars is over two weeks on conventional radio this century, so that buys you some time.”

“What about friends, relatives, people in Tezqan who might recognize me?” Dehner wondered, pushing the rest out of her mind for the present, even the ticking away of two weeks before her cover got dangerous.

“Tezqan was leveled by an earthquake ten years ago and has been almost entirely repopulated,” Kelso reported. “Your entire family was killed.”

“All right.” Dehner nodded. Until this moment she’d felt virtually useless. “I can work with that. Thank you, Lee.”

“Sure.” He grinned, blushing. Beneath the admiring gaze of his immediate fan club, he produced the final set of papers. “Lastly, for me—I couldn’t resist this one: Technician Howard ‘Studs’ Carter, member STEM Local 583 Itinerant, out of Hollywood, California.”

“What’s STEM?” Kirk asked, bemused.

“Stuntmen’s, Technicians’, Electricians’ and Mediatricians’ Union, of course,” Kelso said. “Exploits all of my known talents and some of my unknown ones and gives me, shall we say, lots of ‘lee’-way?”

No one so much as groaned.

“Lee, you’re a genius!” Kirk said.

“I know,” Kelso said modestly, erasing the menu he’d created from scratch, reinstating the overrides so that no one from this century would be able to detect any tampering.

“All right,” Kirk said, ready for action. “Gary, how much time left on the cameras?”

“Minute and a half, Jim,” Mitchell said calmly. “We can make it, if we hustle.”

They hustled.

“Spacemen,” Easter said. “You got the tape?”

Aghan showed it to him with a leer. “Already decoded.”

Easter thought about it. He was a slow thinker, an odd trait in a terrorist, but in a century where his kind was ostensibly obsolete, Easter was an odd kind of terrorist.

He had chosen his code name after a rebellion of the previous century, one of countless gravemarkers in a grudge war twelve hundred years in the solving. One peculiar outcome of the Eugenics Wars was to get England at last out of Ireland, barely in time for both to become mutually cooperative pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that was United Earth. The final generation of IRA guerrillas, bred to street fighting and not much else from the time they could stand, had suddenly found themselves out of a job.

Their grandchildren held college degrees and meaningful jobs and a broader perspective on matters politic, but there were always throwbacks, and Easter was one of them. Spiky-haired, underground-pale, living on chips and Guinness and overdoses of sweets, crooning “A Nation Once Again” in his exaggerated brogue without ever understanding that its words no longer had meaning—where he found no war, Easter created his own.

He and his kind lived in a past that had never existed, created an edge to live on, a need to be hunted through the fetid undergrounds where they functioned best; it lent some spurious visceral energy to their emptiness. Easter and his motley band—Red, the stringy-haired blonde whose heroes were Abu Nidal and the Red Brigades, Aghan the greasy November soldier, and others scattered globe-wide to foment and instigate, and their arch-enemy and sometime-ally Racher, whose name meant Venger, a hardcore survivalist who would have them all dead, but only after they’d helped him destroy his enemies, who were most of mankind—had killed and maimed and laid waste without ever being so much as captured. For one like Easter whose every waking moment was a death wish, this was its own kind of agony.

“What’s t’use of it, then?” he asked at last, after he’d mulled over Aghan’s news until Aghan had begun to doze. “Spacemen. So what? Was it an invasion, I could see. We’d sit back and let ’em do the killin’ for us. But two, y’said? What’s t’use of it, then?”

“You are thick!” Aghan despaired. “Hostages. Trade-offs for whatever we want, or else we waste ’em. Then more spacemen come to avenge them. There’s your invasion. A jihad to end them all.”

Easter thought that over for a long time, too.

“How we gonter find ’em?” he asked at last. “If t’ship was gonter take ’em away, they could take ’em anywheres.”

Aghan waited for him to finish his thought. Irish were as thick as legend. When Easter had run out of his simple syllables, Aghan spoke a single word: “Media.”

Easter looked at him blankly. “Come again?”

“Slip this”—Aghan fondled the tape of Comrade Mediaperson Mariya Yevchenkova’s conversation with her niece—” to some ‘investigative reporter’ for a rival service. Say the bleeding-heart North-Ams. They do the legwork, we follow in their footsteps. They get headlines, we get the spacemen.”

Easter thought about it some more, tilted his chair back until his feet were crossed on the tabletop and he was staring at the damp on the ceiling. Six feet of reinforced thermoconcrete and twenty feet of earth separated him from the sky. He hadn’t seen the sun in over a year.

He thought, and his thoughts became lurid in their violence. He and his band against the armed forces of Earth, with Racher’s people deployed as backup to take as many of them out as possible, perhaps even Racher himself—it was sure death, death in a blur of blood and glory, the thing Easter craved most.

He swung his feet hard onto the concrete floor. Sure death.

“Contact Racher,” he told Aghan. “We’ll do it.”

“Broadcast on the high frequencies only,” Kirk instructed his troops, handing Dehner’s communicator back to her. “Earth equipment won’t be able to pick up that high. Lee, you’ll be relatively stationary while the rest of us are moving around, so the others will call in to you at four-hour intervals. As soon as you get set up, contact Parneb and let him know where you are. Use an ordinary telephone or computer link and assume you’re being overheard.”

“What about you, Captain?” Kelso had not secreted his communicator in his new Earth-style clothes, held it out to Kirk. “You’ll be in the greatest danger.”

“I’ll get your location from Parneb and try to call in whenever I can,” Kirk said lamely. His communicator lay somewhere in the blue dust of M-155, a victim of his temper. Any junior officer that careless would have been chewed out for his stupidity, but who was going to chew out the captain? He would pay his own price. “I’ll manage.”

“It doesn’t make sense!” Kelso objected. “I’ll be playing around with some of the most sophisticated computer equipment in this century. Want to bet I can’t find a way to reach the high frequencies? Besides, like you said, I’ll be safe in one spot. Captain—Jim, seriously. Take it.”

“I said—” Kirk began tightly, but Mitchell headed him off at the pass.

“Take the damn communicator, James,” he said pleasantly. “We don’t have time for heroics.”

Kirk acquiesced.

“Thank you, Lee,” he said humbly, pocketing the communicator.

Parneb drove them to the airport.

“I shall not rest, my friends, until you have all returned safely,” he said sadly, clasping each of their hands in turn, Dehner’s last. “Captain, if there is anything more I can do—”

“We’ll be in touch,” Kirk promised, thinking: You’ve done more than enough already!

“Mother, consider,” Sorahl observed after Captain Nyere had left them in their well-appointed guest quarters deep within the great ship, away from human eyes and human questions, late into a night when several of those humans, enervated by the day’s events, were thinking of sleep. The Vulcans, gifted with greater stamina, however overtaxed, were at least restful. “There is a curious irony to our situation.”