Strangers From the Sky (3 page)

“How’s the air down there? You’re not making much sense.”

“I’m fine. Rig the bosun’s chair and don’t bother me!”

That
sounded like Tatya. Yoshi went to work.

“Odd!” he heard her say, half to herself. “I can’t find a pulse on either of them!” She raised her voice to make sure he heard her. “I’m going to start sending them up!”

“‘Them’ who?” Yoshi shouted as he scrambled to rig the rescue harness with its snap-away stretcher. He didn’t expect an answer to that either. For some reason he couldn’t explain he’d been scanning the horizon since Tatya had gone below, anticipating company. Certainly they hadn’t been the only ones who’d seen it go down. “At least tell me what I’m rigging for!”

“The first one’s male, approximately six feet, one-sixty to one-seventy pounds,” Tatya recited, all professional. Yoshi could hear her sloshing around; the water level was rising, then. “Unconscious due to blow on the head, possible concussion. Some second- and third-degree burns and—damn! None of my readings on internal organs makes any sense, and it’s too dark down here. We’ll have to risk moving him. You got the full stretcher rigged?”

Yoshi snapped it to the aft hoist and tugged the lines.

“All set!”

“Okay, lower away. I’m checking the second one now.”

“Male, young what?” Yoshi couldn’t resist as he lowered the stretcher vertically through the hatch. “Sounds awfully big for a little green man. No tentacles, extra arms? You sure he isn’t an android? How many heads does he have?”

“Yoshi,
dammit
!” She sounded more disappointed than angry.

“Just trying to lighten things up a little. You need some help lifting him?”

That earned him some of Tatya’s favorite Ukrainian barnyardisms; in practical application she was stronger than he was. After a moment he felt her tug the line and started the foil’s auxiliary to begin hoisting her patient out, guiding the line with his hands so the stretcher wouldn’t bump the hatch.

“Male, young
what
, Tatya?” he had to ask one more time.

He caught a glimpse of her pale, concerned face in the cabin below as the stretcher emerged slowly into the sunlight.

“I’m not sure. You have any relatives on Mars?”

“…located and if at all possible retrieved. Standard radiation and microorganism precautionaries to be implemented. Survivors, if any, to be quarantined aboard your vessel under Regulation 17-C until we contact you. Under no circumstances are you to break radio silence. Do you copy,
Delphinus
?”

“We copy, Control,” Captain Nyere said to the screen. “Commodore, what exactly is it that we’re looking for?”

“Not your concern, Captain. Just follow your orders.”

“And when—if—we find it?”

“If Regulation 17-C applies, you will stand by until you receive further orders. If not—General Order 2013, Captain. Methodology at your discretion.”

The screen burst into static without so much as a signoff. Jason Nyere realized he was sweating.

“Jesus!” he whispered. “This is the kind of thing you have nightmares about. I never thought it would come down to me. I can’t do that!”

“Can’t do what?” Sawyer demanded, moving between him and the vacant screen; Nyere had forgotten she was there. “General Order 2013 is not in any reg book
I
ever read.”

“It wouldn’t be. The 2000 series is accessible to command officers only,” Nyere said softly, vaguely. He kept dabbing the perspiration from his brow and his mustache, but it didn’t help. He stared at his sodden handkerchief as if he’d never seen it before. “It’s
Flag Officers’ Handbook
, crisis activated only. It’s none of your—I told you not to listen in!”

A number of smart-ass retorts sprang to Sawyer’s lips; she clamped her rather horsey teeth down on them and didn’t speak. She’d seen Jason stare down the muzzle of a loaded neutron cannon without breaking a sweat. She’d never seen him look this frightened. Unobtrusively she moved behind him and began massaging his shoulders. If any of the crew stumbled in now, there’d be hell to pay for insinuations. Let them dare. If one old friend couldn’t comfort another in times of stress—

“Jason, what is 2013?”

“Two-oh-one-three—and I shouldn’t be telling you this,” he said tiredly, slumped in his chair, unresponsive to her ministrations, “is a contingency plan for possible alien invasion.”

Melody’s hands stopped. She laughed.

“You mean they’re sending us out to look for a flying saucer? I don’t believe it!”

Jason nodded dismally.

“Believe it. Ever since the first UFO sightings, there’s been a contingency plan of one kind or another on the books to contain, assess, and, if necessary, destroy any incursion from beyond our solar system. Even when it was passed off as the hallucinations of a few crackpots, there was that much credence given to it. Now that we’re capable of moving out of the system ourselves, now that we’ve been sending messages for over a century, it seems all the more likely that someone or something is going to answer us.”

He paused. He was saying these things, his life and his command were being dictated to by them, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe them, nor what he was going to have to do if they were fact.

“Whatever it was that went down out there last night, Melody, it wasn’t one of ours.”

Sawyer paced the confines of
Delphinus
’s fairly roomy captain’s cabin, contemplating the calm and sparkling Pacific, somewhere in which a supposedly alien spacecraft had gone down the night before. Chances were it had simply plummeted like a stone into a pond and that was the end of it. General Order 2013 would be preempted by something as basic as gravity and the depths of the ocean floor.

“Why ‘destroy’?” Melody asked at last. “I can see if they were hostile. An invasion force. But they’d hardly come in one ship at a time, would they? And the order wouldn’t have turned you into the face of Armageddon in the time I’ve been sitting here. It’s something else, isn’t it?”

Nyere smiled wanly, unable to shake his awful dread.

“You’re right. It’s nothing so simple as any of that. What it is is our having a long, considered look at the alien or aliens and reporting our findings to Command. Command then decides if old Earth is ready—for the first time and for an absolute certainty—to know that such aliens exist.”

“And if Command decides not?”

“Then it falls upon us to make certain that they—and any witnesses to their arrival”—he shook his head, unbelieving—“cease to exist.”

“Relatives on Mars?” Yoshi said. “Tatya—”

Whatever comeback Yoshi might have had was throttled in mid-breath as the first survivor hove into view in the brilliant sunlight. The fact was that despite burns and abrasions and just plain dirt he did look Japanese, at least at first hurried glance as Yoshi swung the hoist and lowered the stretcher below decks to move him off of it and onto one of the bunks. Under closer scrutiny, though…

Yoshi felt his hands go numb and deliberately shut off the part of his brain that tended to extrapolate from what he saw to the extremities of what in all cosmic senses it could mean.

What if Tatya was right?

She was tugging on the line with a kind of urgency, anxious to get her second patient up, and Yoshi shrugged off his reverie and forced his hands to work, but even as he went through the motions, maneuvered the lines, kept an eye on the water level (another foot and it would reach the lower edge of the hatch, already the stray wave lapped inside—hurry, Tatya, hurry!), he still found time to stare over his shoulder at his newly acquired passenger.

It all happened rather quickly after that. Tatya’s movements, to judge from the craft’s renewed rocking, became little short of frantic. Yoshi heard her shout something as he hand-over-handed the stretcher up for the second time, and had to ask her to repeat.

“I said she seems to have smashed her face to hell,” Tatya yelled. “I wanted to warn you. Knowing how you usually react to blood.”

“Don’t sweat it!” Yoshi yelled back, annoyed. It wasn’t his fault he was squeamish, and she didn’t have to be so superior about it.

He had no time to test his tolerance. Without warning the foundering craft tilted precipitously off the barrier, snapping the hawser, which caught Yoshi on the ankle. He howled in pain as his leg buckled, refused to work right for some seconds. The craft lurched and spun and water poured into the open hatch. Yoshi shoved the laden stretcher unceremoniously onto the deck, unsnapping it from the harness, which he flung desperately down into the filling darkness.

“Tatya, now! Grab the line and hold on!”

The auxiliary chugged and wheezed as it pulled Tatya upstream against the current. Yoshi flung her, gasping, drenched, and cursing onto the deck, left her to recover on her own while he veered the bucking hydrofoil as far away from the sucking maelstrom of the sinking craft as he could.

In an instant it was over. The sea was calm, and except for a slight fraying of the barrier cables, the spacecraft might never have been.

“You all right?” Yoshi asked over his shoulder, pointing the foil toward home.

“Waterlogged,” Tatya admitted, hugging him squishily, water and kelp strands streaming out of her hair. “You?”

“Hawser damn near busted my ankle.” He showed her the ugly red swelling that would be three shades of purple by nightfall. “Bruised my backside. Damaged my pride. I’ll live. Better have a look at your patients.”

Something in the way he said it had Tatya below in a flash. Yoshi said nothing more, pretended not to look as she examined them for the first time in full light.

“Yoshi, come here a minute,” he heard her say, her voice on the last calm edge of panic and beginning to fray. “Turn off the damn engine and come here!”

He did. She held out her hands to him in the sunlight. Considering the extent of the survivors’ injuries she’d expected blood, but this—

“Tell me I’m not crazy,” she pleaded. “Tell me I’m really seeing this.”

“You’re not crazy, Tatya. I see it too. I saw it when you sent the first one up.”

“
Bozhe moi!
” Tatya breathed. “It’s
green!
”

“Boy, do I remember that feeling!” McCoy sat warming himself at the fire in Jim Kirk’s apartment. “First time I saw surgery on a Vulcan—I couldn’t have been more than a first-year med student, never been offworld, didn’t know a Vulcan to speak to—I’m telling you, I couldn’t make a fist for the rest of the day! It was so
strange!
You expect blood to be red, dammit, no matter what the textbooks tell you.”

It was evening. Kirk had put in a full day at the Admiralty. Spock was out on
Enterprise
for the next several weeks, taking his cadets through maneuvers. McCoy as usual managed to make himself to home wherever he was. He’d been telling Kirk about
Strangers from the Sky
, hoping to pique the amateur historian’s curiosity.

“We’ve all had our moments of strangeness with other species, Bones,” Jim Kirk said quietly, gazing into the fire. For some reason the topic made him uneasy. “And God knows there’s been enough written on the subject, from abstracts in
Xenopsych Today
to those interspecies biology texts we used to pass around when we were kids. From the sound of it, this book of yours seems to fall somewhere in between.”

McCoy cocked an eyebrow at him.

“That’s a helluvan assumption from someone who hasn’t read it.”

“Nor do I intend to,” Kirk replied pleasantly enough. “That particular era doesn’t interest me. Never has. I don’t know why, but—well. Freshen your drink?”

“Don’t know what you’re missing!” McCoy grumbled, keeping a weather eye on the level of the bourbon as Kirk poured.

“I remember the last book you recommended,” Kirk said. Planetside the good doctor found far more leisure for reading—one of his tamer vices—than he did on double Sickbay shifts in space. “Gave me nightmares for weeks. You know the one I mean—
The Last Reflection?
”

“
The Final Reflection
,” McCoy corrected him. “Dammit, Jim, you’re getting soft! Tell me that wasn’t one of the most electrifying docudramas you ever read. Tell me you didn’t enjoy it.”

“It was and I did,” Kirk acknowledged. “I just—didn’t like the thoughts it left me with afterward.”

“Such as?”

“Such as how there really are no Good Guys and Bad Guys. Just a lot of people falling over each other trying to do what they think is right. And about how fragile history is.”

He had caught his breath then, the way he always did when he was about to spin off on one of his poetical monologues. McCoy settled back and let him fly, along for the ride. Damned if the man couldn’t talk you to the gates of hell if you let him.

“I got to thinking about how one individual can sometimes change the course of history,” Kirk was saying. “How if Krenn had been the kind of stereotype Klingon we’d come to expect, if Tagore had been a lesser human, we might have destroyed each other long ago. You read books like that and you realize how fragile the whole structure is. The old theory that if Hitler hadn’t been born, Earth’s Second World War wouldn’t have happened. Or that without Khan Singh there’d have been no Third—”

“—and if the archduke hadn’t been assassinated at Sarajevo, there’d have been no First and no reason for the other two,” McCoy cut in. “Bull! Jim, you don’t really believe all that hokum? War was the human condition until we outgrew it, Hitler or no. That one-man-as-catalyst theory is a lot of horse hockey!”

Kirk shrugged. “I don’t know that for sure. Sometimes it seems so much hinges on little things. One small incident, one misspoken word, one tiny misinterpreted gesture and the whole structure collapses. When I think of how much power we have, and how little common sense, I get the shakes.”

“Which is exactly why you’ll love this book, Jim,” McCoy promised. “It deals with an incident none of us knew about until now. Our first
real
contact with alien life, the one the textbooks never told us about, and how we almost botched it so completely we might never have tried it again. Might have curled up in our little isolationist nest and pulled the covers over our heads and let history and the Federation pass us by.”