Strangers From the Sky (37 page)

“I have to!” Kirk shouted, then got control of himself. “Captain, you’ve got to—”

“Doctor, I ordered you to stay below!” Jason rumbled, leading her toward the stairs. He had overheard, not that he understood. Prime Directive? What the hell…?

Dehner gave Kirk one last backward glance. “Jim—”

“All right, doctor!” he said tightly. “As you were!”

The military parlance suited Kirk, Jason saw. He was going to take a chance. He shoved a limited-range laser rifle into Kirk’s hands.

“Go give Sawyer some backup.”

But halfway up the stairs with weapon in hand, Kirk realized Dehner was right. He couldn’t. Not even for Gary. But he had to do something.

He plunged up the stairs and threw himself in beside Melody at the gunnery slit; Sawyer never took her eyes off her gunsight. She was single-handedly holding the line, keeping whoever they were inside the outbuildings with steady bursts of fire, but for how long? From his limited perspective, Kirk could see the buildings of the complex, their shattered windows spitting varieties of death, and the roof of the snowmobile, but no Gary.

“Thought a ship this size would be equipped with more than hand weapons,” he remarked, realizing the one he held was of such antique design he probably wouldn’t be much use with it if he could figure out how to fire it.

“Brilliant deduction, cream puff!” Melody spat between rounds. “We could take out a whole city, except the heavy artillery’s under the ice, and we can’t move this hulk under these conditions without a full crew. If it were up to me, we’d seal off and wait for them to run out of spitballs, but captain seems to think your friend’s worth saving.”

She stood up and used her backhand to lob a sonic grenade damn near inside the nearest building to keep the crazies busy while she reloaded. When the shock waves subsided, Kirk tried to get her attention.

“Is there a way out of here besides topside?”

“Auxiliary hatch ’round back of the radio room. Puts the tower between you and them.” Melody slid a full clip home before it dawned on her what he was suggesting. “Are you crazy?”

“If I can get Gary in, you can seal off,” Kirk said hurriedly. “If I can’t, you’re rid of both of us and you can seal off anyway. Give me your grenades.”

“And have you slam-dunk one in on me before you go join the opposition! Like hell!”

“Melody,” Kirk said patiently, the laser rifle easier in his hands than it ought to be. If he only had a hand-phaser. “Right now I could vaporize the top of your head and the conning tower simultaneously. Will one of you for God’s sake trust me enough—”

“Captain suh!” Melody shouted past him, fired another round, waited for Nyere to respond. “I read ten to twelve of them, assorted light-to-medium armament. And the cream puff wants to go play in the snow!”

“Jesus!” Nyere breathed. He would have been up there with her, but he was still on the infrared trying to get a fix on each terrorist, and he was anticipating trouble from below. Sure enough, T’Lera was there.

“Captain Nyere.”

Her voice seemed to strike him like a blow, and even he for once cringed from the fire in those eyes. She had disregarded Yoshi’s instructions about repairing to the infirmary for safety, had for that matter disregarded Yoshi, deflecting him and all things human until she did what she must. She was in full command mode now, formidable. Sorahl followed her without word, as if to the gates of hell, Jason thought, if Vulcans had subscribed to such things.

“Dear God,” Nyere breathed, seeing her. “You’re the last thing I need!”

“Captain.” T’Lera had been briefed by her son, held out her hands in a gesture of surrender. “If it is us they want…”

Jason groaned. “Don’t you understand? This is my ship! I’m not in the habit of tossing lambs to the slaughter, and until I know who and what I’m combatting, you are in my way!” His hands too made a gesture of surrender. “For the love of God, T’Lera.” He had never addressed her by name before. “Please!”

It cost her much, but T’Lera acquiesced. It was not given to her to dictate to another’s command, even if lives were lost. She nodded once and was gone, Sorahl with her.

Now all Jason Nyere had to contend with, aside from a dozen terrorists, was this enigma named Kirk.

A ship’s captain’s greatest skill lay in split-second gut-instinct decisiveness, in any century. Kirk recognized the struggle Nyere fought with himself and for once kept his mouth shut. Nyere’s hand was on the string of grenades around his own neck, when—

“Pete’s sake!” Melody shrieked, hurling herself backward and halfway down the stairs as a wave of flame shot through the gunnery slit, dissipating in a greasy-stinking fireball that would have fried her in an instant if not for her tennis player’s reflexes. “They’ve got a flamer!”

Twenty-first-century flame-throwers, Kirk remembered vaguely, having heard Sulu raving about them once, were napalm-fed, laser-powered, and had a range of over a hundred yards. Hardly kid stuff, even by his century’s standards. He felt Nyere thrust the grenades into his hands.

“We can’t hold up long under one of those,” the captain breathed. “Leave the slit open and they’ll cook us one by one. Close it and they’ll fine-tune the thing and slice us open like a tin can. You’ve got three minutes to get your friend. I’ll lower the gangplank in two. When you see the tower light go on, move.”

Kirk gripped his arm briefly, warriors’ gesture of gratitude too ancient to eradicate, and moved.

He hadn’t bothered with outdoor clothing, wouldn’t have wanted the encumbrance of it, gave no thought to the incredible cold until he had to pry his hands loose from the ladder rungs as he let himself down the far side of the tower and flung himself onto the ice. He half ran, half slid until he reached the little of the prow that stuck up through the ice, his last bit of cover. Another wave of flame shot out of Byrd toward the tower, illuming a scene out of somebody’s hell before plunging it back into darkness. In that instant Kirk spotted Mitchell facedown in the snow and prayed he was only covering.

Something exploded, knocking Kirk sideways off his feet. Melody was throwing grenades again, covering him. This one sent the flame-thrower back into hiding and sent Kirk into motion. He leaped, rolled, scuttled forward on hands and knees, crawled on his belly like a reptile, ran the last few yards zigzag around a burst of automatic fire that Melody quelled with yet another grenade as Kirk dived behind the snowmobile and smack on top of Mitchell.

“Gary, it’s me!” he screamed above the racket, shaking Mitchell to keep him from reflexively ripping his head off. Recognition brought wild laughter and a great deal of mutual back pounding.

“Are you all right?”

“Sure, kid!” came the answer, but Mitchell’s voice was ragged, his lips trembling from more than cold.

Kirk saw the tower light strobe on and sweep across the battered facades of the outbuildings, sending the terrorists scattering back from the windows out of range. The gangplank started down. Kirk shoved Mitchell toward it.

“Go! I’ll cover for you!”

He thought he remembered what to do with an old-style sonic grenade; he was about to find out. He allowed himself to watch Mitchell leap for the gangplank and scramble upward to the hatch, then slipped two grenades off the string, flipped the safeties and sent them rolling in opposite directions down the alley between the complex and the ship as far as he could throw. Let them figure out
that
strategy, he thought, head down to weather the synchronized blasts. The tower light swung over his head again. Mitchell was safe inside. Kirk ran for it.

In the twisted synapses of Racher’s mind, it was all Easter’s fault.

He and his dozen had had great fun at the expense of the monosyllabic Provo and his traveling circus with its cumbersome killing toys—rocket launchers and vaporizers and a neutron cannon so unwieldy it took two people to fire it—toys so powerful they could not be used in close-quarters hand-to-hand without destroying attacker along with victims. Cowards’ toys, Racher had called them, wishing he had them now.

If all had gone as planned, Racher thought, spitting fire with his flame-thrower, they’d have had no need for such awkward hardware, would already be inside carving their way inch by bloody inch to victory. Now only the flame-thrower stood between them and total rout. The heavy toys were with Easter, wherever the bloody hell Easter was, and there was no way to breach the ship.

“Pointless!” one of Racher’s lieutenants screamed in his ear. “We can’t get inside! Call it off!”

“Never!” Racher shrieked back, spitting flame across the distance, feeling his own heat and power to the exclusion of all else. A lick of flame caught Mitchell’s abandoned snowmobile, incinerating it in a thunderous fireball that rocked the pack ice and the great ship.

The conning tower shuddered under the impact. Melody had barely slammed the hatch shut behind Kirk when the blast sent her sprawling the full length of the stairs this time, right into Gary Mitchell’s waiting arms.

“Some reception committee!” Mitchell grinned, his humor restored now that he was inside. “Can I play?”

“Civilians!” Melody spat, dismissing him, and Kirk, who stood wringing his hands (with fear, she thought), lurched over to where Jason was getting readouts on blast damage.

“You all right?” Jason grabbed Melody, concerned.

“Been better!” she remarked, feeling around her teeth with the tip of her tongue. “Think I bit my tongue. Look at us, will you, Jason—tennis togs and stocking feet! Some defense team! How bad?”

Nyere showed her the readout. “Exterior stress fractures and partial bulkhead rupture. We’ll know the next time we try to go under.”

Melody meanwhile was scanning the body readings on the infrared, memorizing where they were inside the buildings. She took Jason’s as-yet-unfired laser rifle from him without resistance.

“Time we put a stop to this!” she declared, bolting the stairs to the tower with eight generations of Alabama marksmen behind her.

Laser rifles make very little sound. Melody picked off three of Racher’s dozen before they knew what hit them. One was the lieutenant who had pleaded for retreat. He fell inches from his leader, who never turned to look. The others, recognizing futility at last, wheeled and ran for the snowmobiles.

Only Racher remained, his metal-and-plastic body, lizard-cold, yielding no heat reading on infrared. In full awareness of a cause lost, he did not relent. Revving the flamer to its highest setting, he leaped into the clear, charging the great ship alone, spitting flame, admixture of dragon and perverse Quixote, howling vengeance like some reborn Teutonic berserker.

Whatever else Racher was, he was part of the diversity of creation. His weapon, human-made, fueled not by vengeance but only napalm, proved the less invincible. Its semisolid fuel, rendered too solid in subzero air, jammed in the feeder tube and began to drip onto Racher’s arctic fatigues, saturating them. Racher’s destiny came in a howling column of flame, beacon in a frozen hell, transmogrifying whatever might have been human in him into a charred lifeless hulk toppling under its own weight, smoking feebly in the snow and stolid starlight.

“They are in retreat, suh!” Melody reported, scanning the fleeing snowmobiles from the helm. The ultimate irony of Racher’s incendiary end was that no one saw it. “Request permission to have a look around, see if they left any wounded.”

She knew the three she’d dispatched were dead—she never missed—but she had to somehow goad Jason out of the well of weariness in which he was in danger of drowning.

“All right, dammit,” he breathed now. “Let me at least get my boots on. Kirk, how’d you and your friend like a breath of air?”

“So fill me in, James,” Mitchell said out of the side of his mouth as Sawyer none too subtly led them out onto the ice at gunpoint. “What have I missed? What fun times have you and the lady psychiatrist been having in my absence?”

“You’ll be briefed,” Kirk mouthed back, eyeing Melody over his shoulder. “As soon as you tell me what the hell you’re doing here against orders.”

“Oh, we-el…”

Kirk understood completely why Jason wanted them out here for the body count; if he were in command, he’d have done the same—kept the unknown quantities out in the open and away from the Vulcans, seen if they reacted with anything like recognition to the bodies in the buildings, or if there was anything on the dead to connect them with the living. Then, too, if there were any live ones still lurking in the vicinity, Kirk and Mitchell would do for cover.

“No ID on the three inside,” Melody reported. “But the weapons were Ground Forces-issue.”

“Doesn’t necessarily mean what you’re thinking, Sawyer,” Jason grunted, watching a pale newborn sun flush the ice at his feet from blue to pink. A heaping yellow-gray storm front on the opposite horizon, promising blizzards, moved in on them with ominous speed. “Lot of terrorist splinter groups have access to GF hardware—”

“Sold to them by GF regulars looking to foment insurrection and keep themselves in business. It’s an old trick, and one I wouldn’t put past that tin-star general who was here.”

“Sawyer, conspiracy theories are as old as—” Jason began, but Jim Kirk saw an opportunity and seized it.

“Excuse me, Captain, but maybe it’s not so farfetched,” he offered. “Who else would know that you’re out here with the Vulcans, without your crew, and on radio silence? Would it be the first time Ground Forces acted ahead of the council’s decision?”

Melody was nodding sagaciously, but Jason had had enough.

“Kirk, do me a favor?” His voice was pained. “Shut up!”

Kirk did, but not before planting the seed of doubt in Nyere’s mind.

“Wait’ll you see what else I found,” Melody said, leading them across the ice to where Racher’s smoldering remains left an ugly smear of ash against snow and ice melt. “I hear tell GF is doing android research. You tell me what you make of that, Captain suh.”

Together the four of them examined the mass of burned flesh and plastic fused and melting into charred metal.

“Never mind this!” Nyere looked ill. He’d been crouched over the carcass, got to his feet now, listening. “Tell me what the hell you make of
that
!”