Strangers From the Sky (40 page)

Kirk looked at Spock, and knew his first officer had reached the same conclusion. Kirk nodded. “Do it,” he said.

Slowly Spock removed his hat.

T’Lera’s gaze never faltered.

Her far-searching eyes saw in Spock’s the future that would form him—halfling, hybrid, offspring of the best of both worlds, bridge between the world presently lost to both of them and the world on which they stood. She whom no planet could contain recognized one kindred soul.

And another. T’Lera’s gaze took in Kirk—so obviously human and yet, she saw now, no Earthbound thing. In these two she beheld not one future but two—a future that would give them life, and a future within that future which they themselves could not yet see, which would forge them, at each other’s side, into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

T’Lera saw the future, and accepted the challenge.

The blizzard had let up. The media people, frustrated in their efforts to cut in on
Delphinus
’s silenced radio, had set up a loudspeaker system out of their pooled audio equipment, and mounted a continuous auditory assault upon the battened-down ship.

“
Captain Nyere!
” boomed out across the ice, penetrating the thick hull to where Nyere and Mitchell labored. “
Captain Nyere! We demand to see the aliens! We demand to know who is responsible for the deaths of four citizens of Earth. We demand
—”

“Citizens of Earth!” Nyere snorted, getting the bugs out of the sonar and checking his fuel consumption ratios.

“Kind of clears your sinuses, doesn’t it?” Mitchell mused, working with Yoshi to repair the stress fractures caused by the snowmobile’s explosion.

Tatya was manning the radio, jamming everything the media tried to ram through. Jason had drafted the twosome along with Mitchell. After some soul-searching, he’d told them why.

“There’s
another
Vulcan on board?” Tatya was overwhelmed by this information; the fact that these were people from another century seemed to have gone right by her. “Can we see him, talk to him?”

“Then what T’Lera and Dr. Bellero—I mean, Dr. Dehner—said was true,” Yoshi marveled, staring at Mitchell as if he expected him to glow. “Someday we really will have an alliance with Vulcan.”

“And about five hundred other worlds, son,” Mitchell assured him. “But not unless you and I get this jury-rigging done right, and fast.”

“Gods!” Yoshi said, working faster.

The noise outside was, if possible, growing louder; some of the media types had gotten up the nerve to attempt a physical assault on the great ship, climbing the conning tower and banging on the hatch as if they expected it to open magically for them.

“Hey, Captain!” Mitchell yelled above the loudspeaker, the banging, and Yoshi’s welding torch. “How soon before we can put some distance between us and them?”

“Right now!” Jim Kirk announced, striding onto the bridge. T’Lera and Sorahl were with him, and Spock was at his side.

A man couldn’t ask for a better crew, Jason Nyere thought, quietly amazed at what he saw happening on his bridge.

The virtually inseparable younger threesome was down in the engine room, the doctor—whatever her real name was—had gone to check on Melody and get some rest herself, and the bridge was still top-heavy with talent. Jason’s helmsman, a starship captain in another life, sat at ease beside one of a plethora of navigators, and this new Vulcan, who in his quiet way seemed capable of handling any station, had his ears on, so to speak, at communications. Jason Nyere sat back in his command chair, utterly confident that they would reach their destination, whether it was Fairbanks or Timbuktu.

“A little closer to the latter, I think,” Kirk had told him after conferring with Mitchell. “We’ll know for sure as soon as we can open communications.”

Nyere watched, bemused and utterly calm. He’d used up about a year’s worth of adrenaline in the past few days; calm was all he had left. Beside him, essence of calm, stood T’Lera—watchful, certain, as if no ship’s bridge were alien to her.

They would be going under the ice.

The racket outside had virtually ceased when a new storm front moved in, first scattering those pounding on the hull, then toppling audio equipment and sending everyone back to the helicopters or to the cold comfort of the complex from where, as Spock reported: “They are tapping our communications, Captain.”

It was never clear which captain he addressed; both turned their heads whenever he spoke.

“Let them!” Jason Nyere said. “They’ll get an earful in a moment. Engine room: stand by. I’ll want full steam in five minutes—mark.”

“Affirm, Captain,” came Sorahl’s crisp response.

I could get used to this, Jason told himself.

The comm screen crackled ominously.

“Message incoming, Captain,” Spock reported unnecessarily. The import of the message did not disturb him as much as the fact that: “They are three minutes, fourteen seconds late.”

Nyere opened his mouth to say something—he didn’t know what—but Jim Kirk had turned from the helm to cut him off.

“Don’t mind him, Captain; he does that all the time.”

“Understood, Captain,” Nyere said conspiratorially. “Transfer to my screen, please, Mr. Spock.”

Only the brief flick of his tongue over parched lips indicated Nyere’s nervousness as he prepared to lay his personal future on the line for the sake of a larger one.

“‘The whole world is watching,’” he murmured softly.

It got Kirk’s attention. “That’s from something, isn’t it?”

“Ancient history,” was all Jason would say as the bland face of Norfolk Command appeared on his screen.

“Prepare to receive your final orders per disposition of your detainees, Captain.”

“Command, stand by, please.” Unseen, Nyere motioned to Spock, then leaned into the screen. “Command, we have reason to believe we are under frequency tampering. Repeat: someone is tapping us, Commodore…”

Slowly, methodically, Spock began to manipulate a series of dials in the order Nyere had shown him. The commodore’s face began to jiggle and blur on the screen.

“We have been under siege by the media since 0830 hours,” Nyere continued. “Suggest they may be responsible…”

Spock manipulated more dials. The commodore was fairly dancing on the screen now, as well as fluttering in and out. Onscreen at Norfolk Command HQ, Jason Nyere was doing the same thing.

“…also a storm front moving in, contributing to—”

“Say again, Captain.” The commodore seemed to be having difficulty with his voice. Spock’s fingers continued to work their magic. “Not—you clearly. Repeat—”

“Sorry, Command, unable to comply,” Jason Nyere said in all innocence, and Jim Kirk wondered silently if all ships’ captains were blessed with glibness. “Message is breaking up. Repeat—”

At the unseen downsweep of Nyere’s hand, Spock broke the connection. T’Lera watching, might have had second thoughts about a future that taught a Vulcan such duplicity.

“Bridge to engine room!” Nyere opened the intership, nodded to Kirk and Mitchell. “Open her up!”

The diving klaxon whooped in time with Jim Kirk’s heart as the great ship surged under him, never as smoothly as
Enterprise
, but with a kindred pent-up majesty. The ice surrounding them groaned in protest, as probably did whoever at Byrd could see through the blizzard, as the great ship shrugged them both off simultaneously and lowered away, sounding the depths like some massive version of the creature it was named for.

Jason stepped down from the center seat. “Commander?” he addressed T’Lera formally. “While I ride herd on the sonar, would you care to take the con?”

T’Lera’s eyebrows expressed what she could not. “I would be honored, Captain.”

Even at this depth, they had to watch out for ice.

“Just treat ’em like asteroids, kid,” Mitchell advised Kirk, plotting a course around yet another ominous chunk.

“Give me phaser power and I will!” Kirk retorted, though he was having the time of his life.

Once past the ice and the three-mile limit, they made top speed.

“Captain,” Spock announced when they dared break radio silence, “I have reached the mobile transmitter at the coordinates Mr. Mitchell has provided.”

“Parneb,” Jim Kirk explained from the command chair; it was his turn to play captain. “Gary said to expect a one-word message. Either we’re all clear to come ashore where he is, or we’ll have to await a new rendezvous.”

Spock listened. “The answer is in the affirmative, Captain.”

Jim Kirk stopped holding his breath. “Good. Captain Nyere, how much of a safety margin would you say we had?”

“Figure it took them an hour or two to guess we’d bolloxed our own communications,” Jason said. “By now they know we’ve cut and run, but they have no idea where. They’ll have deployed whatever they can spare, but they’ll be bumping heads in the dark if they’re not careful. As long as we stay under, we’re maybe an hour ahead of them.”

Jim Kirk relaxed in the center seat; it was about what he’d calculated himself.

Bridge personnel had altered somewhat. Sorahl had replaced Mitchell at navigation; beside him, T’Lera had the helm. Spock, of course, remained at communications. The sight of three Vulcans running the ship had given Melody Sawyer a turn.

“What the hell, Captain suh?” she greeted Nyere after her nap. She’d been updated on the situation, not that she believed any of it. She gave the new communications officer a good hard look. “Mr. Spock, is it?”

“Affirmative,” he said, returning the look in kind.

Melody sighed. “Well, there goes the neighborhood!”

“Consider the future, Sorahl-
kam
,” his mother said so softly human ears could not hear, her eyes upon the hybrid Spock and his human companions.

The young Vulcan had been doing precisely that. “Are we instrumental in this, Mother? Is it because of us?”

“In spite of us, my son…”

“Captain suh, are you mad at me?”

“Why? Just because you shot up the chandeliers and damn near busted all my ribs? Why, Melody, think nothing of it…”

“Earth will never know!” Jim Kirk mused aloud. “They’ll never know what they had in their hands. What they came so close to missing, what they almost destroyed!”

“Indeed, Captain. But in the fullness of time…”

“When they’ve learned,” Jim Kirk said. “Matured, as I had to. Spock, I—”

“Captain, centuries of peace preceded Vulcan’s sending T’Lera to Earth. Humans had less time in which to mature. Yet, on the whole, each of us has done remarkably well—together.”

The farewells were necessarily brief.

“‘Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only…’” Jason Nyere rumbled, unsuccessfully banking down his too-human emotions.

“‘For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go…’” T’Lera added. Earth’s poetry had been among her many studies.

“‘And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.’” Jason kissed her hand. “I’m going to miss you, lady.”

“Live long and prosper, Jason Nyere,” T’Lera replied. “I will hold you in my thoughts.”

Only she would know for how long.

Yoshi and Sorahl had no words. A simple handshake joined them for the last time.

“So long, Junior,” Melody Sawyer blustered. God, but her daughter would hate her for letting this one get away! “Tell your mom I—tell her I’m sorry. Tell her maybe I’ll mellow out in about twenty years.”

“I shall tell her,” Sorahl promised, his velvet-dark eyes betraying some appreciation of Terran humor. “Though I do not believe it.”

“Good-bye, Lieutenant Kije!” Tatya whispered through her tears.

Once upon a time, vast pods of dolphins had frolicked along these shores. Indigenous fishermen had noted their migrations and prepared their nets, knowing the fish would come in ahead of them, herded closer to the shore by the playful predators. Man and dolphin had worked in harmony for generations, sharing the largess.

Now the dolphins were gone, the fishermen turned to other trades, and this particular stretch of beach lay dormant in the moonlit night. The conning tower of a great ship breached the surface some kilometers offshore, looking lost and alone, as if seeking its brethren who were no more.

Beside the tower bobbed the small skiff that had in Jason Nyere’s capable hands first brought two exiled Vulcans to his ship. A different captain, the one named Kirk, held the tiller now as three Vulcans left
Delphinus
for their journeys home.

“Beautiful night,” Gary Mitchell said quietly, scanning the beachfront. “Wish there was a little less moon, though. I read some kind of vehicle up the beach a-ways.”

“Just one?” Kirk asked. Mitchell nodded. “We’re almost in the clear, then.”

Elizabeth Dehner was the last to leave the great ship. She had seen to the “reeducating” of each of the four to be left behind. The experience had drained her. She looked pale, drawn, desperately tired.

“Are you all right?” Jim Kirk asked as Spock helped her into the small boat.

“No, I’m not,” she said frankly, pale hair falling over her paler face as she stumbled and Spock caught her, seated her in the last available space beside him in the bow. “I’d like to rest now.”

The night was chill. There were blankets in the emergency kit. Spock wrapped one around Dehner’s shoulders. Half drugged with weariness, she leaned against him and tumbled into sleep. Spock held her, perhaps only to steady her in the bobbing boat. She woke when they touched ashore.

“I’m sorry!” she murmured, coming to herself with her head against Spock’s chest, knowing how Vulcans, and he especially, were disquieted by human touch.

Silently Spock helped her out of the boat.

Sorahl stepped agilely over the gunwale and knelt at the tide line, scooping up two handfuls of sand—one sea-wet, the other dry. His face wore wonderment beneath an alien moon.

“It is this moment, Mother,” he said.

T’Lera knew what he meant. They had at last set foot on Earth.

A
FAMILIAR ROBED
figure stepped out of the overland vehicle parked where moonlit beach met shadowed rain forest.

“All are here and all is well!” Parneb rejoiced as the little entourage straggled up the beach. “I have prepared for all contingencies. The vehicle—is she not a beauty?—will seat you all quite comfortably. I have provided suitable disguises for our guests—turbans and
djellabas
for the gentlemen, a
tobe
and veil for the lady. Ah, if only you had not been born Vulcans, you could have been Egyptians! Oh, and, Captain Kirk,” he called to the last member up the beach, busy setting the homing device that would drift the little skiff out to sea and then scuttle her. “I have a small surprise.”

Kirk, made melancholy at the thought of sacrificing any ship, no matter how small, to any cause, no matter how large, turned in the direction of the overlander as the “small surprise” uncoiled himself from the driver’s side, grinning like a mischievous small boy.

“Lee?” Jim Kirk couldn’t believe it. He cleared his throat. “Mr. Kelso, where the devil have you—”

“I got sidetracked for a while,” Kelso admitted. “Little difference of opinion with the authorities about borrowing computer time. They tried to keep me overnight but, a little improv here, a door jimmied there—I’ve been around.”

“I’ll just bet he has!” Mitchell remarked. “Bet you he’s been lying around in the sun while the rest of us have been where the shooting was. Time we got you to do an honest day’s work, Lee.”

“On the contrary,” Parneb nattered away as they settled themselves into the overlander for the long drive to the Western Desert. “Lee has been a very sorcerer! Wait until he tells you what he has accomplished! Captain Kirk, if you could see your way clear to spare him, what magic I could work with such an apprentice….”

There were indeed two sleeper ships suspended in horizontal berths in the man-made cavern beneath the desert. Beside them, an empty gantry had evidently once held a third.

“Burn marks on the floor,” Jim Kirk observed, his voice bouncing off the walls. “Then they can be launched from here, if we’re lucky. Go over the two remaining ones carefully,” he instructed his augmented crew. “We’ll use the one that needs the least refurbishing and strip the other for parts. Let’s see how much we can boost these old nuclear engines. I wish Mr. Scott was with us!”

“We’ll cope, Jim,” Mitchell assured him, tossing a spanner up to Sorahl on the exterior catwalk, boosting Kelso into a crawl space bristling with wires and old-style transistor units.

Spock and T’Lera had already brought up the on-board computer and had their heads together conferring over exterior hull readouts. Kirk rolled up his sleeves and was soon sneezing in the fifty-year-old dust of the reactor room.

“So you’ve been censoring the people’s right to know, have you, Lee?”

“Well, I wouldn’t go
that
far, Mitch. A little judicious cut-and-paste here, an occasional bit of editing there—”

“A little tinfoil here, a couple of tapeworms there—”

Jim Kirk cleared his throat impatiently. The three of them were wedged cheek-to-jowl inside an environmental control conduit; he could live with a little less hot air.

“Mr. Mitchell, get your elbow out of my ribs!” he grunted. “Would one of you mind telling me what you’re talking about?”

“You mean Lee hasn’t told you what happened after he skipped on the CommPolice?” Mitchell backed out of the conduit to get a spare part for the humidity sensor, called over his shoulder. “Tell him, Lee!”

“Well?” Kirk asked tightly. Kelso’s elbow was in his ribs now.

Kelso managed to look sheepish even from this angle. “Well, Ji—Cap—I, um—well, I guess you had to be there. Had to hear the hysteria every time you turned on the vidscreen. You guys were protected from a lot of that. But I couldn’t sit there and do nothing, let it get all blown out of proportion.”

“I can appreciate that,” Kirk conceded, sliding further up the conduit to adjust an oxygen converter valve. “So what did you do?”

“Well, I was afraid someone would get hurt or killed,” Kelso went on. “Panic in the streets, riots, mass hysteria. So I—”

“You
what?
” Kirk growled. “Come on, Lee, spit it out!”

“I got into the GlobalNews computers and planted some virus programs,” Kelso said all in a rush. “Tapeworms to eat up the inflammatory news stories, new programs to replace them with ‘unconfirmed and conflicting reports.’ Left them tied up in knots!” he finished, beaming, pleased with himself.

Kirk collapsed against the wall of the conduit. “Lee, you amaze me!”

“I know,” Kelso said modestly, not for the first time.

“Maybe I
should
leave you behind with Parneb,” Kirk threatened, easing himself out the way Gary had gone. “You still haven’t told me how you got away from the CommPolice.”

“Maybe that one should wait,” Kelso said uneasily. “Remind me to tell you later.”

But he never did.

“Logically,” Spock explained to Kirk and T’Lera, “Planetary defense systems will be directed outward, in search of incoming hostile vessels. The last Earth system directed against the planet itself, and in essence against its own citizens, was the so-called SDI system of the last century, which was dismantled with the signing of the United Earth Accords. Present systems will not anticipate a vessel containing aliens heading
away
from Earth.

“Consequently, if Sorahl is as skilled a navigator as his commander purports him to be,” Spock concluded dryly, studying his paradoxically both younger and elder kinsman, “their vessel should be able to leave the Sol system undetected.”

“And that’s the best we can do,” Kirk said in turn to T’Lera. “I only wish we could give you warp drive.”

“It is more than sufficient, Captain,” T’Lera replied. “And if my navigator is as skilled as I purport him to be, it will serve.”

Kelso had tuned the on-board computer to a nearby radio band to check up on his tapeworm crop.

“…rumors continue to trickle in from the frozen continent, particularly in light of the discovery of the bodies of four armed individuals, one of them reputedly that of the terrorist leader known as Racher, the Avenging One…”

Covered with lubricant and grinning from ear to ear, Lee Kelso slid back under the chassis of the old DY-100 and whistled while he worked.

“In a not-unrelated story, PentaKrem officials have issued a statement confirming that the AeroNav vessel found at anchor off the coast of Mali this morning is in fact the
CSS Delphinus
, the same vessel sent to retrieve an unidentified spacecraft from the South Pacific two weeks ago. Captain Jason Nyere and his first officer, along with two as-yet-unidentified civilians who were the only personnel aboard, were removed from the ship for questioning…”

“And if I’ve done my job right”—Elizabeth Dehner handed off the container of food concentrates Parneb had just unloaded from the overlander to Jim Kirk, who stacked it atop the others in the hold—“they’ll find all four of them smiling, cooperative, and totally uninformed about what’s happened to them in the past two weeks.”

“God willing!” Kirk said.

“…this just in: security forces in Antarctica report the arrest of four individuals passing themselves off as journalists in an attempt to leave the continent at a point not too far from Byrd Research Complex, the still-unconfirmed site where two alleged extra-terrestrials were supposedly being held. One of the four detainees was identified as Aghan, participant in the Twelve November Alliance…”

“Optimum launch window at 2300 hours, Commander,” Spock informed T’Lera as an automated winch slowly raised the DY-100 to its vertical position beside the waiting gantry.

“Affirm,” T’Lera said distantly, her thoughts already on the stars.

“…further evidence that the body found frozen in a disabled snowmobile, along with a substantial cache of arms, is in fact that of the ringleader of the group calling themselves the Easter Rebellion. The mystery deepens in conjunction with the death of the survivalist leader Racher and the arrest of four others, suggesting that terrorism in our time has been dealt a serious, possibly fatal blow…”

The desert sky was cloudless and abrim with stars. One of this glittering host, a red M-2 sun about which orbited a harsh, demanding world, birthplace of fourteen billion disciplined, logical beings, beckoned two of its number home. A third native of that world, who as yet had no home, began a countdown from the control room beneath the rock. Inside the clumsy Earth ship, T’Lera of Vulcan touched the controls, triangulated off that glinting ruby in the sky, and the lumbering DY-100 lifted off.

Radio telescopes at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, in Khazakstan and the Nevada desert, on Mars and the far side of the moon, scanned the skies outward, unnoticing of a small silver ship slipstreaming under their noses, past Jupiter and beyond.

Sorahl kept Kelso’s radio frequency open as long as it was viable.

“…disease continues to spread unchecked, with unconfirmed reports that the entire South Pacific crop has now been affected. Personnel on Luna and Mars have been advised of possible food shortages and the need to abandon their bases and return to Earth if…”

“No sir.” Yoshi smiled affably at the intell-agent asking all the questions. “Jason never told us where he was taking us or why. Naturally I wanted to stay with my crops, but pass up a free vacation?”

Other intell-agents, searching his cabin aboard
Delphinus
, puzzled over a book of late-twentieth-century poems entitled
You and I
hidden with his socks. Yoshi used to read those poems aloud to Tatya on the agrostation, he explained. Love poems, you know. The intell-agents nodded, put the book back, completely missing the crumpled computer printout stuck in it for a bookmark.

“We’re done our best,” Jim Kirk announced to the remnant of his crew long after the DY-100’s trajectory had taken her out of sight. He climbed into the overlander with the others. “Parneb, take us home.”

“Leaving Sol system in one hundred seventy-three minutes—mark, Commander,” Sorahl reported, reverting to the language and the time measurement of his birth planet, which somehow fitted him not so smoothly after two Earth weeks of speaking Standard.

“Affirm,” T’Lera replied, her far-searching eyes containing only the stars.

The transmissions from Earth continued, growing fainter.

“…begun in 1986 as the World Hunger Year Concerts, in those desperate times when much of the world’s people were inadequately fed, this year’s sixtieth annual Concert for Peace seems particularly poignant in view of the recent uproar over a possible alien incursion upon Earth…”

“…PentaKrem spokespersons, in a joint statement with the United Earth Council, reiterated yet again today that maneuvers in the South Pacific and on the Antarctic continent, erroneously believed by media infiltrators to be evidence of an alien invasion, were nothing more than a test of Earth’s preparedness to cope with any potential invasion. Repeat: rumors of an alien invasion were totally false; the exercises carried on by Combined Services forces were intended to test planetary defense systems and to assess Earth’s readiness to deal with life on other worlds. PentaKrem and council officials have stated unequivocally that there were not, and never have been, aliens on Earth. We repeat: the so-called alien invasion…”

As the slow-moving sleeper ship passed Pluto, the radio signal continued to fade.

“…concluding our classical program with the suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s ‘Lt. Kije.’ This comic tale of the imaginary romantic hero created by a stroke of Czar Nicholas’s pen—”

Static from the Oort Cloud swallowed the signal. Sorahl, like his commander, turned his thoughts outward to the stars.

Parneb’s overlander pulled up in front of his tel in the hour before dawn. Kelso still had the radio on.

“We repeat once again: there were not and never have been—”

“Lee, enough!” Jim Kirk said testily as everyone piled out of the vehicle. “Turn that thing off!”

Kelso did. Everyone but Spock went inside.

“Mr. Spock,” Kirk said quietly in the morning stillness. Somehow the relationship between them would never be the same. “Come inside, please. The sooner we get out of here…”

The Vulcan seemed lost in thought. “A moment, please, Captain.”

He stood in the deserted Theban street beneath a royal-blue sky in the hour before dawn, at the base of a tel of six thousand years’ building in this ancient Earth place. He would not have attracted attention had some early riser happened by, dressed as he was in a sky-blue
djellaba
, his stark features enhanced by the turban that did indeed make him look almost Egyptian. Spock gazed for what might be the last in a long time at the sky of Earth, where all but the brightest stars had faded, and reached inside the
djellaba
to remove a thin silver chain from around his neck.

He held the talisman in his gifted hands and considered. This thing belonged to Earth; he had no right to take it with him. Loosening some stones from the base of the tel, Spock buried the talisman in Earth.

The others, back in Starfleet uniform, were waiting for him in Parneb’s ancient cellar. Above and beyond them, as Parneb made his preparations for their departure, an awakening world turned on its vidscreens to the first somber news of the day.

“…today mourned the death of Professor Jeremy Grayson, who died peacefully in his sleep…”

“You’re sure this will work?” Kirk asked Parneb, uneasy about the entire process.

“You have worked your magic, Captain,” the sorcerer said equably. “Now it is my turn.”

He had moved the great crystal down to the ancient room beneath the tel to augment its power; it pulsed and glowed in empathy with the smaller crystal hung about his neck. Jim Kirk found himself wondering if a transporter were any less magical.

He had arrayed his people on the sand-swept floor as if awaiting a transporter beam up, noticed Kelso was out of position. He cleared his throat.