Strangers From the Sky (5 page)

But T’Lera would have her will in this as well.

“And if it is necessary for you to act upon the Prime Directive?” Prefect T’Saaf demanded. It was a last resort; she knew the answer.

Destruction before detection. It seemed to T’Lera that she had ingested it with her mother’s milk.

“It is not given to me to violate that which Surak has taught and which Savar my father has labored all his days to promulgate,” T’Lera said evenly. “The commander accepts the responsibility for the lives of all her crew, whether blood relative or no. I accept, and I will act accordingly.”

Within moments Commander T’Lera was crossing the quadrangle of the Prefecture, on her way to the Academic Hall to bring the news to her navigator in person. There was no lightness in her step, no sense of triumph. Having argued for her father’s fitness and her son’s qualification, she had added to the already heavy burden of every scoutship commander. She, above all others, must not fail in her mission.

“We’ve got to be out of our minds!” Tatya muttered frantically as they brought the male inside and lifted him onto the waterbed in the sleeping room. “He’s got a concussion, possibly a serious one, and my instruments can’t detect intracranial pressure. He ought to be flown out by MedEvac or he could die on me. The other one’s lost a lot of blood and she’s going to need reconstructive surgery. What are we going to do? I can’t—”

“
Tatiana!
” Yoshi was winded, more out of fear than exertion, and his nerves were shot. “It’s too late to think about that now! We’re committed. Pull yourself together!”

“All right,” she whimpered meekly, all out of character. “I’ll try!”

What was the matter with her? All her life she’d dreamed of space flight, of discovering life on other planets. Only a couple of mediocre scores on a simulator test had disqualified her from the AeroNav program and she’d opted for agronomy instead. Last night it had seemed so exciting. Why was it so terrifying now?

“Let’s get the other one,” Yoshi was saying, tugging on her arm. “
Hurry!
”

This time they both scanned the horizon for visitors.

Yoshi went below first, getting his first real look at the female alien. Her shattered face didn’t bother him as much as he’d expected, but her eyes had the same effect on him as they’d had on Tatya.

“We won’t hurt you,” he blurted before he could stop himself. “We’re trying to help.”

He realized what he was doing and struck his forehead with the heel of his hand.

“Stupid! What’s wrong with me? She can’t possibly under—”

Tatya saw the alien’s swollen lips form a single word.

“Under—understood,” she breathed, and Yoshi felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“Our mission is to observe,” then-Prefect Savar had written. “We will exert every effort to elude their observation telescopes and scanners, and avoid activating the defensive weaponry which every advanced world will perforce have pointed skyward against invasion.

“Approaching no nearer than their own artificial satellites, we will study the topography of their world, and learn their dwelling places and their natural phenomena. We will monitor the carrier wave messages with which they communicate with each other and those which they hurl into space in search of otherworlders. By analyzing all of their forms of visual communication, we will learn their arts and cultures, for these will tell us how they perceive themselves in relation to their world.

“Above all we will master their languages, for how else are we to communicate with them when the time comes?”

“Understood,” T’Lera said in the official standard language of Earth, gleaned by previous scoutcraft crews from the audiovisual programs they had monitored over the years, computer-analyzed for grammatical structure, and stored in universal translators, a language she had learned from her father’s lips as a child and spoken fluently with him and others in the Offworld Service ever since, though never before with one of its native speakers. “Understood.”

She had spoken only to allay the fear she heard in the male Terran’s voice, the anxiety she read on both of the concerned faces floating before her blurred and darkening vision. Had she not been in shock from her injuries and the hours of exposure in the shattered craft, had she been less uncertain of Sorahl’s condition and therefore better able to formulate a logical course of action, she might have taken into consideration the fact that a human’s curiosity is as all-consuming as a Vulcan’s, and kept her silence.

“You speak our language!” Yoshi whispered, incredulous. “But how?”

T’Lera’s fading consciousness did not permit her to explain.

“I’d have thought,” Melody Sawyer said, doing a visual all-points from the conning tower as
Delphinus
cruised at a leisurely three knots, searching, “they’d have everything that could float or fly out here looking. If it’s what you say it could be. A worldwide alert, like in those old 2-D movies about men from Mars. You remember the one—”

She and Nyere were alone on the bridge for the moment, Jason working the scanners for the regular tech, who had gone below for a late breakfast, and Sawyer could afford to be loose-lipped.

“—the one we took the kids to at the Antique Films Festival? Where they built that whole military installation near some mountain in Wyoming just to welcome those little bald-headed, goggle-eyed critters coming down in this big old glittery flying whatsis…”

Her voice trailed off. Jason wasn’t listening to her, wasn’t looking at the scanners he’d so meticulously calibrated, sat squinting grimly at the far horizon hoping against hope that they wouldn’t find what he knew was out there, though he was honor-bound, duty-bound, to try his damnedest to find it, and if he didn’t, AeroNav would simply send out someone else who would.

“So how come, Jason?” Melody broke into his thoughts, grating. “How come it’s just us out here?”

“Because the fewer people know about it, the fewer have to be reeducated later,” Nyere said, watching with perverse satisfaction as Sawyer’s eyes went wide.

“You mean we’ll have to be ‘wiped’?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “The hell you say!”

Ah, the power of euphemism! Jason Nyere thought. “Reeducated,” “wiped,” whatever one chose to call it, it amounted to several mandatory hypnosis sessions to excise classified information from the memories of those who no longer needed it, and it was contained in every AeroNav reg book, a holdover from the reactionary days Sawyer pined for. Odd that she should be the one to object to it.

“Take it to a higher court,” Nyere rumbled.

Sawyer sensed it was best to drop it for the moment.

“What’d you tell the crew?” she wanted to know.

“Told them it was routine salvage op. Derelict satellite with the databank intact.”

“Think they bought that?”

“No. But as long as we’re on radio silence they can speculate to their hearts’ content.” The captain glanced toward the stairwell to see if the tech was on her way back. “And that goes double for you. We don’t want to risk alarming anyone else who might already have found what we’re looking for.”

He nodded unnecessarily in the direction of the agrostation some fifty kilometers off their port bow. The kelp farmers were the only other inhabitants of this stretch of ocean;
Delphinus
had been en route to them with supplies when the Priority One call had come in.

Sawyer whistled quietly. She was quite fond of Yoshi and Tatya; she and Jason and members of their ten-person crew had spent some wonderful long mid-ocean evenings in the company of the two young agronomists. But if civilians were going to get mixed up in this kind of thing, especially civilians with their own communications station and contacts on the mainland—

“As soon as we’re in range, put a tracer on Agro III’s comm band,” Nyere said as if reading her mind. “Close-monitor it yourself. Let’s see what’s new in their little corner of the world.”

“Yes suh, Captain suh!” Sawyer said with a bit too much alacrity.

The scanner tech’s footsteps on the metal stair treads curtailed further conversation.

“Sol system entry 24.01 minutes, Commander,” Helm T’Preth had reported, her voice barely louder than the impulse engines whose control was at her fingertips.

(These were Vulcan minutes, based upon the beating of the Vulcan heart and the logic of units of ten, hence one hundred Vulcan heartbeats equaled one Vulcan minute. In human terms, based on standard time measurement, a Vulcan’s heart beat 240 times per minute, therefore a Vulcan minute equaled twenty-five standard seconds, and twenty-four Vulcan minutes equalled ten standard ones. But the need for such conversion calculations did not yet exist. At present T’Preth’s announcement signified only that their craft would cross the orbit of Sol IX, outermost planet and the one humans called Pluto, in the equivalent of ten Earth minutes.)

“Acknowledged,” Commander T’Lera said from the conn, her voice almost as soft as T’Preth’s, though it never lost its cutting edge. “All: duty stations, twenty minutes—mark.”

Those already at station acknowledged with their silence. There was no extraneous talk aboard this or any Vulcan vessel. While every Vulcan appreciates the value of silence, perhaps nothing reinforces that appreciation better than the proximity of six other beings of varying temperaments within the confines of a scoutcraft on a long space voyage.

In the early years before warp drive, those who kept watch in two-year shifts on this decade-long journey, while their fellows lay aft in cryogenic suspension, often reduced their conversation to nothing more than the relaying of essential data. Even now the ancient Savar, perhaps conditioned by those times, had not spoken for days.

The only one not at his station was the navigator. At his mother’s command and well before the requisite time, Sorahl left off the private study he had been engaged in at one of the library screens and took his place at the navcon, though a trace of puzzlement on his face indicated a lingering preoccupation with what he had been studying. His mother and his commander took note, but said nothing.

Instead she devoted these waiting, interim moments to contemplating the faces of her crew, convinced from long observation that intense concentration upon that which one did best evoked a certain ethereal beauty in any face. As always, her crew did not disappoint her.

Truly her crew was a marvel to behold: a single unit of seven minds, seven distinct personalities and a multiplicity of gifts intermeshed and working together toward a single goal. They were seven and they were one, unity and diversity, the Vulcan ideal. T’Lera beheld them, and marveled.

Foremost was Selik, astrocartographer—tireless, methodical, his universe contained in his work as his work contained a universe. Veteran of several similar voyages, he was at present absorbed in plotting the course of a rogue comet that had altered the gravimetry of this sector since last he’d journeyed this way. The hunch of his narrow shoulders, the particular slant of his silvered head, evinced the degree of his absorption.

Beside him at her communications console and equally intent upon her work was the pale-eyed T’Syra, genetic rarity, Selik’s consort, T’Lera’s contemporary and cherished companion on all her voyages save the earliest. T’Syra’s responsibility was the monitoring and recording of every radio wave that emanated from Earth even at this distance, and her listening posture would vary little in the hours ahead.

The comet’s trail created a great deal of static, disrupting the frequencies T’Syra had been monitoring. Before Selik could inform her of the cause of the disturbance, T’Syra acknowledged with a gesture. Communication between these two required no words.

It had been Prefect Savar’s thought from the beginning that consort should accompany consort on long space voyages, not for human reasons of shared physical intimacy—such was impossible with any degree of privacy under conditions of scoutcraft travel, and the Vulcan required it with far less frequency than humans—but because two minds locked together since childhood could all the more readily intermesh with the minds of others within command structure. Hence Selik and T’Syra were paired, as were the somber helmsman T’Preth and the robust musician/ sociologist Stell, who, sight unseen from the living quarters, offered the contemplative strains of his
ka’athyra
for the diversion of his crewmates.

Ironic, T’Lera thought, that both the initiator of the consort principle and his offspring should themselves always journey alone. What had estranged Savar from her who was her mother was not her concern, and as for her own divorcement from Sotir, it was something she no longer permitted to enter her thoughts. And Sorahl was too young to concern himself with his duties toward his betrothed for some time.

Sorahl. His mild expression, his mother knew, masked a fiercely contained excitement as, his studies forgotten, he sought the first blue glimmer of Earth on the forward screen.

His hair wants cutting, T’Lera thought, seeing it curl over his collar. But were these a commander’s thoughts or a mother’s?

“Time, Helm?” T’Lera thought, not because she needed to know, but to distract herself from her distraction.

“Five minutes—mark, Commander,” T’Preth replied.

“Acknowledged.”

Running on impulse engines, their craft would not reach Earth for hours yet. Officially T’Lera should have been midway into her requisite five-hour sleep cycle, but she had never yet missed this crossing and would not do so now. She could have left the center chair at any time since they’d stopped down from warp speed just outside the system, could have given the conn to Stell who was rotation crew for this ten-day stint, or to any crewmember for that matter. All of their roles were interchangeable; any of the seven could run the duty stations in an emergency, and each had specialized gifts as well.

T’Syra was a registered healer and xenobiologist. Both Stell and Sorahl held engineering degrees and could literally dismantle and rebuild the entire vessel. T’Preth was linguist, artist, and artisan, though the Vulcan made no distinction between the latter categories. Selik was third-ranked navigator in the entire Offworld Service and a member of the High Council; should this be the vessel that made first contact with humans, he would act as spokesman. And T’Lera, their commander, who would give no order she herself would not obey, was to some degree all of these things.