Strangers from the Sky

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Strangers from the Sky Page 1

by Margaret Wander Bonanno




  STAR TREK

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  ONE

  Tatya raised herself on one elbow and gaped through

  the sleeping-room port at the night sky, her

  china-blue eyes wide. She hadn't imagined it.

  "Yoshi? Yoshi, wake up. Look!"

  He was sleeping on his stomach as usual, stirred

  and groaned, tried to burrow deeper under the thermal

  quilt, but Tatya shook him again. He pushed himself

  up on his elbows and vaulted out of the waterbed in a

  single graceful movement, padded across the floor

  to stand before the wide port in all his lean, golden

  nakedness.

  "It's a meteor," he muttered, one hand

  holding his long black hair out of his eyes. "All

  day in the outback mending fences and you wake me for a

  stray meteor. Tatya, for gods" sake"

  "It's not a meteor," Tatya said

  emphatically. Lord knew they saw enough of those out here

  where the sky was tw tilde thirds of their world.

  She stood at the port beside Yoshi, naked too no

  one but fish to gawk at them this far out as broad as he

  was narrow, as pale as he was golden, her heavy

  blond hair in two plaits down her back. She

  pointed to where the strange light moved down the arc of the

  sky. "It's not bright enough,

  and it's moving too slowly. Steadily, not

  tumbling. Like it's on a set course. It's a

  ship, Yoshi."

  "Aeroationav would have signaled us if there'd been

  an accident." Yoshi yawned, dived back into the

  warm nest they'd made among the

  bedclothes. "It's a meteor. Or space

  junk. Somebody's antiquated satellite come

  hurtling down on our heads. It'll be all over the

  screen tomorrow. FAILURE OF SALVAGE OP;

  VITAL

  DATA LOST OVER SOUTH PACIFIC. his

  He considered putting the pillow over his head, as

  if that would protect him from things falling out of the sky.

  "One of these days something'll hit us square on,

  you 11 see. KELP FARM STATION

  OBUTERATED, TWO DEAD."

  Wasn't enough we

  tried to destroy the ecology down here. Now

  we're cluttering up the whole solar system.!"

  "Cynic!" Tatya clucked, crawling back

  into the bed beside him.

  The strange orangish glow across the

  royal-blue bowl of mid tilde cean starscape

  was gone now. Maybe it was only a meteor or

  space junk, but it had been awfully close;

  Aeroationav should have warned them. Tatya imagined she

  could have heard its hiss and plop as it hit the water.

  Silly, she knew, but perched on a tiny

  platform kilometers from nowhere, surrounded by acres

  of undulating kelp and in the company of only one

  other person, one got to thinking

  sometimes. Only those with unshakable psych

  profiles were assigned to the outlying agronomy

  posts; the screening was almost as rigid as that for deep

  space. Tatya and Yoshi were optimally matched and

  well adjusted to the isolation. Still . . .

  "Yoshi?"

  There was a feeble movement among the bed- ciothes.

  "Just supposes what if it was an alien

  spaceship? Seventy-five years ago

  Asimov

  stated there were tens

  of thousands of Class M worlds that might

  support 10

  intelligent life. And the ship we sent to Alpha

  Centauri his

  was won't be back for another nine years, if at

  all," Yoshl mumbled sleepily. "Any truly

  intelligent species would take one look at us

  and keep right on going. Million years on this

  planet, still haven't gotten the knack of not killing

  each other. Three Worid Wars, Colonel

  Green . . ."

  "But that's all over," Tatya insisted.

  "We're a United Earth now. And someday we'll

  break the light barrier and our chances of encountering other

  species will increase a hundred, maybe a thousand

  times!" She jounced the bed in her excitement. "It

  has to happen. Maybe within our lifetime."

  "Time-warp speed is still only theoretical,"

  Yoshi the cynic stated, and suddenly he was snoring

  softly, unaware that his prophecy was about to be

  fulfilled. Something had already come hurtling down on

  their heads, and it was about to hit them square on.

  Tatya was the first to spot the wreckage the

  next morning.

  She and Yoshi were in the hydrofoil,

  performing their weekly tour of the perimeter to make

  sure the barriers had held (little worse than having

  to pick masses of jellyfish tentacles or

  decapitated squid out of the kelp braids after

  storm damage) and that no vessel had run afoul of

  their planted acreage despite the warning buoys.

  It wouldn't be the first bme they'd had to rescue some

  private sea- or air-going pleasure craft

  caught in the weir, batteries dead, food and

  water depleted. But what Tatya saw was something

  other.

  "Cut power!" she yelled over the thrum of the

  foil's motor.

  They'd requested a replacement damper

  months ago, but it had gotten buried in

  bureaucracy. The kelp and algae and soybean

  farms, basis of all synthetic food production

  on this planet, which at brig last had

  reamed to feed all its peoples, were supposed

  to get top priority on equipment requisitions,

  but that was the official story.

  When Yoshi didn't hear her, Tatya reached

  past him and flipped the main.drive toggle herself,

  answering his startled look by merely pointing off

  to starboard.

  "There'"

  As the hydrofoil settled into the water at

  cruising speed so as not to disturb whatever floated

  there, the shape of the wreck was unmistakable despite

  the extensive damage. This was an

  extra-atmospheric vehicle, a

  spacecraft. There were many such vessels used for

  exploration and mining operations

  throughout the sol system, including a

  regularferry making the run between Earth, its

  moonbases, and the recently established

  Martian Colonies. But this vessel was none of

  theirs.

  "It's not an Earth ship," Tatya said with that

  absolute bedrock certainty that always made Yoshi

  tease her.

  "Since when are you an expert?" he started in on

  her now, his mouth twitching with

  amusement as he pulled athwart the blackened

  hull and cut the foil's motor to a standstill.

  A fragment of what could have been lettering still

  visible on the seared and pitted hull, in no

  alphabet he would recognise, might have

  shaken him just a little if he'd bothered to look at

  it.

  "Does it look like anythin
g you've ever seen?"

  Tatya demanded, touching it tentatively, as if it

  might have been alive.

  "Looks like it might have had somebody in it at one

  time," Yoshi said, avoiding her question. "May as

  well see."

  He stood up in the bobbing foil and threw a line

  out to the wreckage, securing them

  together. Standing astride the two, his long skinny

  legs wobbling as he struggled to keep his balance, he

  tugged at what looked like a hatch, warped away from

  its housing by 12

  the impact, offering them access to the craft's

  insides and, very possibly answers to all their questions.

  "Well, does it?" Jatya insisted.

  "Probably some toeaence greater-than comsecret

  new design we mere civilians aren't privy

  to," Yoshi said vaguely, intent on what he was

  doing.

  He'd fetched a grappling hook out of

  me hold and was using the foil's auxiliary power

  to lever the hatch open with a raw, screeching noise.

  When he got it to where he could move it

  manually, he did so, peering into the darkness within,

  where all he could see at first in contrast to the

  brilliance of sunlit seascape around them were the

  lights of We monitors and what he took to be

  corpses. No one could have survived the outer hull

  temperature of the incendiary they'd watched across the

  sky last night. Yoshi suddenly pulled back,

  jerking his hands away as if the hull were still hot.

  "Gods, Tatya, I think there's someone still

  alive-in there!"

  "Alive? But how?"

  "I don't know! I don't see how, but his

  "Let me see!"

  She pushed him out O; the way to get a

  closer look. Tatya was a paramedical least

  one member of every station team was required to be and if

  there was a chance to save a life, no matter whose

  First Mate Melody Sawyer of the CSS

  Delphinus handed Captain Nyerc a cup of

  ersatz coffee from the dispenser and sipped at her

  own, trying not to be too conspicuous in her loitering.

  She had to know if what she'd seen in the sky

  toward the end of last night's watch had anything to do

  with the orders coming through on Nyere's screen right now.

  Jason Nyere tasted the coffee and made the

  obligatory gagging sound (ironic that the hold was

  stocked with cases of the genuine

  article hermetically sealed, time coded,

  inaccessible short of detonation all

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  bound for agronomy station personnel, while he and

  his crew were consigned this stuff,

  concocted from the very kelp harvested on the stations,

  molecularly processed into something that tasted like a

  cross between parched

  sorghum and Nile Delta water at low tide

  on washday but sure as hell wasn't coffee),

  tore his slate-grey eyes away from the

  static-filled screen, and nailed his first officer with

  them. tilde

  "Sawyer, when this comes through it'll be Priority

  One," he rumbled at her, hoping she'd have the good

  grace to leave before he had to order her out.

  "Coffee's that bad, huh?" Sawyer drawled,

  stretching her long, tennis player's legs in their

  belled uniform trousers, not taking the hint.

  ""Coffee," my Aunt Tillie!" Nyere

  grumbled. "Time was, I am told, when the navy

  got the best rations, not the worst."

  "Time was, Captain sub, when the navy was a

  purely military entity," said Sawyer tilde

  hose severalffmes-great-granddaWy had seen

  military service in a place called Shiloh in

  a time when there were only nations or fragments of

  same, not a united humanity putting its world back

  together in the wake of juggernauts the like of Khan

  Noonian Singh and Colonel Green "not the

  misbegotten agglomerate of re-

  searchisurveillancestdiplomatic

  courierstoccasional deterrenVgeneral maintenancesterrand

  boystchief-cookand-bottle-washerstorganized

  grab-ass entity that it is today. Suhl"

  Nyere chuckled softly. Sawyer had these

  reactionary fits often; she was an incredible hardener

  when it suited her. Personally, he preferred the

  enlightened demilitarisation of today's Combined

  Services to what had gone before.

  "You'd do things differently, I take it?" he

  inquired, though he'd heard this speech before.

  "Damn straight! Jack of all trades is

  master of none," 14

  Melody snapped back. There was something

  incongruous about such macho opinions

  coming from this er/while southern belle with her

  freckles and her soft drawl, neither of which took the

  edge off the opinions or the wilfulness behind them.

  Sawyer had been transferred four times in her

  early career before Jason Nyere decided her

  abrasiveness was exactly what he needed to keep

  him from going soft. "This ship being a prime example

  of the problem, suh. We are designated neither as

  submarine nor

  exclusively surface vessel, neither

  battleship nor merchantman, yet we are some how

  expected to act as all four simultaneously.

  Suggest that in a real crisis we'd get tangled

  In our own lines and sink under our own weight.

  Suggest the absence of identifiable parameters is enough

  to reduce the entire crew to a state of permanent

  paranoid schizophrenia. Suh!"

  "Speak for yourself, Sawyer," Nyere said. "Some

  of us would rather his

  The communications screen crackled and

  bleeped (Message COMING THROUGH), and

  Nyere remembered where this conversation had

  begun.

  "Melody, I'm not kidding. Priority One.

  Take a hike."

  "Captain, sub, respectfully suggest you try

  and make me!" she shot back. She was a

  hardliner only when it suited her; the rest of the time

  she was insubordinate to the point of

  Nyere sighed. The two of them had served on the

  same ships for over a decade. He'd saved her

  life once, she his twice, and he'd been godfather

  to the younger of her two kids. The tough-as-nails act

  had no effect on him. He waited for her to soften.

  "Let me stay this once, Jason, please?"

  "All right, damn you. But keep out of range of the

  screen. It's my neck."

  "Tough neck!" Sawyer remarked, sidling over

  to where she could see without being seen.

  The message was out of the Norfolk Island Command

  Center, from Aeroationav Control itself.

  Tatya, her hands full with the torch and the

  hydrofoil's emergency medical kit, had

  misjudged the distance and lowered herself none too

  gently into the damaged craft. It began

  to yaw violently and Yoshi lost his footing,

  tumbling backward into the foil. By the time he'd righted

  himself, nursing barked shins and an assortment of

  bruises, he could see that the spacecraft had

  settled considerably lower in th
e water.

  "Tatya?" he called into the darkness below.

  "You're taking on a lot of water. How's the

  situation where you are?"

  The sound of sloshing was her only answer.

  "Get me the spare light down here!" she barked

  after some time. "Whoever said these things were waterproof .

  . ."

  He lowered the second torch down to her, wondering

  if he should join her to hurry things or if that would

  only make the craft sink faster.

  "Don't move around more than you have to!" he

  shouted down to her. There was no answer. "Usten, if

  it starts going uncler, I'm pulling you out. Never

  mind about anyone else. You hear me?"

  He got no answer to that either, hadn't expected

  one. Tatya was intent on saving lives, could only

  concentrate on one thing at a time. Yoshi shifted his

  bare feet in his impatience. Tatya's unseen

  movements continued to rock the craft. It slowly

  settled deeper in the water, balanced

  precariously on the flexible cables of the barrier

  weir, listing inexorably away from the hydrofoil,

  pulling the securing hawser taut.

  "Tatiana . . ." Yoshl called sweetly

  after he thought the silence had gone on too long. He

  never called her that when she was within swinging distance.

  "Can't you hurry? Or at least give me some

  idea his

  "There were four altogether. The two aft are dead.

  Incinerated," she reported flatly. "No

  surprise. What I can't figure out is why the

  other two aren't."

  The two aft, she didn't bother mentioning'

  floated sluggishly in an ever-rising pool of

  seawater at the skewed lower end of the cabin. If

  Yoshi knew how bad it was, he'd order her out

  immediately, never mind the two survivors at the forward

  end, still strapped in their seats, unconscious and

  pinned under wreckage, but alive. Tatya inched her

  way through the rising water, gripping machinery and

  chairbacks

  against the slippery slant of the deck until she

  reached the other two.

  "What pretty uniforms!" Yoshi heard her

  exclaim. "Everything here is so attractive

  functional, but beautiful at the same time. The

  furnishings, the machinery. It's all so so

  wonderful!"

  Yoshi felt his scalp prickle. That didn't

  sound at all like old practical Tatya.

  "How's the air down there? You're not making much

 

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