Strangers from the Sky

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Strangers from the Sky Page 2

by Margaret Wander Bonanno


  sense."

  "I'm fine. Rig the bosun's chair and don't

  bother met"

  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 ups'

  ""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, onesixty to one-seventy pounds,"

  Tatya recited, all professional. Yoshi could

  hear her sloshing tilde round; the water level was

  rising, then. "Unconscious due to blow on the

  head, possible concussion. Some second- and

  thirddegree burns an tilde 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.

  Fle 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?"

  "dis . . Iocated 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 slience. 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 concem, 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 your

  discretion."

  The screen burst into static without so much as a

  signoff. Jason Nyere realised 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 still 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 maw saging 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 9 Ding 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 owl 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 his

  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 insid tilde hurry, Tatya,

  hurry!), he still found time to stare over his shoulder at

  his newly acquired passenger.

  It all havened 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 tocombe 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."

  "Bozbemoi!" 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 c
ouldn'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 his

  was 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."

  "I don't buy that, Bones," Jim Kirk

  said, moving about the room winding those of his antique

  clocks that needed winding, a nightly ritual.

  "Sounds like a pretty big fish story to me."

  "Not if you consider the era we're talking about,"

  McCoy argued. "Earth was less than fifty

  years away from Khan's war, had just begun to consider

  itself a united world, and it had its growing pains. People still

  living who'd lost family and friends in that war and could

  never be reconciled, some cities still in ruins, a

  lot of grievances and old vendettas still festering.

  Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the best

  or the worst time for a bunch of aliens to come dropping

 

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