Strangers from the Sky

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Strangers from the Sky Page 30

by Margaret Wander Bonanno


  his throat had been shot out or burned out or even

  ripped out and replaced with a robotic voice box,

  that other body parts had met similar

  metal-and-plastic fates. Easter, watching those

  eyes roll and click at him on the commscreen, could

  well believe it.

  "I ain't afraid o'nothin"!" Easter

  retorted, having thought it through thoroughly. It was a

  lie. Death he did not fear, at least not his

  definition of it death immediate in a flash of heat and

  fire with nothing to follow or, at worst, a hell of

  further fire. But death by cold slow, creeping,

  numbing, Dantesquc that was fear. "I done my

  share. T'reporters is eating it out of our hands.

  And I said yez could have any of me people."

  "But not you?" Racher's metallic sneer

  transmitted across a hemisphere from his base

  somewhere in Africa. "Easter keeps his rear covered

  while we freeze ours? Nicht so. You come with,

  coward, or there is nothing!"

  "Who yer calling a coward?" Easter

  spluttered, then stopped.

  Slowly it penetrated his brain that Racher intended

  exactly what he'd had in mind, the real reason

  behind this caper that made the capturing of spacemen

  tilde 264

  go

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  secondary a desolation of polar ice as the

  perfect arena for their true purpose, the elimination

  of the other for supremacy over the global terrorist

  ratpack. Only one King Rat would emerge from such

  a showdown. The

  white-on-white nihilism sparked some remnant

  of Irish heroic poetry buried deep in the

  detritus of Easter's murderer's soul.

  "Listen, yer lousy scut." He chose his words

  carefully, for all their seeming rage. "I'll beat

  yer there!"

  "Ever wonder about the others out there, Ben?"

  Jeremy Grayson asked his

  many-times-great-grandson.

  Spock finished drying the dinner dishes,

  meticulously folded the dishtowel. ""Others,"

  Professor?"

  "I've never known quite what to call them,"

  Grayson said, setting out his pawns. was

  "Aliens" sounds like a slur somehow, and

  "extra-terrestrials" is so ethnocentric.

  The Others, then. The intelligent beings on all those

  other worlds out there."

  Spock sat carefully opposite his ancestor.

  Their nightly conversations had covered a variety of

  philosophical and speculative topics, but

  never this one. Was this some manner of test?

  "Do you believe unequivocally that they exist,

  Professor?"

  Grayson found that amusing. "You mean do I

  really think humans are all there is? A perfect

  God would hardly be so easily content. Oh, I

  believe in them, Ben. I only wonder if they

  believe in us."

  He palmed a pawn of each color for Spock

  to choose from; his eye quicker than any human hand,

  Spock chose the black.

  "I am not certain I understand."

  "It occurred to me" Grayson opened with a standard

  knight gambit "that they've probably been out there

  watching us for years, and if they aren't weeping,

  they're probably killing themselves laughing."

  Spock considered the actual history of

  "alien" obser

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  vation of Earth as he contemplated an unusual

  bishop defence. "I must confess, Professor, that

  I have never considered the question in quite that way."

  "Captain's Personal Log, Day Six;

  Location: Aeroationav Wingboat hangar, Staten

  Island, Tierra del Fuego:

  "I wait with the other intelligence personnel in

  what passes for the VIP lounge of this desolate

  great barn in this more desolate corner of the world. Our

  destination: a place that gives new meaning to the word

  "desolation": Byrd Research Complex, on the

  inland edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica.

  "My intelligence credentials have passed all

  inspections thus far, making it possible for me

  to infiltrate the system with remarkable ease.

  Special Commendation, Lee Kelso, appended.

  My fellow intell-agents are predictably

  featureless; even those obviously traveling in

  pairs do not speak to each other. At the opposite

  end of the lounge, a select group of civilians

  seems to be enjoying themselves a lot more.

  "Dr. Dehner or, should I say,

  Dr. Bellero, has gone on ahead with the first

  boatload of military and medical personnel.

  She, at least, left knowing what she had to do. I

  only wish my mission were as clear.

  "I have the virtually impossible task of seeking

  out two Vulcans, stranded on an ambivalent

  Earth twenty years before their appointed time, and somehow

  persuading them to trust me to extricate them from their

  velvet-lined captivity, lest they fall prey

  to human fear or permit themselves to be "lost" in a

  bureaucratic gulag from which there may be no

  return.

  "The only Vulcan I knew to speak

  to invariably rubbed me the wrong way without trying, and

  I am forced now to admit that most of the fault was

  mine, my insistence on trying to make him over in a

  human image, which simply cannot, and should not, be done.

  If only I had been able to

  understand that, we might never have been caught in

  Parneb's machinery at all,

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  and if Spock is lost, as Parneb believes

  he is, it is my responsibility, and mine

  alone. A Vulcan is not a human with

  pointed ears; he is a Vulcan, with all of the

  difference and similarity this implies. I have learned

  this too late. How much more difficult will it be for

  humans of this century to understand; how ironic that it

  falls to me to make them see it!

  "As for what I am to do about the human witnesses

  to this event the logistics of escape are child's play

  by comparison. As for my only other contact with

  Vutcans, the celebrated Vulcanian

  Expedition . . ."

  Jim Kirk stopped jotting in his notepad,

  aware that at least one other intell-agent was

  pretending not to watch him behind dark glasses. This

  compulsion to record his thoughts was a blatant threat

  to his cover, and Jim Kirk cursed himself for a

  fool. When the boarding announcement came, he

  stopped in the lavatory, first incinerating his notes,

  then flushing the ashes. Taking his seat in the

  wingboateahe continued his log entry in his head.

  The Vulcanian Expedition. Its very misname was

  evidence of a fiasco masquerading as a serious

  mission.

  According to official statements, the

  convergence of four starships in orbit around the dry

  red planet was intended primarily as a show

  of unity to impress the empires. That it also served

  to remind the Vulcan Council of the scarcity of

  Vulcan nationals in St
arfleet was purely

  coincidental.

  The Articles of Federation clearly stated that every

  member planet was to provide a certain percentage

  of its population for service to the UFP. Vulcan

  had no objection to that, had in fact been one of the

  major proponents of the article, and her scientists

  and students provided far beyond the quota of

  volunteers for research and exploration, as well as

  such inglorious tasks as clearing brush and planting

  crops on colony planets. But certain other

  Federation members, Tellar in particular, found this

  inequitable. Vulcans should 267

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  serve in Starfleet in equal numbers as well,

  they maintained. Why should humanoids take the

  brunt of combat missions while Vulcans raised

  flowers and gave seminars on safe

  outplanets"...Bywhat right did Vulcan waive a

  military draft, leaving Starfleet service only

  to those who wished it? Thus the Vulcanian

  Expedition.

  The outcome was the commissioning of the starship

  Intrepid, built and manned entirely

  by Vulcans, the only starship in the Fleet never

  to fire its phasers against a living being. Rumor had

  it the phaser tubes were sealed, the torpedo bays

  empty, but any Vulcan would assert that this was

  illogical. The weapons' existence did not

  necessitate their use.

  It was a logical response to a no-win

  challenge. Starfleet chose to view it as a

  compromise, a concession on the part of the Vulcans,

  and the four starships left orbit with a feeling of

  relief. Vulcan considered Intrepid neither

  compromise nor concession, but a statement of

  logical purpose a shipful of scientists without a

  single combatant aboard. Vulcans would indeed

  participate in Starfleet, but only according to their own

  convictions.

  Starfleet's concession was to send Intrepid

  solely on research missions, leaving potential

  combat situations to those who had manned them before.

  Tellar lodged an official protest, but this was not

  unexpected.

  And a generation of young Starfleet officers could tell

  their grandchildren that they'd been to Vulcan, though it

  wasn't entirely true.

  The Republic had been one of the starships sent

  to flex its muscles over Vulcan, and her

  navigator, one James T. Kirk, was one such

  participant in the expedition who never set foot on

  the planet. Unneeded at his post once they were in

  orbit, he'd been drafted as a glorified

  security guard, shepherding diplomats to and from

  transporter rooms, Letting no closer to the world

  itself than Vulcan Space Central, the vast

  orbiting space station, over a thousand years old, with

  its red-draped walls and torrid temperatures.

  He'd man268

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  aged to keep his nose clean how not, on a world with

  no words for the concept of a barroom brawls. and never

  once spoke directly to a Vulcan, had to be

  content with snatches of conversation overheard in

  corridors to give him some vague notion of who these

  beings were. What he had or had not learned would not

  help him now.

  Jim Kirk watched as the wingboat lifted off from

  the frigid waters off Tierra del Fuego and

  soared over an expanse of grey whitecapped sea

  on its way to Antarctica.

  If only Spock were here! he thought, not

  for the first time, but for a different reason. I don't know

  if I can dothis alone!

  Lee Kelso yawned, stretched, checked the time.

  Captain Kirk would still be in transit to Byrd;

  there was no way to contact him until he arrived and

  probably it was just as well. Better to save him a

  few hours' grief over these news leaks.

  There was nothing else to do tonight except possibly

  key down and get some sleep. Kelso had barely

  turned off the lights in his cubicle and wished his

  trusty little computer pleasant dreams when the door

  buzzer sounded.

  Kelso frowned, half sat up, remembered the

  cubicle's low ceiling just in time. He'd left a

  wake-up call at the front desk, but that wasn't

  for another four hours. Unless the buzzer was

  defective, or whoever it was had the wrong cubicle

  . . .

  It buzzed again. Uh-oh, Kelso thought. This

  has to be trouble. He looked around the tiny

  cul-de-sac, as if there were any means of

  escape. Bracing himself for just about anything, he leaned

  against the entrance door and yawned.

  "Yes?"

  A baleful eye met his through the

  peephole. "Mr. Howard Carter?"

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  Definitely trouble, Kelso thought, scanning the

  room to make sure he'd left nothing incriminating

  Iying around. "Who wants to know?"

  A badge replaced the eye at the peephole.

  CommPolice, here to question him on suspicion of

  tampering, using computer time without paying for it.

  "We'd like to talk to you."

  Kelso laughed inwardly. If they had any

  idea what else he'd been up to . . .

  Opening the door slowly, looking like nothing so much

  as a sleepy small boy standing there in his

  skivvies, Kelso was inclined to be

  philosophical. They'd have caught him

  eventually; it had only been a matter of time.

  Chapter Seven

  WITH JASON NYERE at her right hand and

  her son at her left, T'Lera of Vulcan

  faced a United Earth and attempted to answer its

  questions. Among the representatives of the

  military, intelligence, and several diplomatic and

  peace organisations, Jim Kirk

  listened, and marveled.

  He did not know what preparation the Vulcan

  commander had made for this ordeal, only knew from her

  answers and her unflagging patience that she was

  prepared. He could not know that her transit here in the

  big ship that lay now with its conning tower thrust up

  through the pack ice like some fantastical city

  mushroomed overnight in the wilderness, had been

  spent kneeling in meditation on the unyielding metal

  deck of her guest cabin deep in the belly of the

  Whale, letting its vibrations subsume her body

  and enter her very soul.

  Another Vulcan might have found the

  unrelenting noise of this human-built behemoth

  unbearable as it Flowed its inexorable way first over,

  then under, a cold dark Earthsea where dwelt

  creatures so seeming-alien most humans would be

  utterly repulsed by them, carrying far from the reach of

  most humans two not so

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  alien that those humans could not accept them, given the

  chance. But T'Lera had lived in motion most of her

  days, and however strident this pounding, thrumming machine

  noise compared to the lissome slipstreaming of

  ship through silent space, i
t was as much a part of her as

  her own heartbeat.

  A human's heartbeat, loud and slow and strong;

  in close proximity these past days T'Lera's

  acute ears had heard such hearts pulsing

  urgently, all but engulfing the soft swift

  susurration of her own. Thus this ship, slow and loud

  and strong, traversed an ocean that had engulfed the

  silent swiftness of her craft. Thus this species

  loud of voice, slow to reason, strong by virtue of

  its numbers tilde sought to exile the silent

  swiftness of her and her son in a living desolation of

  cold white Earth, where she had sought the peace of

  death in cold black space. Overlong contemplation

  of such ironies could threaten even a Vulcan's

  mastery. T'Lera had moved her thoughts

  elsewhere.

  Father, she had thought, addressing Savar's Katra

  not in prayer but as a kind of focus. Father, my

  logic is uncertain where Earthmen are

  concerned. were it for myself alone I would know what

  to do. But for my son . . .

  A hundred years' observation of Earthmen

  indicated that they had evolved enough not to kill

  indiscriminately but only when they perceived

  themselves threatened. If they had considered T'Lera and

  her son a threat, the task of executing them would have

  fallen to Jason Nyere from the beginning. Had he

  hesitated, the one named Sawyer would have only too

  willingly fulfilled the duty he refused; it

  needed no telepathy to read this in her eyes. Not

  death, then, but some other fate, awaited outworlders on

  this world. What price would Earthmen exact for what

  they

  obviously considered an act of trespass?

  were aliens stranded on her world, T'Lera knew,

  STRANGERS FROM THE SKY

  they would be provided unquestioningly with a ship to return

  to their own. Could humans be made to see the logic of

  this? Or did they still disbelieve that Vulcans

  presented no danger? If neither death nor

  freedom, what alternative was there?

  Delph tilde nus's destination provided its

  own answer: exile in a place no Vulcan could

  escape unaided, but exile of what duration? The

  young human female seemed convinced her leaders were

  capable of "losing" two unwanted visitors.

  Would they be left alone in this wasteland of ice or,

  perhaps more humanely the word was Earth

  origin, derived from Earthmen's name for

  themselves would they be provided with some less

  inhospitable cage which was a cage

 

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