Strangers From the Sky (2 page)

Historian’s Note:

Strangers from the Sky
encompasses two different eras in the lives of Kirk and Spock.

Book I begins in those nebulous years between the
Enterprise
’s encounter with V’ger in
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, and the death of Spock in
The Wrath of Khan
.

Book II focuses on a younger Captain James T. Kirk, newly in command, and his Vulcan first officer, not yet quite his friend, in a time just prior to the first-season television episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” This episode first introduced Gary Mitchell, Lee Kelso and Dr. Elizabeth Dehner, and the reader may wish to use it as a referent.

There is no underestimating the sometimes serendipitous impact of coincidence upon the course of history.

To say that the United Federation of Planets owes its existence to the malfunction of a Vulcan scoutcraft in the Terran year 2045 may seem exaggeration, particularly in view of Earthmen’s response to that event. Nevertheless, Earth at least might have condemned itself to total isolationism in a vast and lonely universe, were it not for the chain of events initiated by the arrival of the strangers from the sky.

Every Federation schoolchild knows that Earthmen’s first encounter with alien life was the result of the voyage of the
UNSS Icarus
to Alpha Centauri in 2048. The establishment of peaceful relations between the two safely similar humanoid worlds made it easy for Terrans to overcome any residual fears they might retain about “little green men.”

The rest of the history of that era reads like a utopian dream. The cooperation between Earth and Centauri, together with the genius that was Zefram Cochrane, produced the breakthrough in warp drive technology in 2055. Subsequent contacts with Vulcan, Tellar, and Epsilon Indii, homeworld of the Andorians, made the establishment of the United Federation of Planets in the year 2087 a logical progression.

The first encounter with Vulcans, according to official sources, came about when the Earth ship
UNSS Amity
rescued a disabled Vulcan craft adrift inside the solar system in 2065. Despite vast philosophical and cultural differences and the simple strangeness of this nonhuman race, the encounter with the Centaurians nearly two decades before made it possible for Earthmen to free themselves of prejudice and fear. Diplomatic relations with Vulcan were established in 2068 with the arrival of the first Vulcan delegation on Earth, and the alliance between the two worlds has been virtually untroubled since.

It is all readily available to us in history tapes and the
Amity
’s ship’s log, yet another self-congratulatory example of how human altruism reached across the barriers of difference to offer the hand of friendship.

Except that it didn’t happen that way at all.

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 two-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.”

“AeroNav 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
.’”

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’ll see. ‘
KELP FARM STATION OBLITERATED, 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-ocean starscape was gone now. Maybe it was only a meteor or space junk, but it had been awfully close; AeroNav 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 bedclothes.

“Just suppose—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 intelligent life. And the ship we sent to Alpha Centauri—”

“—won’t be back for another nine years, if at all,” Yoshi 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 World 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 time 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 long last had learned 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 regular ferry 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 recognize, might have shaken him just a little if he’d bothered to look at it.

“Does it look like anything 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 the impact, offering them access to the craft’s insides and, very possibly, answers to all their questions.

“Well, does it?” Tatya insisted.

“Probably some top-secret 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 the 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 the 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—”

“Let me see!”

She pushed him out of the way to get a closer look. Tatya was a paramedic—at 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 Nyere 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 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-gray eyes away from the static-filled screen, and nailed his first officer with them.

“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 suh, when the navy was a purely military entity,” said Sawyer—whose several-times-great-granddaddy 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 research/surveillance/diplomatic courier/occasional deterrent/general maintenance/errand boy/chief-cook-and-bottle-washer/organized grab-ass entity that it is today. Suh!”

Nyere chuckled softly. Sawyer had these reactionary fits often; she was an incredible hardliner when it suited her. Personally, he preferred the enlightened demilitarization 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,” Melody snapped back. There was something incongruous about such macho opinions coming from this erstwhile southern belle with her freckles and her soft drawl, neither of which took the edge off the opinions or the willfulness 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 somehow 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—”

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, suh, 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 AeroNav 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 the 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. “Listen, if it starts going under, 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…” Yoshi 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—”

“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.