Strangers From the Sky (36 page)

“Easy, Jason,” Yoshi told him. “Just me. Not used to wearing shoes. Decks get cold at night.”

“Have to fix that,” Nyere muttered, orienting himself, eyeing the void of the comm screen wistfully. “The Vulcans—”

“—are becoming acclimated to the cold, Captain,” one of them assured him. More awake now, Jason noticed Sorahl and Tatya as well. “Please do not trouble yourself about that.”

“—time is it?” Jason wondered, squinting at the chrono.

“Time for you to get some shut-eye.” Yoshi tried to help the big man out of the chair. “You can keep the screen on in your quarters, can’t you? Nothing’s going to happen up here; they’ve probably sealed off the whole continent by now.”

“Ought to be on the bridge when it comes,” Nyere said halfheartedly, easing himself up. He was getting too old to sleep upright in a command chair. “Captain’s duty to keep the watch…”

He staggered. Yoshi supported him on one side, Sorahl on the other.

“Want us to call Melody to the bridge?” Yoshi asked. He got no answer; Jason was asleep on his feet. Together Yoshi and Sorahl half carried him into the radio room where there was a daybed. Tatya removed Jason’s boots and found a blanket.

“Poor old man!” Yoshi mused as the three of them tiptoed out.

Except for the stray monitor light, the bridge was in total darkness. Beyond its wraparound window lay a jumbled expanse of snow-covered pack ice, trampled and dirty around the buildings at Byrd, stretching as far as the rise of the glacial ridge that marked the beginnings of the mainland. Above the ice sprawled a breathlessness of stars.

“I guess we can’t see Vulcan from here,” Yoshi whispered as the threesome stood together on the tower. Whatever else he was made to forget, he must somehow condition himself to seek out the small red point of Epsilon Eridani for all his nights.

“Only from your Northern Hemisphere,” Sorahl replied solemnly, “my friend.”

Had he sensed what emotions brought Yoshi here or, being a Vulcan and without such emotions as jealousy, did he simply disregard them in others? No one spoke, no one dared look anywhere but at the stars. Yoshi wrapped one long arm around Tatya.

She rested her head on his shoulder, recognizing as if from long ago the familiar smell of him—of sea breeze and sandalwood and something uniquely Yoshi, Earth things, human things—and sighed, content.

Yoshi’s other hand went instinctively to push his lank hair out of his eyes, but stopped. Instead he tossed his head back and reached out to clasp the Vulcan’s shoulder, gesture of fraternity in spite of difference.

Sorahl accepted the gesture, and with it the unshielded turmoil of a human mind. This would be the legacy of any Vulcan who dared call human friend. Perhaps it was not yet time. But he would devote whatever remained of his life to making it time.

A metal-cold figure with infrared eyes picked out the three figures standing as one at the window of the conning tower, targets so easy even he was tempted. His weapon shifted and rose in his hands as if of its own volition; he sighted off the central figure and pondered whether it would be better to take him first, then sweep side to side to pick off the other two, or to start at either side and sweep straight across. Either way it was a matter of seconds. All three would be his.

“Racher?” A voice behind him. “There’s someone there. On the bridge.”

Racher lowered his weapon reluctantly.

“Not yet.” His breath made no vapor on the deadly cold air. “Not yet.”

“Game!” Jim Kirk called a second time, raising his hands at Melody and shrugging as if to say, What did you expect?

“Three out of five!” Melody barked, though her sides were heaving and the sweat stung her eyes even under the sweatband.

T’Lera seemed to weigh the dangers, if not the gratuitous violence, of trampling so fragile a human ego for the third time. Yet there was no question of holding back. She had accepted the challenge; she would do what she must.

“I said three out of five, goddammit!” Melody yelled across her hesitation, swinging wooden arms to keep them limber, bouncing on an ankle that hadn’t hurt like this since Goddard.

T’Lera gathered herself, her bare toes gripping the service line. “As you wish, Commander.”

“It’s all over for you come morning!” Melody taunted her across the net as they played. “I hope you realize that!”

“Indeed,” was all T’Lera said.

“I—don’t understand—you people,” Melody huffed, playing for her pride if not her planet. “Do not—understand you—at all! You could have—grabbed Yoshi and Tatya—and held us off. You could—grab me and the cream puff here—right now—single-handed—you’re that strong. Take over the ship—hold off the whole goddamn planet! What I don’t—understand—is why you don’t!”

Jim Kirk had not cut across her monologue to tally T’Lera’s points; it was about to be over and all he had done was witness. T’Lera’s final return was a butterfly, a dove, whose wings lightly brushed the high ceiling of the gymnasium before floating slow-motion down with a precision beyond any human’s saving. Jim Kirk would wonder forever after if T’Lera had intended it to be so flamboyantly poetic. As for him, he was speechless.

“Must might always make right, Commander?” T’Lera wondered, becoming very still as the ball rolled unmolested across the floor. “Are there not sometimes greater considerations?”

“‘Greater considerations’!” Melody snorted, at the net. There was no attempt to concede the match, no consideration of the traditional handshake. Shake hands with a Vulcan? Impossible! “Logic and lofty ideals! You’re all so noble, aren’t you? You know, I think you could almost change my mind if you’d just once admit to being a little less than perfect. If you’d show a little weakness, a little selfishness—a little concern for your son if nothing else.

“I have a daughter and a son not more than a year or two either side of your son’s age,” Melody finished. She was still out of breath, though not from tennis. “If I were in your place, I’d be on my knees begging for them!”

It would require years under the tutelage of another Vulcan to teach Jim Kirk the constant tension in the Vulcan soul between the pull of diversity and the preservation of what it means to be a Vulcan. All he could think of now was that T’Lera had met her Vulcanian Expedition, and depending upon whether her response was seen as logic or compromise…

“Would such a display gratify you, Commander?” There was Vulcan logic and a thousand years of peace in her voice, Vulcan pride and forty thousand prior years of ferocity in her eyes. “Is it my humility you require, or my humiliation?”

Before Melody Sawyer could find words, before Jim Kirk could move, T’Lera of Vulcan, still somehow unridiculous in her borrowed tennis clothes, was on her knees at Melody’s feet. What she might have said no one would ever know; the ship’s loudspeaker shattered the silence before she could speak.

“Red Alert! Red Alert!” it boomed throughout the huge empty ship in Jason Nyere’s command voice. “Red Alert! First officer to the bridge!”

Sawyer took a split second to throw down her racquet and grab a sweater. Jim Kirk was already running.

Sorahl had heard the snowmobile first.

Bundled in a heavy parka—gift of the departed pacifist contingent, who had provided clothing for him and his mother, neglecting only tennis whites—he’d opened the hatch to breathe the night air, marveling at a cold so different from that of his world’s desert nights. If he had been listening then, he might have sensed the shifting intensity of Racher’s shadow troops, who, seeing him clearly silhouetted against the stars, could barely contain themselves. But Tatya had been on her way up to join him, and the sound of her footsteps distracted him until—

“What is it?” she asked, seeing his faraway look.

“I hear something. An engine, perhaps.”

Tatya listened, shook her head in amazement. “Those ears! I don’t hear anything!”

But they remained very still, and after a moment she heard it too. So did Racher.

“Shoot before my order,” he whispered fiercely, to make certain everyone heard him, “and you are dead before the one you shoot at.”

He still somehow expected Easter’s band to turn up even this much past their rendezvous, wouldn’t mind at all catching them in the crossfire except that he still wanted to wait for a dawn attack. The sound was of a single engine, not two. Was Easter fool enough to approach so near with this much noise? Racher was still puzzling over it when Gary Mitchell’s snowmobile crested the glacial ridge like a motocross racer and roared straight for
Delphinus
.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Racher risked a shout over the mobile’s roar.

There were mutters of disaffection, and he could feel his people coiling dangerously tighter. But curiosity conquered tension as the unfamiliar vehicle fishtailed to a halt in front of the great gray conning tower and a figure stepped out. Gary Mitchell took off his goggles and hailed the twosome on the tower.

“Evening!” he called up pleasantly enough. His voice was easy on the cold air. “Looking for a fellow name of Jim Kirk. Any idea how I can reach him?”

Yoshi had heard the snowmobile too, and gone to fetch Jason Nyere.

“Who wants to know?” Jason had ordered everyone off the tower without a word. Weaponless, groggy with sleep, and missing his boots, he was in charge nevertheless.

“A friend,” Mitchell replied easily, though something he thought he’d glimpsed in the dark as he shot over the ridge, in conjunction with his strange encounter on the way in, was beginning to coalesce in an uneasy equation in his head. “He’ll know me when he sees me, Captain Nyere.”

Thank God he recognized the voice from Kelso’s wire taps, Mitchell thought. Something was out there in the dark behind him; he had no time for formalities.

The mention of his name in conjunction with Kirk’s decided Nyere to trust this apparition out of the night, for the moment. Slowly he began lowering the gangplank to the stranger. Mitchell danced in the snow like a boxer.

“Captain, I appreciate your need for caution, but aside from the fact that I’m freezing out here, there’s something I think you should know about hidden just over that rise there—”

No one knew who fired first, whether it was one of Racher’s dozen made crazy with waiting, or Racher himself, to cover the incredible blunder of leaving the snowmobiles plainly visible against the snow. Racher did not make blunders. Someone began to fire; all hell broke loose.

Mitchell dived for cover between ship and snowmobile, wondered as he watched tracers kicking up spurts of ice in search of him whether the mobile’s thin aluminum construction offered any protection at all, wondered if he dared chance a leap to the half-lowered gangplank or if that would only make it easier for them to pick him off.

He realized he was probably dead. Nyere would assume he’d been sent to decoy the ambush and leave him to get chewed up in the crossfire. Mitchell burrowed into the snow with his hands clasped over his head and tried to remember how to pray.

Jason Nyere had ducked down from the conning tower at the first burst, sealed it behind him, and lowered the louvers over the ports while he activated the Red Alert.

“Get below!” he bellowed, grabbing Sorahl’s arm, shoving Yoshi and Tatya toward the stairs. “Find T’Lera and the doctor and seal yourselves off in the infirmary until you hear from me personally. Move!”

He was breaking out hand weapons and scanning the Byrd Complex with infrared when Melody and Kirk barreled in.

“Kirk, I want to talk to you!” Jason tossed an automatic at Sawyer, who caught it one-handed.

“What the hell, Captain?” She was about in the mood to blow somebody’s head off.

“I don’t know yet!” Jason huffed. “Mr. Kirk here’s going to tell me. Whoever they are, they’re holed up in the buildings with some heavy hardware.” He briefed her as rounds from the terrorists’ weapons rattled off
Delphinus
’s thick hide like so many dried peas, shoved a string of sonic grenades and a helmet at her. “Get up there and keep ’em busy. I’ll have a head count for you in a minute. Don’t lose yours!”

“Suh!” Melody bolted up the stairs to the gunnery slit halfway up the tower; visibility was for spit, but she’d have to be damn careless to get hit from there. “What about the guy under the mobile?”

“Cover him until we find out whose side he’s on!” Jason shouted back. “Kirk—”

“Captain,” Jim Kirk seized the moment, “I’ve had weapons training. I can help.”

Nyere narrowed his eyes at him. “I’ll just bet you can. The question is, whom?” Bursts from Melody’s automatic punctuated their sentences; the stench of overheated lubricant permeated the bridge. “You want to explain to me how a guy in a snowmobile slips through the security cordon to get here, asks for you by name, and before I can lower the drawbridge I find myself fighting World War IV?”

“Gary…” Kirk said with a sick feeling. It had to be. No one else would be so reckless. “I don’t know anything about who’s shooting out there, Captain, but the man in the snowmobile is a friend. You can trust him as much as you can trust me. Just let me get him out of there and—”

“As much as I can trust you!” Nyere exploded; he was charging a laser rifle, stringing sonic grenades around his neck as they talked. “Where the hell are my boots? Trust him like I can trust a self-proclaimed pacifist who’s suddenly a weapons expert? Trust him when he’s tailed by who knows how many crazies attacking on God knows what premise an AeroNav vessel which, if I could get clear of this ice could—” He began to wheeze, breathless, needing breath for more than argument. “Kirk, I
don’t
trust you, and if we live through this, the first thing I’m going to do is—”

“You’ve got to believe me, Captain, Mitchell has nothing to do with this attack!” Kirk cut across him. He had no idea how Elizabeth Dehner managed to be beside him in the thick of things, but he gripped her hand, tried to explain. “Gary—it has to be! I have to get him out of there—”

“Cap—Jim!” Dehner’s voice was shrill, her pupils dilated with fear, a fear of more than terrorists. “The Prime Directive. You can’t! If you kill anyone—”