Strangers From the Sky (11 page)

Tatya tried to throw herself between them, but Yoshi caught her by the shoulders and held on. Sorahl struck his mother again, and again. Tatya struggled as if it were she who was being attacked.

“He’ll kill her!” she shrieked, trying to get free.

“He knows what he’s doing!” Yoshi hissed in her ear with a conviction he only half felt. “Stay out of it!”

Sorahl struck again. Tatya turned away, clutching at Yoshi, who had his eyes closed. Had they been wrong? Had all Sorahl’s talk of his logical, peaceful people been nothing but lies? Was this his way of wresting control from his commander, saving his own skin?

Then it was over. Neither human actually saw T’Lera bolt upright and seize her son’s arm with a strength equal to his own, but both heard the authority with which she spoke.

“Sufficient,” she said curtly, and proceeded to assess her surroundings and her hosts with those far-searching eyes as if nothing untoward had happened.

Yoshi just stood, as dumbstruck by the mother as he had been by the son. Tatya, as if to get out of the glare of those eyes, drew closer.

“May I?” she asked, reaching one hand out toward T’Lera’s face, stopping just short of touching with mother as she had with son.

“You are a healer?” T’Lera inquired, understanding her intent.

“A what? I’m a paramedic. Is that the same?”

“Then you may examine me,” T’Lera said with absolute equanimity.

Tatya limited herself to hands-on; she wouldn’t have believed any of her instrument readings anyway. But her hands betrayed her as well, because except for the deformity of the nose, which would have to be rebroken and reset—

“You’re completely healed!” the human said.

“Indeed,” the Vulcan said, looking at her son for the first time. “My gratitude, Navigator.”

“
Kaiidth!
” Sorahl said instinctively, forgetting where he was.

“We will speak the language of those in whose presence we are!” his mother/commander said sharply. Despite Sorahl’s insistence that his people had eliminated emotion, this certainly looked like anger. “Do you forget so easily?”

A human might have made excuses. Sorahl simply lowered his eyes and clasped his hands meekly behind his back.

“I ask forgiveness, Commander.”

“It is not I of whom you should ask forgiveness,” T’Lera said, neither accepting nor rejecting his apology. “I must know what has transpired during my incapacity.”

She was not exactly dismissing the humans, but she had effectively eliminated them from her consideration.

“Excuse us!” Yoshi muttered, pulling Tatya out of the room with him. T’Lera seemed not to hear.

The sun was coming up. Yawning hopelessly, Tatya set the coffeemaker and went to freshen up. Yoshi opened the port to let a soft breeze in, stood listening to the lap of waves, the burble of brewing coffee, seeing nothing.

Suddenly it was there. Hours ahead of schedule, looming on their horizon against a glare of brilliant sunlight. The Whale.

“I’ll go,” Yoshi said when Tatya returned, rebraiding her damp hair. “See if you can persuade our friends to keep quiet and away from the windows.”

Tatya watched him narrowly. If he was still unsure of his motivation, she was that much less sure.

“I’ll tell them to leave everything dockside,” he said off her look. “Or I’ll go pick it up. I’ll say you’re not feeling well.”

“Yoshi…”

“Look, what else do you want me to do? As soon as the rain stopped I was going to take the foil out alone, let them think we’d tried to run for it. Maybe it’s better if we stay put, try to bluff it out. If they’d shown up this afternoon like they were supposed to…”

It was hopeless and they both knew it.

“We’re still civilians,” Yoshi said, suddenly determined. “We have rights. They don’t get past the threshold without a warrant.”

“Doesn’t surprise me that your dreams are inhabited by strange women, Jim,” McCoy said when Kirk told him about the nightmares. “Personally, I wouldn’t worry unless they
stopped
appearing.”

They were backstage behind the
Kobayashi Maru
simulator, Kirk programming variations on the basic scenario for the latest batch of cadets.

“I’m not joking, Bones. This thing has me worried. You’ve finished the book, haven’t you? Is there such a person as this mystery blonde?”

McCoy pondered on it.

“Not to my knowledge. Not that you give a man much to go on. Blond hair and boots, you said? Sounds like the beginning of a pleasant kind of fantasy, but as far as I know the only woman specifically described as having blond hair was Tatya Bilash. Maybe it’s Tatya you’re dreaming about,” he suggested hopefully.

“The voice is different,” Kirk maintained, his eyes on the simulator screen. “It’s familiar somehow. I feel as if I should know who she is, but every time I’m on the verge of remembering a name, a face, she slips away.”

“Maybe she’s from another source entirely,” McCoy suggested. “From one of your real-life memories or fantasies. Dreams are tricky stuff, Jim. You could be subconsciously mixing an old memory with what you’ve been reading and end up with a third thing that’s neither one nor the other. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t,” Kirk said testily, punching in a series of codes with unnecessary vigor. “But I would. The woman is only part of the mystery. Why are these dreams so vivid, so consistent—and so consistently wrong? Why am I embellishing what I read in that book to the point where I feel as if I’ve
been
there?”

McCoy shrugged.

“You’re just caught up in the hoopla like everyone else,” he suggested, anxious to dismiss it, wondering why it had Kirk so agitated. “It’s everywhere. You can’t turn on the vid without some talk-show host or discussion group picking it apart. Walk into a party and half the people there are describing it to the other half.”

“I deliberately avoided all that,” Kirk pointed out, pondering the final flourishes on the day’s test. There were two Tellarite cadets in Green Group; he particularly wanted to test their response to pressure. “I wanted to read it for myself. No preconceived notions.”

“Even so…” McCoy began, but didn’t know what to say next.

He was back here with Kirk to monitor the cadets’ interactions and responses to stress during the test for his Medical Officers’ Report. While the
Kobayashi Maru
was always taped and he could review it at his leisure, McCoy wanted to watch the scenario as it happened. There was an immediacy that the camera always missed. Suddenly he found himself monitoring a response to stress from an entirely different quarter.

“Why are you making such a mountain out of this?” he asked his oldest, dearest friend.

“Because there’s more to it than cocktail-party chatter,” Kirk said grimly. “More than what’s between the pages of that book. I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something damned peculiar—”

“You always give ’em three Klingons,” McCoy muttered, knowing the codes by heart, trying to distract Kirk from what sounded like an obsession in bloom.

“What?” Kirk asked vaguely, watching the monitor, half listening.

“I said: you always give ’em three Klingon vessels in the attack phase. Don’t you think they compare notes with the groups that went before? You’re getting predictable. Why not give ’em two Klingons for a change, or four, or one?”

“Because if you knew
anything
about Klingons, doctor, for all the years you’ve logged in space,” Kirk said acidly, punching buttons with a zealot’s fervor, “you’d know that
they
are predictable in their obsession with combinations of three. Hence a bracket of
K’tinga
-lass battlecruisers has been and always will be composed of three. And
who’s
getting predictable?”

“You are,” McCoy said reasonably. “Or maybe I meant to say cranky. Short-fused, irascible, burr-under-your-saddle nasty…”

Kirk turned on him.

“You have a point, doctor?”

“Yes, I do. Low side of fifty’s a little early for a midlife crisis according to today’s demographics, Jim. You want me to prescribe something for the hot flashes? Or some
one
maybe?”

“Don’t
you
make a mountain out of it, Bones,” Kirk warned, returning to his console. “I get this way when I can’t sleep at night.”

“I can prescribe something for that, too,” McCoy offered. “Or someone.”

Kirk broke into laughter and punched McCoy on the arm.

“Damn you anyway!” He watched the cadets from Green Group file in and take their places on the mock bridge and almost pitied them. “And your
Strangers from the Sky
. Tonight that book stays in the drawer.”

The book stayed in its drawer for the next three nights. Jim Kirk continued to dream.

“And I’ll tell you something else,” he told McCoy, pacing the confines of the doctor’s offices in the MedArts complex. “I have whole conversations with them now. All of them—the Vulcans, Tatya, Yoshi, Jason Nyere. And Sawyer. Last night I got into a real knock-down-drag-out with Sawyer. Shouted so loud I triggered the computer alarm. Had some time convincing it I wasn’t under attack or having a coronary. I can tell you what they looked like, what they sound like, what they ate for breakfast…”

“Jim,” McCoy began, knowing it was useless. “You’re projecting. Letting your imagination run wild. Listen, if you’d—”

“No, you listen!” Kirk stopped pacing, leaned across McCoy’s desk at him. “Bones, I’m making perfect sense, aren’t I? You’ve read the book from cover to cover; you know who these people are. You know how the incident turned out. I’m telling you I do too, and I haven’t touched the book since the last time we talked. How can I possibly know all these things?”

“Jim—”

“Did you know Sawyer was a crack tennis player?” Kirk went on, oblivious. “She was second-seeded at the Goddard Moonbase Semifinals in 2028.”

“The book does mention she played tennis. I think.” McCoy frowned. “I don’t believe it goes into that much detail, however.”

Kirk threw up his hands.

“There you are! Bones, I not only know that much about Sawyer, but I’ve seen her play! In fact, I’ve played against her! Last night’s sequence—I don’t even call them dreams anymore; they’re like episodes in a serial—”

“Or chapters in a book you’re writing in your own head,” McCoy interjected, unheard.

“We were playing singles. I’d gone looking for her on the courts. Something I had to tell her about the Vulcans, something vital. She challenged me and we began to play. And by God, Bones, seventeen years off her form she was still good. Beat me in straight sets and she wasn’t even breathing hard!”

“How old were you?” McCoy asked out of nowhere.

Kirk was momentarily startled.

“What?”

“In the dream. How old were you? Were you the age you are now, older, younger?”

“If this is leading to another crack about my being out of shape…” Kirk stopped, realized something for the first time. “I was younger. Much younger. Maybe not much more than thirty. That’s why it bothered me so much, losing to Sawyer. Here she was with a good fifteen years on me, without the advantage of modern aerobic conditioning, and she beat me. That’s why later, when she coerced T’Lera into playing…”

Kirk stopped. McCoy’s blue eyes had that out-of-focus look that meant he wasn’t listening to him but to the voices in his own head.

“Bones? That’s not in the book, is it? About Sawyer playing tennis with T’Lera?”

McCoy didn’t answer him.

“Do you think the age thing means anything?”

McCoy blinked, came back into focus.

“I don’t know, Jim. It might. Mind if I ask you something?”

Kirk shrugged.

“Shoot.”

“When did you have your last psychoscan?”

“Couple of months ago. Why? You know the drill. Regulation 73-C, Subsection A: ‘All Starfleet personnel will submit to routine psychological profile scan no less than once per solar year. Those of officer rank, or whom medical personnel deem under more than usual stress—’”

“‘—will be subjected to scan as frequently as necessary upon recommendation of senior medical officer,’” McCoy finished for him. “Jim, I’m recommending.”

Kirk gave him one of those stopped-in-his-tracks looks.

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.” McCoy returned the look with his best don’t-argue-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you look. “I’ll keep it unofficial, unless you get balky on me.”

“You just want me out of your hair,” Kirk said, trying to minimize it, shrug it off. “Or at least out of your office. I have been monopolizing your time, haven’t I? I’m sorry, Bones, I’ll—”

“Jim, don’t try to charm me. I’m serious. You go voluntarily or I’ll write you up, but either way you’ll go. Now which is it going to be?”

Kirk looked genuinely hurt.

“I think I’m entitled to know why.”

“Why,” McCoy began, cranking up, “is because for the past four nights, from what you tell me, you’ve been playing a major role in a historical melodrama instead of doing what most normal humans do after a hard day at the office, which is engage in the entertainment of their choice and then go to sleep. Now, that kind of activity’s bound to wear on a man. Affect his performance, maybe even his command ability—”

“Bones, I’m not exactly out on the edge lately,” Kirk protested. “People’s lives aren’t hanging on my ability to command anymore.”

“Maybe that’s the problem, Jim,” McCoy said. The response was a thunderous silence. “And since there’s nothing physically wrong with you except for hyper-adrenal activity every time you get on the topic—”

“What makes you so sure of that?” Kirk wanted to know.

McCoy opened his left hand, where he’d palmed the smallest mediscanner Kirk had ever seen. It was silent, too, modified so that it made none of the whirring, humming readout noises of the standard models. McCoy had had it hidden in his clasped hands beneath the desktop, taking readings all the while Kirk ranted and raved.

“Why, you sneaky, son-of-a—” Kirk spluttered, torn between rage and laughter. “If that doesn’t constitute a breach of privacy!”