Strangers From the Sky (29 page)

“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 Vulcans, 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 wingboat, he 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 Starfleet 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 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? By what 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, getting 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 managed to keep his nose clean—how not, on a world with no words for the concept of a barroom brawl?—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 gray 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 do this 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?”

Definitely trouble, Kelso thought, scanning the room to make sure he’d left nothing incriminating lying around. “Who wants to know?”

A badge replaced the eye at the peephole. Comm-Police, 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.

W
ITH
J
ASON
N
YERE
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 organizations, 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 plowed 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 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, it 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—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, 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?

Delphinus
’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 nevertheless?

For herself T’Lera would accept this, but not for her son. Whatever she could bargain for Sorahl’s safe return to their world, up to and including the limits of a Vulcan’s honor, she would give.

Would they free Sorahl if she agreed to remain as surety, possibly for life? She whom no planet could contain would be no more an exile on Earth than anywhere else. She who as a growing child had remained awake for the first half of the twenty-year journey while the adults rotated in two-year cycles through cryogenic suspension, knew what it was like to be alone.

That she might never again share a Vulcan’s thoughts with a kindred soul might have given her pause. Surely there were humans with whom she could hold such discourse—Jason Nyere had the potential to be such a one—but the powers who would decide for her life would make certain she never encountered them. Yet she who had lost her soul’s companion in the death of T’Syra could endure this as well. And if a Vulcan’s mourning belonged to the realm of solitude, what opportunity would she have to mourn those she had lost!

Let permanent exile be her fate, then. She might only request a desert less frigid than the one for which the ship was bound.

This for herself, but not for Sorahl. The time would come when he must return to Vulcan, for reasons no Earthman could comprehend. She must find a way to return her son to their world, by ten-year voyage in a sublight Earth vessel if need be, and alone, but this was what she must do.

The only alternative, that which she had attempted in the destruction of her ship, might no longer be available to her once she was Earth’s hostage.

The noise of the great ship surrounding her had increased then, became a grinding, crushing ferocity as
Delphinus
pushed its way upward through the polar ice as Captain Nyere had told her it would do. The engines had stopped, the noise ceased. They had arrived. All was silence, and the swift susurration of a Vulcan heart.

Holding the inquiry into the Vulcan Problem in the big cold dining hall at Byrd had been deliberate, intended to impress the panelists with their own importance, if not the Vulcans. The high-domed room, entirely surrounded by armed Ground Forces sentries (two deep in places, not counting the snipers on the roofs of the auxiliary buildings), dwarfed its fewer than two dozen inhabitants, transformed their voices into echoes and their breath into vapor in the inadequate heat. Jim Kirk’s feet were cold through boots and heavy socks; he wondered how the Vulcans could stand it.

The medical team had seen them first, submitting them to a battery of tests that took up the entire first day. They’d been poked and prodded physically and psychically until medical personnel had arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that they were what they claimed to be.

“They’ve put them through so much!” Dr. Bellero,
née
Dehner, lamented to Kirk when they could snatch some surreptitious time together. Officially, when they passed in the halls or sat on the same inquiry panel, they did not know each other. “Most of it’s legitimate, but some of it’s downright silly, not to mention humiliating. I’m embarrassed for them, Captain, and for us!”

“Stay with it, doctor,” was all Kirk could tell her. “And hold on to your files. You’re our best hope for containment there. How’d they do on the psych tests?”

Dehner smiled her wistful, crooked smile at him.

“Flying colors, of course. I’m doing my best to spoon-feed the results to my ‘superiors.’ Can’t make them look too brilliant or integrated. And I’ve glossed over the scary stuff—the self-healing and the telepathy. No sense making them seem too different.”

“Good,” Kirk said, half listening. His primary concern since he’d gotten here had been the search for a way out. Considering the heavy artillery, there didn’t seem to be any. “What’s the feeling among the rest of the medical people?”

“The internist walked away shaking his head,” Dehner said wryly. “He’s been holed up in his cabin ever since, probably on a bender. He doesn’t like finding hearts where livers should be; I think it shook him rather badly. The neurologist was a lot more sympathetic. She was the one who suggested reconstructive surgery for T’Lera, if they could risk transfusions from Sorahl.”

“What did T’Lera say to that?” Kirk wanted to know, expecting a typical Vulcan response.

“She was very appreciative, but she ‘questioned whether the aesthetic merits outweighed the risk to the physician of losing a patient.’ Unquote.”

Kirk smiled. “Meaning she’d rather have a broken nose than a posthumous malpractice suit.”

“Smart lady,” Dehner said, and they went their separate ways.

Elizabeth Dehner managed to sit in on all of the inquiry panels even when she wasn’t required, citing “professional curiosity.” Whenever Kirk sought her out at the other end of the L-shaped table, she made eye contact and gave him a vague little shrug.

The arrangement of the tables had also been designed to impress, if not intimidate. The interrogators, anywhere from ten to fifteen of them at any given session, sat at two long tables arranged in a chevron, bracketing and slightly higher than the single table provided for the Vulcans and their human sponsors. Jason Nyere had appeared steadfastly at every session, but the two civilians who had rescued the Vulcans, after repeating their story for about the sixth time, were no longer there. The young woman Tatya had burst into tears at the previous session, and on the recommendation of Dr. Bellero, she and her male companion had been escorted back to the ship.

The questioning had continued throughout the second day, with the Vulcans the only ones showing no signs of stress or fatigue. Sorahl answered only those questions put directly to him. As commander, T’Lera answered everything else, no matter how aggressively phrased or how often repeated—calmly, rationally, and with an almost embarrassing honesty.

“So you’re saying in essence that there will be no search parties, no one to come looking for you?” one of the military types—a three-star general who, from the embittered look of him, had spent his life in a futile search for a war to fight—demanded.

“That is correct,” T’Lera replied evenly. “Once gone to ground, a craft is considered lost. There will be no attempt at search or rescue.”

Jim Kirk winced. Did she have any idea how vulnerable that made her and her son?

“That’s strictly on your say-so,” the general said belligerently. He held an expensive gold pen in his hand despite the recorders, used it more as a bayonet than to take notes. He had it pointed at T’Lera now.

“I beg your pardon, General?”

“All we have is your word that your people won’t launch a search or worse,” the general said loudly. “I’d ask you to prove that.”

T’Lera seemed momentarily taken aback, as if she’d forgotten that this species could lie, did lie, had in some contexts—the military among them—elevated the lie to an art form, and would thus assume that she was lying without concrete proof to the contrary.

“You
have
my word,” she said slowly, precisely. On her world it would have been enough. “Could you raise my ship from the ocean floor, you would find it carried no weapons, nor did any of my crew. And surely your planetary defenses have detected no additional vessels within your system?”

The general had the good grace to look embarrassed at that. All the defense systems around Earth, Luna, and Mars had been on a full-scale alert since the crash, had detected nothing as big as a flea amid the clutter of satellites and space debris of Earth origin.

Score one for the Vulcans! Jim Kirk thought as the delegation’s chairperson banged her gavel to settle the murmurs in the big room. It was bleak comfort, Kirk thought, chafing at the endlessness of the proceedings, and what he saw as no escape. None of this should be happening, and the further it spread, the more impossible his task became.

“Now, as I understand it”—the general had apparently recovered himself sufficiently to continue his line of questioning—“you’ve had ships out there observing us since 1943, you say?”

“The first mission to your world arrived 102.4 Earth years ago,” T’Lera explained for the fifth time. “If that is how you number your years, the answer is yes.”

“So you were orbiting up there spying on us all that time,” the general began, but T’Lera could not allow his misconception to go uncorrected.

“I resist the term ‘spying,’ General. Our purpose was nothing more than to observe a world which has been studying other worlds since the time of your scientist Galileo. If you consider this an invasion of your privacy, I must ask forgiveness for my people. But since your radio telescopes have been ‘eavesdropping’ on other star systems since—”

“That is not the point!” the general bellowed, and the murmurs broke out again. The chairperson hammered them into silence, but not before Jason Nyere, T’Lera’s long-suffering right-hand man, began to chuckle.

“You find something amusing in all this, Captain?” the general demanded hotly, glaring the chairperson’s gavel into silence in midair.

“Sorry, General. Must be battle fatigue,” Nyere replied. “It just seems to me the lady’s got a point. If we had the technology, we’d be doing the same thing—what the hell else did we send a ship to Alpha Centauri for?—and with a lot less grace about it than these people have shown.”

“Suggest if you’re that tired you put in for a few hours of R and R, Captain,” the general advised humorlessly, ignoring everything else Nyere had said. The internecine war between AeroNav and Ground Forces had its roots in navy vs. marines and probably went back to the time of the Caesars; it would hardly be resolved here and now.

Worse, the pacifist contingent, relegated to the lower ends of the tables and not permitted to approach the Vulcans informally, had taken to Nyere from the beginning and applauded him now. Jim Kirk, in his intell-agent guise, wished he could do the same; he had great respect for the burly ship’s captain, considered him a worthy antecedent and a potential ally, possibly the only one in the room.

The general, aware of Nyere’s growing popularity, was hardly about to yield the floor to him and a bunch of peaceniks. He tapped the table with his gold pen until he had everyone’s attention, then jabbed it toward T’Lera again.

“You mean to tell me your people sat out two of our world wars and did nothing?”

“Correct,” T’Lera acknowledged. She had restrained the intensity of her far-searching eyes these two days, mindful of their effect on every human she’d encountered save Jason Nyere. Now she permitted those burning laser points some of their intensity and directed it at the general. “What would you have had us do, General?”