Strangers From the Sky (30 page)

“Well, if you’re as damned peaceful as you claim”—the general lost himself momentarily, feeling the heat of T’Lera’s eyes but not yet knowing its source—“why didn’t you intervene somehow? Stop the wars, prevent all those millions from being killed?”

The general’s face had gone an alarming color and he was breathing hard. T’Lera chose her next words carefully, knowing they would condemn her and her kind in the eyes of many in this room.

“I regret I must point out, General, that our Prime Directive precluded the role of avenging angel. It was our duty, however unpleasant, to permit you to make your own mistakes.”

There were murmurs from all sides at this. Some of the pacifists seemed to be wavering, a few of the intell-agents nodded knowingly, drawing from T’Lera’s statement conclusions that no one who wasn’t an intell-agent could fathom, and Jim Kirk found himself thinking uncomfortably of the Vulcanian Expedition.

“…one of the most callous, inhumane attitudes I have ever…” the general was saying, and by the time the delegation’s chairperson restored order he was totally out of breath. Jim Kirk seized the moment.

“The chair recognizes Colonel Kirk.”

“Commander T’Lera,” he began as heads turned; he had not spoken at all yet, and most of the factions had no idea who he was.

“Colonel Kirk,” the Vulcan acknowledged.

This is it! Kirk thought. “Commander, if you were in charge of this situation, how would you resolve it?”

The question brought the entire oversized room to an uneasy standstill, silenced the ill-mannered mumbling from the diplomats’ quarter, caused the military types to straighten in their seats and the intell-agents to lean forward in theirs, silenced the very echoes in the corners. Above and outside, the sentries could be heard changing shifts in the frigid air, boots scraping, automatics clicking.

“Colonel Kirk.” T’Lera spoke undaunted into that silence. “I would not presume to dictate policy to those who know your people far better than I—”

Damned Vulcan hair-splitting obsession with protocol! Jim Kirk steamed, wishing she’d just answer the question.

“Let me put it to you another way, Commander.” He had to clear his throat to hear himself. “If you and your son were free to leave this room, what would you do?”

The silence became a startled, angry murmur, through which the general’s stage whisper to an aide carried like cannon.

“Who is that man? I want his credentials! Who the hell does he think he—”

Whatever answer T’Lera might have given was lost in the groundswell and in the tumult that followed.

The abrupt sound of wingboats, twice the number that had brought the delegation here, punctuated the icy stillness outside. Sentries could be heard running across the pack ice; two of them, flanking a Ground Forces lieutenant, burst into the room. The lieutenant whispered something urgently in Captain Nyere’s ear, and he and the Vulcans were escorted abruptly out of the room.

The chairperson sought futilely for order. Kirk found himself pushing through the delegation, all of whom were on their feet trying to get past the sentries who were blocking all the exits.

Something’s happened, Kirk thought. Something outside, up north, in the rest of the world. Something bad. Gary, Lee, my people—

“You did
what!
” Jason Nyere’s voice shook with anger, and he had begun to sweat again.

Messages had been streaming across the comm screen for over an hour, messages from Norfolk Command, from Ground Forces Central and the PentaKrem. Someone had leaked a news story about alien invaders being held incommunicado somewhere in Antarctica, and it was all over the media. Every major information source carried some version of it, from the mildest hearsay to the most fantastical eyewitness account, and any number of reporters and thrill seekers were chartering transportation to go and see for themselves. Unless they were stopped on the shores—and the legal ramifications of that were mind-boggling—they could be on the ice within hours, and those perceptive enough to guess at Byrd could be here within a day or two.

It was why Jason and the Vulcans had been so unceremoniously pulled out of the inquiry; it was why everyone still inside Byrd was running around like chickens wondering what to do next. It was why Melody Sawyer finally broke down and told Jason about Tatya’s aunt in Kiev.

“You did what?” Jason repeated, looking down at Tatya, who had collapsed all in a heap on the carpet in his quarters, crying again. It seemed all she’d done for the past two days had been cry for one reason or another.

“I thought if people knew it would help,” Tatya blubbered. She looked up at Jason tearfully. “When Melody cut in, I did what she told me. I told Tante Mariya not to break the story. She wouldn’t have, without my telling her. Someone else must have overheard. I only wanted to help!”

“Oh, you helped, all right!” Sawyer spat at her from where she stood guard at the door, ready to cave in the skull of the first Ground Forces flunky who so much as set big toe across the threshold. This was a family problem, and she would see it stayed in the family. The whole family was here, too—she and Jason, Yoshi and Tatya, and—and the other two. Whatever happened, it would happen inside this room. “You fixed it so the brass have to make the media out as liars no matter what. And if they have to kill your friends here in order to kill the stories—”

“Goddammit to hell, Sawyer!” Jason roared, knocking his chair over and advancing on her; Melody had never seen him so angry. “You! You’ve been sitting on this for how long? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

Melody pulled herself up so straight she was trembling.

“Assumed the situation was contained and no need to trouble you, suh!” she barked. “I heard her retract her story and assumed the aunt bought it, and—” She broke, came as close as she could to apologizing. “Hell, Jason, I thought—”

“That’s always been your trouble, Sawyer!” Jason spluttered. “How many times do I have to tell you—don’t
think!
”

T’Lera passed a look to her son, a look that said simply: Do you still question that it is not yet time? Sorahl hung his head, wished only to return to his makeshift laboratory and his research, away from this human turmoil that gave him cause to question everything he believed.

“It’s done now,” Jason Nyere said helplessly, his anger gone, replaced by a great weariness.

“What’s going to happen to us?” Yoshi seemed perpetually bewildered, got up from where he’d had his arm around Tatya, left her to dry her own tears. “Jason?”

“Ground Forces will probably evacuate their people and whoever else is willing to be ‘wiped’ and returned home,” the captain said. “I think we can be sure it’s their intention not to be here if any reporters get through the security cordon. As for the rest of us…”

All nonmilitary personnel in the dining hall were escorted back to their quarters until such time as Ground Forces decided who was to go and who would be allowed to stay. Rumors about the media leaks grew more ominous with repetition. What had started out as a few individuals’ concern over a stray flying saucer was beginning to sound like an Earth-wide panic. From the white-on-white perspective at Byrd, there was no telling what was truth anymore.

Jim Kirk had been among the first to return to his room voluntarily. Now he sat on his bunk and slapped his communicator shut with a grimace, hiding it in a secret compartment in his luggage. Broadcasting for too long was dangerous even on the high frequencies, and he hadn’t been able to reach Mitchell or Kelso. Lee had warned him there might be too much interference this close to the Pole. Not only that, he couldn’t even get through to Dehner, who was caught up in the chaos with the rest of the medical personnel. Deaf, blind, and on his own, Jim Kirk decided it was time to act.

He retrieved his communicator, slipped it into a pocket, and replaced the intell-agent ID in his wallet with one of Kelso’s backups, which he’d had the presence of mind to activate before he left Tierra del Fuego.

Taking advantage of the confusion still reigning in the corridors among those who balked at leaving, Jim Kirk blended in with the pacifist contingent, blessing Lee Kelso for his ingenuity and offering a silent prayer of thanksgiving to John Gill for his lecture on the Dove Society.

“An anomaly,” the noted historian had called it in his lectures on pre-Federation history at the Academy. “Possibly the first time in human history that the intelligence community stopped looking upon pacifists as the enemy and joined with them in preserving the unity of Earth. The society endured for over a century, until the Romulan Wars focused intelligence attention outward against a new enemy…”

Collector of esoterica even then, a certain eager young plebe had absorbed every shred of information he could find on the Dove Society, used its techniques and code words in a covert operation, with several fellow victims, in a brief abortive foray against a common enemy of peace in the person of an upperclassman named Finnegan. Their victory had been short-lived and Finnegan’s vengeance swift and murderous, but Jim Kirk’s memory for useful trivia endured.

To his surprise, the pacifists immediately accepted him as one of their own.

“I had a premonition,” their leader confided when she’d secreted him in her cabin with the others, out of Ground Forces’ earshot, “when you asked that rather pragmatic question of our unfortunate visitors this afternoon. Pity T’Lera never had a chance to answer it. I presume the ‘Colonel’ is cover?”

“Naturally.” Jim Kirk grinned at her. She was a plump, grandmotherly type, but not impervious to his charm. “It lends me more credibility with the brassheads. Do you think they’ll send us home?”

“They’ve already told us as much.” The pacifists’ leader sighed. “We’re to be airlifted out, then detained somewhere while they ‘wipe’ our memories, then dropped on our respective doorsteps as if we’d been away on a skiing weekend. We agreed to those terms from the beginning or they would never have allowed us in. But we’d hoped for a better outcome than this.”

“Outcome?” one of her companions demanded. “This is no outcome at all! The military intended all along to ‘disappear’ these people. The news leak is just a ploy to keep us from speaking to the Vulcans directly!”

“We should have called Grayson in,” another said. “They’d have listened to him.”

They all began talking at once.

“…hear he’s been ill…lost his wife last year…wouldn’t matter. You don’t know Grayson. You’re too young to remember, but—”

“We asked for Grayson from the beginning!” their leader finally silenced them in exasperation. “They refused to let us contact him. Obviously he carries too much clout.”

“Excuse me,” Jim Kirk said, sticking his neck out. “Who is this Grayson?”

They all looked at him, owl-eyed.

“You are rather young,” their leader said, eyeing him suspiciously. “And I suppose it has been that long. Jeremy Grayson is professor emeritus of the University of Pacifist Studies at Vancouver, one of the founding members of the United Earth Movement, and a hero of the Third War. Less flamboyant than some of the others, certainly, and he’s been in retirement for years, but I would have thought—”

“Of course!” Jim Kirk lied, thinking fast. “He was one of my heroes as a boy. I wasn’t sure he was still alive. It seems a little awesome that he’d be the same one….”

They seemed to accept that. Kirk promised himself if he ever got out of this, he’d learn to be a little less glib.

“If you could get in touch with Professor Grayson…” he suggested.

“Impossible!” somebody said. “We won’t be allowed to communicate with the outside until after we’ve been ‘wiped.’ By then we won’t remember why we came here, or even
that
we came here.”

“But if someone else could?”

“Jeremy would be able to find a sane solution to this; I’m certain of it,” the leader said sadly. “And he commands sufficient respect from world leaders to make it stick. But it’s too late for that now.”

“Maybe not,” Jim Kirk said, and reached a decision.

Starfleet’s Prime Directive, he reminded himself, precluded interference with any normal culture progressing at its own pace. There were no regulations on the books pertinent to time travel. Ergo the only directive that applied to time travel was the moral obligation not to do anything that would alter the future. He didn’t know if his mere presence here had already irrevocably changed history, but now that he was here, he had to do what he could to bring about a peaceful resolution to this crisis.

He whipped his communicator out of his back pocket.

“I have a device here,” he began as the assembled pacifists gathered around to get a closer look. “It’s highly classified, and I can’t tell you how it works, but it’s quite possible I can get a message to your Professor Grayson with it. If you can trust me to remain here as your spokesperson…”

Before the media had broken the space-aliens story, and before Ground Forces and the PentaKrem sought some legal way to cordon off the entire continent of Antarctica, two small pleasure copters skimmed in low over the floe ice and settled on their pontoons on the seaward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf some five hundred kilometers from Byrd. The individuals who emerged from them, ruffling the feathers of the penguin population with the crash and clank of several snowmobiles sliding down the unloading ramps, were anything but tourists.

“We split up,” Racher decreed at once, leaping onto the ice in his arctic fatigues, his face gray against their blinding white, his metal voice whirring and clicking in the frigid air. “You that way, we this. A pincer, with them in the center, so!”

His mittened fist closed like a vise in demonstration.

His people, an even dozen of them—nameless, faceless, sexless, and armed to the teeth—stood in solid ranks behind him to face Easter’s ragged crew, Red and Aghan and the only others he could gather on such short notice: Kaze the self-styled ninja and Noir, who was either Rastafarian, born-again Mau Mau, or Avenging Angel of Allah, depending upon the day of the week. The contrast was not lost on Easter, who was immediately on the defensive.