Strangers From the Sky (34 page)

Some of the white-clad figures murmured in the darkness. They’d been promised hostages, trade-offs, reparations for their various causes, not a night of subzero cold and a dawn of profitless slaughter.

“Everyone?” someone asked.

“
Ja
.” Racher’s eyes glinted metallically in the darkness. “Everyone!”

“You deliberately tried to corner them into revealing their warp-drive technology,” Dehner said, amazed at Kirk’s temerity. “What did you hope to accomplish?”

Kirk shrugged. “I thought T’Lera might see it as a way to bargain for their lives.”

Dehner shook her head. “When will you learn?”

“About Vulcans? Probably never.” He was thinking about the general and all the other experts, pounding at T’Lera with the wrong questions. “Those idiots! They could have had access to warp-drive technology a full decade earlier if they’d gotten over their paranoia and—”

“What makes you think T’Lera would have told them any more than she told you?” Dehner asked quietly.

Kirk didn’t answer her. “I can’t get through to her!” he said, amazed at himself. “I feel so—so helpless!”

He and Dehner were almost alone, still across the table from each other in the mess hall. Yoshi could be heard in the galley unloading the dishwasher; everyone else was gone, somewhere in the big empty ship. Yoshi had replaced the Prokofiev with some Bach; the “Air for the G-String” matched Kirk’s somber mood.

“Does that surprise you?” Dehner asked mildly.

Kirk looked at her askance. “What—that I can’t get through to T’Lera? Or that I feel helpless?”

“Either. That you as a captain without a ship, a leader with no one to lead, should feel helpless. Or that you still don’t know how to talk to a Vulcan.” Dehner leaned across the table at him, playing the lovers’ tête-à-tête to the hilt; she could learn to like this. “Or that there’s at least one female in the galaxy who’s impervious to your charm?”

The conversation reminded Kirk too much of one he’d recently had with Gary.

“Don’t play doctor with me, doctor!” he said tightly, knowing she was right on all counts. “Maybe you’d like to try this yourself?”

“Who, me?” Dehner stretched, cracked her knuckles, put her elbows back on the table. “I’ve got my evening cut out for me trying to find a way into the pharmaceuticals locker.”

Kirk gave her a puzzled look. “How’s that?”

“If you’re serious about my having to ‘wipe’ people,” Dehner explained, “I’ll need the proper drugs for the job.” Kirk nodded. “Meanwhile, why don’t you go another round with Scarlett O’Hara cum John Wayne?” she suggested. “You two seem to understand each other.”

“If we ever get out of here”—Kirk was on his feet; he’d intended to track Melody anyway; was Dehner reading his mind again?—“remind me I owe you a reprimand for insubordination.”

Dehner just smiled at him.

Melody Sawyer stood rooted to the gym floor in her tennis whites, repeatedly whacking a tennis ball off the same spot on the handball wall as if it were a bull’s-eye, or possibly the back of a Vulcan’s head. She’d thought of working off her rage in a few fast sets with the robot, but she knew all its moves by now and was usually one step ahead of it. There’d never been anyone on board she couldn’t beat one-handed.

Whack, whack, whack! She slammed the ball at racquetball speeds, not needing to chase it because it homed to her like a boomerang. Whack, whack, whack! If anything, she was building tension instead of relieving it.

Feeling positively murderous, she programmed the robot for high lobs and determined to sweat it out.

“Service!” she yelled, triggering the robot while she was still on the wrong side of the net. It spat out the first ball and she waited on it until she really had to chase it. About twenty lobs later she was beginning to loosen up when she saw that she was not alone. She gave the solid figure in jogging clothes a once-over without ever slowing up.

“Great form,” Jim Kirk tried for openers. “Captain Nyere tells me you were on the pro circuit.”

“And I bet you came all the way down here just to tell me that, didn’t you, Mr. Kirk?” she asked, all molasses and sarcasm and never missing a beat.

“Actually, I thought I’d do some running,” Kirk lied, picking up a spare racket and testing the grip. “I thought the gym would be empty this time of night.”

The robot had run out of balls and Melody scrambled around the court retrieving them. Kirk’s attempts to help only irritated her.

“Listen, Buster: you want to run, go run.”

“Sure.” Kirk grinned, casually lobbing the ball in his hand over the net and making it look easy.

“You play?” Melody challenged rather than asked.

“Well…I’m a little rusty,” Kirk said diffidently.

Melody kicked the last of the stray balls off the court and threw Kirk one. “How rusty?”

Yoshi was stacking the last of the clean dishes in the pantry and had started on the silverware when Elizabeth Dehner brought her coffee cup out to the galley.

“I’ll do this one,” she told him when he tried to take the cup from her.

She put it in the sink and rinsed it, awkwardly, too accustomed to her era’s disposable, recyclable containers, and saw that the young man was watching her out of the corner of his eye, she hoped not because of her domestic technique.

“What is it?” she asked when he continued to stare. Her voice was cool, clinical, but with the right note of accessibility.

Yoshi responded to it. “Can I talk to you for a minute, doctor?”

They sat in the deserted mess hall and he told her whatever she didn’t already know about him and Tatya, the events of the last few days, the Vulcans, the kelpwilt, his fears for the future.

“Tonight Sorahl gave me this,” the young man finished, showing Dehner the formula, sweeping his long hair out of his eyes in the characteristic gesture. “It’s probably a miracle cure, and he just gives it to me. After I’ve done this jealousy trip on him and Tatya, after everything else. And he
gives
it to me. No ‘shall we share the discovery,’ no ‘what about patent laws,’ nothing. A gift. No strings, no applause, nothing. ‘We who are about to die salute you,’ or something. I’m so confused!”

“We all are, Yoshi,” Dehner assured him vaguely. How could she possibly explain Sorahl’s behavior without explaining how she knew? “That’s really what this whole thing is about. When we don’t understand something, it’s natural to fear it.”

“I thought I understood,” Yoshi said sadly. “In the beginning, that first night when Sorahl told us about his people and his world—I could see it; I could feel it! It was this weird gut feeling that maybe I’d been born on the wrong planet. I wanted to see the world he was describing—a world without war or violence, a world of peace and order and common sense where a person can live and work according to his gifts. I come from a tradition of discipline and respect for elders and spiritual awareness; I would have thrived on that. The more Sorahl talked about Vulcan, the more I felt homesick for a place I’ve never seen. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No,” Elizabeth Dehner said sincerely, thinking that if they could set history right again, Yoshi might yet live to see this world of his dreams.

If everything that brought Yoshi and me to this time and place hadn’t happened, Dehner thought, suddenly visited with a bad case of
Weltschmerz
. She shook her head. No, she didn’t think Yoshi was crazy, only depressed, and justifiably so.

“Yoshi,” she asked in her best clinical manner, “how much would you be willing to do to get the Vulcans home safely? To make it possible for you to visit that world you envision?”

Yoshi’s eyes widened in a kind of rapture, which sparked and died almost as quickly as it had come. He shook his head sadly.

“I lost that chance when I handed Sorahl and T’Lera over to Jason. And if you’re asking me what I’d do now that it’s too late—I’m no kind of hero.”

“There are many kinds of hero, Yoshi,” Dehner said, getting to her feet. “I need a walk. How well do you know the inside of this ship?”

Yoshi grinned shyly. “About as well as the people who run her. Would you like a guided tour?”

Dehner linked her arm in his. “Please.”

“Forty-love!” Melody announced a little too smugly. “Always suspected you peaceniks were cream puffs. Sure you want to go a whole set?”

“Just play!” Kirk’s grin was feral, masking his breathlessness. He wished he hadn’t been so ambitious at dinner. Not that it would have made much difference; the woman was a killer.

“Masochists, too!” Melody’s serve was a rocket.

“Okay, where were we?” Kirk huffed, getting under the ball just in time and sending it wobbling back into a clear fault. With a kind of noblesse, Melody allowed it.

“You were asking why an intelligent person like me couldn’t overcome my prejudices, just walk up to one of the Vulcans, and ‘engage in dialogue,’ is how I think you put it,” she said, sending him running again. “Is that what happens when you sleep with a shrink? You start talking like one?”

“Maybe,” Kirk gritted, feeling his racket scrape the flooring as he volleyed back, lost his balance, and slammed into the far wall. If she got this point, she wouldn’t get it easily. “Well, why don’t you?”

“Because”—Melody got the point, easily—“somebody has to keep a clear head until this thing settles out.”

Kirk rubbed his shoulder and went to chase the ball. “I don’t understand what that means.”

Melody bounced on her toes and laughed humorlessly. “You know, Kirk, I’m beginning to believe you are a pacifist after all. No one else would be so naive. Haven’t you figured out what happens next? Or do you really believe those people will be allowed to go home?”

He couldn’t answer for several moments, needed all his wind to keep the ball in play. By the time he could draw breath the score was thirty-love.

“All right.” He mustered the last of his charm. “Indulge my naiveté. What happens next?”

“The United Earth Council is going to decide that these people don’t exist,” Melody explained. “Then it’s up to AeroNav to ‘disappear’ them, and Jason gets the tag.” She whacked the ball. Kirk got under it and whacked it back, barely. “And if you think that big old softie is going to be able to train a weapon on these people and march them into exile”—whack—“or, worse by his standards, cleaner by mine, pull the trigger on them, you are grossly mistaken.”

To his surprise, Kirk actually saw an opening and scored his first point in a game and a half. “You, then?”

“Damn straight!” Melody shot back. Whack!

“And that’s why you’re keeping your distance,” Kirk countered. Whack! “The good soldier. Just doing her duty. Like the Gestapo, and Colonel Green’s troops. Just obeying orders. As long as they aren’t human—”

“They aren’t!” Melody yelled. Whack! “Nothing you say is going to make them human! And don’t give me that ‘good soldier’ crap, Kirk! You civilians always think it’s black and white!”

“Oh, no!” Kirk assured her with what little wind he had left. If she only knew! “I know exactly how many shades of gray there are in any command decision, believe me.”

That point made them thirty-even. Melody stopped play and came up to the net, ferocious.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Kirk. Maybe it’s because I won’t give your shrink friend the professional satisfaction, and there’s no one else aboard this tub I can talk to. But aside from all that soapbox stuff I gave you at dinner—and don’t get me wrong; I meant every word of it—there’s one little thing I won’t even tell Jason, and that is that whatever I end up doing over the next few days I’ll do because of him, even if he hates me for it.”

She was back in play without warning, and Kirk was recovered enough to chase whatever she belted at him.

“I love that man like a brother!” Melody Sawyer stated. Whack! “He took me on when I was nothing but a loudmouth maverick, insubordinate to the death, transferred off nearly every ship in the fleet and just this side of a dishonorable discharge, and he stayed with me. Turned me into something resembling an officer, and maybe even a gentleman.” Whack!

“I have worked beside him for fifteen years. I know him better than I know my own husband.” Whack! “I’ve held his head when he was sick, and he’s held my hand when I damn near died. He’s not only my CO, he’s my best friend, and I’ve watched him bleeding for these Vulcans from the outset.”

With a final murderous flourish she punished the ball across the net and Kirk didn’t bother to go after it. He conceded the game with a gesture and collapsed in a corner, nursing a stitch in his side. Melody wasn’t even winded.

“Paint me the villain of the piece, Kirk; it doesn’t matter.” She was all but attacking him. “History won’t get it straight anyway. I’ll do whatever I can to spare Jason Nyere whatever agony I can, if it means I have to pull the trigger myself.”

“I hear you!” Kirk wheezed, thinking of himself and Gary and the parameters of friendship. “But it doesn’t have to go that way if—”

“That’s a girl’s set,” Melody cut him off. “Or do you want to go three out of five like a man?”

He would have gone the full set if it killed him, partly to have another go at her philosophically, partly to salvage his pride, but Melody had found another target for her fury. “Goddamned if they aren’t everywhere you turn!”

She slammed her racket against the net post, advancing on someone hidden in shadow just outside the gym. “Have those big ears of yours gotten all that? Come out here where we can see you!”

T’Lera emerged from shadow. “It was not my intention to eavesdrop; I was merely uncertain of the protocol of interrupting your competition. However, the experience was most illuminating.” She crossed the gym floor precisely to the boundary of the tennis court and stopped. Jim Kirk did not recall scrambling to his feet, but there he was. While T’Lera’s eyes included him in her awareness, her words were solely for Melody. “If I understand the terminology of the game correctly, I believe it is accurate for me to say: your form is excellent.”

“Thanks!” Melody said grudgingly and by reflex. The Vulcan’s compliment confused her, reduced her to an angry silence in her confusion.