Strangers From the Sky (38 page)

“Chopper, suh,” Melody confirmed, picking the uneven eggbeater sound out of the silence and a sudden vicious wind coming in ahead of the storm front. “Question is, whose?”

“Back inside!” Jason ordered her against the wind. “Make sure the others are secured. Swing the tower light around if that chopper comes in; that storm’s going to make it darker than midnight in a minute.”

“Suh!” Sawyer was running.

The helicopter Jason heard was only the lead chopper in a convoy. Further out toward the coast, before the sun was up, the inhabitants of two snowbound snowmobiles had watched them go over.

“No markings,” Noir observed, scooping snow off the roof of the second mobile while Kaze checked the runners. “Could be anybody.”

“Too many of them,” Red said, hunched inside her parka. “It’s heating up. I’m for getting out.”

She’d become the unofficial spokesperson for the traveling circus following Easter’s unofficial abdication. Easter hadn’t moved from the driver’s seat of his snowmobile throughout the long arctic night, sat singing antiquated Sinn Fein marching songs until even Aghan had gotten disgusted and scrambled out.

“His brain’s froze,” was the November terrorist’s cheery opinion. “Not that it wasn’t always stuck between gears. His fuel’s gone, leaked out overnight. He’s off his head. I say we leave him.”

“We could’ve blasted that guy that came through last night!” Red spat. “If that idiot hadn’t stopped us. Took his mobile, made it to the rendezvous.”

Aghan shrugged. “It’s all over now, with or without us. Racher’s probably dead. Crazy to go up against a ship that size alone.”

“It was your idea, cockroach!” Red reminded him, stamping her feet on the ice. Several more choppers went by overhead. “Enough! It’s running?” she yelled to Noir, who was back inside the mobile. Noir nodded. “Good! Unload the hardware. We’ll give it to Easter to keep him warm.”

The motley foursome unloaded the back of the second mobile, toted rocket launchers and grenades and vaporizers and the neutron cannon into the back of Easter’s vehicle. Their supplier could always get them more; they could travel lighter without them. Throughout this brilliant piece of deduction the sullen Provo didn’t move, sat with his eyes glazed staring through the windshield, singing his anachronistic songs.

“Now we all fit!” Red announced as the foursome squeezed back into the second snowmobile. “We go home. Anyone asks, we tell them we’re journalists looking for spacemen. Only there aren’t any.”

They were gone in a roar and a skidding of runners, back in the direction the choppers had come, heading for the coast and a way out.

Aghan’s assessment was correct. Easter’s brain was frozen, partly by paralyzing cold, partly by paralyzing failure. He should have captured last night’s cruising tourist, blown his brains out, taken his vehicle. He should have beaten Racher to the rendezvous and ambushed him. He should have captured the spacemen single-handed, or died in a blaze of heat and light.

Instead he sat paralyzed, living out the death he feared most.

“‘A nation once again…’” Easter crooned hopelessly, his eyes frozen on nothingness, his rancid breath the only heat source, fogging the windshield. The numbness crept up past his knees, deceptively warm. “‘And Ireland long a-promised be, A nation once again…’”

“We’ve lost ’em,” the lead chopper’s pilot told her VIP passenger as they emerged from the cloud cover without their unwanted escort and roared in ahead of the storm, swooping down like an oversize grasshopper on the three figures transfixed on the ice.

From inside the ship, Melody nailed the chopper with the tower light. Jason, watching it loom on him, gripped his weapon and wondered if maybe Melody and Kirk were right, and this whole thing had been orchestrated to eliminate the Vulcans and blame it on untraceable terrorists. He kept Kirk and Mitchell well out in front of him for cover; the laser rifle rose slowly in his hand.

The chopper pilot had a voice augmenter. “Hold your fire, Jason. I’m a friendly!”

Jason had to laugh, recognized Raven Takes-the-Bow, AeroNav Aux South’s ace pilot.

“Raven!” he shouted, waving both arms to let Melody know it was okay. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Can’t stop to chat, Jace. Got a VIP to unload and a passel of reporters on my tail.”

“Reporters?” Jason repeated. Raven was still hovering; could do it for hours, she was that good. “Come down here and quit blowing my hair around!”

The chopper lowered ponderously onto the ice and cut her motor to half. A solitary figure in a dark coat and watchcap stepped uncertainly over the pontoons to confront Jim Kirk, whose face lit up like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. Of all the improbable chimera this old Earth had to offer—

“Spock!”

“S
POCK
!” B
ETWEEN THE
wind, the chopper’s noise and sheer disbelief, Jim Kirk could barely draw breath to speak. “I can’t tell you; I never expected to see you again! Certainly not here.”

“Indeed, Captain. I might say the same of you.”

“We have to talk!” Kirk shouted. “Captain Nyere, shouldn’t we go inside? The storm—”

“Hold your water a minute, Kirk!” Nyere shouted back; he was leaning inside the chopper to talk to Raven. “Who is this guy? And what reporters?”

Raven shrugged. “He’s from the Peace Fellowship. Reporters’re from everywhere. Had to let ’em through. Freedom of Information Act, or some such. Best you take your guest aboard and maybe roll up the shutters for a few days. Law says we have to bring ’em in here, but no law says you have to bring ’em aboard.”

“There’s one more thing!” Jason shouted, and he told her about the terrorist raid, the three dead inside the buildings, the one in the snow. “Tell Command. Someone’s going to have to come in and get them out of here.”

“Not till this blows over.” Raven nodded in the direction of the storm front. The wind had gone from freight-train roar to banshee howl, and stinging sheets of sleet threatened the rotors. “Give the reporters something to work on. Have to go.”

Jason had barely stepped over the pontoons before she lifted off, wheeling around the worst of the front and heading back with a cheery wave. Nyere led his charges inside.

First Mate Melody Sawyer was not on the bridge where she should have been.

Maybe it had to do with her killing three people, something she’d only had to do once before, and then because Jason’s life depended on it; Jason alone knew how soft she was beneath the John Wayne exterior. Maybe it had to do with conspiracy theories and the arrival of yet another of Kirk’s mysterious friends, on the heels of a terrorist attack and in a VIP helicopter no less. Maybe it had to do with her not sleeping well since she’d first set eyes on a Vulcan, and not sleeping at all within the past twenty-four hours. Maybe it had to do with nothing more than the descrambled message still beeping through on the comm screen:

Council’s decision expected within the hour. Stand by.

Melody wasn’t supposed to know Jason’s Priority One access code. Obviously she’d known enough of it to descramble the message, which had flung her into action without bothering to acknowledge it. Jason acknowledged by reflex, thinking: What action?

“Oh, dear God!” he breathed, seeing the weapons locker open, the marksman’s laser rifle replaced, his small hand pistol gone. “Kirk, you and your people stay here.”

Jim Kirk had sized up the situation at the same time Nyere did. Maybe it was having most of his crew back that galvanized him, but this time Kirk wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“Melody said she’d kill the Vulcans if she had to, to keep you clear!” He gripped the big man’s shoulders, shook him hard. “You’ve got to let us help. If there were time, I’d tell you who and what we are—”

“There’s no time!” Jason roared, flinging Kirk back to where Mitchell had to grab him.

Footsteps made them all turn. Elizabeth Dehner came up to the bridge, unaware of any new crisis.

“Melody said Jim was looking for me,” she explained, saw Mitchell and Spock, stopped in her tracks. “I—”

“Where is Sawyer now?” Jason demanded, wild-eyed, voice shaking. Unthinking, he slipped a second laser pistol into his belt, then stopped, put it back inside the locker, slammed it shut. Dear God, was this what it came down to: friend against friend for the sake of strangers and a difference of opinion?

“She said she was going to the infirmary to give the others the All-Clear,” Dehner said, totally bewildered.

“Captain,” Jim Kirk began.

“No, Kirk,” Jason said. “My ship. My responsibility.”

It was the one argument that could stop Kirk, even momentarily. And in that moment Jason was past him. The four on the bridge heard Nyere double-time down the steps, heard a rush of air and clanking of bolts that meant he had sealed the bridge off from the rest of the ship. They were trapped.

Jim Kirk rushed down the steps, pounded on the sealed bulkhead, too late.

“Jason!” he yelled. “Jason, listen to me!

“Damn!” he whispered tightly, returning to the bridge, collapsing unawares in the captain’s chair. “I tried to stay within bounds, tried to do it by the book, and I’ve failed! My fault!”

Mitchell had no time for self-recrimination. He and Spock were already stripping down for action, removing their heavy outdoor clothing, though Spock wisely retained the watchcap. Mitchell was soon at the gunnery slit, casing the joint. He whistled softly. “Oh, boy!”

Kirk was on his feet. “What is it?”

“Well, take your pick,” Mitchell said. “A major blizzard packing about eighty-mile-an-hour winds, or three big old choppers grounded and stuffed to the gills with media types. Getting out of here isn’t going to be easy.”

“Out is not the way we want to go,” Kirk said emphatically. “Spock, there has to be an override to trigger that hatch.” He sat the Vulcan down in his seat at the console.

“Captain, I am still uninformed as to the reason for Captain Nyere’s actions or our need for urgency.”

“Later, Spock, later. If there is a later,” Jim Kirk said. “Gentlemen, let’s go to work.”

Melody had been only too pleased to find the lady shrink floating the corridors against orders; sending her to the bridge had eliminated one major stumbling block. Jason’s laser pistol, concealed in the pocket of her tennis sweater, would eliminate the rest.

“Over there!” she ordered T’Lera without preamble, locking the infirmary door behind her, bracing her back against it for cover, the laser pistol aimed right between those quizzical eyebrows. “Junior, you too. Yoshi, Tatya, stay where you are. Don’t even breathe!”

Tatya gave a little involuntary cry. “Melody!”

“I—said—don’t breathe!” Melody rasped, not taking her eyes off the Vulcans. “Sit still! This time tomorrow you’ll be on your way home and it will all be a bad dream! They’ll be ‘wiped,’ their memories erased,” she explained offhandedly to T’Lera, wondering why she bothered; she owed the Vulcan nothing. “We all will.”

“Indeed?” The Vulcan had risen to her feet at once, unfaltering. Not an overly imposing figure, but one to whom attention was due nevertheless. “And this permits you to take our lives?”

“Better me than Jason,” Melody said, her jaw set.

“I quite understand,” T’Lera said. “But would it not be preferable that I accept the responsibility?”

Melody’s gun hand faltered. “You’d do that? Take your own life, kill your own son?”

“I had thought to spare my son,” T’Lera said, a color to her voice that none of them had heard before, except perhaps Sorahl, in a time before memory. “On the tennis court you suggested my weakness would move you. This is my weakness: I would plead for my son, for his life and his freedom in exchange for mine. Would you have granted me this?”

“I wouldn’t have had the authority,” Melody began, but it was Sorahl’s voice T’Lera heard.

“My commander has instructed me to inform her should I detect a flaw in her logic.” As he had aboard their scoutcraft, he sought to dissuade her from sacrificing another’s life for his.

“Be silent!” T’Lera cautioned him, knowing what he was attempting. Her eyes never left Melody’s “I see, Commander, that—”

“Mother,” Sorahl said now as he had then.

“
Kroykah!
” T’Lera hissed now as she had then, violating her father’s dictate and her own in regard to languages unknown to all who could hear her voice. If her son above all did not understand what she did and why—Her control was all but shattered; gathering the shards she had left, she focused all her will on Melody. “I see now I was in error. You cannot give my son freedom, only death. But it must be by my hands. I
will
ask for this. Then you may do with me what you will.”

Melody shook her head. “You could really do that?” She looked at Sorahl, as if expecting common sense from him at least. “And you’d permit it?”

The young Vulcan had stood with head bowed beneath his mother’s reprimand. Now his velvet-dark eyes met Melody’s.

“It was our intention from the beginning,” he said with some fledgling mastery that might someday have flourished to equal his mother’s.

“Aboard your ship, in a crisis—I can see that!” Melody’s hand was frankly shaking now; she two-handed the pistol, lowered it more toward T’Lera’s heart, or where it was supposed to be. “But in cold blood? I don’t—”

“Our blood is no colder than yours, Commander,” T’Lera said, deliberately misunderstanding. “The weapon is not needed. Only give us a place where we may be alone.”

“I do not understand you people at all!” Melody shouted, very near hysteria. Even two-handed she could not keep the pistol still. “I don’t want your nobility, your pity, your goddamn condescending Vulcan ‘understanding’—”

“Looks like you’re stuck with them anyway, John Wayne,” Jason rumbled from the side, stepping in beside T’Lera.

Melody cursed herself for a punchy sleep-deprived fool; she’d forgotten all about the waiting-room entrance. How much had he heard?

“Captain suh,” she said, chin up, control regained, voice colder than the blizzard raging outside. “You are in my line of fire!”

“And
that
,” Kirk concluded, watching Spock manipulating switches at the helm control while Mitchell and Dehner worked over the weapons locker with Kelso’s lock pick, “is how we end up gathered here today. Except for Kelso. Only God knows where Lee Kelso is.”

“Only God and Mr. Kelso,” Spock corrected him mildly, touching a final toggle and sitting back as the hatch below clanked and slid open like magic. “I should like to meet this Parneb. A discussion of temporal dynamics with such a being would be most illum—”

“Later,” Kirk cut him off, grabbing a weapon from Mitchell. He thought fast. The fewer people who got a look at Spock—“Mr. Spock, you and Dr. Dehner will wait here. Don’t let anybody else aboard. Mr. Mitchell, let’s go!”

“Tatya, don’t be an idiot!” Melody said.

“I know what I’m doing!” the young woman said with a quietude and dignity that surprised everyone. She had used the distraction of Jason’s arrival to move across the room to where the Vulcans were, blocking their bodies with her own. “I can’t let you take them away again! I can’t live with never knowing what happened! If you can kill two innocent people, Melody Sawyer, the third can’t be all that hard.”

Exasperated, Melody almost lowered her weapon. “Yoshi, do something! Talk some sense into her, can’t you?”

The young man stood alone on the far side of the room, separated from everything he believed in by the point of a laser. He’d told Dr. Bellero he was no kind of hero. Was it heroism to admit he couldn’t stand by and watch these people destroyed?

“I never could talk her into anything; you know that.” He swept his hair out of his eyes, moved to join the others casually. “Give it your best shot, Mel. No one’ll blame you.”

Did she only imagine she heard Jason laughing at her again? He was out of her range of vision, off to the side where she’d bullied him with the pistol, not realizing he was that much closer to grabbing it from her if he’d wanted to.

“Well, John Wayne?” he rumbled. “Looks like you’ve got the whole shooting match. What’re you going to do with it?”

Melody lowered the pistol, let it fall to the floor, flung herself at Jason and began to pound him with her fists. He held up his hands and let her until, exhausted, she fell sobbing against him, and he wrapped her in a bear hug and stroked her hair.

Her voice was muffled by his tunic. “Damn you anyway, Jason Nyere!”

“Yeah, I know,” he soothed. “Pity the council won’t be as easy to persuade! Come on, tough guy. I’m going to put you to bed.”

It was the moment Kirk and Mitchell chose to kick in the infirmary door.

“Sorry,” Kirk offered lamely. “We thought there might be a problem.”

Jason Nyere, still holding Melody, threw back his head and roared.

Humans! T’Lera thought, more with incredulity than with disgust. For them it was over—one crisis averted, a moment of levity before the next—the final—crisis, and its final solution. Did they not understand that in that moment of shared levity the responsibility for that final solution had fallen out of human hands, and into Vulcan, where it should have been from the beginning?

The responsibility was now T’Lera’s alone. The methodology would be at her discretion, in the place of privacy that she had asked of Melody Sawyer. She would do what she must—soon, now, before humans could intervene yet again.

“You will inform Captain Nyere that we are returning to our quarters to await his superiors’ decision,” she instructed her son in her best command tone and, answering his unasked question: “Nothing more.”

“Understood, Commander,” Sorahl replied, taking her meaning, placing his life once more in her hands. “I am prepared.”

His mother/commander acknowledged his fealty with her silence, and departed, that she might also be prepared.

Jason had ordered Kirk and his party to remain in Kirk’s quarters while he sorted things out. Dehner, sitting on her bunk in the small cabin, reluctantly made room for Mitchell. Her sharing a cabin with Kirk had required some explaining.

“Lovers, huh?” Mitchell teased her now, scrunching in beside her. “Just for the sake of the mission? You expect me to believe that? Why, old Jim here’s got a reputation second only to mine for—”

“Gary, not now!” Kirk snapped. He turned to Dehner, the beginnings of an idea forming in his head. “Did you get what you needed?”

“Fortunately for us,” Dehner reported. “One of the station personnel on Agro Four has a form of Parkinson’s Disease, and he’s under treatment with Neodopamine.
Delphinus
delivers it to him two or three times a year. I managed to get hold of a six-month supply. Far more than we’ll need. And there was enough Demerol down there to chill out the entire southern hemisphere. I took as much as I could fit in my pockets.”