Strangers From the Sky (6 page)

This too had been part of Savar’s thinking from the first. It scoutcraft crews were to be the first other worlds saw of the Vulcan, they must also be the best.

“Crossover effected, Commander,” T’Preth announced softly.

“Acknowledged,” T’Lera said again, and, though as commander she need not say it, added: “My gratitude.”

There was no other acknowledgment. A human crew might have cheered. A Vulcan crew went on about its work.

At last T’Lera rose from her chair and entered the privacy-screened living quarters. Here in one of the sleeping niches—whether meditating or only asleep, only those who knew him well could be certain; the old one seldom closed his eyes for any reason now—lay the ancient Savar, point of origin of all aboard this vessel, of all who journeyed from Vulcan to the stars. His eyes, obsidian and glittering, gazed unblinking into that same nameless realm he had bequeathed his daughter.

“My father?” that daughter said now, kneeling beside his sleeping niche; the musician Stell had set aside his
ka’athyra
and gone to take the conn, leaving the two to their privacy. “We have made the crossover. I wanted you to know.”

The ancient one raised himself slowly to a sitting position.

“My gratitude, Commander,” he said, his voice rusty with many days’ silence, insisting upon the formality as he had when their roles had been reversed. “It will be good to see Earth once more.”

First Mate Sawyer ran the hand-held chemanalyzer over the suspect portion of the barrier weir surrounding the westernmost kelp fields of the Agro III station.

“Cables’re tangled,” she muttered as if to herself. “And they’re frayed—here, and here. As if something heavy got itself caught, then pulled or slid off. Moy, keep this baby steady, can’t you?”

Young eager Ensign Moy, falling all over himself on his first real sea voyage, struggled mightily with the small skiff in what was proving to be a choppy sea.

“Sorry, sir,” he said by reflex; it seemed he was always apologizing for something. “MeteorCom says we’re in for heavy weather.”

His baby face shone with expectation as he tried to read the analyzer over Sawyer’s shoulder. “Whatcha got, sir? Anything interesting?”

“Could be, Moy,” Sawyer muttered, preoccupied. “Could be real interesting.”

It had been pure fluke that she’d been the first to notice something. Nyere had ordered the day watch to cruise the perimeter of Agro III before going inside, and Sawyer just happened to be taking a turn on the forward deck after hours bending over her instruments when the damaged cables hove into view. She’d persuaded the captain to let her lower the skiff and have a closer look.

“Those white patches are not paint,” she said emphatically. “Not that I know what they are. Best we rub off a sample and take it back upstairs for a full analysis.”

“You think it was a satellite like the captain said, sir?” Moy’s words tumbled out in his excitement. “Or you think there’s more to it? He’s been real snappish since he got the word. I hear it was Priority One. You don’t suppose—”

“Button it, Moy. Let’s get back before my breakfast comes up. I’m not used to being this close to the water.”

“Aye, sir,” Moy said glumly, steering the skiff back to where
Delphinus
lay brooding behind them.

“It is not paint, Captain suh,” Melody reported conclusively, the report printout in her hand. “It’s a rhodinium-silica-based coating compound.”

“So?” Nyere was studiously unimpressed. “You’ve heard Yoshi gripe about pleasure craft plowing up his acreage. Another slap-happy Sunday driver, that’s all.”

“I don’t think so. Analyzer says its closest analogue is the kind of temperature-resistant sealant they spray on spacecraft.”

Her particular choice of words was intended to catch Nyere’s attention. It did so.

“What do you mean ‘closest analogue’?”

“According to the analyzer, it contains trace elements not native to this solar system. They can be synthesized under lab conditions, but—”

“Then maybe it’s something new the Space Service has come up with,” Nyere said, grasping at straws. “I wouldn’t call your findings conclusive, Sawyer. Not on this much evidence.”

A long moment of silence hung between them. Nyere’s heel dragging had begun to grate on Sawyer about as much as her impatience did on him.

“Jason, something fell out of the sky last night and got snarled up in that cable. It’s my guess it’s sitting on the bottom waiting for us right now.” Nyere said nothing. “What I want to know is what the hell, in light of your orders, you intend to do about that,
suh?
”

“That will do, Sawyer!” He glared until she backed down. “Recommendations?”

“One, we go for a dive just where that cable’s in such a mess and start scooping the bottom for little green men.”

“Negative,” Nyere said. “Weather’s getting heavier, and we’re losing the light. It can wait until morning.”

“We
can
work under infrared, Captain,” Melody stated the obvious.

“Not this close to the Mayabi Fault we don’t,” Nyere countered. “I’m not going to go plowing around down there in the dark with sand in our faces and end up falling down a crevasse. Tomorrow, when the wind’s died and the sun’s up. Tomorrow and not before.”

Melody nodded, not satisfied. His argument might have made sense, except that he’d taken such risks before. How long did he think he could keep stalling?

“What else, Melody?” Jason asked, reading the expression on her face, not liking it.

“Recommend we go pay our farmer friends a visit.”

Their eyes locked. She was calling his bluff and they both knew it.

“You’ve been listening on their comm band?”

“I have.”

“And?”

“No outgoing calls all day,” Sawyer reported. “No reports of anything unusual, no distress calls. Also no chat with the neighbors, no ringing up Mom on the mainland. Nothing.”

“Maybe they’re out doing their job. Or were until the swells started up.”

“Except for one thing, Captain.” Melody dropped it like a bombshell. “They’ve had the incoming on all day. As if they’re just sitting there listening. Waiting for something to happen.”

“You’re fishing, Melody,” Nyere said, though he didn’t believe it himself. “It’s a lax time of year. Maybe there’s a good movie on.”

“Jason, for Pete’s sake—”

“Look, maybe they’re making love in the middle of the day and they need it on for background music!” Nyere exploded. “Go find something else to do besides peeking through keyholes, will you? We’ll be there at 1400 tomorrow anyway. It’ll keep.”

“If you say so, Captain
suh
,” Melody said watchfully. “So long as you realize it ain’t gonna go away by itself.”

The door to the penthouse scanned Jim Kirk and shushed open, letting him in without a word. That was good. He’d listened to enough words, spoken enough words in a single afternoon to last a lifetime.

Damn staff meetings! he thought. Damn the life of the chairbound paper pusher who brought it on himself! What was I thinking of? The one thing I always hated most about a field command was the paperwork afterward. Locking horns with a Trelane or a Rojan could get you killed, but it was the reports after the fact that busted your—

Jim Kirk sighed. Now Spock had his
Enterprise
and all he had left was the paperwork.

He’d started fiddling with the closures on his uniform tunic while he was still in the turbolift. Now he threw its stiff red newness (almost the color of drying humanoid blood, he thought, as if noticing it for the first time. Whose brilliant idea was that?) over a chair, admiral’s bars clanking disconsolately. He dumped his carrycase on top of it—pompous, silly thing with his name and rank holoscribed in one corner, hermetically sealed against all environmental conditions, equipped with a security lock that would implode and destroy the contents if it was tampered with.

Your tax dollars at work, Kirk thought. All it contained at the moment was a couple of medium-security tapes supplementary to this afternoon’s meetings, which he would return unread in the morning, and The Book.

The book. He’d made a great to-do about having it made up in bound form, though it had cost him a bundle and sent the Troyian bookseller into a spasm over the inconvenience. “Surely the admiral has a speed-read degree!” the Troyian had clucked, fluttering his aquamarine fingers disconsolately over the order form for such an anachronism as a book with paper pages. “Why, a tome of this size can be scanned in an evening with comm-enhance. We even carry a ‘read while you sleep’ version. Such a waste of valuable time—turning pages, reading words instead of scanning paragraphs…”

“One of the reasons God gave man eyes and fingers, Purdi,” Jim Kirk had said softly, but as if to suggest that the subject was closed. Troyians talked too much.

“Coffee-table book!” Purdi sniffed. “At least that’s what they used to call them. That’s why you want the antique version—part of your collection!”

Kirk had left him with his misconception.

“Over a Billion Copies in Scan!” raved holo-ads and vidvertising every time Kirk switched on Prolificom for a weather report.

Not only was everyone buying
Strangers
, everyone actually seemed to be reading it. Kirk caught Heihachiro Nogura scanning it on his office screen the morning after three civilian friends had tried to press their copies on him at a party. Even his students, whose tastes usually ran to
Astromance
and
Warmongoria
, were debating its merits in the corridors between classes. When they asked the admiral his views on its merit, Kirk waived comment on the basis that he was still weighing it in the context of his—ahem—personal experience in diplomatic matters.

The final straw was when he thought he’d managed to escape it for a day by attending to some business up at TerraMain Spacedock, about as far offplanet as one could go without leaving orbit. He’d stopped by the commissary for a cup of coffee and the latest gossip when he caught sight of Nyota Uhura and—

“Admiral, you remember Cleante alFaisal.”

Silly question. Remember her? He’d once been madly in love with her, for nearly five minutes.
Enterprise
had been on a rescue mission, retrieving the two survivors, human and Vulcan, of a bit of Romulan nastiness at the edge of the quadrant. There’d been a moment’s peace and respite beside a lotus pool, and this sad, beautiful creature with Byzantine eyes…

“Hello, Jim.”

“Cleante.”

He kissed her hand now as he had then. Uhura’s eyes danced as she watched the two of them.

“Join us,” she invited Jim Kirk, and he did.

“What brings you to these parts?” he asked Cleante pleasantly.

“Coincidence,” she replied. Her voice was as lyrical as he’d remembered. “T’Shael had an appointment with Dr. M’Benga in Old Frisco and I tagged along to do some window-shopping. I ran into Nyota and she invited me up for lunch. I’d never been to Spacedock before.”

“I see.” Kirk nodded. T’Shael was the Vulcan survivor, genetically prone to some blood disorder that required periodic monitoring; Vulcan healers were hard to come by on Earth, and M’Benga was still the best of the humans. “Well, don’t let me interrupt your conversation—”

“Cleante was just telling me the most fascinating thing,” Uhura said brightly. “She’s discovered a long-lost relative.”

“Really? Something to do with your archaeology work?”

Cleante shook her head, her masses of dark hair an aura about her face.

“Surprisingly enough,” she said, “he turned up as a rather mysterious character in a history book. Have you read
Strangers from the Sky
yet?”

Inwardly Kirk groaned, defeated. “No, not
yet
.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re familiar with the premise. Here you have the entire military-intelligence community of Earth with its knickers in a knot trying to figure out what to do with two misplaced Vulcans, when this—character—by the name of Mahmoud Gamal al-Parneb Nezaj, if you can believe all that…”

That very afternoon, Jim Kirk beamed down from TerraMain and stopped by Purdi’s Book Emporium, waving a white flag.

He’d had his copy of
Strangers
sent to the Admiralty on purpose, to pique the curiosity of the younger generation onstaff, most of whom wouldn’t know what a book was if they fell over it. He’d sat at his desk holding the thing, still in the plain brown wrapper Purdi had so discreetly provided, delighting in the feel of it, the heft of it in his hands. There was something vaguely obscene about owning a copy of
War and Peace
or
Bleak House
complete and entire on a little plastic disk that could be read to you by a computer.

Aides and junior officers passed in and out of his office all day, eyeing this audacious anachronism sitting plunk in the middle of Jim Kirk’s desk, utterly mystified. Kirk did not bother to enlighten them, locked the book in a drawer while he locked himself into an endlessness of staff meetings, then smuggled it out of the Admiralty as if it might have been Klingon aphrodisiacs, instead of what it was.

Alone at last in the penthouse, he still didn’t take it out of the carrycase. The longer he waited, the greater the pleasure when at last he took it out, settled himself by the fire with his feet up, and began turning pages, losing himself in another time, another place. He kept himself in suspense, poured himself a drink, and woke his computer.

“Computer?”

“Yes, Jim?” it answered sleepily; it had had the apartment to itself all day.

Kirk stopped himself from snapping at it for familiarity; he had requested a personality-specific model for home use.

“Read me tomorrow’s sked, please. One item at a time.”

“Of course, Admiral,” it said more formally. “Beginning 0800: Quadrant Three commandants’ tie-in briefing.”

More talk, Kirk thought, complicated by time lags across an entire quadrant.

“Confirmed. Next?”

“Approximately 0930: workout with
kendo
instructor.”

Kirk groaned; his arm was still sore from last week’s session.