STAR TREK
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
ONE
Tatya raised herself on one elbow and gaped through
the sleeping-room port at the night sky, her
china-blue eyes wide. She hadn't imagined it.
"Yoshi? Yoshi, wake up. Look!"
He was sleeping on his stomach as usual, stirred
and groaned, tried to burrow deeper under the thermal
quilt, but Tatya shook him again. He pushed himself
up on his elbows and vaulted out of the waterbed in a
single graceful movement, padded across the floor
to stand before the wide port in all his lean, golden
nakedness.
"It's a meteor," he muttered, one hand
holding his long black hair out of his eyes. "All
day in the outback mending fences and you wake me for a
stray meteor. Tatya, for gods" sake"
"It's not a meteor," Tatya said
emphatically. Lord knew they saw enough of those out here
where the sky was tw tilde thirds of their world.
She stood at the port beside Yoshi, naked too no
one but fish to gawk at them this far out as broad as he
was narrow, as pale as he was golden, her heavy
blond hair in two plaits down her back. She
pointed to where the strange light moved down the arc of the
sky. "It's not bright enough,
and it's moving too slowly. Steadily, not
tumbling. Like it's on a set course. It's a
ship, Yoshi."
"Aeroationav would have signaled us if there'd been
an accident." Yoshi yawned, dived back into the
warm nest they'd made among the
bedclothes. "It's a meteor. Or space
junk. Somebody's antiquated satellite come
hurtling down on our heads. It'll be all over the
screen tomorrow. FAILURE OF SALVAGE OP;
VITAL
DATA LOST OVER SOUTH PACIFIC. his
He considered putting the pillow over his head, as
if that would protect him from things falling out of the sky.
"One of these days something'll hit us square on,
you 11 see. KELP FARM STATION
OBUTERATED, TWO DEAD."
Wasn't enough we
tried to destroy the ecology down here. Now
we're cluttering up the whole solar system.!"
"Cynic!" Tatya clucked, crawling back
into the bed beside him.
The strange orangish glow across the
royal-blue bowl of mid tilde cean starscape
was gone now. Maybe it was only a meteor or
space junk, but it had been awfully close;
Aeroationav should have warned them. Tatya imagined she
could have heard its hiss and plop as it hit the water.
Silly, she knew, but perched on a tiny
platform kilometers from nowhere, surrounded by acres
of undulating kelp and in the company of only one
other person, one got to thinking
sometimes. Only those with unshakable psych
profiles were assigned to the outlying agronomy
posts; the screening was almost as rigid as that for deep
space. Tatya and Yoshi were optimally matched and
well adjusted to the isolation. Still . . .
"Yoshi?"
There was a feeble movement among the bed- ciothes.
"Just supposes what if it was an alien
spaceship? Seventy-five years ago
Asimov
stated there were tens
of thousands of Class M worlds that might
support 10
intelligent life. And the ship we sent to Alpha
Centauri his
was won't be back for another nine years, if at
all," Yoshl mumbled sleepily. "Any truly
intelligent species would take one look at us
and keep right on going. Million years on this
planet, still haven't gotten the knack of not killing
each other. Three Worid Wars, Colonel
Green . . ."
"But that's all over," Tatya insisted.
"We're a United Earth now. And someday we'll
break the light barrier and our chances of encountering other
species will increase a hundred, maybe a thousand
times!" She jounced the bed in her excitement. "It
"Time-warp speed is still only theoretical,"
Yoshi the cynic stated, and suddenly he was snoring
softly, unaware that his prophecy was about to be
fulfilled. Something had already come hurtling down on
their heads, and it was about to hit them square on.
Tatya was the first to spot the wreckage the
next morning.
She and Yoshi were in the hydrofoil,
performing their weekly tour of the perimeter to make
sure the barriers had held (little worse than having
to pick masses of jellyfish tentacles or
decapitated squid out of the kelp braids after
storm damage) and that no vessel had run afoul of
their planted acreage despite the warning buoys.
It wouldn't be the first bme they'd had to rescue some
private sea- or air-going pleasure craft
caught in the weir, batteries dead, food and
water depleted. But what Tatya saw was something
other.
"Cut power!" she yelled over the thrum of the
foil's motor.
They'd requested a replacement damper
months ago, but it had gotten buried in
bureaucracy. The kelp and algae and soybean
farms, basis of all synthetic food production
on this planet, which at brig last had
reamed to feed all its peoples, were supposed
to get top priority on equipment requisitions,
but that was the official story.
When Yoshi didn't hear her, Tatya reached
past him and flipped the main.drive toggle herself,
answering his startled look by merely pointing off
to starboard.
"There'"
As the hydrofoil settled into the water at
cruising speed so as not to disturb whatever floated
there, the shape of the wreck was unmistakable despite
the extensive damage. This was an
extra-atmospheric vehicle, a
spacecraft. There were many such vessels used for
exploration and mining operations
throughout the sol system, including a
regularferry making the run between Earth, its
moonbases, and the recently established
Martian Colonies. But this vessel was none of
theirs.
"It's not an Earth ship," Tatya said with that
absolute bedrock certainty that always made Yoshi
tease her.
"Since when are you an expert?" he started in on
her now, his mouth twitching with
amusement as he pulled athwart the blackened
hull and cut the foil's motor to a standstill.
A fragment of what could have been lettering still
visible on the seared and pitted hull, in no
alphabet he would recognise, might have
shaken him just a little if he'd bothered to look at
it.
"Does it look like anythin
g you've ever seen?"
Tatya demanded, touching it tentatively, as if it
might have been alive.
"Looks like it might have had somebody in it at one
time," Yoshi said, avoiding her question. "May as
well see."
He stood up in the bobbing foil and threw a line
out to the wreckage, securing them
together. Standing astride the two, his long skinny
legs wobbling as he struggled to keep his balance, he
tugged at what looked like a hatch, warped away from
its housing by 12
the impact, offering them access to the craft's
insides and, very possibly answers to all their questions.
"Well, does it?" Jatya insisted.
"Probably some toeaence greater-than comsecret
new design we mere civilians aren't privy
to," Yoshi said vaguely, intent on what he was
doing.
He'd fetched a grappling hook out of
me hold and was using the foil's auxiliary power
to lever the hatch open with a raw, screeching noise.
When he got it to where he could move it
manually, he did so, peering into the darkness within,
where all he could see at first in contrast to the
brilliance of sunlit seascape around them were the
lights of We monitors and what he took to be
temperature of the incendiary they'd watched across the
sky last night. Yoshi suddenly pulled back,
jerking his hands away as if the hull were still hot.
"Gods, Tatya, I think there's someone still
alive-in there!"
"Alive? But how?"
"I don't know! I don't see how, but his
"Let me see!"
She pushed him out O; the way to get a
closer look. Tatya was a paramedical least
one member of every station team was required to be and if
there was a chance to save a life, no matter whose
First Mate Melody Sawyer of the CSS
Delphinus handed Captain Nyerc a cup of
ersatz coffee from the dispenser and sipped at her
own, trying not to be too conspicuous in her loitering.
She had to know if what she'd seen in the sky
toward the end of last night's watch had anything to do
with the orders coming through on Nyere's screen right now.
Jason Nyere tasted the coffee and made the
obligatory gagging sound (ironic that the hold was
stocked with cases of the genuine
article hermetically sealed, time coded,
inaccessible short of detonation all
STRANGERS FROM THE SKY
bound for agronomy station personnel, while he and
his crew were consigned this stuff,
concocted from the very kelp harvested on the stations,
molecularly processed into something that tasted like a
cross between parched
sorghum and Nile Delta water at low tide
on washday but sure as hell wasn't coffee),
tore his slate-grey eyes away from the
static-filled screen, and nailed his first officer with
them. tilde
"Sawyer, when this comes through it'll be Priority
One," he rumbled at her, hoping she'd have the good
grace to leave before he had to order her out.
"Coffee's that bad, huh?" Sawyer drawled,
stretching her long, tennis player's legs in their
belled uniform trousers, not taking the hint.
""Coffee," my Aunt Tillie!" Nyere
grumbled. "Time was, I am told, when the navy
got the best rations, not the worst."
"Time was, Captain sub, when the navy was a
purely military entity," said Sawyer tilde
hose severalffmes-great-granddaWy had seen
military service in a place called Shiloh in
a time when there were only nations or fragments of
same, not a united humanity putting its world back
together in the wake of juggernauts the like of Khan
Noonian Singh and Colonel Green "not the
misbegotten agglomerate of re-
searchisurveillancestdiplomatic
courierstoccasional deterrenVgeneral maintenancesterrand
boystchief-cookand-bottle-washerstorganized
grab-ass entity that it is today. Suhl"
Nyere chuckled softly. Sawyer had these
reactionary fits often; she was an incredible hardener
when it suited her. Personally, he preferred the
enlightened demilitarisation of today's Combined
Services to what had gone before.
"You'd do things differently, I take it?" he
inquired, though he'd heard this speech before.
"Damn straight! Jack of all trades is
master of none," 14
Melody snapped back. There was something
incongruous about such macho opinions
coming from this er/while southern belle with her
freckles and her soft drawl, neither of which took the
edge off the opinions or the wilfulness behind them.
Sawyer had been transferred four times in her
early career before Jason Nyere decided her
abrasiveness was exactly what he needed to keep
him from going soft. "This ship being a prime example
of the problem, suh. We are designated neither as
submarine nor
exclusively surface vessel, neither
battleship nor merchantman, yet we are some how
expected to act as all four simultaneously.
Suggest that in a real crisis we'd get tangled
In our own lines and sink under our own weight.
Suggest the absence of identifiable parameters is enough
to reduce the entire crew to a state of permanent
paranoid schizophrenia. Suh!"
"Speak for yourself, Sawyer," Nyere said. "Some
of us would rather his
The communications screen crackled and
bleeped (Message COMING THROUGH), and
Nyere remembered where this conversation had
begun.
"Melody, I'm not kidding. Priority One.
Take a hike."
"Captain, sub, respectfully suggest you try
and make me!" she shot back. She was a
hardliner only when it suited her; the rest of the time
she was insubordinate to the point of
Nyere sighed. The two of them had served on the
same ships for over a decade. He'd saved her
life once, she his twice, and he'd been godfather
to the younger of her two kids. The tough-as-nails act
had no effect on him. He waited for her to soften.
"Let me stay this once, Jason, please?"
"All right, damn you. But keep out of range of the
screen. It's my neck."
"Tough neck!" Sawyer remarked, sidling over
to where she could see without being seen.
The message was out of the Norfolk Island Command
Center, from Aeroationav Control itself.
Tatya, her hands full with the torch and the
hydrofoil's emergency medical kit, had
misjudged the distance and lowered herself none too
gently into the damaged craft. It began
to yaw violently and Yoshi lost his footing,
tumbling backward into the foil. By the time he'd righted
himself, nursing barked shins and an assortment of
bruises, he could see that the spacecraft had
settled considerably lower in th
e water.
"Tatya?" he called into the darkness below.
"You're taking on a lot of water. How's the
situation where you are?"
The sound of sloshing was her only answer.
"Get me the spare light down here!" she barked
after some time. "Whoever said these things were waterproof .
. ."
He lowered the second torch down to her, wondering
if he should join her to hurry things or if that would
only make the craft sink faster.
"Don't move around more than you have to!" he
shouted down to her. There was no answer. "Usten, if
it starts going uncler, I'm pulling you out. Never
mind about anyone else. You hear me?"
He got no answer to that either, hadn't expected
one. Tatya was intent on saving lives, could only
concentrate on one thing at a time. Yoshi shifted his
bare feet in his impatience. Tatya's unseen
movements continued to rock the craft. It slowly
settled deeper in the water, balanced
precariously on the flexible cables of the barrier
weir, listing inexorably away from the hydrofoil,
pulling the securing hawser taut.
"Tatiana . . ." Yoshl called sweetly
after he thought the silence had gone on too long. He
never called her that when she was within swinging distance.
"Can't you hurry? Or at least give me some
idea his
"There were four altogether. The two aft are dead.
Incinerated," she reported flatly. "No
surprise. What I can't figure out is why the
other two aren't."
The two aft, she didn't bother mentioning'
floated sluggishly in an ever-rising pool of
seawater at the skewed lower end of the cabin. If
Yoshi knew how bad it was, he'd order her out
immediately, never mind the two survivors at the forward
end, still strapped in their seats, unconscious and
pinned under wreckage, but alive. Tatya inched her
way through the rising water, gripping machinery and
chairbacks
against the slippery slant of the deck until she
reached the other two.
"What pretty uniforms!" Yoshi heard her
exclaim. "Everything here is so attractive
functional, but beautiful at the same time. The
furnishings, the machinery. It's all so so
wonderful!"
Yoshi felt his scalp prickle. That didn't
sound at all like old practical Tatya.
"How's the air down there? You're not making much