Star Trek U-02: Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno

Author:Margaret Wander Bonanno
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780743455626
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

WHAT DID MELODY Sawyer expect to find when she followed Jason out of the sunlight into the main room of the agrostation? Little green men, talking petunias, creatures so uncanny she could justify blowing them out of the water to protect future generations from the very sight of them?

They are not human, she told herself over and over again. They are something completely other, and we can’t have any idea what they want here. That makes them dangerous until proven otherwise.

“You all right?” Jason inquired as she swung the rad-detector up to him out of the skiff. “You look a little green.”

“Save that for ‘them,’ why don’t you?” Sawyer said wanly. “I’d feel better if I had my hardware is all.”

“State you’re in, I’m damn glad you don’t!” Jason rumbled. “If you didn’t shoot your foot off, you’d get me in the back. Sure you don’t want to wait in the boat?”

“And let them kidnap you for a love slave?” Melody swung herself up onto the dock and grabbed the medical equipment. “Damn the torpedoes and all that.”

“Right,” Nyere said, and they went in.

They’d had to wait on the dock while Yoshi brought the clothing bundle in. Now the young man held the door and tried to slip out past them. Melody’s hands instinctively went for the weapon she didn’t have.

“Where d’you think you’re going, Buster?” she nailed Yoshi with her voice.

“Out!” he sulked. “It’s too crowded in there, and I don’t want to watch, okay? I have to go check my crops. I’ll be back.” He jerked his head angrily in the direction of Delphinus. “Besides, how far could I get?”

“Let him go,” Jason interceded before Melody could get hard-nosed about it. “See you’re back before dark,” he told Yoshi.

“Sure!” Yoshi let the door slam behind them. The hydrofoil’s motor made a prodigious noise pulling away.

They are not human, Melody thought, her eyes adjusting to the dimmer light as she picked out Tatya hugging one wall, looking simultaneously defiant and scared. There were two other figures in the room. Melody looked.

They are not human. They are not like us. If they go to heaven when they die, it’s their heaven, not mine. They are not human. Killing one or both of them to protect my world is not the same as killing one of my own. They are not human….

Her first thought when she actually looked at them—the tall young male so striking he’d have reduced her teenage daughter to a helpless puddle, the slender, stark-faced female with the oddly crooked nose, looking almost fragile in one of her old flannel shirts—was that this was a joke. Something cooked up by Command to keep them on their toes, some top-secret drill concocted behind closed doors at the PentaKrem to see how AeroNav personnel would respond to a real alien invasion.

Sure, Melody thought. Some HQ genius went and hired a couple of actors or maybe intelligence people, stuck those funny-looking ears on them, trained them to speak in those

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