Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno Page A

distance—
    He considered. It would require nearly a full solar day. Illogical. If there were real danger, there was nothing he could do. Except…
    Spock reached within, took up the silver thread that linked his mind with Jim’s. Those whose minds had touched and been touched were given this.
    Spock searched, found no immediate external danger to the human he so valued. He might have probed deeper to the unconscious levels, but to do so without permission was a grave breach of Vulcan privacy. Were he needed, he would know. Jim Kirk’s voice had called to him from across a galaxy once before, drawing him from the reaches of Kohlinahr , and he had answered. He would do so again.
    But not now. Within moments Mr. Scott would report that his readjustments were complete. The drill would proceed apace; duty would occupy the Vulcan’s conscious mind for the present, perhaps sufficiently to block the insistence of disembodied female voices.
    Further, Enterprise ’s diurnal rhythms had been tied in with the Admiralty upon departure. It was morning where Jim Kirk was as it was “morning” aboard Enterprise . The admiral would still be sleeping.
    (“Sleeps like a baby,” McCoy had observed once, having kept the vigil over a recuperating Kirk yet another time.
    “A sign of a clear conscience,” Spock had suggested dryly, having kept the same vigil, though not for medical reasons.
    “Or no conscience at all,” Kirk had shot back, yawning, embarrassed at all the attention, grinning at both of them.)
    The bosun’s whistle sounded yet again. Mr. Scott was nothing if not punctual. Spock roused himself into full command mode, grateful that whatever troubled his captain was at least held at bay by sleep.
     
    “ No, don’t go! Please, no! ”
    Jim Kirk shouted himself awake. He was sitting bolt-upright in bed, clutching at something that was no longer there, some fragment of the nightmare that had jolted him from sleep. It was gone. A sudden attack of vertigo made him lie back against the pillow.
    When his head cleared he glanced at the time: 0631. He didn’t have to get up for another half hour, but any attempt to go back to sleep would be a joke. He sat up gingerly, wondering why the light was so strange. A mournfulness of foghorns from the bay below gave him his answer.
    The penthouse was well above the fog line; Kirk could have stepped out onto the balcony and let a dazzling morning sun warm his face as he contemplated a world lost in cottony opaqueness below him. He did exactly that for a few minutes until the undulating whiteness brought a return of the vertigo and a touch of nausea.
    So much for breakfast, he thought wryly as the glass wall to the balcony slid shut behind him. McCoy and his damned diets! To hell with green leaves!
    Green. Oh, God, green! Green blood, Vulcan blood—everywhere. The nightmare came back to him in flashes. He could hear himself talking to T’Lera, to Tatya, saw himself as part of the horror that had caused the Vulcans’ deaths, heard a voice—goading him or only warning him?—that he “could not do it alone.” What in God’s name did it mean?
    Kirk sat on the side of the bed for a moment, thinking, mentally backing away from the impressionistic chaos of his nightmares and trying to find a different perspective.
    Why was he rewriting history in his dreams, a history he knew had turned out reasonably successfully, but which he persisted in dreaming as a disaster, with himself as the causative factor? And who was the woman with the blond hair and the voice of doom?
    She was always present in the recurring death dream, first as a disembodied voice, later as a shadowy female figure. Elusive, always just out of reach, poised on the edge of memory, she was nothing more than a flash of pale hair, a tattoo of bootheels, a single phrase repeated over and over in a voice Kirk was certain he ought to recognize. He never saw her face. Whenever he turned to reach out for her, she was gone.
    He