Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [17]
The defenders were gasping in agony, writhing on the floor. Apparently only females reacted well to the royal gel. Kirk kicked to try to dislodge the rancid stuff from his feet, but it didn’t seem to be bothering him.
He reached Luz in time to pull her away from the edge of the splattered gel. Her eyes were glazed, and she was shaking with desire to dive in.
“Make your choice, Luz. I don’t have time to fight you.”
Her straining toward the gel eased, and her eyes focused on him.
“They would kill me before they let me join the birthing chamber.”
“Then let’s go!”
Kirk set off down the corridor at a flat run. It would be a race to see who got to the gateway first.
When he had a moment, he adjusted the phaser setting back to stun. He wouldn’t be reduced to the ruthlessness of the Petraw. But he freely stunned workers and defenders who spotted them. There was no way they would have gotten through the complex without the phaser. If they were faced with a large enough attack force, he could be overwhelmed by numbers. It depended on how long it would take the matriarchs to rally the defenders and send them down to the gateway.
Kirk stunned several more Petraw in the long corridor to the experimental stations. But there were no defenders posted at the door to the gateway room. They had been too eager to accompany them to the matriarchs.
Inside, the magnetomotive was running at full standby. Ready for the final test.
Kirk hit Tasm’s assistant with a phaser beam before she could say a word.
Luz went to the cylinder and grabbed hold of it, trying to wrench it from the metal computer unit.
“No!” Kirk demanded. “This gateway is our only way out.”
Luz protested, “But I need it! No other birthing world will take me without it”
“There’s no time! It’s either die here or come with me. Now.”
She hesitated, glancing at the door where defenders would arrive any moment. Then she looked at the phaser held loosely in his hand. He could point it at her to force her to agree, but his innate sense of decency wouldn’t allow it.
Maybe that did it, or else Luz finally saw the wisdom in his words. She went over to the controls of the magnetomotive and adjusted the dials. “There. It’s ready to go.”
Kirk went to the gateway. The image of the terrace overlooking Starfleet Academy was bright in his mind’s eye. But his hands were busy with the phaser. He clicked it to level ten, then set the energy feed wide open. It was the same way the Kalandan defense computer had overloaded his phaser back on the station. A whine quickly began to grow as the power cell cycled faster.
“What are you doing?” Luz demanded. “You can’t”
“I’m keeping them from following us.”
He took a deep breath and concentrated on the terrace. Voices were coming from the corridor outside as the moist flagstones appeared. The cloud-filled sky loomed over the craggy hills of San Francisco. It was just as Kirk remembered.
Without another thought, he pushed Luz through the gateway. It blinded him for a moment as she stumbled over the threshold. Then the light faded while she fell onto the flagstones, looking around in surprise as if she could no longer see him.
Several Petraw burst into the room and rounded the magnetomotive. As Kirk jumped through the gateway, he flung the overloading phaser sideways, directly into the gap of the magnets where the flux crossed.
The flash as he passed through the gateway was brighter than he remembered, but this time the light didn’t stun him. He looked back as the Petraw running toward him were caught in the explosion of the phaser. It broke the delicate hold of the suspension units, and the magnets began to crash to the ground, falling directly toward the gateway.
A push of air seemed to propel him through the gateway faster than his own momentum.
The last thing he saw, the walls of the chamber shuddered and began to fall. It disintegrated, taking everything in it down into the chasm and the molten rock below.
Kirk’s