Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [56]
… her father lying dead in the caves of Dakhur Hills…
Torrna shook his head. “Can’t do it. Jus’ can’t.”
Snarling, Kira got up and went to the other side of the desk. She grabbed Torrna by the shirt, and tried to haul him to his feet. Unfortunately, while they were the same height, he was quite a bit larger and, in his drunken state, so much dead weight.
… Opaka lying dead after a shuttle crash on some moon in the Gamma Quadrant…
“Get up!”
“Wha’ for?”
“I said get up!” …Furel and Lupaza, only on the station to protect her, being blown into space by an embittered, vengeance-seeking Cardassian…
Torrna stumbled to his feet. Then he fell back into the chair. Kira yanked on his arm, which seemed to be enough to get him to clamber out of the chair again.
She led him outside. She propped him up on one of the wooden railings that separated the small office building area from the main marina and pointed. “You see that?”
“I don’t see anythin’ but”
Losing all patience, Kira screamed. “The bodies! Look at the bodies! Those people died fighting for Perikia! So did Natlar, so did Inna and so did Lyyra. You have no right to give up now because if you do, Lerrit has won. There’s no one else who can unite these people the way you can now you’re a hero! Without you, they’ll fall apart, and either Prince Avtra or the Bajora wil be able to come right in and take over.”
Torrna stared straight ahead for several minutes. Then he turned back to Kira.
When she first entered his office, Torrna’s eyes were glazed over. Now, they were filled with sadness.
In as small a voice as he’d used when they were traveling through the mountains, Torrna said, “I’m sorry.”
Kira remembered that the ground-based gateways tended to do one of two things: jump randomly from vista to vista every couple of seconds, or, like the one at Costa Rocosa, stay fixed on one location. This one, however, was different: it jumped back and forth between only two destinations.
The first was ops on Deep Space 9.
The other was the comforting light that Kira Nerys knew in her heart belonged to the Prophets.
As she stared at the pathetic, drunken figure of Torrna Antosso standing in the midst of the wreckage of Natlar Port, Kira at once realized that she made the right and the wrong choice in stepping through the gateway when she did.
This, she thought, is me. And whether or not Torrna decides to drink himself into oblivion or takes charge of the Perikian government doesn’t matter. Kira walked away, then. Away from Torrna Antosso, away from Natlar Port, away from the Korvale Ocean, away from the Perikian Peninsula.
Or, more accurately, under it.
She’d been in these caves before. The last time was when the Circle had kidnapped and tortured her thirty thousand years from now. She had no idea why she came down here, and yet she was never more sure of anything in her life.
Despite the fact that the Denorios Belt’s tachyon eddies prevented any gateways from being constructed within ten light-years of Bajor, Kira was not surprised by the fact that an active gateway was present in the caves. She didn’t know where it would lead her, but she felt supremely confident as she stepped through it, ready to face what lay beyond…
Chapter 10
Kira Nerys stared at the galaxy.
She had to look up to see it in its entirety, its bright face filling half the sky. She’d seen images of the galaxy before, simulations and holos taken from deep-space probes launched centuries ago by any number of worlds. But nothing prepared her for the sight before her now.
The galaxy stared back down at her, a still and silent maelstrom that seemed to scrutinize her as she stood beneath it, and she knew that it was no simulation. She was as far from home as she’d ever been, and might ever be, and under the unblinking eye of the immense double spiral, Kira Nerys felt very, very small.
She was only partly aware of her surroundings: the smooth circular floor beneath her feet, the central console with its brown-and-blue color scheme and alien markings that registered dimly as matching the known