Gateways 07_ What Lay Beyond - Diane Carey [57]
And no walls. Only sky. She stood in a room without shadows, lit by a hundred billion suns.
Must be a forcefield, but
“Ah, there you are.”
She felt the voice more than heard it, as if it came from within her. Kira wanted to turn around to respond, but found herself transfixed by the starscape. A finger seemed to appear from nowhere and point at a spot in the lower left quadrant of the vista spread out before Kira. The voice said, “It’s here.”
Kira finally tore her gaze away from the view and followed the finger back up the hand and arm it was connected to, and finally to the body. The figure was huge, though definitely bipedal and apparently humanoid, standing at well over two and a half meters tall, dwarfing even the immense Hirogen hunter that she and Taran’atar had faced in the Delta Quadrant. He the voice sounded male, at least wore a maroon cloak with a hood that obscured his features.
“Wh what?”
“The world you come from is here. I believe you refer to it as Bajor.”
“Who are you?”
The figure hesitated. “You might say I’m an emissary of the people who built this outpost, but that might have unfortunate connotations for you. Suffice it to say that I am the custodian of this place.”
“You’re an Iconian?”
There was a movement inside the cloak that Kira supposed could have been a nod. “You’ll be pleased to know that I was able to cure you of that unfortunate energy.”
Energy? It took Kira a moment to realize that he was referring to the theta-radiation poisoning. She had been on that arid desert of a planet in the Delta Quadrant, theta radiation eating away at her, when the gateway beckoned. Her tricorder had told her that the radiation levels were fatal….
Of course, the rational part of her brain said as she looked down and saw that she no longer wore the ancient clothing of Bajor’s past (did I ever?) but was instead in her sand-soiled Militia uniform.
It was some kind of dream, she thought, that’s all. Or maybe a pagh’tem’far. That would certainly explain
She cut the thought short as she felt a mild stiffness in her left arm. Looking down, she saw the badly healed wound she’d received the day they drove the Lerrit Army out of the capital city. “How did how did this get here?” She pointed to the wound.
The hood tilted a little to one side. “Presumably you received it at an earlier date.”
“You’re a big help,” she muttered.
“I assume that you wish to take the gift that has been given to you and then go home?”
Kira almost asked the figure what he meant by that. But duty took over. Like Torrna Antosso, she had a role to play, a duty to perform, and a planet to defend regardless of what obstacles had been placed in her path.
“Actually, I need to return to Europa Nova. I made a promise that I would do everything I could”
Before she could finish the sentence, the custodian drifted walk was too clumsy a word to describe how he moved over to the center console.
“Ah, I see. One of our hezlat gateways is in orbit of that planet,” he said after touching one of the triangular controls.
“Hezlat?” Kira asked as she approached. Two small holographic displays hovered on either side of the blue globe atop the console, each showing a star system. The sizes and magnitudes of the two stars matched those of Europa Nova’s star and the star where they’d found the tanker in the Delta Quadrant.
“Many different types of gateways were constructed over time,” the custodian said, “some large and inelegant, some small and functional, others that could be held in the palm of one’s hand. The hezlat s were among the first, and also among the largest. Let’s see, this one is stable it links System X27 L with System J55 Q.”
The custodian seemed to be just staring at the display, so Kira helped him along. “Someone decided to dump theta radiation into that that hezlat of yours. We had to evacuate everyone from the planet on the other side before the radiation levels became fatal.”
“Yes… I see that now. But there is something blocking part of the gateway.”
Thank the Prophets, the Euphrates is still there. “Yes,