The Eyes of the Beholders - A. C. Crispin [66]
Lifting the bandage away from her ear again for the barest instant, she discerned again that demented roaring. It had to be the Klingon.
Hugging the wall, loaded injector clutched in her hand, Gavar edged to her right. When she reached a branch that her groping arms revealed as a cross-corridor, she called out, “Lieutenant? Are you there?” She did not expect a rational answer, but she at least hoped that he might hear her and roar with rage again.
It took her nearly a minute, measured by her racing pulses, of calling and listening in the briefest of flashes, before she heard him again. To the right again …
Finally, beneath her shoulder as she edged along the new corridor, she felt a vibration, as though a heavy body had struck the unyielding surface. Gavar froze, wondering whether she dared raise her bandage even by the smallest amount, straining her eyes through the sheltering bandage for any sight of a dark bulk before her …
The wall vibrated again, harder. Easing the lump of bandage away from her ear for a heartbeat, Gavar heard the Klingon’s enraged bellow.
Mother of Many, she thought with a clutch of fear. I forgot about the phaser!
She braced herself, half expecting to be roasted or vaporized at any moment.
Before her eyes a darkness loomed. Worf—it had to be!
He lunged for her, and Gavar skipped aside, nimble on her hoofed feet despite her bulk. The Klingon reeled against her, arms out, grasping, his breath hot on her cheek for a second, then the Tellarite jerked her leg hard against his shin, and he went down. Quick as a thought, she was beside him, the injector pumping the sedative into his body, she knew not exactly where. The shoulder, she guessed, leaping away, behind him now, as he lunged to his feet.
Gavar counted seconds by the pounding of her own heartbeats—ten, twelve, fifteen … Oh, Mother, didn’t it work?
Seventeen, twenty … twenty-two …
And the surface beneath her hooves vibrated as the Klingon went down like a monument falling.
Thank you, Mothers, all of you, Gavar thought fervently as she hastily checked Worf’s pulse and respiration by touch. He was thoroughly unconscious—she’d given him the entire dose, because she hadn’t been able to set the calibrator on the injector—but he was definitely alive. She’d used the correct medication.
Grabbing the back of his jacket in both hands, she began dragging him along. But she had too far to go, that was no good, her back was in agony from hunching over after just a few steps.
Hastily, Gavar tugged her own jacket off, turned the Klingon over, and tied her garment around his head by its sleeves. Then she walked around him, turned so her back was toward him, then stooped and picked up his booted feet. Pulling them up into the crooks of her elbows, she grasped his heels in her hands. Much better. She started forward—
—then halted, her heart slamming. Was she headed the right way?
She spent a moment trying to remember whether she’d gotten turned around, so she was now facing in the wrong direction, and decided, finally (all the while knowing that a wrong decision could mean both their deaths), that she had. Slowly, Gavar shuffled around until she was facing the opposite direction, then she began dragging the Klingon along as he lay on his back.
She kept her left elbow brushing against the wall, searching, searching for the way she’d come …
Then her arm met only air, and, praying all the while that she’d chosen the correct direction, she turned left down the branch.
Surely she hadn’t come this far before! She must have missed her way back there, and now was wandering lost in this labyrinth of madness! Gavar hunched her shoulders determinedly and began counting paces, wishing that she’d thought to do that on the way out. Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven …
She would turn around and try to retrace her steps, she decided, at the count of fifty …
Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six—
Her hoofed foot struck something yielding. She had found them!
With