Star Trek - Gateways 7 - WHAT LAY BEYOND

by Various

  Kirk refused to let his own cultural bias affect his judgment this time. What concerned him most was the monolithic nature of these Petraw. He would never be able to admire a society that forced all individuality out of its people.

  One thing was clear, there was no reasoning with these Petraw. Kirk made his decision and acted instantly.

  He knocked against Tasm, grabbing for his phaser. She was so absorbed in gazing at the sac that he twisted it from her hand. The defenders leaped at him, but he bounded up the slight rise and jumped onto the hanging sac.

  It swung widely. Cries rose around him, with Tasm's outraged wail the loudest The defenders hesitated, pulling back as the sac swung toward them, as if it was taboo for them to touch the royal gel. Kirk scrabbled higher up the side, feeling the tension in the full sac like it was going to burst; He got to the top. "Nobody turns my own phaser against me, Tasm."

  "You can't touch the gel!" she screamed.

  "Oh, no?" Kirk stamped on the bag, hanging on to the slender tube as it swayed sharply.

  Tasm shrieked as the defenders gathered around the base of the sac, cutting off any avenue of escape. The waving arms of the matriarchs and the buzzing of their thoughts warned him that more defenders were being dispatched from the blocks of cells. They would be here shortly. Luz backed toward the door, seeing a chance to escape.

  Kirk aimed his phaser down at the sac and fired as he jumped. It was set to kill.

  A geyser burst straight up in a spray of yellow blobs of goo. Kirk was propelled higher into the air as the sac exploded in a boiling gush of sticky liquid. Tasm and the defenders were covered.

  His feet slipped in the ankle-deep stuff, as he landed. But he was instantly up and heading for the door, phaser firmly in hand.

  Matriarchs were protesting in shrill voices, echoing through the well. Tasm was also crying out, but it sounded like ecstasy as she flopped around on her side. The baggy coverall over her legs began to swell.

  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 heart was pounding in reaction, feeling as if he were also sliding to certain death. But the flagstones were firm under his hands, and he could hear Luz's gasping cries. They were on the terrace overlooking Starfleet Academy, forty thousand light-years from the destruction of the gateway.

  It was done. He had buried the gateway in the fiery heart of the planet. And he had managed to return home at the same time. He couldn't stop grinning. "Welcome to Earth!"

  Commodore Enwright and the other Starfleet officials eventually let Luz go after she and Kirk were fully debriefed. She didn't know much more than Kirk had already figured out during his visit to the Petraw birthing world. Luz claimed that it was against Petraw laws when Tasm had made them pose as Kalandans to steal the gateway. Kirk didn't believe a word of her testimony, knowing that Luz would say whatever it took to get her way. But Starfleet was satisfied.

  On the last day, when the Enterprise was finally due to enter orbit, Kirk went to say good-bye to Luz at the orbital space station.

  She was subdued to suddenly find herself alone without any of her people. Kirk hadn't heard a word about how stupid they were since they had passed through the gateway.

  "Do you plan to try to return to the Petraw?" he asked. "It's a long way back."

  "No," Luz said flatly. "The Petraw would never accept me. I'm heading out on my own now."

  Kirk was sure she would be fine. After all, she had almost succeeded in getting everything she wanted. "The Alpha Quadrant is a remarkable place. It may offer more opportunities than you think." Kirk had to shake his head. "There's a lot to admire in your people, but I don't see how their totalitarian regime could satisfy your needs."

  She looked at him oddly. "You never did understand the Petraw, did you? Our unity is what makes us magnificent."

  "You violated that unity," Kirk pointed out.

  Luz finally smiled. "Well you heard the matriarchs. I'm defective."

  "Lucky for me."

  Luz gazed out the observation window, looking toward the core of the galaxy. "But the other Petraw are strong. And they're coming, I know
it. We haven't seen the last of my people yet."

  ******

  STAR TREK CHALLENGER

  EXODUS

  Diane Carey

  The free dancer was dying. Its enormous lunglike body inflated one final time, but not enough. The creature wailed as its microbrain struggled to remember the path to the skies.

  Where would it land?

  Alarms rang through the city trails. Despite the danger, steel shutters clanked open on the north side of many domed huts. Brutish winds scraped by, unable to get a grip on the oystershell domes. Slowly the giant descended from the biohaze in a shroud of parasitic life-forms. The parasites puffed outward from the free dancer and raced upward to the stormy atmosphere, their abandonment clear proof of the animal's doom. The free dancer twisted its long tendrils of shock floss upward as if beseeching its little riders to come back.

  When they didn't, the free dancer almost seemed to understand. It gave off a last sad crackle, buckled like an accordion bellows, and quite sharply dropped the last fifty feet to the ground.

  Tanggg! Tang-tang! Tangggg - shutters closed all over the quarter, just in time. The harsh sound echoed and continued longer than any reasonable echo, into the city, onto the plain, to the mountains, and rang there awhile.

  Like a cattleprod touching flesh, the planet came up to meet the dying free dancer with a sharp slap. At the first inch of contact the creature heaved, then flattened to the trail's surface and there gushed out its life. Electric-blue neon crackles engulfed the corpse in a violent cocoon.

  Again Nick Keller found himself reminded of old newsreels - the crash of the dirigible Hindenburg - a giant lung collapsing into a single great mercurial transfer of matter to energy, as all the animal's stored power shot directly into the planet.

  What a waste.

  "Close the shutter! You'll be burned by the blast wave!"

  "I need to see it."

  Raw energy strobed between the huts. The uncontrolled natural death of a free dancer could take a hundred people with it in a population complex, or go without witness on some distant open tundra.

  The whole planet was a tundra. A metal tundra. Soot on silver on pearl on ingot, with leaden shadows and pewter hills. The only natural life was in the skies, and it came down only to die.

  This animal grounded on the outskirts of the City of the Living, the oldest settlement on the planet, a cluster of knobby buildings and dome huts secured with pylons rooted twenty feet into the planet's mantel. Out there, in the "suburbs," were six or seven scattered huts out by themselves. As Keller watched in morbid fascination, the free dancer flattened right on top of one of the huts. The energy transferred back into the planet, and an instant later the blast wave blew through the city with a single deafening bark.

  The echo bonged like a big doorbell. Blinding disruption blossomed across the open terrain.

  Keller let the heavy iron shutter drop closed just in time, and ducked. The dome thundered around him.

  When the shaking subsided, he bolted to his feet and grabbed his tricorder. "Come on! It landed on a hut!" "Keller, why do you do these things?" He didn't wait. Braxan would follow him. She always did.

  Heat from the dead free dancer radiated through the metallic streets and buildings with a vibrating thrum of harp strings. Though he felt the heat, he was protected by the chain-mail sheath over his own clothes and his tightly woven mail footwear.

  The primary structural shape in the Living city was a dome. The city looked like a huddle of shellacked mollusks. They were built by inflating a free dancer's float gland, then spraying a composite - which Keller's tricorder analyzed as some chemical soup that hardened when mixed, along with a bunch of unreadable adulterants - over the balloon frame. The result was, on average, a six-hundred-ton house. The curvature could absorb hundreds of pounds' pressure per square centimeter, which the weather frequently tested.

  Otherwise, there were a few towers and a few large storage facilities. That's all.

  The free dancer's dropping on a house with its shut-open caused an implosive charge. Curiosity had gotten the better of somebody. The people inside had made a bad bet - a free dancer could die a half mile away, then in its final convulsion flip over and land right on some poor slob's head.

  Could've been me. Next time maybe I'll close the shutter. It's just such a sight!

  The carcass was now a huge pile of placemat-sized ashes crudely recalling the shape of the dead animal, thickened by the spilled and stir-fried contents of its guts - hundreds of pounds of candleflies, now cooked to a paste. Keller plowed right into the mess. Giant black flakes blew out of his way, then began to clog around his knees as he went deeper into the fried remains. His feet were gummed up in the candlefly paste. Behind him, hundreds of people swarmed out of the domes to watch. A few helped push the cooked flakes away from the imploded dome, but most held back.

  As he pushed through the hesitant people, Keller cast a glance behind for Braxan.

  She was there, right behind him. Her narrow shoulders shifted back and forth under the shimmering foil tunic she wore. What it would be on the other side of the gateway, he had no idea. Here, everything was silver, ferrous, bullion, and plate. The planet was one big ingot, hammered, pocked, or polished by constant storms. Some unknown inner force had formed jagged inorganic mountain peaks in the distance, but Keller's tricorder offered only basic statistics and couldn't read beneath the planet's surface. Like a pet dog in a strange house, it didn't act very happy here.

  Braxan stayed with him until he began climbing the dome's ash-entombed ruins.

  "Hold this!" He handed her his tricorder just before climbing out of arm's reach.

  "When will you understand?" she warned. "They've been Anointed!"

  "Don't be silly. Come up and help me."

  "I shouldn't."

  He glanced around for someone who might help and spotted two of their neighbors, a pair of brothers. "Donnastal! Serren! Climb up here! Help me pry this thing open."

  The two teenaged boys looked around at the others, scouting for disapprovals. Excitement got the better of them. They broke with traditions and swam through the ashes toward Keller, who was now about ten feet up on the crumpled dome, straddling the nearest shutter.

  The shutter wasn't latched, but only bent by the force of the free dancer's frying-pan act. The hinges were crimped.

  "Ready ... three ... two ... haul!"

  Though his hands weren't strong enough, his foot behind the shutter and the two boys pulling on the sides did the trick.

  Donnastal and Serren were young, but on Metalworld a teenager was a mighty commodity. Serren was wiry and Donnastal, though only sixteen, was built like a shuttle-craft. Against all the precepts and rules of their planet, these boys would take chances and do what the stranger ordered. Keller wasn't beyond making use of a little teenager hero worship.

  The iron shutter rasped a god-awful honk and bared the glassless window. Keller swung around on his hip and dropped into the hole.

  Inside he dug through what was left of the house and came up with three people right under the shutter - one unconscious, one moaning, one dead. The shutter was a 'light. Probably they'd been sleeping and hadn't heard the alarms in time. Any minute they'd be crushed by the weight of the shifting rubble. The Living called it destiny, fate, random order. Keller didn't buy it.

  He got the moaning woman up on his shoulder and called, "Donny, reach down! Pull these people out and hand them to Serren. Good boys."

  He hoped they wouldn't hesitate. The Living carried fatalism too far. An unintelligible mutter of protests squabbled outside, but Donnastal appeared over his head and reached down. One by one, the victims were hoisted out of Keller's arms and into the open.

  "Braxan, hand down my tricorder. Can you hear me?"

  The instrument had a terrible time operating on this side of the gateway. Half the readings were scatterbrained and silly. He'd learned to take notice of sick blips that otherwise he would ignore and to expect hug
e skips in data. The terrible moment came when the instrument figured out what he wanted it to do, and reported, clearly, nothing.

  Keller turned off the tricorder. He leaned back against one of the bent steel braces and closed his eyes. No one else buried under this jagged, electrocuted mess ... around him, the ruined dome structure groaned. Metal scratching against more metal. Unsupported, it would soon collapse under the very weight of its own materials.

  Metal and more metal and more. For the first six weeks he'd hardly slept a wink from the weirdness of the noise. Simple footsteps made the ring of chains. A falling tool made not a thump or bonk, but a jannnngggggg. He was living on a giant tuning fork.

  No wonder these people dreamed of trees and moss.