Kirk froze. “You’d use my own phaser on me, Tasm?”
She was as coldhearted as Kirk always believed. “Yes.”
Kirk kept his hands out. “It’s set to kill.”
“I know.”
She didn’t flinch, and he didn’t doubt she would fire if he made a threatening move. He did nod toward the distinctive blue cylinder that was mounted on a large computer unit. It was sitting next to the magnetomotive. “The gateway doesn’t belong to you.”
“Now it does. I earned it.”
Kirk couldn’t see anything left of the woman he had kissed in the Kalandan station. Her unformed features were softened and flattened like the other Petraw. Except for her eyes, fierce with Tasm determination.
The big Petraw defenders weren’t taking any chances this time. With each of his arms held by a defender, Kirk was marched out of the experimental station. He cast one longing look back at the gateway. So close. He had almost made it home.
Tasm took the lead, overshadowed by the defender next to her. Kirk was half-carried, half-dragged up a long slanting corridor. As they went up, Kirk wondered if they were being taken to the exterior platform where they would be summarily tossed off the cliff to smash into the molten rock at the bottom. At least the heat would burn him to a cinder before he hit the lava.
But after going up a few levels, they began to move deeper into the complex. Kirk kept track of every turn they took, optimistically intending to use the knowledge to find his way back to the gateway. That was the spirit. He only needed to get Tasm and the defenders to cooperate by turning their backs and ignoring him for a few minutes….
They picked up more defenders along the way who seemed eager to pound him into a pulp if he so much as twitched. He wasn’t sure how he knew that when they didn’t say a word. Maybe it was because they all looked alike, and something about that uniformity was unnerving.
A couple of times Luz started yelling past Kirk at Tasm, venting the frustration that had been boiling inside of her for days. Kirk wasn’t sure how Tasm kept her steady pace. Some of the insults about her intelligence and command abilities were enough to make him wince on her behalf. He supposed Luz wasn’t counting on leniency from her commanding officer. She hadn’t gotten it the first time.
They finally reached their destination. Kirk could tell by the way Tasm glared at him, cautioning, “One wrong move and I’ll shoot you.”
Kirk raised his hands slightly to indicate he didn’t want any trouble. “You could just give me a ship and let me go right now, Tasm.”
“That’s for the matriarchs to decide.”
Luz was panting, infuriated. She hardly looked Petraw compared to the others, with her face contorted in anger. “I saved the gateway! I brought it back.”
Tasm actually smiled. “Perhaps the matriarchs will thank you before putting you away, Luz.”
“You don’t deserve to join them! It should be my honor….”Luz lunged against the defenders holding her, but she couldn’t shake them. She swung there, a fighting slip of a woman.
Tasm didn’t touch the wall, but an opening began to grow slightly larger than the others. The Petraw herded them inside. There must have been a dozen defenders around them now, along with Tasm holding the phaser.
Kirk looked up and kept on looking. They were at the bottom of a cylindrical well that rose very high into the rock, at least ten times higher than it was wide. In the very center, a long slender tube dangled down to a bulbous gold sack that nearly brushed the floor. It was shaped like a ripe pear, and swayed slightly as the air was disturbed by their entrance. Its rounded sides were shiny taut.
Looking up, Kirk saw that the surrounding walls, starting about ten meters above them, were dotted by hundreds of small protrusions. The curving wall was so dark that it took him a moment to see they were moving.
They were Petraw. At least, each one was the head, arms, and chest of a Petraw. Kirk shifted so he could see the lowest one better, and gulped. Where its legs had once been was a swollen mass that stretched wide, bulbously attaching to the lumpy, moist wall.
“What is this?” he asked incredulously.
“This is the birthing chamber,” Tasm said reverently.
“Joining the birthing chamber is our highest honor,” Luz snapped.
“She doesn’t deserve it!”
Tasm glared at Luz, but saved her words for those who mattered. “Beloved matriarchs, we have brought you Luz and the invader.”
Kirk didn’t think it was a good idea to be considered a nameless antagonist. “Matriarchs! I am James T. Kirk and I come in p—”
One of the Petraw defenders belted him in the stomach. That dropped him to his knees, and they withdrew to a watchful two paces.
Kirk coughed and choked, trying to catch his breath. Luz landed next to him, on her knees, looking up the well of matriarchs. Heads turned on the wall, and arms gestured in various attitudes of distress or condemnation.
Tasm stood next to them, with the phaser still aimed at Kirk. “Matriarchs, we found Luz and the intruder near the gateway while we were testing it.”
Kirk had to put his hands to his ringing ears. Something about the well amplified their voices, but it was pure sound with no articulated words.
Gradually, there seemed to be streams of consensus within the tones, as threads of their comments rose to near-audibility. Kirk relaxed to hear what they said, much the same way he did inside the cells. He realized this was the source of the information feed in action.
Luz is defective. Luz must be put away immediately.
Luz’s mouth opened wide. “But I’m the one who brought you the gateway! Ask him! He wouldn’t have let Tasm take it. She would have lost it!”
Like an implacable river, the thoughts droned on: Luz is defective. Luz must be put away immediately.
Rather than be condemned without a hearing, like Luz, Kirk lifted his hands to appeal to them. “Matriarchs, it was an accident that brought me to your world. I’m no invader! Surely we can come to an understanding—”
He could hear their rising agreement even as he spoke, buzzing through the bones of his ears. The invader must be put away. The invader must be put away immediately.
Tasm finally looked satisfied. “I knew it. I’ll make sure it’s done properly this time.”
Kirk started to protest, but a new sentiment began rising from the matriarchs. It was filled with something like warmth of feeling.
Tasm is exemplary. Tasm will soon join us.
Kirk was nonplussed by the idea of what must happen for Tasm to be transformed and joined to the wall of the birthing chamber. She would be stuck somewhere up there among the hundreds….
Tasm took another step closer to the sack that hung in the center of the birthing chamber, raising her empty hand toward it. Her body trembled in eagerness. “The royal gel is almost ready.”
That’s when he understood. The polymer substructure of the Petraw complex was the living body of the matriarchs. It was one vast organism that was growing in the tunnel-riddled cliffs. This well was their brain center. The matriarchs supported their children in their own body, using their own life systems to distribute nourishment and remove the waste.
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.”