The echoes faded, and finally, silence.
There was not too much left of Kali. Dalt only glanced at the remains, turned, and retched. As he gasped for air and wiped clammy beads of sweat from his upper lip, he asked Pard, No chance of regeneration, is there? No answer.
"Pard?" he called aloud, and underwent an alarming instant of deja vu. But this time he knew Pard was still there—an indefinable sense signaled his presence. Pard was injured, weakened, scarred, and had retreated to a far corner of Dalt's brain. But he was still there.
Without daring a backward glance, he tucked the Ibizan into the crook of his right arm, its barrel aligned with the arrow protruding from his liver, and reentered the maze. He was concerned at first with finding his way out, until he noticed drops of a familiar muddy fluid on the floor in the dim light. He had left a trail of blood and bile as it oozed from his liver, along the arrow shaft and onto the floor.
With only a few wrong turns, he managed to extricate himself from the maze and limp back to the flitter. There he was confronted with another problem.
A large group of Kali's guards stood clustered around the craft. Dalt's immediate reaction was to shift the Ibizan and reach for the trigger. A gesture as futile as it was unnecessary: the weapon was empty, and at sight of him, the guards threw down their arms and prostrated themselves face down on the ground before him.
They know she's dead, he thought. Somehow, they know. He hesitated only a moment, then stepped gingerly between the worshipers and their dead brethren who had attacked him earlier.
He had a difficult moment entering the flitter when the arrows protruding from the front and back of his chest caught on the window opening. The problem was resolved when he snapped off the shaft of the arrow under the clavicle a handsbreadth away from his skin.
Situating himself again at the console, he first replaced the empty feeder canister with a fresh one—just in case—and activated the instruments before him. The vid screen to his right immediately lit up with the sergeant's face. Dalt made a quick adjustment of the transmitting lens to limit focus to his face.
"Healer!" the sergeant exclaimed with obvious relief. "You're all right?"
"Fine," Dalt replied. "How are things over there?"
The sergeant grinned. "It was rough going for a while—couple of the flitters took a beating and one's down. But just when things were starting to look really bad, the opposition folded ... just threw down their weapons and went into fits on the beach ... ignored us completely. Some of them dove into the ocean and started swimming toward the island. The rest are just moping aimlessly along the water's edge."
"Everything's secure, then?" Dalt asked. The flitter's engine was humming now. He pulled the guide stick into reverse and upped the power. The craft vibrated as it tried to disengage from the doorway. With a grating screech, the flitter came free and caromed off the port wall before Dalt could throttle down and stabilize. The corridor was too narrow here to make a full turn, so he resigned himself to gliding part of the way out in reverse.
The sergeant said something but Dalt missed it and asked him to repeat. "I said, there's a couple of my men burned but they should do all right if we get back."
With his head turned over his left shoulder and two fingers on the guide stick, Dalt was concentrating fully on piloting the flitter in reverse. It was not until he reached the point where the corridor widened to its fullest expanse that the "if broke through.
"What do you mean, 'if'?" he asked, throwing the gears into neutral and hitting the button that would automatically guide the flitter in a 180-degree turn on its own axis.
"The gate or passage or warp or whatever you want to call it—it's closed," he replied. "How're we going to get home?"
Dalt felt a tightness in his throat but put on a brave face. "Just sit tight till I get there. Out."
"Right," the sergeant said, instantly reassured. He was convinced The Healer could do anything. "Out." The vid plate went black.
Dalt put the problem of crossing the sixty thousand light-years that separated his little group from the rest of humanity out of his mind and concentrated on the patch of light ahead of him. The return had been too easy so far. He could not help but expect some sort of reprisal, and his head pivoted continuously as he gained momentum toward the end of the corridor and daylight.
But no countermove was in the offing. As Dalt shot from the darkness into the open air, he saw the steps leading to the temple entrance blanketed with prostrate Kalians. Most eyes stayed earthward, but here and there a head was raised as he soared over the crowd and headed for the mainland. He could not read individual expressions but there was a terrible sense of loss in their postures and movements. The ones who looked after him seemed to be saying, "You've killed our godhead and now disdain to take her place, leaving us with nothing."
Dalt felt sudden pity for the Kalians. Their entire culture had been twisted, corrupted, and debased by a single being. And now that being was no more. Utter chaos would follow. But from the rubble would rise a new, broader-based society, hopefully with a more benign god, or perhaps no god. Anything would be an improvement.
("Perhaps,") said a familiar voice, ("their new god will be Kalianoid with a white patch of hair and a golden hand. And minstrels will sing of how he crossed the void, shrugged off their arrows and spears, and went on to overpower the all-powerful, to slay She-Who-Could-Not-Die.")
Gained your strength back, 1 see.
("Not quite. I may never fully recover from that ordeal. All debts are paid, I hope, because I will never risk my existence like that again.")
I sincerely hope such a situation will never arise again. And yes, all debts are paid in full.
("Good. And if you awaken in the middle of the night now and again with the sound of horrified screaming in your brain, don't worry. It'll be me remembering what I've just been through.")
That bad, eh?
("I'm amazed we survived—and that's all I'll say on the matter.")
Details of the coast were coming into view now, and below, Dalt spotted an occasional Kalian swimming desperately for the island.
You know about the warp generator? Dalt asked.
("Yes. As I told you before, Kali activated it psionically. She's dead now so it's quite logical that it should cease to function. I think I can activate it briefly. So call the sergeant and have him get his men into the air—we'll have to make this quick.")
Dalt did so, and found four of the five flitters, each overloaded with men from the disabled craft, hovering over the shore.
("Here goes,") Pard said. ("I can only hope that there was some sort of lock on the settings, because I haven't the faintest idea how to direct the passage. We could end up in the middle of a sun or somewhere off the galactic rim.")
Dalt said only, "Do it!" and pressurized the cabin.
Nothing happened for a while, then a gray disk appeared. It expanded gradually, evenly, and as soon as its diameter appeared sufficient to accommodate a flitter, Dalt threw the stick forward and plunged into the unknown.
XXII
They seemed to drift in the two-dimensional grayness interminably. Then, as if passing through a curtain, they were in real space, in daylight, on Fed Central. And what appeared to be the entire Federation Defense Force clogged the alley before them and the air above them in full battle readiness. There was more lethal weaponry crammed into that little alley than was contained on many an entire planet. And it was all trained on Dalt.
Ever so gently, he guided his flitter to ground between incinerated Kalian bodies and sat quietly, waiting for the following craft to do the same. When the last came through, the vortex collapsed upon itself and disappeared.