'Now can we get out of here?' Trask yelled, surprised that he could hear himself over the ringing in his ears.
Pale-faced, Nathan nodded. He stood up, however shakily, closed his eyes, conjured a door. Trask also stood up, and as their top halves came into view, so Tzonov saw them.
They saw his mouth fall open, and a moment later the mad delight that lit in his eyes as his lips formed a single word: 'You.1'
'Shit!' Trask said, as the Russian traversed his weapon and lowered its smoking barrels.
Nathan tried to hold the door but couldn't concentrate. He could feel the Russian's eyes on him where they centred him in the Katushev's cross-hair gunsights. Also, the proximity of the Gate was interfering; the door wouldn't form properly; his grip on the thing was too shaky.
'Nathan,' Trask breathed. And again - but much more urgently - as Tzonov squeezed the trigger-grips, 'Nath-aaan!'
... And the firing-pins slammed forward on to empty chambers! They knew it immediately from the look of instant fury on Tzonov's face: the Katushev's magazine was empty.
It gave Nathan the breather he needed. As Tzonov swung out of the bucket-chair down on to the perimeter ring and made a run for the gantry, so the Necroscope collapsed the first door and conjured another, also unstable, against the solid rock wall of the core.
But in the smoke and turmoil - with the agonized screams of the dying in his ears, and the moans of the dead in his metaphysical mind - Nathan's concentration was still lacking; he hadn't yet mastered the MSbius Continuum, couldn't afford to be distracted. And as Tzonov ran out midway on to the gantry, paused to unsling an automatic rifle from his shoulder and balance its butt on his hip, so Nathan's door slid sideways along the wall until it overlapped the mouth of a thirty-inch diameter energy wormhole, a smooth-bored shaft in the otherwise solid rock. The door's outline at once shrank to a circle and seemed sucked into the narrow shaft ... where it immediately firmed up.
Nathan had taken a step after the door. Looking into the wormhole, he could see that it was now stable. Having receded these few extra inches from the influence of the Gate, it was safe to use. And 'Ben!' he called out to the older man. 'Let's go!'
Trask came from behind his aluminum cover, saw Turkur Tzonov crouched on the gantry, aiming his rifle. And, 'Shit!' he said again.
'You first,' Nathan told him, as Tzonov opened up on them.
'First what?' Trask howled as bullets buzzed all about and sponged from the wall. Nathan made no reply but thrust him headfirst into the wormhole, and as Trask disappeared yelping into Mobius space-time, the Necroscope took one step back and ped headlong after him ...
On the gantry, Tzonov's eyes bugged and his jaw fell open. For long moments, almost absent-mindedly, he continued to hose a vicious stream of lead down the wormhole into which he'd seen Trask and Nathan disappear. Then his jaws snapped shut and his face darkened, twisting in fury. He knew it simply wasn't possible for men to wriggle out of sight that fast. They weren't in the wormhole, not any longer. They were . .. somewhere else.
And Tzonov knew where; or, if not where, he at least knew what. Obviously Nathan had inherited his father's talents, or Trask and British E-Branch had helped him to rediscover them. Like Harry Keogh before him, he too had learned the secret of teleportation; he could move himself instantly, at will, from one place to another without physically covering the distance between. Or rather, he knew shorter, faster routes.