Gulliver's Fugitives Part 21

"What do you mean, looked at it?" asked Picard.

"Experienced it."

"And my whole mind was there? Everything? All memories?"

"Absolutely everything."

Picard thought through the implications of that "everything."

"Please don't be embarra.s.sed," said Amoret as she removed the cap from his head. "It turned me back into a Dissenter. If it had been censored or filtered, maybe it wouldn't have worked."

Suddenly all three realized that Data, outside the van, was speaking.

"Murray Hill spicules mogul in pajamas decorated with vermilion arch supports and re-entry vehicles.

Pork-pie hat reflected in the eyes of maggots which she produced from her wallet as an alibi.

Praying mantis protocol for Pia Colada of scorn and hate, of scorn and hate, accompanied by redness and irritation.

The flying binky formed under his upper lip while the President breaded a group of marmots."

The three humans peered around the sides of the van and saw the android with his back to them. They couldn't see what he was doing, but by the movements of his shoulders he seemed to be manipulating something in his hands.

He continued to speak in the same incomprehensible vein, but took one of his hands away from his mysterious hidden task and gestured for the people behind him to get away.

They looked at each other for a moment, baffled, but then Picard and Riker herded Amoret back into the van. From inside, they heard his utterances continue for another minute. Then there was the sound of a slamming door.

Riker looked around the side of the van.

Data faced him now, but one of his hands was behind his back.

"Data," said Riker, "are you hiding something from me?"

"Yes, sir."

"May I ask why?"

"No, sir. It is vital, sir, that none of you know why, and that you do not ask me about it or even think about asking me.

"Further, it is essential that none of you watch me until I give you further notice. Stay in the van, shut the windows, and completely forget about me."

Riker drew his head back into the van and shut the back gate. He and Picard looked at each other and nodded in silent a.s.sent.

"Is he usually this strange?" asked Amoret.

"Please do what he asked," said Picard. "Why don't you tell us what you can about possible escape routes from this room?"

She began to tell all she knew about the layout of CephCom. Picard listened carefully. He had no time for actual embarra.s.sment or squeamishness, but, still, he found he was more comfortable when he wasn't looking at her face. In spite of the grat.i.tude he felt toward her for saving his mind, the idea of her sifting through his most private thoughts took some getting used to.

Outside the van, in a corner of the room, Data sat on a fifty-gallon drum. His attention was occupied by a small object on his lap.

"What do you mean the transmitter just went down!"

Crichton cradled his head in his hands and ma.s.saged his temples.

"That's impossible!" he said. "That's a triple fail-safe system!"

"I know, sir," said the voice on his headset. "But some teenage girl climbed way up the transmitter tower and crossed a bunch of wires, and now it's off-line. She's still up there. Do you want us to shoot her down?"

"This is all wrong," said Crichton. "The Dissenters were to be forced into the quadrangle. Ferris is already there, the one-eyes are already there ..."

"Ferris is still there, sir, and so are the one-eyes, but as you know, all of the one-eyes on the CephCom grounds have to use the transmitter, and can't relay information or coordinate their fire until the transmitter is back up. Some of the Dissenters have entered the building. I'm getting damage reports."

"Look," said Crichton, "I want all of the Dissenters forced out of the building now, including the girl. Don't wait for the one-eyes, don't worry about coordinating fire, just do it. These people should be no problem-they aren't even armed! Since we don't have the one-eyes, we'll have to use cameras in the hovercraft to get our video. Make sure they get plenty of close-ups of Ferris firing at the Dissenters. And I want a hand-to-hand scene as well-Ferris one-on-one with a Dissenter, no guns. Make sure he takes his helmet off."

"What about the criminals we've trapped in the shelter behind the clean room? The three from the Enterprise?"

"Just leave them there with guards posted outside. They can't go anywhere from in there. We'll arrest them after we finish with the rest of the operation."

"Yes, sir."

Crichton looked up at the lenses and antennae that pointed to the interrogation platform in his office. He rose from his chair and went into his private bathroom. There were no antennae or cameras in there.

He washed his hands compulsively, for the twentieth time this day. As always, he didn't know why he had to do it. The compulsion was irresistible and it made him feel much better to just go along with it.

At least it gave him time to think. A moment ago he had only barely suppressed the insane fictions in his mind. But he was sure that by now some antenna somewhere must have picked up a bit of them. And it could only be his value to the CS and the Council of Truth, his peculiar talent for creating video images the public wanted, that was keeping him from arrest. Who could they get to replace him?

He blamed the Enterprise people and the Dissenters for the fictions. The blasphemous tales had started surfacing in his head the moment the Enterprise had arrived, and, clearly, the Enterprise had come to help the Dissenters. The s.h.i.+p was full of the Allpox.

At the foot of the steps in front of CephCom's grand main entrance, Ferris waited. He knew the one-eyes were out of commission; still, he didn't antic.i.p.ate major problems. There were several hundred CS soldiers crouched behind jeeps and personnel carriers, weapons at the ready. Ferris held his own service weapon at his side.

Two white CS hovercraft circled above, cameramen and their cameras visible through the open doors.

Ferris looked at the formations of soldiers around him. He was back in his tactical, operational element. That fiasco in Riker's cell had been entirely his fault. He'd let Riker goad him, manipulate him, but it wouldn't happen again. He was fully in control.

He heard a noise on his headset and responded.

"OpsCom, you back on-line? This is Ferris."

"We're back, Major."

"I want a situation report."

"Roger that. Uh, wow, radar is showing something big crossing the perimeter from the southwest."

"Hostile?"

"I don't know ... it's ... it's a Navaho Rainbow Guardian, sir! Coming at your position!"

Ferris turned reflexively.

"I don't see anything."

"Watch out, sir, he's going to deploy hozho, the Path of Beauty! Watch out!"

"What-" Suddenly Ferris realized he was being fed something blasphemous through his helmet. The headphone filters weren't working. He ripped the helmet off as though it were full of anthrax germs.

"I guess he didn't want to hear it," said Coyote, as he put down the mike. He sat in a mobile communications truck, in a nest of patch-cords he'd rigged for the disruption of military communications.

Next to him, Gunabibi's eyes were closed as she played the dijiridu into a mike she'd set up in front of it. Her circular breathing, the special technique that allows breath in through the nose while the mouth continues to expel air through the instrument, enabled her to indefinitely sustain the sounds.

"There," said Coyote as he plugged in a cord, "this will patch your mike into all intercoms and headsets. Play! Play!"

It was a song with no words; a single, deep, main note with many intertwining sub-tones and phases. Gunabibi's fertility song. It was the continuous all-note of the entire chain of life, the song of DNA itself, double-strand after double-strand entwined a trillion-trillionfold, helixing back into the dark time-well.

Coyote peered out. The communications truck was parked on an upper level garage. Even up here there was confusion because of the flooded lower garages; vehicles were jostling and CS men were scurrying about like ants. None of them had spotted the cables leading from the truck into the communications box on the wall.

Coyote could see some of the CS men tweaking their helmets as they tried to identify the strange music playing in their ears. Their panic and confusion multiplied as he watched.

A few of them fell to the ground or covered their eyes or cried out in terror. They were having seizures in their right temporal lobes. The creative image-and-music parts of their brains had been starved and straitjacketed for so long that Gunabibi's song had triggered bursts of wild hallucinations.

Odysseus drove the armored truck on a service road that ringed the CephCom complex.

Troi could see disruption everywhere. Convoys roared past them in both directions. Troops ran across the road. Gunabibi's dijiridu hummed from the truck's CS-frequency radio.

The dijiridu-sound stopped and Coyote's voice replaced it.

"Let me tell a story the Tlingit Indians tell, about the Statue that Came to Life. A ma-"

Coyote's voice was cut off. Troi heard m.u.f.fled shouting from the radio, then a silent interval, then the voice of a CS officer.

"All sectors-the transmitter is up and the one-eyes are back on line. The intruders in sector C have been caught."

Odysseus speeded up.

"We'll still make it, and we can get them free too," he said, "if we make it to that bridge."

Troi could see the high, narrow bridge, still far ahead.

She had a feeling of foreboding. Then she realized an actual shadow had descended on the truck. It was as if a black cloud were following above them.

Slowly, a huge olive drab-colored object, much larger than their truck, lowered itself into view in front of them. It was flying along with them, tracking their course.

Guns, missile-tubes, and antennae covered its surface, and a single, huge purple-tinted gla.s.s lens stared out from its nose.

"Battlefield one-eye," Odysseus said. "Keep cool. I'll deal with it."

He slammed on the brakes and the truck slewed all over the road. When it stopped the airborne behemoth stopped with it, hovering, peering into the truck's winds.h.i.+eld, its antennae searching for thoughts.

Troi ducked below the dash, waiting to feel the pulse of radiation that would kill her. She looked up at Odysseus. He was sitting with eyes closed, in rapt concentration.

He remained like that for several seconds.

Then he opened his eyes.

"We got it. It heard my thought."

Troi peered over the dash.

The huge battlefield one-eye had backed off. It jerked about randomly in the middle of the sky, pointing at the ground, the clouds, the side of a building, as if it had lost its mind. The movements accelerated.

"Get down," said Odysseus.

They both ducked. There was a flash, followed by an explosive blast. The truck winds.h.i.+eld shattered. Debris rained down outside. There were a dozen secondary explosions.

When they stopped, Odysseus looked over the dash, then down at Troi.

"You okay?"

Troi brushed gla.s.s off herself. "I'm fine."

There was a small bleeding cut on her arm. Odysseus stared at it for a moment, then their eyes met.

Troi wondered if the blood might make him doubt that she was from another world. But if it did, she couldn't perceive it.

Odysseus started driving again, rolling right over chunks of the exploded behemoth.

"There's a speculative equation that screws up the control programs in the battlefield one-eyes," he said as he sped on toward the bridge. "That Cyclops ran on numbers. We fed it too much of its own wine."

In front of the main entrance, Ferris waited, gun drawn, as his headset crackled with CS voices. The voices, still a bit confused from the Dissenters' escapades, still had information to impart to him. They said that one of the Dissenters was being chased toward the door.

Above, the two hovercraft circled close, their cameramen setting up shots of the doorway and of Ferris himself.

Ferris was alone in that part of the quadrangle. The rest of the men had pulled many yards back to isolate him and make the video image more forceful.

Ferris saw a running figure inside the building, strobing light and dark as it pa.s.sed windows, heading toward the wide doorway. A Dissenter, the headset voices told him.

The figure burst into the open. Ferris fired at it.

The figure fell. It was an adolescent girl. She had long hair and crooked teeth. Stunned instantly unconscious, she lay at the top of the stairs, her hair flaring out like a fan on the concrete.

Ferris could hear voices on his helmet headset saying "Oh, no, she's too young," and "Crichton can't use a picture like that."

Ferris was unfazed, self-possessed, as he readied himself for the next Dissenter. Then the comm officer told him that the other Dissenters had already been captured in the building. All except three: one man alone, and one man with a woman-all were being reserved for Ferris.

Odysseus stopped the van and led Troi up a spiral stair to the bridge's upper level.

They spotted Lomov at the other end of the bridge.