Gulliver's Fugitives Part 7

They began to hear the whup-whup of hovercraft rotors.

Riker noticed a steel door standing open nearby. The room behind it looked like storage s.p.a.ce.

"Counselor, wait in there," he said, then looked at the red-haired woman. "You can too if you like."

The two women stepped into the room and closed the door behind them.

Riker, phaser in hand, craned his neck to look upward at a maze of pipes.

The hovercraft's rotors became very loud and they could feel its wind. Its searchlights abruptly illuminated the maze of ducts on the floor below. Another craft could be heard landing outside.

Riker motioned to Data that he was going to climb into the network of pipes and catwalks overhead. Data nodded and signaled toward the stairs that led downward. The human and the android went their separate ways.

In the small storage room, Amoret and Troi stared tensely at each other as they listened to the hovering craft.

"I still think you and your friends are Dissenters," said Amoret. "You were going to Alastor, weren't you?"

"Where is that?" asked Troi.

Doors slammed and curt voices muttered outside the building.

Amoret pulled a moldered, wrinkled, stained page from her coat.

"Can you read this and keep it in your memory?" she asked Troi.

"Why?"

"It's the only piece of genuine cla.s.sic fiction I've ever owned. I found it when I was little. I've spent all my life trying to write the rest of the story. Someone has to keep it alive, either one of us."

Troi would have refused the request had it not been for the compelling emotions she felt in Amoret. The page was the focus of a tragedy-Amoret's impending death-and of a hope or wish as well. The page itself was an avatar of something immeasurably greater, something that could live on after the page was gone, or die and rise again even more powerful than before.

Troi looked at the page.

"Gulliver's Travels," proclaimed the heading at the top. Under it was a drawing of Gulliver himself, bound to a crude sled, surrounded by Lilliputians.

The page abruptly became dark.

Troi looked up and saw that something had moved over the hole in the ceiling. The lens of a one-eye looked down at them.

Troi put her hands out to show she was unarmed.

"Clear away from the door," said a male voice from outside.

Troi complied.

A CS officer wearing a white field jumpsuit and visored helmet kicked open the door and entered, gun at the ready.

"I hereby identify you as criminals and place you under custody of the CS," he said.

He handcuffed Troi, then went to Amoret.

Amoret looked at him defiantly. He pulled at the page in her hand, and she let it go.

He cuffed her, then locked the page into a metal cylinder slung at his side. In a moment a little puff of smoke from the cylinder signaled the destruction of the page.

"Someone will write that book again," Amoret said. Her voice was trembling.

"Sure," said the officer.

He turned his attention to Troi. She couldn't see his eyes behind the randomized jag-patterns of his twin rasters. He pulled the communicator pin off her uniform. As he put it in his pocket there was a bright flash outside the room, and the sound of an Enterprise phaser.

Riker looked out from his perch on the catwalk, six stories above the ground, and tried for another shot at the one-eyes. He had seen the CS man below, moving toward Troi's hiding place, but a one-eye rising up from nowhere had forced him to take cover.

Now the one-eyes were swarming all around him, dodging in and out of the pipe-maze.

A one-eye darted into the open dead ahead. Riker shot too late; it dodged the beam, which blew a hole in a great iron pipe.

Riker waited for his target to reappear. He squinted, eyes sweat-stung, into the blue-lit tangle of tubular shapes.

"Riker!"

He looked down. There, standing on the floor five stories below, was Ferris. Behind him floated several more one-eyes, and behind them stood several CS men, and Troi and Amoret, both handcuffed.

"I'm offering you a fair chance to give yourself up," Ferris called, his voice echoing among the steel pipes.

"Release your prisoners, and we'll talk," said Riker.

"Procedure says I have to give you this chance," said Ferris. "If you don't take it, you're not getting another."

Riker wondered where the h.e.l.l Data was.

Maybe if he stalled for just another moment ...

'Is intimidation the only kind of social interaction you know?" asked Riker.

"The record will reflect that you refused my offer," said Ferris.

Riker fired at a one-eye that dodged in front of him. He missed. The one-eye swung outward, and a moment later was obliterated by a phaser shot from the shadows below.

Data.

Another one-eye was. .h.i.t, and dissolved into nothingness.

Then Riker heard a hum so close behind his head he could feel it on his scalp. He turned around slowly and looked directly into the lens of another one-eye. He dropped his phaser, put up his hands, and looked down at Ferris, six stories below.

Ferris raised his weapon, contempt on his face.

In an instant, Riker understood that Ferris was going to kill him, even though he had given himself up.

Ferris fired.

Riker had the sensation of his body falling apart, limbs beyond conscious control, as the cells of his brain were rudely vibrated. His sensory confusion was absolute and uninterrupted. He didn't even know he was falling.

On the floor of the factory, from a tangle of pipes, Data leapt forward, and with the speed and precision proper to androids, covered in giant steps the distance to Riker's impact point. He stretched his arms up and out. Riker fell onto them. Data absorbed the shock like a tempered spring, letting Riker nearly touch the ground at the end of his deceleration, then pulling him back up.

The CS men surged forward and in a moment surrounded the pair.

Ferris stepped toward Data, reached out and pulled the communicator pins off the uniforms of both men from the Enterprise.

Data carefully observed Ferris, the ring of armed CS men, and the hovering one-eyes.

Even Data, an android, could see the anger and frustration on Ferris' face. Ferris had wanted Riker to fall to his death.

"Put him down, robot," said Ferris. "Our weapons can destroy you as well as your flesh and blood masters."

Data set the unconscious Riker gently onto the ground.

"Throw down your weapon."

Data hesitated for just a wink.

He had deduced, during careful observation over the last several minutes, that the one-eyes could not read the super high-speed impulses in his positronic brain. Now, as he slowly removed the phaser from his belt and threw it to the ground, his fingers touched the phaser settings and the fire b.u.t.ton in precisely calibrated movements.

The burst of phased energy was so short it appeared as though the phaser merely glitched or sparked on the way out of his hands. Its beam flashed for a microsecond at a far corner of the building, where Data, during his survey with Riker, had detected a flammable concentration of natural methane gas.

A round fireball bloomed in the air, and the shock wave knocked everyone over. The one-eyes were forced to the ground.

Troi was thrown backward. She rolled away from the fireball, and kept rolling until she stopped halfway into a large open duct pipe. As the fireball rose, Troi could see Data grappling with several CS men simultaneously. One of them reached over and pressed a spot on Data's back, a cutoff switch only a select few people on the Enterprise had ever known about-until the one-eyes came.

Data went limp.

Hands still cuffed, Troi leaned her whole body into the duct pipe and let herself slide a short way down. The pipe descended at an angle and she could control her descent.

The pipe had a square shape, one of those she recalled Data mentioning as a good candidate for access to the underground tunnels.

She let herself slide downward for several meters. The duct turned and joined with another, steeper one, and she slid faster, sc.r.a.ping and b.u.mping, until she landed in complete darkness on a soft pile of dirt.

Ferris led his men toward the two white a.s.sault hovercraft that stood with engines idling. As he strode across the gravel several one-eyes kept pace, hovering in front of him, their lenses pointed in his direction, their lights throwing his rugged features and light blond hair into relief against the night sky.

Behind him, his men carried three unconscious criminals on stretchers.

Ferris strove to quell his frustration. He was a by-the-book military man, and he knew all about tactics and strategy. But, faced with this eternal rebellion, he sometimes got fed up with all the rules. Dissenters didn't go by the rules.

There were no clearly marked fronts and campaigns, and the CS, it seemed, could never know if it was winning. Could he be blamed for needing to pop his cork, for wanting to kill when he should only stun? Criminals, once arrested, were as good as dead anyway.

He'd seen some of his soldiers ma.s.sacre Dissenters during skirmishes. He hadn't partic.i.p.ated but G.o.d knows he'd come close. And he'd never disciplined his soldiers for it. They were good men, unselfishly, risking exposure to the Allpox every day.

Now he climbed into the c.o.c.kpit of one of the hovercraft and sat in the copilot's seat. On a small video screen in front of him, the face of Crichton was already waiting.

"We've been watching the video, Major. How did you find them?"

"We already knew the transporter frequencies to watch," said Ferris. "We weren't counting on the Dissenter woman showing up at the same spot, though. We'd been following her for weeks, waiting for her to lead us to the Dissenters' caves, but the Enterprise people's arrival made us blow our cover. Will we go in now anyway, sir?"

"Yes, we'll still carry out the cave mission. And we'll arrest the Enterprise woman in the process."

Crichton looked at the synchronized images on a bank of monitors behind him.

"The one-eyes gave us superb news video from this, Major. We did a live feed straight to broadcast on some of it. The excitement out there is incredible."

Crichton's mask-face stretched slightly in a configuration Ferris recognized as pleasure.

"Just another operation, sir," said Ferris.

"I know you aren't always comfortable with these necessities of presentation, Major. But the people need you."

Ferris busied himself flicking a row of toggle switches over his head as the hovercraft prepared to take off. Crichton was right, he didn't enjoy being in front of the camera. The camera was Crichton's affair. Using the one-eyes to gather news video had been Crichton's idea, and Ferris thought it was untidy from a military point of view.

"I endure them by defining them within my duty, sir. When am I going into the caves?"

"I'm sending another patrol in."

Ferris paused for just a moment, a "why" on his face. But he quickly recovered with a snappy, "Yes, sir."

"If we force them out," said Crichton, "you'll make the actual capture. On video."

The hovercraft lifted smoothly.

"I have another mission for you now," said Crichton. "Some criminals have just attacked a Mental Hygiene clinic and are destroying the mind-cleansing equipment. You'll be-"

Crichton's mouth seemed to jam up. The color drained from his face. His eyes stared forward at something off-screen. He started to quiver slightly, like a slab of aspic.

Ferris cleared his throat.

"Sir, are you all right?"

Crichton leaned over his desk and held his head for several seconds.

When he came back up he seemed to have recovered.

"Sorry," he said, breathing like a man who's been held underwater. "My injury has been giving me trouble lately."

"Yes, sir."

Crichton, still looking very pale, launched into the details of Ferris' next mission.

The a.s.sault hovercraft-fitted with the most expensive ordnance available-flew Ferris on over miles of tenements, then over some mud flats strewn with old tires, rusting machinery, and household trash.

There, rising from the mud, was a cleverly a.s.sembled, monument-size sculpture. It was made of broken pieces of wood and sheet metal, and bits of colorful garbage. It was a caricature, a bust of a head seen often on Rampart, but here with features distorted to ludicrous effect, a mockery of manliness. The head was bent over, gnawing on another human head beneath it, in a rendition of a scene from Dante's Inferno-Count Ugolino, in the Ninth Circle of h.e.l.l, eternally gnawing the b.l.o.o.d.y head of his partner in treachery, Archbishop Ruggieri.