Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [23]
The door swung inward, and steps came toward them, then stopped. Riker peered around the gear and saw, standing on the platform, a red-haired woman, about thirty, wearing somber-hued clothes. As she began to walk forward again, Riker stepped around the gear and into the open. The woman turned toward him, as though she were expecting him to be there.
She appeared to be unarmed but Riker kept his phaser trained on her. They confronted each other tensely.
“What about your two companions?” the woman asked. “Are they shy?”
She motioned toward where Troi and Data were hidden.
“Counselor, Data,” said Riker. “Come on out.”
The woman watched them keenly as they emerged. Then she seemed to make a decision.
“We’re wasting time,” she said. “I watched you and heard you talking. The CS could be out there right now, ready to arrest all of us. I think I know why you’re here, but I have to hear you say it. You are Dissenters.”
“We don’t belong to any particular group,” said Riker.
While the woman paused, trying to decide what to do, Troi assessed her. She felt the woman’s rebellious spirit and keen intellect, explored her inner emotional mind-set. She decided the woman was an aesthete, a connoisseur of feelings and images. A poet, perhaps? A Dissenter—one of the anti-establishment rebels Crichton had mentioned?
“My name is Amoret,” the woman said, then waited for a reaction.
“You don’t object to my name?”
Riker looked at Data, who accessed his memory.
“Amoret is a character created by Edmund Spenser, sixteenth-century English poet,” said Data.
“No,” Riker told Amoret, “I don’t object to it.”
“You know the meaning of my name, and even spoke aloud of Sisyphus and Helen of Troy. You did that, committed a crime punishable by death, and you aren’t a Dissenter? You ought to be.”
“I’m sorry, but we can’t be involved with you or your activities,” said Riker. “If you could leave for just a minute or two, we’ll be gone when you come back and you can do whatever it is you intended here.”
“I can’t risk going back out there!”
“You may not have to,” Data said. “The CS are already here.”
He pointed upward.
They all looked up. Thirty feet over their heads, silhouetted against the night sky, a group of six one-eyes hovered dead-still in precise hexagonal formation, looking down at them.
Riker reflexively pushed Troi and Data under an overhanging stair-landing. Amoret ducked in with them.
Riker touched his communicator.
“Enterprise, three to beam up now!”
He glanced regretfully at Amoret, sorry he could not help her.
But there was no response from the ship.
Riker tabbed again. “Enterprise!”
“Sir,” said Data, as he moved a switch on the tricorder, “we are being electronically jammed, from several directions. The Enterprise can’t hear us. It is as if the Rampartians knew precisely which wave patterns to use and already had equipment ready for our arrival.”
He adjusted the tricorder again.
“Aircraft approaching.”
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 space.
“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.