Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [24]
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 classic 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 hell 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 hit, 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