Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [25]
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 button 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, scraping and bumping, until she landed in complete darkness on a soft pile of dirt.
Ferris led his men toward the two white assault 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 massacre Dissenters during skirmishes. He hadn’t participated but God 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 cockpit of one of the hovercraft and sat in the copilot’s seat. On