Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [49]
The door-stone moved, then moved again, then fell forward onto the floor with a thunderous boom.
Six white-uniformed CS men holding radiation guns ran over the fallen stone and into the statuary room, followed by a pair of one-eyes.
The CS men all wore imagination-proof helmets.
They looked around at the great chamber, then quickly took up positions in front of the Dissenters. One of the CS, the one standing nearest Troi, brandished his weapon.
“This place has been identified as a criminal hideout. The facts are already a matter of record. All of you are under arrest.”
He looked young, and Troi felt his skittishness without needing to see the eyes obscured behind the jagged, moire-quivering rasters on his helmet visor. She read the nametag on his uniform: “Lieutenant Daley.”
“We are going to scan you one by one, starting with you on the end,” he said, pointing to Caliban. If—”
A pebble struck him in the back of the head. He glanced behind him and saw Coyote, far out in the middle of the statue garden, dodge from one statue to shelter behind another. The multitude of stone images created confusing shadows and false perspectives.
“I’ll take care of him,” Daley said to his men.
He aimed his gun at a statue of Mahu-ika of Polynesia. The gun whined, the stone glowed, and Coyote leapt from behind the statue just before it burst like a bomb. He took cover behind the voluptuous curves of Venus Callipyge.
Again Daley fired, and again Coyote escaped to the protection of another statue. Troi was astonished at the old Indian’s agility.
“What are the one-eyes picking up from his mind?” Daley asked the CS man on his right.
“They’re not getting much from here, sir. What they’re getting, they’re censoring. Must be all fictional. Unrepeatable. No usable information. Send the one-eyes in after him?”
Daley nodded. “I’ll go, too.”
The pair of one-eyes drew up and flanked him as he walked toward the host of statues.
“Hoooeee!” Coyote shouted with elan from the middle of the crowd of stone figures.
Daley threaded his way with difficulty through the statues. His eye-rasters were filtering the statues, making them into vague globular shapes.
He reached a small open space near the center of the room. He stopped and looked about for Coyote. The one-eyes hovered overhead, sweeping their scanners downward, moving about, trying to get a line-of-sight fix on the elusive Indian.
When the one-eyes were aligned in a pair over Daley’s head, Coyote reached up from behind a statue of the Chinese deity of literature, Wen-ch’ang, and tugged at a rope that was anchored to Wen-ch’ang’s fat pencil.
Troi heard a ripping sound, then saw a heavy dark mass fall from above onto Daley and his two machines, knocking them all to the ground.
Daley yelled and thrashed about on the stone floor. The one-eyes rose back up, circling in a wild mazurka, covered with muck.
One of the CS men ran toward Daley. Coyote’s foot shot out and tripped him. He fell right into the mess.
An ammonia-like smell reached Troi’s nose. She realized the substance that fell was excrement. It looked like bird guano—or perhaps haguya guano.
She stood poised, ready to take advantage of the confusion and make a break for the door. But three CS men still had their guns pointed at her and the Dissenters, and another still blocked the door. Troi saw no safe way to get out of the chamber.
One of the CS men, apparently seeing her intent, suddenly pointed his gun directly at her.
Odysseus stepped in front of her, protecting her with his body. He shouted one word, “Nummo!”
The CS man fired, and Odysseus pitched forward onto the rock floor.
Troi felt the ground begin to vibrate under her feet.
The CS men felt it too. They began to back away from the Dissenters. Daley, by now on his feet though smeared with guano, looked about for the source of the vibration. The one-eyes pivoted and hummed about erratically, their sensing devices and weapons guano-clogged. One of them shook itself violently, like a dog trying to shake off water,