Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [66]
Crichton hung up and let the doctor continue his search.
“Sir, you’re under an awful lot of stress. Did you ever consider quitting the CS? Seems like you would be good at directing TV news shows or commercials.”
Crichton sighed. “Probably what I should have done, all along. Now it’s too late. The Council will keep me where I am.”
The orderlies had come in an hour ago and strapped Riker onto the bed. He had spent the intervening time in unendurable anguish, not because he seemed to have reached the end of his days, but because he seemed to have failed his friends. The away team mission had been a disaster, had accomplished nothing.
From this position he could still see the video screen on the opposite wall.
He saw images of Ferris and a squad of CS men, jumping from hovercraft onto the roof of a Rampartian building. They threw concussion grenades into the building, then cleared away from the windows as the explosions showered glass and thick smoke into the air.
Then the camera moved smoothly in, taking up a position behind Ferris’ shoulder, following him as he leapt through a shattered window and sprinted down a hallway. In an office at the end, behind a door marked “Mental Hygiene,” three rag-clad rebels had some lab technicians tied and blindfolded. Ferris burst in at the head of his team. The insurgents were quickly subdued and handcuffed. Ferris went over to one of the technicians and removed her blindfold: expression of undying gratitude on innocent face.
Oh yes, thought Riker, Ferris the liberator, Ferris the patriot, Ferris with all the emblems and decorations … If Riker hadn’t been tied down he would have kicked the screen to pieces.
The door to Riker’s room opened. Two CS men entered, followed by a woman in white uniform with red CS logo, wheeling a cart full of electronic gear. A cap with electrodes sat on top of the cart.
Ferris and another man, both wearing helmets, followed them in.
“Take your helmet off,” said Ferris to the man with him. “Let him see you.”
The man took his helmet off. It was Picard.
“Captain!”
“Hello, Will.”
“I didn’t even think you were still alive!”
Picard stood over his first officer with an expression of pity.
“Will, it would be hard to explain it to you in your present state of mind.”
The woman started shaving areas on the top of Riker’s head.
“But Ferris wanted you to see me,” Picard went on.
“That’s right, Riker,” said Ferris. “I wanted you to see how your captain turned out. How we burned the evil right out of him. Like what we’re going to do to you.”
Riker had a terrible desolate feeling as he looked at Picard. The Captain’s whole demeanor had changed. He was a patronizing schoolmaster.
This, he supposed, was what awaited him too. He kept himself calm, and focused the totality of his concentration on finding a way out, for both of them. His senses felt heightened, as he saw everything with an almost painful clarity. It was as though a layer had been peeled from his eyes.
The other CS men were regarding Ferris with curiosity. It got Riker’s attention.
Riker could see that Ferris was agitated. Not operational, not by-the-book. Ferris had come to win a fight while the enemy was still an enemy, and the only way he could signal victory was by showing off a brainwashed Picard. What Ferris really wanted was a true fight to the death, a struggle—complete with ritual blood at the end; not this kind of unwinnable battle against ideas.
Ferris was like a certain type of soldier that had committed brutalities in the twentieth century. The two “oldest” parts of his brain—the R-complex and limbic system, the parts humans have in common with pterodactyls and wolves, the parts that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago—were overstimulated, exploited, driven to distorted aims by his society. His