Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [70]
“I didn’t enjoy that at all,” said Riker, looking down at the sprawled man.
Amoret finished removing the bolts from the restraints holding Data. She swung the steel restraints outward, and Data sprang onto his feet.
He pulled up his shirt. The skin on his chest was partially opened, like a ripped plastic curtain. He reached in and made some adjustments by hand to the gleaming mechanisms inside his chest, then pulled his shirt back down.
The doors boomed again.
“Do you know of an escape route?” Data asked Amoret.
“I didn’t assume I’d make it even this far,” said Amoret. “I thought I would come up with something as I went along. The one thing I wanted to do most was … here, let me show you.”
She brought Data and Riker around to the van, and showed them the disk and a full rack of blanking equipment.
She then told them how she had saved Picard’s original mind on the disk, and how the blanking equipment in the van could be used in reverse, to refill Picard’s mind with what it had lost.
“Usually when the CS does something like that, they only put back selected parts. That’s what they did to your captain last time. For that you need a lot of supplementary gear. But to just put back the whole mind, I can do that with the equipment in the van.”
“Data,” said Riker, “check out this equipment.”
“Yes, sir. However, I have been examining it, and I believe I understand the theory behind the device. If it appears operational on closer inspection, I recommend we proceed with her plan as soon as possible, as we do not know if we will escape with Captain Picard, the disk, and the equipment. And the magnetic emulsion used on the disk is probably no more stable than a—”
“Okay, Data.”
Data checked the equipment and found it satisfactory. Within a few minutes Amoret was hooking up Picard.
As they worked, the booming sounds from the concrete doors ceased.
To Riker, it suggested only that the CS were changing their mode of intended entry.
Chapter Fourteen
TROI HAD EXPECTED the Dissenters to enter CephCom through some preexisting opening, such as a sewer.
She now saw that she was wrong. They were going to roll a boulder off a high cavern cliff to smash the concrete basement wall from outside. Lomov and several others were already working the boulder loose.
It seemed an unlikely way to enter the belly of the whale, but Troi was even more worried about Odysseus himself.
She perceived that his Odysseus-persona had shrunk and weakened. He paced by himself along the bank of the rushing cave-river, casting dark looks at the concrete wall on the river’s far bank. He was succumbing to regret and anxiety. He looked exhausted.
She approached him with the intent of a counselor: to bolster a flagging spirit. She would need his help getting into CephCom. She would have the best chance of completing her mission if he was able to complete his. He needed to be Odysseus again, with all his wiliness and resourcefulness. The mood of that character was the source of his effectiveness; without it he could do nothing.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
He inclined his head toward the concrete wall.
“I don’t think many of us are going to leave that place alive. And it’ll be my fault. This was my plan.”
“I don’t understand,” said Troi. “I thought you were Odysseus, and this was your moment to return home. To string the bow no one else could string, show your true self, restore order in your house.”
“Sounds great doesn’t it,” he said. “But I used to work in there. I know what’s behind that wall. I have no bow, and what you’re looking at is my true self.”
“Are you telling me you aren’t Odysseus anymore? You’ve gone back to being the man who arrested his own family?”
“I arrested them and sent them to their deaths,” he said. “Nothing I do, no mind-game or heroic story, no pretense that I’m someone else, is going to change that. It’ll be with me until the moment I die.”
Troi could feel his Odysseus persona slipping away like sand through an hourglass; it was almost completely