Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [75]
Ferris looked at the formations of soldiers around him. He was back in his tactical, operational element. That fiasco in Riker’s cell had been entirely his fault. He’d let Riker goad him, manipulate him, but it wouldn’t happen again. He was fully in control.
He heard a noise on his headset and responded.
“OpsCom, you back on-line? This is Ferris.”
“We’re back, Major.”
“I want a situation report.”
“Roger that. Uh, wow, radar is showing something big crossing the perimeter from the southwest.”
“Hostile?”
“I don’t know … it’s … it’s a Navaho Rainbow Guardian, sir! Coming at your position!”
Ferris turned reflexively.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Watch out, sir, he’s going to deploy hozho, the Path of Beauty! Watch out!”
“What—” Suddenly Ferris realized he was being fed something blasphemous through his helmet. The headphone filters weren’t working. He ripped the helmet off as though it were full of anthrax germs.
“I guess he didn’t want to hear it,” said Coyote, as he put down the mike. He sat in a mobile communications truck, in a nest of patch-cords he’d rigged for the disruption of military communications.
Next to him, Gunabibi’s eyes were closed as she played the dijiridu into a mike she’d set up in front of it. Her circular breathing, the special technique that allows breath in through the nose while the mouth continues to expel air through the instrument, enabled her to indefinitely sustain the sounds.
“There,” said Coyote as he plugged in a cord, “this will patch your mike into all intercoms and headsets. Play! Play!”
It was a song with no words; a single, deep, main note with many intertwining sub-tones and phases. Gunabibi’s fertility song. It was the continuous all-note of the entire chain of life, the song of DNA itself, double-strand after double-strand entwined a trillion-trillionfold, helixing back into the dark time-well.
Coyote peered out. The communications truck was parked on an upper level garage. Even up here there was confusion because of the flooded lower garages; vehicles were jostling and CS men were scurrying about like ants. None of them had spotted the cables leading from the truck into the communications box on the wall.
Coyote could see some of the CS men tweaking their helmets as they tried to identify the strange music playing in their ears. Their panic and confusion multiplied as he watched.
A few of them fell to the ground or covered their eyes or cried out in terror. They were having seizures in their right temporal lobes. The creative image-and-music parts of their brains had been starved and straitjacketed for so long that Gunabibi’s song had triggered bursts of wild hallucinations.
Odysseus drove the armored truck on a service road that ringed the CephCom complex.
Troi could see disruption everywhere. Convoys roared past them in both directions. Troops ran across the road. Gunabibi’s dijiridu hummed from the truck’s CS-frequency radio.
The dijiridu-sound stopped and Coyote’s voice replaced it.
“Let me tell a story the Tlingit Indians tell, about the Statue that Came to Life. A ma—”
Coyote’s voice was cut off. Troi heard muffled shouting from the radio, then a silent interval, then the voice of a CS officer.
“All sectors—the transmitter is up and the one-eyes are back on line. The intruders in sector C have been caught.”
Odysseus speeded up.
“We’ll still make it, and we can get them free too,” he said, “if we make it to that bridge.”
Troi could see the high, narrow bridge, still far ahead.
She had a feeling of foreboding. Then she realized an actual shadow had descended on the truck. It was as if a black cloud were following above them.
Slowly, a huge olive drab-colored object, much larger than their truck, lowered itself into view in front of them. It was flying along with them, tracking their course.
Guns, missile-tubes, and antennae covered its surface, and a single, huge purple-tinted glass lens stared out from its nose.
“Battlefield one-eye,” Odysseus said. “Keep cool.