Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [76]
He slammed on the brakes and the truck slewed all over the road. When it stopped the airborne behemoth stopped with it, hovering, peering into the truck’s windshield, its antennae searching for thoughts.
Troi ducked below the dash, waiting to feel the pulse of radiation that would kill her. She looked up at Odysseus. He was sitting with eyes closed, in rapt concentration.
He remained like that for several seconds.
Then he opened his eyes.
“We got it. It heard my thought.”
Troi peered over the dash.
The huge battlefield one-eye had backed off. It jerked about randomly in the middle of the sky, pointing at the ground, the clouds, the side of a building, as if it had lost its mind. The movements accelerated.
“Get down,” said Odysseus.
They both ducked. There was a flash, followed by an explosive blast. The truck windshield shattered. Debris rained down outside. There were a dozen secondary explosions.
When they stopped, Odysseus looked over the dash, then down at Troi.
“You okay?”
Troi brushed glass off herself. “I’m fine.”
There was a small bleeding cut on her arm. Odysseus stared at it for a moment, then their eyes met.
Troi wondered if the blood might make him doubt that she was from another world. But if it did, she couldn’t perceive it.
Odysseus started driving again, rolling right over chunks of the exploded behemoth.
“There’s a speculative equation that screws up the control programs in the battlefield one-eyes,” he said as he sped on toward the bridge. “That Cyclops ran on numbers. We fed it too much of its own wine.”
In front of the main entrance, Ferris waited, gun drawn, as his headset crackled with CS voices. The voices, still a bit confused from the Dissenters’ escapades, still had information to impart to him. They said that one of the Dissenters was being chased toward the door.
Above, the two hovercraft circled close, their cameramen setting up shots of the doorway and of Ferris himself.
Ferris was alone in that part of the quadrangle. The rest of the men had pulled many yards back to isolate him and make the video image more forceful.
Ferris saw a running figure inside the building, strobing light and dark as it passed windows, heading toward the wide doorway. A Dissenter, the headset voices told him.
The figure burst into the open. Ferris fired at it.
The figure fell. It was an adolescent girl. She had long hair and crooked teeth. Stunned instantly unconscious, she lay at the top of the stairs, her hair flaring out like a fan on the concrete.
Ferris could hear voices on his helmet headset saying “Oh, no, she’s too young,” and “Crichton can’t use a picture like that.”
Ferris was unfazed, self-possessed, as he readied himself for the next Dissenter. Then the comm officer told him that the other Dissenters had already been captured in the building. All except three: one man alone, and one man with a woman—all were being reserved for Ferris.
Odysseus stopped the van and led Troi up a spiral stair to the bridge’s upper level.
They spotted Lomov at the other end of the bridge.
“Niki!” cried Odysseus.
The hulking barge hauler was trying to pry open a door with a tire iron. The door was a metal-grate type with an electronic lock. Lomov was bending the steel of the door but the lock itself was not giving way.
Lomov turned to look at Odysseus, then, realizing there was no more time, redoubled his efforts.
Suddenly a huge assault hovercraft appeared from behind the building, coming toward Lomov. Lomov pulled and smashed at the door in desperation.
“Wait till I call for you,” Odysseus told Troi, “then run across the bridge to us.”
She was about to plead with him not to try and defy the hovercraft himself. But she stopped herself, because she knew he’d try anyway. She would do best by strengthening his Odysseus character, the clever persona by which he achieved all his successes. She remembered that Homer’s Odysseus, resourceful as he was, sometimes needed help from beings of another order.
She pointed at the sky. The Enterprise was up there somewhere.
“My people are