Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [85]
Troi looked ahead and saw the cage-like security doors at the other end of the bridge. They were still broken, as Lomov had left them, but several guards were there.
She looked down, watching her own trudging footsteps. The experience of seeing Picard, Riker, and Data all condemned to death was worse than her own death sentence; it was physically devastating. The events of the last few days caught up with her all at once.
For a brief moment she blacked out and collapsed. The CS man she was cuffed to kept her from hitting the ground, and the whole group paused.
She recovered a few seconds later. When she felt able to walk again, she nodded, and the group moved on.
The room itself was stark and gray. There were four chairs in it, plain but sturdy wooden affairs, bolted to the floor. Mounted at various positions along the walls were several cameras that swiveled to track the condemned as they were led in.
Again Troi tried to look at Captain Picard, Riker, and Data, but the CS men flanking her and leading her to her chair were too close and blocked her view.
She was pushed gently down into the chair and strapped in. When the CS men stood aside she saw that her shipmates were already strapped into their chairs and blindfolded.
She craned her neck and saw a nurse standing behind them at a little table. On top of the table, four syringes waited in a glass rack.
Troi felt her heart racing. There was something she hadn’t quite understood about this whole thing, some thing about Crichton, the Other-worlders, and imagination, but it was too late.
She heard Crichton talking with a low voice into his headset. She heard the breathing of her shipmates and the clink of the syringes rattling faintly against their rack.
Now the nurse was standing in front of her, lifting a blindfold to her head. As the black cloth blocked her vision, Troi’s heart pounded so hard that she began to think the earth was throbbing.
And suddenly, the earth really was throbbing. The throbs felt like seismic tremors, except they were evenly spaced, like timed explosions or a great drumbeat.
The nurse, confused by the noise, dropped the blindfold and Troi could see again. The CS men looked at each other, alarmed. Troi leaned her head around one of them and caught sight of Picard. The captain was looking expectantly around the room, as if readying himself to take advantage of the situation and lead an escape.
Crichton grabbed the nurse and shook her shoulders.
“Inject them!”
The nurse reacted quickly. She grabbed a syringe off the rattling cart and moved toward Troi.
The vibration emanating from the ground reached a peak. Suddenly the roof itself caved in, crushed downward by some unseen force. Wood and plaster fell all over the place. A great hole had opened up and Troi could see the morning-twilight sky.
Something huge and flesh-colored moved in through the hole and felt around the room. Crichton, the CS men, and the nurse desperately crawled, fell, and rolled away from it.
It was a giant human hand, searching around the room, feeling for something. Finally it grasped Crichton between two fingers and lifted him right out through the hole.
Now the owner of the hand became visible through the aperture. It was a man roughly a hundred feet tall, perfectly proportioned. He was dressed in the fashion of an eighteenth-century seafarer, with a buff-colored jerkin and knee breeches. He looked to be in his late thirties, intelligent and cultured. There were slim cords dangling from his arms and legs, as though he had been tied up but was now free.
Troi realized she had seen him before. She’d seen him in an illustration on a certain page burned by the CS in her presence—a page from Gulliver’s Travels. This giant was Gulliver himself, in the flesh.
Gulliver dangled Crichton from his fingers, letting the Director of Cephalic Security swing, struggling and flailing high above the ground. The giant seemed amused by the angry little mite. Then he paused and looked around him in a wide