Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [86]
Gulliver set Crichton down somewhere out of view, then leaned his head close over the execution room.
“Let the prisoners go,” he said, and his voice was like the soughing of a giant bellows.
One of the CS men reached for his weapon.
Gulliver put his hand back into the room and flicked the CS man with his finger, sending him sprawling onto a pile of debris. Then Gulliver crushed the weapon like a small seed with his fingernail.
“Let them go!” he repeated, in the loudest human tone Troi had ever heard.
The CS men hurriedly undid the straps on the chairs. The prisoners stood. Riker put himself in front of Troi, shielding her with his body.
But when Gulliver’s hand slid over and gathered up the four from the Enterprise, there was nothing Riker or any of them could do to prevent it. Troi felt the flesh of the hand against her own hands. It was warm and alive. It even had the whorls and ridges of an individual handprint.
Gulliver lifted the four up near his face. He looked at them and laughed. He was delighted, as though he’d found new friends.
Picard whispered to Troi.
“Counselor, can you feel anything from his mind?”
“Yes. He’s real, and alive. Very alive.”
“Intriguing,” Data commented.
Gulliver slowly lowered his hand and set it down in the quadrangle between the CephCom buildings. Riker quickly stepped off and helped the others to the ground.
Across the quadrangle they could see Crichton, sheltered under the overhang of the main CephCom entrance. In the shadows his eye-rasters glowed with an evil green light. He was talking into his headset and looking into the sky expectantly.
Gulliver rose to his full height. He looked off into the distance.
Troi heard the throb of hovercraft.
Within moments two white CS assault craft were flying round Gulliver, making passes at his face. Troi could hear their weapons firing. Gulliver dodged and weaved.
A phalanx of CS officers appeared on the quadrangle. They knelt in unison and began squeezing off shots at Gulliver.
Gulliver seemed to feel the sting of the radiation weapons on his face. He swatted at the soldiers and hovercraft, forcing them back.
Crichton kept speaking into his headset. Now he motioned with his arm and the CS men retreated into the complex. A truck-mounted radiation cannon drove onto the quadrangle. Crichton ran up and stood behind it. He pointed up at Gulliver, and barked some orders to the men in the gun’s turret.
The gun swiveled on well-greased gimbals as it was aimed. Gulliver eyed it with surprise.
It fired a great blast of energy.
The giant swayed, and reached for the gun. It fired again. He fell to his knees with a tremendous crash.
The gun tracked him and fired a third time.
Gulliver collapsed. His body came to rest outside the CephCom complex, out of view. The earth shuddered for several seconds, and then all was still.
The hovercraft circled over the area where Gulliver had fallen. CS troops ran back onto the quadrangle. For a moment Troi thought the CS were going to rearrest her and her shipmates. But in the next moment pandemonium broke loose.
A huge crowd of beings swarmed into the quadrangle and around the CephCom buildings. They were all characters from myth, metaphor, fiction, all forms of human imagination.
The charge was led by Sekhmet the Egyptian Lioness-deity, goddess of the desert sun, terrifying Daughter of Ra. The head of an asp protruded from the hair above her eyes, and over the hissing asp was a solar disk, radiating heat and light all about the quadrangle. Sekhmet roared and bared a full set of awesome feline teeth as she charged. The characters from imagination all charged with her and as a body they attacked the CS troops.
Troi tried to grab onto Riker but lost contact with all her shipmates in the confusing melee. The air was filled with shouts and cries in many languages.
Troi saw jinns, love-goddesses, and golems cavorting among the CS, disrupting their ranks, and pulling off the soldiers’ helmets, depriving them