Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [95]
The stunned CS men recovered their wits enough to raise their weapons.
Their motion drew his attention away from the haguya and his own revelations.
He stared at the men for just a second. His Starfleet training took over. The most basic part of the training, how to handle contact with alien life.
“Everybody hold your fire and lower your weapons!” he barked into his headset.
Some of the soldiers obeyed, some didn’t. A lot of weapons were still raised.
“Lower them, damn you, and keep them down, and move all aircraft back two kilometers. I want no hostile moves of any kind.”
Now the haguya’s golden falcon eyes and massive tendoned wings were clearly delineated against the clouds. They split ranks in a complex maneuver, and with mathematical precision regrouped and finished their dive at an angle, coming straight at the bridge.
With a great rush of wind, they flew directly over the Dissenters and the CS men holding them. Some of the CS men ducked in fright as leathery wings and bony talons whooshed past them.
The haguya turned in the air beyond the bridge and came in for another pass, even lower this time, specifically targeting the CS men around the Dissenters. The men fell flat on the ground to avoid impact, while the Dissenters shouted exhortations to the flying aliens.
Bowles could see what the alien attack was all about. These Dissenters—who Crichton arrested—were the aliens’ friends!
Some of the CS raised their weapons again.
“Put ‘em down!” Bowles yelled. “Let go of the Dissenters. Step away from them.”
They obeyed.
The haguya flew upward and then began to wheel about in a circle. One glided back down solo and, flapping heavily, braked itself to a landing next to the Dissenters.
Rhiannon ran up to the beast and touched its head. She whispered some words to it, then leapt nimbly to its back.
As it beat its wings and bore the girl aloft, another haguya came in for a landing and took its place. Gunabibi climbed onto its back, and she too was borne skyward.
One by one the other haguya landed and took off until all the Dissenters were riding on their backs, high up among the clouds.
Bowles didn’t let the CS soldiers move a muscle or fire a shot during the entire process.
Many of them were too stunned anyway. One soldier named Lieutenant Redman was among the more affected. His training and inculcation had made him fear fiction, but this science fiction in the flesh turned out not to frighten him at all. He thought the haguya were the most beautiful creatures he’d ever seen. However, his aesthetic rapture could not help him retrieve the memories of his previous life as a Dissenter—when he was the son of a CS officer named Powell. Those memories were gone forever.
On the bridge of the Enterprise, Picard, Troi, Riker, and Data watched the viewscreen. Data tabbed his panel repeatedly, choosing between several different views of the CephCom bridge, the haguya, the CS, and the man Troi had just suggested was Captain Bowles, of the U.S.S. Huxley.
“This is all raw feed from their one-eyes and cameras,” Data told Picard. “Uncut images being fed into the CS video control room.”
“I daresay the CS won’t be able to do much with this,” said Picard, “unless they want to expose themselves as fools and publicly admit that alien life exists right under their noses. Counselor, can you tell us anything more about these haguya, as you call them?”
“As I said, I could never feel any thoughts or emotions from them. They seemed generally helpful to the Dissenters but I couldn’t verify anything beyond that.”
“Captain,” said Data, “I am separating a component of the audio signal from the video feed. I believe it to be the haguya. Their speech, perhaps.”
The android looked at Troi. “You would not have heard it. The frequencies are twenty thousand hertz above your hearing range.”
Data looked back at his console. “The sounds are definitely a form of information transfer between them. I estimate the speech to be three times as information-intensive