TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW (18 page)

"Look at this!" he said. "Doc, they're in trouble! You've got to help me!"

"Look, Priest, I thought I already explained that—"

"Dammit, Doc, I haven't got time for this! I don't care about the validity of your field tests; I've got to find out what happened here. I can't fade out the way you can. If I went back to see what happened, I'd be visible and there's no telling what I might be clocking into; but you could find out what happened without anybody seeing you."

"Yes, well, I suppose I could do that," grumbled Darkness. He grunted.

"Perhaps you're right. Under the circumstances, I can't expect you to cope with all of this yourself. Do you want me to find out what became of Steiger and Delaney, as well?"

"It could be important, Doc. Please."

Darkness sighed. "Very well." He grimaced wryly. "Do you think I could depend on you to remain in one place long enough for me to do that?"

"I'll try to think good thoughts," said Lucas, sarcastically.

"Yes, do," said Darkness. "I'll be right back."

He disappeared and almost immediately reappeared, standing directly behind Lucas.

“I’m back.”

Lucas jumped, startled. "God, don't
do
that!" He took a deep breath. "You certainly cut it close. You only left about a second ago!"

"So?"

"So what if you'd arrived a second earlier and seen yourself leave?"

"So what? As long as I didn't tell myself what I'd found out in order to save myself a trip so that I couldn't have found out what I told myself I'd found out in the first place, it wouldn't have caused any problems whatsoever."

"Huh? You want to run that past me again?"

"Never mind. The important thing is that you were correct in what you had surmised. Something
did
happen here. Miss Cross and Gulliver were abducted at gunpoint by some character right out of a Frank Sinatra movie."

"Frank who?"

"Never mind. He looked like a 20th century gangster dressed by a Hollywood designer. His .45 automatic was what made the bullet hole you found. He shot at the bottle, apparently to impress them with the fact that he wouldn't hesitate to shoot if they resisted. They seemed sufficiently impressed. He made them surrender their warp discs, then he replaced them with some he had brought with him. Evidently, they were preprogrammed with the desired transition coordinates."

"What
the hell
is going on?" said Lucas. "Where did they go?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," Darkness said.

"Great," said Lucas, with resignation. "Just great."

"That isn't all," said Darkness. "I tached to the 27th century, as well, to check with your headquarters. I spoke briefly with Steiger. There's been an attempt on Forrester's life. He's critically wounded. Steiger's had to remain at headquarters and assume command."

"Good God," said Lucas. "What happened?"

"Steiger said a renegade T.I.A. agent smuggled in a commando assault force in a briefcase and . . ." Darkness stopped and frowned.
"In a briefcase?
No, wait, that can't possibly be right. . . ."

"Lilliputians!" Lucas said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Lilliput commandos!" Lucas said. "They murdered Steiger's brother, right here in this very room. They were after Gulliver. They must have—"

"Wait a moment!" Darkness interrupted. "Lilliputians? Gulliver? I knew I'd heard that name somewhere before. You're talking about a novel by Jonathan Swift, for God's sake!"

"I can explain," said Lucas. "You see, Gulliver encountered Swift after he escaped from Lilliput Island and—"

"Never mind," Darkness said, holding up his hand to stop him. "This plot is becoming positively Byzantine. I'll simply try to follow along as best I can."

"Fine. What about Delaney?"

"He should be here."

"Well, he's not."

"Obviously."

"So where is he?"

"How the devil should I know?"

"Didn't you
ask?"

"Steiger simply said that Delaney had to go on without him."

"Did you tell him what happened to Andre and Gulliver?"

"No, I thought I'd keep that information to myself," Darkness said, sarcastically. "Of course, I told him. He was understandably distressed, but he said there was nothing he could do."

"No, of course not," Lucas said. "He's second in command. He can't leave HQ with Forrester out of commission. Finn must have gone on ahead, assuming we'd be here when he returned from scouting Gulliver's coordinates for Lilliput Island. Only he hasn't returned and Andre and Gulliver have been captured. The question is by whom?"

"The obvious answer would be the S.O.G.," said Darkness.

"Yeah," Lucas nodded, "the Special Operations Group might have located another confluence and crossed over undetected, but there's another possibility, as well. It could be the Network."

"The Network?" Darkness frowned. "What the
devil is the Network?"

"Something I've only learned about since my return," said Lucas, grimly.

"Andre was telling me about it. You know about the Underground? Well, the Network is like an Underground on the inside of the T.I.A., a secret agency within a secret agency. They're like moles within Temporal Intelligence, only instead of working for some foreign power, they've struck out on their own and set up a sort of black market, transtemporal corporation."

"Enterprising of them," Darkness said. "And entirely predictable. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened."

"If you're finished with the puns, we've got to figure out what the hell to do about it," Lucas said.

"You have any suggestions?" Darkness said.

"Yeah, but it's going to be risky."

"You're talking to a man who's liable to discorporate at any moment," Darkness said, wryly. "Don't tell me about risk. What's on your mind?"

"I want you to go back to the time Andre and Gulliver got snatched again," said Lucas. "You've got to try and read those warp discs Andre and Gulliver were given, find out where they
went.
But you've got to make sure nobody notices. We mustn't do anything that could disrupt the scenario. Otherwise there's no telling where they might wind up. Meanwhile, I'm going to check out those coordinates that Gulliver gave Finn."

"You think that's wise?" said Darkness. "You still haven't fully adapted to your telempathic chronocircuitry. You've been very fortunate so far. You took a hell of a chance translocating all the way back to Earth by yourself. Suppose something had gone wrong? You might have materialized in space and died in seconds."

"What do you want me to do, Doc? You went and turned me into a human time machine without even bothering to tell me about it. Now you want me to say 'mother, may I?' every time I draw a breath just because you're worried about your precious prototype? Well, screw that. I died back in 1897 with a .50 caliber ball through my chest, remember? The way I see it, Doc, this isn't life, it's only special effects. We'll rendezvous back here exactly five minutes from now. And if I'm not back by then, you're on your own."

Finn groaned and opened his eyes. Shafts of painfully bright sunlight streamed down on him through a canopy of tree branches. He squinted against the glare and tried to turn his head. It felt as if someone had given his hair a sharp yank. He tried to raise his head and found he couldn't do that, either.

In fact, he couldn't move at all. He had been tied down, Immobilized by a large number of thin, crudely braided ropes that were firmly staked to the ground. He could have broken any one of them with ease, but there were far too many of them. His floater pak had been removed and he had been dragged out of the thicket and turned over on his back, then spread-eagled on the ground in the middle of a small clearing, like a butterfly pinned to a board. He felt something moving across his chest.

Footsteps.

A tiny figure moved across his chest and stood silhouetted against the sunlight, looking down at him. Then two more little figures came up to stand beside the first one. He could not make out their features. All he could see were three shadowy figures, no more than six inches tall, standing on his chest. Two of them were aiming miniature laser rifles at him.

"Who are you?" one of them said, raising his small voice so that Finn could hear him clearly.

"Who the hell are
you?"
countered Finn.

The tiny man crouched down on Finn's chest and a second later, Finn yelped with pain. The Lilliputian had taken a fistful of his chest hair and yanked it out.

"You little son of a--"

One of the other Lilliputians whacked him in the chin with the butt of his tiny rifle, then brought it up to his shoulder and aimed right between Finn's eyes.

"Now you just lie very, very still, answer my questions and speak softly," said the first Lilliputian, crouching on one knee on Finn's chest, "or my men will start shaving off pieces of your anatomy with their lasers. You understand?"

Finn grunted.

"I'll take that as a yes," the Lilliputian said.

Finn strained to raise his head a little against the restraining ropes, so that he could see his tiny interrogators better. The little man doing all the talking had long, black, wavy hair that fell down to his shoulders like a lion's mane and was held in place by a cloth headband. He was bearded and shirtless, wearing a black shoulder harness resembling crossed bandoliers. It held a miniature laser pistol on one side and several power magazines in loops on the other. He was dressed in loose camouflage trousers bloused over tiny jungle boots.

His small physique was lean and heavily muscled, ripped to the bone. His two companions looked about the same, like jungle commandos who had been out in the bush too long.

"One more time," the Lilliputian said, "who are you?"

"Capt. Finn Delaney, Temporal Intelligence. You want my serial number, too?"

"That won't be necessary," said the Lilliputian, with a smile. "I believe you. However, if I stop believing you, my men will start causing you considerable pain. Now then, Captain Delaney, what are you doing here?"

"I came looking for you, you little pipsqueak—Aahhh!"

One of the other Lilliputians had fired his laser, barely grazing Finn's left ear. Finn strained hard against the ropes and the little commandos on his chest danced a jig to keep their balance. Almost immediately, Finn heard a multitude of rapid little tapping sounds on either side of him. With his peripheral vision, he could see other Lilliputians on the ground, using tiny sledge hammers to pound in the stakes he had loosened with his movements. The one who seemed to be the leader let go of Finn's chest hair, which he had seized with both hands to keep his balance when Finn had started to strain against the ropes.

"Please don't do that again. Captain," the Lilliputian said. "I don't really want to kill you, but I will if you leave me no choice."

Delaney couldn't believe it. He was being threatened by a man who was smaller than his shoe size.

"How did you find us?" the Lilliputian said. "How did you locate the confluence?"

"Gulliver gave me the position of the island," Finn said. "Gulliver? Impossible. He didn't know anything about the confluence."

"Of course, he had no way of knowing about the confluence," said Finn. "He must have simply sailed right through it without realizing he was crossing over from one universe into another. He took a sextant reading when he escaped from here. He must have done it the moment he came through the confluence. The thing I can't figure out is which timeline he came from in the first place. I don't suppose you'd happen to know?"

"No, Captain, I wouldn't. And at the moment, I don't really care. My main concern right now is deciding what to do with you. What, precisely, were your orders?"

"What orders?"

"Come on, don't play stupid. You're an advance scout for an invasion force. How many others were sent out with you? How long before you're overdue?"

"I came here alone."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I don't really give a damn what you believe," Delaney said. "If the Temporal Army was going to invade this island, they'd have been on you like a fox on a duck by now. And if you really believed there was going to be an invasion, you wouldn't still be here. You'd have killed me and gotten the hell out."

"You're probably right, Captain," said the Lilliput lieutenant. "Getting off this island would have been the smartest thing for us to do. Unfortunately, my men and I had no means of getting off this island, so if an invasion force is coming in hard on your heels, we're simply going to have to fight. Unless, of course, your people
are
planning to wipe out this entire island with a warp grenade, in which case I guess we're shit out of luck. And so are you."

"Wait a minute," Finn said. "If you have no way of getting off this island, then how the hell did you get to the 27th century to make that assault on HQ?"

Delaney said.

"That wasn't us," the Lilliput lieutenant said.

"Oh, yeah, I guess it was some other bunch of Lilliputians," Finn said, sarcastically.

One of the other Lilliputians quickly raised his rifle and aimed at Finn's other ear, but the lieutenant raised his hand, holding him off. "That wasn't us," he repeated. "We're stuck here. Or at least we were till you showed up with your floater pak and warp disc."

"No offense, but I don't think they'd fit you."

"No, but they fit you and we could easily fit inside your clothing. All we have to do is kill you, program your disc, get inside your pockets and your shirt, down inside your sleeves and trouser legs, hit the button and we're out of here."

Delaney licked his lips nervously. "Yeah, I guess that ought to work. So what's stopping you?"

"Unfortunately, none of us knows how to program a warp disc," said the Lilliputian.

"I see," Delaney said. "So that's why I'm still alive."

"As one soldier to another, Captain, I'm sure you can appreciate that my first responsibility is the safety of my men," the tiny commando said. "If killing you would ensure their welfare, I wouldn't hesitate to do it. However, I hope that won't be necessary."