TW09 The Lilliput Legion NEW (6 page)

"Colonel, you're insubordinate!"

"Fine, you want my damn birds, you can have 'em anytime you want," Steiger snapped back, ripping off his insignia tossing them on the floor at Forrester's feet. "I only know one way to do my job and that's not to take any halfass measures You're not out in the field facing soldiers anymore; it isn't straightforward. You're up against intelligence pros who make the Timekeepers look like a smalltime inner city street gang. The Network wants you dead and if I was a betting man, my money'd be on them. However, since
I'm
one of their targets; too, I'd kinda like to make it a little harder for them to score a hit. They came pretty damn close just now and I almost bought it. I'm not about to let them get that close to you. So either let me do my job or relieve me of command!"

There was a moment of shocked silence following outburst, then Forrester softly cleared his throat.

"Are you finished?" he said.

"Yes
sir,
I'm finished,
sir!"

"Fine. Pick up your eagles. When and if I want them, I’ll tear them off you myself, is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"I didn't hear you."

"Yes,
sir!"
said Steiger, snapping to attention.

"Oh, stand at ease, for God's sake. Roberts, get the colonel one of my fresh shirts. He seems to have torn his."

"You okay?" Delaney said. Steiger was wired so tight, he seemed to be vibrating.

Steiger took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Yeah, I guess I'll live." Then he seemed to notice Gulliver for the first time. He looked at him and blinked twice, taken aback at not having realized there was a stranger in the room with them. "Who the hell is
that?"

Gulliver had followed the preceding conversation with incomprehension and alarm. Now he rose uncertainly to his feet and hesitantly extended his hand.

"Dr. Lemuel Gulliver, at your service, sir."

"Col. Creed Steiger." They shook hands.

"I perceive you have been wounded. I do not have my instruments with me, but . . ."

Steiger shook his head. "Thank you, but it wasn't very serious. I've already had it seen to." He frowned.
"What
did you say your name was?"

"Dr. Gulliver is the man mentioned in your brother's report," said Forrester.

Steiger stared at him. Gulliver had been given a suit of disposable green transit fatigues to wear, so there had been nothing to mark him externally
as
a T.D.P., a temporally displaced person.

"Sandy was your brother?" Gulliver said. "There is a strong family resemblance. He was very kind to me." There was a pained expression on his face. "If not for me, he might have. . I . . . I wish . . . it really should have been me, instead."

Steiger stared at him for a moment, then nodded sympathetically. "No one's blaming you, Doctor." He glanced at Forrester. "Sandy sent him through?"

"Yes, to tell us what he couldn't," said Forrester, with a tight grimace. "You saw him?"

Steiger nodded. The tension had started to go out of him, though he was still wired from the news of his brother's death and the attempt on his life.

Roberts brought him one of Forrester's black fatigue shirts and Steiger accepted it gratefully, wincing as he removed his own torn and bloodied one.

"They homed in on him with this," said Forrester, handing Steiger the plastic envelope containing the implant transmitter.

Steiger examined it, frowning. "It doesn't make sense. If they had him long enough to surgically install a cybernetic implant, they had him long enough to kill him. Why fit him with an implant, let him go, and then track him down and kill him?"

"Maneuvers?" said Delaney.

They all turned to look at him.

"What?" said Steiger.

"I was just thinking out loud," Delaney said. "Maybe they installed the implant and let him go so they could practice long-range assault tactics. Track the target, home in on the target's coordinates, clock in, hit hard, take out the target and clock out again. Suppose you had a target area that was hard get to, maybe you could only get one man in or you had the coordinates, but a full-scale assault would be impractical whatever reason. Too well defended, not enough room maneuver . . but if you could clock in a miniaturized assault force . . ."

"Jesus," Steiger said. "That could be a bloody nightmare!”

"It
is
a bloody nightmare." Forrester said, grimly. "What’s more, we're not even sure who's responsible for it. Is this some new wrinkle from the Special Operations Group in the parallel universe or has the Network somehow managed to come up with this?"

"Either way, we've only got one lead," Delaney said. looked at Gulliver.

"You're not going to ask me to go back there, are you?” Gulliver said, in a hollow voice.

"Our Archives Section has been unable to find any record such an island, Dr. Gulliver." said Forrester. "I realize you already been through a great deal, but perhaps if you could help us to locate this island, or at least show us its location on a chart, then we'd require nothing further from you."

"And what shall become of me then?" Gulliver stared them all anxiously.

"Have no fear. You'll be returned to your own time," said Forrester. "And we shall arrange it so that you have no memory of this experience."

"You could do that? You could actually take away my memory?"

"Yes," said Forrester. "But there's no need to be concerned. The procedure is quite safe and painless, I assure you."

Gulliver shook his head vehemently. "No! No, absolutely not! I cannot allow that."

"I'm afraid you have no choice in the matter, Dr. Gulliver," said Forrester. "You have seen entirely too much."

"And who in their right mind would believe me?" Gulliver responded. "They ridiculed me for my story of the Lilliputians, as Mr. Swift called them, can you imagine how they would react if I told them about
this?
They would undoubtedly put me in a madhouse. I suppose that I could not prevent your using force against me, but in that case, I would refuse to help you. I would tell you nothing."

"Dr. Gulliver," said Forrester, "please try to understand—"

"No, General,
you
try to understand. A man's life is but the sum of his experience. How can I forget what's happened to me? How can I forget that gallant young man who gave his life to save my own? I said that I would help you, but it must be in my own way. If I were to tell you all I know and show you the island's location on a chart, then there would be nothing to prevent you from doing as you will with me. No, sir. If you are going back there, then much as I dread it, I fear that I must go as well."

Forrester glanced at Gulliver, his mouth set in a tight grimace.

"Dr. Gulliver, you're putting me in a very difficult position. We could easily get the information that we need from you, even without your consent. And yes, it would involve using a form of force, though not what you might think. You would feel no pain whatsoever. In fact, you would feel mildly euphoric and be happy to tell us whatever we wanted to know. However, I would prefer to have your voluntary cooperation. And I'm not unsympathetic to your feelings in this matter. I'll have to give it some thought."

Suddenly Andre gasped and dropped her glass.

"What is it?" Steiger said.

She was staring at the window behind them. For a moment, only the briefest instant, she had seen Lucas standing in front of it, but there was nothing there now. She blinked and shook her head.

"Nothing," she said, swallowing hard. "It was nothing. I just thought . . . for a moment, I thought . . ."

Delaney was watching her with concern. "Andre, you all right?"

"You didn't see anything?" she said. "Over there, by the window? You didn't see?"

Delaney shook his head, frowning. "No, I was looking al Dr. Gulliver."

"What did you see?" said Steiger, frowning.

Andre shook her head. "Nothing," she said, nervously. "It must have been my imagination, a trick of the light . . I don't know."

"What do you
think
you saw?" Delaney said.

"Nothing!
It was nothing, just
drop it,
all right?"

"Lieutenant?" said Forrester.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, sheepishly. "It wasn't anything. I . . . I guess I'm a little jumpy, what with everything that's happened tonight."

"Well, we've all been under a strain," said Forrester. "And I'm afraid it's going to get a lot worse before it gets much better." He glanced at his watch.

"It's almost dawn. Why don't you all go freshen up and grab some chow and coffee? Dr. Gulliver will stay here with me. Be back here for a briefing at oh-six-hundred hours."

As they left, Finn Delaney grabbed Andre by the arm. "You're not the type to jump at shadows," he said. "You want to tell me about it?"

"I've already told you—"

He interrupted her. "Something's bothering you, Andre. I know you too damn well. You saw something back there or you
thought
you saw something. What was it?"

"Okay, you're right, I thought I saw something. I guess I'm seeing things. That makes me a liability, right? Maybe I should go to the division shrink and get myself checked out."

"Hell, you're saner than anyone I know," Delaney said. “and we’ve known each other too long to keep things from each other. Now tell me what you saw.”

Andre licked her lips nervously. “A ghost, all right? I just saw a ghost.”

"You should've let me stay dead," said Lucas Priest, sighing and wearily running his hand through his dark brown hair. I simply can't seem to control it."

Dr. Robert Darkness turned a steely gaze on Priest. "You
will
control it. You will
learn.
You have become the living embodiment of my life's work, Priest. I brought you back from death for this and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow you to give up!"

"It doesn't look as if I have much choice, does it?" Lucas k said, rubbing his aching head.

He lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The simple act of smoking helped to keep his mind occupied. It was excruciatingly difficult trying to control his thoughts. It had never before occurred to him just how exhausting it could be. Random thoughts were taken for granted by most people, but unlike most people—in fact, unlike anyone else in the entire universe—Lucas Priest could no longer afford to take random thoughts for granted. A random thought could mean disaster for him now. And his thoughts were becoming increasingly harder to control. A person could concentrate only for so long and then something had to give. Lucas was tired. And he was afraid.

He had always thought of Dr. Darkness as a brilliant scientist, eccentric, highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, but it went beyond that. Dr. Darkness was a madman. Not a raving lunatic, but a madman just the same. It was often said that there was an exceedingly fine line between genius and insanity. When had Darkness slipped over the edge? Was it after his invention of the warp grenade, the most devastating weapon known to man? Perhaps his sanity had been derailed by the knowledge that his invention had been responsible for the loss of billions of lives, when the surplus nuclear energy of exploding warp grenades was mistakenly clocked into a parallel universe, setting off the war between the timelines. Or maybe he lost it after the disastrous experiment in which his atomic structure became permanently tachyonized, turning him into the man who was faster than light. There were so many cataclysmic upheavals in the life of Dr. Darkness, so much pressure brought to bear upon his fragile genius that it was a wonder he had not snapped completely.

Dr. Darkness never spoke about his past. Lucas knew nothing about it whatsoever prior to the event that gave him both his fame and infamy. After years of laboring as an obscure research scientist in the Temporal Army Ordnance Division, Darkness had invented the terrifying warp grenade purely as an accidental by-product of his own independent work in temporal translocation.

He had begun by working on voice and image communication by tachyon radio transmission. He eventually achieved a method of communication at six hundred times the speed of light, but that still wasn't good enough. He wanted it to be instantaneous, even over distances measured in hundreds of light years. Working from the obscure zen mathematics based upon Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers, Darkness found a way to make his tachyon beam move more quickly by sending it through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, more commonly known as a "space warp." The result was instantaneous transmission, going from point A to point B without having to cover the distance in between. The warp grenade was merely an incidental by-product of this discovery.

It occurred to Darkness one day that his method of translocation through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge could be applied to nuclear devices, allowing unprecedented control of nuclear explosions and drastically limiting fallout, in some cases almost eliminating it entirely. Having explored this idea merely as an intellectual exercise in abstract theory, Darkness lost interest in it.

However, since the Temporal Army Ordnance Division took control of all the paperwork and computer data generated by its scientists, from complex equations down to incidental doodles done on Temporal Army time and Temporal Army facilities, the end result of this "intellectual exercise in abstract theory" was the warp grenade, a combination nuclear device and time machine, small enough to held in one hand and capable of adjustable, transtemporal detonation.

The principles behind the function of the warp grenade Darkness to the development of the warp disc, which rendered Prof. Mensinger's chronoplate obsolete. It had led him to the development of the disruptor, or the "warp gun” as it was sometimes called by those few who knew of existence. It was the first true disintegrator ray. Yet frightening a weapon as the disruptor was, the warp grenade made it seem tame by comparison. It could be set to destroy a city, or a city block, or one house within that block, or a room within that house, or a space within that room no larger than a breadbox. The surplus energy of the explosion, whatever not required to accomplish the designated task, was t clocked instantaneously through an Einstein-Rosen Bridge explode harmlessly in the Orion Nebula—or so it was believed.