STAR TREK - TOS (32 page)

So much for that threat. Now to deal with Porter.

Looking about hurriedly, he spied the fleeing terrorist on one of the many escalators rising up to Platform 23, where the morning train was preparing to depart. Lighted departure screens informed passengers which escalator to take to reach the coach containing their reserved seats. Surmising that Porter was intent on catching the train, Seven scurried onto the same escalator, racing uphill several steps at a time.

[286]He couldn’t afford to let Porter get away, not while there was still a chance that the fanatical militia member might have another lethal juice box on his person.

The escalator carried him swiftly up to the boarding platform, where he was happy to see that the train had not yet pulled out of the station. The sleek modern streamliner, painted white with a yellow tip, looked uncomfortably like a missile. Coach numbers and destinations were indicated by highly-legible liquid-crystal displays located alongside the power-operated plug doors. Peering down the length of the platform, which looked to be nearly a half-kilometer long, Seven saw Porter dart into a nearby coach.

Seven followed after him. He had reserved a seat on the train, of course, to guarantee access into the terminal, but had hoped to intercept Porter before he boarded the train. Seven wondered briefly if the militiaman had even planned on taking the train as well, or were they both making this up as they went along?

The coach’s interior was surprisingly plush and roomy, like the imperial carriage on Deneb IV. Reclining seats, with plenty of leg room, faced fold-out tables covered by spotless white tablecloths. Most of today’s inaugural travelers had already taken their seats by now, clearing the corridor between the seats except for a few late arrivals, a conductor checking tickets, and, at the far end of the spacious coach, the escaping Porter.

Another bilingual boarding announcement warned that the train would be departing momentarily.

Automated plug doors slid sideways, then pulled in to seal the coach.
All’s aboard that’s going aboard,
Seven thought wryly.
Looks like I’m definitely taking a train ride today.

[287]Glancing back over his shoulder, Porter saw Seven pursuing him. Their eyes met across the length of the passenger car, and Porter redoubled his efforts to avoid capture, rushing toward the closed glass door leading to the next car. Seven hurried down the carriage after him, only to be delayed by the sharply-dressed Eurostar conductor. “Excuse me, sir. Can I help you find your seat?”

Ulcer-inducing memories of the excessively helpful station employee flashed through Seven’s mind.

Resolved not to go through the whole routine again, he reached into the interior of his gray tweed jacket and drew out an unusually intimidating piece of ID, thoughtfully manufactured by the Beta 6 prior to the mission. “Interpol,” he said curtly, flashing the bogus ID in the conductor’s face.

“Yes, sir!” the ticket taker said with a gulp, hastily stepping aside to let Seven pass. Keeping the absconding militiaman in his view, Seven saw Porter enter the open vestibule between this coach and the next, then pull open another glass door to gain access to the adjacent car.

The train started moving, and Seven reached instinctively for the closest seatback to steady himself. He needn’t have bothered; the streamliner’s acceleration was so smooth and gradual that you could barely tell that the train was moving at all, aside from the excited mutterings of the seated passengers and the sight of the boarding platform rushing past the windows. The gentle purr of the high-speed electric engines reminded him of Isis, and he couldn’t help remembering how much he missed her company
I
could sure use your help today, doll,
he thought.

[288]Entering the connecting vestibule himself, Seven noted the presence of the recessed yellow fire doors, currently withdrawn and inactive; he guessed that the safety doors would not slide into place until the train actually entered the Chunnel, roughly an hour from now, but was glad to know that there was a means of further sealing off the individual coaches just in case Porter had more sarin to disperse.

Quickly but carefully, he crossed the open vestibule. A slight but perceptible rise in the floor over the bogie almost tripped him up, but he managed to hold on to his balance, making it into the next car, where Porter was already halfway down-the corridor, en route to the next set of glass doors. A look of panic came over the man’s sun-creased face as he spotted Seven gaining behind him.
Good thing he doesn’t
have a gun,
the older man reflected, confident that the security at Waterloo Station had been competent enough to keep anyone from entering the terminal with a firearm; otherwise, Porter looked as though he might have started firing wildly at Seven, heedless of whoever might be in the way.

“Out of the way! Interpol!” Seven shouted, brandishing his phony ID to clear his way through the center of the carriage, past startled passengers wrestling bags to and from overhead luggage racks. There were, he recalled, at least sixteen coaches and two bar cars between the missile-nosed power cars at both ends of the train; Seven hoped he wouldn’t have to chase Porter through every one of them. Despite his superior conditioning, he was starting to feel winded from the chase.
I’m getting too old for this,
he realized.

Roughly shoving an elderly tourist aside, Porter[289]raced out of the coach only a few paces ahead of Seven, who clutched his ready servo in his free hand. Porter lunged across the second vestibule, but Seven moved even faster. The servo hummed and the fire doors slammed shut in front of Porter, trapping him in the vestibule with Seven. “Give it up, Porter,” he warned, resetting the servo to Tranquilize. “It’s over.”

Spinning around to confront Seven, his back to the closed yellow door, Porter glared at his relentless pursuer. “Who are you?” he demanded, spittle spraying angrily from his lips. “How do you know my name?” His hand burrowed energetically into the pockets of his red-and-black hunting jacket, removing, just as Seven had feared, another box of counterfeit apple juice. “Stay back!” he threatened, drawing back his arm to hurl the snack-size carton at Seven. “I won’t surrender to the Beast!”

Seven sighed wearily When was the human race going to grow out of this sort of corrosive paranoia?

With the fire doors sealed, Porter’s threat to unleash the nerve gas carried little weight; Seven had prudently injected himself with the antidote, pralidoxine chloride, before transporting out of Scotland this morning.

“The only Beast is unchecked human aggression,” he replied, not that he seriously expected Porter to listen to him. The servo hummed once and an unfocused glaze replaced the homicidal zeal in the terrorist’s eyes. A goofy grin transformed his surly features, rendering him almost unrecognizable. He slumped back against the door to the next car, his menacingly poised arm drooping harmlessly to his side.

“I’ll take that, if you don’t mind,” Seven murmured, easily[290]prying the juice carton from Porter’s pliant fingers. He tucked the captured box carefully into the pocket of his gray jacket.

Porter was tottering somewhat precariously above the bogie connecting the two cars, so, grunting with effort, Seven threaded his arm beneath the tranquilized man’s shoulders and began guiding him back toward the stabler footing of the adjacent coach. A click of the servo’s controls caused the activated fire doors to slide back into their recessed hiding places, so that only a single glass door stood between them and the waiting passenger area. To Seven’s slight surprise, someone else opened the door and he found himself face-to-face with a bewildered-looking British couple. “Er, is this the way to the bar car?” the male pensioner asked, looking askance at the sagging, bleary-eyed Porter.

“I’m afraid so,” Seven admitted glibly, struggling to keep the tranquilized terrorist upright. “As my friend has obviously already discovered.”

The couple
tsk
ed disapprovingly at the apparently inebriated American (‘And so early in the morning, too!” the scandalized older woman declared), but obligingly allowed Seven to slide past them with his slack-limbed charge. A vacant lavatory caught his eye, and, with an apologetic shrug, he deftly shoved Porter into the tiny rest room, then squeezed in after him and pulled the door shut.

It was a tight fit, but Seven welcomed the privacy. He dropped Porter onto the waiting toilet and raised his servo to his lips. In a moment, he intended to teleport both he and Porter back to Scotland, where he could make arrangements to turn the captured[291]terrorist over to Roberta’s contacts in the FBI; first, however, there was one more matter to look into.

What about Paris?he worried. Porter’s crony, Connors, remained unaccounted for, and Seven feared that another sarin-wielding maniac had targeted the other end of the rail line, four hundred and seventy-six kilometers away.

Which is why he had taken care to have a very special operative posted at the Eurostar terminal in Paris’

Gare du Nord. “Seven to Guinan,” he whispered urgently into the servo’s receiver. “Please report.”

“Guinan to Seven, chill out.”His tense frame relaxed significantly at the sound of the El-Aurian woman’s amused voice emanating from the tip of his servo.
“Everything’s très cool at this end. Paris is not
burning.”

That was just what he wanted to hear. “And the terrorist? Connors?”

“Sleeping it off, and ready for pick-up,” she assured him.

Seven allowed himself a bemused smile. He didn’t impose on Guinan often, but he knew that he could always count on her when he did. And, over the years, the unflappable alien had tipped him and Roberta off to any number of brewing situations; she was one of his best informants on this planet, not to mention a few others. “Thanks again, Guinan.”

“Just remember: you owe me one, Seven.”He could readily imagine her mischievous expression.
“Au
revoir, toots.”

“Till next time,” Seven replied. Ending the transmission, he promptly sent a signal to transporter controls in Scotland, requesting an immediate extraction[292]for both him and Porter. A tingly blue mist began to fill the tiny lavatory, even as an inquisitive knock rattled the door of the rest room.

“Excuse me, sir?” a worried voice asked. “Are you quite all right in there?”

Seven wondered how long the conductor would wait before forcing his way into the empty rest room.

SOUTHWEST ARIZONA

UNITED STATES

NOVEMBER 14, 1994

“GET A MOVE ON!THE BEAST IS ON ITS WAY!”

Rifle-toting militiamen herded dozens of confused and sleepy-eyed people toward the bomb shelters beneath the fort. It was three o’clock in the morning, Arizona time, but the entire camp had been roused in expectation of an imminent attack by the shock troops of the New World Order. Men, women, and children, in varying stages of undress, grabbed onto their guns and lined up to enter the underground shelter via a descending concrete ramp. “This is it!” a wild-eyed freedom fighter exclaimed, sounding more enthusiastic than apprehensive. “We’re making our stand!”

Of the assembled horde, only “Bobbie Landers” had a glimmer of what was really going on.
Seven
squashed
[294]
Operation Applejack,
she guessed,
and now Morrison is panicking.
She had been afraid of something like this, which was the main reason she had stayed on at Fort Cochise for the last few months, in hopes of preventing another bloody showdown like Waco or Ruby Ridge. With a campful of heavily armed fanatics anticipating an apocalyptic confrontation with a diabolical foe, all the ingredients were present for a truly godawful tragedy.

Not if I can help it,she thought earnestly Unlike many of the groggy people around her, who had been yanked from their cots in the wee hours of the morning, Roberta had only been feigning sleep when the alarm came; knowing what was going down in London this morning, she had been ready for anything.

Besides the de rigueur personal firearm—in her case, a loaded blue-steel shotgun that she clutched close to her chest—she also had her servo tucked into the pocket of the flimsy nylon windbreaker she wore over her stylish, khaki-colored pajamas. A pair of buckskin moccasins completed her ensemble, which she hoped would get her through whatever the morning had in store.

Fifty feet beneath the renovated ghost town above, the primary bomb shelter was a huge concrete structure the size of a football field. A large-screen television monitor occupied the entire north wall of the bunker, while a patriotic mural, painted by an artistically inclined member of the militia, ran along the remaining three walls, depicting key moments in the never-ending battle for Liberty, from Lexington and Concord to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Roberta shuddered involuntarily at that last image, remembering

[295]when and where she was when the Wall came down.
That was when Khan really started getting
out of control,
she recalled.

“Keep moving, people!” The crowd pouring into the shelter pushed Roberta to the far end of the chamber, not far from the colossal television screen. Claustrophobia threatened as her elbow room swiftly evaporated, leaving her packed in tightly with too many people and even more guns. The hubbub of hushed and excited voices blended with the tearful cries of confused infants and children, over the omnipresent hum of powerful, industrial-strength air cleaners. Roberta was disturbed to see, standing only inches away from her, a cammo-clad young mother balancing a swaddled baby on one shoulder and a gleaming Remington hunting rifle on the other.
Yikes!
she thought, taken aback even after her eye-opening stint at Fort Cochise.
Hope she doesn’t try to burp the wrong one!

So many bodies crammed into even so generous a space rapidly raised the temperature to a sweltering level, forcing Roberta to unzip her jacket in search of relief.
Whatever Morrison is up to,
she thought, fanning herself with her hand,
Iwish he’d get on with it.
She stood on her tiptoes, searching the faces of the throng for the hawk-eyed militia leader, but could not see the general anywhere.
I wonder where he
is?