STAR TREK - TOS (34 page)

Nobody had started shooting yet, but she figured it was only a matter of time.

An emotionally charged situation. Overwrought people. Too many guns. Roberta knew a potential bloodbath when she saw one, so she explained to Seven exactly what was required.

Within seconds, a distinctive blue mist began to permeate the stuffy atmosphere of the bunker. The[305]

phosphorescent azure haze swiftly engulfed the interior of the shelter, like a heavy fog rolling in from some strange radioactive sea. The unnatural phenomenon momentarily hushed the crowd, that, unlike Roberta, did not recognize the static tingle of the mist against their skin. Unavoidably, however, it quickly became a fresh source of anxiety and alarm.

“We’re being gassed!” a horrified militiaman shouted, understandably if inaccurately.

“Nobody fire their weapon!” someone else shouted in a panic. “You could set the whole place off!”

Roberta regretted giving the frightened crowd one more thing to be scared of, but saw no way around it.

The transporter fog was providing a needed function, which would increase everyone’s safety in the long run.
Just hang on, folks!
she urged her freaked-out neighbors silently.
This won’t hurt a bit, I promise!

Fortunately, for the trapped hostages’ peace of mind, the eerie blue mist disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, leaving behind a bunker full of confused and disoriented people. “What in Sam Hill ... ?”

muttered the older woman in the nightdress.

“Transport accomplished,” Seven declared via the servo.

“Great,” Roberta said, feeling a whole lot safer all of a sudden. And none too soon; she found herself on the verge of gasping, taking deep, gulping breaths to secure ever smaller quantities of oxygen. Scanning the people around her, she saw many of the bunker’s other prisoners were breathing hard as well, some of them looking more than a little faint, particularly the ones she knew to be heavy smokers.
The air’s
already getting pretty thin in here,
she realized.
I’m running out of time
—
and oxygen.

[306]Unfortunately, her whispered conversation with Seven caught the ear of the anguished young mother beside her. “Hey!” she shouted harshly, eyeing Roberta with jittery suspicion. “What are you doing?” Hugging her baby with one arm, she swung up the barrel of her Remington until the muzzle was pointed directly at Roberta’s head. “Over here!” the militia madonna shrieked loud enough for the whole bunker to hear. “I’ve caught a spy or something! She’s talking to someone on her pen!”

Roberta instantly felt like Veronica Cartwright at the end of the 70’s version of
Invasion of the Body
Snatchers,
exposed and surrounded by pod people. A small arsenal of guns turned toward her, backed up by a sea of hostile, paranoid faces. “Put down that gadget, lady!” growled a surly-looking individual in full combat gear. Roberta recognized him as one of the militia members who was beating up Dunbar only a few minutes ago. “Hand it over or I’ll shoot, I swear it!”

That he was utterly serious she had no doubt; nevertheless, Roberta held on to the servo, blithely ignoring all the impatient firearms aimed at her tinted, honey-blond scalp. “Okay, Seven,” she told him.

“Get me out of here.”

“That’s it, lady!” the life-size G.I. Joe snarled. “I warned you!” He pulled the trigger of his Ruger Mini-14 assault rifle, at the same time that several other militia members, including the stressed-out woman with the baby, tugged on their triggers as well.

The crossfire would have killed most of the shooters, let alone Roberta, had not Seven already ’ported away every speck of gunpowder in a five-mile radius.
Now that’s what I call gun control!
Roberta thought as she[307]listened to half a dozen rifles and pistols click impotently around her, while their dumbfounded owners stared at their weapons in frustrated bewilderment.

She didn’t stick around long enough to explain. A discrete column of swirling blue plasma enveloped her, much to the amazement of the flabbergasted onlookers. “What—?” the baby’s horror-stricken mother gasped, backing away from the roiling pillar of smoke as though it were toxic waste. “Who the hell are you?”

Ordinarily, Roberta avoided ’porting in front of witnesses, but there was no time to find a more private spot. She was already starting to feel lightheaded from lack of oxygen. She would have to count on the confusion, not to mention the AEV’s serious lack of credibility, to protect her anonymity this time around.

(“But, Your Honor,” she imagined a diehard militia member telling the authorities, “she disappeared into thin air, probably onto a top-secret UFO piloted by the CIA!”) It wouldn’t be the first time one of her exploits ended up in the pages of the
Weekly World News.

She waved good-bye to her fellow freedom fighters as the fog evaporated, carrying her away from the bunker. This trip on the Blue Smoke Express was even faster than most, though, as she quickly rematerialized right outside the huge iron door.

The sun was still hours from rising, but a full moon gave Roberta enough light to see by. A surprised gila monster skittered away from the entrance to the shelter, while a hoot owl watched her from the rusted remains of an abandoned ore car. She looked around hastily for some sort of emergency release switch,

[308]then realized that, in theory, the barricade had surely been intended to keep an attacking force out of the bunker, making it unlikely that it could easily be opened from outside; presumably Morrison had overrode whatever locking mechanism existed on the inside of the shelter.

Fine,she thought tenaciously.
We’ll just have to do this the hard way.
Setting her servo on Disintegrate, she blasted out a couple of airholes near the top of the iron gate, safely above the heads of the crowd on the other side.
There. That buys us some much-needed breathing room, in more ways than one.

She considered leaving the entire militia trapped in the bunker while she dealt with Morrison, then decided not to chance it. What if, in a worst-case scenario, something happened to her before she could return to liberate the captives? That would leave them buried alive, at the mercy of hunger and dehydration, not to mention any other nasty surprises the general might have up his khaki-colored sleeve.

Morrison would have to wait, while she took the time to laboriously carve an exit-size hole out of the dense steel door. “Stay back!” she warned the hostages, hoping they could hear her through the newly created airholes; if nothing else, she was counting on the glow of disintegrating metal to alert the bunker’s unwilling inhabitants to back away from her impromptu demolition project. “I’ll have you out in a minute or two!”

The invisible beam cut through the six-inch metal like Lorena Bobbit’s cutlery sliced through her husband’s, er, servo.
Wonder what the hot tabloid story is now?
Roberta thought, looking forward to a little[309]mindless TV-watching after several months of compulsory media deprivation. Within minutes, she finished the makeshift exit. “Watch out below!” she hollered as a roughly six foot by ten foot rectangle of iron toppled over onto the floor of the bunker.

Thankfully, no one appeared to have been squashed, although it was hard to tell as a panicky stream of escaping militia members came flooding out of the breached shelter. Roberta wisely jumped to one side to avoid the pell-mell exodus, although she was relieved to see that the woman with the baby was among those making the disorderly flight to safety. She wondered briefly how many, if any, true believers would feel obliged to stay behind in the bunker, awaiting further crazed instructions from their general.

They’ll be waiting a long time, if I have anything to say about it,Roberta vowed. With the AEV’s mass

“suicide” put on hold permanently, dealing with Morrison was next on her agenda. As his nearly fatal stunt in the bunker proved, the superhuman militia leader was far too dangerous to remain at large. Now that his private army was in disarray, Roberta fully intended to take the general into custody until she and Seven could arrange to turn him over to the proper authorities. With luck, some of his disillusioned followers could be persuaded to testify against him.
Stockpiling weapons is one thing,
she thought, ticking off the charges that could be brought against Morrison.
Trying to suffocate dozens of people is
something else indeed.

Not to mention whatever evidence Seven might be able to amass regarding all that nerve gas unpleasantness ... !

[310]Doberpits barked and howled indignantly as scores of former militia members abandoned Fort Cochise. Roberta heard the roar of multiple automotive engines as every truck, Jeep, bus, and recreational vehicle in the camp’s motor pool gunned into life and headed for the front gate, unmanned and unguarded for the first time since Roberta’s arrival back at the middle of August. She glanced up at the looming watchtowers and saw they were unoccupied as well, their searchlights dark, their gun placements deserted. She guessed that the once-bustling compound would be a ghost town again before dawn.

Spurred on by their close brush with asphyxiation, none of the fleeing refugees accosted or even noticed Roberta as she determinedly made her way toward the old adobe post office that served as Morrison’s headquarters.
Was he still sitting behind his desk,
she wondered,
and what was he thinking now that
his lunatic ambition to re-create Masada had gone down the tubes?
He had to know that his plans had gone awry somehow; there was no way he could escape the chaotic sounds of his army defecting en masse. Even now, Roberta could hear raised voices arguing as people fought over the last few provisions and vehicles, making her gladder than ever that Seven had turned all of Fort Cochise into a gunpowder-free zone.
Things are just a little too intense right now,
she observed, noting that many of the vamoosing militia types were still hanging onto their various pistols and rifles anyway. An enforced cease-fire and cooling-off period was definitely a good idea.

Making a mental note to report Morrison’s key lieutenants to the FBI later on, Roberta climbed the

[311]steps to the closed front door of the old post office, past an antique hitching post. No light escaped around the edges of the oak door, making her question whether the general was still at home. She worried that Morrison might have already fled the compound, or, worse, disappeared into the maze of mining shafts underneath the ghost town. No way could she find him down there.

“Here’s hoping he stayed put,” she whispered. The door was locked, but her servo hummed it open easily Not quite as soft-footed as Isis had always been, she tiptoed down an empty hallway toward Morrison’s private office at the rear of the building She used the servo as a penlight, letting a narrow beam of white light guide her way through the darkened post office. A sturdy metal door had replaced the wooden timbers Morrison had smashed through after Roberta locked him out during her previous stint of breaking and entering. She placed her ear against the door, but heard only silence beyond; it was looking more and more as if the hawk-eyed general had already flown the coop.

Trying the knob, she found the office door unlocked. Holding her breath, she shoved it open and peered inside. No moonlight penetrated the windowless chamber, forcing Roberta to rely on the light from her servo. The incandescent beam found an empty chair behind Morrison’s neatly ordered desk, then slid down to reveal that his Navajo rug had been shoved aside, exposing the open trapdoor beneath.

“Damn,” Roberta muttered.

Just for a moment, she wished that she hadn’t wasted precious time freeing the fruitcakes trapped[312]in the bunker. But what else was she supposed to do? Leave all those terrified people (and their children!) locked underground indefinitely? She had done the right thing, she knew, even if it meant that she and Seven would have to track down Morrison all over again.

Maybe the lonely office held some clue as to the general’s future whereabouts? Holding the servo before her, she stepped warily into the unlit room, with an eye toward raiding Morrison’s files and hard drive.

Assuming he hasn’t shredded or trashed them all,
she thought.

A karate chop slashed down against her arm, shattering her wrist and sending her servo flying out of her fingers. A shadowy figure darted out from where it had been hiding, up against the wall to the left of the doorway, and grabbed onto the collar of Roberta’s windbreaker, yanking her roughly to one side.

“Did you really think I wouldn’t hear you sneaking up on me?” Morrison snarled into her ear. His hot breath carried the spearminty scent of his chewing gum. “My ears are almost as good as my eyes, which means they hear a helluva lot better than any average grunt’s.”

Wincing in pain, clutching her fractured wrist, Roberta could not put up a fight as Morrison dragged her farther into the room, then shoved her brutally into the wooden chair in front of his desk. Her eyes desperately sought out her servo, rolling across the floor a couple of yards away, but Morrison snatched it up before she could even think of retrieving it. “I’ll hang on to this little doohickey,” he told her sneeringly. “You stay right where you are.”

[313]
Idon’t have much in the way of options,
she thought, biting down on her lip to keep from whimpering. Unarmed and injured, with stomach-churning waves of agony coursing up her arm, she doubted she could outrun a genetically engineered superman with enhanced night vision. Shock and nausea battered against her ability to concentrate, making it hard even to keep an eye on Morrison as he sat down behind his desk, clasping his hands atop the desktop like a high school principal preparing to lecture a misbehaving student.

Although keeping the overhead lights dark, he clicked on a bendable halogen reading lamp atop his desk. His mirrored sunglasses were tucked neatly into the breast pocket of his short-sleeved khaki shirt, so that he gazed at Roberta with the enlarged red eyes of a bird of prey.

“Freewoman Landers,” he addressed her, “if that’s your real name. So you’re our resident snake-in-the-grass. I wish I’d caught on earlier, before you had a chance to sabotage all of our noble plans and aspirations.” He leaned toward her, like a raptor stalking fresh game. “Who are you working for? Who sent you here? The FBI? FEMA? The Illuminati?”