“We’ll wind up very wet,” said Steiger. “And those are shark-infested waters.”
“Look, I may be a little reckless sometimes,” said Delaney, “but I’m not crazy. I’m suggesting that a couple of us clock ahead to base and pick up some floater paks so we can do an air reconnaissance. We can fly a search pattern within a fifty mile radius of Gulliver’s co-ordinates, or a hundred mile radius if that’s what it takes, but we’re obviously not going to get anywhere sitting around here and arguing about what is or isn’t on the map. We’re simply going to have to go out there and look.”
Gulliver cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Captain. “Yes?”
“Did… did I hear correctly? Did you just say that you were going to … to fly?”
“Don’t worry, Lem,” Delaney said, “no one’s going to make you fly. Besides, it takes a bit of training to learn how to use a floater pak. You’ll be staying here with Andre and Lucas while Creed and I clock out and fly our search pattern. And if we find your island, we’ll come back for the rest of you and see if there are any little people on it.”
“Six-inch commandos,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “Incredible. If I didn’t know better, I’d say we’d run into a bizarre new generation of Drakov’s hominoids.”
“You know General Drakov?” Gulliver said.
They all spun around and stared at him with amazement.
“What did you say?” said Andre.
“General Nikolai Drakov,” Gulliver said. “He is the leader of The Lilliput Legion.”
“But that’s impossible!” Delaney said. “Drakov is dead!”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Andre, slowly. “And so was Lucas.”
Nikolai Drakov stood in Central Park with his hands in the pockets of his elegant, dark wool velour topcoat. A cool autumn breeze ruffled his thick, wavy black hair as he watched a young mother and her small boy from a distance as they fed the ducks with bread crumbs. The dark-haired boy bore a startling resemblance to Drakov. In fact, he was Nikolai Drakov, or more precisely, a clone being raised under controlled conditions and carefully monitored from time to time by his creator/father.
This was the end result of Drakov’s experiments with the hominoids, a subspecies of genetically engineered, human-based lifeforms that were first created under the auspices of Project Infiltrator, headed by Dr. Moreau and funded by the Special Operations Group. Drakov had deceived the S.O.G. and spirited Moreau away from the parallel universe with promises of generous funding and unrestricted research, the opportunity of developing his hominoids to their fullest potential. Instead, Drakov had taken control and carefully observed Moreau, studying the process until he had mastered it, and then he took the hominoids in directions Moreau had never dreamed of. Now, this was the crowning touch, the piece de resistance. He had replicated himself.
The young boy he was watching along with his “mother,” an earlier generation hominoid, had been part of the first run, a dozen versions of himself born out of petri dishes and artificial wombs, then clocked back to various periods in the past, each to be raised in different environments, but under highly controlled conditions with predetermined key stages of development, the first occurring when they received their cerebral implants in early childhood, enabling them to be programmed at specific points throughout their lives, and the last when they received the scars that matched his own, a diagonal knife slash that ran from beneath his left eye to just above the corner of his mouth.
The first of these secondary versions of himself had already been subjected to this process that Drakov called “time lapse maturation” and had been killed in an encounter with the temporal agents. They now believed him to be dead. Drakov smiled as he anticipated their rude awakening.
He turned and started walking back toward Fifth Avenue. Gulliver’s escape had been a minor setback, but it didn’t really matter. The temporal agents were alerted to the threat now, but it was far too late. Even as they prepared to seek the secret island base of The Lilliput Legion, the Lilliputians would find them. And this time, his little soldiers would know what to expect.
“Wake up! Cmon, wake up!”
Hunter felt his face being slapped. His head rocked back and forth with the blows as if it were somehow a thing apart from himself and he tried to ignore it all, to retreat back into the warm, thick mist of unconsciousness, but they weren’t having any of it.
“Come on, wake up, dammit!”
Whack!
“He’s still out of it.”
“The hell he is, he’s playing possum, only I ain’t buyin’ it.
Wake up, you bum!”
Whack!
An involuntary groan escaped him.
“Ah. there we go! Come on, baby, you can make it! Wakee, wakee!”
WHACK!
“Stop…” Hunter mumbled, his voice thick and slurred.
He felt someone take hold of his chin and steady his head. “Open your eyes.”