“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 co-ordinates 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 co-ordinates 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.”
Chapter 8.
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 bed down, immobilized by a large number of thin, crudely braided ropes that were firmly staked to the ground. He could have broken anyone 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—”