“Now!” he said. “Clock out now or you’re dead!”
“You kill me now and none of you will ever make it out of this clearing,” said Delaney. “The situation’s changed, my little friend. Right now, I’m the only thing keeping you and your men alive. Kill me and you’ve all had it. My buddy there will burn you the minute my body hits the ground. You’d better give it up.”
“Surrender?” said the Lilliputian commander. “And wind up being dissected in one of your research labs? Not on your life. So long as we’ve got you, your friend won’t dare to make a move.”
“Looks like it’s a stand-off then,” Finn said.
“I don’t think so,” said the Lilliputian, He stuck two fingers in his mouth and gave a long, piercing, high-pitched whistle.
Finn felt movement inside his trouser legs. Several of the Lilliputians hiding there had let go of the ropes and dropped down onto his boots. Lucas stared wide eyed as several Lilliputians came bounding out from the bottoms of Finn’s trousers, tiny laser rifles aimed straight at him.
“That was not a good move,” said Finn. Lucas disappeared.
The Lilliput commandos on the ground glanced around, confused, then suddenly, one by one, they were snatched up into the air, crying out briefly before they vanished from sight, their tiny rifles falling to the ground.
“What the—where did they go?’ their commander said. “What—ahhh!”
Lucas suddenly materialized at Finn’s side, and with a deft motion, he plucked the Lilliputian leader out from under Finn’s shirt collar. His other arm was held tightly across his body, holding squirming Lilliputians trapped between his forearm and his chest.
“Now then,” said Lucas, holding the struggling Lilliputian leader up between his thumb and forefinger, “I suggest you drop your weapon and order the rest of your people to evacuate Captain Delaney’s clothes and fall in right down there, or I’ll drop these men to the ground and stomp on them. And that goes for you, too. “
“Never mind us!” shouted the commander to his other men. “We’ve had it! Shoot! Shoot! Save yourselves!”
Finn had a bad moment, but the scorching fire never came. Instead, the men inside his breast pockets threw out some rope and rappelled down the length of his body to the ground. The others came out of his trouser pockets and the inside of his shirt, sliding down tiny ropes to the ground as Finn stood there, feeling like the north face of the Eiger.
“Nobody’s ever going to believe this,” he said, shaking his head as the Lilliputians dropped their weapons in a pile and fell into platoon formation at his feet.
“What I can’t figure out is how the hell they got into your clothes in the first place,”
Lucas said, gazing down with wonder at the three ranks of Lilliputians down below him, standing in formation with their hands clasped atop their heads.
Delaney sighed and grimaced ruefully. “Don’t ask., okay?”
“Dear Lord, now where are we?” Gulliver asked, with exasperation.
“I don’t know, Lem,” said Andre, turning around slowly and examining their surroundings.
Both of them were handcuffed. The man in the tailored mauve suit had made Gulliver cuff Andre’s hands behind her back, then he’d cuffed Gulliver himself and fastened his own warp discs around their wrists, slightly above the steel bracelets. Then he clocked them through one at a time to… where?
They had materialized in the centre of a large room, beneath a skylight. They seemed to be standing in some sort of empty warehouse or abandoned loft. Above them, the hangar like ceiling was a crisscrossing webwork of supporting girders and steel beams on which small kleig lights were mounted. Andre turned and saw a row of large rectangular casement windows in the wall behind her at about eye level. They were the kind that opened outwards from the bottom. A warm, humid breeze wafting in carried the sounds of traffic and the stifling smell of air pollution. Through the windows, she could see the West Side Highway and the Hudson River, with New Jersey on the other side. It was starting to get dark.
“We’re in New York City,” she said. “The 20th century, I think, but I’m not sure about the exact time—”
“Never mind the time,” said a voice from behind them. “Get back away from the windows.”
The man in the mauve suit had materialized behind them and as they turned around, he beckoned them away from the windows with his gun. It was a big, black semiautomatic pistol, Andre noticed, and it was cocked. It was a 10 mm Springfield. That, along with the style of the man’s suit and her brief glimpse of the city outside, confirmed her guess about the time period. Late 20th century, early to mid 90’s. The dark-haired man watched them from behind tinted, aviator-style glasses. His manner was calm, self-assured, and thoroughly professional.
“You’re with the Network, aren’t you?” Andre said.
“That’s right,” the man said.
“Who are you? Are you with the agency or did they bring you in from the outside?”
“What’s the difference?” he said, flatly.
“One of degree, I suppose,” said Andre. “One merely makes you a criminal. The other makes you an agent who’s gone bad. In my book, that’s about ten times worse.”
“Really?” he said, still in that same flat, world-weary voice. “And how long have you been with the agency?”