"This is crazy!" said Amoret. "We don't have time!"

Picard put a calming hand on her shoulder.

"Please trust him."

The red-haired woman stared back at him. They held a momentary silent colloquy-she accepted his advice because she knew him with the intimacy of a wife or lover, and he saw her familiarity and had to turn away so as not to be distracted by the odd feeling. A stranger knew his innermost self.

Data lowered himself back down from the air shaft.

"The concealment is complete. We may now exit."

In the next instant the blast door at the other end of the room exploded inward. CS men rushed in and arrested Picard, Riker, Data, and Amoret.

Chapter Sixteen.

TROI WAITED, handcuffed and under heavy guard, outside Crichton's office.

Far down the hallway, she spotted the Dissenters as they were herded along by one-eyes and CS men. The Dissenters were turned away from her, but she could see that all those from the caves were there, plus Amoret, who, though a prisoner, was wearing a CS uniform. They disappeared around a corner.

A moment later a guard led Troi into Crichton's office.

His bald head was covered by the standard CS helmet. He had the rasters turned up very bright, burning in electronic h.e.l.lfire everything that met his eyes.

He was terrified. Troi perceived that clearly.

"You're useless to me," he told Troi. "Your captain, your first officer, and your android are no longer necessary either. I've already defeated your ship. You can't touch me now."

"Then why are you telling me this?"

Crichton swiveled his chair around and pressed a b.u.t.ton. On a monitor behind him, an image appeared: the Enterprise as seen by the cameras of one of the Rampartian ships surrounding it. The Enterprise was plunging down toward the planet, the dull red heat of atmospheric entry already showing on its shields.

Crichton watched the image for a moment, in silence.

Troi allowed herself no panic. She had to stay focused on Crichton; figuring him out was the only way she could help the thousand people on that ship.

She strained to pick up everything she could.

His inner terror was pushing toward the surface. It was waiting to erupt. She was herself a contributor to the terror, but it was larger than any one person. It was as big as an entire alternate universe, as big as the Other-worlders, the realm of myth and imagination.

But if it was the Other-worlder phenomena, it was much worse for him than it had been for her. He had a psychotic, paranoid reaction to it. He didn't know what it was and didn't want to know.

Since she couldn't see his face, she found herself looking at his hands. Oddly, there were no scars on them; they looked as if they belonged to someone else. Long-fingered, dextrous-an artist's hands. They fidgeted compulsively.

Now he stood and spoke.

"For the high crimes specified in the Code of the Council of Truth, pursuant to and as a result of doc.u.mentation gathered and on record, the detainee before me, Deanna Troi, is hereby sentenced to death, such sentence to be imposed without delay. The penalty will be bodily destruction by injection."

His voice had sped up at the end, as if the words themselves had panicked on their way out of his mouth.

He sat down and hurriedly pressed a b.u.t.ton on his intercom.

"Send in the execution corps. I'm coming with them. We'll execute all of the Enterprise people together, and the Dissenters afterward."

"Director Crichton, before you do anything else, listen to me," said Troi. "I know you're hiding something in your mind. Maybe your computers don't know, but I do. I've experienced the syndrome myself. I've had those mythical creatures invading my mind."

"A fabulist to the end," said Crichton. "Spin your fictions until the moment you die." He hit the b.u.t.ton on his desk insistently.

"No, wait!" she cried. "I'm a counselor, a scientist of consciousness. It doesn't matter to me if mythical characters are considered criminal here. Nothing in the mind is criminal to me. Nothing need be judged or condemned. I don't have anyone to report you to. Please just try to tell me about it. What can you lose by trying? How do you know I can't help?"

Troi realized there had to be validity to her perceptions. The protective headgear Crichton wore was not filtering out her words-or at least not all of them. Crichton really was experiencing a recurrent mental problem, and the CS computers knew it.

Crichton seemed to pause and consider her offer. Troi sensed that for the briefest of instants he admitted to himself how wonderful it would be to just talk, to seek help without fear of judgment or stigma.

But the dominant part of him, the tyrannical, paranoid side, rea.s.serted itself. Troi knew she'd lost her gamble.

The CS execution detail came in. The four officers surrounded Troi, and one of them hooked her handcuffs to his own wrist.

"Let's go," said Crichton.

As they left his office, they paused before a large monitor in the hallway. Ferris' stern carven-oak face stared out over the dates of his birth and death.

The image was replaced by shots of Ferris' fight with Odysseus on the bridge. The sequence ended with both men lying dead. There were no shots of the finale. The Rampartians would not see Ferris' death at the hands of his own one-eyes.

The narrator said something about the treachery of the Dissenters, and how they murdered Ferris, the defender of truth. A photomontage of scenes from Ferris' life and career followed.

Crichton ordered the group to move on. They walked Troi to an elevator and took her up several stories to the level of the bridge.

In a gla.s.sed vestibule opening onto the bridge, a dozen CS guards stood in formation around Picard, Riker, and Data. All were handcuffed. They looked up and saw Troi coming. Riker and Picard seemed beaten and exhausted. Data had no expression at all.

"Why is the android with them?" asked one of the CS officers walking with Crichton. "Isn't he going to be dismantled in the lab rather than injected?"

"Yes," said Crichton, "but I want a video image of all of the criminals together, being executed. The public should be allowed to see this."

Troi was led past the other group. The guards around her blocked her view and she was not able to make any further eye contact with her shipmates; but as she was pushed through the doors and onto the bridge, she could sense her friends being led along behind her.

It was a clear night outside, with a light wind. The great blue rho Ophiuchi nebula filled most of the sky, but a large number of background stars shone through it.

Ahead of Troi, groups of one-eyes hovered, surrounding the bridge, gathering images of the doomed group and their escorts. Banks of lights on the surrounding buildings painted the bridge with neutral white light.

Troi looked ahead and saw the cage-like security doors at the other end of the bridge. They were still broken, as Lomov had left them, but several guards were there.

She looked down, watching her own trudging footsteps. The experience of seeing Picard, Riker, and Data all condemned to death was worse than her own death sentence; it was physically devastating. The events of the last few days caught up with her all at once.

For a brief moment she blacked out and collapsed. The CS man she was cuffed to kept her from hitting the ground, and the whole group paused.

She recovered a few seconds later. When she felt able to walk again, she nodded, and the group moved on.

The room itself was stark and gray. There were four chairs in it, plain but st.u.r.dy wooden affairs, bolted to the floor. Mounted at various positions along the walls were several cameras that swiveled to track the condemned as they were led in.

Again Troi tried to look at Captain Picard, Riker, and Data, but the CS men flanking her and leading her to her chair were too close and blocked her view.

She was pushed gently down into the chair and strapped in. When the CS men stood aside she saw that her shipmates were already strapped into their chairs and blindfolded.

She craned her neck and saw a nurse standing behind them at a little table. On top of the table, four syringes waited in a gla.s.s rack.

Troi felt her heart racing. There was something she hadn't quite understood about this whole thing, some thing about Crichton, the Other-worlders, and imagination, but it was too late.

She heard Crichton talking with a low voice into his headset. She heard the breathing of her shipmates and the clink of the syringes rattling faintly against their rack.

Now the nurse was standing in front of her, lifting a blindfold to her head. As the black cloth blocked her vision, Troi's heart pounded so hard that she began to think the earth was throbbing.

And suddenly, the earth really was throbbing. The throbs felt like seismic tremors, except they were evenly s.p.a.ced, like timed explosions or a great drumbeat.

The nurse, confused by the noise, dropped the blindfold and Troi could see again. The CS men looked at each other, alarmed. Troi leaned her head around one of them and caught sight of Picard. The captain was looking expectantly around the room, as if readying himself to take advantage of the situation and lead an escape.

Crichton grabbed the nurse and shook her shoulders.

"Inject them!"

The nurse reacted quickly. She grabbed a syringe off the rattling cart and moved toward Troi.

The vibration emanating from the ground reached a peak. Suddenly the roof itself caved in, crushed downward by some unseen force. Wood and plaster fell all over the place. A great hole had opened up and Troi could see the morning-twilight sky.

Something huge and flesh-colored moved in through the hole and felt around the room. Crichton, the CS men, and the nurse desperately crawled, fell, and rolled away from it.

It was a giant human hand, searching around the room, feeling for something. Finally it grasped Crichton between two fingers and lifted him right out through the hole.

Now the owner of the hand became visible through the aperture. It was a man roughly a hundred feet tall, perfectly proportioned. He was dressed in the fashion of an eighteenth-century seafarer, with a buff-colored jerkin and knee breeches. He looked to be in his late thirties, intelligent and cultured. There were slim cords dangling from his arms and legs, as though he had been tied up but was now free.

Troi realized she had seen him before. She'd seen him in an ill.u.s.tration on a certain page burned by the CS in her presence-a page from Gulliver's Travels. This giant was Gulliver himself, in the flesh.

Gulliver dangled Crichton from his fingers, letting the Director of Cephalic Security swing, struggling and flailing high above the ground. The giant seemed amused by the angry little mite. Then he paused and looked around him in a wide arc at the spread of CephCom, and even wider, at the city of Verity. He grew more thoughtful.

Gulliver set Crichton down somewhere out of view, then leaned his head close over the execution room.

"Let the prisoners go," he said, and his voice was like the soughing of a giant bellows.

One of the CS men reached for his weapon.

Gulliver put his hand back into the room and flicked the CS man with his finger, sending him sprawling onto a pile of debris. Then Gulliver crushed the weapon like a small seed with his fingernail.

"Let them go!" he repeated, in the loudest human tone Troi had ever heard.

The CS men hurriedly undid the straps on the chairs. The prisoners stood. Riker put himself in front of Troi, shielding her with his body.

But when Gulliver's hand slid over and gathered up the four from the Enterprise, there was nothing Riker or any of them could do to prevent it. Troi felt the flesh of the hand against her own hands. It was warm and alive. It even had the whorls and ridges of an individual handprint.

Gulliver lifted the four up near his face. He looked at them and laughed. He was delighted, as though he'd found new friends.

Picard whispered to Troi.

"Counselor, can you feel anything from his mind?"

"Yes. He's real, and alive. Very alive."

"Intriguing," Data commented.

Gulliver slowly lowered his hand and set it down in the quadrangle between the CephCom buildings. Riker quickly stepped off and helped the others to the ground.

Across the quadrangle they could see Crichton, sheltered under the overhang of the main CephCom entrance. In the shadows his eye-rasters glowed with an evil green light. He was talking into his headset and looking into the sky expectantly.

Gulliver rose to his full height. He looked off into the distance.

Troi heard the throb of hovercraft.

Within moments two white CS a.s.sault craft were flying round Gulliver, making pa.s.ses at his face. Troi could hear their weapons firing. Gulliver dodged and weaved.

A phalanx of CS officers appeared on the quadrangle. They knelt in unison and began squeezing off shots at Gulliver.

Gulliver seemed to feel the sting of the radiation weapons on his face. He swatted at the soldiers and hovercraft, forcing them back.

Crichton kept speaking into his headset. Now he motioned with his arm and the CS men retreated into the complex. A truck-mounted radiation cannon drove onto the quadrangle. Crichton ran up and stood behind it. He pointed up at Gulliver, and barked some orders to the men in the gun's turret.

The gun swiveled on well-greased gimbals as it was aimed. Gulliver eyed it with surprise.

It fired a great blast of energy.

The giant swayed, and reached for the gun. It fired again. He fell to his knees with a tremendous crash.

The gun tracked him and fired a third time.

Gulliver collapsed. His body came to rest outside the CephCom complex, out of view. The earth shuddered for several seconds, and then all was still.

The hovercraft circled over the area where Gulliver had fallen. CS troops ran back onto the quadrangle. For a moment Troi thought the CS were going to rearrest her and her shipmates. But in the next moment pandemonium broke loose.

A huge crowd of beings swarmed into the quadrangle and around the CephCom buildings. They were all characters from myth, metaphor, fiction, all forms of human imagination.

The charge was led by Sekhmet the Egyptian Lioness-deity, G.o.ddess of the desert sun, terrifying Daughter of Ra. The head of an asp protruded from the hair above her eyes, and over the hissing asp was a solar disk, radiating heat and light all about the quadrangle. Sekhmet roared and bared a full set of awesome feline teeth as she charged. The characters from imagination all charged with her and as a body they attacked the CS troops.

Troi tried to grab onto Riker but lost contact with all her shipmates in the confusing melee. The air was filled with shouts and cries in many languages.

Troi saw jinns, love-G.o.ddesses, and golems cavorting among the CS, disrupting their ranks, and pulling off the soldiers' helmets, depriving them of their censoring eye and ear filters.