tried, but he could not make out their faces as they stood over him. He couldn't move. One of them bent down and pulled up his sleeve.
'That's it,' someone said.
He felt the warp disc being removed and then everything went black.
Chapter 6,
'There's nothing there,' said Steiger, bending over the charts and studying them closely.
'Or. Gulliver, are you sure that was the correct position?' said Delaney, glancing over his shoulder at Gulliver, who stood behind them, looking down at the charts spread out on the table.
'I'm absolutely certain of it,' Gulliver said. 'I've sailed as a ship's surgeon long enough to know my navigation, gentlemen. I took a reading with my sextant on the day of my escape. Longitude 110 degrees, 4 minutes east; latitude 30 degrees, 2 minutes south. '
'That would put it approximately 200 miles to the north-west of Perth, Australia,' said Steiger… And there's nothing there.'
'Quite so,' said Gulliver. 'I have already told you that the island does not appear on any charts. '
'If that was the case only with the charts available in this time period, ' said Steiger, tossing aside the charts that Gulliver had obtained for them, 'then that would be understandable. However, ~ he tapped the modem maps spread out before him on the table, 'it doesn't appear on any of our charts, either, and that's impossible. You must have made a mistake in calculating the position.'.
'I don't mean to argue with you, Colonel,' Gulliver replied, 'but had that been the case, then I would certainly have noticed it when I escaped, for I would have found myself off course. However, the course I had plotted turned out to be correct, which meant that my original reading had to be correct, as well.
Lilliput Island lies exactly there.' He stabbed his forefinger down at the map on a spot that showed nothing but open sea.
Steiger glanced up at Delaney and shook his head. 'There's nothing there, Finn.'
'Well, there's only one way to find out for sure,' Delaney said.
'Wait a minute,' Andre said, grabbing his ann. 'You're not seriously suggesting clocking out there blind? What if Gulliver’s wrong?”
'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 10 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 stcady his head. 'Open your eyes.'
His eyes blinked open.
He was tied to a straight-backed wooden chair. Thcre was a blurred face close in front of him and several people standing in the background. He tried to focus in. It came slowly. The blurry images gradually resolved themselves into a sharp. featured, hatchet-like face surmounted by thick, elaborately styled black hair and a custom-tailored, dark silk suit filled out well with muscle. The tie was incongruous. Bright canary yellow. Silk. The
