THE SECRET DEVICE
By Jules
CHAPTER 4 - RILEY MAKES HIS MOVE
So what's it going to be Captain?" Riley said as he pushed the barrel of the pistol into Lucas's soft flesh again, getting another gasp from the teenager for his efforts.
"Let's be sensible about this," Bridger said as he tried the tactical approach. He really was trying to delay things until he could think of a better idea.
"No Captain Bridger, you be smart and start backing up so me and the kid here can make it to a launch," Riley barked in return.
"Why are you doing this to Lucas?" Bridger now asked.
"Well, I might as well tell you because my intentions are out in the open anyway. I only came aboard this hunk of metal for one reason and one reason only. To get this kid and his micro- chip and bring them both back to my employer. When we get there it is intended that both of them will be sold to the highest bidder," Riley replied.
"You mean all of this is over that stupid chip that Lucas made?" Miguel asked in astonishment.
They had all heard about how good this chip was and how that was probably the reason why Lucas had been attacked earlier. But the fact that people were willing to kidnap or hurt Lucas just seeming ludicrous at the least.
"Yes it is all over that chip. That chip that this kid here designed is incredible. My organisation has had at least 10 offers of over 15 million dollars for the kid and his merchandise. But the kid has to be delivered alive with it," Riley shot back.
"But you can't just trade people's lives off like products," Bridger said as he tried to control the anger that was rising within him. He knew he had to keep a cool collected head during this whole drama. He could afford to get angry once Lucas was safe again and his would-be kidnapper was locked up in the SeaQuest's brig.
Riley felt the teenager still struggling against his grip. He was getting with all the chit chat anyway. "Let's cut the chatter and move back," he said forcibly thrusting the teenager one step forward towards Bridger and the others.
Bridger and the others had very little choice but to comply with Riley's demands. They could see the scared look on Lucas's face.
Riley now pushed Lucas forward a few more steps until they were standing in the main corridor. By this time, some of the other SeaQuest members had overheard the commotion and come to see what was happening.
Kristin had also come upon the dangerous situation and was standing beside Commander Jonathan Ford as they tried to come up with a suitable solution. They couldn't allow Riley to get to a shuttle launch and take Lucas from the boat.
They had already heard the threats of what was to happen to the teenager if Riley managed to get him back to the mainland. They also couldn't stand the idea of Lucas being possibly shot or hurt.
"I suppose it is a stupid question to ask if you were the person who attacked Lucas in the corridor the other day?" Bridger now asked.
"Yeah it was me," Riley openly admitted.
"I just wished I would have had more time and we would have already been gone. The kid wouldn't wake up for me to get him to walk and I heard voices coming from close by so I just took the money and left him there. I knew there would be another opportunity to get him on his own."
"You took my money?" Lucas now asked. He could still feel the barrel of the pistol being held at him, but he felt a little annoyed about the man taking the money he had put aside for the Captain's birthday present.
"Yeah, I took it so shut up kid," Riley yelled at the teenager and struck Lucas with the pistol on the side of the head. Lucas didn't collapse entirely, but his head was spinning. He had already had a major injury to his head in the last couple of days and that wasn't even healed properly yet. The fresh glance by the gun only made his senses go fuzzy again.
"You Bastard!" Tony Piccolo yelled at Riley as he saw the man strike Lucas. He could see that such a blow was the last thing Lucas needed right now. He had seen the stitches in the teenager's head.
Bridger held onto Tony's arm in case he tried to do something more dangerous and put Lucas at even further risk of being hurt. He knew how Tony felt. He was livid himself and saw the same emotion in everybody else standing nearby but they had to think about Lucas's safety first.
Riley could feel the teenager's struggles weaken after the blow and knew that the kid was dangerously close to collapsing to the floor. He didn't particularly like to think of having to toss the kid over his shoulder and carry him unless absolutely necessary.
He would just have to work faster at getting him to the shuttle. Once inside he didn't care if the kid passed out or not. He already had ideas about subduing him before they reached the mainland anyway.
"You get me that launch now, Captain or I am going to put a bullet into him right here and now," Riley now shouted. He grabbed a fist full of Lucas's hair and pulled his nodding head up with a jerk causing him to cry out at the sharp pain he felt.
Part of it was due to the older wound on his scalp another was the fresher blow he had just received and the actual feeling of his hair being almost torn out at the roots.
Bridger nodded towards Jonathan Ford to at least give Riley some room to move with Lucas towards the launch hatch. He didn't like the idea anymore than any of them did, but he didn't want to see Lucas hurt anymore. He could see the pained expression on the teenager's face and knew the blow from the gun had revived the dull ache in his head into a now re-emerging full scale monster headache.
The Captain could see Lucas struggling to stay on his feet due to the giddiness that was present. He was probably standing mostly by force from Riley and not because of his own body's strength at the moment.
Riley grinned a little when he saw a path between him and the launch bay hatch open up a little wider. He adjusted his grip on his hostage and his weapon and manoeuvred a weakening Lucas towards the ladder to the hatch way.
Lucas could see them getting closer to the hatch and the ladder. He knew that whatever the man had in store for him once they were inside the shuttle couldn't be good for him. He had to hope that his friends were able to do something and rescue him in time.
"Let me go damn it. I am not going anywhere with you," Lucas said using the most determined voice he could find at the moment.
"You heard him, let him go," Kristin now said as she too felt fearful for the teenager's safety.
Riley didn't answer their demands. Instead he made sure that they were all looking as he moved Lucas closer to the ladder and the opening over the hatch. Then without warning to them or Lucas, he gave the kid a mighty shove so that he lost his balance and fell down the hole, missing the ladder completely.
Bridger and the others could only look on in stunned amazement as they heard the startled cry from Lucas as he felt himself falling. They heard a thud to signify that he had landed awkwardly on the shuttle floor. They heard no more after that from Lucas.
Riley now carefully lowered himself down the ladder, still keeping the gun trained on the SeaQuest crew in case they decided to amount a last minute rescue.
"It's been a pleasure, but I really need to be going now. Got a parcel to deliver to my employer," he said and disappeared down the hole.
Bridger and the other immediately ran over to the hatch way and Tony actually started to get onto the ladder in readiness for climbing down to help Lucas. He paused though when he heard voices coming from the inside the shuttle.
Initially they all thought it was Lucas still pleading for the kidnapper to let him go, but as they listened carefully and a little bit closer, they soon realised that the voice came from someone different entirely.
"What are you doing to Lucas" Dagwood asked as he saw his friend laying very still on the mesh floor just under the ladder. He had not known about Riley's plan to kidnap the young genius.
Dagwood had been routinely going about his duties of keeping the ship clean. Commander Ford had bestowed this responsibility on him some months ago after he first came aboard. He made sure that he carried out his required tasks every day. He admired Commander Ford and Captain Bridger immensely and he wanted to prove to them that G.E.L.F.'s could be just as useful in the everyday community as humans.
The next comment they heard from Riley was, "Get out of my way you freak!".
"I'm not a freak, I'm a prototype," came the response from Dagwood with an angry look on his face.
By now he had made up his mind that this man had hurt Lucas somehow. Hurting Lucas was something that Dagwood just couldn't bear. Lucas was one of his closest friends. Captain Bridger had asked him only a day or so ago to keep an eye out for the teenager because someone had already hurt him a couple of days ago.
Riley now came at Dagwood determined that somebody that wasn't even human was going to stop him from achieving his goals and rob him of his prized cargo. He stepped over the unconscious kid on the floor and went to punch the larger man.
Dagwood didn't have much of a problem in restraining him though. The punch hadn't even struck him that hard.
"Get out of the way, Tony," Dagwood now said to Piccolo how was still partly down the ladder. Tony complied immediately as he saw the big man with something in his hands. He couldn't quite see from his angle whether Dagwood had a hold of Lucas or the kidnapper.
Dagwood had grabbed the man in between the groin area and by the back of his shirt collar and lifted him physically into the air. He walked a few paces until he was standing directly under the ladder and then with a surprising amount of force threw Riley back up to the hatch way above.
Riley landed in a confused heap over the top of the hole and barely had time to understand what had happened before the hands of Commander Ford and Miguel Ortiz were roughly grabbing at him and restraining him.
"Did I hit anybody?" a sheepish Dagwood asked as he poked his head up the hole and looked to see where the man had landed.
"Get him out of here. Lock him up in the brig Commander. I will talk to him later," Bridger yelled. He wanted to make sure that Lucas was okay before spending time finding out more about who was responsible for wanting Lucas kidnapped.
Commander Ford and Miguel dragged a somewhat subdued Riley off to the Brig.
"Lucas down here but he not moving," Dagwood now said in a more serious tone to the Captain and the doctor who were still there. He wanted to make sure that his friend was going to be alright.
Within a few minutes, Captain Bridger, followed by Kristin, followed by Tony had gone down the ladder into the shuttle. All of them had felt their hearts constrict at the scene that lay before them at the bottom of that ladder.
Lucas had landed a couple of feet away. Bridger knelt down beside the still unconscious teenager and put his hand to his neck to feel for a pulse. He didn't for one minute think that Lucas was dead, but he needed to feel that reassuring throb underneath his fingers to at least ease his mind some.
The relief was very minor. He gently stroked his hand down the teenager's face and called his name a few times, hoping for some kind of response. There was nothing.
Kristin's first worry apart from Lucas being unconscious was to see about the older head injury and make sure that the kidnapper's actions hadn't caused the stitches to break open or cause any more damage to the wound. She too gave a sigh of relief when there seemed to be no real damage. The stitches were still in place and there was no external bleeding that she could see immediately.
She then moved to the area of the recent blow a few minutes ago in the corridor. Thankfully all she could find was a slightly raised red area on his temple that might leave a small bruise.
Bridger had been too preoccupied with rousing the teenager to notice anything else for the moment and Kristin herself was trying to check the stitches rather than any other injuries at that time.
Tony had been looking at Lucas as the doctor worked. His gaze now travelled down the teenager's body until he stopped when he came to how Lucas had landed. From the way it looked, Lucas must have landed feet first and his legs would have simply collapsed from under him. Now looking at how Lucas's legs lay entangled around one another, Tony couldn't help but notice the odd angle in which his right foot was.
"Um Doc, I think you had better take a look at his foot," Tony said now said, voicing his concerns for the first time.
Kristen immediately stopped what she was doing as did Bridger and both now looked down to where Tony was indicating. Both of them swallowed hard at the sight that Tony had spotted. Lucas's ankle did look as though is was laying funny.
"I'm going to try and move his legs so that they are straight first," Kristin now told them. "Then I might be able to see what is wrong with his foot."
With steady hands she now moved a couple of feet on her knees towards Lucas's legs. She very gently and carefully took hold of his left leg that was on top and tried to straighten it out. Her progress to straighten the limb was slow for two reasons, one to prevent causing any unnecessary pain to Lucas if there was any underlying injury. Secondly, hopefully if he did feel any pain due to her actions, it would help to identify the exact area of pain.
Kristin managed to get the leg about half way straight before there was a moan coming from Lucas, indicating he was regaining consciousness. She heard the moan but kept her mind focused on the job at hand. She left the soothing words and comforting motions to the Captain who was still sitting beside him in the same place.
By the time she had gotten his left leg fully straightened, there had been a few more moans of pain from the teenager. She was certain however that the moans were not from the moving of his left leg. She knew that if his left leg seemed okay, then it could be assumed that if there was any injury to be found it would be to his right leg.
She looked back towards Lucas's face and saw that his eyes were still closed. He hadn't come around fully yet. He was somewhere in between at the moment. Maybe that was a good thing, because if his leg was hurt, then hopefully he wouldn't feel the pain as much.
Again she gently placed her hands on Lucas's right leg. She told herself that there was some injury to this leg. Due to the tightness of the material from the wetsuit, the swollen area around the top of his foot became more obvious now. She couldn't tell at the moment how bad the injury was but the foot was definitely swollen.
As she began to lift the leg, she could hear Bridger telling the teenager that everything was going to be okay. She could also hear Lucas's muffled reply of "What happened?". This thought was interrupted by the shooting pain up that leg that caused him to cry out.
"Ahhhhhh," he said as he made a motion to grab at the area where the pain was coming from. Tony knelt where Kristin had been and together he and Bridger helped restrain the teenager's wandering hands. They could see the grimaces of pain on his face and knew that what ever the problem was, the pain was very bad.
"Shhh, it's okay Lucas. Kristin is having a look at it for you. I know it hurts. We'll have you fixed up soon," Bridger said as he tried to be strong for the boy.
Kristin now managed to stretch out the leg enough to examine it. Lucas had screamed a few more times through the whole thing. Kristin now felt the swollen skin with probing fingers and made her diagnosis in her mind. She knew that there was a definite break in the top of his foot. She could feel the small bones that was responsible and the inflammation that was present around the bones.
Lucas by now was groaning a little more from the pain and bit down on his lip to stop him from screaming so much. He know had a small trickle of blood his lip.
Being such small bones in the foot, Kristin knew that she would have to get Lucas to MedBay in order to fix the problem. She hoped she would be able to mend the broken bones without having to break the skin. She prayed that she wouldn't need any surgery to repair the damage.
"Commander Ford, are you there," Kristin now shouted back up the ladder.
"Yes Doctor, how's Lucas?" Ford answered back.
"He's in a lot of pain Commander, quickly go and get my medical bag from my office. When you come back, I will need two of you to help lift Lucas out of here," she said seriously, with an edge of urgency in her voice.
Commander Ford went as quickly as he could without responding to Kristin's request. Within a short space of time, he was lowering the small bag down to Tony who then passed it to the doctor.
"Just let us know when you are ready," Ford now said down the hole.
Kristin didn't say anything as she dug around in her medical bag and prepared a syringe of clear coloured liquid. Lucas was still whimpering at the pain in his foot. He was trying to free his hands and move about, as if to roll away from the pain.
He looked up with very red eyes and spotted the needle in the doctor's hand. He knew that there would be no avoiding it, so he turned his head into Bridger's chest until he felt the prick to his upper left arm.
Bridger put his arms around Lucas's shoulders and held him until he was certain that the sedative had taken effect. Within a few minutes he rolled Lucas back and could see that he was now in a deep, drug induced sleep.
"Is he going to be alright?" Tony said. He wasn't normally one bothered by another person's pain, but he couldn't hide the worry about his friend on his face.
Kristin could see the concern on the man's face and her face immediately became softer and full of compassion. When it came right down to it, she knew that Tony cared about Lucas as if he was a brother.
"I think some of the small bones in that right foot are broken. But the bones are too small for me to realign them down here. We will move him to Med Bay where I can make a better assesment on his foot and repair the broken bones. They are very small so they shouldn't take much to mend them back together, but I want to make sure that they are realigned properly," she explained.
"Let's help him out of here okay?" she now instructed both Tony and Bridger.
"Commander we are ready. Tony and Nathan will pass Lucas up through the hole. You make sure that you lift him very gentle up there. He is sedated so he won't be able to help you. And Commander, be very careful of his right foot. The are some broken bones and I need to set them."
"Sure, doctor," Ford answered back. He couldn't help but feel guilty that he and the others hadn't been able to prevent Lucas being hurt any further.
It took a few very tense and awkward moments to manoeuvre Lucas's tall frame through the narrow opening of the hatch way up to Commander Ford's and Miguel Ortiz's waiting hands. Tony and Bridger had been either side of him in the shuttle and lifted him up as high as they could until Miguel and Jonathan reached his arms.
Lucas's head lolled to one side the whole time and they were anguish to make sure that he didn't hit it on any of the metal parts of the hatch way as he travelled through. He didn't need another blow to his head again.
"Come on Lucas, your doing fine," Jonathan said in a gentle tone as he reached the sleeping youth and gripped him under the arms. Miguel waited for Ford to bring him out a little further and then like they were told, carefully took a hole of his legs at the knees. There were a few audible moans of pain through the whole process, but Lucas never woke.
He was now carried by both men down towards Med Bay with Bridger and the others tagging closely behind.
At least they had been able to prevent Riley taking him off the boat they told themselves as they thought about what might have happened.
Back in the Brig, Riley had been able to communicate with his employer whilst the crew was concerned with rescuing the injured teenager. Riley had seen them carrying the unconscious teenager through the small porthole sized window in the door of the Brig.
He didn't know what was wrong with the kid this time, but hopefully it would help to slow the boy up. If he was moving slowly he would be an easy target for the next person to take him.
Riley knew that he wouldn't get another chance but he could convey the latest turn of events onto his employer, so they could prepare for another attempt to get at the kid and his chip.
"Where is he now?" his employer asked through the communicator that the crew had failed to locate on Riley.
"They are taking him to be patched up. I don't know what's wrong with him but he was out to it when I finally got him into the shuttle. I don't think it's serious. Maybe slow him up some, but not life threatening. You should be able to take him next time with no trouble at all."
"This next time shouldn't have to happen Mr Riley if you had done what you were paid to do. You have failed twice," his employer now said.
"Well it wasn't exactly easy with all of his crew friends around him all the time," Riley said back in anger.
"Well, next time we try we will just have to make sure that he has no friends around to help him, won't we" the employer now suggested.
"I will contact you once you are back on the mainland. It shouldn't be too hard to release you on bail, no matter what charges they pin on you. When they do release you, you just make sure you ready when I tell you where to be. Is the other place ready for our guest? Have the necessary arrangements been made?"
"Everything is still arranged. It is all ready to go. Just needs for him to arrive," Riley now said.
He disconnected the conversation when he saw somebody looking through the Brig window. He hid the small communicating device in the waist band of his trousers again. Unless they were specifically looking for it, they wouldn't find it in a hurry.
to be continued ...