by Diane Duane
“Ready to go up after transport,” said Worf.
Trapped, Picard thought. There would be no way out once they went up. He wished things had worked better, wished the away team were gone with what they had come for. If wishes were horses, we’d all ride, he thought, and did his best to calm himself: Troi was here, after all.
“Such nervousness,” said the soft voice beside him. She had sat down in her chair and was regarding him with considerable amusement. “Is it possible that you’re really beginning to be afraid about something? A historic event—”
“Shut up, Counselor,” he said pleasantly. Just the presence of her now made him angry, which was probably a very good thing.
The screen flickered again. “Engineering!” Riker snapped. “La Forge, what’s going on down there?”
No answer. “Engineering!”
Nothing.
Communications first, Picard thought, and kept his face like stone to stop the smile from getting out.
“Run the diagnostics again,” Riker said. Picard sat there watching him, and Riker turned toward him and stared, and the look in his eyes was pure murder. Picard moved never a muscle. Does he think I’m responsible somehow? he thought. Does he think I managed this to make him look bad? As an excuse to get him killed?
This may be getting more complicated than I thought. The small white form on the screen abruptly vanished.
Immediately afterward, the screen went dead.
Picard simply sat there and looked at Riker, letting him have the chance to cover himself. He didn’t take the opportunity: just glared.
Picard stood up. “It would appear that we have some systems functions that need to be seen to. Number One, take care of it. Have the security teams return to posts until we’re ready and the diagnostics come up clean. Phase two will have to be postponed accordingly.”
“Yes, sir,” Riker said, sullen.
“It’s fairly late in my shift,” Picard said, and hoped it was. At any rate, ship’s night was approaching. “I have some more work to tidy up in the ready room, then I’m going to go and get some rest. Gall me if I’m needed.”
He went through the ready room doors and waited for them to close so that not even Barclay would get a look at the eventual private, utterly relieved grin.
CHAPTER 11
La Forge’s quarters were spartan. He didn’t spend much of his off-shift time there, preferring to spend his time among his machines, and his staff, both of which gave him more amusement by doing what he told them—or by his efforts at correcting them when they failed him—than anything he might do in private, and most of the things he did in company. The quarters were comfortable enough, as all the senior officers’ quarters here were, good for sleeping, if nothing else, and comfortably furnished, but otherwise unornamented.
Which was why he was mildly surprised to come in, at the end of his shift, and see Counselor Troi waiting there for him—sitting on the edge of the bed and smiling at him slightly.
At first sight of her, he was afraid. That was the wisest reaction to the counselor, for someone who had been as long aboard this ship as La Forge had and knew the stories that made the rounds.
“Mr. La Forge,” she said softly, looking up at him from under those dark brows.
“Counselor,” he said, beginning to feel a little more comfortable—though not much. So far he hadn’t felt the dreadful stab at his mind that all too many of the crewpeople had felt in their time aboard. She didn’t always behave that way, it was true: her moods swung in some impenetrable Betazed fashion, turning her very occasionally kindly, but more often deadly, or simply curious. The last mood was most to be feared. At such times she strolled through minds the way she strolled through the hallways, leisurely, abstracted, picking up a thought here or an emotion there and looking it over to see whether it seemed threatening or merely amusing. If it amused her, you would drag yourself away, sweating and feeling as if you wanted a bath, counting yourself lucky that she hadn’t seen the idea or feeling as a threat to the ship. When she perceived those, you wound up in the Agony Booth, while Troi let the pain break down the mind’s barriers and spent hours, with a dreadful professional detachment, going through every thought in a brain, looking for the one weak spot that represented the tendency toward weakness or betrayal. Once it was found, there was no question of mercy anymore. People who might fail the Enterprise, or worse, were found in the act of failing her, never came out of the Booth—and the horror of their screams was much worse than the usual cries of pain. The counselor specialized in making sure the maximum punishment was extracted from the condemned before they were allowed to die. And to those who had had even light brushes with it, the thought of that calm, amused regard sitting in your mind, watching while you died—even that last privacy denied you—was the greatest terror of all.
So when La Forge looked at the counselor as if Death were sitting there on his bed, demure and calm, he felt that he could be pardoned for the reaction. It was wisest to be safe, after all. But the counselor seemed to have other things on her mind at the moment. There were stories about this, too, that made the rounds of the crew. There were times when Betazeds apparently became more than usually… interested in the sensual side of life, and the whispered scuttlebutt said that the counselor had ways of making the experience more than usually… interesting for the other person involved; a flip side, as it were, to the ability to brush aside the boundaries of someone’s mind like a curtain. Pleasures redoubled and reflected almost beyond bearing for their intensity, that was what the rumors said… what rumors there were. The counselor’s lovers tended to be tight-lipped, if only because she could become murderous if she felt a confidence might have been betrayed. La Forge had never dreamed that he might find himself in this situation. But now, looking at her, he smiled, determined to make the best of it. The counselor could make a powerful friend; even the captain had to give way to her under certain circumstances. Her patronage could mean early advancement, privileges… and the obvious pleasures.
“Come sit down,” the counselor said, patting the bed beside her. La Forge came toward her slowly, his grin broadening, taking his time. He knew he looked good; he didn’t mind making her aware of the fact… and feeling the fear die away, feeling the desire come up, was enjoyable, too. He sat and decided to dare to be a little aggressive about it—she was rumored to like that, from Riker at least.
“Well,” he said, “this is a nice surprise,” and he slid his arms around her, grinning still. Her great dark eyes widened a little; she smiled, too, slipping her arms around him, holding him quite tightly.
“Yes,” she murmured, “it is, isn’t it?” Behind his neck, something hissed—and that was all he heard.
Troi disentangled herself from the unconscious form of La Forge and let him down gently on the bed. She looked over to the side of the room, the spot out of sight by the closet, and Geordi came out and smiled grimly at the sight of “himself.”
“Glad we were able to tap into comms enough to catch him going off shift,” Geordi said. He put his hands under the man’s armpits and pulled him off the bed, half-dragging him over to an open access panel in the wall. “Didn’t take long to get the message, did he?”
“No question of that,” Troi said, standing up and rubbing her hands together. She caught herself at it, analyzed it as a sudden urge to get clean of trickery and of the mélange of emotions she had sensed in him—that dreadful fear, coupled with desire that lay so close to the surface—the two potentiating each other. A lot of these people seemed unusually labile: not necessarily less complex than the crewmen with whom Deanna was familiar, but it was as if the controls normally trained into Fleet personnel to make living together easier had never been trained into these people at all—or as if no one had ever seen the need. These people wore their emotions very near the surface, released them more readily than usual. It made them both easier than usual to manipulate, and more difficult to accurately predict. A pretty problem.
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nbsp; Geordi was busying himself with sealing up the access panel. “My last scan showed the nanites almost into the comms functions,” he said, “and working in all three cores. Things are going to hot up pretty quick now. Better signal the captain. Where are you going to keep yourself?”
“Here will probably be safest, but if as I’m monitoring the situation I see an excuse or an opportunity to head for the captain’s quarters, I’ll do that instead.” Troi did not mention her terror at the thought of walking out into those halls and having to “be” the woman who was the cause of so much fear… but she would do it if she had to.
From outside came the whooping of red-alert sirens.
“There they go,” Geordi said with a grin. “We’re in business.”
Troi touched her badge. “Troi to Captain Picard. Objective acquired and stowed.” She smiled slightly. “Next move.”
The badge buzzed once under her fingertips. “He’s ready,” she said. “Get yourself set.”
On the bridge, everything had begun to go energetically haywire. Picard was watching it with well-feigned annoyance, stalking around as one system after another began to flicker, falter, go down, then up and then down again, as if the ship were one giant traveling short circuit. He was hard put not to laugh out loud, and he understood better than ever the delight Geordi had started to show at the prospect of purposely failing out the computers; it was hilarious to watch the results, especially when they weren’t your responsibility to fix.
“This is becoming extremely annoying,” he said severely to Riker. “What the devil are they doing down in engineering?”
“It’s difficult to tell, Captain, when we don’t seem able to reach them on comms,” Riker said, moving from one station to the other, getting redder and redder with fury.
“Well, do it the old-fashioned way,” Picard said with exaggerated patience. “Send a runner down there. I want La Forge up here to tell me what the problem is, since none of you seem able to manage it. And then I want it fixed!”
The volume of the demand brought some heads around, and Picard was slightly relieved. Good, he thought, I’m not that much of a shouter here, either, to judge by the reaction. Just as well I couldn’t stand it if I had to rant all the time.
Riker gestured at one of the security men who was standing by the turbolift doors. “You, get down to engineering and bring Mr. La Forge up here.”
“Some diagnostics are running, though patchily, Captain,” Worf said quite calmly, seeming immune to Riker’s performance. “There would appear to be some kind of trouble in the computer cores.”
“Cores plural?” Picard said, sounding outraged. “Two of them? All of them?”
“All of them, Captain, to judge by these readings.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Uncertain as yet, sir. As I said, the diagnostics are themselves malfunctioning.”
“How very delightful.” Picard stalked up to Worf’s station and looked over his shoulder at the readouts. “What else might go wrong if all the redundant systems are contaminated this way? This ship lives by those computers.”
“Our mission could be seriously compromised,” the counselor said, getting up from her seat and throwing an obscure glance in Riker’s direction.
“I am very concerned about the mission, Counselor,” Picard said, meaning it entirely, “but I am just as concerned at the moment about the thought that the computers control life support as well, and I don’t care to breathe vacuum, or freeze to death.”
The turbolift doors opened, and the security guard who had gone out now returned with a grim-looking La Forge. He saluted Picard, who returned the salute and said, “Mr. La Forge, you had better come up with some answers for us pretty quickly.”
“Yes, sir,” Geordi said, and went over to the engineering panel and started working at it. At least once it went down on him, so that he swore and smacked it. It came back up immediately, leaving Picard wondering about the malleability of machines in their perceived master’s hands.
“Damn,” Geordi said. “All three cores are compromised. Nonselective holes are developing in the associational networks. Looks like the subspace field is down, but that alone wouldn’t cause these problems.”
He moved to another panel, touched it; it flickered and went dark. “Captain,” Geordi said, “we’d better unlock these cores while they’re still answering to command. If they go down before we do that, we’ve got problems.”
“Quite right. Counselor?” Picard said. “We’ll need your security code.”
“I should think you might do that yourself,” the counselor said, raising her eyebrows at him, “since you know the code as well as I do.”
“I bow to your primacy in this matter, as I should have bowed in that other. My apologies: I overreacted.”
Picard stood there and tried not to sweat too visibly while starting to recite “The boy stood on the burning deck…” in his head, by way of cover. The counselor studied him for a long moment: there was that feeling of a veil brushing across the face of his mind…. Then she bowed her head to Picard with a slight smile—a queenly gesture, and a condescending one. “And they say chivalry is dead,” she said with another odd glance over at Riker, a different one this time, that left Picard wondering again. “But perhaps the reports of its death were premature.”
She walked over to the engineering console and said, “Computer. This is Lieutenant Commander Troi.”
“Voice ID verified,” said the computer in a voice that cracked and wavered unnervingly.
“Release computer core security controls in all three cores. Code fourteen nine twelve twelve A.”
“Code correct. Core security controls released.”
“Thanks, Counselor,” Geordi said. “Oops—”
For the console went dark again, and around the bridge, various telltales and lights that never went dark now vanished. Only the main viewer remained functional, and the image on it was stitched with signal artifact, normally filtered out, now making a nuisance of itself. “I’d better get down there. Counselor, will you release me some security people as well, to act as runners? We’re going to need them, with comms down. I’ll pull three teams from engineering.”
“Go on, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said. “Time’s wasting, and we have a mission that won’t wait.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Geordi said, understanding perfectly, and made for the ’lift in a hurry, with the security guard behind him.
The bridge crew watched him go. After a moment, Picard said, “Well, it’s late in my shift, and I can do little here until we’re operational again. I’ll be in my quarters getting some rest.” He looked over at Riker. “Number One, please send a runner immediately when we start to get any results with the cores.”
“Yes, sir.”
Picard nodded and headed for the ’lift, his pulse racing. And but the booming shots replied, and fast the flames rolled on. He could feel the counselor looking at his back as the doors shut.
Geordi headed into engineering at high speed, which was probably just as well. Though he had seen the schematics of the place, stopping to gawk at the sheer wonderfulness of it would probably have been a bad move at the moment. He made his way down the great central hallway toward the matter/antimatter exchanger in a hurry, with the security man behind him, and shouted, “Okay, people, we’ve got trouble, let’s have a meeting!”
There were curious looks directed down at him from some of the crewmen up in the galleries, but obediently enough they started heading for the lifters and ladders that would take them down to the bottom level. While waiting for them to gather, Geordi did a quick cruise around the main status table, wondering at the differences of it, and noticing particularly the indications of the third main power conduit, the one leading off to something big and power hungry down on the right-hand side. Buddha on a bicycle, he thought, eight hundred terawatts; you could boil a small ocean over that if you had a pot big enough!
Engineering crew began to gathe
r around him. He recognized them all, though on his own ship many of them were people who were assigned to science. It said uncomfortable things about the state of theoretical research and labwork on this ship, but he didn’t have time to be overly concerned with that right now. At least he knew these people’s capability: they could do the job—and they’ll need to, the poor kids: I still remember the nuisance it took us to fix the nanites in our core. He simply hoped he could depend on them, for there were the differences in personalities to cope with as well: any one of these people could be assumed to be gunning for his job. Not a pretty prospect at the moment—especially if any one of them should guess his real intentions. They would take themselves off to the counselor like a shot.
He finished his circuit of the table, looked up, and was not shocked, but was nonetheless disturbed, to see Eileen Hessan gazing thoughtfully at him from behind a few other people. Are we friendly here? he wondered. Well, no harm in being cordial, anyway.
“I need two big parties and one smaller one,” he said. “Two for the main cores in the primary hull and the engineering hull, and one for the secondary one in the main hull. We don’t have a lot of time to sit around doing diagnostics, so we’re going to just pull the affected media and replace them with new chips from stores. Analysis can wait until we have something to analyze with. We’re going to have to start doing a selective purge of the isolinear chips in each core. Fortunately”—he pointed to the schematics now showing on the status table—“different parts of each core seem to be affected, so that we should be able to selectively restore to clean media from the other cores. But it’s going to take a lot of running around with chips because we don’t dare do it by optical conduit—they look like they’ve been compromised, too—and anyway, the backup protocols need to have at least one core running FTL. None of them are, just now: all the subspace generators are down. At least we don’t have to worry about frying our brains.” There were some covertly amused looks among the engineering staff: apparently there were some of them who wouldn’t particularly mind seeing others’ brains fried. That they made no secret of the fact bothered Geordi, but he ignored it for the moment, while wondering in the back of his mind what their accident rates were like here.