Dark Mirror (15 page)

Geordi watched the screen thoughtfully. “I’m still not sure I see it.”

“Wait for it. It comes up again.” They watched together as the other Geordi nudged the crewman whose work he was supervising—not a friendly gesture—and moved on back to the main console.

“Hands-on management,” Geordi muttered, not liking the look of it. “It is a swagger, though. Look at that.” He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“Don’t try to mimic the movement. Just be familiar with it. It’s going to be more effective to try to think yourself into the mind-set that causes the motion. Look at his face instead.”

“I’ve been trying to avoid it,” Geordi muttered, but he ran the recording back again and did so. There was a curl to the other La Forge’s lip that suggested emotions normally alien to Geordi: a nasty enjoyment of someone else’s discomfiture, at the very least. Troi viewed the expression on the counterpart La Forge’s face with nearly as much unease as she had felt on first seeing her own face set in that very alien mold—the chilly look, the look of luxurious superiority, of pleased domination. Nonetheless, these were the people she and he had to be, at least for a little while, if they were to do the
Enterprise
any good.

“Pretending is going to be your main protection,” Deanna said. “Be angry—start being angry now—and stay that way. That at least will steer your body language in the right direction.
His
body language says he spends most of his time thinking angry, contemptuous thoughts; his face says the same. So steer yourself in that direction. It’ll do for the moment—and with luck, maybe we won’t be seen at all. We’re beaming directly into the core control chamber, after all.”

Geordi nodded, then glanced away from the playback to have a look at the shuttle’s autopilot. At almost the same moment, the communications panel chirped.

“
Hawking,”
Geordi said softly, as if someone might overhear him.

“
You’re within range,”
O’Brien’s voice said. “
Ready?”

“Stand by.” Geordi glanced at Troi, muted the circuit for a moment. “Did I mention,” he said, “that I’m scared out of my ever-lovin’ mind?”

She smiled at him as reassuringly as she could, but the smile had a rueful edge, Deanna knew, for she was as frightened as he was. “I got that sense,” she said. “Did I mention that I was, too?”

They stood up. He laughed, just a breath. “Come on, Counselor, let’s go bell the cat.”

They moved to the transporter pads. Geordi was wearing a small belt pouch with the isolinear chips and a few other small pieces of hardware. Troi, first on the pads, watched him touch the relay transporter console into life, then he climbed up beside her. It was a tight fit—what with the low ceiling of the shuttle, the emitter arrays were barely six inches above their heads, and Troi kept feeling as if she wanted to duck a little. But she was sure that the other Troi would never stand anything less than regally straight. She almost laughed at the memory of her mother’s voice saying severely,
Stand up, little one, you’re one of the daughters of the Fifth House; whoever heard of one of us slouching?

“Ready, Chief,” Geordi said.

“
The console reports all the preset routines are answering,”
O’Brien said. “
All you have to do is hail the shuttle and the transporter’s computer will bring you home on demand. Or call us—but you know the routine. Try not to have to. The signal strength required to drive a call out our way may be noticed—and if there’s a problem with the transport…”

“Understood,” Geordi said.

“
Well, then, Godspeed,”
O’Brien said. “
Energizing…”

And the world dissolved in light—

—and reasserted itself: a tiny room, really, no more than
a pie slice carved out of the top of the secondary computer core, with a chair, a sit-down terminal, some wall displays—

—and a crewman leveling a phaser at them, with his face working between astonishment and fear. Astonishment at the sight of Geordi, then fear at the sight of Deanna.

His fear froze him briefly as it also stabbed Troi’s fear and made her angry—she having turned herself toward that emotional set already, by way of self-defense. Without a moment’s hesitation she kicked the phaser out of his hand. No sooner was her leg out of the way than Geordi jumped him, a blur of speed and fear-turned-rage. A second or so later, the man was down on the floor, nearly unconscious, and Geordi came up with the hypospray from his belt pouch and let the man have it in the leg, one of the fast-absorption sites that Dr. Crusher had shown him. The man sighed and was still.

“He’ll be out of it for a few hours,” Geordi said, getting hurriedly to his feet. “But I don’t like him being here. Either they were expecting us or the security levels around here are too high for
my
liking. Let’s get on with it.”

He moved to the console, sat down, and started to work. Deanna stood by him, only half watching; the rest of her was trying to cope with the feel of the many minds around her.

Normally this was something she had to endure anew every morning: the pressure of all those minds against her own, the brief disorientation on waking up from sleep to find that there were a thousand people, more or less, in bed with you—not in terms of their thoughts, but the ebb and flow of their emotions, like a low roar of ocean noise, peaking here and there in a whitecap of excitement or annoyance. At times when the ship was nervous—such as the past day or so—the volume of that noise increased greatly, and the variability of it, so that you could sit there naming other people’s emotions all day and hardly repeat
yourself once, for it was Deanna’s experience that negative emotions tended to be endlessly varied, while positive ones tended to feel more or less the same. At such times she had to spend more time than usual working on the inner disciplines that helped a Betazed shut out the noise, and occasionally, during periods of great tension, she found herself relieved that she could hear
only
the emotional noise and not the details of each person’s fears, endlessly reiterated.

Now, though, she found herself wishing she were completely mindblind, even though it would have rendered her useless for this mission. Her description of this ship’s gestalt to Picard as “a midden,” Deanna now found, had been an understatement. The only consolation was that there seemed to be fewer minds—a fact that left her uneasy, for reasons she didn’t have time to evaluate just now. No matter: those minds, fewer though they might be, were for the most part horribly vital, and much of that vitality was being spent on a constant flow of malice, wariness, and stifled fury. This, too, was as dreadfully varied as negative emotion was on her own
Enterprise—
hundreds of combinations, each reflecting its home mind’s preferences and the stimulus of the moment: sullen dislike and discontent and vengeful passion, animosity and envy, broad-based ill will and focused resentment, jealousy and smothered rage—“Name an emotion,” Will would say to her sometimes, teasing. Now Deanna found herself heartily wishing she had just one to name. And this perception was at a distance. Confronted with any one of the people feeling these things, her own perceptions, as always, would narrow down, locking on to the personality at the forefront of her attention, and those presently unfocused feelings would hit her full on, at pressure, like a firehose.

One of them did so now—but it was Geordi’s. “
Damn!”
he whispered.

“What’s the matter?” Deanna said, glad of the distraction, and ashamed of herself for it.

“I can’t get into the core. Security.” She looked over his shoulder. “See,” Geordi said, pointing at the console. “I can’t even get in far enough to fail out the core. It keeps asking me for an access code.”

“Voice override?”

“That leaves traces, I’d rather not. But…”

He frowned for a moment. “Let’s do this first.” He pulled out the isolinear chip that was in the slot, substituted another. “Computer, copy of present crew roster and nonprotected personnel files to hard medium reader.”

“Chief engineer voiceprint match confirmed,” the computer said. Deanna started, as did Geordi: the voice was male. “Security officer’s clearance required.”

Deanna swallowed. “This is Deanna Troi. Confirm voiceprint and acknowledge clearance.”

“Clearance acknowledged,” the computer said after a second. “Copy in progress.”

It only took a few seconds. “Copy ship’s history and condensed nonclassified Starfleet history to hard medium reader,” Geordi said.

“Security officer’s clearance required,” said the computer.

“Cleared,” Deanna said. “Comply.”

“Voiceprint clearance acknowledged,” the computer said. “Working…”

“I don’t want to do too much more of this,” Geordi muttered. “This kind of request leaves trails, too, if anyone thinks to look for them. Take this.” He pulled the chip out of the read/write device. “And here.” Out of his belt pouch he removed a tiny device that he clipped onto the chip. “Activate that; the transporter in the shuttle’ll pick it up and pass it back to the
Enterprise.
I don’t like beaming back anything before we’re ready to go ourselves, but this
operation already isn’t going according to plan, and they’ve got to get this stuff if nothing else.”

Deanna touched the tiny stud on the clipped-on device, a small flat disc, then she put the chip down on the floor. It vanished in a small patch of glitter.

“Now then,” Geordi said, pulling in a long breath and letting it out as he thought. “I can’t think of any other way around this; we’re going to have to risk it. Computer, read program file ‘Runl’ from hard data reader.”

It cheeped. “Run program ‘Runl.’” It cheeped again. There was a second silence. Geordi looked at Troi, a grin beginning to spread across his face. And then the computer said, “Specified program affects security-sensitive areas. Security officer’s or captain’s authorization required.”

“Authorized,” Deanna said.

“Security officer’s authorization code required,” said the computer.

Troi stared at Geordi. He made a quick cut-his-throat gesture, and Troi said, “Abort run.”

“Aborted,” said the computer.

The smile was gone as if it had never been there. Geordi looked at her thoughtfully. “Do you have a password that you routinely use on your voice-locked files? Most people do—they tend to repeat two or three of them.”

Deanna blinked. “I have four or five. I rotate through them.”

Geordi shook his head. “Too many to chance it. If you try giving this thing a wrong password, it’ll set off alarms all through the system, from the looks of it. At least it does in ours. What it’s going to do in this place—they’re too paranoid here for words.” He made a face. “I don’t see how we can risk it. No. There must be some other way to get into the core.”

The console chirped and a voice said, “Security to Kowalski. Hourly check.”

Troi and Geordi stared at each other. Then Geordi
leaned over sideways in his chair, reached underneath the control panel, and swiftly removed a facing: the panel went dead.

“What did you do?” Troi said.

“Killed the main power coupling. Now…” He looked around the tiny room, then back at Troi. “We have to decide how we want to leave this place.”

“You don’t mean beam back—”

“No,” he said, but he glanced over at the crewman whom they had incapacitated. “It had better look like his board failed, and he went to get help.”

Troi swallowed and nodded. “What about us?”

“My guess is that they’re going to have somebody up here in about a minute, maybe a minute and a half,” Geordi said, getting up and heading toward one of the wall panels. He touched it in a couple of places; it obediently fell away, revealing another panel behind it with much incomprehensible engineerese imprinted on it. This, too, he touched, in what looked to Troi like a coded sequence, and it fell away as well. “In,” he said. “Hurry up. Two meters back, the access tunnel bends to the right. A meter and a half past the first bend there’s a long drop, a vertical tunnel with ladder rungs set either side of the access. Go down one. There’s a big red line drawn right around the vertical tunnel, a meter and a half where it meets the access tunnel. When you go down the ladder, make sure your body is
below
that line, but whatever you do, don’t get your head below it.”

Troi gulped, feeling his fear, and at the same time an odd exhilaration that she didn’t fully understand. She went straight in, headfirst; the access tunnel was small enough that crawling was easier than crouching. Immediately she found the right-hand bend and went on around it; then she came to the drop. There was no more gulping in her when she saw it; her mouth went dry. Heights had never been one of her strong points… and this, this was a height and a
half. Down below her yawned a cylindrical pit, smooth-walled, dimly lit with engineering telltales in its walls—at least two hundred feet deep, maybe more. She saw the two sets of projecting ladder rungs, set one on each side of the cylindrical tunnel, leading downward. She saw the red line and wondered what it was about, at the same time feeling a faint buzzing hum that lingered on her skin, like an itch that hadn’t quite started to be an itch yet.

Behind her she could hear soft scrabbling sounds up in the access tunnel: the click of paneling, another set of clicks, then the soft sound of Geordi making his way down to join her. His head peered over the edge to see which set of rungs she was on, and he quickly scrambled down onto the other.

“Not used to closing those from the inside,” Geordi said softly, “but I managed it finally. Remind me to drop a note about an inward-closing utility to the people at Fleet Engineering.”

“Absolutely,” Deanna said. “But won’t this be the first place they look?”

Geordi chuckled as he settled himself in position on the ladder across from hers. “Counselor, do you know there are nineteen computer subprocessors in the bridge?”

“Well, yes, that’s common knowledge; they link to the cores in the primary and secondary hulls.”

“Right. Where are they?”

Troi opened her mouth and shut it again.