Dark Mirror (36 page)

“You’re quite right, of course. Do it any way you can. Commandeer someone to act as a messenger… but get the help you need. Just keep her off my case.”

“Yes, sir.” They were quiet together in the ’lift for a few moments.

Finally Barclay said, “Captain…”

Picard nodded at him.

“About my promotion.”

Picard had to laugh out loud. “You know how to strike when the iron’s hot, don’t you?”

“We have been rather busy the past day or so. And I think without me…”

“Yes. Without you…” Picard looked gravely at the man, and after a few moments Barclay looked away. Picard hoped it wasn’t because he had frightened him in any way. “I will look into it. If your general service record until now accords with your behavior of the last few days…” He nodded.

Barclay, astonishingly, blushed and looked away. “Thank you, sir.”

The ’lift stopped. They came out together on deck fifty-four, far down in the engineering hull, a quiet place, no need for anyone much to be down there. Without much trouble they found the room. Barclay had stopped someone they passed as they got out of the ’lift, sending a message along. For the time being, he posted himself by the door to the storage area.

Picard looked at him. “Will you be all right?”

Barclay looked back at him with the kindly look that bodyguards reserve for their slightly insane charges. “Captain, I’m supposed to be asking
you
that.”

“You stay here,” Picard said, thumping him gently on the biceps. “I know who’s in there.” He smiled grimly. “No one better. Don’t interrupt us. We’ll be fine. And
remember—don’t leave the spot. If the counselor should come…”

“She won’t get past me, sir.”

“Good man.” Picard nodded to Barclay. He went in the door cautiously, and it shut behind him.

And the instant it shut, the foot came shooting out, caught the phaser in his hand, and knocked it halfway across the room.

He did the only thing he could under the circumstances. He grabbed the foot and yanked sideways, hard. There was a crash, and for confusion’s sake, he threw himself on top of it, grappling. Found a throat, seized it, looked—

—and the shock, the shock went through him worse than he’d thought. To have yourself by the throat, to see your own enraged and anxious eyes fixed on yours… He almost let go. It was close. If he had, he would have been dead. The other’s arm came up between his throttling hands, over, then under, the standard break-the-throttle—and that hand had a phaser in it.

Picard did as he had been taught—let go with the left hand to break the twist, seized with it again from underneath this time, leaving the arm that had tried to break the hold useless above it, except that there was a phaser in it. And the phaser came in hard and hit him in the side of the head.

Everything went hot and shot with bright lights, and he fell back—but not before seizing his knees around the waist of the shape he had knocked sprawling and taking it rolling with him. His own hands came up, interlaced, and clubbed the other in the head.
Two can play at this game,
he thought, his own head still spinning. He clubbed again, but it did little good, and in a moment the hands were at
his
throat.

The phaser went flying, dropped out of the fingers that lost their grip for a moment, then found it again, on Picard’s throat this time. They rolled over and over on the
floor, two or three times. The other kneed him hard in the groin: the breath went out of Picard. He was grateful, at least, as he rolled away in a different direction, that he hadn’t been hit in the head again. It would have made him throw up, and he was quite sure that the other would kill him while he did—thus putting him out of his misery in an effective but permanent manner. As he rolled, he came upon one of the dropped phasers, gripped it, rolled to his knees gasping—and found that his counterpart, on his knees as well and clutching his bruised throat, was holding the other phaser on
him.

And the only problem was that Picard wasn’t sure whether he had the phaser with the safety off or the one with it on… and he didn’t dare look.

“‘Ill met by starlight’ indeed,” said the other, glaring at him and coughing.

“You heard that?”

“Hearing is always the last thing to go.”

“So Dr. Crusher says, yes. Well, the meeting was your idea. Don’t blame me for the circumstances, or if you don’t like the taste of it when it’s happened. You don’t suppose that we could just sit back and do nothing.”

The other laughed at him harshly. “I suppose we shouldn’t have, but then Fleet said that’s
exactly
what you’d do. Who was to know that you would be anywhere near as resourceful as we are?”

Picard had to laugh at the self-assured sound of it. “We are. The more fool you for taking Fleet seriously. What desk jockey ever correctly evaluated a field situation?”

The other looked at him. Picard felt like shivering. It was so strange, as if you looked in the mirror and the mirror spoke—words you never dreamed of, or words you had dreamed and put away as nothing you could ever say. “I must tell you immediately,” Picard said, “you’ll never succeed at this.”

“That I see you at all means that you have, much to our
surprise, made some move that was not purely defensive.” The other shrugged. “Our own personal success doesn’t matter in this. If we must try again at a later date, we will… and this time we’ll be prepared.”

“I very much doubt that,” Picard said softly. “Your intelligence, your
hard
intelligence on us, may be better by far than ours on you—but it’s the soft intelligence that will trip you. The knowing of personalities and unwritten laws… those you’ll never master. A day with your crew has made it plain.”

“So you say.” His counterpart gazed at him thoughtfully. “Are you so sure? Bears may dance badly, but they do dance. We
will
manage it again. There will be other parts of your Federation not so carefully watched. Back doors… weak spots. There are always such. You have had other conspiracies of late that nearly brought Starfleet itself down. Those were alien creatures involved, things not even human. Still they almost fooled you when installed near the heart of things. You’ll be easily enough fooled by us when we come back.”

“But there’s no hope of that ‘us’ including you. Not if I understand
your
Starfleet. You’ll be lucky to get out of this with your life.”

“Oh, I’ll manage,” said his counterpart, grinning evilly. Picard wanted to shudder at the thought that such an expression could live on his face. “I am still the most experienced captain they have. They had to come to me for advice when they began to put this plan together… and I didn’t spend the past five years of my career maneuvering to make sure that the mission was assigned to my ship.”

“To
you,
you mean.”

“You do learn, eventually. Of course. Once we’ve succeeded at this, even if the success isn’t total, the power I’ll acquire—”

It was in the middle of that sentence that Picard realized
what the other was doing and leapt at him, simply leapt like a mad thing, regardless of phasers—though he kept his clutched in his hand. He caught his counterpart in the chest, and again they went rolling over.
They’ll be here shortly,
he thought as he grabbed for the other’s flailing hand—managed to grab it by the wrist and began pounding it against the floor. The other rolled the other way, and the worst of it began, a thick, tangled, confused fight, all arms and legs, not the clean, efficient combat that had been taught Picard in school, but something more like the halves of a mind fighting. Two men who were one man, terrified of each other, trying to remember their expertise, losing it in the basic horror of the moment: that each of them was face-to-face with something that was his diametrical opposite, but each similarly equipped, each as sharp of mind, and the minutes ticking away. It could only be a matter of time before…

The other Picard caught him hard in the solar plexus, rolled away, lurched to his knees. Wheezing, gasping for breath, Jean-Luc came to his own knees and then threw himself sideways as the phaser beam sizzled past him, then once again threw himself straight at the other. The beam went awry, but only just. It singed his left eyebrow off, and the force of it passing through the air by his ear left him half-deaf on that side, the ear ringing. Not that it mattered in the wake of the red streak of pain that left him wondering whether he had actually been grazed. A graze it would have had to be, for anything closer would have left him without that side of his head. For a moment he struggled again with the other, then clubbed the phaser out of his hand with his own, and looked down into that snarling face, teeth bared, more an animal’s than a man’s.

He gripped his own phaser, checked the setting, the charge. The other glared sheer hate at him, made a grab at the phaser.

He stunned him point-blank, then reeled back, feeling sick to his stomach from the blows and the backwash of the stun. Picard staggered to his feet, tried to pull down his uniform, failed
again,
said, “
Ah, j’m’en fous!”

The sound of phaser fire came from outside. He whirled. The door opened.

And the counselor and two of her guards rushed in, with Worf behind them. They looked from him, to the form on the floor, to him again.

Picard had no time for their confused looks. “Barclay,” he breathed. He brushed past them as if they were hardly there, out into the hall.

Nothing. No one there: only the faintest smell of scorched meat. Not a body, not even a hand to clasp as the poor faithful soul passed away.

He turned, walking slowly back into the room. Troi was staring at him. He felt the brush of a veil against the face of his mind—but the fury was growing in him second by second, fueled by the tears starting to burn in his eyes. For a moment he tried to control himself—
No. I will hide no more of my humanity,
he thought,
though they kill me for it.
The anger burned, he could almost see the veil catch, bloom into fire, drift away as cinders—and Troi, looking at him, actually backed away from him a step, two steps, like death seeing Death.

“Where is Mr. Barclay?” he said softly.

“He should have known better than to put up resistance when a security matter was in hand,” Troi said.

He stepped toward her, backed her right into the wall, and took her one-handed under the chin, gripping hard. Her guards stared, fascinated and afraid, and did nothing. The counselor tried the stab of the mind again, but she was uncentered and unsure, and the blow missed. It stuck in the armor of his rage, the intensity of his emotion trapping it, and down the channel Troi had opened between them, Picard’s rage poured, transfixing her—open-eyed, openmouthed,
anguished, like a woman being burned at the stake in her mind.

“That was my best man,” Picard said, low, even-voiced. “A young officer barely past the threshold of his career. A loyal man. Who knows what he might have been in a year, or five? Except possibly
you
knew.” He looked at Troi, narrow-eyed. “Always better to nip these things in the bud, isn’t it?” He let go of her, looked away from her, disgusted by the sight of her—

—and found himself looking over at Mr. Worf. Worf’s expression was a strange one: recognition of something he had seen before, and confusion and dawning—Picard swallowed. He realized that Worf
knew,
beyond question he knew.

Picard simply stood there and looked at Worf for a second. There was nothing else to be done.

Worf looked back and never said a word. Confused, but not about to waste the moment, Picard turned back to Troi. He gestured at the floor. “Take that out of here.”

“The Booth?” Troi said weakly.

Picard’s mouth set hard. How many others had this other self ordered it for in his time? A little justice, though it came late, would suit his own present mood. “Yes. Wring it dry. How are the repairs?”

Troi actually stammered. “They’re, they’re coming along, Captain. We should be spaceworthy again, Hessan says, within—”

“Half the time she said,” Picard said bitterly, “whatever it was. See to it. Meantime—” He stepped much closer to Troi. “That was most unnecessary, Counselor.” He gestured with his head at the door. “You will rue this day’s work.”

“Not so much as you will,” she said rather desperately, “when Starfleet Command catches up with you. Quite shortly, I should say.”

“Trust me, Counselor,” Picard said, and his smile must
have been terrible, for she took another step back, “other things will catch up with
you,
first, and I will watch and enjoy every moment.” He pointed at the floor again. “Now get that out of here.”

Troi and her guards picked up the unconscious body of the other Picard and carried him out. “Mr. Worf,” Picard said, “perhaps you would wait a moment.”

When the doors had shut, they spent a long few moments studying each other. “You didn’t betray me,” Picard said. “I thank you for that. But how did you know?”

“Your manner. Your courtesy. The way you spoke to me earlier—taken together with the fact that you cared at all about a dead bodyguard. These have not been typical of ‘your’ past behavior.” Worf smiled grimly. “Unlike others here, I can see the unlikely when it is under my nose; I would not have survived long without learning how to notice things.”

Picard nodded. “Time is short. I must recover my people and go… but I will not forget your help.”

“I will see you safely away. But one thing quickly, before we go.” The abrupt sorrow in his eyes was terrible to see. “In your universe—what has happened to my people?”

Picard smiled somberly. “They are a mighty empire, and our allies. Oh, we were enemies once; there were times when we had territorial ambitions that clashed, and our fears of each other’s strengths blinded us for a long time to the ways we might help each other. But the will to peace, and some happy accidents, brought us together at last. Now the Klingon Empire is prospering, and its people are a noble and honorable race. Nothing is more important to them.”

Worf nodded. “So it was once with us. But not for a long time now.” He turned toward the door. “I will accompany you, Captain. Where are you going?”