Dark Mirror (37 page)

Picard touched his communicator: there was no more time for secrecy. “Counselor—where are you?”

“
The core access room above the starboard primary-hull core,”
the answer came back. “
Hurry, Captain!”

“Where’s Mr. La Forge?”

“
He’s here, sir. He’s lost his transponder, but otherwise he’s all right.”

“We’re on our way…. Come on, Mr. Worf.”

“
We’re
on our way?” Geordi muttered, touching his tricorder into life again.

Troi, standing by the locked door with her phaser drawn, shook her head. “Don’t ask me…. How is it?”

“Security barriers are still down,” Geordi said, rubbing his aching head as he worked. “Not for long, though. Eileen has been a busy little bee. But I still know a few tricks she doesn’t.”

He worked over the tricorder. “She’s restored the core on the other side, but I can reroute this control pathway to the core in the engineering hull.” He grinned. “You can’t be in two places at once.”

“Oh, can’t you,” Troi said, looking at the door. “We both
are.”

Geordi snorted, then winced at the residual pain the gesture cost him. “We are, maybe, but Eileen’s not, and her crew down that way aren’t in that much of a hurry, to judge by what I see here. Some kind of place,” he muttered, “where people won’t work unless someone is standing over them. Ah…”

Troi looked nervously at the door. The emotional “temperature” of the ship was rather higher than it had been for the past few hours, and one particular bloom of emotion caught her attention: a dreadful cold rage, and closely associated with it, in another mind, raging anger so tinged with embarrassment that she shied from the touch of it… and that was in the mind that seemed, structurally, so like hers. She didn’t dare open the link that had been between them earlier, but she could guess what was going
on—the other counselor had discovered that Geordi was missing, taken away by another Troi.

Then came a feeling of movement—toward them, mentally as well as physically. She could feel that other mind feeling about it for its own version of the link, a way to tell what
she
was doing and feeling. “Trouble,” she said, starting to erect her mental protections as quickly as she could. “Hurry up!”

“I’m going as fast as I can, Counselor.”

When they had started training her, as a child, in erecting the mental barriers that kept a Betazed’s mind from being littered with other people’s emotional baggage all the time, Deanna had made one of those laughable mistakes that your family then teases you about for years afterward. Hearing the term
mental block,
she had always envisioned her barriers as just that, blocks—brightly colored and piled up in a wall between her and whatever she wanted to shut out. Now she started piling them up in her mind as fast as she could, the ones with the letters and numbers on them, and the ones with painted pictures of animals, the paint a little chipped and fading, but the blocks absolutely dependable… once they were in place. Nervousness sometimes made her fumble them. Today, though, she slammed them in place in her mind with frantic speed and saw the wall grow, willing it to be invulnerable—for there was more than just her behind it. Geordi would be very vulnerable at the moment, she must not allow—

“Got it!” Geordi said softly, and slapped another isolinear chip down on the console’s reading pad. “Resumed.”

That core of embarrassed anger came hurrying closer and closer. Troi pulled out her phaser, adjusted it to full stun, and waited. “She’s coming,” she whispered to Geordi.

She saw him shudder all over, and moan with the pain of
the movement. Nonetheless, he pulled the chip off the reading pad on the console and substituted another. “One-third done, Counselor,” he said, and that was all he said.

Troi bit her lip, put herself behind the door, and waited.

The sound of phaser fire came from right outside the door. Troi got an image from her counterpart of the sparks and smoke jumping from the door control. The door flew open.

It was, of course, one of her guards that plunged in first: no chance she would have gone in first herself, if only because it was below her dignity. Deanna stunned the man immediately.

From outside, that mind seized hers. Its power was terrible, magnified by some kind of training that Deanna couldn’t believe—and, terribly, that she coveted.
I could have that kind of power,
she thought.

The wall of blocks trembled. Oh,
no,
Deanna said, furious that she could be tempted that way. But she was having none of it. She reached out to that other mind, grappled with it. Then came the shock of satisfaction as the
other’s
alarm came down the link, now reestablished, between them. The other might have raw power, but Deanna had finesse. The other battered at her blocks and found them too well established: hit them, hit them again, bristling with rage and scorn.

But her counterpart had no blocks up at all—apparently thinking she had no need for them. And it was hilarious, in a way, for she refused to acknowledge Deanna as another version of herself—if she had, she could have treated Deanna’s blocks as if they were her own and demolished them, as it were, from the inside.

Deanna, though, knew perfectly well they were more or less the same person—no matter how loathsome the
concept was—and knew she could affect that other mind as if it were her own. She laughed soundlessly and left the other battering at her own protective walls, while she slipped out from behind one of them and came at the counselor’s mind from underneath, stabbing it deep with a well-whetted knife of rage at what the counselor had done to Geordi.

There was a soundless shriek of pain and surprise at the violation. Deanna enjoyed the feeling, and while the other was frozen with reaction, simply stepped around from her hiding place by the doorway and out into the corridor. Alone, the counselor stood there, trying to move, unable to escape the iron grip Deanna had on her—and Deanna, very calmly, stepped up to her and clubbed her in the side of the head with her phaser.

The counselor went down like a felled tree. “You can have too much of the life of the mind,” she said softly, and reached down to take the counselor under the armpits and drag her in out of sight.

Geordi was still busy with the tricorder. “How much longer?” Deanna said, starting to feel the reaction now to what she had just done, and the nervousness—for other minds were coming toward them, very close. One of them was plainly Picard’s—all stern resolution and an odd pity. In company with it was another, a smothered blaze of excitement and surmise. Another, though, was Picard’s counterpart’s, that icy rage very much in evidence, and they were both getting closer all the time.

“Just a couple more minutes!” Geordi said.

Down the corridor, Deanna heard the turbolift door open.

She peered out most cautiously, hearing the hurrying footsteps, holding the phaser ready—

—and saw the captain and this universe’s Worf coming toward them. All was well with both their minds, there was
no sense of compulsion. Her face lit briefly with the smile she hadn’t dared to let out.

“Captain!”

“Counselor,” Picard said, then winced a little and smiled. “Perhaps I might call you Deanna for the moment—I’ve had enough of the counselor for one day.”

“It would seem
she
has as well,” Worf said as they stepped into the core access room and found the other Troi collapsed on the floor.

Picard raised an eyebrow at this and looked over at Geordi. “Mr. La Forge, how is it going?”

“Almost done, Captain. One more chip.”

“I meant, how are
you?”

Geordi smiled, then groaned again. “I feel like elephants have been holding a tap-dancing competition on my body, and the finals are being held in my head. But other than that…”

Picard nodded. Worf was looking around at them, the expressions of relief, the humor, and Deanna got a brief mental image of a hungry man standing outside a window full of food, looking in with longing. “Fellowship,” Worf said. “Honor. This would be a universe worth fighting for.”

“We think so,” Picard said. “But it’s not too late for yours. Mr. Worf, the first officer of an earlier
Enterprise
of this universe said that the Empire had only two hundred years or so to run. One hundred of those years are gone. It is closer to its fall than ever… and perhaps for reasons that not even your Spock suspected. The Empire is overextending itself, parsec by parsec, day by day. In another—oh, even fifty or sixty years—its forces will be spread so widely through the space it claims to ‘control’ that the control will be a myth. That will be the time for the peoples who have been suppressed to stand up and throw off the yoke. Inevitably, the time will come. If you and your people can be ready for it…”

Worf’s eyes gleamed. “A long time we have dreamed that things might somehow become better. But they were only dreams: no one ever took them seriously or did anything about them. However, to know that the dream is a reality, somewhere,
anywhere…”

“The dream is alive, Mr. Worf,” Picard said. “Who knows—maybe in seventy or eighty years, if our Fleet allows, we might put our noses back in to see how you are getting on. Or, if news of this technique for travel between congruent universes gets around, perhaps the Klingons will.” He laughed softly. “I suspect that would make an interesting visit. But this is all conjecture: your worlds’ fates are in your own hands. Just know that we will always wish you well.”

“Damn!” Geordi said. “Lockout! Security protocols are back up. The cores are restoring from backup.”

“Did you get everything?”

“Ninety-eight percent, but if that last two percent was the bit we need… !”

From down the corridor came the sound of the turbolift doors opening, and then the sound of running footsteps.

“No more time,” Picard said. “Get that chip, Mr. La Forge.”

“Mr. Worf,” Deanna said, lifting the phaser. He looked at her in brief shock, then nodded and smiled the ghost of a smile.

She stunned him, and he crumpled to the floor over Troi as the captain touched his badge. “
Enterprise,
” he said hurriedly, “emergency, three to beam back
now!”

They clustered together, Troi with one arm around Geordi, to compensate for the lost transponder, she told herself—but he sagged against her with such alarming weariness that she might have spared herself the excuse. The doorway filled with figures holding phasers, one of them being the other Picard. As the transport effect took
them, Deanna caught a last blast of blinding rage from him, saw the face twisted with it, screaming. The phaser beams stitched through them, and as the world dissolved, Deanna heard that other Picard shouting, “Bridge, trace this transport and destroy the source!”

And it all vanished like a bad dream—

—and dissolved into the interior of the shuttlecraft. They stared around them, relieved to be somewhere completely normal, but Picard was unnerved. That ship’s phaser capacity would be back now; it would be easy enough to detect this craft and—

They started to dissolve again. It seemed to take an unconscionable time. But no sooner had the singing whine of the transporter completely washed all other sound away than a sheet of white fire went through the place. Picard watched with a degree of fascination as the walls of the shuttlecraft blew away to nothing around them, the white fire fading to black, then to stars, which faded as well.

Light grew around them again slowly, through the unchanging shimmer, and slowly the transporter room became visible. When the soft singing noise finally dwindled to nothing, Picard and the other members of the away team looked at each other almost in disbelief, and then out at Chief O’Brien, who was bracing himself against his console like a man who needed help in standing up.

He looked at them and said, “I’m glad I handled that one
myself, directly from here. If the pattern buffer in the transporter on the
Hawking
had been—”

Picard shook his head and came down from the platform. “If it had…. Never mind…. Thank you, Chief.”

From all around them came the whooping of the red-alert sirens. Picard touched his communicator. “Picard to Number One.”

“
Captain,”
Riker’s voice said, “
forgive me if I say I’m very glad to hear you!”

“Let’s save the rejoicing for the moment,” Picard said. “What’s the situation?”

“
The other
Enterprise
is in restart cycle,”
Riker said.

“Looks like they had to shut down the warp engines toward the end of their computer problems, but they didn’t have time to get too cold: we only have a few minutes’ grace.”

“I don’t intend to linger, Number One. Pick a direction and go to warp five immediately. I’ve had enough of this neighborhood.”

“
Yes, sir,”
Riker said with relish. “
Mr. Redpath! Bearing one, two, five, mark eight, warp five, go!”

Picard didn’t hear the response, but he could instantly feel the subtle difference in the ship’s “feel” as she went into warp. Troi was helping Geordi down off the pad; he was still weak and looked pallid. “Mr. La Forge,” Picard said, “my apologies. You’ve suffered worse than anyone else in this operation. And worse yet, we still need you.”

Geordi nodded. “It’s all right, Captain. We’ve got the goods. At least I think we have.”

“Get down to engineering and find out,” Picard said. “Commander Riker! Have a full team prepared to meet Mr. La Forge in engineering.”

“
Commander Hwiii is ahead of you, Captain,”
said Riker, “
literally. He and a team of fifty are waiting. Tell Mr. La Forge that a platform to support the apparatus is built and waiting for him.”

“Acknowledged.” Picard looked over at Troi as Geordi went out. Troi’s face looked odd. Then odder still—and then she sneezed.

Picard laughed a great laugh… and it felt extremely good. “My feelings exactly, Counselor,” he said, looking down at himself. “Let’s get out of here and slip into something more comfortable.”