The Soldiers of Fear (9 page)

"I also ran several experiments on this sector of space, thinking perhaps we had run into some sort of field that generated unease within the crew."

Picard felt startled. He hadn't thought of that, even though it was obvious. Too much of his energy was focused on remaining calm.

"And?" he asked.

"Nothing, sir. We seem to be in a normal sector of space."

For some reason, the news did not discourage Picard. It made him realize that there were answers, and answers beyond the Furies' control of the subconscious.

The key was to find those answers before the Furies' attack began in earnest.

"Excellent, Mr. Data," Picard said. "Keep working along those lines. If you need additional resources, let me know."

"Aye, sir." Data turned back to his console.

Picard resisted the urge to cross his fingers. If they could find a way to block the fear the Furies caused, they would have half the battle won. Perhaps more than that. The fact that Data had come up with ideas Picard had not thought of disturbed Picard, and showed, only too clearly, the advantage that fear gave the Furies.

Picard needed to take that advantage away.

And he needed to do it soon.

RIKER KEPT HIS HEAD DOWN as he moved through the ship. He had tried, when he first got on the turbolift, to pretend nothing was wrong, but he couldn't. Seeing fear in the other crew members made fear increase within him. And he needed to bring the fear down. Captain Picard felt the same terror, yet he seemed to continually face it. Somehow it weakened Riker's defenses, made him seem less than he was.

He finally understood how the Klingons felt disgraced in battle with the Furies. Riker had survived on a Klingon ship, against the betrayal, the constant danger, the tests made on his human capabilities, and he had seen that as a challenge. Nothing had brought this kind of deep emotion out in him before.

The same things had probably happened to the Klingons in that first fight. They were used to being tough. They knew how to master difficult circumstances. They never suffered from unreasonable fears. Every fear they faced, and faced down, was justified.

A Klingon always weighed the risks and entered into battle knowing the odds. But that time a Klingon general had panicked and turned to the Federation for help. No wonder they never talked about that battle, even in legends.

Now Riker didn't even know what he was fighting. He suspected he was fighting himself.

Throughout the ship, crew members were down. Some had passed out. Others were moaning. A few were running as if the hounds of hell were behind them and perhaps they were.

An even larger number of crew were getting back on their feet, surveying their surroundings, mastering their feelings, and helping those around them. Their eyes had a haunted look that probably mirrored the look in Riker's eyes. He knew if he survived this he would never again view his own capabilities the same way.

So, coming into engineering seemed like walking into a haven. Three crew members were unconscious, and someone had propped them near the door. Pale, shaking engineers were examining the warp core. Two ensigns were repairing a sensor pad on top of the screen grid.

Geordi was milling through all of it, appearing busy and concerned. The only thing that gave away his own terror was the speed with which he moved. Geordi always hurried when he felt he could do nothing else. He was hurrying now.

The surprise was Redbay. Someone else had made out the duty rosters this week, and they had placed Redbay in engineering. He now leaned over a console, his forehead propped against the plastic edge of a screen, his lanky frame hunched forward.

"Sam," Riker said.

Redbay snapped to attention, something he never usually did. Redbay's normal movements were languorous, even in battle. He always moved as if he couldn't be bothered, as if the latest threat were a mere inconvenience. This time was different. This time, he gripped the laser pen in one hand and nodded at Riker.

Redbay's eyes were haunted too.

Their gazes met. Two old friends who knew, without saying, what the other had been through.

"The captain sent me down here. He thinks we can block these waves of emotion."

"I do too," Geordi said from behind him, words clipped and businesslike. "I think there's a link between the fear we felt on the station, and the fear felt shipwide here. Most people paralyzed by terror on the Enterprise hadn't seen the Fury. And a significant number aren't human and don't have the same subconscious fears. If I were making a hypothesis, I would say that only select Terrans would be frightened by the imagery we saw on the station, yet it affected me. My parents were in Starfleet, and I didn't hear about the more colorful versions of hell until we studied the Furies at the Academy."

"We can rule out smell," Redbay said. "Our noses aren't detecting anything, and the computer says that nothing has changed in the chemical component of the air."

"I don't want to rule anything out yet," Riker said. "Some gases are odorless, and we can still suffer their effects."

"But the computer should be able to read them."

Riker shook his head. "Our systems are good, but they're not perfect. The Furies are clearly sending something our way, and our sensors aren't picking up a beam or a weapon or anything. They've been in this quadrant before, eighty years ago. They've had plenty of time to develop a weapon that will affect us, but one that we can't detect."

"It would help," Geordi said, "if we could determine the nature of the weapon."

"If there is a weapon," Riker said. But he knew he was being too careful. The Enterprise had been attacked, he knew that for certain.

"There is," Redbay said. "There has to be."

Riker grinned at his friend. There had to be not because it was logical, but so that they could save face, within themselves. One of the major tests for Academy admission was the ability to subdue fear. A cadet had to be able to face any situation with strength. That way he could negotiate with creatures that terrified him, or keep a cool head in the middle of an attack.

As the captain had.

As Riker attempted to do, and had, if he were being honest with himself. It just hadn't felt that way.

It still didn't. His greatest fear was that he would lose control of himself.

He shoved the fear aside.

"I have some ideas, Will," Redbay said. "I've been thinking about them since" he paused, grinned, and shrugged "well, since I got my brain back. Let's assume that the Furies have developed some sort of weapon that does this to us. If so, it must be something that can be projected across distances. To send a gas through a vacuum would require some kind of containment field, and that would be very difficult to hide."

"We don't know the limits of their technology," Geordi said. "They might be able to hide such a field from us."

"Perhaps," Redbay said. "The reactions you had on the station argue for some sort of assault on the senses. Smell is the most logical. But Lieutenant, we were all hit with this wave, as Will calls it, at the same time. You were in a Jeffries tube. One of the ensigns still out cold over there was in the containment field around the warp core."

"And it has a separate air-filtration system," Geordi said.

"So does the Jeffries tube," Riker said, beginning to follow Redbay's argument. "Anything airborne would have taken longer to hit people in these separate areas, and it seemed that we all got hit at once."

"So we can fairly safely rule out smell," La Forge said.

Riker nodded.

"Sound could have reached all of us at the same time," Redbay said, "but unless I miss my guess, Captain Picard was not broadcasting his talk with the Fury shipwide."

"No, he wasn't," Riker said. He frowned. "For the Furies to be using sound, they would have to broadcast on some sort of wavelength that was carried along on the transmission. And when the conversation was cut the effect should have stopped."

"True," Geordi said. "It would either have to piggyback on the communication with the captain or it would have to travel long distances and somehow pierce the hull and affect all of us at the same time. Again, a containment field would be needed."

"Not likely," Redbay said, "at least not without detection. I was modulating the screens when that first attack hit. I should have noticed something."

"Data was actually monitoring the Furies' vessels," Riker said, "and he found nothing."

"So they are using something subtler, something not quite as obvious, and something that can affect all of us at exactly the same time."

"It would need to be a beam of some kind, but of a kind we don't recognize right off." Geordi's voice was rising with his excitement. "We would have to test for everything."

"Not everything." Riker believed he knew where Redbay was going. "Only physical things, things which would induce an involuntary fear reaction."

"Smell, sound, sight, what else?" Geordi asked.

"No," Redbay said. "Maybe just the reaction to sight, smell, and sound. What does the body produce in reaction to those outside stimuli? Pheromones? I'm not real strong in that area."

"But doesn't that fall under smell?" Riker asked. He didn't know either. But he knew who to ask.

Geordi shrugged. "It's outside my area of expertise, too. I suggest we consult with Dr. Crusher. I also think we might want to test you, me, and Data to see if we brought anything back from the station. Maybe the Furies baited a trap for us, lured us over there, and had us bring back the trigger. The trigger might be some sort of virus, airborne, and then they pull the switch on their ship, and voilŕ, we all get scared."

"It's one theory," Redbay said.

Riker agreed. His logical mind said there needed to be a reason why the Furies did what they did on the Brundage Station. They couldn't have done such a thing just in spite.

"Follow that idea, too," Riker said. "The captain did say that the Furies would be stronger this time."

"Did the first run-in with them have this weapon?" Redbay asked.

"Not that the records show," Riker said. "The reaction back then seemed to be more out of fear of what they looked like, what they represented. Kirk and the rest of that crew never mention that the Furies used such fear as a weapon."

"Except," Geordi said slowly, "those old reports were of cultural demons and devils, figures of myth returned. The Klingons put a high store in that sort of thing, even now. It caused their extreme reaction, that ended up bringing in the original Enterprise. Remember Worf 's reaction when Kahless returned?"

Riker nodded.

"This is different," Geordi went on. "When I got hit in the Jeffries tube, I was flashing back on that fire when I was five. I could have sworn everything on the ship was burning up."

Redbay nodded. "I was back reliving the horror of the day my parents died."

And Riker, who had never allowed himself real terror, hadn't had anything to pin his fear on. Somehow that bothered him even more. "What's your point, Geordi?" he asked, wanting to move his own thinking away from the terror and his ability or lack of ability to control it.

"This fear hit us, and instead of finding an external cause, our minds searched for the last time we had felt this kind of terror and made up the rest. This wasn't cultural. This is sophisticated."

"A weapon," Redbay agreed. "We're back to that again. But a weapon that somehow triggers fear reactions normally caused by sights, smells, and sounds."

Geordi grinned. "If it's a weapon, we can find it. And we can block it."

Riker grinned too. Even though the fear was still present, like the hum of a machine in the background, it suddenly became tolerable. "Then we need to find a systematic way of searching for it."

"Yes," Redbay started.

Then Picard's voice cut over the comm system. "Senior staff to the conference room."

The order made Riker shudder. He didn't want to know what emergency had broken now.

But that was his fear talking.

He took a deep breath. Geordi clapped him on the shoulder and turned to Redbay. "Lieutenant," Geordi said, "go ahead and begin a search. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Redbay nodded and bent over the consoles. Riker and Geordi left engineering at full run.

"Sam's creative," Riker said as they got on the turbolift. "If anyone can find out what's going on, Sam can."

"I hope so," Geordi said. "Because I have the feeling we don't have a lot of time."

BEVERLY CRUSHER STOPPED outside the door to Deanna Troi's quarters. Fear made her heart race, and because she wasn't sure if the fear was entirely real or a product of her fevered imagination, she actually knocked.

And received no response.

"What am I doing?" she whispered. Around her the corridor was filled with dazed crew members. At an intersection a short distance away a crew member lay unconscious, her arms covering her face as if something had been hitting her when she passed out.

Beverly hesitated, wanting to go to the woman, then forced her mind back on her goal. She took a deep breath, brushed aside a strand of loose red hair, and then said, "Computer, emergency medical override."

The door hissed open, and there was Deanna on the floor, her face pressed against the carpet, one hand raised and the other bent awkwardly beneath her.

It looked as if she'd been trying to crawl to the door to escape something terrible behind her.

Beverly's fears had been real.

She knelt beside Deanna, and as she pulled out her medical tricorder, she smoothed Deanna's hair away from her face. Deanna's eyes were rolled back in their sockets, lashes fluttered. Her mouth was partially open, and her skin was clammy.

Beverly flipped open the tricorder and ran it over Deanna. Her pulse was too rapid, her blood pressure was high, and the levels of adrenaline in her system were off the charts. Yet she wasn't moving. These readings matched the readings from Lieutenant Young, and the result appeared to be the same:

Deanna was dying.

Beverly grabbed a needle from her kit, and then paused. To wake Deanna would be to put her through hell. According to the tricorder readings, Deanna was still conscious, but her system was overloaded. To stimulate her, to make her mind deal with all of the input it was getting, would probably push her over the edge into total insanity.