Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [111]
He stood silent and merely looked at her.
“I see. That pride of yours.” She shook her head. “No matter. If you recover this situation by yourself, then we’ll talk further. I’ll have no need to contact Starfleet.” Somehow he knew that this was a lie: if she hadn’t already done it, she was going to do it quite soon. “If I must do it, I think you know very well the aftereffects will be unfortunate. Commander Riker has refused several offers of command of other craft, as you know, because he’s been waiting for this one. He won’t have thought to be authorized to take command of it so soon.”
Picard considered how many meanings rode behind the word authorized. She would call Starfleet and get permission to have him assassinated. Would she let Riker do it, he found himself wondering with an almost clinical detachment, or would she insist on doing it herself? Hell hath no fury …
“I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” she said, turning, and added with some scorn, “such as they are. Third-rate poets.”
“There is nothing third-rate about Villon,” Picard said mildly.
She snorted. “I have some other matters to attend to.” She turned and went quickly out. The feeling of rage that trailed behind her in the air was like smoke. He was meant to feel it, he thought, meant to take alarm.
He was alarmed, but not in the way she thought.
In the shaft servicing the computer core, Geordi pulled out another chip, scanned it, found it compromised, and slipped one of his own storage chips into place. He touched the “run” command on his padd again and started loading in the last eighty terabytes of material. It always seemed to take longer when you were so close to the end of a job. He whistled softly, looked around him, then started pulling some of the other chips to genuinely replace them.
The padd flashed at him: that chip was full. Only four terabytes. He shook his head, took another from the belt pouch and slipped it into the spot the first one had occupied.
“Mr. La Forge?” Eileen’s voice said from above. “Can you come have a look at this one?”
“What—got a problem?”
“Yes, I’m not sure what to make of this.”
“Right,” he said, perching his padd just inside the open panel he was working on. “God,” he said, floating upward—he had changed to a floater half an hour ago—”I’m so stiff from sitting on this … thing,” he finished as his head rose above the level of the top of the shaft, and he looked up at those boots, those legs, that skirt—and, looking down on him, her eyebrows raised slightly, the counselor, with two security people behind her, phasers drawn and pointed at him.
He swallowed. “Counselor Troi.” The first thought to pass through his mind was that he should simply push himself back off the floater and take the fall, a hundred fifty feet down to the bottom of the core, before she could—
—and it was too late. He was frozen like a statue where he sat, unable to move, and she was inside his head. The pressure of it was like bricks laid on his brain, squeezing it down, squeezing his will down and out of the way, while from inside a knife sliced delicately through layer after layer of thought, looking for something in particular —and then it found it.
With terrible clarity, clarity greater than even he had experienced in the moment itself, he saw his hands pull out the little transporter tag, put it on the pile of chips, and beam them away. Then his sight was his own again, and he was looking at Troi, and Hessan standing beside her, with a quirk of nasty smile on her face. And he still couldn’t move a muscle.
“Why, it’s quite true,” said the counselor with great interest. “You were quite correct to send for me, Hessan. You did see what you thought you saw. Not the same chips at all. Where did those go, I wonder?”
She looked at Geordi. “Two of you,” she said to her security people. “Haul him up out of there. Take him down to the Agony Booth by my quarters: that one’s still working. We’ll have a nice long talk. Good. One thing first.”
She pulled the