Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [116]
“There,” she said to the nervously waiting engineering staff. “Now do what you were doing and hurry. We don’t have all day here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” some of them said, and people started descending into the shaft again.
Sweating, Troi walked out briskly, her head high, and made her way without stopping straight back to La Forge’s quarters. There, clutching the tricorder and chip, she sat down, then laid them aside, folded her hands, and tried to center herself enough to at least get control over the stress. It was very hard.
That wasn’t too bad, she thought, but I’m going to have to do it again almost right away. First, though …
When she was adequately centered, Deanna did what she had not yet dared to do—felt around her with her mind and reached directly toward that other mind that so closely matched her own in structure. She got quite close, in that directionless, distanceless way that minds have of drawing near or apart from one another. She waited for it to notice her.
It didn’t. It was very busy on some matter of its own, lost in cool enjoyment that rose and fell in time with the screams in Geordi’s mind. Deanna shuddered, but she could understand the rationale for the torture perfectly well. Even powerful telepaths preferred exterior circumstances to do as much of their work for them as possible. Why bother breaking a mind’s barriers yourself, and wearing yourself out, when good old-fashioned pain could do the job as well?—leaving you to go over the remains unwearied. All loathsome—but it might serve her yet.
She leaned up closer yet against that mind and actually put some pressure on it. There was no one else, Deanna knew, that she could do this with; but this was her mind. She could influence it.
And it noticed nothing. … She leaned there a good few moments, but it was so busy with its own nasty delights that it never noticed her. Deanna wanted to shudder again—how could anyone luxuriate in someone’s pain this way?—but she repressed the urge, afraid it would attract notice. Indeed she must keep her own reactions very much to herself for the next little while, and she choked the revulsion moving in her down to almost nothing. It was horrible to see this “her”: it indicated all too clearly what, if things had gone wrong in the past —or did go wrong in the future—she could become. She didn’t let it distract her, though.
She slipped softly closer in mind, until she could actually start hearing some thoughts. It was eerie, and bitterly frustrating, that the only time she should approach anything like a Betazed’s proper abilities should be while en rapport with this creature. But she kept herself calm and listened and opened her mind to the thoughts and the images. Who came with you? she heard the counselor demand— felt Geordi try desperately to resist and saw her own image flicker across his mind. Counselor.
Her counterpart mistook his meaning, pressed him harder. Deanna swallowed; by so little had her position been protected.
Then the next image came up out of the haze of pain. Picard. Down the link, she could hear her counterpart thinking, The captain! Her mind suddenly was aflame with conjecture, instantly satisfied. She realized that the man to whom she had spoken, who had seemed so gentle and noncommittal, was not at all the man she thought she had been speaking to.
The counselor opened her eyes and turned away from the suffering, screaming man, toward her guards. “You and you, come with me. You,” she said to the third, “stay here. Leave him on this setting for about ten minutes, then lower it again—not long enough to let him recover completely. And make sure you keep an eye on the refresh rate.”
“Yes, Counselor.”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes … then I’ll let you know what’s to be done with him next.” And off she went, her guards in tow.
Deanna felt her do it. Immediately she