Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [119]
“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