Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [122]
Worf nodded. “So it was once with us. But not for a long time now.” He turned toward the door. “I will accompany you, Captain. Where are you going?”
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