Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [54]
Troi sat there, feeling Geordi’s tension beginning to rise, and looked over at him thoughtfully. He caught her glance, cocked his head at her, smiled. “It’s bad, huh,” he said.
“I try to manage it,” she said, “but I think you do better than I do. Or than most.”
He smiled at her. “Nice to know. It’s just that this method of communications … raises the old blood pressure a little.”
“Like passing notes at school,” Troi said wryly. Geordi laughed out loud, though without taking his eyes off the spot on the floor from which the iso chip had vanished. He picked up the small tricorder that he had brought with him and hefted it, then flipped it open and touched a couple of the controls.
“I thought you said you couldn’t get a decent scan so close to the FTL field.”
“Not what I’m used to, no,” Geordi said absently, adjusting another control. “But a passive scan, very low-power, “blunt” and unfocused, will still work—and the core’s proximity will act to confuse any system that might be listening.”
Geordi gazed at the display, reading its mysteries. Troi shook her head and waited, trying to stay calm. “A few possibilities,” he said. “Down by the field generators for the structural integrity field: there are blind spots there. Back of the deck just above the shuttle bay, the field generators for the irising atmosphere-integrity field would interfere.” He paused then, looking slightly astonished.
“What is it?” Troi said, leaning over his shoulder to look.
He pointed at the display. A large fuzzy blot showed off to one side of the schematic of the primary hull, which Geordi was studying. Another, smaller blot counterbalanced it to forward. “Deck eleven, right,” he said softly.
“The captain’s quarters,” said Deanna. “It would make sense, here—one of the few spots in the ship that can’t be scanned.”
“And unoccupied,” Geordi said. “That one isn’t.” Deanna looked at the second spot on the schematic to which he was pointing and swallowed. She knew very well the location of her own quarters. “Now,” Geordi said, “scan for electromagnetics and life-signs won’t work, but see …” He made an adjustment: the larger blurs vanished, and in the area to port, a slight small glowing smudge appeared, with a faint trail behind it. “Plain old heat shows just fine. Thirty-seven point six centigrade.” And on the starboard side, there were several small blurs outside the captain’s quarters, but none inside.
“That’s the spot,” Geordi said, grinning—the grin had gone wolflike. “Let’s make a note and send them one more chip.”
Picard looked up finally and said, “I’ll go.”
“Captain!”
“I’m willing to hear what else you have to suggest,” he said to Riker as calmly as he could —and it was hard: it felt to him as if his blood were jangling. “But you have about one minute to convince me. Otherwise that other ship’s security is going to come down around our people’s ears.”
“I’m not sure that the risk to them is as great as the risk would be to you,” Riker said. Picard looked at him with veiled admiration. What must it take for the man to say that when one of the away team is Deanna? he thought. “If they were caught, even killed, the damage to the Enterprise would not be as great as it would be should you be lost. And besides— we’re reasoning from very old data. There may have been changes.”
“Number One,” Picard said a touch sharply. “You’ve read Kirk’s report by now. Though our … management styles … might differ somewhat, he was an excellent commander and never prone to exaggeration. You’ve read his description of the people among whom he found himself. Are you willing to bet that the crew of that ship, descendants of that earlier culture, have changed that much in eighty years? Are you willing to bet the away team’s lives on the premise that a miracle might have happened?—because their lives are the counters on the table at the moment.”
Riker frowned harder than before, if possible. “It’s just that—”
“You don’t want to let the captain risk himself, yes, yes, we’ve had this argument how many times?—and will have it again many times more.”
“That