Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [56]
“On that our cultures would agree,” Worf said. “Success to you, Captain.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. … Mr. O’Brien, have the away team made their transfer?”
“Thirty seconds ago, Captain.”
“Very good. I’m ready. Energize.”
The ready room dissolved around him.
The interior of the captain’s quarters shimmered inffbeing around them. Phasers in hand, they looked around hurriedly. No one was in sight.
Deanna looked around curiously. The room, as far as she could tell, was exactly the same as the captain’s rooms aboard their own Enterprise: even the bookshelves seemed the same to her.
Geordi glanced around, apparently having the same thought, then nodded briefly to her and went softly over toward the door, stopping just out of the range of its opening sensor and touching the control that would lock it from the inside. He gestured at the door with his head and raised his eyebrows at her.
She cast her sensitivities that way and got nothing but a sense of nearby boredom—the guard outside. That was something else she was still having trouble with. She had had just time enough to read the transcript left by Spock of the alternates’ presence aboard her own universe’s Enterprise and of the angry shout of the other Captain Kirk: “Where’s my personal guard?” The implications of those words alone had so shocked her that she was almost unable to take in the rest of the report: his offers to that Spock, of power, money, and command. This was a place where a captain not only did not expect his crew to trust him, but expected them to try to kill him on a fairly regular basis.
Deanna let her perceptions range a little more widely. They were still overwhelmingly negative … but it seemed to be troubling her a little less. Possibly, like a bad smell, if you stayed in the midst of it for long enough, it stopped bothering you as much. Deanna shuddered. She wasn’t sure she wanted such emotions to stop bothering her.
Geordi nodded and moved off to one side of the room, toward the captain’s closet—pulling out his tricorder, now muted, and checking the closet for booby traps. Satisfied, he touched a control. The door slid aside, revealing neatly hung uniforms.
“Uh-oh,” he said softly.
Troi looked at him. “Problems?”
“Not really. It’s just that all these uniforms”— he went through several on the rack—”are like mine, but more so. The captain’s going to love that.”
Deanna let out a small breath of amusement, then turned her attention once again toward what she could sense outside the room. She moved about slowly, past the bed, toward the far side of the room and the windows on the stars, letting the motion calm her and help her think. There was a doorway at the far end of the room where as far as she could remember there had been none before, but for the moment she let that pass, stopping short of it while she stood there and cast about her with her mind. That same low, almost snarling background noise, of anger, frustration, low-level hatred. That was the worst of it: the hatred was so ingrained that much of it was more or less taken for granted, habitual —like mental nail-biting. Here and there a bright spot sparked, a place where the emotion flared— anger, here and there pleasure—but too rarely.
She let her mind quest outward—forward, yes, and to port a little ways—
Shock stopped her then, and an odd feeling, so strange, so like— For a fraction of a second she struggled for simile. Like having your leg fall asleep, then touching it and being unable to feel it, but knowing it’s yours. That wasn’t quite it either. This was a cast of mind so familiar—and no surprise, for it was hers. But it wasn’t her. It was the other Troi, at rest for the moment, calm enough. But the taste of that mind—Deanna wanted to jerk her whole inner self back as if she had touched something burning hot. But she knew that the vehemence of the movement might attract the other’s attention. Slowly she edged away, like a bird avoiding a sunning snake. The comparison was apt. The