Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [84]
The bay had a raised platform in the middle of it, with a cylindrical force field shimmering around the perimeter. In the middle of it, suspended like a puppet on invisible strings, hung Wesley Crusher, his body twisting, racked with pain; and he screamed and screamed again. Not too far from him, at a console controlling the installation, stood Troi, with a couple of her own security people behind her. She turned as Picard stopped in the bay’s doorway, and the smile with which she favored him was almost sunny.
“Captain,” she said. “You’re looking much better.” She turned back to Wesley, admiring, with smiling detachment, the way he curled like a poked bug, and shrieked, and curled again.
“These do work so much better than the old ones,” she said. “Those were blunt instruments at best, the old agonizers. Just general field effect on the nerves—no subtlety about it, no specificity. When they learned to tune the effect, though, when they learned to match it specifically to the requirements of the specific nervous system—so much better. No waste motion, no waste energy.” She leaned against the console, smiling through the cries of desperate pain, the bark and wheeze of indrawn breath. “Each agonizer calibrated to the pain center in its wearer’s brain, and matched to his nervous system, to the places where he hurts worst. One man might be better enervated in the hands than the trunk: then it’s the man’s hands that catch fire, not just the all-over pain that we had to settle for in the old days. And it does so much less damage than the old ones used to do … progress is wonderful.”
She turned back to the console while Picard kept his face from showing anything whatsoever. “And there are other refinements,” she said. “Moment-to-moment evaluation of which nerves have overfired and need to rest before they become sensitive again. The shift of the load to those which have regenerated. All much more satisfactory.”
“I thought I gave orders,” Picard said very quietly, “that he was to be confined to quarters pending my decision on what further action was to be taken.”
Troi waved a hand. “You know my authority supersedes yours in matters pertaining to security. You can’t just let someone attempt to assassinate the captain of a starship and then walk away.” Oh, can’t you? Picard thought, furious, but kept his peace. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: that’s the rule, isn’t it? He tried for the whole carcass. So?” She shrugged. “He gets what he’s brought down on himself. How can you possibly object? … Or maybe you’re just feeling that much better after Dr. Crusher’s … ministrations.” She gave him a half-lidded look that added a whole new set of meanings to the word.
“Counselor,” Picard said. “Even in matters of security, unless there are most pressing reasons to be overridden, I expect to have my orders obeyed.”
“Not in this case,” Troi said, looking at him almost merrily. “You hate him! You always have. You hate him almost as much as his mother does. It hardly takes a Betazed to see that. She hates him because he reminds her of what she had that you took from her. And you hate him because you know that he reminds her of what you took. But you couldn’t throw away good officer material, and his father still had some friends in Starfleet. This was a good way to throw them off the scent, or at best to appease them. So you bided your time and waited. You knew that eventually he would make this attempt. In fact, I think you encouraged it, so that you would then have the right to get rid of him without prejudice: who expects any failed assassin to be given mercy?”
She turned away, eyeing the console. “Some people, today, were thinking that you had genuinely made a stupid mistake. But I don’t believe that. I know you too well. I think you were careless on purpose. A good enough excuse: a tense mission, one of those quiet periods when the tension builds and people make mistakes … even captains. Even you.” She looked at him. “So finally he makes his