Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [99]
Her voice was quite steady, but the tears were showing in her eyes, ever so slightly. “Then you engineered that business with the Lagos mission—pretty setup, that. I could have been cashiered, despite the fact that I was following your orders. But you defended me to Starfleet and made it plain enough what the price was. I got to come out of “retirement” for your amusement, whether I liked it or not. The knife again. So what will it be this time? I wonder. Wesley, perhaps?” She smiled at him. “If you think so, you misjudged. You’ll have to do a lot better than that to hurt me at this point.”
“I would think,” he said, choosing his words with some care, “that having been a”—he could barely bring himself to say it—”captain’s woman for this long, you might have developed a thicker skin.”
“That’s the problem. I would have thought so, too. The trouble is, you keep doing unexpected things. Like that.” She gestured with her chin at the canvas on the other side of the room, covered over again, for Picard hadn’t been able to bear looking at it. “Every now and then you do something that seems to break the pattern, and I almost forgive you … almost let it go. That’s a hell of a thing.” She looked him straight in the eye for the first time in a while. “To actually forgive the man who killed your husband in cold blood. And then the pattern reasserts itself, and the knife goes in again, and I realize I’ve been manipulated again and curse myself for a fool … because you ride relationships the way you ride your vessels: to destruction.”
She watched him watching her. Silence was the best defense, Troi had told him often enough. Now he simply stood and watched her. She watched back.
The silence got heavy. It had to be broken, he had no choice: “I think for the time being, you’re going to have to sleep elsewhere. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She gave him such a look as a mother might give a child caught in a substandard lie. “That’s all you’ve done since you saw me and decided you wanted me and took me. But that’s mostly what you do to everyone—just to make sure you’re still alive. You put the knife in and listen for the scream. Did you never think that someone might put the knife in you? Apparently not, to judge by this afternoon.”
“Oh, I think about it.”
“But you don’t believe it. As far as you’re concerned, everything you do is right. It’s always been the way … it’s probably why you’re so successful in this fleet. People only fail here when their scruples get in the way. You haven’t had a scruple for years.”
She stood up with the blanket gathered gracefully around her. “I’ll take to my own side of the quarters for the time being.” She made for the door at the far side of Picard’s quarters. “There’s no injuring your dignity—you might as well try to injure a glacier. As for me, I still have mine, and I’ll keep it intact.”
She paused by the door. “But one thing.” In the dark, her eyes were indistinct, but they were narrowed, and the cast of her face went suddenly ugly. “If it is simply another woman … she’d better not get sick. It will be a short illness.”
Beverly went through the door and it shut behind her; and Picard heard the extra cheep of the lock on her side.
CHAPTER 12
Standing on the ladder, Geordi gave a soft grunt as the third of the access panels in the core shaft came away. “Coming up, Eileen,” he said, touching the control on the floater he had attached to the panel. It levitated gently upward past him, and Eileen, up in the crawlway that met the access shaft, caught it and put it aside, taking the floater pad off it. Two other engineering staff came floating down past him, carrying pouches full of isolinear chips. Geordi smiled slightly. The situation had this advantage at least: he would hardly stand out, now, for the