Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [21]
“You impress me,” he said spontaneously.
She laughed again. “Don’t be too impressed. I cry myself to sleep more often than I’d like to admit.”
Her faint Greek accent tapped the words out with the clip of a sparrow’s talons hopping across marble. Riker bit his tongue and kept his inadequate reassurances to himself. She didn’t need them-at least none he could voice.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and he knew he’d failed to keep his feelings to himself. “I’m needed, Bill. I can make a contribution that even full Betazoids could never make. For that privilege, I’ll happily pay the price. I’m not sure, though, that this is the place to make that contribution.”
Riker clasped his hands and leaned his elbows on his knees, gazed down for a moment, then looked up. “Do you know how guilty you’re making me feel?”
Troi flickered her eyes at him, paused, then tossed her head. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Caught off guard, Riker blushed and couldn’t keep control of his smile, but she was still smiling too. Damn, she was good at that.
“To the bridge, Number One?” she suggested gently.
He stood up and reached for her hand. “To the bridge, Counselor.”
“Go ahead, Mr. Data.”
Picard spoke evenly as he stood on Troi’s right, Riker on her left, as though their presence at her sides would help protect her from what was to come. She still looked controlled enough, considering she’d gotten no chance whatsoever even to put her head back for a moment and absorb these events. Data punched up the records he’d discovered.
“Sir, I must apologize,” Data said. “The search was not as exhaustive as I first estimated. Counselor Troi’s perceptions were accurate and all the information came together-“
“Let’s hear it, then, Data. Don’t dawdle.”
“Yes, sir. As you can see on the monitor, this is a full-deck nuclear aircraft carrier from the nineteen-nineties. It was a Soviet Union vessel out on a demonstration run in the Black Sea when it mysteriously disappeared on April twenty-fourth, 1995.”
“Disappeared?” Picard rumbled. “Do you have any idea the size of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Commander?”
Though Picard meant the question to be rhetorical, Data had an immediate answer. “Oh, yes, sir. Up to ninety thousand tons with a personnel complement five times that of our starship.”
The captain suddenly felt silly for having asked. “All right, go on. What was this ship called?”
Even Data was aware of Deanna Troi as he quietly responded, “The Gorshkov.”
Troi’s eyes drifted closed. She steadied herself within the sounds of that word, then opened her eyes again and kept tight rein on the battery of emotions-even the grief.
“Go on, Data,” Picard urged.
“Her captain was Arkady Reykov. He had a long, rocky political history before leaving that arena for the naval command. His disapproval of the Soviet system had caused him some discomfort, but his skill as a naval officer evidently overshadowed that. Such experience was at a premium in the U.S.S.R. in those days, so he was allowed to continue.”
Riker listened to the simplified description of a twisted international skein, all the tugs and pulls of that volatile period, and couldn’t help wondering what Reykov would have felt if he’d known the future. If he’d known he was a cog in the mechanism that led to Earth’s 21st-century cataclysms.
“And this Vasska?” Picard prodded.
The response, spoken as tenuously as spider’s threads snapping between two leaves, came not from Data, but from Troi.
“Timofei … “
They turned to her.
Troi poised