Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [51]
“Who are you?” Picard began carefully.
Troi’s eyes began to tear with the strain. “All … you end … “
“We don’t understand. We don’t know what you are,” the captain clearly said.
Troi began to tremble, a bone-deep trembling that came as much from her own effort as from the effect of whatever was happening to her. Despite Picard’s renouncement of folklore and ghost stories, the battle bridge took on the hazy elemental aura of a seance. Troi herself was like a specter now, a thing of dark times, of times when ignorance made indelible marks upon the imaginations of all men for all time. She was a whisper of legend somehow transferred into the present. Her hair glowed, ebony beneath the flashings, and in spite of all the lights from Data’s assailant, her eyes were their usual pumice black. Yet in the midst of enchantment there was also the conscious work of a scientist. And never once were they allowed to forget that Data was also involved; the snapping brightness from the vortex around him slithered across Troi’s face in a constant and patternless reminder.
Riker stepped tentatively toward her, and was grateful that Picard didn’t try to stop him. “Deanna … ” he began. Then he had nothing to say afterward.
Troi forced herself to speak. Somehow they could see and understand that the insistence was hers and no one else’s. “You … can end … it.”
The captain squinted as though he could see the words. Something about the way she said it made him motion the bridge to silence.
Her voice-still soft. A raspy whisper only. But it held a power, a decisiveness Picard hadn’t expected to hear at such a moment. And when the statement was over, it was completely over. Her effort slid off, she was allowed a deep breath, and the light patterns reflecting on her face began to fade.
Riker and Picard spun about, and sure enough Data was looking more like Data and less like a Fourth of July sparkler.
“No one move!” Picard warned. “Wait till it’s completely gone.”
In spite of the order, Riker sidled toward Troi, keeping his eye on her while Data glittered in his periphery, and when she suddenly collapsed, he was almost beside her.
The color fled from her face, and Troi dropped so sharply that Riker almost missed her completely. He was able to catch her upper arm and keep her head from striking the bridge rail, but she turned in his grip like a dangling fish until he could rearrange himself and lay her down on the deck. He knelt beside her, brushed the trailing black curls from her forehead, and looked up in time to see the same thing happen to Data.
The android’s denser body struck the deck with a loud thud, and both Geordi and Worf were there to turn him over. In the dimness that suddenly reestablished itself on the bridge, he looked baffled and confused, but unlike Troi he was conscious.
Picard glanced once around the bridge to be sure the electrical effect had truly gone away. Then: “Yar, condition of that creature?”
“Still involved with the asteroids, sir,” she reported, “though going after the antimatter explosions very deliberately. It doesn’t seem to understand what the disturbances are. Seems unclear about what it should do.”
Picard huffed. “Aren’t we all. LaForge? Leave Data to Worf and get us away from here quickly.”
“Yes, sir-heading?”
“Back toward the saucer. While we still have the chance.”
With that he knelt beside Riker, who was hovering rather helplessly over Troi. “She alive?”
“Her pulse is like a bass drum,” Riker told him. “Under these circumstances, who knows what that means?”
“I’ll take it for the good,” Picard said ruefully, “since it’s all we’ve got.”
“Are we going to reestablish contact with the saucer, Captain?” Riker asked, though he knew the answer. This time reestablishment wouldn’t mean the trouble was over. Quite the opposite. It would mean they’d utterly failed.
Picard eyed the screen. “Looks like we crowed before we were out of