Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [52]
“Aye, sir; right away.”
“Make that low band, as frugal a message as possible.”
“Aye, sir.”
Now the captain lowered his voice as he turned back to Riker, and clasped Troi’s wrist to find her pulse for himself. “What do you make of all this? Those words she spoke … and is she in contact with the same thing that’s contacting Data?”
Riker shook his head. “It’s pretty boggy right now. Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to be affecting them both in the same way. She keeps talking about these-well, these people as though she knows them, and it doesn’t glitter around her like it does on Data. And it didn’t grab her. Did you notice she could still move around? It’s like the electrical field of the entity is focusing on him, but speaking through her.”
“Yes, but these messages she’s perceiving. How accurate is her telepathy? I’ve never seen anything like this from Troi before. You know as well as I do that Betazoid telepathy is subfrequency and seems supernatural, but that it’s perfectly explainable scientifically. This business of behaving like a spiritual medium, though … I don’t buy into that.”
“If it’s any help,” Riker told him, “I don’t think she does either, sir.”
“What was it she said? We can end it? End what?” He tilted a little closer and lowered his voice. “Have you any idea at all?”
Riker licked his lips. So this was what a first officer was for. To come up with hypotheses about things he knew nothing about. To fudge answers out of nothing. Then again, sometimes that was the best way to get the answers: plow on through until you hit wall or water. “End it. We can. I wonder if that even means us specifically. Could it have been talking to the life essences Troi was sensing?”
“Or rather, were they talking to it? Tell you what,” Picard said with sudden conviction, “soon as these two can sit straight again, we’re going to put them down side by side and get some answers. We’ve got the messages right in our hands, and we simply aren’t interpreting them correctly. It’s time we did.”
“How is she, Mr. Riker?” Tasha Yar kept her voice low. Afraid to attract attention to herself, possibly because she had stepped away from her post at this critical, touchy moment, she knelt beside Troi and leaned over her, nearly whispering.
“I’m no doctor,” Riker said simply, venting his frustration. If he had time to step away from his own post, Troi would be on the way to auxiliary sickbay, but there simply weren’t those extra seconds to spare. So she would remain here, beneath his hands, within his sight, under what little care he could offer.
“Sir, are we going to reconnect with the saucer section?” Yar asked. She looked at him with eyes that wanted everything to be all right, and she seemed as innocent and hopeful as a Disney drawing.
“I don’t think we have much choice,” he told her. “It just didn’t work. We get used to situations that work out, and it’s hard to get hit with one that doesn’t. Fortunes of risk, that’s all, Lieutenant.” He gave her a dismissing toss of his head, silently ordering her back to tactical, but she didn’t go.
“Mr. Riker?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“Sir … it was my idea to separate the sections.” Tasha paused, waiting to catch his attention again. When she did, she tightened her thin narrow lips and asked, “Should I apologize to the captain?”
Riker dropped himself into the wishing well of those eyes, just for a moment. Her eyes were enhanced with a simple stroke of eyeliner and a touch of mascara; not very much, as though she were unsure and self-conscious about her femininity. Riker found himself fascinated by those thin brown lines, now slightly smudged and a tad uneven. Tasha Yar was all good intentions in one package. Had Riker not reviewed the personnel files of the bridge officers when he got this assignment, he’d have taken one look into those eyes and at the supple, slim body under them and reassigned her to teaching kindergarten to all the children on Enterprise who would brighten to see her face each day.
He felt that way