Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [2]
It was a testament to the complexity of her day-to-day job as Ship’s Counselor, engineer of emotions, maintenance mechanic to a thousand minds.
But today’s appointments had all been fulfilled. There remained only a note that she wanted to talk with the captain about his habit of suppressing too many feelings.
Hardly an urgent problem. He’d been like that as long as she’d known him. It could wait. She cleared the list from the screen.
Now it was time for her to begin her observations.
“Computer …”
Troi found herself hesitating. She felt unaccountably jittery about saying the word out loud.
She sounded it in her mind. Tukurpa. Tu-kur-pa.
Then, before she spoke the word, she began to feel vertigo, as though something were wrong with her inner ears, her balance center. The feeling intensified. It was as if she were spinning, as if the cabin were at the axis of a centrifuge, going faster and faster.
She tried to bring her hand up to touch her communicator, to call for help, but the vertigo made it impossible.
Now the spinning feeling was so overwhelming, the revolutions so rapid and violent, Troi couldn’t focus her eyes. The walls of the cabin were disintegrating. She felt herself thrown out of her chair, tumbling through air or space.
Then she hit the ground facedown.
It was definitely the ground—sand or dirt, not a ship or a man-made surface. For several moments she lay still, getting her equilibrium back. Then she realized that the sand was hot enough to burn her skin, and she got to her feet in a hurry.
What Troi saw gave her a devastating shock. She was in the middle of a wasteland, a desert—an endless expanse of white and tan sands and tortured cracked outcroppings of rock under a blinding sun.
She instinctively felt for her communicator pin. It wasn’t there. She had no way to contact the Enterprise.
Before Troi had time to consider how she had gotten here, the heat demanded her undivided attention. It came up through the soles of her thin shoes and in through her nostrils, stinging her rhinal cavities. It penetrated right through her one-piece jumpsuit. She was already sweating like a marathon runner.
The nearest shade appeared to be a distant blue mountain ridge. How far was hard to judge, but she thought it might be fifty kilometers. Maybe too far. She doubted she would make it without collapsing.
Troi was no athlete, but she had been trained at Starfleet Academy and knew how to avoid panic no matter what the situation.
She started to walk, and think about her predicament. How had this happened? It had been a normal day, she had been in her cabin … but for some unknown reason she couldn’t remember what she had been doing there. Only that she had suddenly been transported away to this desert by means unknown… . Some kind of amnesia was blocking the rest.
The heat took its inexorable toll. Troi was dehydrating fast, and her body temperature was getting too high. Still she kept walking. To stop on the burning sand was unthinkable. She had to get to the mountains.
After two hours of walking, she became dizzy and disoriented. She had stopped sweating and her lips were puffing up. Her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth.
She looked around and saw she had entered a shallow dry wash. She collapsed to her knees and stared, forlorn, at the yellow dust.
She knew she wasn’t going to make it; she wasn’t going to get out of this trap. Her body wouldn’t carry her much further. She was going to die of dehydration.
“Why, why can’t I remember how I got here?” she croaked at the sand.
“How you got here?” said a voice in reply. “I don’t know. You wanted to come, so you came. ‘How’ doesn’t matter. ‘Why’ matters.”
“Great,” Troi told herself. “I’m hearing voices. I guess that means I’m starting to die.”
But when she concentrated with her empathic sense, her ability to sense others’ emotions which came from the Betazoid half of her heritage, she picked up a living presence. Not