Nightshade - Laurell K. Hamilton [52]
But the corridors were very narrow, forming a white maze that spread out in every direction. It was dizzying. The white walls seemed to squeeze around them like a fist.
‘Which way?” Worf asked.
‘I have not been to see Picard, either,” Breck said.
‘I was not asking you. Counselor?” Worf turned dark eyes to her. His certainty that she would lead them through the puzzle-box of this place was clear and unwavering.
Troi only wished she felt as confident as he did. As soon as she knew they were coming to a place of torture, she began building the mind-shielding she would need to survive. The Orianians emotions were so overwhelming at times that she didn’t know if she could go into the bowels of real despair and still be able to function.
‘If I drop my mental protection to search for the captain then I may not be able to filter out the feelings of all the other prisoners.”
‘We don’t have much time,” Breck said. He cradled his rifle more securely in the crook of his arm, waiting. Waiting for her to decide whether all this effort had been for nothing.
A shrill scream cut the silence. It was impossible to know if it were male or female. A level of pain had been reached where it made no difference in the voice. The scream came from up ahead in the heart of this white maze, and it decided Troi.
They had to find the captain.
The mind-shield was like a layer of buzzing, made up of her own emotions, like bricks in a wall. She had entombed her mind behind pieces of her own thoughts. She could have shattered the shield with one gentle touch, but Troi knew better. In this place the influx of emotions could drive her mad. It had happened to Betazoids before.
There were reasons why empaths avoided torture chambers. Other than the obvious ones.
The buzzing quieted it. Each sound, each emotion faded back into her mind, until there was nothing but that last great shield. A solid blankness, a blessed quietness that all empaths needed as a last retreat. On the other side of that quietness Troi could feel the press of emotions. It was almost physical, like hands shoving against her mind.
She cast that quietness away, like discarding a piece of clothing. Now, her mind was naked to everything. Troi remembered nothing for a moment. Then, there was a voice calling to her, but the sound was very far away. The only thing she could ‘hear’ was the roar of terror. A screaming, crimson sound that clawed across her mind. Pain had color and shape and texture. Other people’s terror rode her, and she could not remember who she was, or why she had come.
Hands were digging into her arms, tight, hurting. It hurt. Her body. Her pain.
‘Troi, can you hear me? Deanna!”
That was right. She was Deanna Troi, and all this pain belonged to strangers. Someone was shaking her, hard and harder. She looked up into Worf’s grim face. Somehow she had fallen to the floor. It was Worf’s hands that had brought her back, his small violence that had chased away the pain. He was still shaking her.
‘Worf, I’m all right.”
‘Deanna,” the relief in his voice washed over her, soothingly. “What happened to you?”
‘There is no time to explain. Please, help me up.”
Worf stood and lifted her as he moved, one motion that made her feel like a child in his hands. She clutched his arm as she tested whether she could stand alone.
The pain, terror, despair were still there, but as a distant buzzing. She could concentrate again, feel her own thoughts again.
Could she sort the captain’s thoughts from all the noise? If the people in the cells had been any other race, she would have been confident, but the Orianians for better or worse were an overwhelming empathic mess.
But Troi knew the feel of Picard’s mind, the ordered strength of his thoughts, the cool control of his emotions. Troi knew Picard was a very private man, and as much as he valued Troi, she made him just a little nervous.
It was that nervousness that Troi reached for, that reserve, the solid, familiar core that was Jean-Luc Picard. She knew some Betazoids said people were like tastes in their mind, or smells, but to