Nightshade - Laurell K. Hamilton [60]
Troi nodded. “I think so.”
‘Could you teach me how to use my powers?”
‘I believe so,” Troi said.
He laughed then, delighted as a child. “We must save you, Picard. Your Federation has too much to teach us for it to end here. If we can prove to my people that killing and destroying this planet has robbed us of our healing… all of them, even the ones who want to continue this war, might listen.”
‘Then we must talk to the Greens,” Worf said.
‘Agreed, Lieutenant.” Picard smiled, slightly. “But I doubt that they will allow me to accompany you.”
‘Captain, I cannot leave you to be tortured. I cannot…”
‘You can and you will. Believe me, Worf, if I saw another solution I would take it. But we don’t have the firepower to fight our way out. Even if I was willing to allow the peace mission to die in my place.”
‘Captain…”
‘Find the real murderer, Lieutenant, clear my name. Perhaps this afternoon’s unpleasantness will be the only interrogation needed.”
Worf stood in one smooth motion, using only his legs. “We will not fail you, Captain.”
‘I have no doubt of that, Worf.” He carefully did not look in Troi’s direction. He did not want to see her compassionate glance. She would know, if no one else did, that he was worried. Two days, and he would die. The worst of it was, the peace mission seemed likely to die with him. And now he had less than an hour before he was going to be led away to voluntary torture. It was ridiculous, but he saw no way out of it.
Picard had always known that death was a likelihood as a career Federation officer, but ending his days executed for murder… It was too absurd.
The others went out the door. They would do the questioning. The sorting out of all the horrible implications. Picard would have felt better if he could have gone with them. It was not that he thought he would see something or hear something Worf and Troi did not. It was that once that door closed behind them, all Picard had to do was wait.
To wait for the guards to come and take him back to the clean white room, and its devices. But after the pain he would be returned here to wait some more. To wait and wonder. It rankled that he should spend his last hours helpless, and dependent on others, even trusted friends.
‘Enough of this,” he said to the empty room. “I am Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the Federation Starship Enterprise. I am not so easily defeated.” Out there was the best security chief he had ever worked with, and the only counselor he had ever trusted with his own thoughts. They were good people. They were part of the Enterprise crew, and that meant the best. He was in good hands, the best hands. Picard knew that, and yet… he worried.
Chapter Fifteen
The Greens’ cell door was near the center of the maze of white corridors. The stark white walls stretched as far as they could see, a tide of prisoners behind identical clean, white doors.
Worf leaned close to Troi and whispered, a rumbling growl that vibrated in her ear, “Are there prisoners behind all these doors?”
She whispered back, “I’m trying very hard not to sense anything, Worf.”
He nodded and straighted back to attention. They were all waiting until Talanne could be brought. She had left very clear orders that they were not to question the Greens without her presence. So, they waited.
Troi stood very still in the center of the corridor. She had rebuilt her barriers after the captain was found. She had no choice. The emotions behind the doors were like vibrating static playing along her nerves. Troi felt exposed, or worse yet, diffused. She felt stretched thin, tugged at by every emotion they passed. A planet of unbelievably strong empaths with absolutely no training. It was too frightening.
If the captain hadn’t been jailed, awaiting execution, Troi knew that she would have been the one in the greatest danger. So she stood in the midst of the buffeting wind of the Orianian minds and tried to feel nothing.
Worf and