Pantheon - Michael Jan Friedman [71]
Riker looked up at the intercom grid. “We’re in your ready room, sir. What’s happening down there?”
“Nothing good, Will. There’s been another attack, as you probably guessed. A phaser attack. Cadwallader’s been hurt.”
Riker felt his throat constrict. “How badly, sir?”
“She’ll recover completely, Dr. Crusher tells me—though it’ll be a few days before she’s ready to leave sickbay. And a couple more than that before her tissues have fully regenerated.” A pause. “She was hit with a phaser beam at setting-six intensity.”
The first officer gritted his teeth. At setting six, a phaser beam could punch a hole in duranium. Cadwallader was lucky she was even alive.
“Where and when was she attacked?” Deanna Troi asked.
“Deck Seventeen,” Picard answered. “She was with Morgen and Dr. Crusher, in one of the lounges, when we tried to outrun the slipstream. The killer took advantage of the power blackout to try again. Morgen and Dr. Crusher escaped without injury, but Cadwallader was not so fortunate.”
Riker bit back his anger. “Did they get a look at the assassin?”
The captain’s sigh was audible. “They did not. However, Mr. Worf is engaged in an analysis of the scene now. Perhaps he will turn up some clues as to the killer’s identity. In fact, that is where I am headed once our discussion is over.”
“Is there anything we can do?” the first officer asked.
“Not right now, Number One—you are needed on the bridge. I just thought you should know what happened.”
“Thank you, sir,” Riker said.
Picard didn’t reply. Apparently, he had already started out for Deck Seventeen. In the silence, the first officer turned to the ship’s counselor.
“Rotten news,” she commented.
He nodded. Right about then he should have said something clever and optimistic—“silver linings” kind of stuff. That would have been characteristic of him.
But somehow, he didn’t feel like it. All he could think about was Cadwallader, and how she might have died without ever knowing why he’d canceled their dinner. It was sort of maudlin—but hell, it was the way he felt.
He desperately wanted to see her. To sit down at her bedside and explain. But he couldn’t. The captain had left specific instructions that he was to remain on the bridge.
“Will?”
Abruptly, he remembered that Deanna was standing in front of him. He’d been staring right past her.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
She smiled—half sadly, he thought. “You care for her, don’t you?”
He started to ask to whom she was referring—and then stopped himself. Denying something to Deanna was like denying it to himself.
“Yes,” he told her. “I guess I do.”
There was a time when he would have felt funny admitting that to her—a time when their own relationship was too fresh in their minds for them to talk about other lovers. But things had changed between them—for the better, as far as he was concerned.
“Now I understand,” she said.
“Understand what?”
“The feelings I have been sensing in you lately. The conflicts. As long as Cadwallader was a suspect, you had to submerge your feelings for the sake of the investigation.”
He said, “I had to break a date with her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—believe it or not.”
“I believe it,” she told him.
Riker looked at the empath. “Deanna, be careful out there, all right? If this could happen to Cadwallader…”
She put a hand on his shoulder—a gesture of reassurance. “I am a big girl,” she told him, grinning. “But thanks all the same.”
And gently but firmly she steered him toward the door.
Worf turned as the turbolift doors opened, cursing inwardly. He had programmed the lift to bypass this floor until their investigation was over.
Then he saw the captain come out into the corridor, and he realized that his order had been overridden by one of the few individuals on the ship capable of doing so. Nor did he have any problem with that—the bypass would be back in place as soon as the doors closed behind Picard.
He squared his shoulders