Possession - J.M. Dillard [58]
“Yes, Mr. La Forge,” Skel said in the same soft monotone, “that is our plan. And you are critical to its success.”
The Vulcan moved his face closer to Geordi’s. La Forge struggled to move his face away, or even close his eyes, but, of course, that had no effect on the VISOR, which continued to feed him images.
“Is he afraid?” Tarmud asked, looming over Geordi, beside the Vulcan. He sounded odd when he asked that, almost eager, but everything that had happened here in the last few minutes had been odd.
“Yes,” the Vulcan admitted, which shamed the engineer. “He is afraid, but not enough.”
“If his fear is strong enough, they will follow the energy flow. They’ll find their way inside, to feed.”
“Yes,” Skel agreed. “That’s true. Very logical, Tarmud.”
They wanted him afraid? Fear he could control, Geordi realized. He would emulate Data, his closest friend. He would be Data. With no fear. No feelings at all. If fear was what they wanted from him, then that was the last thing they would get. With an almost preternatural calm, Geordi clamped down on his emotions, turning himself into a human android.
And then the Vulcan did something more peculiar and frightening than anything he’d done up to now. He smiled. No. Not a smile—a leer. Skel’s face turned into a grinning, leering death’s head, as his eyes blazed with a murderous light.
Geordi fought an almost instinctive panic reaction and made himself be Data, finding this nothing more to react to than an interesting scientific phenomenon. But Skel had only just begun.
Suddenly, Geordi was jerked out of the chair he was in and out of the ship he was on, and he found himself on the surface of the planet Vulcan. It was full night, the deep blackness of a starred though moonless sky. But he had no time to admire the sight because he was running, running for his life, and hot on his heels was Skel, grinning like a madman. If Skel caught him, he knew, he was finished. He would kill him slowly, by inches, piece by horrible piece, and Geordi’s only defense was to run.
In his mind, he heard Troi screaming at him to run for his life, and all he could do was obey.
“No,” the engineer murmured, “no, this isn’t happening.”
He wasn’t on Vulcan, he was on the Enterprise where an infected Vulcan had taken over his brain and forced the vivid hallucination on him in an attempt to evoke a fear reaction. He couldn’t submit. He couldn’t.
But he couldn’t make himself stop running. And Skel was almost upon him. Troi was shrilling frantically at him. And that grin, that horrible grin, loomed over him.
No. No fear, no fear …
Geordi slipped in the sand and fell, and Troi begged him to get up, to hurry, to save himself! Just as Skel reached for his foot, he leapt to his feet and bolted free. No! No! He wasn’t on Vulcan!
His lungs heaved for air in the thin hot atmosphere; his heart pounded. If Skel caught him—
What was he thinking? Skel had already caught him.
He felt another hand—Tarmud’s hand—touch his face even as he staggered wildly over the desert sand. Some distant part of his mind realized that the two scientists were feeding off his terror, off the energy the hallucination was causing him to burn up, and that the entities within them were growing stronger because he was afraid. But the Vulcan had his mind in his powerful grip, and the images he forced upon Geordi were Skel’s own memories, his own childhood terror, and they were too strong for Geordi to resist. As Troi’s voice kept urging him to flee, to hurry, to run, he found himself falling into the imagery of the hallucination and struggling to outrace the Vulcan, even though he knew none of it was real.
As the shimmering, dancing lights behind Skel’s and Tarmud’s eyes became more and more visible to him, he watched in dread fascination as they grew brighter and brighter, even as he ran from his fantasy pursuer. Geordi watched as the sparkling energy bands finally left Skel’s eyes and came closer and closer to his face.
Contact.
His body jerked—in real time as well as in the hallucination—as though he’d touched a live