The Battle of Betazed - Charlotte Douglas [22]
The room was quiet until the silence was broken by Okalan, who was shaking his head as if in grief. “All our hopes in a madman,” he muttered. “By the First House … what have we come to?”
Chapter Five
“V AUGHN TO T ROI.”
Deanna sighed and stopped in midstride down the corridor leading to the counselor’s office, knowing Vaughn’s call meant the next phase of unpleasantness was about to begin. She steeled herself and tapped her combadge. “Troi here.”
“Please meet me in holodeck two in half an hour for combat drills.” Vaughn phrased his words as a request, but the underlying hardness in his deep voice made it seem more like an order.
“Commander, is this necessary?” Troi asked. “I have a great deal of paperwork—”
“Table it,” Vaughn said. “We have little time until the mission, and a great deal of ground to cover beforehand. I want you ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“For anything.”
Deanna hesitated. She had continued to sharpen her combat skills when she had the chance, but she suspected Vaughn wouldn’t consider her abilities up to the needs of the mission. On the other hand, a physical workout would probably do her some good. No doubt Vaughn knew that.
She couldn’t help recalling, however, that her least favorite courses at Starfleet Academy had been those in hand-to-hand combat, where close contact made tuning out her opponent’s emotions impossible. In her subsequent Starfleet assignments, she’d had to kill on occasion, both in self-defense and to protect the lives of others, but those deaths haunted her. With her empathic abilities, she had felt her enemies’ pain, had sensed their fear, and their spirits draining away until only soulless voids remained. Each time she’d been compelled to take a life, something of her had died with the victim.
“How long since your last refresher course in hand-to-hand combat?” Vaughn’s voice demanded over her comm link.
“Too long,” Deanna admitted. “And I should warn you, Commander, I’ve never had much of a killing instinct. Most Betazoids don’t.”
“But you have a survival instinct. That’s a start. Thirty minutes, Commander. S.O.B.s only. Vaughn out.”
Deanna sighed again and would have laughed at Vaughn’s little joke if the situation weren’t so deadly serious. In recent years, Starfleet had designed a uniform variant specifically for ground-based combat operations. Characterized by their padded black fabric—unbroken except for the division-specific color stripe that cut across the chest, shoulders, and back—the uniforms were supposed to be referred to as “surface operations blacks.” Of course, it wasn’t long before somebody shortened the name to S.O.B., a designation that was quickly extended to anyone who put on the uniform. Deanna had never expected to be involved in a mission that required her to don the garment, and wondered how much of the nickname was self-fulfilling.
After detouring back to her quarters and quickly replicating the uniform, she put it on and stood in front of the mirror for a few minutes, feeling ridiculous and trying not to think about how dark all of Starfleet’s uniforms had become in the last few years. It was, she believed, symptomatic of a fundamental shift in the Federation’s cultural psychology, a response to the growing number of threats in an increasingly hostile universe. Her days of wearing flowing azure dresses on the bridge were long gone.
Now Vaughn required her to wear this. She thought again about Betazed, about the effect she feared Tevren’s knowledge might have upon it. And part of her wondered if Vaughn was now doing the same thing to her: turning her into a stranger that the Deanna Troi of ten years ago would have reviled.
Vaughn. When she had met him earlier that morning, Deanna had still been coping with the news of the defeat at Starbase 19, and so had spared little thought for the man himself. Now, as she thought back to this morning’s meeting, she reviewed the unconscious impressions she’d been too preoccupied to consider at the time, and compared them to what she recalled of his infrequent visits to the Troi household decades