The Battle of Betazed - Charlotte Douglas [23]
Deanna’s earliest memories of Vaughn went back to childhood, years before her empathic abilities had developed. He’d been a friend and colleague of her father’s and, she recalled, a source of tension for her mother. Even back then he’d seemed old, and Deanna remembered wondering, in the way children sometimes do, what had carved such deep lines into the man’s face, especially around his eyes. Those lines had cut even deeper in the years since.
To Will and probably to most humans, Deanna realized, Vaughn seemed curt, somewhat harsh, perhaps even a little condescending. But thanks to her empathic sense, she knew this was an incomplete picture. There was a kind of “mist” around Vaughn, indicating he’d had his guard up emotionally—a fairly standard technique for officers involved with advanced tactics and intelligence work, but only partially effective most of the time. The mist meant that she couldn’t read him as clearly as, say, Captain Picard, but it couldn’t keep certain intense emotional states from getting through. Even so, she found she’d only picked up two clear emotions from Vaughn during the morning meeting: a self-directed bitterness and, she now realized, a sincere concern for Deanna’s well-being. Everything else was white noise.
Accustomed to forming a generally accurate profile of someone after only a first encounter, Troi was frustrated by her inability to see clearly past a veneer that Vaughn had obviously spent years fortifying, precisely in order to discourage what she was attempting. She wondered if her father had developed similar skills.
The thought completed a circuit in Deanna’s mind, and she suddenly recalled the last time she’d seen Vaughn, when she was only seven years old. He was there, in their home on Betazed, speaking quietly to her mother just before a grief-stricken Lwaxana had told young Deanna that Ian Andrew Troi was dead.
Deanna walked to her desk and swiveled the computer display so she could see it. “Computer,” she said. “Show me the personnel file of Commander Elias Vaughn.”
The computer screen on her desk showed a standard personnel record, complete with a recent visual. Vaughn had been born on Berengaria VII in 2275. Exactly a century old, she thought. It was an age by which most Starfleet humans were already retired. Academy class of‘97. There was no information about his subsequent postings, and no specific current assignment other than the innocuously worded “consultant,” which almost made Deanna laugh aloud.
Frowning, she said, “Computer, search for Elias Vaughn in the historical database.”
The number of items listed was surprisingly paltry for a man who’d served in Starfleet for nearly eight decades, but he’d had a tumultuous career, to say the least: the civil war on Beta IV, the genocidal holocaust on Arvada III, the Tomed incident, and one or two others. The database didn’t even list the Betreka Nebula, and Deanna knew that Vaughn and her father had served there together.
She suppressed a sigh of frustration. The facts were so sparse a spy would have a better background cover than the limited information available on the commander.
She really didn’t want facts, however. She wanted more about his character. What made the man tick? Traveling from assignment to assignment with no permanent place to call home had to be the loneliest of lives. Did he need no one but himself? She couldn’t help wondering about his emotional life, his self-control, his impulses and appetites. Who were his friends? His family? His record listed no wife, but a daughter who was a recent Academy graduate serving as an ensign on the U.S.S. Sentinel.
But everything else she sought was conspicuously missing.
So much for the official record, she thought. Well, there’s always the old-fashioned way. She still had a good opportunity to learn something meaningful about the man whose command she’d accepted, and that opportunity awaited her in holodeck two.
“Beverly?” Deanna reached the holodeck entrance just as the doctor staggered out. Normally groomed immaculately, Beverly Crusher sagged against