The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [154]
WILL RIKER AWOKE WITH A RATTLING GURGLE IN HIS THROAT.
His lungs burned as if they couldn’t fill with air fast enough. He felt colder than he thought it was possible to feel. And his chest hurt like hell.
He looked around, desperately trying to regain his sense of place, but nothing looked familiar. He was on a warm floor. A muggy, musty smell filled the air. Beverly Crusher was kneeling in front of him, unmoving. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. Her mouth agape.
As if…
As if she had seen a ghost…
With that, memories spun about him. Tellarite…swamp…Deanna…the shuttlecraft…Deanna…some kind of outpost…Beverly…Deanna…
Desperate to ground himself, Will tried to lock eyes with Beverly, but he couldn’t catch her gaze. She was looking at him, but not at his face. She was looking at his chest. Riker moved his head downward, following her line of sight.
That’s when he saw a large hole in his chest, a hole that a surprisingly detached part of his mind told him was too large to be anything but fatal. Protruding from that hole, sitting right in the center of a gaping chest wound, was a small, triangular piece of highly polished metal.
And Riker screamed.
“…although these polar shifts are a natural occurrence, we are still at something of a loss to explain their cause.”
Riker tried to focus on Data’s droning recitation of the mission briefing but was failing miserably. Having an emotion chip may have changed the android’s personality, but, unfortunately, it had no effect on his speaking style. Try as he might, Riker couldn’t concentrate on this briefing. All he could think about were the two major changes that were about to take place in his life. His upcoming captaincy of the starship Titan and, even more important, the fact that, finally, he was getting married to ship’s counselor Deanna Troi.
Deanna was more than just his friend and fiancee. She was his imzadi. It was a word from Deanna’s homeworld, Betazed, that translated loosely meant “beloved.” But like so many words transposed from one language to another, the fullest meaning would not translate well. Imzadi meant beloved, but it also meant so much more. Betazed was a planet of telepaths, a world of beings who knew what bonding between two people on every level truly was. A world that gave such true bonding a name all its own.
Riker fumed silently, upset that he couldn’t let his full frustration show. He was supposed to be with Deanna right now on Holodeck 2 in a recreation of L’Astrance, a Parisian restaurant overlooking the Eiffel Tower that was Deanna’s favorite place to eat on Earth. They had reserved the holodeck time weeks ago as a getaway, promising themselves there would be no wedding plans. No discussions about the delicate seating arrangements required when the bride was a Daughter of the Fifth House or finding a menu that would satisfy a guest list that included vegetarians and devotees of live gagh worms. Just him and Deanna together for one night in the City of Lights. Rich food and richer company.
It was where Riker was supposed to be. Where he wanted to be. There. With Deanna. In Paris. Not in some boring briefing of the Enterprise’s department heads called just because one of the ship’s damned probes came back with a “startling revelation.”
Riker pictured Deanna in his mind, eating a Souffle au Bleu d’Auvergne and talking about something amusing she had heard during lunch in Ten-Forward. He was trying to remember the exact taste of L’Astrance’s exquisite creme brulee, when Geordi La Forge put his coffee cup down on the briefing room table, just loud enough to snap Riker out of the daydream.
Riker half turned his head and looked at La Forge with mild annoyance. Then he caught a hint of smile on the chief engineer’s lips that seemed to say, “Hey, if I have to suffer, we all have to suffer.”
Riker glanced out of the corner of his eye over at Jean-Luc Picard to see whether the Enterprise’s captain had noticed his earlier lapse in concentration.