“FIRE PHASERS.”
Captain Picard’s precise enunciation gave the order a theatrical tenor. It was followed almost immediately by the thunder of weapons powering through the big ship. A slim, magisterial man of thrifty movement, Picard stood the deck without pacing as most would, watching the latest of a series of rather tedious scientific exercises.
In the corner of his eye he saw the yellow alert light flashing, and it reminded him that stations had been manned and any quick shifts in orbital integrity could be handled without surprise now. “Orbital status, Mr. LaForge?”
As he spoke, Picard crossed the topaz carpet to bridge center and glanced over the shoulder of Geordi LaForge, ignoring—through practice—the fact that the dark young man had a metal band over his eyes that made him appear blindfolded. There was something ironic and disconcerting—to humans—about trusting the steering of a gigantic ship to a blind man.
LaForge’s head moved, downward slightly and left—it was their only signal that visual tie-in to his brain was working at all. “An orbit this tight is tricky since gas giants have no true surface, sir, but we’re stable and holding. I guess the Federation’s going to get all the information it wants whether we like it or not.”
Picard moved quietly to the other side of LaForge and placed his hand on the young officer’s lounge. “When I want an editorial, I’ll ask for it, Lieutenant.”
LaForge stiffened. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The captain imperiously guarded his own opinion. Though the huge new starship was supposedly on an exploratory mission, the Federation was dragging its feet in letting the Enterprise get on with it. The ship had yet to push into truly unexplored space, and Picard was annoyed by the giant gas planet turning on the room-sized viewscreen before him. All right, it was an anomaly. Yes, it was unique. Yes, it was large. But if the Federation Science Bureau wanted to study it, surely the planet wasn’t going anywhere. They needn’t take up an entire Galaxy-class ship to have a look at it.
“Mr. Riker, secure from yellow alert. Go to condition three.”
William Riker came to life up on the quarterdeck. “Condition three, aye, sir.” He started to look toward the tactical station, where the order would be funneled through, but at the last instant left it to the officer in charge, for his own gaze was fixed on Jean-Luc Picard.
The captain regarded his bridge and its people and their task with the stateliness of a bird on a bough. Not a bird of prey, though, this captain. This one could soar in any direction, whichever way duty demanded. Not a large man or even an imposing one—a task he left to his first officer—the captain was at times unobtrusive, the bird hiding in the foliage, watching, never seen until those great wings suddenly spread. Those around him knew this could happen at any moment, this sudden peeling off across the bridge panorama like a lean sky thing. Even in repose, his presence kept them alert.
I wish I could do that, Riker thought, a little wince crossing his broad features. He tried not to watch the captain while the captain was watching the bridge, but it was hypnotic. As usual, Riker’s back was hurting as he stood to starboard, too rigidly. He wished he could shake the habit of prancing, born of deep-seated little insecurities that nagged at him constantly as though to keep him in line. Later he always wished he hadn’t moved so punctiliously as he got from here to there. Horrible to risk the captain’s thinking he was being deliberately upstaged. Next selection: “First Officer on Parade.”
But worse . . . if the first officer appeared diffident. Wasn’t that worse? There was no middle ground, or at least Riker hadn’t found it. He wanted to be a bulwark, but not one the captain had to climb over.
It was tiring, pretending to be completely one with a commanding officer whom he simply didn’t know very well on a personal basis. Yet they faced the prospect of sharing the next few years at each other’s side. Could that be done on the plane of formality that had set itself up between them?
Riker tried to pace the bridge casually yet without appearing aimless. That was the tricky part. It actually hurt sometimes—his back, his legs, aching. Like now. If not done right, the movements became pompous and ambiguous. He would become victim to the plain fact that the first officer actually had conspicuously little to do on the bridge. He worried about that all the time. Good thing he generally had command of away teams; at least he had that to make him worthwhile.
Picard had it down. Quiet authority. Dependable not-quite presence. They could easily forget he was on the bridge at all. He would simply watch from his bough.
Riker forced himself to look away from the captain’s coin-relief profile before he was entirely mesmerized.
“Something wrong, Mr. Riker?”
Caught.
Riker turned and drew his mouth into a grin that must have looked forced—another mistake—and said, “Not at all, sir. Everything’s fine.” He felt his eyes squinting and didn’t want the grin to get out of hand, so he pursed his lips and pretended to be very interested in the tactical display.
Good—the captain was looking away. Relax, Riker. Down with one shoulder. Now the other. Good soldier.
A casual turn told him no one was looking at him. Everyone was busy with the giant.
A moment later he was hypnotized again, but this time it was not by the subdued presence of Captain Picard. Now the gas giant caught him, held him, cradled in its unparalleled blueness as it roiled before them on the wide ceiling-to-floor viewscreen.
Ah, that viewscreen. It was the only thing on this ship that truly conveyed the size of the vessel and its technological grandeur. Dominating the bridge, the screen was half a universe all by itself.
The other half was over Riker’s shoulder: the new Enterprise. Barely broken in, swan-elegant, she spread out behind him like the wings of the bird.
Birds. Everything’s birds all of a sudden, Riker thought, and he glanced at Jean-Luc Picard.
“Condition report, Mr. Data,” the captain requested then, directing his gaze to the primary science station aft of tactical.
Riker turned aft in time to see a slender humanoid straighten at the science post. The face was still startling, its doll-like pyrite sheen softened only by its sculpted expression. Data’s expression, when there was one, always carried a childlike naïveté that eased the severeness of his slicked-back hair and the cartoon colors of his skin. For the hundredth time, Riker involuntarily wondered why anybody smart enough to create an android so intricate was too stupid to paint its face the right color or put some tone on its lips. If his builders filled it with human data—pardon the pun—somewhere in the download must have been information that the palette of human skin types didn’t include chrome. It was as though they went out of the way to shape him like a human, then went even further out of the way to paste him with signs that said, “Hey, I’m an android!”
Data’s brushstroke brows lifted. “Readings coming in from phaser blast echoes now, sir. Absolutely lifeless—high concentrations of uncataloged chemical compounds, very compressed . . . extremely rare reactology, Captain. This information will prove valuable.”
“Is there a margin of safety to attempt probing through to the gas giant’s core?” Picard asked.
Data’s face was framed by the black mantle of the slenderizing one-piece flightsuit, its color picked up again by the breast panel’s mustard gold, a standard Starfleet color since the Big Bang. “A wide margin, sir. I recommend it.”
Riker pressed his arms to his sides. There was something unreal about Data’s voice. More human than human, the words were rounded and spoken with an open throat, as though it was always working a little harder than necessary.
“He.” Not “it.” For the sake of the rest of the crew, think “he.” No sense rupturing the trust others might have by accidentally pointing out the fact that he’s an instrument, even if he is. Riker shook himself from his thoughts as he sensed Picard’s glance, and in that moment he collected the authority he needed to carry out the captain’s unspoken order.
He cleared his throat. “Increase phasers to full power. Let’s see what’s at the heart of this beauty.”
“It is beautiful, isn’t it? You don’t stumble on one of these every day,” Beverly Crusher commented. Folding her long arms, she sat on the bench just port of the counselor’s seat, exercising a ship’s surgeon’s traditional right to be on the bridge when she didn’t feel like being anywhere else. Dr. Crusher was yet another stroke of color against the bisque walls and carpet. Over her cobalt-and-black uniform her hair was a Cleopatra crown of pure terra cotta—and there was just something about a redhead. She was reedy and quick, smart and graceful, and inclined toward sensible shoes in spite of her narrow-boned loveliness. Riker liked her. So did the captain. Especially the captain.
“Yes,” Captain Picard murmured, using the conversation as an excuse to move a few steps closer to her, “and it’s twice the size of common gas giants. Fire phasers.”
The muted phhhiiiuuuuuu hummed through the ship again, and on the screen an energy bolt cut downward into the surfaceless swirl.
“Reading various concentrations of gas,” Data reported, “merging to liquid . . . compressing into solid masses in some areas . . . logging the compounds now, sir.”
“Excellent,” Picard responded. “I’m sure—”
The forward turbolift beside the captain’s ready-room door opened, and Deanna Troi flew out onto the bridge, so unlike herself that she drew all eyes. She was a wreck—about as opposite her usual demeanor as she could get without mud-wrestling first. Her hair, usually knotted up in a style so tight it made other people’s muscles ache, was a black mass, spilling over her shoulders and around her pearly cheeks. Her eyes, extra large with their touch of alienness, obsidian as eyes that looked out from a Greco-Roman fresco, were skewed by some terrible calamity. She was breathing hard. Had she run down every corridor?
Riker plowed through the bridge contingent to the space just below her platform. “Deanna . . . what’s wrong?”
She panted out a few breaths, her pencil-perfect brows drawn inward to make two creases over her nose. “Why . . . why is there a yellow alert?”
Even now she spoke softly, her words touched with that faintly alien Betazoid accent. She was working hard to compose herself, but something was obviously pressuring her.
Riker moved a step closer, hoping to reassure her. “We’re attempting close orbit around that.” He made a gesture toward the viewscreen, but his mind wasn’t on it any more than hers was. He parted his lips to say something else, but Data was interrupting him.
“We’re firing into its atmosphere to get feedback readings. Even though its core is unignited, the planet is putting out three times the energy it should, mostly in long-wave radiation. We have to be on alert in case of shock waves or gravitational recoil—”
“Data,” Riker snapped, wishing there was an off switch. He silenced the android with a sandpaper look, then turned back to Troi. “I should’ve told the computer to bypass standard procedure and not call you up here. It’s my fault.”
She put out her hand in what began as an appeasing gesture, but as she spoke it turned into the kind of move a woman makes when she wants to steady herself. “No . . . it isn’t your fault. . . .”
The captain floated in at Riker’s left. “What’s bothering you, Counselor?” he asked, gently but with an edge of impatience.
Her kohled eyes narrowed beneath those drawn brows. “I heard something . . . in my mind . . . ”
“Can you describe it?” Riker asked. A twinge ran up his spine. Her muted telepathic talents always made him nervous. It wasn’t exactly disbelief, because no one could dispute the existence of Betazoid mental traits, but it was a kind of distrust.
She backed up a step. “I’m sorry . . . ” She blinked, took a deep breath, and pretended to recover. “Captain, I’m sorry for the interruption. I didn’t mean to disturb your tests. Please excuse me.”
Before either of the men could speak, she made a quick and nervous exit.
Riker stared at the lift doors. “I’ve never seen her act that way,” he murmured.
Data rose and came a few steps toward the ramp. “Is Counselor Troi ill?”
“It’s something else,” Riker decided quietly, more to himself than to Data.
“She behaved abnormally.”
Now he drew his eyes from the lift and struck Data with a look that would have bruised had it been a Ghost Ship blow. “I don’t think you’re anyone to judge,” he barked.
Picard tilted his shoulders as he turned, saying, “Permission to leave the bridge, Number One. Temporarily.”
“Thank you, sir,” Riker said. “I won’t be long.” He had to restrain himself or he would actually have bounded for the lift. He cast one more acid glare at Data before leaving the bridge.
Picard smoothed the moment with a calm extension of the science tests. “Continue phaser bursts at regular intervals.”
Data drew himself away from the stinging, confusing reaction Riker had given him and settled into his usual station at OPS on the forward deck. “Science stations are receiving continual information from the planetary core now, Captain.” He lowered his voice as he had often heard humans do, and to LaForge said, “Commander Riker is annoyed with me.”
LaForge shrugged. He glanced at the android, but saw not what human eyes would see. The android’s bodily heat was unevenly distributed throughout the high-tech body, a body far denser than that of a human body of equal volume. The sections of infrared were localized into hot spots, more defined than the infrared blobs in a human body, and LaForge could easily discern the places where organic material was fitted in to intricate mechanics. Data gave off an electromagnetic aura, but he wasn’t exactly a toaster oven.
“You could try being a little less stiff,” LaForge suggested. “Learn some slang or something.”
Data’s lips flattened. “Slang. Colloquial jargon, nonstandard idioms, street talk . . . it’s often inaccurate. I have tried to incorporate that speech into my language use, but it does not seem to flow.”
“That’s because you use it as though it still has quotation marks around it. You use individual words instead of the whole meaning of the phrase. You’ve got to try to use slang more casually.”
“What purpose does it actually serve?”
LaForge leaned toward him and delicately said, “It makes you approachable. Give it a swing.”
As his lips silently traced that last word, a perplexed expression overtook Data’s features. Unlike the times when he worked too hard at his expressions and ended up looking like a vaudeville clown, these moments made him look much more human than any he could force, these moments when unexpected emotion simply popped up on his face. “Swing . . . a child’s toy, a sweeping maneuver—oh! An effort. A try. Yes, swing. I’ll swing. Computer, show me all available dictionary and dialect banks on Earth slang, rapid feed.”
The computer came to life on the panel before him and its soft feminine voice, in a delivery much more at ease than Data’s own, asked, “What era’s slang would you like, and what language?”
Geordi LaForge settled back into his lounge and mumbled, “I always thought you needed a hobby.”
Abruptly there was a sound on the quarterdeck, something akin to a growl, but as quickly it was gone and replaced by the resonant bass of Lieutenant Worf as he stared at his monitor.
“Not possible!”
Captain Picard drew his attention away from the blue giant and approached his own command chair, behind which the horseshoe rail arched upward and across the tactical console. Past that, Worf stood with his back to the bridge, staring at his status monitor as though his dissatisfaction could bore right through it. Of course, with a Klingon, that might very well be the case.
Pulling up the automatic extra measure of calmness he found himself using with Worf, Picard urged, “Lieutenant? Something?”
“I’m not sure I saw it,” the Klingon spat.
But Security Chief Tasha Yar twisted her toned body without taking her hands off her tactical console and told him, “I saw it too.”
“Saw what?” Picard demanded.
“An energy pulse, Captain.” The girl pushed back a lock of her boy-cropped blond hair. “A huge one. Across the entire solar system.”
Only one step carried Worf all the way forward to Tasha’s side. “Very sharp and powerful, sir, a refractive scan. Like an instant sensor sweep.”
“It was too quick-fire for sensors,” Tasha shot back.
“Then what?” Worf boomed. “There’s no trace of it now.”
Picard used their argument to cloak his movement up the ramp to tactical, where he peered over the controls. There was nothing showing. “Could it have been an aberration? Feedback from our experiments?”
“Sir, it came from outside the solar system,” Tasha said, her throat tightening around her voice as it always did when she let herself get excited.
“Track it.”
“Nothing left to track,” Worf said coarsely.
Picard raised his head. “Don’t use that tone with me, Lieutenant. There is no crisis yet.”
Worf’s big brown face didn’t look in the least apologetic, given a particularly animalistic texture by the riblike cranium of his Klinzhai racial background, the strain which had emerged dominant during the last Klingon purge. He was imposing; in fact, he was downright terrifying, because the other crew members could always see that controlling himself was plain work for him and someday he just might lose the fight.
“Sorry, sir,” he rumbled. “It was there during our last phaser burst, then it was gone.” He placed his big hands on the tactical board and burned a glare through the forward screen. “I don’t like it. It’s like being watched.”
Picard stood back on his heels for a contemplative moment, his handsome eyes wedging. “Could be another vessel. Let’s make sure they don’t miss us. Saying hello is part of our job. Put sensors on wide scan. Lieutenant Data, you handle broadcast of standard hailing frequency with greetings in all interstellar languages and codes as well as automatic universal translation.”
“I’m hopping to it.”
“Lieutenant LaForge, take us out of orbit. Disband further testing of the gas giant until we ascertain the trim of the solar system.”
“Aye, sir. Disengaging orbital condition.” LaForge pressed his fingers to the signal controls on the beautiful board at wrist level and just that easily drew the massive starship out of the gas giant’s gravitational envelope. During that maneuver, while the ship was safely under control of the navigational computer, he took a moment to glance left to Data.
When he looked at the other crew members, he saw the layerings of infrared that he could intensify as needed, he saw blood running through arteries, arterioles, capillaries, and so on, but he saw them better than a computer would because his brain acted as interpreter and he was more intuitive than any computer. Over that infrared image, like a nylon stocking drawn over a mannequin, he saw skin and a hazy shine of fine skin hairs. The mannequin appeared to be lighted from within, and had a slight glow.
But Data—Data was a work of art. Geordi alone could see the exotic materials, brilliantly blended, the different levels of heat and coolness, the different densities where metal met synthetic, where synthetic met organism, and where all meshed. He saw the density of Data’s body, and all the million tiny electrical impulses that kept him working and ran like swarms of insects through his body when he worked a little harder or concentrated a little more or called up more strength. But it wasn’t like looking at the computer stations before them or the mechanism behind the wall at the coffee/food dispenser. Not at all. Those were machines.
LaForge sometimes got the feeling that people forgot he could hear too. He had listened to Riker’s tone just before the first officer left the bridge. He had heard the flutter in Data’s voice when he mentioned that Riker wasn’t too pleased with him. Data was mechanical, but to Geordi LaForge he was no machine.
Geordi allowed himself an indulgent gaze at Data’s face as the android glowed with concentration. He saw the structure of synthetic facial bone, tiny blood-fed fibrous ligaments attached to impulse interpreters, stockinged by the cool involucrum that was his skin. Geordi saw a handsome face, unafraid of its own features, a face that could show many feelings, from courage to calculation, confusion to compassion, to those sensitive enough to see its minute changes. And Data’s eyes, no matter their brimstone cast, were unfailingly gentle.
Geordi shook his head and uttered, “Machine, my ass.”
Picard looked up. “Lieutenant?”
“Secure distance, sir.”
“Speak up, then.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door’s buzzer sounded clearly, but Troi didn’t respond to it. Once again lights played across her face, but not the lights of yellow alert. She sat at her private desk, watching a holograph simulate the motion of a patch of blue ocean water. At the ends of the foot-wide holograph, the ocean faded and became table. Dead center on the patch of churning water was a three-dimensional image of an old military vessel. It was wedge-shaped, piled high with steel-gray metal mountings that made no sense to her. On the screen at her wrist came the simple description: First iron screw steamship, S.S. Great Britain.
She frowned and tapped the continue button. The 3-D image sucked in on itself as though imploded, twisted around a little, and reanimated into something utterly different, something bigger, flatter, clunkier, chugging across her table. The dark band of screen beneath it said: Tanker, Edmund Fitzgerald, lost with all hands, Lake Superior, Michigan, United States, Earth 1975.
Troi hit the button almost angrily. Those weren’t right. They weren’t right. A new image came almost instantly, a big black, white, and red ship, very elegant and slim this time, obviously meant to carry people. People—that was right. She looked at the display band. Luxury liner Queen Elizabeth II, Cunard Line, Earth.
No . . . no . . . Troi’s mulberry-tinted lips lost their perfect shape. No. Her finger moved again.
H.M.S. Dreadnought, battleship, Great Britain, Earth, 1906.
She leaned forward now as she recognized some element—the color, the demeanor of this ship . . . closer. She tapped the button again, this time saying, “This type of vessel.”
“This is a naval defense/offense vessel which would be used during and after World War One,” the computer courteously told her.
“Continue.”
The holograph winked, and she was gazing at another ship of the same kind, but from a different angle as it crashed through the little round patch of sea. Its slate-gray bow rose and fell in the sea. The computer image turned as though Troi were circling it in an aircraft, to give her a complete look at it from all angles. It had a crude kind of grace about it, certainly a strength, but it had no lights at all, no colors like the starship’s sparkling yellow and white lights, its glowing reds, its vibrant electrical blues.
Aegis cruiser, built by SYSCON for the U.S. Navy, Earth, 1988.
The door buzzed again.
“Oh—yes; come in.”
She let the old-style ship pierce its way through the tiny sea in front of her as she looked up to see Will Riker stride in. As soon as the door opened, his eyes were already locked with hers. How long had he been waiting out there? She faintly remembered now that the buzzer had sounded once before.
“I was worried about you,” he said. He settled into the other chair and leaned one elbow on the desk just short of the holograph. The bulky cruiser splashed toward him, and yet stayed right where it was. “I didn’t know you were a history buff.” He nodded at the Aegis. “That’s nice.”
Troi tilted her dark head. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
So that was the end of the easy transition, Riker realized. Something in her tone told him her statement was more significant than it pretended to be.
“What happened?” he asked, no longer protecting her from her own behavior on the bridge.
She gave him an uncharacteristic shrug with one shoulder and shook her head, a self-conscious smile tugging at her lips. “Did you see what I did? I’m so embarrassed. I’ve never mistaken a dream for reality before. I must really have looked funny. Did anyone laugh?”
“Laugh?” Riker said saucily. “You should’ve seen them. Captain Picard had to be wheeled off the bridge, Worf was—”
“Oh, you!” She swatted his nearest knee and chuckled at herself again.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Riker told her, lounging his big frame back in the chair. “Everybody does something like that sooner or later. The more stoic you are, the worse the goof-up seems.”
“Am I stoic?” she asked, the smile broadening again.
“I don’t know, Counselor,” he said. “I don’t remember the last time I looked at you and only saw the professional. I’ve got more flowery things to remember about you.”
Troi pursed her lips, leaned forward, ignoring the holograph of the ship as it continued its nonvoyage, and propped her chin on one hand. “Tell me, Bill. Make me feel better.”
“No fair. Figure it out for yourself. You of all people could do it.”
Settling back, she said, “That’s not very comforting for a person who just dashed onto the bridge in a frenzy.”
Will Riker’s bright eyes flashed before her impishly. “You want comfort? How’s this? I was assigned as second officer on a destroyer right after my promotion to lieutenant commander—about a thousand years ago, if memory serves. I got my assignment at Starbase Eighteen, and keyed the coordinates to the new ship into the transporter, stepped on the pad, and boom, there I was. I strutted around being the almighty second officer, puffed up just like a souffle, and we were ten hours out of spacedock before I figured out I had beamed myself onto the wrong departing ship.”
“Oh, Bill! Oh, no . . . ”
“And the ship I’d landed on wasn’t a destroyer, either. It was the U.S.S. Yorktown—an Excelsior-class starship, heading out on a two-year mission. Her captain made Picard seem like Francis of Assisi. They’d already been delayed four days by diplomatic entanglements, and here’s Second Officer Riker having to report to the real second officer.”
Her hand was clapped over her mouth by now, and she parted her fingers enough to burble, “What did they do?”
He spread his hands. “What could they do? They turned the whole ship around, this huge ship, and they came all the way back through space to rendezvous with the destroyer I was supposed to be on. So there was the destroyer, having to meet a starship just to pick up its second officer, who was supposed to have reported in ten hours before.”
“Oh, dear . . . ”
“So quit complaining.”
“Is that a true story? You’re not making it up to make me feel better?”
“Make it up? Deanna, nobody sane could make up anything that punishing. It’s like a practical joke somebody plays on a bridegroom on his wedding night, except I did it to myself.” Shaking his head musingly, he added, “I could never quite look at a transporter platform the same way again. I always wonder if I’m going to end up beaming into somebody’s shower by mistake. And the worst was yet to come. Two years later, I really was assigned as Yorktown’s second officer and I had to report to that captain again!”
She giggled, bringing an unlikely girlishness to her demeanor. “Did he remember?”
“Remember? First thing he asked was if I’d been hiding in the hold all this time.”
Their laughter entwined and filled the dim room, chasing away the discomfort.
As Riker watched her custodially, he noticed she had picked up on his feelings and was actually doing the blushing for him. At first he was tempted to draw back within himself, but he knew it didn’t matter. With Deanna, holding back showed up like a beacon. There was no point. He wished he could be this relaxed with the other members of the crew.
They sat together, grinning at each other, warm in their mutual memories and the privacy of a relationship and a past they had allowed no one else on board to see. It was like starting fresh, with a whole new life, with their attraction to each other getting a second chance, because no one else knew. No one else on the entire ship knew.
Breaking his gaze at her gentle face, Riker looked at the unlikely holograph beside him and asked, “You had a nightmare?”
Her expression made his smile fall away. He forced himself not to say more, to give her a chance to answer in her own time, while he indulged in the presence of her troubled onyx eyes.
“A nightmare,” she murmured. “But in this nightmare I could feel the emotions of the strangers in it. It was nothing I recognize . . . sharp images of things I know nothing about. Names I’ve never heard.”
Riker perked up. “What names?”
She drew the memory up and forced herself to speak. “There was Vasska, Arkady, Gork . . . Gorsha . . . I don’t know those sounds. And I don’t understand why I would hear names. I can’t do that. I can only read some emotions. I’ve never been able to draw complete communication.”
He inched a little closer. “But you’re Betazoid. What’s so surprising if you can—”
“I can’t. I never could,” she insisted, wondering if she could make him comprehend. “You don’t understand what it means to communicate with a silent mind. You don’t know the trouble, the discomfort of dealing with races that can’t shield their thoughts. It’s as if a sighted person suddenly enters a world of chaotic lights and colors, or a hearing person suddenly comes into a place that was nothing but uncontrolled noises. The light would be blinding, the din maddening . . . I’ve worked hard to separate my own thoughts from those of others, Bill, and I’ve done well at it. You can see why it disturbs me that I’m experiencing something so unfamiliar.”
“Deanna, it was a dream,” he told her soothingly, cupping her hand under his.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “But it wasn’t,” she insisted. “At least . . . not entirely.”
He believed her. Deanna Troi was the quintessence of professionalism and not given to the flights of personality often displayed by her Betazoid race. Without a pause he asked, “Have you asked the computer to trace the names?”
Troi lounged back in her chair, finally relaxing. “Computer off.”
The holograph gave an electrical snap, sucked down into a tiny core of light like a balloon suddenly losing all its air, and winked out.
“Have you?” he prodded.
“I suppose I’ll have to.”
“Why do you say it that way?”
“I don’t like to give in to dreams.”
Riker gazed at her, dubious.
Without giving him time to formulate a response to that, she asked, “Bill, what do you think? Do you think I might utilize my talents better in some other way?”
“You don’t mean leave the ship, do you? You aren’t thinking about that.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “if that’s how I can best serve the Federation.”
Desperation struck him. As much as he had—yes—avoided her, as afraid as he was that their past liaison would cloud his effectiveness as first officer, the prospect of her vanishing from his life suddenly cut him like a blade. “Don’t you like it here?” he asked, careful of his tone. “Don’t you like starship duty?”
“Oh, I like it very much,” she said. “Oh, yes, very much. But there are times . . . can you imagine what it’s like to stand on the bridge and realize I have nothing to do?”
With another shake of his head, Riker tapped a finger on the table and blurted, “Can I imagine it? I don’t have to. It’s the legacy of first officers the universe across. If you look up first officer in the marine dictionary, it says ‘do not open till crisis.’ Listen, it takes time for a new position to evolve. When we actually turn to exploratory missions, I think you’ll find yourself up to your chin in work. Keeping us sane in deep space—that’s hardly nothing. A ship’s psychologist is second only to the chief surgeon on deep-space missions.”
She smiled softly at his sincere effort, and murmured, “Where does that put the ship’s telepath?”
To this, Riker had no ready answer.
Troi sensed his concern and forced up a partial smile to ease his worry. She fell into his wide blue eyes as she had so long ago, and crashed through them just as the holographic cruiser crashed through its patch of blue sea. How could she make him understand? Could any human understand how uneasy she was, all the time? She knew people were uncomfortable around her because they thought of her as a kind of voyeur, always peeking through the keyholes of their thoughts. Mind slut, some called her. Many avoided her, so she had always tried to be more businesslike and stoic about her extremely businesslike talent—and even that practice had backfired.
Cold, they called her. An unfeeling mind slut.
How could she tell him that a crowded corridor was an empty place for Deanna Troi? Barren and lonely. She made such an effort to hide inside herself that she had become insulated from everything but their eyes, accused of a crime she refused to commit. Among her own people she could no longer go unrestrained; having built her discipline almost obsessively, she could no longer drop it for the short times she spent among Betazoids. Thus lost in both communities, misinterpreted by each as too aloof, she had become a woman of feelings who walked forever alone.
Even now she hid those truths from William Riker and his gentle waves of concern.
She swallowed imperceptibly and parted her lips. “Now I ask you—what’s the matter? What disturbs you?” She could both sense and see him weighing whether or not to tell her what he was thinking, then almost immediately he changed his mind.
“I don’t like to see you experiencing hurts that aren’t your own,” he admitted. “It doesn’t seem fair.”
“It’s my nature,” Troi told him. “My heritage from my mother’s people. It’s the nature of telepathy. Oh, I could shut my mind, become more alone, as you are, but I’ve found my way to be useful. I’m lucky, you see,” she said, forcing a smile. “I can experience the emotions yet remain objective about them.”
He thought of the strange ship that had just clicked out of being on the table beside them and shrugged. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”
She pulled her hand from under his, then put it on top of his and pressed down gently. “There is more than hurt to be felt, you know. I can also feel love.”
Riker allowed himself a sentimental smile. For an isolated moment they shared something that neither was completely sure still existed between them anymore. The magnetism was undeniable, but at the same instant it pierced him with its own dangers.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “I have to go back up there and act indispensable.”
“I know.”
He crooked his forefinger under her chin. “Try to relax. We all have that kind of dream sometimes. I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”
Troi smiled warmly. “I’m all right.”
He squeezed her hand, somehow feeling he hadn’t quite accomplished what he came in here for. Well, no point dragging it out to the maudlin. Stepping toward the door, he made what he thought was a clumsy exit.
The door brushed open, then closed automatically behind him, leaving him alone in the corridor as he took a stride or two toward the bridge turbolift—
And braked hard.
There was someone in front of him. He’d sworn the corridor was empty an instant ago. The air was chilled, heavy.
The man was big, almost as big as Riker. And maybe fifteen years older. His eyes were ready for Riker’s, and didn’t flicker away, but remained steadily focused. A wave of silver was the only inconsistency in his thick dark hair, and there was a uniform cap tucked under his arm. Yes—he was wearing a uniform, a dark blue uniform of some kind.
Riker vaguely recognized the style, but it was almost a “racial” kind of memory rather than something from his own experience.
The man’s pale lips separated without moisture. His face worked as though to speak, but there was an invisible wall between them. There was no sound, no sensation of warmth—in fact there was now a distinct chill in the corridor.
The large man, standing straight and proper, lifted a hand toward Riker, beckoning. Or perhaps asking—a gesture of entreaty—but then his handsome face crumpled, his brow knitting tightly, brackets of frustration forming on either side of his mouth.
Riker was as a man chained during those moments. He might have believed anything when the other man’s form slowly turned gauzy, thinned, and disappeared.