“HAUNTED,” CAPTAIN PICARD snorted. “Superstitious claptrap. Belay that attitude, ensign.”
He moved to the command center, not quite ready to sit down, plagued by the sensation that those entities were still walking around him. He cast an intolerant glance at Wesley Crusher, communicating that all they needed now was the wisdom of a teenager to gum up the works. As he caught Wesley’s whipped-puppy expression, Picard felt once again the sting of his decision to make Wesley an ensign, a decision no good parent would make, yet one that he, as a man who had never had children, had made without realizing the consequences. He should have known better, for as commanding officer he was indeed the father of all his crew and complement. Wesley’s face was the face of a child; no seasoned officer would take the reprimand so personally. And having given it, Picard could not take it back.
There were many things which could not be taken back. Such an error and a disservice, promoting the boy to the bridge so early, without the earning. Not so much a disservice to the bridge, but to the boy.
Picard watched the viewscreen, turning away from the young face that occupied his mind now.
Yes, promoting Wesley to the bridge had aroused the resentment of Starfleet officers who might not be as brilliant but might be more deserving. Wesley Crusher had become the supreme knick-knack—a pretty display of talent, but not really functional. Anything he did on the bridge had to be monitored, no matter that he could calculate things inside his head sometimes before the computer made its reports. That was just how it was.
And why did I do that to him? Picard wondered, letting the familiar thought roll through his mind all in that one glance. Do I feel so responsible for his father’s death? Do I owe Jack Crusher so much for the mistake that killed him . . . that I would make another mistake with his son? Am I so anxious to gain the gratitude of this boy’s mother that I would use his brilliance to showcase my good will? And now I risk destroying his distorted image of himself if I withdraw his status as acting ensign and put him back where he belongs . . . Ah, Picard, tu t’es fait avoir.
He sighed, and turned to his command crew. “All right. Ensign Crusher says ghosts. It’s as good a starting point as any.”
Worf’s Klingon brow puckered. “But, sir, ghosts are fables!”
“Perhaps so, from a metaphysical perspective,” Picard said evenly and without a pause. “But we’re not going to address that. We’re going to approach them from a wholly scientific vantage. Disband all thoughts of wraiths and think in terms of alternate life-forms and mind forms. Mr. Data, what can you give me on that?”
Caught off guard by having so folklorish a subject cast at him, Data blinked and appeared suddenly helpless.
Riker stepped in, knowing better, but still not fast enough to stop himself. “An android wouldn’t know anything about life, sir, much less the occult.”
The captain’s eyes struck him like blades. “I’m talking about spectral apparitions, Riker, and you are out of line with that remark. Aren’t you?”
Bruised, Riker nodded smartly. “Yes, sir, I guess I am.”
“I asked Data a question.”
Data may or may not have appreciated the dressing-down on his behalf, but the fact was he found himself floundering on such a subject. To a being for whom knowledge had always meant plain facts, this mystical concept was quicksand. Very conscious of the attention he was getting, Data glanced at Riker, straightened a little, and spoke.
“Sir,” he began, “I would postulate that, since the life-forms were picked up by Geordi’s visor and then by the recalibrated bridge sensors, they are not foibles of Earth thaumaturgy, but indeed of a substantive hylozoic constituence.”
Picard’s mouth crumpled. “What?”
“They’re real.”
“Oh. You might’ve said so.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“What you mean,” Picard continued, “is that something incorporeal need not be unalive. Traditionally, ghosts are unalive. These beings aren’t.”
Data cocked his head. “Difficult to say, sir. That transgresses into the realm of semantics. We would have to isolate what it means . . . to be alive.”
The android’s sudden discomfort with those words drew Picard’s attention once again to his eyes, to the boyish innocence of a being who had gone all the way through Starfleet Academy, spent a dozen years on Starfleet vessels, yet somehow remained the quintessence of ignorance. Data would have to have that word applied to him . . . but no book learning, regardless of its extent, could replace the priceless pleasures and brutalities of living interaction.
“Do we have an analysis from the science labs yet?” the captain asked.
Data played with the computer board nearest him and accessed the information as it was fed back to him through the computer’s sophisticated comparative-analysis system, then said, “They seem to be some sort of phased energy, sir.”
“What does that mean?”
“Apparently they exist here in pulses. Here and not here. They don’t always exist in one place. It’s not energy as we commonly define it. It is more like a proto-energy. It has some of the properties of energy and matter, yet sometimes none of those. It seems unfamiliar to our science.” Data looked up. “Apparently stability is not their forte.”
“That’s an interesting nonanalysis, Mr. Data. Seems to me the computer is turning backflips to avoid admitting that it doesn’t know.”
“At the moment, I cannot blame it, sir.”
Picard gave him an acid glare, but was pleasantly distracted when Troi came to him, deliberately holding her hands clasped before her, evidence of her effort to keep control. “Sir . . . ”
“Go on, Counselor, nothing’s too outlandish at this point.”
“If they are . . . ghosts—that is, the remaining mental matter of deceased physical forms,” she said, “can they be destroyed?”
“Destroyed.” Picard tasted the word. “You mean killed, don’t you? To be able to be killed is one of the signs of life.”
Moved by his blunt response to the problem, Troi forced herself to push the point. “And if they can be killed, does that mean they’re alive?”
“No one has talked about punitive action yet, Counselor,” the captain said. “But these images of destruction you’re receiving,” he added. “I can’t dismiss those.”
From her expression they could see she wasn’t trying to split hairs; the question was very urgent to her, a true matter of life and death. “Yes, sir, I know. But I’m desperate that my perceptions not be misread. I don’t trust myself to analyze them yet. I wouldn’t want you to take punitive action before it’s warranted, just because of me.”
“Are you saying you do sense a danger to us?”
Frustrated, she tilted her head and sighed. “I’m trying not to say it, but I’m also afraid not to. If you understand me . . . ”
“Oh, I think I understand. These entities exist on a plane so different from our own that their very existence may endanger us. We’ve run into that sort of thing before in Federation expansion.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I mean,” Troi said anxiously. “Even if they pose a danger to us, do they deserve to be killed when all they’ve done is trespass onto the ship?”
“Mmmm,” Picard murmured. “And will they be as generous when discussing us, I wonder.” He paced around her, contemplating the carpet. “I’ll keep all that in mind. Whatever the case, I will not allow my crew to succumb to superstition. We will find the answers, and they will be scientifically based.”
Troi straightened her spine. “Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir,” Data said, turning to his console.
“I agree, sir,” Riker said. “Whoever these beings are, we have to assume they’re sentient, and that they have intentions that we’ll have to figure out before we can act.”
“Yes,” Picard murmured. “And the question remains,” he added softly, scanning the bridge, now as eerie and silent as a graveyard at dawn, “what are they doing here?”
The words put a pool of ice water around all their feet. The captain didn’t wait for it to warm.
“Mr. Riker, my ready room. I’ll have a word with you.”
Riker forced himself to follow the captain’s retreating form into the private room off the bridge. No sooner had the door brushed shut behind him than the captain froze him in place with a lofty glare.
“You undermined my authority, Mr. Riker.”
Trying to replay the past moments in his mind without the jitters that still ran the deck on the other side of that door, Riker asked, “Did I, sir?”
The captain stood with his compact frame backdropped by the viewport’s starscape, appearing quite the nobleman among the peerage. “You did.”
Inclining his head, Riker offered, “But I saw those forms closing in on you. I didn’t know what they intended.”
“You needn’t have done your Olympic pole vault on my account,” the captain said. “A simple word of warning would have been sufficient.”
Squaring his shoulders—but not too much—Riker proclaimed, “It’s my job to protect you, sir.”
“Yes, I know that’s the official story,” Picard said. “When you’ve come back alive as many times as I have, you’ll earn the right to have someone look after you as well. I’ll thank you to allow me the dignity of taking my own punches from now on. Dismissed.”
“Geordi, look at this. Geordi, look at that. Geordi, tell us what this is made of. Geordi, look through walls like Superman. Sure, no problem, I’ll look. All I am is what I look through.”
“Take it easy,” Beverly Crusher murmured as she adjusted the tiny filter on the miniaturized low-power sensory compensator in LaForge’s visor. “You know, you should have a medical engineer doing this.”
“No thanks,” the young man grumbled, blinking his flat gray unseeing eyes at her, trying to imagine what she really looked like—really.
“And you should have rested after what happened on the bridge,” she told him evenly. “You can’t ask your body to power this sensor system to that level without letting yourself rest. That’s why it hurts you so much, Geordi. You’re unremitting.”
He nodded his cocoa-dark head in her general direction and said, “I don’t mind the hurt. I can’t just leave my post. But somehow I expected a little more appreciation from people who were stationed on Enterprise. I just assumed anybody who could get assigned to this ship would be a little more up to date than the run-of-the-mill ship’s crew.” He closed his eyes tight against the pounding headache and rubbed his hand across them, waiting for the medication to work. “Riker just expected me to tell him. It’s not that easy. I can’t just glance at things like you can. I can’t just pop out with words for the sensory impulses that make my brain act like a computer interpreter. Do you know that at close range a computer with a sensory readout can’t match me? It’ll miss or misinterpret things, because a machine doesn’t understand things like I do.”
“That’s because it doesn’t have the intuitive sense for interpreting what it sees,” Crusher told him placidly. “You should be proud of that.”
“I am,” he insisted. “But I didn’t know what those forms on the bridge were any more than anybody else did, including Mr. Riker. When people look at me, they don’t see me. They just see that thing.” He cast his hand in her direction, encompassing all of her and the item she held.
“They don’t understand,” the doctor said, “and you can’t expect them to. They aren’t going to understand how much it takes out of you to make this visor work.”
“I know!” he shot back with a frustrated slap of his hand on his knee. “I know . . . but it’s hard to be reasonable sometimes, specially when everybody’s kicking off a Geordi-what-do-you-see. They don’t know what it took to learn to interpret all the information I get out of every square inch I see. I’m not a machine, doc, you know? My brain wasn’t made to do this. It’s not like I look at a thing and a dozen little labels appear to tell me what it’s made of. I had to learn what every impulse meant, every vibration, every flicker, every filter, every layer of spectral matter . . . people don’t know what it takes out of me to say, ‘I don’t know what it is.’ ”
Crusher stopped her adjusting and paused to gaze at him, suddenly moved by her ability to simply do that. Because he was blind now, without his prosthetic, he didn’t see her pause. He didn’t—couldn’t—see anything. And she was glad of it.
“It’s not easy, you know,” he went on. “It took years of retraining—painful retraining—to make my brain do this. A human brain is never meant by nature to do what mine’s doing. And every time I have to say, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ it goes through me like a steel bolt. It means I’m truly blind.”
“Oh, Geordi . . . ” Crusher murmured.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I go through twenty or thirty levels of analysis and every one takes a piece out of me. When I can’t tell what it is I’m seeing, it’s not like a sighted person looking at a box and not being able to see what’s inside. It’s like holding your breath and diving deeper and deeper, no matter how much it hurts . . . and when you can’t touch bottom, you still have to plow back to the surface before your lungs explode . . . oh, I can’t explain it; I can’t make you see.”
He reached out in his blindness and by instinct alone he found the visor she held as she stood nearby—a blind man’s instinct that told him where her hands were—and with his artificial eyes back in his own hand he slid from the table and somehow found the door. As it opened for him he went flawlessly through it, homing in on the sound and the faint gush of air from the corridor, as though to show her he could be a whole person without the burden of his high-tech crutch.
“Geordi,” Crusher called after him, but she did so only halfheartedly, for she had no words to help him. She winced as Riker appeared out of nowhere and Geordi bumped into him. It would’ve been such a smooth exit otherwise . . .
“Lieutenant—” Riker started to greet, then simply gaped as LaForge plowed past him without even a “sorry, sir.” After Geordi rounded the arch of the corridor and disappeared, Riker crooked a thumb in that direction as he came into the sickbay. “What’s eating him?”
“You are.” Crusher folded her arms and sighed.
“I am? How’d I get into this?”
“Funny you should ask.” She grasped his arm and drew him into the sickbay, then planted him in the nearest chair and assumed her lecture position—any parent knows it. Sliding her narrow thigh up onto an exam table, she broached the subject with a practiced look of sternness. “He’s a little bothered by that episode on the bridge.”
“He told you about that . . . okay, I’ll bite,” Riker said. “Why’s it bothering him?”
Beverly Crusher’s lovely art deco features were marred by the situation. “You sure you want to know?”
Frustrated, Riker held his hands out. “When did I start looking so aloof to everybody? I want to know.”
“That’s not what you came down here for.”
“No,” he admitted. “I came down because I knew LaForge was here and I wanted an analysis of physical composition of those life images. I figure he’s the best man to do it.”
“I think you’d better get Data to do it.”
“Why? All of a sudden, everybody’s functioning at half power. Isn’t Geordi LaForge the expert on spectroscopy?”
“Only by necessity,” she said, “not by choice.”
Riker looked at her; just looked at her. Then he shook his head. “You’re mad at me. Been conniving with the captain?”
Suddenly a common thread looped around them and Crusher’s lips curved into an understanding grin. “Oh . . . I see. No, I’m not mad at you. But let me give you a bit of advice.”
“Please!”
“Listen to Lieutenant LaForge. Just listen.”
“I do listen.”
“You don’t. You hear what he has to say, but you don’t appreciate it. You think all he does is ‘see.’ ”
Riker tried to interpret what she was saying by looking into her deep-set eyes and reading them, but after a few seconds of that he floundered and admitted, “I don’t know what you mean.”
She settled her long hands in her lap. “My God, Will. Do you think he just puts that thing on and sees? Okay, not fair . . . I’ll explain. Of course that’s what it looks like to everybody. I tried to tell him that just now, but from his perspective—well, Geordi LaForge is one of only four blind people successfully fitted with the optic prosthetic. I mean, four who’ve successfully learned to operate it. Four. That’s all in the whole Federation.”
“Really . . . ” Riker muttered, rapt. “Keep talking.”
Crusher drew in a long breath, trying to find the words to explain something she herself had never experienced. “When he looks at an apple, he has to interpret between twenty and two hundred separate sensory impulses just to get shape, color, and temperature. After that, he has to recalibrate to get molecular composition, density, and everything else he gets. Trust me—it’s mind-boggling. Which is what it does to Geordi. You’re talking some thousand and a half impulses just to look at an apple. Do you know that he gets exhausted if he doesn’t take the device off several times a day?”
“No . . . I didn’t. But he doesn’t take it off.”
“He refuses to give in to his handicap. And because of his dedication, he gets depleted and has to deal with some considerable pain.”
Riker grasped the edge of the chair and crushed the cushion tight. “Pain? Are you telling me that thing hurts him?”
“He never shows it.”
“I had no idea. . . .”
Dr. Crusher slid off the table and said, “That’s the kind of crewman you’ve got, Mr. Riker. Now you know.”
The first officer slumped back in the chair, his blue eyes slightly creased as he tried to imagine something his own brain simply wasn’t made to visualize. But he understood pain, and he understood the resistance of it. And the dogged recurrence of it. Suddenly he was aware of how little time he and these special people had spent together. Special talents, yes, but also special handicaps. Data and his mechanical self; Yar and her explosive temper and overprotectiveness; the constant tug and pull between himself and the captain with the undefined split of authority on a starship with civilians on board as regular complement; Troi and what she was going through on all fronts; and now this with Geordi LaForge—blind, but not—a man who could see phenomenally or not at all, no easy middle ground.
This was hard. It was a strain. Since day one there had been troubles, troubles that made them put aside those all-important moments when people got to know each other. They had been through much together, yet they were still strangers. What did he really know about Geordi? How did Geordi feel about other things than sight and that helm he worked? What was Yar’s favorite pastime other than polishing her martial prowess? Certainly such a woman, so young and so vital, would think about something more fun. What music did she like? Did her shoes hurt sometimes? And surely there must be something more to Wesley than just a typical sixteen-year-old invulnerability. And Worf—was he lonely? As lonely as Troi seemed to be sometimes? What kept him in Starfleet when he could easily go back to his Klinzhai tribes and be completely accepted? It wasn’t a Klingon trait to reject one of their own blood, no matter the circumstances of his separation. Why didn’t he go?
Somehow each had become nothing to the others but a name and one particular eccentricity. Data was the Android, Geordi was his visor, Worf was the Klingon, Crusher was the Doctor, Wesley was the Kid, Troi was the Empath, Picard was the Marquis—
I guess that makes me the gentry. Or the rabble, Riker thought, not caring what all this did to his expression as Crusher watched silently. I don’t know them. I don’t know any of them yet, and all this time we’ve been depending on each other for life and limb. And Captain Picard . . . I know him least of all. But then, I haven’t shown him much of Will Riker, either—have I?
“Damn it,” he whispered.
Crusher pressed her lips inward and tried to avoid a softhearted nod, for she saw the changes in his face and especially noticed when he started absently picking at a nail and looking guilty.
“What?” she prodded, very careful of her tone.
“Nothing.” He stood up abruptly, committing the very crime he was hanging himself for. Even as he began to turn toward the door he realized what he was doing, and he paused, balanced on one foot. He tipped his shoulder back toward her and thought about turning. “We aren’t . . . we aren’t showing—”
“Commander Riker, to the bridge immediately. Yellow alert, all hands, yellow alert. Commander Riker, report to the bridge—”
“Something on the edge of sensor range, sir.”
Tasha Yar’s voice gained a sudden rock-steadiness as she raised her volume over the yellow alert noise.
Picard stood resolute at bridge center, glaring at the viewscreen, very aware of Counselor Troi beside him. “Scan it.”
“Scanning.”
“On your toes, everyone. And where the devil is—”
“Riker reporting, sir. Sorry for the delay.”
Picard turned toward the turbolift and said, “I want you one hundred percent available the next twenty-four hours, Number One. We don’t know what we’ve stumbled upon and I don’t like riddles. Until we discover what’s going on—”
“At your service, sir, no problem.” Riker landed in his place between the captain and Troi with a faint thud on the carpeted deck. Troi caught his eyes for just an instant, and each had to work hard to keep from speaking out-of-place reassurances to each other. Forcing himself to look away from her, he noticed Yar working more furiously than usual at her tactical station and demanded, “Fill me in, Lieutenant.”
Her pale brow furrowed. “Scanning something on the periphery of sensor range, Mr. Riker, but I can’t get a fix—wait a minute—that . . . that can’t be right. I’m not getting anything back. No, that can’t be right.”
Picard spun. “Nothing at all? No reaction to the scan at all?”
“No, sir,” Yar complained, “not even readings of surrounding space debris or bodies—” She broke off and slapped her control board like an errant child. She straightened decisively, absolutely sure of what she was seeing on her instruments. “Sir, far’s I can tell, it’s absorbing the sensor scan.”
Picard’s face took on an arrogant disbelief. “That’s the most curious damned thing I’ve ever heard of. Corroborate it with the space sciences lab immediately.”
“They’re already tied in, sir,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “Same report.”
He swung about and bumped his fist against his thigh. “Well, damn that.” With an imperious stride, he approached the starfield before them, his eyes going to slits. “Boost the sensors.”
Yar looked up again. “Sorry?”
“Yes. Put out a high-energy sensor burst over the nominal sensors.”
Yar’s hand leaned ineffectually on her board, and she looked with helplessness to Riker. Her mouth formed her silent question: Boost them?
Riker felt the weight slam onto his shoulders. At least a foot shorter now, he approached Picard. “Sir, could you refresh us on that procedure?”
To everyone’s surprise—relief—Picard merely glanced at him and said, “Of course.” He stepped to the Ops station, where Data had been sitting in silent vigilance all this time, and put one hand to the small tactical access panel on the Ops console, pecking the controls carefully. “It’s more or less an unofficial skill, not something Starfleet engineers approve of . . . somewhat radical. If it’s done too often it can cause quite a burnout. We’ll have to key in the computer sensors, readjust the energy output for tight-gain/ high-energy bolt, ask for a momentary scan so all the energy is contained, and tell the computer to fire when it’s ready. There you are.”
His hand fell gracefully away from the instruments, leaving them with a surprising clue to his rogue side. Within seconds, sure enough, there was a flush of energy from the bridge sensory systems, and the scanning burst was off, crossing the distances of space with the unfettered speed of pure energy.
“Sir!” Yar jolted at her station. “Definitely reading something now! God! It’s heading directly at us out of interstellar space—it homed in on us! It’ll be here in seventy-eight seconds!”
The captain snapped, “Visual!”
LaForge kept his voice laudibly calm as he reported, “Sir, for visual of these readings, the sensors’ll have to be adjusted twelve points into the gamma-ray spectrum—”
“Just do it, Lieutenant!” Picard roared.
The young blind man grimaced behind his visor, punched in the code, and nailed the engage button, then held his breath as the ship’s systems whined their strain back at him. But the readings began coming in.
“Sensors at maximum output—draining their sources, sir,” LaForge reported over the energy shriek. “Almost got visual—there!”
The starfield blurred before them, sizzled, and reformed into a new pattern—and suddenly the bridge was walled with a gigantic glassy false-color image, undulating and fluxing as it raced at them through open space. Its aurora borealis colors were chaotic, its luster blinding, its electrical nature obvious as it crackled across the huge screen.
Geordi instantly brought a hand up to shield his visor. “Chrrrrist—”
The fireworks blazed across their faces and ran amuck on their fears. It was a thing utterly alien, and struck panic in all their hearts—it looked like fire, like electricity. Like the face of hell itself.
Suddenly Troi came to life behind Riker and the captain, her horrified expression even more horrifying as the fulmination from the screen glared on her skin and in her eyes.
“Stay away from it! Don’t let it get near us!”
Picard was beside her as though appearing out of nothing. “Counselor?”
Her slim hands clamped on his arm like talons. “Captain! Do not let that thing come near us!”
“I can’t just—”
“Do not let it!” she repeated. “Captain, what am I doing on this ship if you do not take my counsel? If I’m wrong, I’ll resign my position! If I never do anything worthwhile in my life again, I’ll have done this! Captain, please!”
The purplish veins of light played ugly patterns between them, glowing as though to hammer out Troi’s words and the conviction in her eyes.
The captain held her by the arms and bored through her with eyes that were doing something other than questioning her veracity. At once he sucked in a breath and his voice gripped the bridge. “Raise shields! Go to red alert status.”
“Red alert!” Riker echoed instantly, flashing the words toward Tasha. “Speed and ETA?”
“Warp six now! Sixty-one seconds ETA!” She flinched under the prismatic light from the screen. Her blond hair sparkled orange, then amethyst, then blue, then a cruel white. Her arms moved among the fireworks, and the ship whooped into alert. Lights of their own flashed now throughout the starship, and all around the vessel, high-energy defensive shielding buzzed to life around the great hulls and nacelles.
Picard pressed Deanna Troi behind him, back toward the three lounges that were their command places in better moments, and shouldered his way into the glaze of lights. “Lieutenant Yar, fire phasers across its bow. Make our intentions absolutely clear. Warn that thing off”
Behind him he heard Troi whisper, “Weapons . . . no!”
But it was too late.
Without acknowledgment, Yar played her controls and before them long-range phasers lanced space, thin as needles, their power twisted into threads so slim that they could strike even at this distance and be felt like solid blades.
“Captain, it’s accelerating!” she shrieked then. “It’s put on a burst of speed—warp ten now . . . warp twelve! Warp fourteen-point-nine!”
“LaForge!”
The captain’s roar bombarded the bridge.
LaForge smeared his palms over the controls, jamming the starship into emergency warp. The change of speed was so abrupt that even sophisticated Starfleet equipment couldn’t compensate for the stomach-sucking effect.
The starship wheeled in space and bolted into a sudden warp five, but there was no warp fifteen in its vocabulary. Before the ship could maneuver more than one light-year’s distance, the thing was upon them.
St. Elmo’s fire blanketed the bridge as the new Enterprise was given the shakedown of the millennium. A billion tiny firecrackers erupted across the heavy-duty shielding. Electrokinetic jolts fanned through the ship, through every person’s body, through every bone and nerve, every circuit, every conduit, every skin hair, and crackled through every inch of stuff, living or mechanical.
Troi felt a short scream squeeze out of her as she crumpled against an enemy she somehow recognized. All around her, jagged voltage profaned the bridge with ugly blue fingers and left sparks wherever it touched. She saw her crewmates falling, writhing, fighting. She heard the whine of the ship’s gallant battle against this electrical storm, and knew the Enterprise, like her crew, was defying the attack.
The weight of a thousand minds crushed into her head and she forgot the ship, forgot everything but the pain of it. They were screaming at her, shrieking the reedy noises of zombies and wraiths, the graveyard shrill of things Picard had ordered she not consider. She struggled against the sharp piercing clarions and tried to cling to that order. Her fingers were electric blue as they clawed at the air before her, her eyes frozen open no matter how she tried to close them.
The effect squealed around her, and as it sought her brain and all the parts of her that reacted to her telepathic self, it released her muscles one by one and she sank to the deck, still staring, still wrapped in the blue lightning.
Riker saw her fall, and tried to reach for her. But he too was being beaten by the attack. The ship might as well have been impaled on a lightning rod. Fiery blue veins accosted every panel, and beneath them the deck itself tossed and bucked as energy crashed through it. As the seconds dragged past, the effect sank away from Troi and left her lying on the deck as it scouted the bridge for whatever it wanted and couldn’t find.
Riker was trying to reach Troi when the chair beside him moved abruptly and Data was dragged out of it and thrown across the Ops console on his back, and mauled by the electrical pistolwhipping. The ship shuddered one more time before the silvery blitz dropped away from its attack on the whole bridge, converged to a single point from all over the bridge and settled on Data, wrapping around him and his Ops console and effervescing there.
“Data!” LaForge plunged toward the android, only to be knocked to one side by Riker’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch him!”