Dark Mirror (34 page)

With terrible clarity, clarity greater than even he had experienced in the moment itself, he saw his hands pull out the little transporter tag, put it on the pile of chips, and beam them away. Then his sight was his own again, and he was looking at Troi, and Hessan standing beside her, with a quirk of nasty smile on her face. And he still couldn’t move a muscle.

“Why, it’s quite true,” said the counselor with great interest. “You were quite correct to send for me, Hessan. You
did see
what you thought you saw. Not the same chips at all. Where did those go, I wonder?”

She looked at Geordi. “Two of you,” she said to her security people. “Haul him up out of there. Take him down to the Agony Booth by my quarters: that one’s still working. We’ll have a nice long talk. Good. One thing first.”

She pulled the knife out of her boot and took Geordi’s bare arm, studying it for a moment. “Let’s see. Yes, there it is. I don’t want us being interrupted.”

She cut. Geordi couldn’t even cry out, and a moment later the counselor held up the bloodied intradermal implant, dropped it on the floor, and crushed it under her heel. “That’s better. Now, Hessan, as for you—you’ve been waiting for a promotion, haven’t you? Some little while now.”

“Yes, Counselor,” she said, still smiling. “I didn’t think it was likely to come soon, though.”

“Oh, no problem with that. You take over this operation. Granted, there are three assistant chiefs ahead of you, but they can’t really do the job, can they?—we both know that.” The two smiled at each other conspiratorially. “Get
moving now,” the counselor said, “and get this ship running again quickly. We have problems to deal with.”

Hessan turned to the other engineering staff gathered around. “Never mind this swapping back and forth between cores; it’s too time-consuming. Let’s simply break out the emergency ‘hard’ six-hour backups out of stores and use those instead. Get me more crew: I want all the diseased chips pulled and destroyed within half an hour. Take as many people as it needs.”

Geordi swallowed. They were going to do it the old-fashioned way, the simple way—the way he had hoped no one else would think of in the face of direct orders and a sufficiently elegant solution.

The counselor nodded, satisfied, as people went into action around her. “Fine,” she said to Hessan. “Meanwhile, I’ll take care of him.” She turned, and her eyes rested on Geordi, and that smile broadened.

In great horror he found himself understanding how the fly feels when the spider looks at it.
Do spiders smile?
he wondered. If they did, they would look like
this.

They dragged him away.

On the bridge of the other
Enterprise,
Riker leaned over Data’s console. There was nothing else to do at the moment, nothing to see on the viewscreen since the other
Enterprise
had taken itself out of range. “How’s the data analysis going?”

“I am still completing it,” Data said. “The amount of information Mr. La Forge has sent us so far is considerable. I have, however, been able to extract and abstract for Commander Hwiii those parts of it which are most practically oriented. There is some information in the package we have received about the actual building of the apparatus that causes the inclusion of another object into this universe.”

“Does it say anything about getting an object out of this universe, back where it belongs?”

“Indeed it does, a great deal. Under average circumstances there does not seem too much difficulty in pushing an originating object back where it came from. There appears to be some question whether in the theory, hyperstring structure from one universe may not actually
extend
into another. It would seem that some traces of string structure remain about a dislocated object and may be used as a shortcut to ‘snap’ that object back into its original location- and duration-space.”

“Like a rubber band,” Riker said.

“The simile would be fairly exact. The only difficulty would appear to be if an object remained too long in this universe. Not only would the universes themselves move out of phase, complicating matters”—Riker rolled his eyes: Data was understating again—“but the strength of the hyperstring attachment attenuates over time. The relationship is expressed by the equation IV/pL equals kO. Once the final string connections are broken or weakened past the point where the apparatus can successfully use them, other means must be found to locate the ‘home’ universe.” Data stopped a moment, considering. “This is an entirely different theoretical area, on which it would appear the Empire has as yet done no work, since there is only one specific universe they are interested in: ours.”

Riker shook his head. The thought of the
Enterprise
having to bounce from universe to universe in search of its home… But it had to be considered. “Mr. Data, what would your estimate be of the number of alternative universes we would have to explore to find our way home from here under such circumstances?”

Data blinked. “An accurate estimate would require at least moderately reliable projections of the number of universal or semi-universal faces on the surface of the hypothetical solid, the rotation of which through hyperspace
creates or can have been said to ‘create’ the alternative universes, but—”

“You don’t know,” Riker said gently.

Data opened his mouth, then shut it again. “No,” he said a bit mournfully.

“Then let’s not even bother with it just now. How’s Commander Hwiii doing?”

“He has already started building the basics of the inclusion/exclusion device from some of the matrix information in the last upload.”

“How far along is he?”

“I would estimate he and the engineering team working with him have already completed about fifteen percent of the construction work that will be required.”

“You did tell him to take as much crew as he needed…”

“Certainly, Commander. But at this stage of the construction, sheer numbers will not be of much help. Among other things, not all the theoretical or construction data on the inclusion device is yet in place here. Mr. La Forge’s upload is still incomplete: he has advised us that another hundred and forty terabytes of material are still to come.”

Riker whistled.

“Until the information is complete and we have the necessary data on the fine detail of the device, we will not be able to progress too much further.” Data thought for a moment. “It is as if the commander were building a subspace radio set. He has the information needed to build the chassis, as it were—the matrix into which the specialty frequency and modulations boards would be plugged—but as to the boards themselves, he has as yet neither an idea of what they are or where they should be placed and how they should be powered.”

“He’s done the groundwork.”

“That is correct. And until the download is complete, there is little more that can be done.”

“If there was only some way to find out what’s keeping that upload,” Riker said softly.

“Scrambled communications with the away team are possible at this point.”

Riker thought about that. He thought about it for a long moment and opened his mouth to say, “Riker to La Forge”—then changed his mind. “No, no reason to stand over his shoulder and hurry him. No one works best in a situation like that.”

Riker made for the turbolift doors. “I’ll go down to engineering and see how Hwiii is doing, see if he needs any help.”

The doors shut. Worf watched Riker go with some amusement, then said to Data, “Apparently, since he cannot stand over Mr. La Forge’s shoulder, he will now go and stand over Commander Hwiii’s.”

“An example of irony,” Data said after a moment.

Worf grinned. “It is an example of Commander Riker,” he said, and went back to monitoring the other ship.

He screamed again. Screaming was becoming like breathing now. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t done it. His throat was so raw with the pain that the sound of the torment in the Agony Booth was a new torment in itself, every time he did it—and he couldn’t stop.

The pain came in waves, like the ocean, and felt as relentless. There was no way to stop it or block it. It rolled through his body, trailing an anguish after it that was like a prolonged version of the time the coolant gas got loose in engineering: a cold that burned like fire, all over him. But this was not cold. He might as well have been half-immersed in lava, or live steam, for the way his body felt. Then the pain would reduce, just slightly, he suspected; but to his agonized nerves, the change seemed so great that the
difference was more like that between a mild headache and a migraine. He found himself absurdly, pitifully grateful when it decreased even so slightly. He felt as if he would do anything to keep it from increasing again. And that fear was much with him in those moments of decreased pain: that after a little while, he
would
do anything, say anything.

“Who came with you?” the soft voice inquired. His vision had long since stopped working correctly. Whether the Agony Booth’s field was interfering with the visor somehow, or the optic nerves themselves were rebelling, he had no idea. He had to blink and stare through the shimmer of the field before he could see her standing there, smiling at him, waiting. She had something else to use on him, he knew, besides the Booth, but she was in no hurry. He had barely enough strength even to shake his head and thought he had better conserve it. So he merely hung there, said nothing, did nothing. Though his body twitched—the poor overfired nerves firing one another in sympathy and frightened anticipation. Every time he tried to move, his body wouldn’t move the way he wanted it to—and it hurt.

“You may as well tell me,” the counselor said. “I am not going to stop until you
have
told me what I want to know. And that’s just the Booth I’m talking about. Once you’ve finally told me, I’m going to go in the other way… and make sure.” Geordi shuddered all over and cried out again with the pain of it; every nerve cringed and twitched at the motion.

“The sooner you tell me,” she said reasonably, “the more useful you are to me. And the more useful you are to me, the more likely it is that I’ll keep you alive after we finish this. Your counterpart—oh, yes, we found him, that didn’t take long, after you told us where to look—your counterpart is a very talented man. Having two of him in the Empire would be better still. I daresay we could make your working for us very pleasant. But there’s no hope of it
happening unless you’re alive at the end of all this…. And whether or not you’re alive depends on whether you annoy me or not.”

He shuddered again.
Told them? he
thought, through the confusion of the pain and fear.
I don’t remember telling her anything about
… But that was the horror of this situation. He
might
have told them. He might have. And if he had—what else might he tell them?
Stop this now,
part of him shouted.
Stop it now and
control
what you tell her! Give her a little piece of information at a time.

The shock of the pain caught him again. “Don’t you want to live?” she said softly while it rolled over him and left him writhing.

He knew it was a lie. He knew there was no way that they could leave him alive—that she would kill him, and enjoy it, after she had extracted the information she wanted. But the pain began to build again, washing away reason, and he drew a long breath and screamed again and again, the body trying desperately to get someone to stop this. Everything hazed out, nothing was left but that pain, a world gone white and dead with it. It would not stop.

“I hate having to rush things this way,” she said an eternity later when the pain lessened a little. “It’s so slapdash—not to do things in neat stages, but to have to chop and change.” He felt, then, the first fingers touching his mind—almost casually. The effect was horrific, like being touched on an open wound by someone slowly, delicately drawing a finger over the ragged edge, the place where the hypersensitive tissue was beginning to crust and dry. He sobbed.

“I suppose I can just be resigned to it. Unless you change your mind very quickly and start telling me what you know. It’s so
draining
to have to go through someone’s mind the hard way… but I will if I must. I may be tired of it at the end, a little, but I’ll be better in an hour or so. But
dead.” She smiled more broadly. “Not without feeling what will feel to
you
like several years of this pain.”

He moaned.
Oh, yes, I can prolong it,
she said from inside him again, and it was as if his own mind spoke to him, having turned traitor, punishing him for all the secret wrongs of a lifetime.
Time sense is one of the most easily altered of all the interior senses. I can’t spend a long while with you myself—I’ve got a lot of other things to do—but the little while I spend with you will feel like
months
of this. I know where to touch the mind to make it happen. See?—

—and something happened, so that the moment froze with the pain increased to a point so shocking that he was no longer even able to scream, but had to merely hang there and feel it, burning him up as if he were a stick in a fire. When time started running again, and his consciousness emerged enough to get behind his eyes and look at her…

“See?” she was saying. “How simple. See how long the time between one breath and the next can be?” She laughed. “What was it they used to say about relativity? A second with a pretty girl—a second on a hot stove.” She smiled at him charmingly. “See, now you’ve got both. And you’ll have both for a good long while. Now, tell me”—the pain increased once again, though time kept running—“who came with you?”

The field wrung another scream out of him, and the mind touched him, just
there,
and he cried, helpless, “Counselor!”

“No use begging me for mercy,” she said softly. “I have very little of that to spare today.”

He gulped, desperate, realizing how close he had come to doing real damage.
Tell her!
his mind screamed.
Start telling her, control it!