by Peter David
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that it's not too late for us. That we are meant to be together. That we can still make it all work. I know, I know, it's coming at a bad time. But I couldn't keep quiet any longer. I've had to reprioritize my life, and I want you to be a part of that, as I want to be a part of yours. And I want you to know that, no matter what happens, I love you as no one else can or will. Not Worf. Not anyone."
A dozen emotions vied for dominance in Deanna, her heart battling against her brain, her soul trying to sort it all out. "Come," she said suddenly, tugging on his hands.
"Come where?"
"To the house. Mother will want to see you."
"I... I don't think that'd be a good idea."
"Oh, why? You know she'd love to."
"She was never crazy about me," he said, shaking his head. "I don't think it'd be wise___"
"Not crazy about you? Will, for heaven's sake, when Mother was in phase, she considered the possibility of you as a mate. Obviously you're not exactly repellent to her." She tilted her head in curiosity. "You look so surprised. . . ."
"I'm just. . . startled that you would bring that up, that's all. Actually, I guess that's part of the reason I'm uncomfortable about seeing her at the moment. Here I am, pleading my case with you. Considering my history with your mother, well. . . you know . .."
"I... I suppose . .." Deanna said uncertainly.
"I just need some more time with you .. . time to be alone, just the two of us, to talk things out.. . can you give me that, at least. . . ?"
"I. .." She took a deep breath, with the distinct feeling that she was making a life decision. "All right, Will. I... I suppose I owe it to you . . . and to me . . . and to everything that we had . . ."
"Have."
". . . had together," she continued. "But I won't lie to Worf. I can't. You and I, we'll get together, and we'll talk and .. . and
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we'll see, we'll just see ... but I'm going to tell Worf that that's what I'm doing."
"He's not going to be thrilled."
"He'll understand, I'm sure of it. He wouldn't want us to be married unless everyone's conscience was clear."
"All right." Riker looked less than enthused. "All right... I think you're making a mistake, but all right."
"Where do you want to go? There are some nice places in town. . . ."
"Actually ... I know exactly where I want to go. There's only one place, really." He smiled, and he looked years younger. "The Janaran Falls."
"Oh, Will... I don't know . . ."
"The Janaran Falls, Deanna. It has to be there, don't you see? Everything that went wrong with the relationship ... everything that I screwed up, and it was me, Imzadi, I admit it, it was me . . . happened after the Falls. We were happy there. It was the last time we saw each other, after all, and probably the best time."
Her hands tightened on his.
"Deanna ... is something wrong . . . ?"
"The . . . last time we saw each other . .."
"That's ... that's right..." He looked confused. "Deanna ... there is something wrong, isn't there. Is it something I said? I'm sorry, I just... I have such fond memories of that time... ."
"That last time."
"Right. Why do you keep saying that?"
Her jaw hardened, and her dark eyes became very cold. Then, without a word, she turned and started to head toward Lwaxana's house.
"Deanna! What's wrong? Come on, I'm entitled to know!"
She stopped some feet away from him. She was standing on an elevation of the incline and looked down at him in what seemed a most imperious fashion. "Oh, I think you already know."
"No, I don't!"
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She was so angry that she didn't trust herself to verbalize. Instead a thought projection blew out from her with such force that it staggered Riker when it sounded in his head.
/ think you do .. . Tom.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out.
"I will not meet you at the Janaran Falls," Deanna said loudly. "I don't know what your game is, or what you were hoping to accomplish. But you tried to fool me, to use me ..."
"It's not like that, Deanna. . . ."
"It is exactly like that. I don't know what you're doing here, but your coming here was a mistake. I suggest you rectify it immediately by leaving, now."
"Deanna."
"Now!" With that, she walked stiffly away.
Except Riker wasn't about to let her get away that easily. He ran after her, grabbed her by the arm. "No, Deanna. I'm not going to let it end like this."
"It's already ended. I was foolish to listen to you at all. Go away."
"It's not that simple. Just say you'll meet me . .."
"Go away! I never want to see you again!"
And then something seemed to ripple in the air to Deanna's right. She turned to look, but saw nothing . . . but she sensed it... sensed that something was there .. .
And then a Romulan appeared out of thin air. He was speaking into a comm link on his wrist. "She's not cooperating. Attack."
Deanna stepped back, confused and stunned. "What..."
Riker had a look of total despair on his face. His voice barely above a whisper, he said, "I'm sorry. ..."
Just above them, in the cloudless skies, a Romulan warbird materialized.
"Oh my God," gasped out Deanna, and she tried to bolt for her mother's house. Intellectually, she knew it was pointless, that there was nowhere to run. But she did it anyway, as much to warn her mother and Alexander of the danger that had
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suddenly materialized at their very doorstep. Riker made no move to stop her. He didn't have to, for suddenly a squadron of Romulan soldiers materialized directly in front of Deanna, blocking her escape route. And squarely in the forefront of the squadron was Sela.
"Hello, Counselor," she said with a clear smirk. "I almost didn't recognize you, what with your not being disguised as a Romulan." Then amusement vanished from her face as she said brusquely to the others with her, "Take the house."
The Romulan warbird recloaked as the soldiers charged the home of Lwaxana Troi. As they did, Sela sidled up to Riker and ran a finger along the curve of his jaw. "So, Will. . . did you have a nice reunion?"
Deanna heard that and looked in confusion at Riker. And this time it was he who cast the thought into her head. And the thought was If you say anything. . . we're both dead.
She kept her mouth shut.
Kressn, the Romulan telepath, spearheaded the invasion force into the Troi home as the Romulans burst through the door and found Mr. Homn waiting for him.
He took no defensive posture, did not seem particularly disturbed over the fact that a squadron of Romulans was charging into the house. Assuming him to be no threat, they started to move right past him, at which point Mr. Homn picked up the nearest one as if he weighed nothing and threw him with full force against the nearest wall. The Romulan hit it so hard that he cracked the plaster and slid to the floor, leaving an imprint of himself behind.
"Get him!" shouted Kressn.
The Romulans aimed their disrupters at Mr. Homn. Disrupters had no variation settings in the way that phasers did. The only way to do less than lethal damage was to fire at extremities such as arms and legs, and even then the target could still die of shock. A blast to the head or vital areas was invariably fatal.
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They aimed for the head and upper body, which generally contained most of the major organs. Considering Mr. Homn's size, one would have thought that they could not possibly miss.
One would have been in error. Mr. Homn darted like lightning between the opening salvo and lunged toward a nearby tapestry hanging on the wall. He ripped it down, turned, and hurled it toward the Romulans. The weight of the thing was formidable and when it landed upon them it flattened the lot of them.
"Mr, Homn, what in the world is going on?!" It was the strident voice of Lwaxana Troi, and she was heading into the main foyer, Alexander in tow.<
br />
It was a momentary distraction, but it was unfortunately enough. More Romulans poured through the door, and one of them got off a shot that caught Mr. Homn squarely in the chest. Lwaxana let out a shriek of horror as the blast cored through Homn, knocking him flat onto his back. Not a word emerged from his lips as he went down, hitting the floor hard and lying there, looking up at the ceiling, stunned but stoic. Blood pooled on the floor beneath him.
"Homn!" howled Lwaxana, and when she turned to look at the invaders, there was something very terrible in her eyes. Alexander, eager for the battle, started to charge forward, but Lwaxana held him back with one hand. "You bastards!" she shouted. "How dare you! How dare you!"
"Take her!" called Kressn.
The Romulans started to advance on her, and Lwaxana shouted at them.
In their heads.
When an ordinary person raises his or her voice at another, the result is simple irritation. When a telepath raises her voice-particularly as powerful and strident a telepath as Lwaxana Troi-it's another matter entirely, particularly when she is being driven by a combination of fear and complete moral outrage.
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How dare you?!?
Lwaxana's voice blared in their minds like a massive horn ushering in doomsday. It was thunder in their heads, driving out every other thing they could possibly be thinking, indeed perhaps everything they had ever known. They staggered, putting their hands to their ears instinctively, except that it did them absolutely no good. The assault wasn't coming from outside their heads, but from inside.
How dare you do this! I am Lwaxana Troi, Daughter of the Fifth House ...
They writhed in agony, falling to the floor, their weapons slipping out of their fingers.
Holder of the Sacred Chalice of Rixx, and Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed! This is my home ... these are my people ... and you are not welcome here! Leave! Now!!
The Romulans wanted to shout that she should be stopped, that someone should shut her up, but they couldn't even put a coherent thought together. Fortunately for them, they didn't have to.
Kressn took all his strength, all his telepathy, all his ability to influence others, and in his mind gathered them into a large ball and hurled it with all his strength squarely into Lwaxana's brain.
Lwaxana was not a trained psi-warrior by any stretch of the imagination. She had never been in a true mindwar in her life, aside from the one time when she'd had a battle royale with Q . . . and even then, that wasn't exactly the same because her own abilities were supplemented with the power of the Q. In this case, she knew outrage, she had a tremendous sense of herself, and when she was angered, you simply did not want to get in her way. But she knew nothing of fighting a
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two-tiered mind battle. She was all offense, fueled by her moral fury, and so had no screens in place, no defensive capabilities.
Consequently, Kressn won.
She staggered under the shock of the retaliatory strike into her mind. Alexander cried out her name, but she didn't hear it. Instead she became as rigid as a board, her eyes wide and staring but not seeing, and she tumbled backward. Alexander, seeing her fall, caught her. "Lwaxana!" he said again, and suddenly Romulan hands were snatching him away from her. Lwaxana hit the floor and lay, immobile, next to Homn.
The Romulans who had been flattened slowly started to gather their wits about them. Kressn was on one knee, looking a bit haggard but otherwise all right.
"Mother!"
Deanna was horrified by the scene that greeted her when Sela prodded her forward through the door of the house. Her mother was immobile, Mr. Homn lay bleeding on the floor, and Alexander was being forcibly restrained by one of the soldiers. Suddenly Alexander sank his teeth into the hands of the man holding him and the Romulan lost his grip on him. Alexander slid loose and tried a desperate charge at Sela. He made it only a few feet, though, before another Romulan stepped forward and swung the butt end of a disrupter down and around. It stunned Alexander until they managed to restrain him once more.
A troop of Romulans was apparently trying to pull itself together, and the Romulan whom she had seen appear out of thin air appeared rattled. But they were all of no consequence to her.
Sela, for her apart, appeared rather annoyed, "What went on in here?" she asked impatiently. "I've trained you all myself. It doesn't reflect well on me when you have this much trouble dealing with an old woman, one giant, and a Klingon boy."
Deanna ran to her mother, knelt down, and looked deeply
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into Lwaxana's eyes. Whatever the Romulans had done to her, it was progressive, boring more and more deeply into Lwaxana's mind, like a fungus. Mother.. . she thought at her.
Something seemed to emerge from her mother's mind .. . a telepathic link, a bond that suffused Deanna, warmth and love reaching out as if to assure her that she was all right.. . nothing that could be articulated in words, but a connection such as Deanna had never known, forged by desperation and fear...
And Deanna was suddenly yanked away, the link broken with the force of cold water being dashed on her face. Sela was standing there, and she tucked the barrel of the disrupter under Deanna's chin. "Now. . . you're not going to make problems for us the way your mother did, are you?"
"She can't," Kressn said. "She's half human. She's not remotely the telepath her mother is. And .. . speaking of Mother . .. what should we do with her? With both of them?"
"Well, the big one is dead . .."
"No, he's not."
Sure enough, Mr. Homn was still among the living. He wasn't moaning. Instead, incredibly, he had repositioned himself so that he was next to Lwaxana . . . and, operating as if from pure instinct as much as anything else, he had draped a protective arm over her and was looking at them defiantly. The wound was still very much in evidence, and there was a large pool of blood on the floor, but the bleeding had stopped.
"Now, that's impressive," said Sela. "We don't need a mental vegetable and a nearly dead man; the daughter and the boy will do. Kill these two."
"No!" shrieked Deanna.
The Romulans stepped forward, prepared to do as ordered, bringing their disrupters up and aiming them to finish the job.
That was when a firm voice rang out, loud and clear "Weapons down. Sela .. . no."
It was a tone that was so obviously accustomed to command
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that the Romulans froze in the act. Sela, without even turning to look at the speaker, said, "This is none of your concern, Riker."
"Oh, yes it is," said Riker, crossing the room quickly and stepping around in front of Sela. "You asked me how far I would go, what I would be willing to do. What would I stop short of. Well, I stop short of this, Sela: being party to the coldblooded murder of two helpless innocent people."
"Really." She snorted derisively. "You're a member of the Maquis, Riker. That's a terrorist organization. Do you truly believe that no harm has ever come to innocents during their activities? You took the Defiant and attacked Cardassian installations. Military targets, but there might well have been innocent people there: visitors, friends or family, simple maintenance people just trying to eke out a living. How many of them did you destroy, hmm? You don't really mean you won't be party to it. You just don't want to be involved with it when they wear the faces of people you know."
"Be that as it may . . . you hurt them, Sela, and I'm out."
"You're 'out'?" She raised one curved eyebrow. "Are you under the impression you can just pull out at any time?"
"Are you under the impression that you can stop me?" he replied tightly, his voice like a knife. "And do you think anything is going to be gained by both of us trying to find out?"
She appeared to consider the merits of the situation, and then she said to the others, "Get them out of sight. Move them upstairs."
"Shall we clean up the blood?" asked a Romulan.
"No. Leave it. The blood will upset him, make him aggressive and
sloppy."
For a moment Deanna was confused, but then she understood. "Worf. You're laying a trap for Worf."
"That's right."
"But... I don't understand . . . why .. . why did you have to attack this house? Involve my mother and Homn, why . . ."
"Because," Sela said easily, "we wanted to have some fun."
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II
Deanna couldn't believe what she had just heard. "Fun? Fun? You call all of this . . . chaos fun?"
"We all seek our amusements where we can, Deanna," Sela said. She had taken a step back to Riker's side, and then she suddenly wrapped an arm up and around the back of his head, drew it forward and kissed him with an almost violent enjoyment. Their faces drew apart, but she kept her teeth dug into his lower lip for an extended moment before releasing it. Then she cast a contemptuous glance at Deanna. "I take it we understand each other."
"Only too well," said Deanna, her eyes blazing as she looked at Riker. "Only too well."
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CHAPTER
14
I he painting was exactly where Will Riker had remembered it being.
It hung on the wall of the Betazed museum of art, a canvas of concentric splashes of red, blue, green, white, black, and several colors that Riker still didn't recognize. A dozen years ago, Deanna and he had stood in front of it and she had tried to urge him to see something in it, to examine what it had suggested to him. At the time, all he had seen were paint swirls. Riker had never been much for abstract art. His feeling was that a painting should be of something recognizable. Otherwise he was always worried that somewhere out there, the artist was laughing at his admirers by simply splashing together whatever colors he felt like at random and calling it a painting.
But Riker had learned much during the intervening years, and when he gazed at the painting now, he relaxed his mind, let it wander. The curious thing to Riker was that, whenever he was willing to do that-let his thoughts simply run in free-floating directions rather than in nice, ordered headings- invariably they would always turn, sooner or later, to Deanna. One would have thought that consistent happenstance alone
