by Diane Duane
They headed for sickbay. Picard had already heard so many baffling things in one conversation that he decided to just let it drop. When they came into sickbay, Picard found it slightly different from the one aboard his own ship. The color scheme was different, darker, as most things were, so that the feeling of space and airiness in the sickbay on his own Enterprise was missing: this one felt smaller. The diagnostic beds were a bit closer together, the ceiling a bit lower. “Where do you want me?” he said.
“Right where I’ve got you,” Beverly said, flashing him a small smile with more sheer wickedness about it than he had seen in anyone else’s face since he got here. “All I need is a protoplaser. Just sit down where you like.” She went to fetch the instrument.
Picard wandered around for a few moments, looking at the place, the diagnostic panels, the cabinets—and then he froze as his eye fell on one in particular. Everything fell into place.
He remembered looking at that cabinet back on his own Enterprise, and saying to Beverly, “This needs much better security—I want multiple authorizations required before…”
But that had plainly not happened here. It was open: it was unlocked. He slid one clear facing aside, reached in, and took the small container and the wafer that lay beside it, slipped them down into his tunic, and shut the cabinet again smoothly. He was wandering around again in the middle of sickbay before Beverly came back.
“Come on, sit down,” she said. “I have other things to do today.”
He sat. She ran the protoplaser along his jawline, and he felt the usual tingle as the severed nerves were reknit and complained about it, as skin sealed over and the derma rewove itself. She turned away, and he sat there rubbing his skin in the usual futile attempts to deal with the itch, which wouldn’t go away for another day or so.
“You’re very lucky it wasn’t any deeper than that,” she said. “You would have had a very amateur tracheotomy: that knife grazed right past the cricoid cartilage. Now how are you feeling otherwise?”
“The stun?” He shook his head. “A bit of a headache… the usual.”
“Here.” She reached into another cabinet, came up with a spray hypo. Such was the level of his paranoia at this point that it was all Picard could do to hold himself still and let her administer it. He remembered what else had come out of one of her spray hypos, and poor Stewart, lying sweating and delirious in his sickbay, while this woman’s counterpart looked at him and said, “What kind of doctor…”
“There,” she said. “It’s Aerosal.” As usual, the headache began clearing itself away instantly.
“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, getting up.
Crusher looked at him sideways, with a small smile. “My, aren’t we formal today. I’ll see you later.”
That begged the question of where, but he let it be. He would have to go back to the bridge now, he supposed: there was really no excuse for him to go back to his quarters immediately. He was changed, he was “put right,” as Beverly had put it. He desperately wanted to get back to that mission report; and now, considering what he had in his tunic, there was other business as well….
But for the moment, it would be well if he was seen around and about. “Come on, Mr. Barclay,” he said at the door to sickbay, “let’s see what’s going on around here.”
They started off down the hall… and all his good intentions were abruptly derailed by the sound of the scream from down the corridor. He knew that scream: he had been within three feet of it, not long ago. And this time it was much worse.
“Come on,” he said, and headed down the hall. Barclay followed, looking like a man who expects to see something he’ll appreciate.
Around the curve of the corridor from the turbolift was the source of the sound. It was a bay opening off the corridor, not too far away from sickbay. At first Picard wondered why it wasn’t closed off if this kind of sound came out of it on a regular basis. But then he realized why. Others were meant to hear that sound. It was intended as a deterrent. He wondered if it was.
The bay had a raised platform in the middle of it, with a cylindrical force field shimmering around the perimeter. In the middle of it, suspended like a puppet on invisible strings, hung Wesley Crusher, his body twisting, racked with pain; and he screamed and screamed again. Not too far from him, at a console controlling the installation, stood Troi, with a couple of her own security people behind her. She turned as Picard stopped in the bay’s doorway, and the smile with which she favored him was almost sunny.
“Captain,” she said. “You’re looking much better.” She turned back to Wesley, admiring, with smiling detachment, the way he curled like a poked bug, and shrieked, and curled again.
“These do work so much better than the old ones,” she said. “Those were blunt instruments at best, the old agonizers. Just general field effect on the nerves—no subtlety about it, no specificity. When they learned to tune the effect, though, when they learned to match it specifically to the requirements of the specific nervous system—so much better. No waste motion, no waste energy.” She leaned against the console, smiling through the cries of desperate pain, the bark and wheeze of indrawn breath. “Each agonizer calibrated to the pain center in its wearer’s brain, and matched to his nervous system, to the places where he hurts worst. One man might be better enervated in the hands than the trunk: then it’s the man’s hands that catch fire, not just the all-over pain that we had to settle for in the old days. And it does so much less damage than the old ones used to do… progress is wonderful.”
She turned back to the console while Picard kept his face from showing anything whatsoever. “And there are other refinements,” she said. “Moment-to-moment evaluation of which nerves have overfired and need to rest before they become sensitive again. The shift of the load to those which have regenerated. All much more satisfactory.”
“I thought I gave orders,” Picard said very quietly, “that he was to be confined to quarters pending my decision on what further action was to be taken.”
Troi waved a hand. “You know my authority supersedes yours in matters pertaining to security. You can’t just let someone attempt to assassinate the captain of a starship and then walk away.” Oh, can’t you? Picard thought, furious, but kept his peace. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth: that’s the rule, isn’t it? He tried for the whole carcass. So?” She shrugged. “He gets what he’s brought down on himself. How can you possibly object?… Or maybe you’re just feeling that much better after Dr. Crusher’s… ministrations.” She gave him a half-lidded look that added a whole new set of meanings to the word.
“Counselor,” Picard said. “Even in matters of security, unless there are most pressing reasons to be overridden, I expect to have my orders obeyed.”
“Not in this case,” Troi said, looking at him almost merrily. “You hate him! You always have. You hate him almost as much as his mother does. It hardly takes a Betazed to see that. She hates him because he reminds her of what she had that you took from her. And you hate him because you know that he reminds her of what you took. But you couldn’t throw away good officer material, and his father still had some friends in Starfleet. This was a good way to throw them off the scent, or at best to appease them. So you bided your time and waited. You knew that eventually he would make this attempt. In fact, I think you encouraged it, so that you would then have the right to get rid of him without prejudice: who expects any failed assassin to be given mercy?”
She turned away, eyeing the console. “Some people, today, were thinking that you had genuinely made a stupid mistake. But I don’t believe that. I know you too well. I think you were careless on purpose. A good enough excuse: a tense mission, one of those quiet periods when the tension builds and people make mistakes… even captains. Even you.” She looked at him. “So finally he makes his move, and you react, creating the perfect reason to get rid of him at last. Oh, no, I know what you want.”
“Counselor,” Picard said warningly. I know what you want, the voi
ce said inside his head.
And it was her voice and his, at the same time—the same way that the Borg voice ringing through him had been the Borg’s and his at the same time, that being what made it so intolerable—the feeling of a thought he was having himself that he wasn’t actually having himself.
And hard on the heels of the thought came the deep, hard stab right to the center of him, the feeling inside of fingers picking up his thoughts and letting them trickle through hands, like pebbles, jewels, sand—flowing away, picked up again by the handful, flowing through those hands for the amusement of the one who picked them up and scrutinized them… idly, with amusement, hateful amusement. One thought in particular stopped her while he fought for control, struggling to throw her out. The fingers of the questing mind fixed on it, picked it up, held it up in the fierce light of her mind to examine it.
You don’t want him dead, said the voice in his mind, incredulous. The rage was building in him at the horror of this violation. Externally he could barely move a muscle for shock; internally, he shook himself like a man coming up out of dirtied water and shouted at her, “NO!”
She actually flinched back from him, only slightly; then that smile came back. “Well, the things we do find. What kind of perverse desire—” She shook her head. “Unless it’s something to do with the mother. Did she beg you for his life?” Again that stab, but this time it came up against the armor of Picard’s rage. He felt the blow skid sideways and miss. “No, I don’t think so somehow, that’s not Beverly’s style… anyway, she hates him, too, after all, and wouldn’t waste her time. Then again, who knows? I really must have a talk with her about you. But it’s very strange in you. Why should you want to keep alive the son of the man you killed, when you have a chance to get rid of him? You would think his absence would be much better for… domestic tranquillity.”
Picard stood rigid and hung on to his rage like the armor it was. “Take him out of there, Counselor.”
She stared at him. “Now,” Picard said. “Are you refusing a direct order?”
“No,” Troi said after a moment. “Not yet. But in your present mood, I daresay you’ll soon give me grounds to. And then beware.”
Picard waited while her people shut the Agony Booth down. Wesley collapsed on the floor in a heap, moaning, his whole body trembling still with the overstimulation of the nerves. “Mr. Barclay,” Picard said. “Call a couple more of my people. Have them come here and return Mr. Crusher to his quarters. Then stand guard over him there. He is not to be moved by anyone else. If anyone tries—stop them by whatever means necessary.”
“Yes, sir,” Barclay said, glaring at Troi’s people. Apparently there was no love lost among the officers’ various guards.
Picard waited until other members of his bodyguard arrived and took Crusher away. Troi, still smiling that disturbing smile, went pointedly off in the opposite direction, toward the bridge.
“Are you all right, Captain?” Barclay said. “I felt her bearing down on you.”
“You felt that, too,” Picard said, inclined to shudder at the memory.
“When she’s in that mode, sir, there’s no not feeling it, even at a distance. You’re just glad you’re not on the receiving end of her real attention. Some have been. Some die of it.”
“Point taken, Mr. Barclay. Come on.” Picard headed for the ’lift. “I was in the middle of some work when Dr. Crusher arrived. I need to finish it. Then we’ll go back to the bridge.”
CHAPTER 10
Once back in his quarters, Picard moved swiftly, not knowing how much time he would have before he was disturbed again. Hurriedly he sat down at the desk and slipped out of his tunic the small, closed container and the wafer he had removed from Beverly’s cabinet. Then he started working at the desk terminal, calling up a voiceprint-classified program, and carefully specifying an authorization code for it.
Wesley, he thought. His mind was in such turmoil on the subject of the young man, both here and there, that he hardly knew what to think. But of this he was certain: when he saw his own universe’s Wesley Crusher again, he would have a word or two of exoneration for him.
Carefully Picard opened the container, slipped the wafer into it, and shut it again. He put the whole container on the media-reading spot on his desk and brought up a link between it and his desk terminal.
Now let’s see how much of this I remember, he thought, and started to work. His programming was understandably rusty: captains had computers and programmers to do this kind of work for them as a rule. But he still remembered the rudiments, enough to do quick-and-dirty coding in C50 and Logex and Arian and some of the similar programs designed for directing automated tools. Tools were all these were, after all.
He brought up a visual of the contents of the container, by way of the link built into the contact wafer. There they were—a host of little six-armed creatures with crabby claws. They were one of a surgeon’s most useful tools: tiny hands and manipulators that could stitch together a single nerve fibril as easily and dexterously as a sailor butt-splices a rope. They could cut and join and suture: they could weave muscle and nerve and even bone fiber together as if it were stiff cloth. An average microsurgery replacement of, say, a severed limb, or a patch of diseased brain tissue, might use a hundred, maybe even two hundred of these, depending on the size of the operative site and the amount of work to be done. There were—Picard laid a grid down over the view, using the computer, and then counted—there were about two hundred of them here. Would it be enough? He didn’t know, but it had to be tried.
Some time back, after his ship had started selectively falling apart—after the string of bizarre malfunctions and systems failures—he had read, very carefully, young Ensign Crusher’s science project paper on the care, feeding, education, and breeding of “nanites.” Obviously here there was no time for the breeding. It would take at least a month to engender nanites who had the proper associational links and the number of neuronal connections in their joint neural network to become intelligent and self-aware. If he had such nanites at the moment, he could ask them politely if they would kindly give him a hand and then turn them loose. But the principle would still work for him now and was worthwhile. Until the damage was done, until it was too late, there was no way to detect the tiny microsurgeons loose in your optical network, or in your computer core, cheerfully chowing down on all the components in a starship’s computer that made life worth living—that in fact made life possible to live at all.
Shields, life support, propulsion—and, Picard thought, most particularly, that large set of boxes down in engineering. They looked, if he was any judge of such things, to have their own set of backup computers. But there were ways around that. Chances were very good that they would be backed up to the central cores. Once the cores were out of commission—even one of them—not only would his chief engineer have an excuse to get at it, but those computers servicing the exclusion apparatus would be left to stand alone. And stand-alone equipment was always vulnerable. But meanwhile, why infect just one core? Geordi only needed one to work on, true, but the cores backed up to each other. He would infect them all.
Now—Picard got busy with his programming. These were still just machines: machines that did what you told them, though that doing might lack the charm of saying “please” to another sentient organism and having that organism say, “Why, certainly, don’t mind if I do.” But even without being intelligent, they were quite capable of “chewing up” and pulling apart bits of the toughest materials, one from another—even the molecules of magnetic storage medium in the cores—and reducing them, with dedication and energy, to finely divided fluff. Now he set about the specific instructions, as to what to chomp on and how and where. Communications first. Picard smiled grimly: he would teach them to value that, if nothing else. Then after that, the weapons systems. Life support—he thought about it, then decided not. “Though…” He changed his mind, added an instruction. Occasional random failures here and there would hav
e a useful effect. Most of all, he instructed a party of about thirty of the microsurgery assistants to go find the area in the cores from which the agonizers and the Agony Booth were powered and programmed—if they could—and kill them.
After that, he sorted down through a list of priorities and instructed the nanites where to go to deal with each of them. As the captain of a starship, he had a fairly clear sense of in what particular associational network each grouping of information might be found. He didn’t have the precise, brain-surgeon’s knowledge that Geordi would have, the equivalent of the kind of knowledge that could pinpoint the spot in the brain that when triggered caused uncontrolled punning, or the memory of the scent of a garden decades gone. Picard’s knowledge was more on the phrenological level, a sense of bumps and zones and likely spots, effective enough to go on with. Most specifically, he instructed his little assistants not in any way to damage the storage areas where the information about the “switchback” technique, the “inclusion” data, might be found, but to cut power to it as quickly as they might, once found—and its finding was an overriding priority for all of them. Some of them he instructed to do some work and then take themselves out of the immediate core area, holding themselves in reserve. Unless otherwise instructed, they would come out later and start the whole business again.
Picard checked his programming, twice, and three times, as he’d been taught. When he was sure that it would work, that no loops or loopholes had been left in, he activated the microsurgeons and swiftly resealed the container. Using the magnified view available from the reader, he could see them already climbing over and onto one another, trying to get out and do what the program told them, eager to be at it.
“Good luck,” he said to them softly. “And if you people have time—feel free to be fruitful and multiply.”
Picard slipped the container back into his tunic, then thought a moment and slipped it down a bit farther, into the waistband of his pants, where it would lie flat. If he had to suck in his gut a bit more than usual, that was fine; at least he could get at it quickly and unseen.
