by Diane Duane
“She won’t get past me, sir.”
“Good man.” Picard nodded to Barclay. He went in the door cautiously, and it shut behind him.
And the instant it shut, the foot came shooting out, caught the phaser in his hand, and knocked it halfway across the room.
He did the only thing he could under the circumstances. He grabbed the foot and yanked sideways, hard. There was a crash, and for confusion’s sake, he threw himself on top of it, grappling. Found a throat, seized it, looked—
—and the shock, the shock went through him worse than he’d thought. To have yourself by the throat, to see your own enraged and anxious eyes fixed on yours… He almost let go. It was close. If he had, he would have been dead. The other’s arm came up between his throttling hands, over, then under, the standard break-the-throttle—and that hand had a phaser in it.
Picard did as he had been taught—let go with the left hand to break the twist, seized with it again from underneath this time, leaving the arm that had tried to break the hold useless above it, except that there was a phaser in it. And the phaser came in hard and hit him in the side of the head.
Everything went hot and shot with bright lights, and he fell back—but not before seizing his knees around the waist of the shape he had knocked sprawling and taking it rolling with him. His own hands came up, interlaced, and clubbed the other in the head. Two can play at this game, he thought, his own head still spinning. He clubbed again, but it did little good, and in a moment the hands were at his throat.
The phaser went flying, dropped out of the fingers that lost their grip for a moment, then found it again, on Picard’s throat this time. They rolled over and over on the floor, two or three times. The other kneed him hard in the groin: the breath went out of Picard. He was grateful, at least, as he rolled away in a different direction, that he hadn’t been hit in the head again. It would have made him throw up, and he was quite sure that the other would kill him while he did—thus putting him out of his misery in an effective but permanent manner. As he rolled, he came upon one of the dropped phasers, gripped it, rolled to his knees gasping—and found that his counterpart, on his knees as well and clutching his bruised throat, was holding the other phaser on him.
And the only problem was that Picard wasn’t sure whether he had the phaser with the safety off or the one with it on… and he didn’t dare look.
“‘Ill met by starlight’ indeed,” said the other, glaring at him and coughing.
“You heard that?”
“Hearing is always the last thing to go.”
“So Dr. Crusher says, yes. Well, the meeting was your idea. Don’t blame me for the circumstances, or if you don’t like the taste of it when it’s happened. You don’t suppose that we could just sit back and do nothing.”
The other laughed at him harshly. “I suppose we shouldn’t have, but then Fleet said that’s exactly what you’d do. Who was to know that you would be anywhere near as resourceful as we are?”
Picard had to laugh at the self-assured sound of it. “We are. The more fool you for taking Fleet seriously. What desk jockey ever correctly evaluated a field situation?”
The other looked at him. Picard felt like shivering. It was so strange, as if you looked in the mirror and the mirror spoke—words you never dreamed of, or words you had dreamed and put away as nothing you could ever say. “I must tell you immediately,” Picard said, “you’ll never succeed at this.”
“That I see you at all means that you have, much to our surprise, made some move that was not purely defensive.” The other shrugged. “Our own personal success doesn’t matter in this. If we must try again at a later date, we will… and this time we’ll be prepared.”
“I very much doubt that,” Picard said softly. “Your intelligence, your hard intelligence on us, may be better by far than ours on you—but it’s the soft intelligence that will trip you. The knowing of personalities and unwritten laws… those you’ll never master. A day with your crew has made it plain.”
“So you say.” His counterpart gazed at him thoughtfully. “Are you so sure? Bears may dance badly, but they do dance. We will manage it again. There will be other parts of your Federation not so carefully watched. Back doors… weak spots. There are always such. You have had other conspiracies of late that nearly brought Starfleet itself down. Those were alien creatures involved, things not even human. Still they almost fooled you when installed near the heart of things. You’ll be easily enough fooled by us when we come back.”
“But there’s no hope of that ‘us’ including you. Not if I understand your Starfleet. You’ll be lucky to get out of this with your life.”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” said his counterpart, grinning evilly. Picard wanted to shudder at the thought that such an expression could live on his face. “I am still the most experienced captain they have. They had to come to me for advice when they began to put this plan together… and I didn’t spend the past five years of my career maneuvering to make sure that the mission was assigned to my ship.”
“To you, you mean.”
“You do learn, eventually. Of course. Once we’ve succeeded at this, even if the success isn’t total, the power I’ll acquire—”
It was in the middle of that sentence that Picard realized what the other was doing and leapt at him, simply leapt like a mad thing, regardless of phasers—though he kept his clutched in his hand. He caught his counterpart in the chest, and again they went rolling over. They’ll be here shortly, he thought as he grabbed for the other’s flailing hand—managed to grab it by the wrist and began pounding it against the floor. The other rolled the other way, and the worst of it began, a thick, tangled, confused fight, all arms and legs, not the clean, efficient combat that had been taught Picard in school, but something more like the halves of a mind fighting. Two men who were one man, terrified of each other, trying to remember their expertise, losing it in the basic horror of the moment: that each of them was face-to-face with something that was his diametrical opposite, but each similarly equipped, each as sharp of mind, and the minutes ticking away. It could only be a matter of time before…
The other Picard caught him hard in the solar plexus, rolled away, lurched to his knees. Wheezing, gasping for breath, Jean-Luc came to his own knees and then threw himself sideways as the phaser beam sizzled past him, then once again threw himself straight at the other. The beam went awry, but only just. It singed his left eyebrow off, and the force of it passing through the air by his ear left him half-deaf on that side, the ear ringing. Not that it mattered in the wake of the red streak of pain that left him wondering whether he had actually been grazed. A graze it would have had to be, for anything closer would have left him without that side of his head. For a moment he struggled again with the other, then clubbed the phaser out of his hand with his own, and looked down into that snarling face, teeth bared, more an animal’s than a man’s.
He gripped his own phaser, checked the setting, the charge. The other glared sheer hate at him, made a grab at the phaser.
He stunned him point-blank, then reeled back, feeling sick to his stomach from the blows and the backwash of the stun. Picard staggered to his feet, tried to pull down his uniform, failed again, said, “Ah, j’m’en fous!”
The sound of phaser fire came from outside. He whirled. The door opened.
And the counselor and two of her guards rushed in, with Worf behind them. They looked from him, to the form on the floor, to him again.
Picard had no time for their confused looks. “Barclay,” he breathed. He brushed past them as if they were hardly there, out into the hall.
Nothing. No one there: only the faintest smell of scorched meat. Not a body, not even a hand to clasp as the poor faithful soul passed away.
He turned, walking slowly back into the room. Troi was staring at him. He felt the brush of a veil against the face of his mind—but the fury was growing in him second by second, fueled by the tears starting to burn in his eyes. For a moment he tried
to control himself—No. I will hide no more of my humanity, he thought, though they kill me for it. The anger burned, he could almost see the veil catch, bloom into fire, drift away as cinders—and Troi, looking at him, actually backed away from him a step, two steps, like death seeing Death.
“Where is Mr. Barclay?” he said softly.
“He should have known better than to put up resistance when a security matter was in hand,” Troi said.
He stepped toward her, backed her right into the wall, and took her one-handed under the chin, gripping hard. Her guards stared, fascinated and afraid, and did nothing. The counselor tried the stab of the mind again, but she was uncentered and unsure, and the blow missed. It stuck in the armor of his rage, the intensity of his emotion trapping it, and down the channel Troi had opened between them, Picard’s rage poured, transfixing her—open-eyed, openmouthed, anguished, like a woman being burned at the stake in her mind.
“That was my best man,” Picard said, low, even-voiced. “A young officer barely past the threshold of his career. A loyal man. Who knows what he might have been in a year, or five? Except possibly you knew.” He looked at Troi, narrow-eyed. “Always better to nip these things in the bud, isn’t it?” He let go of her, looked away from her, disgusted by the sight of her—
—and found himself looking over at Mr. Worf. Worf’s expression was a strange one: recognition of something he had seen before, and confusion and dawning—Picard swallowed. He realized that Worf knew, beyond question he knew.
Picard simply stood there and looked at Worf for a second. There was nothing else to be done.
Worf looked back and never said a word. Confused, but not about to waste the moment, Picard turned back to Troi. He gestured at the floor. “Take that out of here.”
“The Booth?” Troi said weakly.
Picard’s mouth set hard. How many others had this other self ordered it for in his time? A little justice, though it came late, would suit his own present mood. “Yes. Wring it dry. How are the repairs?”
Troi actually stammered. “They’re, they’re coming along, Captain. We should be spaceworthy again, Hessan says, within—”
“Half the time she said,” Picard said bitterly, “whatever it was. See to it. Meantime—” He stepped much closer to Troi. “That was most unnecessary, Counselor.” He gestured with his head at the door. “You will rue this day’s work.”
“Not so much as you will,” she said rather desperately, “when Starfleet Command catches up with you. Quite shortly, I should say.”
“Trust me, Counselor,” Picard said, and his smile must have been terrible, for she took another step back, “other things will catch up with you, first, and I will watch and enjoy every moment.” He pointed at the floor again. “Now get that out of here.”
Troi and her guards picked up the unconscious body of the other Picard and carried him out. “Mr. Worf,” Picard said, “perhaps you would wait a moment.”
When the doors had shut, they spent a long few moments studying each other. “You didn’t betray me,” Picard said. “I thank you for that. But how did you know?”
“Your manner. Your courtesy. The way you spoke to me earlier—taken together with the fact that you cared at all about a dead bodyguard. These have not been typical of ‘your’ past behavior.” Worf smiled grimly. “Unlike others here, I can see the unlikely when it is under my nose; I would not have survived long without learning how to notice things.”
Picard nodded. “Time is short. I must recover my people and go… but I will not forget your help.”
“I will see you safely away. But one thing quickly, before we go.” The abrupt sorrow in his eyes was terrible to see. “In your universe—what has happened to my people?”
Picard smiled somberly. “They are a mighty empire, and our allies. Oh, we were enemies once; there were times when we had territorial ambitions that clashed, and our fears of each other’s strengths blinded us for a long time to the ways we might help each other. But the will to peace, and some happy accidents, brought us together at last. Now the Klingon Empire is prospering, and its people are a noble and honorable race. Nothing is more important to them.”
Worf nodded. “So it was once with us. But not for a long time now.” He turned toward the door. “I will accompany you, Captain. Where are you going?”
Picard touched his communicator: there was no more time for secrecy. “Counselor—where are you?”
“The core access room above the starboard primary-hull core,” the answer came back. “Hurry, Captain!”
“Where’s Mr. La Forge?”
“He’s here, sir. He’s lost his transponder, but otherwise he’s all right.”
“We’re on our way…. Come on, Mr. Worf.”
“We’re on our way?” Geordi muttered, touching his tricorder into life again.
Troi, standing by the locked door with her phaser drawn, shook her head. “Don’t ask me…. How is it?”
“Security barriers are still down,” Geordi said, rubbing his aching head as he worked. “Not for long, though. Eileen has been a busy little bee. But I still know a few tricks she doesn’t.”
He worked over the tricorder. “She’s restored the core on the other side, but I can reroute this control pathway to the core in the engineering hull.” He grinned. “You can’t be in two places at once.”
“Oh, can’t you,” Troi said, looking at the door. “We both are.”
Geordi snorted, then winced at the residual pain the gesture cost him. “We are, maybe, but Eileen’s not, and her crew down that way aren’t in that much of a hurry, to judge by what I see here. Some kind of place,” he muttered, “where people won’t work unless someone is standing over them. Ah…”
Troi looked nervously at the door. The emotional “temperature” of the ship was rather higher than it had been for the past few hours, and one particular bloom of emotion caught her attention: a dreadful cold rage, and closely associated with it, in another mind, raging anger so tinged with embarrassment that she shied from the touch of it… and that was in the mind that seemed, structurally, so like hers. She didn’t dare open the link that had been between them earlier, but she could guess what was going on—the other counselor had discovered that Geordi was missing, taken away by another Troi.
Then came a feeling of movement—toward them, mentally as well as physically. She could feel that other mind feeling about it for its own version of the link, a way to tell what she was doing and feeling. “Trouble,” she said, starting to erect her mental protections as quickly as she could. “Hurry up!”
“I’m going as fast as I can, Counselor.”
When they had started training her, as a child, in erecting the mental barriers that kept a Betazed’s mind from being littered with other people’s emotional baggage all the time, Deanna had made one of those laughable mistakes that your family then teases you about for years afterward. Hearing the term mental block, she had always envisioned her barriers as just that, blocks—brightly colored and piled up in a wall between her and whatever she wanted to shut out. Now she started piling them up in her mind as fast as she could, the ones with the letters and numbers on them, and the ones with painted pictures of animals, the paint a little chipped and fading, but the blocks absolutely dependable… once they were in place. Nervousness sometimes made her fumble them. Today, though, she slammed them in place in her mind with frantic speed and saw the wall grow, willing it to be invulnerable—for there was more than just her behind it. Geordi would be very vulnerable at the moment, she must not allow—
“Got it!” Geordi said softly, and slapped another isolinear chip down on the console’s reading pad. “Resumed.”
That core of embarrassed anger came hurrying closer and closer. Troi pulled out her phaser, adjusted it to full stun, and waited. “She’s coming,” she whispered to Geordi.
She saw him shudder all over, and moan with the pain of the movement. Nonetheless, he pulled the chip off the reading pad on the console and
substituted another. “One-third done, Counselor,” he said, and that was all he said.
Troi bit her lip, put herself behind the door, and waited.
The sound of phaser fire came from right outside the door. Troi got an image from her counterpart of the sparks and smoke jumping from the door control. The door flew open.
It was, of course, one of her guards that plunged in first: no chance she would have gone in first herself, if only because it was below her dignity. Deanna stunned the man immediately.
From outside, that mind seized hers. Its power was terrible, magnified by some kind of training that Deanna couldn’t believe—and, terribly, that she coveted. I could have that kind of power, she thought.
The wall of blocks trembled. Oh, no, Deanna said, furious that she could be tempted that way. But she was having none of it. She reached out to that other mind, grappled with it. Then came the shock of satisfaction as the other’s alarm came down the link, now reestablished, between them. The other might have raw power, but Deanna had finesse. The other battered at her blocks and found them too well established: hit them, hit them again, bristling with rage and scorn.
But her counterpart had no blocks up at all—apparently thinking she had no need for them. And it was hilarious, in a way, for she refused to acknowledge Deanna as another version of herself—if she had, she could have treated Deanna’s blocks as if they were her own and demolished them, as it were, from the inside.
Deanna, though, knew perfectly well they were more or less the same person—no matter how loathsome the concept was—and knew she could affect that other mind as if it were her own. She laughed soundlessly and left the other battering at her own protective walls, while she slipped out from behind one of them and came at the counselor’s mind from underneath, stabbing it deep with a well-whetted knife of rage at what the counselor had done to Geordi.
There was a soundless shriek of pain and surprise at the violation. Deanna enjoyed the feeling, and while the other was frozen with reaction, simply stepped around from her hiding place by the doorway and out into the corridor. Alone, the counselor stood there, trying to move, unable to escape the iron grip Deanna had on her—and Deanna, very calmly, stepped up to her and clubbed her in the side of the head with her phaser.
