Dark Mirror (7 page)

Picard sat quiet.

“There’s something else I don’t like the look of, though I don’t know quite what to make of it. The neural diagnostic routines turned up some near-systemic damage in our duplicate out there. It’s very low-level stuff—myelin-sheath damage, some minor mononeuropathies, some involvement of dermatomes… and I’m not sure what would cause such a presentation. If the trauma were more serious, I would suspect something like Hansen’s disease, or even neurotransmitter-substance abuse. But it’s
not
that serious, and I have no diagnosis.”

“Which annoys you,” Picard said, and smiled slightly. She made a wry face. “Doctor, I want some answers out of him.”

Beverly shook her head. “Are you going to ask me for ‘truth serum’? I’m fresh out. Better see what Deanna can do. Ah—”

The door opened; Geordi came in and stood by the desk, holding a tricorder. “Can I dump to your terminal, Doctor? I didn’t want to do it out there… our boy’s watching, though he’s trying not to look it.”

“Feel free.”

“Report, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said.

Geordi looked both annoyed and intrigued. “Captain, both his communicator, as you discovered, and his uniform are forgeries. The communicator’s just a dummy, made of base metals, no silicates or transtator components. And the thread in the uniform, though it’s replicated material, has the wrong molecular structure. Or at least, a different one from what’s in our uniforms.” Geordi raised his eyebrows. “More than that—the
tailoring’s
bad.”

Beverly had to smile. Picard looked momentarily wry. “I assume you’re commenting on something besides the workmanship.”

“Yes, sir. Normally the computer adjusts fit to change with the changes in your body, using your last uniform as a template. But this was a one-off, if I’m any judge. The computer that made it wasn’t sure how to tailor it: it was using some other set of algorithms, and it made a botch of it. What that guy’s got on is definitely not the uniform he usually wears. Whatever
that
might be.”

“Well. Someone has gone to a lot of trouble to get an impostor onto my ship. I intend to get to the bottom of this—preferably humanely, but…” Picard touched his communicator. “Picard to Counselor Troi.”

“
Yes, Captain?”

“Please access the information presently in Dr. Crusher’s terminal regarding our intruder. Then I would be pleased to see you in sickbay to give us the benefit of your impressions.”

“
Right away, sir.”

“One thing first, Mr. La Forge,” Picard said. “The first we knew of this intruder was when we detected his presence in the computer core. Why didn’t we get any alert to the fact that someone had transported aboard?”

“I don’t know, Captain.” Geordi looked embarrassed. “I’m looking into it.”

“I’ll expect answers at the department heads’ meeting
later. Meanwhile”—the captain looked out through the glass—“let’s see what the counselor discovers.”

Having reviewed the security tape of Stewart’s capture, and having finished reading Dr. Crusher’s report, Deanna Troi made her way down to sickbay in a state of some unease. She knew Stewart slightly, having met him before in Ten-Forward; he had invited her down with some other crewpeople to see his plant collection, and they had spent a cheerful afternoon in one of the greenhouses. But his medical and psych profiles had always been unremarkable. He was simply a good steady crewman, not an under-achiever or overachiever; interested in research—he had been doing some extremely delicate work on one of the more impenetrable alien DNA-analogues. The image of this crewman trying to break into the computer was ridiculous… but she already knew it wasn’t him. There was no other way to read the data, no matter how impossible it seemed.

She was uneasy, though, at the appearance of this sudden extra persona wearing a body she had thought she was familiar with. As usual when she was uneasy, Deanna had “managed it away”—had gotten right down into the unease, experienced it sufficiently for it to no longer feel actively uncomfortable, and then had sealed it over temporarily. Unfortunately there had been no time to indulge herself in enough self-work to feel completely at rest. The taut sound of the captain’s voice had made it plain that time was of the essence. But she still found herself wondering what she was going to find when she went into sickbay.

She paused for a long moment outside the doors, seeing what she felt. There was a knot of tight concentration that she felt sure was the captain, Geordi, and Beverly, for it came in three different flavors—one quite fierce and concentrated, one cool and thoughtful, the third holding
itself in check only with difficulty. As always, she could almost, almost hear thoughts moving on the edges of the emotions, but not quite. She had long since given up being frustrated about such things.

There was another source of emotion in the room besides the two security men—their minds, alert and a bit suspicious, she could clearly distinguish. The other—it was certainly not Stewart. Even if she hadn’t had an evaluation of his physical condition to go by, she would have known that immediately. Mark had never had such a core of suppressed fury in him. And overlaid on that was bitterness, a dreadful sense of betrayal, and a boiling desire for revenge—but all balked, all frustrated because the person having the feelings knew that there was nothing he could do about any of these things. He was trapped, he had failed somehow, and he was frightened for himself. She could feel his mind moving restlessly like a caged beast, trying to find a way out, finding nothing, repeating the motions because there was no hope, and nothing else to do.

All right
, she said to herself,
there’s your baseline. What are you waiting for?
Still, it took Deanna a few seconds before she could make herself go in.

Ryder and Detaith looked at her as she came in, smiled at her, and moved aside to let her have easier access to the diagnostic bed. The man on it didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes—or at least didn’t seem to. At the sound of the door, he jumped internally—then, hearing the footsteps pause by his bed, he kept himself very still, a waiting feeling.

Deanna decided to take the initiative: “Hello, Mr. Stewart. Or is that really who you are?”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Picard, Crusher, and Geordi watching through the glass doors of the doctor’s office, saw them react as the man’s eyes flew open. She had little attention to spare them, though. She was too busy bracing herself against the abrupt, desperate wash of fear that came blasting out of the man, directed squarely at her.

He was physically holding himself still, and a feeling came to Deanna that translated into the image of a small creature being very quiet, quiet for its life’s sake, under the pitiless eye of a predator. He stared at her, opened his mouth, and closed it again. Inside him, utter dread and anguish fought with each other. If the emotions had words, they would have been something like,
Oh, God, oh, no, they never told me
.

Deanna fought for her own balance. It was poor technique to say something simply in order to alter the other’s emotions in favor of your own comfort. She was sorely tempted, but she put the urge resolutely aside. “I think you have some explaining to do,” she said, purposely holding her body in a nonthreatening position, arms by her side, so as not to encourage him into any response that he didn’t generate himself. The line was “nonguiding,” too, a good one for giving whatever free-floating anxiety was about a chance to express itself.

“As if you need explanations,” Stewart said. His tone had some bravado about it, but the bravado was frightened and ineffective. He despaired of convincing her; he certainly didn’t convince himself.

“Suppose you tell me what you were doing trying to get into the computer core.”

Stewart stared at her. He was trembling now. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Picard stand up in the next room, looking uncomprehendingly from her to the man on the diagnostic bed. Stewart began to sit up. Ryder and Detaith moved a little closer. Deanna waved them back. “No, it’s all right. I want to hear what he has to say.”

“So it was all a trick then,” Stewart said. “The whole thing. Maybe this, too. A holodeck simulation?” He stared around him, then looked back at Troi, wincing as if it badly frightened him to look at her directly. “Why me?” he burst out. “What have I done wrong? I’ve always been loyal.”

“Exactly how would you say you’ve been tricked?”
Deanna was having a hard time keeping herself from trembling now. The man’s fear was only partly for this situation, this place; most of it was of
her
specifically. She could get no clear sense of why he was so afraid, but there were shapes moving in the back of his mind, lowering, something worse than just dying, worse than just torture, worse than—Deanna shied away from the inchoate images, they were so frightening. In any case, she couldn’t make them out clearly, and clarity was needed here, if nothing else.

Stewart gulped. “They told me, ‘We’re going to beam you over to another
Enterprise
. It’s going to look like our
Enterprise
, but it’s not. You’re not to speak to any of the people you meet there.’” Stewart looked away, his face crumpling. “I’m dead already.”

“Not yet,” Troi said consolingly, but the look of stark terror the man turned on her…

“Please, no,” he cried, “please, Counselor, I’m telling you—”

And again that wash of fear, and fear of
her
, as if she were Death standing by the bed, inescapable. She held her face quite still and nodded to him to continue.

He gulped. “They said, ‘Get into the computer core,’ and they gave me some codes, and they said, ‘These’ll get you first-level access, get these files…’” He rattled off a long string of file names.

Out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of Geordi bending over the doctor’s terminal, making notes. Deanna shook her head when he had finished. “They.”

“Commander Riker,” Stewart said, “and Mr. La Forge.”

“All right. What else?”

He looked at her mistrustfully, and all his emotions roiled in him: a man seeing someone behaving most uncharacteristically, not knowing what to make of it, and still deadly afraid.

“They said, ‘Here’s a transmitter to get out the data we want. As you access the data, it’ll feed to this—when it’s finished, just go back out into the ship and just wait. We’ll pick you up, beam you back in about six hours.’” He gulped again. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he moaned. “I did my best, I tried—I did the transmission! Why am I going to be punished now!”

“No one’s going to punish you,” Troi said, shaken. The look of pure, hating disbelief that Stewart turned on her was a poor echo of the blast of rage and betrayal that hit her now.

“Oh, come on, Counselor,” he said sarcastically, turning the title into an epithet. “Why would you be here otherwise? Everybody knows you can’t bear to be left out of a little ‘conditioning.’ Especially at the moment. One of those Betazed ‘weird times,’ it’s more than usually good for you, I hear—” And then he caught himself. Some fear even worse than the fear of
her
briefly impinged. He looked around the room, saw the captain, Geordi, and Crusher looking at him, and his face sagged into hopelessness again. “Are they real?” he whispered. “It doesn’t matter, does it? You’ll kill me now, won’t you? For
him.”
Among the incoherencies, this one stab of cold dread went through Deanna like a spear as the man’s eyes fell on Picard. If the feeling could have been put into words, “Abandon hope, all ye—” might have been a good rendering.
No hope. Failed, seen to have failed, seen by the
captain
to have failed—a death sentence
. “Get it over with,” Stewart said, sick with fear, and turned away toward the wall, slumped: a man waiting to be shot.

Troi’s head was already aching with the onslaught of such bitterness. At the same time, she was rather annoyed.
The problem here
, she thought,
is that I don’t know what questions to ask. Or how to ask them. All I can do is be nondirective and hope for the best
. “The security team,”

Deanna said. “You said you could make it worth their while. How exactly did you mean that?”

Stewart looked at her sidewise, the question distracting him from his terror momentarily, so that more normal reactions asserted themselves for the moment. “You of everybody aboard this ship know
that,”
he said. “A little action on the side, someone taken off the promotion ladder here, a bribe or two there, a word whispered somewhere else to help your career along—if it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for us little crewmen, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t I try the same pitch?” And there was a sudden dawning inside him of a wild hope—but caution, caution. His expression was going almost sly. “I wonder what you mean by asking. No disrespect, Counselor,” Stewart said hurriedly. But the sly look got stronger. “Getting tired of Number One then, are you?”

The emotional subtext of his words was so amused, and there was such a background of distaste to it—slightly lascivious distaste—that Deanna almost blushed. Not quite: she had that much control over herself left. “If I am?” she said.

“Then maybe I can make it worth your while as well. I know about Betazeds—it’s one of the problems, isn’t it? There just sort of isn’t—enough—at certain times. There are some of us, though, who might surprise you. A little less easy to wear out than”—the man’s eyes darted around nervously—“Number One. He’s been so busy lately, anyway, what with—” And now Stewart glanced, ever so briefly, at Picard, who had sat back down again in Crusher’s office and was trying very hard indeed not to watch them.

“Commander Riker’s duty load can be considerable,” Deanna said neutrally.

Stewart burst out in a great laugh of anger and amusement. “If we’re going to make a deal, let’s make it. Let me
go back to my duties—let me out of this test or drill or whatever it is—I’m a good crewman. I’m a loyal crewman. I back my principals. I’ve never turned my coat on any of them. I’d be good as one of your men, too. You could buy me off my principal easily enough—or take me.” His tone was wheedling, now, but under the wheedling the fear remained, and the confusion. There was also a feeling of growing boldness, though: he seemed to think he had achieved something, possibly just by still being alive. “A word, a favor—you have the power on this ship. Everybody knows that. Even
he.”
And his glance slid to Picard again, and away. “You know,” he said more softly, “even the captain can’t act without the security officer’s approval.”