Dark Mirror by Diane Duane Page B

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