Chapter Eleven

DEANNA TROI LAY UNCONSCIOUS in a private room in sickbay while Dr. Beverly Crasher stood at the foot of her bed checking her vital signs on the overhead screen. Except for her brain waves, which were slightly more active than usual, Troi’s vital signs were all within normal ranges. She appeared to be sleeping peacefully, almost angelically, with her raven hair streaming outward across the pillow from her radiant face.

That would last only about another fifteen minutes, thought Crusher, until the sedatives began to wear off. At that time, there was no telling which Deanna Troi would return to them—the trusted counselor or the delusional patient.

As a friend, Crasher hated what she had to do next; as a doctor, she had no choice. She bent down and made sure that the heavy-duty restraints on her comrade’s arms and legs were tight, but not tight enough to cut off circulation. Deanna hadn’t appeared to be a danger to others, but she could easily injure herself if she became destructive again. It was better to be overly cautious than sorry. The restraints were the main reason the doctor hadn’t wanted Will and Jean-Luc to see her patient. They might get the wrong idea.

Or perhaps they might realize how serious it was.

With a troubled frown, Crusher gazed at her colleague, shipmate, and friend, thinking how painful life would be on the Enterprise if she didn’t recover. She could mend the burns, broken bones, and diseases she saw every day, but a damaged psyche was beyond her bag of tricks. Deanna should be at a starbase, under the supervision of a team of counselors, but knowing that didn’t do either one of them any good. They were trapped here, far removed from help for her condition. It wasn’t in Beverly’s nature to be pessimistic about a patient’s chances, but she didn’t think the terror she had seen in Troi’s eyes would leave easily.

Her combadge beeped, snapping Beverly out of her oppressive thoughts. “Crusher here,” she answered.

“Doctor, this is Nurse Ogawa. Commander Riker is in the receiving room.”

Crusher nodded to herself, knowing that she couldn’t hold him off forever. “Tell him I’ll be right there. And, Ogawa, let’s have somebody standing by with Counselor Troi—she could wake up any time.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t leave her alone,” promised the senior nurse.

When Crusher entered main sickbay, she found Will Riker pacing. The big man whirled around and stared expectantly at her, his clean-shaven face making him look more boyish than he had in years. “Any change?”

“No,” she answered softly, “but the sedative will be wearing off in fifteen or twenty minutes. The next time she wakes up should tell us a lot about her condition.”

“Can I see her?”

“Why don’t we wait until she’s awake,” said Beverly pleasantly. “I’ll let you buy me a cup of coffee until then.”

Riker looked uncertain about leaving Deanna again—after all, it wasn’t that long ago that he had rediscovered his feelings for her. But Crusher smiled and took his arm, guiding him out the door and into the corridor before he could mount a protest. With any luck, thought the doctor, the next time he saw her, she wouldn’t be strapped down and unconscious.

“Enterprise to away team,” said Captain Picard from the command chair in the center of the bridge. When there was no answer, he tapped the combadge on his chair again. “Picard to Barclay. Come in, away team.”

“They may be out of range,” suggested Data, plying the ops console. “Interference from the new crystal growth has drastically reduced our effective range. When we last got a fix on the shuttlecraft, they were at the shell, but our scanners indicate they have left the shell. They will probably go deeper into the planet.”

Picard nodded, trying to temper his worry and impatience. Experience had taught him that the Elaysians, Lipuls, Alpusta, and other denizens of Gemworld were not the easiest to get along with, and he had best let the away team do their job. He had faith in both Barclay and Pazlar. Their movements clearly showed they were traveling far and wide, trying to gain access to the computer codes. Once they did, another piece of the puzzle would be uncovered.

The captain knew it was up to him to turn over a large chunk of that puzzle himself. Tangre Bertoran and the Jeptah had been right about one thing—the rift was connected, and they couldn’t ignore it. They had to find out more about this invisible singularity which spewed dark matter, thoron radiation, and destruction in equal measure. If it truly was a dimensional rift, they couldn’t even guess what was on the other side.

The captain had stared down a black hole before, but at least he knew what awaited him on the other side of a black hole—nothingness, nonexistence. Another dimension, one full of dark matter, could be more alien than anything ever seen in their galaxy. Despite the captain’s wealth of experience, that was a sobering thought.

Picard kept recalling what Data had said about imbalance and equalization. If the rift were left open, dark matter might keep flowing between the two dimensions until they were equalized. First Gemworld would be destroyed, then the solar system, the sector, the quadrant—and both dimensions. The rift would widen until it consumed the cosmos.

“Mr. Data,” said the captain, “prepare to launch the probe.”

“Yes, sir.” The android deftly worked his board for a few seconds. “Without accurate sensor readings, targeting is problematic. I will be forced to make an approximation of the rift’s location.”

Picard smiled slightly. “I trust your guess, Data.”

“Course laid in,” reported the android. “Probe is ready for launch.”

“Fire when ready.”

Data tapped his console. “Probe launched.”

The captain looked up at the viewscreen to witness a scene very similar to the simulation he had viewed on the holodeck with the Jeptah protestors. The probe zoomed through an opening in the shell and streaked into space. Scanners picked up the blip outside the shell as it soared toward a jagged gash in the starscape. At least that’s how Picard imagined it.

“Sensors reporting in,” said Data, scanning screen after screen of readouts. “Trace gases are consistent with a dark-matter nebula. Thoron radiation increasing exponentially, as are graviton readings, baryon particles, and gamma rays. Probe is now encountering unknown gas clouds; recognizable substances are ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water vapor.”

Picard frowned, thinking those were the basic ingredients of amino acids, the building blocks of life. Could that thing be alive? He was about to order the probe aborted when it disappeared from the viewscreen.

“Transmission ended,” said Data simply.

Deanna Troi was asleep. Oblivious, until a sharp pain punctured her stomach, and a horrible whining sounded in her mind. She howled as her abdominal muscles tightened involuntarily, and she tried to sit up to ease the pain. But her arms were strapped down! All she could do was thrash about on the bed, not knowing where she was or what was happening to her. It felt as if a knife was tearing her insides out, and her head was about to split open.

In a small cafeteria a few meters down the corridor, Beverly Crusher’s combadge chirped. “Ogawa to Crusher,” came a familiar voice.

“Crusher here,” answered Beverly, hoping it was good news. Across the table from her, Will Riker leaned forward expectantly.

“Come quickly!” urged Ogawa. “She’s delirious.”

Crusher jumped to her feet and reached the doorway a split second before Riker. The two of them charged down the corridor and into sickbay, barely giving the automatic doors a chance to whoosh open. An anguished scream pierced the air, urging them past rows of occupied beds and into the private examination room where they saw Nurse Ogawa and two orderlies trying to subdue Troi, who thrashed and shrieked like a woman possessed.

“Don’t you know you’re killing me! Stop it! Stop it!” she cried between screams and lunges.

“Twenty cc’s of lectrazine,” ordered Crusher, holding out her hand for the hypospray.

“Wait a minute . . . can’t we talk to her first?” Riker rushed to her bedside, pushing the others out of his way. He gently touched her trembling, sweaty forearm. “Deanna, do you hear me? It’s Will.”

“Ah! No! Stop!” She cried like a frightened animal caught in a trap, while she struggled pathetically against her binds.

Riker gazed with anguish at the troubled woman. “Does she have to be tied up like this?”

“Look at her, Will,” shouted Crusher over the din. “I’m afraid she’ll hurt herself!”

Just then, Troi erupted with a scream that was primal, like a childbirth scream, and even Riker recoiled. Crusher glanced at Ogawa, caught her eye, and waited as the nurse placed a hypo in her palm.

Will inserted himself between them, shielding Deanna from the hypo. “Let me talk to her for just a second.”

“She’s in pain,” said Crusher. “I don’t know why she’s like this, but the mind can do real damage to the body.”

Riker desperately tried to grip Troi’s hand, then he yelped in agony as she dug her fingernails into his flesh. Spittle flew from her mouth as she shouted, “Don’t do that again! You stabbed me! Why? I gave to you, and you took—” Deanna grimaced and would have doubled over in pain if she weren’t bound so tightly.

With considerable effort, Riker wrenched his bloodied hand away from hers and rose to his feet, a distraught look on his face. With the path clear, the doctor waded in with her hypospray.

“You wanted it!” shouted Troi, struggling against her bonds. “You wanted to know . . . now you have it all! It’s in you . . . and me. Everyone—”

“I’m sorry,” said Crusher as she administered the hypo.

“Unnh,” moaned the disheveled woman, sinking back on her pillow. Within a few moments, Deanna Troi was again sleeping peacefully, her hair radiating outward from her serene face.

Riker scowled with a mixture of anger and helplessness. “What brought this on? Was it those damn dreams? She was fine before this!”

“I don’t know what happened to her.” Beverly shook her head in frustration. “We may never know what started this agitation . . . unless it has a physical cause I haven’t found yet.”

At Riker’s crestfallen expression, Crusher patted the big man on the shoulder. “We’ll keep looking, but the sooner we get out of here, the better . . . for her. She needs the specialists at a starbase.”

“There’s nothing you can do for her?”

“We’ll keep her comfortable, and we’ll try to talk to her again,” answered Crusher. “Next time, I’ll bring her around more gradually. We don’t have any Vulcans on board, do we?”

“No, none at the moment,” muttered Riker. “During the war, most of them went to serve on Vulcan ships, and we never got them back. You can forget about a mind-meld.”

“Will, I don’t know what to tell you.” She patted him again on the shoulder, and they both looked down at the bound figure. Beverly didn’t want to give him any false hope, and she was fresh out of words of encouragement.

“I’ m going to get her out of here,” vowed Riker. He strode from the examination room, through main sickbay, and out the door.

Crusher sighed wearily and rubbed her eyes. She thought about going back to bed, but instead she turned to Nurse Ogawa and said, “Let’s do a complete workup again, starting with a brain scan.”

Reg Barclay gaped at the magnificent hall of the Exalted Ones, with its rose-hued prisms sparkling with bubbles, glints of light, and the faint silhouette of a Lipul. As if revisiting a dream, Reg glided deeper into the hollow crystal, clinging to Melora’s hand. By the time his eyes adjusted to the dim, refracted light, his expression had changed from wonder to distress.

The floor of the cavernous chamber and all of its nooks and crevices were encrusted with the mutant black crystal, growing like spiny weeds. Here and there, black clouds of crushed and broken crystal floated ominously in the air, and an oppressive silence hung over the sparse assemblage. Barclay looked around the gloomy hall but could see no Alpusta or Yiltern, and only a handful of desolate Elaysians.

From the rear of the hall, a figure zoomed toward them gripping a hover-platform, his yellow robes billowing behind him. “Tangre Bertoran,” muttered Reg, pulling back from Melora’s grip.

“You let me handle him,” she insisted.

When the Peer of the Jeptah reached them, he swung around to a stop and hovered dangerously close to Reg’s head. The lanky engineer flinched a little, but not much, and he returned the unfriendly gaze.

“He has no right to be here,” declared Bertoran, pointing at the human.

“He has every right to be here.” Melora pointed to the violet shard floating around Reg’s neck. “He’s the proxy for Zuka Juno.”

The gray-haired Elaysian looked abashed for a moment at this news, but he quickly recovered both his attitude and his sneer. “If that’s true, then it shows that my brother Zuka has made a mockery of his esteemed office and should be replaced.”

“I really d-don’t want to intrude,” said Barclay, gripping the shard for comfort, “but you people need to know what you’re up against. Zuka Juno said you would believe me . . . if I carried this jewel.”

Reg held up the shard, and it glinted briefly, which caused more commotion than his entire speech. The Elaysians waved their arms and conversed in urgent whispers, and the Lipuls bobbed with agitation inside their rose-hued crystals. Melora tried to call them to order, but it was hopeless.

She gave him an encouraging smile, but all Barclay could do was gulp. In front of him, Tangre Bertoran seethed with such anger that it looked as if he would break his hover-platform in half. Before he could denounce Reg, his constituents swooped forward, clamoring for his attention.

“You won’t keep that trinket,” Bertoran vowed under his breath. He gripped his disc and sped away from them.

“Now what?” asked the human worriedly.

“You’re the one with the crystal,” said Melora. “Use it.”

Reg knew he needed help, but then he remembered that the Elaysians didn’t run this show by themselves. Although few in number, the Lipuls seemed to possess considerable authority and influence. As Deanna had said, they were certainly the oldest of all the sentient races, and nobody wanted to upstage them.

He looked around and spotted a glimmer on the floor. By bending over and peering into the clumps of misshapen, smoky crystal, he was able to make out a small cluster of rainbow prisms. Reg remembered that this gemlike instrument had helped Captain Picard communicate with the Lipuls, so he gripped Melora’s hand and pointed down.

She nodded and whirled around to push off the roof of the entryway. Grabbing Reg as she soared past, she dragged him into the thicket of black spires, which shattered at their touch, sending up noxious clouds of dust. Reg would have coughed himself to death, but Pazlar kept them moving briskly through the new growth. Finally they reached the rainbow cluster, which glittered like a treasure at the bottom of a sooty mine.

With Melora’s help, Reg pulled off the lanyard and pressed the violet crystal into the center of the larger crystal, as he had seen the others do on his earlier visit. Melora pushed off the floor to elevate the two of them above the clouds of soot, and they watched while the aged cluster cycled through a vibrant display of colors.

After a moment, a strange, disembodied voice spoke loudly enough for all to hear: “Barclay is recognized as a proxy. Afford him all regard and esteem you would afford a senior engineer.”

“Bah!” scoffed Tangre Bertoran from the back of the hall. Several other Elaysians murmured their disapproval, but no one jumped up to openly challenge him.

Melora urged Reg, “Go ahead and tell them.”

Reg’s mouth suddenly felt as dry as the brittle, black crystal beneath him, and he wished he had drunk more from his sip tube. He blurted out, “The fractal program on the shell is corrupted. It’s in an endless loop, sucking dark matter from the rift. It’s spewing it as fast as your collectors can grab it. We can’t stop it—not even Zuka Juno—because the code has been encrypted. To be blunt, one of your senior engineers has sabotaged the shell.”

Now the murmurs grew to shrill squawks and cries. Accusations rent the air, and the Elaysians fluttered around like a flock of starlings scattered by a loud noise. “You have to be wrong!” shouted Tangre Bertoran, shaking his fist. “Or mad!”

Melora dashed in front of Reg and shouted, “I didn’t believe it either! Neither did brother Juno. But when we entered the programming room, opened the files, and saw with our own eyes, we had to admit the truth. Now you will have to open your eyes and see that one of us is a traitor. Not all of us, just one. Unless we find that being, he or she may succeed in destroying Gemworld.”

From the corner of his eye, Barclay saw Tangre Bertoran descending quickly toward the glowing cluster on the floor. He tugged on Melora’s shoulder and pointed. “He’s after the crystal.”

Using Reg as a springboard and pushing him ten meters higher, Melora went soaring back toward the cluster. Although Bertoran was moving faster than her on his hover-platform, Melora had the shorter distance to travel, and she reached the cluster a second before him. Deftly the blond Elaysian snatched the violet shard from its socket and held it up for all to see.

Then she waved the shard in Bertoran’s face and crowed, “You’re too late to get this one! Is that how you got to be proxy for the Gendlii?”

“Enough of these games!” shouted Tangre Bertoran. He gripped his own gleaming green crystal, which floated from a golden cord about his neck. “I will return to the shell, using my own proxy, and inspect the programming. If what these outsiders say is a lie—and I’m sure it is—we will charge them with blasphemy and heresy!”

That pronouncement was met with considerable agreement, and the clamor grew deafening for a few seconds. Melora floated to Reg’s side and hung the violet gem around his neck. He wasn’t going to say anything else, but resentment walled up within him. We risked our own lives to save these fools!

On top of that, he was getting very queasy. All of this put Reg in a mood to speak his mind.

He shouted, “This time, you won’t survive! The Ancients would be ashamed of you. No . . . you can’t be descended from the beings who built the shell!”

That insult got their attention, and several of the Elaysians stopped to glare at him.

“This is not how your ancestors survived,” he told them, “by ignoring a problem. No, they . . . they survived because they faced every problem that confronted them—from the receding of the oceans to the loss of their atmosphere. The inhabitants of Gemworld have gotten soft. You prefer to bicker and fix blame instead of finding a solution. I’m sorry . . . that’s not how the Ancients would have faced this.”

When Reg caught Melora beaming at him, he knew he was on a roll. He puffed his chest out and continued, “Actually our first guess about this crisis was wrong. We thought the shell might have malfunctioned, but it turned out to be the oldest problem in the book. On earth we used to call it ‘human error,’ and you can use that term, although this act was not done in error. It was done on purpose. You’ll claim that it can’t happen, that I’m insane, or whatever . . . I’ve heard that all before. The question is—will you act like your ancestors? Will you do what it takes to survive? Or would you prefer to hide in this room and bicker . . . until you die?”

No one talked against him now, and no one mocked him, not even Tangre Bertoran. Melora moved to Reg’s side and squeezed his arm. “What was good,” she whispered. “When you invoked the Ancients, you hit them where it hurts. Now what do we do?”

Barclay’s stomach churned. Without gravity to hold the bile down, he felt it coming up. “I’ve got a big finish,” he said with a groan.

A look of realization dawned on Melora’s face, and she jerked away from him just as he vomited. Retching in a weightless environment was far worse than retching in gravity, Reg decided. For one thing, there was no obvious direction.

Doubled over in pain and embarrassment, he let Melora drag him backward out of the hall of the Exalted Ones.