The Peacekeepers (Book #2)

by Gene Deweese

The Enterprise stumbles across a strange derelict satellite and an away team beam across to investigate. But on arrival, they trigger an automatic destruct device and the Enterprise manage to beam back the away team and transfer the bomb into open space, avoiding disaster. The away team beam back again, intent on exploring the satellite further only to this time, trigger its shields, only this time only Will and Worf return to the Enterprise. Geordi and Data are trapped on the ship, and lose contact. The Enterprise detect a dangerous level of radiation and fear for their crew mates lives. An away team try again to rescue Geordi and Data, but fail.
Meanwhile, The two lost crew mates discover a transport system within the satellite, but find it transports them to other similar satellites. Later they discover that the ships are guard posts when they find themselves in a room with a screen, a chair and a screen, the two men began to understand that the guards are orbiting in the space of six planets, operated by the residents are guarding themselves from their own countrymen.
The away team try once more to find Geordi and Data, but when again they are thwarted, only two manage to make it back to the Enterprise, leaving Riker and Yar behind, trapped.
Finally meeting the leader of one world - called the Peacekeepers, all is not as it it seems. Later when Data and Geordi are drugged and kidnapped, they understand why. The unknown brother of the leader, Shar-Tel, is very much alive and after meeting with his sibling, Shar-Lon, and revealing the traitor and warmonger in their midst, Kel-Nar, they plead for the Enterprise to destroy the guard ships - the Repositories; the places which hold 'the gifts' - the advanced technology like the transporters etc.
The Enterprise destroys the Repository but are then faced with the largest ship the Enterprise have ever seen. Kel-Nar's ship and the rest of his fleet. Captured and imprisoned on the huge ship, the brother, Shar-Lon, on his last few dying breaths, gives the command to destroy the entire fleet, freeing his world from its fifty years of tyranny.

Notable Imzadi moments:
Pages 136 to 139

For another minute, she continued to sit still, gripping the cushioned arms of her chair, her eyes looking at but not seeing the star patterns as they shifted in the viewer, and all she could see in her mind's eye was Riker as he stepped onto the transporter platform.
Angrily, she tried to force the image away. It was always difficult when Riker led an away team to an unknown world, into unknown dangers, but it had never been like this.
This was more than simple apprehension for his safety. This -
Abruptly, she stood up and strode to the forward turbolift. She had never been able to funnily understand or control the odd mixture of Betazoid mental powers and human intuition, but now and then they seemed to combine and virtually scream for her attention.
As, she had suddenly realized, they were screaming now.
The second in the turbolift seemed to stretch endlessly, and as the doors opened on the corridor only yards from the transporter room, she virtually leapt out, raced down the corridor and had to slow to give the transporter room door time to slide open to admit her.
Inside, she lurched to a complete stop, the urgency that still held her in its grip reaching a crescendo.
On the platform stood Yar and Riker. Both wore heavy-duty radiation suits and each carried, in addition to the standard away-team paraphernalia, a compact subspace radio transceiver and a not-so-compact phaser rifle. The helmets of their radiation suits were in place, only their eyes showing through the transparent slits. Riker was already raising his arm in a gesture to Ensign Carpelli at the controls.
But then he stopped and turned his head slightly to face Troi.
Through the narrow slit in his helmet, his eyes met hers, and he saw in them the urgency that had brought her racing here.
And she saw in his what she had seen there so many times before - that his duty to Starfleet and to his ship and its crew came above all else. That what he was doing now was carrying out his duty, nothing more.
As she had countless times before, she reached out to touch his mind with hers, even though she knew his human senses could not feel the full impact of that touch.
Imzadi, she whispered silently, though she knew there would be no response. Imzadi. Beloved.
But this time there was a response. Or was it, like the uneasiness and fear, merely an echo of her own thoughts?
Imzadi, it said, I will always be with you.
And even through the narrow slit of the radiation-suit helmet, she saw from his eyes that the words were real, that their minds were, in that moment, making a contact that they had never fully achieved before. Her own intensity, the urgency that had gripped her increasingly and had come to a jarring climax as she had entered the transporter room, had made it possible, however briefly.
And it terrified her all the more, this sudden, unprecedented touching of their minds.
There had to be a reason that it had, of all times, come now.
At this particular parting.
They had parted a hundred times before, under far more intimate circumstances, and it had not come.
But now, in the midst of a thousand distracting tensions, it had come.
But then the touch was gone, leaving only its memory.
And the terror its brief coming had inspired.
She could only watch, helpless, as Riker completed the gesture to Carpelli that he had begun immeasurable seconds before. A second later, he and Yar were gone, swallowed up by the energies of the transporter.

Pages 156 to 157

The chaos of swirling, impossible colors faded.
And as the world solidified around him, he heard a sound, and realized with a start that it was his own voice whispering a single word, over and over:
Imzadi, Imzadi, Imzadi...
But the lifeline, the link that had kept his mind from being scattered irretrievably during those endless moments before the subspace transporter energies had been gathered and reintegrated into the mental and physical whole that was William Riker - that lifeline was gone.

Pages 241 to 242

Suddenly, she fell silent, her lips and fingers as motionless as stone as she felt a faint breath of contact.
Only in her mind did she involuntarily form, the thought, Imzadi.
Somehow, despite the literally painful waves if emotion with which the Enterprise crew still bombarded her, she was positive that, for a brief moment, she had felt Will Riker's mind once again touch hers.
And, in that same instant, in a flash of insight, she realized why the contacts had been possible. She realized what the conditions were that had allowed that first contact and this new, even fainter one.
In the first contact, though the mind had been unmistakingly that of William Riker, there had been a difference, as if that mind were being seen through a distorting lens. And it had come only moments after he had been sent - somewhere - by the derelict's transporter, a transporter Chief Argyle had believed operated not through normal space but through subspace.
Riker's mind, in those moments, had itself been in subspace, where matter and energy were distorted in ways that could never be visualized, only described by the abstractions of mathematics, and where distances were meaningless in terms of normal space.
And now, during this second, vanishingly brief contact, she had once again sensed that same element of distortion.
He had once again been in subspace, she realized, and the distance between their minds had been virtually been abolished.
Abruptly, she stood up, turning toward the aft stations.
"Lieutenant Worf," she said, her normally soft contralto startlingly sharp and urgent, "scan for any subspace activity, and disturbance, anywhere your sensors can reach."
"Right away, Counselor," Worf responded without hesitation as he recognized the urgency in her tone. His fingers darted across the controls.
Picard, already on his feet, was watching Troi closely. "You felt something, Counselor," he said. A statement, not a question.
"Yes, but unless the sensors-"
"I have something, Counselor," Worf rumbled. "Bearing one-two-seven, mark five-eight."
"Lay in that heading, Mr. Gawelski, now!" Picard snapped. "Distance, Lieutenant Worf?"
"Almost beyond sensor range, sir. At least one-point-five parsecs."
"Take us there, Ensign Gawelski, maximum warp.. Lieutenant Brindle, try again to raise Commander Riker and Lieutenant Yar on their subspace transceivers."
And then, with the great ship under way toward this new destination, Picard turned to Troi.
"I assume, Counselor," he said with traces of the first smile to appear on the bridge since Riker and Yar had vanished, "that there is a good reason for your sudden interest in subspace activity?"
Returning the smile with an even fainter one, she nodded and began to explain.

Thank you Carol for putting this together =)