Picard rose from behind his desk and walked over to the viewport. The darkness outside was punctuated by thousands of distant pinpoints of light.
For a long moment, he silently contemplated the loss of three wide, nominally empty sectors of space to the Romulans. He found the notion unacceptable. He suddenly couldn’t stomach the thought of losing anythingto such Machiavellian schemers.
“I quite agree,” Picard said with determination. “This has all gone on long enough. One way or another, we’re going to find out what’s behind that cloak.”
Chapter Twelve
His eyes closed tightly, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge sagged heavily against the side of the turbolift. “Bridge,” he heard Data say.
Geordi opened his eyes as the car began moving. The android was staring at him, concern evident in his golden eyes. Eyes as artificial as mine,La Forge thought. It struck him as ironic that he could observe his friend’s efforts to become human only by means of a synthetic sensory apparatus. At first glance, the engineer’s ocular implants appeared to be perfectly ordinary, natural human eyes–until a close inspection revealed the intricate filigree of hair‑thin circuit‑patterns etched into their metallic‑blue irises.
“Are you all right, Geordi?”
La Forge smiled weakly. “Never better, Data.”
“I have noticed that, among humans, even the closest of friends will, on occasion, deliberately prevaricate to one another,” Data said evenly. “I believe that your response constitutes what Commander Riker would almost certainly describe as a ‘whopper.’ ”
La Forge nodded, sighed wearily, and massaged his temples. His head felt as though it were being squeezed in a colossal vise. According to Dr. Crusher, his headaches would cease once his nervous system had had a little more time to adjust to its new sensory inputs.
“Guilty, as charged, Data,” La Forge said.
For most of the past two days, he and Data had worked alongside engineers Kehvan and Waltere Zydhek–the hulking brothers from Balduk–poring over the countless gigaquads of data contained in the captured Romulan scoutship’s computer core, seeking two critical command pathways. The first was the electronic portal into whatever Romulan security systems might lay behind the cloaking field; the second was the precise cloaking‑harmonic frequency needed to get a ship insidethat field undetected.
He noticed that Data was still staring at him. “Did Dr. Crusher not caution you that sleep‑deprivation might aggravate the temporary neurological discomfort your new sensory inputs are causing?”
Geordi nodded. “She did, Data. And if she asks me about it, I’ll promise to sleep for an entire month. Afterwe finish our job here.”
As the turbolift sped forward and upward toward the bridge, Geordi considered the ramifications of the problems he and Data had just spent nearly thirty‑six continuous hours trying to solve. Tracking down the correct lines of Romulan code among the quadrillions of irrelevant commands had been no simple undertaking, Data’s prodigious computational power notwithstanding. The solution had remained stubbornly elusive for the first day, despite the endless specialized recursive “search” programs he and Data had devised for the purpose.
Geordi’s first hurdle had been overcoming his astonishment over the tremendous storage capacity of the Romulan scoutship’s computer core, and the extraordinarily complex information that filled it to overflowing. Such inelegant, convoluted programming techniques made no sense from an engineering perspective, and he had said as much to Cortin Zweller during the commander’s brief visit to the shuttlebay.
Maybe you should stop thinking like an engineer,Zweller had said, chuckling as though La Forge’s comment had been unbelievably naive. Instead, why not try looking at it from the perspective of a Romulan Tal Shiar operative?
The very mention of the Tal Shiar made Geordi’s skin crawl. He remembered only too vividly how Romulan agents had manipulated him six years before, nearly turning him into an assassin.
But Zweller’s remark had also given Geordi renewed hope that somewhere in the Romulan vessel’s electronic labyrinth lay a definitive–if subtly hidden–solution to his problem. And sure enough, a few hours after he had put aside his engineer’s tendency to seek out the shortest, simplest solutions, the relevant pieces of code had revealed themselves.
Geordi didn’t notice that the turbolift had halted until its doors opened, interrupting his reverie. He and Data strode out onto the bridge, where the members of alphawatch were at their customary places. Commander Zweller and Admiral Batanides stood in the center of the bridge, their eyes upon the forward viewscreen, which displayed a featureless region of space.
Their attentiveness told La Forge that there must be a great deal more on the screen than met the eye. “What exactly are we looking at?” he asked aloud.
“The sensors have picked up several small subspace ‘hiccups’ over the past few hours,” Riker said. “And every one of these distortions has been localized within that region.”
“Behind the cloaking field,” Zweller added.
Picard regarded La Forge and Data. “Were you able to learn anything new from our first probe’s scans?”
“No, sir,” La Forge said. “Whatever’s at the center of that effect is still invisible. But I believe I can get a second probe across the barrier intact, and bring in some clear images.”
“Make it so,” Picard said, nodding. La Forge and Data immediately busied themselves at the engineering consoles. Data loaded the correct cloaking‑harmonic information into the probe’s isolinear memory buffers while Geordi initiated the device’s remote launching system.
The admiral shook her head, looking defeated. “I’ve really got to wonder how anything we might discover could possibly affect the Romulan takeover of the Geminus Gulf this late in the game.”
“We should have an answer for you momentarily, Admiral,” Data said. “The probe is away.”
“Let’s just hope that the Romulans haven’t changed their cloaking‑field frequencies,” Zweller said.
La Forge’s breath caught in his throat. The notion that all of his hard work might have been for naught was simply too much to contemplate right now.
“I do not believe that will be a problem,” Data told Zweller. “The cloaked area is no doubt maintained by thousands, perhaps hundredsof thousands, of field generators. Adjusting the harmonics of the entire field would require making very precise changes to each component with utterly perfect synchronization. It is highly unlikely that the Romulans could accomplish this without momentarily lowering the cloaking field. So far, we have seen no evidence of this.”
La Forge started breathing again. Thank you, Data. I needed that.
Everyone’s eyes were riveted to the screen’s tactical display as the probe rapidly approached the cloaking field’s invisible perimeter–
–and then vanished into its imperceptible interior.
La Forge felt moistness on the back of his neck. Had this probe been silenced as easily as the last one? The moment of truth had arrived at last. “Any probe signals, Data?” he said.
“Negative,” the android replied.
Damn! The harmonics must have been wrong after all–
“Correction,” said Data. “I am now receiving narrowband subspace telemetry. I do not believe the Romulans will be able to intercept it.”
The engineer grinned broadly. Bingo!
“Put it on the screen,” Picard said.
Lieutenant Hawk’s fingers flew across his console in response. The image on the viewer abruptly changed, and La Forge heard sharp intakes of breath coming from points all over the bridge. A small, six‑sided metallic shape with a hole through its center hung in the void, occupying the precise center of a spherically arranged network of even smaller orbiting platforms. Surrounding this was a second–and far larger–conglomeration of tiny pods of gleaming metal, an outer sphere composed of thousands of individual components, each separated from the next by several kilometers of empty space. Geordi had no doubt that this outermost layer made up the network of cloaking‑field generators, which had kept this gigantic assemblage hidden until now.