Gauntlet - Michael Jan Friedman [67]
“Are we ready?” he asked.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” said Ben Zoma, who was standing in his usual place beside the captain.
“And Lieutenant Valderrama?”
“On her way.”
Picard had deemed it fitting that Valderrama join them on the bridge at this juncture, as it was her brainchild that had set this effort in motion.
Just as he thought that, the turbolift doors hissed open behind him. Looking back over his shoulder, the captain could see Valderrama come out onto the bridge. She was smiling, albeit a bit nervously.
“Welcome,” Picard told her.
She nodded as she took up a position beside him, on the opposite side from Ben Zoma. “Thank you, sir.”
The captain glanced at Gerda. “Launch probe, Lieutenant.”
The navigator ran her fingers over her controls. Then she turned to him and said, “Probe away, sir.”
On the viewscreen, Picard could see the probe shoot through the nest of misty, wine-colored gases. It didn’t take long before it was gone—or at least, seemed to be gone, at this level of magnification.
He turned to Lieutenant Valderrama. The science officer looked tense, hopeful, and perhaps more than a little proud of herself. But then, she deserved to feel that way after she had given them their best chance to locate their prey.
Valderrama’s idea had been a wonderfully simple one. The plasma soup surrounding the star made it impossible to get any more useful information out of the ship’s active sensor systems.
Sensor systems consisted of proton spectrometers, gravimetric distortion scanners, and gamma ray imagers. What Picard needed—and what Valderrama had prescribed—was a sensor technology that predated the Stargazer by hundreds of years.
A technology called radar.
Radar was just a matter of bouncing ultrahigh-frequency radio waves off a distant object. And as Valderrama had so astutely pointed out, certain frequencies of radio waves could make it through almost anything, including the veils of hydrogen gas that surrounded the star in this system.
It was with this in mind that Simenon’s people had spent the last day or so working on the navigational deflector and lateral sensor arrays, rerigging them so that the former could emit radio waves, which the latter could then receive and analyze.
And to enhance their prospects of success, the Gnalish had added a touch of his own. He had outfitted the probe they had just launched with radar capabilities as well.
Programmed to follow a course parallel to the Stargazer’s, the probe would give them additional input from a remote source and, as a result, substantially better odds of finding what they were looking for. Nor was it likely to tip off the White Wolf with its presence, since it was flying parallel to the Stargazer and not ahead of her.
For now, however, the probe would serve a different purpose. Its communication facilities temporarily deactivated, it would present Valderrama’s idea with its first test.
“Activate radar assembly,” Picard said.
“Activated,” Gerda told him.
He looked forward again. “On screen.”
Instantly, the image of the plasma sea gave way to a rigid green-on-black grid—the same one Gerda saw every day on her navigational console. Unfortunately, there was nothing remarkable to be seen on the grid. In fact, there was nothing at all.
Radar, Picard knew, was ploddingly slow compared to the other sensor technologies at their disposal—technologies which had, for all their quickness, proved useless here.
This might take a while, Picard told himself. Not that he minded. What they were doing here was important. No, he thought—critical.
Then he saw it—a bright red dot in the upper left quadrant of the grid. It flashed at the captain triumphantly, bringing a smile to his face. Nor was his smile the only one.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the White Wolf. It was just the probe. But if they could find a probe, Valderrama had reasoned, finding the pirate would be just a matter