Intellivore - Diane Duane [11]
“Let’s do it then,” Picard said. “Captain?”
“Our preparation for continuous-stream link are just about complete,” Clif said. “We may as well finish the tests on the system now, and see how well it actually works.”
He nodded to his science officer, grinned a little at Picard. “We’ll be in touch.”
The screen flickered. Another voice said, “Hey, Jean-Luc, the game’s afoot!”
“So I see, Ileen,” he said. “Oraidhe will be activating data stream momentarily. Are you ready to link in?”
“Are we ready?” she said, sounding amused and annoyed. “For two weeks now. What else do you think we did while we were waiting for you two to show up? Come on, time’s a-wasting.”
“Ready for data-stream link,” Mr. Worf said. “Set for terabaud bandwidth during evaluation.”
“Initiate.”
Nothing happened, but then Picard didn’t expect anything to, at least not for a while. Not for a long while.
On and off for the next three days, Picard watched Data sifting information about decay traces through his computers, like someone slowly, patiently panning for gold, hunting that one flake, one grain, that will tell him whether he’s wasting his time. Almost every time the captain came on the bridge, he found Data talking to either Tamastara on Oraidhe or Ileen’s enthusiastic science officer Pickup on Marignano. But after a while, Tamastara’s even calm appeared to be acquiring an edge to it, while Pickup’s enthusiasm seemed to be getting some of its edges worn off.
Though Picard understood the need for slow, careful research as well as anyone else, this kind of work he found as wearing to watch as it must be for the people working on it; so he stayed out of the way, and busied himself with the hundred other things that required daily attention on a ship the Enterprise’s size.
On the fourth day of this, though, when Picard came onto the bridge for a look around, preparatory to going off shift, Data looked up at him. The front viewscreen was split between views of Marignano’s science station and Oraidhe’s, and the two other science officers were there, looking worn-out but very pleased. “Captain,” Data said, “I believe we have a result.”
He glanced at the other two science officers; both of them shook their heads. “Mr. Data did most of it,” Tamastara said mildly.
Picard nodded. “Mr. Data?”
“Captain, we have a very faint trace leading off in the direction of chi Scorpii. A slight predominance of rho-mesons in the space in that direction over the past several hours. It appears to be getting stronger.”
“How close is our quarry, then?”
“The vessel responsible for these decays is no closer than five light-years and no farther than fifty,” Data said. “I cannot provide a closer reading until we have followed this trail long enough to better judge the speed at which the trace becomes more concentrated. I would estimate, however, that the ship that left it is not one ship, but several moving in company.”
“And we’re all agreed,” Tamastara said, “that the ship leaving the telltale is one of Federation or Fed-allied make and build, one of the Ilenya types, mark eight to twelve.”
“We’d better go after that trail, then,” said Picard.
Over the next day, the concentration and energy spent by the crew involved in the chase gave Picard a whole new set of referents for the word tension. Data never left his post, and his concentration mostly reminded Picard of a holodeck Holmes, hot on the trail of one of Moriarty’s more nefarious schemes. From the main screen, at any given moment, when Picard looked out of the ready room, he might find Tamastara or Pickup looking over at Data as they worked together, both wearing the same kind of rapt and hungry look as hunters after some quarry. Picard had to force himself to stay off of the bridge.
There was a flurry of excitement that brought him in, late in the afternoon: the sudden discovery, not only of an increased number of particles in the local space, but of scrap—metal and plastic fragments, and plasma residues which indicated