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“Report, Lieutenant,” Picard called, snapping Sito out of her reverie.

“There are now some hundred Romulan android troopers in the city, Captain,” Sito said, turning from the miniature gateway. “There appear to have been isolated conflicts between the Turing populace and the troopers, but the anti-positronic disruptors have given the Romulans the upper hand.”

“And no sign of Commander Isaac or Data?”

Sito shook her head sadly, her lips pressed together.

“Damn,” Picard said under his breath. “Keep at it, Lieutenant.”

The other end of the gateway had been reoriented, providing a different vantage of the streets below. Sito’s idea about using small openings for observation was working even better than she’d expected, the tiny gateways all but invisible a hundred or so meters up in the air, pointing downward to give an unobstructed view of the city. Unfortunately, though, their goal of locating their missing crewman, and the two androids he’d been with when the Romulans had opened fire, had so far been frustratingly unrealized.

Lal was standing a few meters away at another tiny gateway, employing a similar strategy. “Close gateway and reinitiate with same dimensions three meters overhead in common room three, one centimeter from south-facing wall,” she called to the android at the controls.

“Acknowledged,” the operator responded.

While Sito was getting a bird’s-eye view, Lal was attempting something more like a fly on the wall, checking each of the rooms in the city in turn, one after another. But she appeared to be having no more luck than was Sito.

“Captain,” Lal called over to Picard as the gateway cycled closed and open. “Should this search prove fruitless, there is another alternative. If the subspace communications network could be reestablished, we could triangulate the position of my father and the others.”

Picard was thoughtful. “Even if they’re no longer on the planet’s surface?”

Lal cocked her head to one side. “Is it your opinion that they may have been transported to another location?”

Picard nodded. “It would be in line with Romulan operating procedures to relocate key prisoners to their ship in orbit.” He frowned. “I don’t see how they would have been able to communicate through the subspace interference any better than we can, though.”

Sito had a thought. “Captain? If I were the Romulans, I’d have kept a particular subspace band clear, while blocking all the others. That way they can continue to send and receive while everyone else eats static.”

“Mmm.” Picard rubbed his lower lip with his index finger. “Is it possible to locate that channel and use it for our own purposes?”

Sito shook her head. “We might be able to find it, but if the Romulans are smart…”

“Which we can assume that they are,” Picard put in. “The idea of an 'unintelligent Romulan’ is almost an oxymoron.”

“Right,” Sito answered. “Well, that being the case, they’d likely be cycling the clear channel at regular brief intervals. Their communicators would all be set to switch to the new channel at the same time. Even if we could find the clear channel, it would probably drop back to interference again almost immediately. Maybe even a matter of nanoseconds, and almost certainly too short a time to triangulate their position. And unless we knew the cycling sequence-which we probably couldn’t guess in a million years-we’d be right back where we started.”

“Understood, Lieutenant,” Picard said.

“Captain?” La Forge called from the control console.

“What is it, Number One?”

“You might want to take a look at this, sir.” He motioned to the tricorder in Crusher’s hands.

The captain moved over to join them.

“I think,” Crusher said, with some reluctance, “that we may have just worked out the science behind the gateways.”

Picard arched an eyebrow.

“We still need to check a few things,” Crusher hastened to add, “but if my theory is correct, we should be able to reverse-engineer the entire gateway network. With a little time, we might even work out a way to create a new gateway mechanism from scratch.”

A faint smile shadowed Picard