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La Forge wasn’t sure what he’d expected. An apology? A hug? All he’d gotten was the same cryptic, familiar, maddening Data that he’d come to love all those years ago. La Forge had grown up with a sister, but he’d always wanted a brother, someone to share his interests in machines and model ships and chess. And if Data had never quite shared his love of model shipbuilding, and could beat him ninety-nine times out of a hundred at chess, he was still a better friend to La Forge than anyone had ever been before, and the closest thing to a brother he’d ever had. So when he’d left without warning, Data’s disappearance hadn’t just been a mystery. Consciously or not, La Forge had always seen it as a betrayal.

Now, after being reunited, however briefly, it had looked for a time as if Data might actually be lost for good, fallen into the clutches of the Romulans. Was that why La Forge had allowed himself to become so obsessed with the gateway controls? Was it an unconscious mechanism to distract himself from the thought of losing his friend all over again?

Crusher’s interest wasn’t unconscious, La Forge knew. He was obsessed, but then Wesley always was, when faced with a riddle that science had not yet solved. But La Forge was more interested in tinkering with machines, and was that really more important to him than the attempt to rescue Data and the others? Hardly.

“I have the coordinates for the gateway,” Lal said to the hairless android at the controls.

“Excuse me,” La Forge said, stepping forward and laying a hand on the android’s shoulder. “Do you mind if I give it a spin?”

The android regarded him without emotion and shook his head. “Be my guest, Commander,” he said without affect.

La Forge cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist warming up. He might not have been able to wring a tune from a mandolin, but machines? Machines he could play.

Wesley Crusher kept a careful watch on the tricorder’s display while La Forge cycled power to initiate the gateway to the Haakona. It was going to be somewhat tight, since the warbird was still in flight, still exchanging fire with the Enterprise. But he had worked out that the gateways were designed to compensate for relative movements anyway, or else they wouldn’t be able to instantiate on planets orbiting other suns. It was all a question of calculating the appropriate vectors when initiating the process.

There was a kind of hum at the back of Crusher’s head, almost like music, that he’d felt only a few times before. It was as if he was hearing the music of the spheres, as the ancient philosophers used to call it, eavesdropping on the sound of creation itself. It was a sensation he got only when he felt like he was just about to grasp something huge and complex, like when he hit on an entirely novel way to reconfigure the Enterprise’s warp field, or when puzzling out some piece of truly alien technology for the first time. And there was no technology more alien than that of the Iconians, Crusher was sure of that now.

It was somewhat surprising that a planet full of genius-level androids hadn’t been able to solve the mystery of the gateways. But then Crusher had always found that he had a knack of looking at things from oblique angles and coming up with solutions that others had overlooked. His mother used to suggest that maybe Starfleet wasn’t the place for him, and that his destiny lay somewhere else, somewhere that lateral thinking like his was more of an asset. For all that starship captains liked to have their engine efficiencies improved, and didn’t object to their chief engineers tinkering with warp field geometries, at the end of the day what they really wanted was for their ships to go fast when needed, the weapons and shields to work when called for, and for gravity, lights, and heat to remain operational. Main engineering wasn’t really a place that invited a lot of lateral thinking and oblique strategies.

Did that suggest that Soong-type androids, designed as they were to think in particular ways, geniuses