Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [104]
The rokhelh probed tentatively at the intruding lines of code, gently insinuating its binary feelers below the Other’s surface. More code lay beneath, and more still below that, a seemingly infinite regress of expanding fractal complexity. The rokhelh saw at once that the interloper was a sentient artificial intelligence-a complex, constructed entity like itself.
But unlike the rokhelh, this Other was crafted by alien, non-Romulan minds.
With a thought, the rokhelh raised the alarm, even as it sought to do to the Other what the Other had just tried to do to the Apparatus-to neutralize it by probing its manifold cybernetic pathways with a billion fractally-expanding tendrils.
A millisecond later, the rokhelh’s consciousness was deeply embedded within the Other’s innumerable circuitry pathways.
Data sat silently in his seat, his body rigid.
“Data?” Picard said, swiveling in the cockpit to face the android. The last word he had heard the android utter had sounded like an uncharacteristic “Uh-oh.”
Hawk took over the conn as Picard disengaged from the cockpit and made his way over to Data. Kneeling, the captain was met with a glassy stare. “Data? Mr. Data, report.”
He snapped his fingers before his friend’s dead, artificial eyes. Nothing.
Picard stood and turned back toward the cockpit. Hawk regarded him uneasily.
“Captain, shouldn’t the singularity have started slipping back into subspace by now?”
Picard nodded. “Yes. If Commander Data succeeded in transmitting the abort command into the singularity’s containment protocols.”
But on the forward viewer, Picard could see that the inferno at the singularity’s heart continued to blaze just as brightly as ever.
Merde, Picard thought, his heart sinking.
Data felt disembodied, a ghost floating in cybernetic freefall. And he noticed the disconcertingly near presence of something. It was asking him questions, but he was having difficulty parsing them. Then this Presence was suddenly all around him, engulfing him, holding him immobile. A moment later, it began probing at his thoughts-from the inside.
Fear emanated reflexively from Data’s emotion chip, coursing through his consciousness as he realized that another entity-an artificial intellect not altogether unlike his own-was attempting to seize control of him. He was being overridden, hijacked as he once had been by the multiple personalities stored in the D’Arsay archive. With a tremendous effort of will, he shut his emotion chip down. This maneuver did nothing to halt the advance of the Presence as it invaded his positronic systems, nor did it allow him to assess the damage the alien entity might be causing to his hardwired subroutines. But with the emotion chip inactive, he had at least exchanged fear for clarity.
Data clung tenaciously to that clarity, aware that without it he and his shipmates might never make it back to the Enterprise.
While the rokhelh devoted much of its digital substance to probing and testing the Other’s vulnerabilities, it traced the interloper’s origination point to a subspace carrier-band being directed toward one of the Apparatus’s most peripheral exterior nodes. Backtracing the signal turned out to be a very simple matter, requiring only patience.
This was where most of the Other’s resources actually lay; not within the diaphanous binary circulatory system of the Apparatus itself, but aboard a nearby cloaked vessel. Lashed to a positronic physical substrate of cortenide and duranium.
The rokhelh traced the Other’s linear datastream back through the cloaked ship’s computer and into the Other’s own small but highly organized internal positronic computational network. After pushing the Other back to its origin point-the location from which it had invaded the sanctity