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“Agreed. And the longer we stay here, the greater the chance we’ll be detected. We’ll have to find another way to force the array into abort mode.”

At that moment, the viewscreen suddenly displayed the image of a huge Romulan warbird. As it decloaked before them, it blotted out the fires of the subspace singularity like a planet eclipsing its sun.

A deep, cool voice issued from the scout’s communications panel. “Scoutship Chula. This is Commander T’Veren of the warbird Gal Gath’thong. You will decloak immediately and explain your business here.”

Hawk sounded as though he were fighting to keep his voice calm. “Captain, if they know this ship by name, then they already know what our business is.”

“And who’s aboard this ship,” Picard said soberly. “Drop the cloak, Lieutenant. Then stall.”

“Stall, sir?”

“Send a ‘technical trouble’ signal. We need to buy ourselves some time.”

Hawk complied, glancing at the sensor readouts. “More bad news, sir. They’re powering up their disruptors. Should we withdraw?”

The captain brushed a palm across the thin sheen of sweat that had formed on his brow. “No, Mr. Hawk. We can’t outrun them. So we’ll have to… out-think them instead.”

Hawk nodded, saucer-eyed. Though Picard kept his expression impassive, he could hear his own pulse roaring in his ears.

Without Data’s help, thinking my way out of a Romulan target-lock isn’t going to be easy.

Data floated in a formless, sensory-deprived void. With his emotion chip deactivated, the fact that he and the Presence were becoming inextricably linked was no reason for panic-though it did give him cause for real concern. It was a development that Data could not allow to continue without a fight.

I cannot permit you to appropriate my body, Data told the Presence, his voice a gossamer construct of electromagnetic impulses, rather than sounds.

the Presence said, its words issuing from the nothingness surrounding Data.

Data considered the alien machine-entity’s words for nearly a millisecond. For the moment, he concluded that the Presence was correct. He was indeed helpless, at least so long as the artificial intelligence maintained control over many of his body’s higher functions. But Data also knew that he might succeed in bypassing or disabling some of those functions-at least for a short while-if he proceeded very carefully, camouflaging his efforts with the background maintenance subroutines that were always running.

A picosecond later, it was done. Rivers of heuristic neural information re-routed themselves into Data’s secondary and tertiary control nodes. He sensed immediately that the Presence was no longer controlling his limbs. But then, neither was he. He wondered how long it would take the Presence to regain the upper hand. At the rate the entity’s consciousness was expanding and entwining through him, it would surely not be long.

Perhaps I cannot stop you, Data admitted. But I can make an effort to understand you.

But Data had already begun to understand something important. The Presence had revealed that it believed itself capable of manipulating his positronic pathways. The Presence believed it could address the world through Data’s senses. It believed that it could run Data’s body as though it were its own.

That told Data that the Presence was comprised of code that was not significantly different from his own. And it further told Data that if he could find some subsystem in his android body that the Presence had yet to subvert, there might yet be a way to defeat the invader.

Tentatively, careful to steer clear of the Presence’s notice, Data probed at his own systems. Three-point-eight-six milliseconds later, he discovered a sliver of his own consciousness that the Presence had yet to wrest from him: a little-used backup diagnostic subroutine, a system designed for use