Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [82]
“I quite agree,” Picard said with determination. “This has all gone on long enough. One way or another, we’re going to find out what’s behind that cloak.”
Chapter Twelve
His eyes closed tightly, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge sagged heavily against the side of the turbolift. “Bridge,” he heard Data say.
Geordi opened his eyes as the car began moving. The android was staring at him, concern evident in his golden eyes. Eyes as artificial as mine, La Forge thought. It struck him as ironic that he could observe his friend’s efforts to become human only by means of a synthetic sensory apparatus. At first glance, the engineer’s ocular implants appeared to be perfectly ordinary, natural human eyes-until a close inspection revealed the intricate filigree of hair-thin circuit-patterns etched into their metallic-blue irises.
“Are you all right, Geordi?”
La Forge smiled weakly. “Never better, Data.”
“I have noticed that, among humans, even the closest of friends will, on occasion, deliberately prevaricate to one another,” Data said evenly. “I believe that your response constitutes what Commander Riker would almost certainly describe as a ‘whopper.’”
La Forge nodded, sighed wearily, and massaged his temples. His head felt as though it were being squeezed in a colossal vise. According to Dr. Crusher, his headaches would cease once his nervous system had had a little more time to adjust to its new sensory inputs.
“Guilty, as charged, Data,” La Forge said.
For most of the past two days, he and Data had worked alongside engineers Kehvan and Waltere Zydhek-the hulking brothers from Balduk-poring over the countless gigaquads of data contained in the captured Romulan scoutship’s computer core, seeking two critical command pathways. The first was the electronic portal into whatever Romulan security systems might lay behind the cloaking field; the second was the precise cloaking-harmonic frequency needed to get a ship inside that field undetected.
He noticed that Data was still staring at him. “Did Dr. Crusher not caution you that sleep-deprivation might aggravate the temporary neurological discomfort your new sensory inputs are causing?”
Geordi nodded. “She did, Data. And if she asks me about it, I’ll promise to sleep for an entire month. After we finish our job here.”
As the turbolift sped forward and upward toward the bridge, Geordi considered the ramifications of the problems he and Data had just spent nearly thirty-six continuous hours trying to solve. Tracking down the correct lines of Romulan code among the quadrillions of irrelevant commands had been no simple undertaking, Data’s prodigious computational power notwithstanding. The solution had remained stubbornly elusive for the first day, despite the endless specialized recursive “search” programs he and Data had devised for the purpose.
Geordi’s first hurdle had been overcoming his astonishment over the tremendous storage capacity of the Romulan scoutship’s computer core, and the extraordinarily complex information that filled it to overflowing. Such inelegant, convoluted programming techniques made no sense from an engineering perspective, and he had said as much to Cortin Zweller during the commander’s brief visit to the shuttlebay.
Maybe you should stop thinking like an engineer, Zweller had said, chuckling as though La Forge’s comment had been unbelievably naive. Instead, why not try looking at it from the perspective of a Romulan Tal Shiar operative?
The very mention of the Tal Shiar made Geordi’s skin crawl. He remembered only too vividly how Romulan agents had manipulated him six years before, nearly turning him into an assassin.
But Zweller’s remark had also given Geordi renewed hope that somewhere in the Romulan vessel’s electronic labyrinth lay a definitive-if subtly hidden-solution to his problem. And sure enough, a few hours after he had put aside his engineer’s