Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [83]
Geordi didn’t notice that the turbolift had halted until its doors opened, interrupting his reverie. He and Data strode out onto the bridge, where the members of alpha-watch were at their customary places. Commander Zweller and Admiral Batanides stood in the center of the bridge, their eyes upon the forward viewscreen, which displayed a featureless region of space.
Their attentiveness told La Forge that there must be a great deal more on the screen than met the eye. “What exactly are we looking at?” he asked aloud.
“The sensors have picked up several small subspace ‘hiccups’ over the past few hours,” Riker said. “And every one of these distortions has been localized within that region.”
“Behind the cloaking field,” Zweller added.
Picard regarded La Forge and Data. “Were you able to learn anything new from our first probe’s scans?”
“No, sir,” La Forge said. “Whatever’s at the center of that effect is still invisible. But I believe I can get a second probe across the barrier intact, and bring in some clear images.”
“Make it so,” Picard said, nodding. La Forge and Data immediately busied themselves at the engineering consoles. Data loaded the correct cloaking-harmonic information into the probe’s isolinear memory buffers while Geordi initiated the device’s remote launching system.
The admiral shook her head, looking defeated. “I’ve really got to wonder how anything we might discover could possibly affect the Romulan takeover of the Geminus Gulf this late in the game.”
“We should have an answer for you momentarily, Admiral,” Data said. “The probe is away.”
“Let’s just hope that the Romulans haven’t changed their cloaking-field frequencies,” Zweller said.
La Forge’s breath caught in his throat. The notion that all of his hard work might have been for naught was simply too much to contemplate right now.
“I do not believe that will be a problem,” Data told Zweller. “The cloaked area is no doubt maintained by thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of field generators. Adjusting the harmonics of the entire field would require making very precise changes to each component with utterly perfect synchronization. It is highly unlikely that the Romulans could accomplish this without momentarily lowering the cloaking field. So far, we have seen no evidence of this.”
La Forge started breathing again. Thank you, Data. I needed that.
Everyone’s eyes were riveted to the screen’s tactical display as the probe rapidly approached the cloaking field’s invisible perimeter-
-and then vanished into its imperceptible interior.
La Forge felt moistness on the back of his neck. Had this probe been silenced as easily as the last one? The moment of truth had arrived at last. “Any probe signals, Data?” he said.
“Negative,” the android replied.
Damn! The harmonics must have been wrong after all-
“Correction,” said Data. “I am now receiving narrow-band subspace telemetry. I do not believe the Romulans will be able to intercept it.”
The engineer grinned broadly. Bingo!
“Put it on the screen,” Picard said.
Lieutenant Hawk’s fingers flew across his console in response. The image on the viewer abruptly changed, and La Forge heard sharp intakes of breath coming from points all over the bridge. A small, six-sided metallic shape with a hole through its center hung in the void, occupying the precise center of a spherically arranged network of even smaller orbiting platforms. Surrounding this was a second-and far larger-conglomeration of tiny pods of gleaming metal, an outer sphere composed of thousands of individual components, each separated from the next by several kilometers of empty space. Geordi had no doubt that this outermost layer made up the network of cloaking-field generators, which had kept this gigantic assemblage hidden until now.
“I want a better look at the object at the center,” Picard said. “Maximum magnification, Mr. Hawk.”
The view changed again, and the artifact in question resolved itself into a complicated aggregation