Tooth and Claw - Doranna Durgin [14]
of interlocking shielding with fluctuating frequencies, meant to foil any poacher, no matter how sophisticated.
La Forge wasn’t sure but that it would foil him.
He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. Just to make things interesting, the Fandreans admitted that for the past several days, they’d been experiencing unpredictable surges in the technology damper; they thought it was interacting with the shields, but weren’t sure how. They wondered if La Forge might possibly take a look at that little problem, while he was at it. “Sure,” La Forge muttered to himself, looking out at the opaque force field dome arcing up and away from the edge of the staging area. “Why not?”
“Did you say something, Lieutenant Commander La Forge?” His Fandrean liaison, Yenan—La Forge had the feeling he was of middling rank, but the Fandreans didn’t seem to go for tides—pulled himself out of the shield booth. Like most of the Fandreans, he came only to La Forge’s chest, but given the muscle on that stout form—and Yenan was stouter than most—La Forge wouldn’t want to get into a wrestling match with him. He’d stick to wrestling with the shields.
“Just talking to myself,” La Forge said. “And call me Geordi.”
“Geordi.” The Fandrean … well, La Forge supposed that was a smile; he drew his mobile upper lip down to completely cover his normally exposed teeth. And whether it was meant to be a smile or not, a smile was certainly the reaction it invoked in La Forge.
“So you’re telling me,” La Forge said, picking up on the conversation they’d been having before Yenan ducked into the booth, “that out in the shield perimeter somewhere, there’s a device that will generate a fixed dimensional portal within your shields.”
The Fandrean nodded. “It nullifies the shields, in effect. Only because for that moment, we assign a stable frequency to the shields—which we change every time, so none of the poachers take advantage of that moment.” Yenan had an under-purr with a less gravelly tone, and it made him much easier to understand than Akarr—a fact for which La Forge had been instantly thankful. “But the procedure uses an enormous amount of power, and we can only trigger it a few times before we must recharge the system.” He gave La Forge a flutter-fingered gesture chagrin? A shrug? “You can see why we have such need of communications. We cannot see through the shielding to know when someone needs to come out; we can only arrange intervals at which we open the portal. This often leaves our Legacy specialists out in the field much longer than we’d like them exposed.”
“Yeah, I can see that would be a problem,” La Forge said. He scanned the shield along the perimeter line, looking for variations in the neat energy patterns his VISOR showed him. “There,” he said, pointing. “Is that the portal?”
“That is where it will be,” Yenan said, surprised. He gave La Forge a curious look, and then smiled again. “That is an impressive device. If we have time, you will have to tell me more about its function.”
“If we have the time,” La Forge said, not expecting to have any such thing. Right now, he wished Akarr would get a move on. He couldn’t start work until after the portal had been invoked and closed again, and he needed There finally. Akarr came strutting out of the museum. Unlike several hours earlier, this was a private moment, and one without excessive data recorders. La Forge saw only one, wielded by one of the museum officials. Riker walked just behind him, and the personal
escort followed them, in formation. But once they reached the shuttle, the escort broke formation and entered first to see that all was to their satisfaction. Riker angled over to La Forge. After a hesitation, Akarr followed him.
“Any progress?” Riker asked La Forge, nodding a greeting to Yenan.
“We’re ready to get started, as soon as you’re under way,” La Forge said. “This is a pretty severe shielding arrangement—it