“Must have been that vaunted ‘mastery of manipulation’ the counselor says I excel in,” Zweller said dismissively. Turning toward Picard, he said, “C’mon, Johnny, don’t tell me you’ve never charmed your way into an adversary’s good graces before turning the tables on him.”
Picard felt his own fund of patience beginning to run out. “Not by violating my oath as a Starfleet officer.”
“If I did bend a regulation or two,” Zweller said, “then you can rest assured that I did it in the service of a greater good.”
“You mean the Army of Light’s struggle against Ruardh’s government,” Batanides said.
“If you like,” replied Zweller quietly, nodding slightly.
Batanides scowled. “I thought you said Grelun was an adversary.”
“Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what that means, isn’t it?” Zweller said tartly. “You won’t find any angels on Chiaros IV, Marta. Everyone’s hands get bloody in a civil war.”
How ironic, Picard thought, that Chiarosan blood is gray.
He decided to try a placating tone. “Corey, please. You have to admit that you aren’t being very forthcoming. You still haven’t answered our primary question. For the sake of the friendship the three of us shared, I would have hoped that you’d—”
Zweller interrupted gently. “That’s exactly why I can’t tell you anything more, Johnny. If you keep probing into whatever I might or might not have done down there, you’re only going to put yourselves in harm’s way. Frankly, I’d prefer it if you didn’t do that.”
“Corey, that almost sounds like a threat,” Picard said, taken aback.
Zweller shook his head, then paused to gather his thoughts. “Could I speak absolutely candidly to both of you for a moment?” he said finally.
“That would be a nice change,” Batanides said. She was not smiling.
“All you have is the hearsay of two of your officers and the word of an obstreperous Tellarite doctor against mine. You’ve got no proof of anything—even with an empath in the room! So if you’re not prepared to arrest me and convene a general hearing, I respectfully suggest that you both let this matter lie.”
Picard watched as Batanides silently fumed. He realized that Zweller had outmaneuvered them. For now.
“All right, Corey,” Picard said at length. “I will put this matter aside. But only until Grelun or some of your colleagues from the Slayton can shed some more light onto it.”
“Thank you,” Zweller said, his emotions inaccessible.
“You are dismissed, Commander,” Batanides said icily.
Pained that his old friend would not reach out to him, Picard watched in silence as Zweller exited the ready room.
Feeling weary, Zweller entered the quarters Riker had issued him. Picard’s first officer had strongly suggested that he remain there pending the resolution of the political business on Chiaros IV. Noting that he didn’t actually seem to be under arrest, Zweller decided he was too tired to argue the point tonight. He’d take the matter up directly with Johnny in the morning.
Ensconced in his quarters, Zweller contacted La Forge to request information about the huge volume of space the Romulans were apparently concealing. Though the engineer had seemed a bit overworked and harried, he had promptly uploaded the relevant observational data into Zweller’s computer terminal. Though there was no conclusive information about what the Romulans were doing behind the vast invisibility screen they had constructed out in the Chiaros system’s far reaches, they were clearly using it to hide an artificial construct of some sort.
Zweller waded through the data late into the ship’s night, a worm of apprehension turning deep in his gut as he read. The Slayton’s crew had not detected the cloaking field before Zweller and his crewmates had taken the shuttlecraft Archimedes down to Chiaros IV.
If they had, Zweller thought as sleep finally began to take him, then Section 31 might never have struck its deal with Koval.
Picard was not surprised in the least to learn that Romulan Ambassador T’Alik wished to meet with him. What did surprise him was that the ambassador had waited an entire day to respond to his acquisition of the officially nonexistent Romulan scoutship.
It was shortly after 0800 when Batanides and Troi entered the ready room, where Picard was already seated behind his desk, sipping a cup of Earl Grey. Lieutenant Daniels signaled from the bridge that the Romulan delegation had been beamed aboard and was on its way.
Picard smiled over his teacup at the two women, who seated themselves on the ready-room couch.
“This should be good,” Picard said, smiling mischievously for a moment before restoring the impassive demeanor of interstellar diplomacy. Troi and Batanides did likewise.
Moments later, a pair of security guards escorted T’Alik and her assistant, V’Riln, into Picard’s ready room. Picard noted that V’Riln was the very same Romulan whose life he had saved during the armed contretemps in Hagraté. V’Riln nodded curtly to him, but there was no hint of gratitude in his eyes. You’re quite welcome, the captain thought wryly.
Picard did not rise from his chair, nor did he offer T’Alik or V’Riln a place to sit. He knew there was nothing to be gained by making them unnecessarily comfortable.
“Madame Ambassador,” Picard said simply.
“Captain,” the Romulan responded, unsmiling.
“Allow me to introduce Vice-Admiral Batanides of Starfleet Intelligence. And you have already met my ship’s counselor, Commander Troi.”
T’Alik bowed her head in courtly fashion. “Admiral. Counselor.”
V’Riln cast a sour glance at Troi. “I wish we had been advised of your intention to bring a Betazoid to this meeting, Captain. Perhaps we would have furnished a telepath of our own.”
“Surely that would be unnecessary, Mr. V’Riln,” Picard said, deliberately adopting the smile of a magnanimous host. “After all, what do either of us have to hide from each other?”
Troi’s expression told Picard that she could probably spend several hours answering that single question. Batanides, for her part, seemed content to let Picard do all the talking. She sat in silence, watching the Romulans closely.
“Please allow me to come to the heart of the reason for this visit,” T’Alik said.
“I would appreciate that, Ambassador,” Picard said. “We only have one day left before the planetary referendum, so time is fleeting. And I suppose you’ve read the polls.”
T’Alik almost smiled at that. “We are well-aware of the referendum’s likely outcome. And frankly, I have come to ask you to concede those results sooner rather than later. After all, no purpose can be served by waiting until the bitter end.”
“The writing, as you humans say, is on the wall,” V’Riln said.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Picard said, smiling. He hoped to throw them off-balance. “It might do my crew some good to leave this dreary region a day or so early.”
“That would be a great relief, Captain,” Troi said, falling in step.
Picard smiled at the counselor, well aware that the relief Troi had just registered was not her own; T’Alik was evidently both surprised and pleased to hear that the Enterprise might be leaving early.
Perhaps she sees that as a sign that we won’t embarrass her in front of the Chiarosans by unveiling the unauthorized ship we captured.
That was the moment when V’Riln floored him.
“The Tal Shiar has informed us that you still have the scoutship you used to escape from the Army of Light’s Nightside compound,” the Romulan assistant said in a matter-of-fact tone.
Picard did his best to hide his surprise. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
T’Alik did not appear fazed in the least by her assistant’s revelation. Picard supposed that their presentation had been well-rehearsed for maximum emotional impact.
“No, Captain,” the ambassador said with a faint smile. “I don’t suppose that you do. But I must tell you that I am delighted to hear yo
u say it.”
“I’m sure if we were to discover any unauthorized Romulan vessels on Chiaros IV,” Picard deadpanned, “it would greatly complicate your mission here.”
“Indeed it would,” T’Alik said.
Picard put on his most solicitous expression. “And it would probably place you, personally, in an extremely awkward position.”
“It would force the ambassador to protest the actions of her own government, Captain,” V’Riln said haughtily.
T’Alik began to look ever-so-slightly uncomfortable. “In the event of any such discovery, Captain, I would likely have no choice other than to resign my post. As a fellow diplomat, I’m sure you can understand that I cannot be a party to a treaty violation, either official or otherwise.”
Picard smiled broadly. “Madame Ambassador, as a fellow diplomat, I wouldn’t dream of placing you in that position.”
“I’m delighted that we understand each other so well, Captain,” T’Alik said, bowing her head fractionally.
And with that, the Romulan diplomats said their short but polite farewells, then allowed the security officers to escort them out of the ready room.
“Well,” Troi said. “Now we know that they know we have the scoutship.”
“Data was right,” Batanides said. “Whatever we decide to do with that ship, I suppose we can forget about having the element of surprise.”
“I’d already accepted that as a given,” Picard said, frowning. “But if there’s a way around that problem, Geordi and Data will find it.”
“For some reason, our continued presence is making the Romulans very nervous,” Troi ventured.
Batanides nodded. “It can only have to do with whatever the Romulans are hiding behind their cloaking field.”
Picard rose from behind his desk and walked over to the viewport. The darkness outside was punctuated by thousands of distant pinpoints of light.
For a long moment, he silently contemplated the loss of three wide, nominally empty sectors of space to the Romulans. He found the notion unacceptable. He suddenly couldn’t stomach the thought of losing anything to such Machiavellian schemers.
“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 tendency to seek out the shortest, simplest solutions, the relevant pieces of code had revealed themselves.
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 alphawatch 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 narrowband 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 of asymmetrical spaceborne structures, clumped together in apparently slapdash fashion into an irregularly hexagonal torus. Geordi and Data exchanged surprised looks after seeing what lay at the object’s open center. It raged at them from within an annular metal structure, which could not have measured more than a kilometer or two in diameter. There, in an extremely compact volume, blazed a primordial inferno—a barely constrained fury so intense that it might have been the cosmic forge in which the universe itself had been made.
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