Star Trek: The Next Generation™: Slings and Arrows

by Phaedra M. Weldon

  “It appears Lieutenant Daniels’s forensic methods have proven accurate.” Picard set the padd back on his desk and adjusted his uniform jacket. It had been a long day—from the early morning docking to assigning the rotation of leave on board the station for their twenty-four-hour stay. He was ready for a bit of relaxation himself.

  Assuming he could relax in the current climate. The bombing had everyone on edge—especially everyone on the station. Being so close to Dominion space was anything but relaxing. He looked at the padd again. “I saw some of what Daniels and t’Saiga put together in Quark’s holosuite. It was quite impressive.”

  “I’m surprised Quark allowed that. When Starfleet takes up precious holosuite time, he loses money.”

  “I’m afraid Major Kira and Commander Travec didn’t give him much choice. Unfortunately, so much processor power was needed to render the images that several of his holo-imagers were blown out. We lost one of the suites.”

  Sisko smiled. “I wish I could have been there to see that.”

  “In order to continue his work on the Enterprise, Chief O’Brien suggested integrating the application with the holodeck and the matrix in stellar cartography.”

  “Impressive. How long will this delay your departure?”

  “O’Brien estimated a day. He’s volunteered two of the Defiant engineers to help, and Mr. La Forge has brought in two of his people as well.”

  “And if I know the chief, he’ll have it done in half that time. Very well, Captain. I’m sure the admiral would prefer that Travec’s team continue their analysis using the very best Starfleet can offer. I’m sure the chief is happy to get his hands on the new Enterprise.”

  O’Brien had worked as the transporter chief aboard the Enterprise-D for six years before transferring to Deep Space 9. The E was a new design and a new passion.

  Though Picard knew the chief would have to share that love with his conn officer, Lieutenant Sean Hawk, who had been with the E since the ship’s framing. Hawk knew it inside and out, and Picard hadn’t been surprised to hear a few rumors of the two knocking heads once or twice, arguing about the different classes of ships and their pros and cons. In fact, the young lieutenant had enjoyed a little browsing on board the Defiant since their arrival, impressed with the chief’s hull and shielding modifications, as explained to him by Defiant engineer Enrique Muñiz.

  But what had grabbed the young lieutenant’s attention was the cloaking technology.

  “How did the chief get past Mr. La Forge in overseeing that project?”

  “Geordi’s supervising two teams that are fine-tuning the repairs we had done at Starbase 51.” Picard’s expression darkened, his thoughts returning to the events revolving around Lieutenant Addison and the Changeling that had killed her, as well as the crew of the U.S.S. Samson.

  Sisko must have understood, because he didn’t ask about the repairs. “You’re in good hands with the chief.”

  “Captain.” Picard took a deep breath. He’d wanted to ask the question ever since the conversation began. “Even if Travec’s team checks every installation Starfleet has, there’s no guarantee the Dominion will use the same tactics again, or the same bomb. Are we sure that shuttling these three around the Alpha Quadrant isn’t just for show?”

  He could see the muscles working beneath Sisko’s dark skin, showing his strong jaw and even stronger resolve. “Of course it’s for show as much as it’s for security. I hate to admit it, but I’ve also asked the same question. The president feels the members of the Federation need to know we’re doing what we can to prevent another bombing anywhere in the quadrant—sending in specialists to check facilities is at least putting a face on Starfleet. The Dominion wanted us to know that they killed those twenty-seven people. I have a hunch they’ll stick to the same formula if given the same opportunity again.”

  Picard heard it in Sisko’s voice: the slight catch of anger, the determination that nothing—neither the Dominion nor the Jem’Hadar—was going to get through on Sisko’s watch.

  Sisko continued. “Starbase 375 is one of our most important facilities, Captain. Having the Federation flagship arrive with the bomb specialist team should help to ease any fears there.”

  “That sounds like Leyton talking.”

  A bright smile finally broke through Sisko’s dark expression. “It was.”

  “Benteen to Sisko. We’re ready for the secondary systems check.”

  Sisko tapped his combadge. “I’ll be right there.”

  The interruption reminded Picard that Sisko had other duties to perform, other responsibilities. He only wished he could be there on Earth with him to lend a hand.

  “Captain,” Sisko said, “duty calls. Let me know when you reach Starbase 375.”

  “Of course.”

  “Sisko out.”

  The image changed immediately to the Federation emblem of blue with white stars. Picard sat back in his chair, his mind wandering in several different directions.

  “What exactly is bothering you, Captain?”

  Commander William Riker sat on the opposite side of Picard’s desk. He’d remained quiet, listening, as Picard had asked him to do. Now his curiosity and confusion were evident in his expression.

  “I don’t know yet,” Picard said as he looked at his first officer. “I think it was that last statement about us transporting a specialist to the station. It does seem a trifle trumped up.”

  Riker shook his head and shrugged. “Makes perfect sense to me. It doesn’t hurt to have a specialist look over each station and check for bombs. And seeing a face attached to the scrutiny humanizes it.”

  “Oh, I’m in agreement with the political and bureaucratic end of things.” Picard sat forward and clasped his hands on his desk. “But what bothers me, Will, is that if Pádraig Daniels and the others are such important Starfleet bomb specialists, why is Leyton sending them away from Earth?”

  Daniels filtered out most of the conversation bouncing off the walls in holodeck three on the Enterprise. His eighteen-month deployment at the Department of Planetary Operations in Lisboa had been a much quieter posting before the bombing. Until the hallways and conference rooms were filled to the brim with people, Daniels hadn’t really noticed how empty the job had been.

  Given his talent for detail and background in explosives, the security officer was reassigned to Starfleet Security after taking a two-month leave to wed his fiancée of two years, Siobhan Bryn. They were married in a traditional Irish wedding in the Hanging Gardens of the Canopus Planet.

  And all too soon he found himself living on Earth, blowing stuff up, analyzing and cataloging the latest and deadliest weapons found on different worlds, but never actually seeing those worlds.

  Until now.

  At first he’d been a little anxious about being chosen as part of the team to sift through, analyze, and identify the components used by the Dominion in Antwerp. The blast radius alone was the neatest he’d ever seen—not in terms of being impressive, but in terms of being clean.

  Unobstructed.

  Tidy.

  Neat.

  Only the conference area had been directly affected by the bomb. The rest was simply collateral damage, and even that had been minimal. Witnesses outside of ground zero had felt the explosion, but many had commented that the tremors were less than those they had felt on board a starship encountering turbulence.

  The explosion was well timed, well planned, and well executed.

  Daniels had been determined to reverse-engineer the process piece by piece. He and t’Saiga, one of Planetary Operations’ best engineers, had actually found the catalyst. The next step was to identify the components.

  Tall order, but Daniels and his team of Sage; G’sive Dee, a Bolian tactical specialist; Murial Paquinn, one of Starfleet’s top sensor array linguists from the Daystrom Institute; Sahvisha, a Vulcan chemist; and Dr. Torsten Uzzle, the leader of the project, all working together had identified eight of the twelve components within the bomb, and ha
d tagged the origins of three of those components and the races who mined and sold them.

  All within the Gamma Quadrant.

  Of course, the human or alien knowledge to link the components together for bomb possibilities still had to be there. It was easy to tell a sensor to sweep for certain pieces of ore or chemical, but that was as far as a computer could go. Daniels, Sage, G’sive, Paquinn, Uzzle, and Sahvisha had to actually analyze the data.

  Their intention had been to write a program to do just that, until the orders came down for Daniels and Sage to visit and scan every key Federation installation personally and check for Dominion bombs, while the rest of the team would be assigned to other ships.

  The decision seemed completely wrong to Daniels. Why break up the group when they had been so successful together? But within a day he and Sage were assigned to Travec, and on their way to their first Federation installation, and within the first hour after that, Sage and Travec were at each other’s throats.

  Siobhan had been surprised at his assignment, and of course a little disappointed because it meant a longer delay before he could take leave again, but she’d been proud of him. Of all the people he knew, she understood his longing to finally be out in the universe.

  Though he still wasn’t sure this was exactly what he had in mind.

  And so here he was, on board the Enterprise, hoping to continue his work with the bomb simulation.

  Assuming he could get his program integrated with the Enterprise-E’s computer.

  Unfortunately, nothing was working.

  He’d been buried up to his eyeballs in system glitches since installing the program into the Enterprise computer—and twice the array had dumped half of it.

  Six times they’d attempted to bring the new subroutine online. Six times the protocols were ignored, and then dumped. Deputy Chief Engineer Paul Porter, as well as the two Defiant engineers, Fabian Stevens and Enrique Muñiz, were as stumped as he was.

  Travec, of course, was convinced Sage had somehow botched the install. Luckily, he’d left the holodeck to find more qualified help.

  “…bypassing it completely,” Muñiz said somewhere to Daniels’s left, where he and Stevens were deep in conversation with O’Brien and Porter.

  “It’s acting like an old service pack module,” Stevens said. “Remember the one we tried modifying on the Defiant, Chief?”

  “Yes, and if I recall correctly, you two had to downgrade the hardware to fit the software. Which it looks like we might have to do again—the subprocessors are too fast.”

  “That’s it!” Sage said. “I can’t believe it’s that simple.” Fijorians had sharp eyesight, hearing, and smell, which made them excellent scientists and engineers. It was the doglike ears that protruded up through Sage’s thick, silver hair that gave him an almost canine appearance. Daniels could get past the golden eyes—but if Sage had had fangs, he would have been hard pressed not to call him Rover. “I should have known the DPO’s computers were years out of date.” He gave Daniels a smirk as his ears twitched. “Government issue.”

  “I am not sure I understand the reference,” Lieutenant Commander Data said as he frowned at Sage. “Why would you have known the age of the computers used at the Department of Planetary Operations?” He shook his head. “You are only a scientist.”

  “That was sarcasm, Data,” O’Brien said. “Sage has a very dry wit.”

  Daniels could feel the tension rise when the android worked with his team. Several times Data had lost his temper, though his anger had cooled quickly. Mostly the altercations had been between Travec and Data—as the Tellarite believed an android with an emotion chip was incapable of logical assessment and performance.

  La Forge had informed all of them in private about Data’s emotion chip and the problems it had caused—and continued to cause—the android. It had been several months since the chip had fused with his neural net, and he was seeing the ship’s counselor regularly in order to get a better handle on his emotions.

  But—like most humans facing anger management issues—Data slipped now and then. And Daniels could sympathize. Travec had that kind of effect on people.

  Daniels was proud of Sage as he turned a very calm face toward Data. “When I wrote the protocols for the program, I used the specifications for the model-nine isolinear chip processors, which is what we use at the DPO—but of course those are about five years out of date with what the rest of the Federation uses.”

  Data frowned. “That is a much slower processor than what the computer core subsections use on board this vessel. I am not even sure that model fully integrated the holographic matrix for three-dimensional storing.”

  “They—they didn’t,” came an unsure voice behind Daniels.

  He turned to see Lieutenant Reginald Barclay step forward, a tricorder in his right hand, a thermal patch in his left. When everyone turned to look at him, Daniels was afraid the man might faint.

  “He’s right,” O’Brien said. “The isolinear subprocessors on this ship are the fastest they make.” He looked at Daniels. “That’s why it keeps dumping the program. Protocols can’t keep up with the processor speed. Quark’s subprocessors in his holomatrix were faster, but only fast enough to cause the glitches we saw.”

  “So we either have to rewrite the protocols,” Stevens said, “or dumb down the system.”

  “Can you do that?” Daniels moved from the console he’d been working at to join them, careful not to leave Barclay out. “Either one. The subroutine doesn’t have to run simultaneously or be integrated—it’s a rogue system—acts on its own to look for patterns in the sensor sweeps and then compiles them into the simulator program. Maybe if it were on a separate system it could be modified better, updated as Sage and I work on it.” He was ready to try anything at this point. He’d always believed this project had been too rushed.

  “I am afraid that,” Data paused a beat and looked at Stevens, “dumbing down the system, as you say, is impossible. The design of the ship would not allow it. It would disrupt normal ship functions.”

  “He doesn’t mean change the entire system, Data,” O’Brien said in a somewhat tired tone. “We could build a separate console.” He looked at Muñiz and Stevens. “Maybe rig up something out of those old multitronic systems you two scrounged up.”

  But Stevens was shaking his head. “That’s working in the opposite direction, Chief. Comparatively, the model-nine processors are still much faster than anything we can rig out of the trash.”

  “M-maybe you could—” Barclay began.

  “Looks like we’re going to need to rewrite the protocols.” Porter ran a hand through his thick, short dark hair and blew air between his lips. “The program doesn’t take into consideration the encryption needed for holographic indexing at the speeds this ship utilizes. Wow. That’s going to require a whole new set of command logarithms.”

  Daniels hung his head and sighed. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this? It was like fitting a shuttle-sized warp core into a starship-sized core cradle. The core would just fall right through.

  But then again, he’d never tried to integrate his small program into something as incredibly advanced as the Enterprise-E.

  “Ah—you know you—you could—”

  “How long would that take?” O’Brien asked.

  “A day or two,” Sage said. “I’m not as familiar with this model circuitry.” He smiled. “But I’d love to learn.”

  “We cannot continue to delay the Enterprise’s departure to Starbase 375,” Data said.

  O’Brien nodded. “I know. We don’t have time if we’re to get you up and running before then. We need to find another solution. Everyone look for any other cogs in the gears.”

  Muñiz nodded and grabbed up the padd resting on the nearest console. He glanced at the readout, frowned, and then held out his hand to Daniels. “May I see your tricorder?”

  Daniels handed it to Muñiz and then moved closer to see what had him puzzled. He looked at the diagnos
tic screen over the engineer’s shoulder.

  “Some of these initial syntax errors are wrong,” Muñiz said as he looked from the tricorder to the padd. “I don’t think this is the main problem, but I think this might be one of the associated anomalies. But it appears not all of the database is loaded.”

  “Of course it is.” Data moved to stand on the opposite side of the console, facing the engineer. “I supervised the upload myself.”

  “Well.” Muñiz shook his head. “According to this diagnostic, there’s only twenty-three percent embedded.”

  “I saw the database upload.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” The engineer held out the padd. “But I’m only looking at what the computer is telling me.”

  “So are you saying I am wrong and the computer is always right? Computers also make mistakes, not just me. And I do not appreciate your double-checking my work.”

  Daniels straightened at the sound of irritation in Data’s voice. The android had been responsible for cataloging the components and their variations before uploading the database into the sensor’s memory. He absently wondered why there was a partial upload—unless the speed difference also caused the database to be dumped. Either way, he didn’t suspect the android of any faulty work.

  But apparently that wasn’t the way Data was seeing it.

  “I wasn’t checking your work, sir,” Muñiz said, looking up from the tricorder to meet Data’s gaze. “We’ve already established that the protocols need to be rewritten in order to be compatible with the subprocessors.” He looked at Data. “I was just checking to see if the database itself needed to be coded for a holographic imaging matrix. And it does—only a part of it uploaded at all.”

  Daniels nodded. Now he understood. The database needed to be formatted as well.

  Abruptly Data snatched the padd from Muñiz’s hand. The young man stepped back.

  “Whoa,” Stevens said as he and Porter also moved away.

  “How was I supposed to know the database needed to be formatted before I uploaded it? And it did upload. All of it,” Data said, his voice rising. “It is not my fault this program does not work. If anything is wrong, it will be with your calculations, not mine. And I certainly do not appreciate your pointing out my mistakes.”