He was still angry, but managing it. My ship. My ship. How dare they! Yet under the anger ran a little thin thread of pride that, as far as Will could tell, the Romulans had not bothered to try to sabotage one of the other ships a-building, but this one. Those ships were merely nascent. This ship had a life. She was somebody … somebody they hated … and they were determined to do away with her.
We’ll see about that, Will thought.
A short time later the console cheeped softly, and Decker looked thoughtfully at the “pie graph” it displayed for him—a big blue disk, a smaller red-burning tranche—and whistled softly. Something like 40 percent of the code originally installed had already been altered somehow. That would have happened anyway in the normal course of things, as code was tailored to systems forced to work together in new and sometimes unexpected configurations.
Will would have died of old age any number of times if he’d tried reading through that much code. But there was more than one way to swing a cat, as his father had always said, and fortunately Will knew fairly well in what direction to swing it. “Computer,” he said softly. “Delimiter statement. Display percentage of code altered while one or both of the following personnel have been on duty: Ensign Maliani, Lieutenant Dorwinian.”
“Working,” the computer said as softly. After a few moments the disk and tranche displayed on the console burned dimmer, and the tranche subdivided itself into a large slice of about five-sixths the original size, and a smaller one of one-sixth, which burned a brighter red.
That was better, but still an awful lot of material to go through. Will breathed out, looked at it, turning over in his mind something else that was of concern. Those comms calls in the code I was looking at before … He touched the console again, brought up one or two excerpts of that material. Not all those comms calls were to other administrative nodes in the ship’s computer network. Some of them appeared to be to nodes outside Enterprise.
The absolute nerve of them, Will thought, flushing hot and cold again. They were sending messages out, probably about their work, through our own system. Certainly coded. Probably to their handler … reporting progress, asking for new instructions. And the brilliance of it; their messages to their handlers masquerading as our own.
He frowned at the console. On a whim, Will touched one control, and let the computer feed him live sound from down in the computer core.
Someone was humming as they worked: a soft, unconcerned sound. A second tone added itself to the first, a fourth higher; an odd harmony, if the listener hadn’t known about Elthene multiple intonation. Will knew about it, though, and smiled slightly at the completeness of the role being played here, of which cosmetic alteration was literally only the surface. Surgery on her larynx, too. Too bad she’ll have gone to all that trouble for nothing.
“Computer,” he said. “With the exception of areas presently being accessed or referenced, examine all code in this last sample for nonstandard content.”
“Define ‘nonstandard.’”
“Comment material. Also communications calls to and from other nodes and/or systems.”
“Working.” After a moment’s silence, another much smaller, slimmer tranche displayed itself, burning red.
“Display code. No, stop,” Will said then. “Analyze selected code for evidence of cipher algorithms, single- or multiple-element satchel ciphers, or other encryption.”
“Working.” He held his breath again.
“No result.”
Impossible. Will bit his lip, tempted to tell the computer to do the analysis again; but that would be useless.
But wait a minute. “Rerun analysis,” he said, “by same-time or near-time sections, using letter or phoneme distribution based on standard Romulan dialect, expressed using Modern Roman characters.”
“Working,” said the computer. There was a long pause.
Will held his breath.
“Sixty percent positive,” said the computer.
Eureka! “State parameters for percentage of positive.”
“Letter/phoneme distribution not invariable. More than 20 percent variation in suspected same-word or similar-word or -group content.”
That would be likely enough, especially if the “private” coded messages were written in one or more of the Romulan subdialects. Or it might have to do with the limitations of the universal translator’s Romulan-language data, which understandably lacked the widest desirable vocabulary and idiom, since there had been so little official contact between the two species. But the basic translator hardware had the grammar and syntax down all right: that had been an absolute requirement for the subspace-radio-negotiated treaty that had ended the First Romulan War so long ago and established the boundaries for the Neutral Zone.
He swallowed; now came the worst question. “Is the cipher breakable?”
A long pause. “Affirmative,” the computer said, “using on-file nonstandard additional ‘legacy’ decryption routines installed during last command.”
He realized what that meant, and could have fallen down and hugged the console, or whatever nameless computer technicians had recognized those old routines in the old Enterprise computers’ programming for what they were and had preserved them, “off to one side” as it were, in the new installation. The Vulcan who had been responsible for writing and installing those routines in the first place had been more than merely a genius in the mathematics of both computer systems and cryptography generally; this was a ghost that Will didn’t mind haunting his ship, not at all. “Estimate of decryption time.”
“Five hours, twenty-three minutes.”
Not good enough. “Recompute estimate,” he said, touching the console here and there, “using Enterprise’s entire processing capacity except for that specifically excluded in previous instructions.”
A moment’s silence. “Twelve minutes, forty seconds.”
It was going to have to do. “Computer,” Will said, “begin decryption of patterned/ciphered sequences. Arrange ciphered sequences in time earliest to latest. Priority processing for sequences with portions which also occur in other sequences. Report on progress. Report when complete.”
“Working,” the computer said, and fell silent.
Will stood there, wishing there were a chair in here … leaning on the console, listening to the minutes ticking by, and to his heartbeat. He thought suddenly of the likeness of this quiet struggle to the combat Kirk had had first with the Romulans long ago: nothing face to face, everything remote, move matching move across the darkness, a business of anticipation, uncertainty, feeling your way in the dark … and waiting. He waited now, and for once the whispering was silent, the voices waiting with him. Only the faint humming came from elsewhere in the deck, and someone’s casual voice said, “Pass me that solid, will you?”
“Of a certainty. How do you proceed?”
“It’s going fine. Another twenty minutes, half an hour maybe … then we may as well knock off for the night.”
“Idiom is a problem…” Not for him, Decker thought, wry. “Progress,” he said softly.
“Working. Thirty percent complete.”
“Type of cipher.”
“Switched-packet satchel, compressed, alternating-character type.”
He whistled again. It was a “hard” cipher, and would probably not have been detected unless someone got suspicious of just these two people … and what were the odds on that? But ships called Enterprise carried their own luck with them, and handed it off sometimes to their captains … as Will was now discovering, to his delight. It was the ultimate accolade, the one that no money could buy, no mere Starfleet assignment could guarantee. She would wake up to you and make you part of that unique symbiosis … or else she wouldn’t. If we survive this, Will thought, stroking the console idly, we’re going to get along famously, you and I….
“Progress.”
“Sixty percent.”
He stood there trying not to count seconds or heartbeats. And I will alwa
ys do right by you, Will thought. No surrenders … no retreats. No alien species is going to take you away from me and run you halfway to another galaxy. You belong to me now….
It took what seemed like a very long time before the computer spoke up again. “Analysis complete,” it said.
“Display results,” Will said, and bent over the console.
The results were all expressed in text. Will breathed out slowly at that. No voices to fake … His luck was still running, so far: but there was no telling how long it would hold. The messages were spotty, incomplete, the syntax of them mangled: again and again the computer had inserted ##### in the translation, indicating it reckoned its chances as less than fifty-fifty that it knew what a word was. Looking at all the other words, Will began to sweat at the thought that the computer might be wrong in its evaluation of some of those words, too. Yet for the time being he had no choice but to trust the universal translator algorithms stored in Christine’s end of the computer. They were good enough to get a treaty signed, Will thought, and there were additions later, too, out of the online instructions from when Kirk and Scotty stole the cloaking device—Scotty told me so, told me he passed them on to Uhura for incorporation into the translator. It’ll be good enough.
It’ll have to be good enough….
Will swallowed again and took a few deep breaths as he read down the text of the many, many messages. They were short. Both sides of this conversation were terse, probably not wanting to artificially inflate the size of the standard-text messages in which these encrypted missives were encapsulated. PROGRESS REPORT UNSATISFACTORY, said one of them, a statement which just about summed up Will’s feeling about this whole business. ##### INSUFFICIENT ##### TIME FRAME ##### UNSCHEDULED CHANGES. Does that mean they’re working too fast, or not fast enough? Or that the Enterprise won’t be ready as fast as they wish it would be? It was the only other thing on which Will thought he was likely to agree with these people.
He scanned on down the messages. ##### SATISFACTORY, said the next one. And the next. ##### ALTERATIONS ##### INSERTED ROUTINES EXCELLENT, said another. CONTINUE ##### CAUTION REGARDING SECURITY #####. COMMUNICATIONS TEST SUCCESSFUL, TEST ROUTINE CORRECTLY IMPLEMENTED, ##### TRIGGERED.
Will kept reading. This was more than enough evidence to keep these people in the pokey until their ears grew back—assuming that their genetic heritage could reassert itself that far through the surgery, implants, and other disguising procedures that had been used on them. But there was too little information on what he really wanted, the details about the sabotage—
Aha, Will thought then. My own fault. “Computer,” he said, “rearrange the decrypted messages, pairing remote demand and local reply side by side. Oldest to newest.”
The display blanked itself, then complied. Will bent to his reading again. There were still plenty of uncertainties in the translation, and nothing could be done about those, but he was beginning to see what was going on. One of the places the original Romulan “treaty” translation algorithms had been strongest was computer terminology, because otherwise the two sides could not have coordinated their communications sufficiently to get each other to understand the treaty’s terms in the first place. Now that strength was standing Will in good stead, and serving to betray his enemies. And in an additional irony, since the language of computers had moved so far ahead on both sides since the time of the treaty negotiations a century ago, to make themselves understood to their handler, the spies aboard the Enterprise had been forced to choose between coining new words to explain what they were doing, and using Terran ones with Romulan noun affixes. Being in a hurry, and not being linguists, they had chosen the latter….
Will was grinning harder now as he read. Even in as delicate a job as this was, bureaucracy had been rearing its ugly head. SCHEDULE ##### PRESSURE FROM SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE, said one of the later messages; Will hoped desperately that, if nothing else, the translator program was right about the renderings of the words for “intelligence” and “committee,” two terms usually otherwise mutually exclusive in his opinion. REPORT PROGRESS ADVANCED SCHEDULE SOONEST. And at the end of that message, a word that had not been translated, because it was recognizably part of a proper name: TR’HRIENTEH. And the same word, at the end of another message a little further along; and also at the end of a third one, almost at the end of the sequence.
Will grinned wolfishly. A spymaster who starts to sign his messages, he thought. How careless can you get? Or how arrogant. Yet arrogance could be part of the Romulan mindset, Will knew, especially when faced with what seemed a stupid or unworthy enemy. And this time, it had blinded its owner in a way which made Will’s job much easier.
The “handler’s” terseness was mostly matched by that of his two spies. “7387” and “3364” was how they referred to themselves in their responses. There was no way to tell which of them was which, and Will wasn’t sure, at the moment, that it mattered. MEMORY RESTRUCTURING ##### ACCORDING TO PLAN, SCHEDULED ##### DELAYED DUE TO COMPUTER TEAM INTERFERENCE, RESCHEDULED FOR ##### THREE DAYS. And then, near the end, a message that made the hair stand up on the back of Will’s neck: FINAL PHASE COMPLETE, RUNNING CHECKS, CHECKS COMPLETE ##### FORTY-FIVE HOURS LOCAL, FINAL LOCKDOWN AND ENCRYPTION SCHEDULED IN FIFTY HOURS LOCAL—
That message, outgoing from the spies, was dated yesterday morning, eleven hundred Greenwich. One more day, Will thought, sweating, and they would have sealed their sabotage routines into permanent memory, encrypted and disguised as normal machine language … and we might never have known until some day out in space, when everything started to go wrong … if it was indeed designed to “go wrong” slowly, and not in some immediate and irreparable way like overloading the warp engines….
But I wouldn’t do that, Will thought, if I were a Romulan … not unless I had no choice. I’d try to get my hands on the ship first … and if I couldn’t do that, I’d blow her to hell. Especially this ship, which they hate…. And the Romulans would not be insensitive to the blow such destruction would be to the Federation, and the propaganda coup for them, if the Enterprise were to be lost with all hands….
But that’s all conjecture, Will thought. I need better data.
He looked clown at the messages from the spies’ handler … and the idea came to him. It was dangerous. It was possibly foolhardy. But he had come too far now not to try it. Tr’Hrienteh, Will thought, whoever you are, you’re about to send another message….
“Computer,” Will said softly. “Composing message.”
“Ready,” said the computer.
“Senate Intelligence committee re-formed after suicides,” said Decker. “Schedule now queried in all particulars. Complete project summary required soonest, highest possible priority. Tr’Hrienteh. Finished,” he said to the computer.
“Message complete.”
“Encrypt using the decryption algorithm used to decode the previous messages,” Will said. “Encapsulate code in a message derived from logically arranged sections of earlier ‘encapsulating’ messages. Match context and improvise where necessary. Time-stamp new message in agreement with previous message transit times and transmit to destination address of previous received messages.”
“Working,” said the computer. After a few moments’ silence, it said, “Complete. Transmitted.”
Will leaned against the console again, listening to the audio from the computer core. There was nothing he could do, now, but wait.
Down there he heard Dorwinian humming again, a different melody this time, but still perfectly tritonal, a sequence of major chords. “Gonna be glad to be done with this for the night,” said Maliani after a moment.
“I also,” said Dorwinian, “will seek my sleeping place with pleasure.”
Will swallowed. There was another long, long pause. Then he heard a soft chirp, and a rustle as of someone turning to look at another console.
“Got a message here from my mom,” said Maliani then. He sounded a little bemused.
; “I thought you said you had not expected such,” said Dorwinian. “These are not her usual hours….”
“I hadn’t,” said Maliani. “Hmmm…”
There was another of those long silences, presumably while Dorwinian read what Maliani had received from his “mom.” “Sounds kind of urgent,” he said. “I guess I’d better take care of it….”
“We are almost done here,” said Dorwinian casually; “pausing to make a reply now will not put us behind schedule.”
“I guess not…” Maliani said. “Computer…”
“Working.”
“Keypad mode…”
“Done.”
Will could hear nothing for the moment. “Computer,” he said to his own console. “Intercept message when sent. Prevent transmission. Reroute to this console, decrypt, and translate.”
“Prevention of transmission impossible under present main comms programming routines,” said the computer. “Reroute and translation will be executed on send.”
Will held still for a moment and thought about that. It meant that one last message would go out to their masters from these spies before they went “off the air” … and the odds were good that Romulan High Command would eventually guess what had caused them to send this last report. But by the time it reached the Romulans, subspace delays being what they were between here and the empire, their agents would be permanently out of the loop as far as Enterprise was concerned. They won’t try anything like this again, Will thought. Which, as far as Romulans are concerned, simply means they’ll make sure their next ruse is much more deeply buried than this one. In the long run, we may have cause to be sorry about that.
But meantime, I’m going to make it plain that you don’t mess around with Enterprise and get away with it.
All he could do for the moment, though, was wait. After what must only have been about ten minutes, but seemed more like ten hours, Will heard Maliani say, “There—”
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 16