Grelun sat in silence as he considered his scant alternatives. “Then I shall notwithdraw my request,” he said finally. “But I willfind the means to return to the Army of Light, and to lead my people to freedom.”

Troi turned toward Riker, concern etched on her brow. “Can we still consider his asylum request, Will? He’s just admitted that it was only a ruse.”

“Maybe according to your empathic sense,” Riker said. “But I’m not sure that’s admissible in a Federation court. Besides . . . weren’t we speaking off the record?”

Troi smiled, evidently satisfied with that.

“Tell me, Commander Riker: What will you do when Ruardh attacks?” Grelun said earnestly. “And she willattack, rest assured, probably within the hour. When that happens, will you raise arms against this ‘sovereign government’ your laws respect so well?”

Riker wasn’t sure what to say to that. After an awkward pause, he said, “I’m sure the captain will negotiate a resolution everyone can live with.”

“If he survives his present undertaking,” Grelun said earnestly.

“Jean‑Luc Picard is an extremely resourceful man,” Riker said. “And he has a pair of excellent officers at his side.”

“Then I will pray that will be enough,” Grelun said.

The voice of Lieutenant Daniels issued from Riker’s combadge. “Bridge to Commander Riker.”

“Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

“You wanted to be alerted when the captain’s scoutship reached the edge of the Romulan cloaking field, sir. That’s due to happen in a little under ten minutes.”

“I’m on my way,” Riker said, then excused himself.

Data sat motionless behind the scoutship’s cockpit, his golden eyes unfocused. Interfaced directly with the ship’s systems, the android consulted the sensors and confirmed that the cloaking field lay dead ahead. It was almost time to begin the mission’s most critical phase.

He heard the captain speaking, his voice sounding as though it had traversed a great distance before reaching him. “Any sign we’ve been detected, Mr. Hawk?”

“Negative, Captain. Our cloaking frequency still matches the data we got from the telemetry probes. The maximum harmonic variances aren’t even worth mentioning.”

Picard sounded relieved to hear that. “Good. Mr. Data, it appears there’s nothing standing in our craft’s way. Let’s hope that means there’s nothing standing in yourway, either.”

Data paused to damp down the output from his emotion chip. Nervousness was an emotion he did not particularly enjoy.

“Contact with the cloaking field in fifteen seconds,” Hawk said. Data listened as the lieutenant began counting down. He recognized the slight quaver of apprehension in the lieutenant’s voice, and understood its source well enough. After all, if the Romulans had indeed somehow managed to rotate their cloaking‑field harmonics at any time since the Enterprisehad last probed the area, then the scoutship would immediately become conspicuous. A warbird could be upon them in moments, ending the mission ignominiously–and there would be no time for a second attempt.

Data’s android perceptions were now attuned to an extremely minute resolution, which enabled him to notice the trillions of separate information cycles that occurred every second within his positronic brain. Each of those seconds seemed to last for hours, enabling Data to review most of the onboard library of Romulan literature, music, and drama in an eyeblink. Using an infinitesimal fraction of his positronic resources, Data listened as Hawk continued with his countdown, leaving protracted lacunae between each word.

“Four.”

Data reiterated the mission plan two thousand and seventy‑one times, while simultaneously reviewing the probability theory equations of Earth’s Blaise Pascal as well as the collected sonnets of Phineas Tarbolde of the Canopus Planet.

“Three.”

Data monitored and corrected an almost undetectable engine‑output imbalance–which he attributed to the close proximity of the subspace singularity–and at the same time revisited Kurt Gцdell’s axiom negating the recursive validation of mathematical systems.

“Two.”

He reviewed the mission plan several dozen times yet again while composing a complex contrapuntal string interlude based on large prime numbers and the mathematical constructs of Leonardo Fibonacci and Jean Baptiste Fourier. At the same moment, he extracted from the ship’s computer core the rules to a multidimensional Romulan strategy game that was strongly reminiscent of the meditative Vulcan pastime known as kal‑toh.

Stop fidgeting,Data told himself.

“One.”

Just as the ship crossed the threshold, Data transmitted a simple handshake code to one of the buoys located on the Romulan array’s periphery, then patiently awaited a response. After an eternity–which concluded in an almost negligible fraction of a second–the countersignal arrived. The buoy appeared to have accepted his credentials, recognizing him as a part of its own programming. His foot, as Geordi might have said, was in the door.

Data briefly permitted some real‑time visual inputs to enter his accelerated consciousness. He watched as the Romulan array winked into existence on the forward viewer, along with the nearest few dozen of the outermost layer of buoys. From the array’s still‑distant center, the subspace singularity’s accretion disk stared out like a baleful red eye. Though he was tempted to pause and continue admiring the vista before him, Data instead shut down his optical inputs and shunted those resources back toward his mission objectives. He resumed parsing time infinitesimally.

“I can see some of the nearer cloaking buoys,” Picard said. “There must be thousands of them out there. It’s extraordinary.”

Data felt a stab of envy, since the sensory information he was receiving at the moment couldn’t really be described as sight. For about a femtosecond, he longed to see everything the two humans in the cockpit were seeing. He wondered if the abstract polygonal shapes and solid geometrical forms now impinging on his consciousness resembled the universe as Geordi La Forge perceived it. He put the matter aside for later consideration.

Redoubling his concentration on the task at hand, Data extended a significant portion of his positronic matrix through the scoutship’s communications system, across a frigid gulf of space, and back into the spaceborne cloaking buoy with which he was linked. He entered the labyrinth of hyperfast subspace channels and positronic pathways that connected the buoy to thousands of identical others. Dozens of blocks of angular Romulan text, each of them scrolling past at lightning speed, flickered almost tangibly before him, though he knew that their ideographic code was visible to no one else. He read them, digested them, analyzed them, and memorized them as though each byte were taking weeks to move through his quickened sensorium. Slowly, he channeled still more of his positronic resources through his subspace connection with the Romulan security network, bringing his artificial metabolism to a near standstill.

“Initiate Phase One, Mr. Data.” Picard’s voice was glacially slow, his words like millennia‑old potsherds that required long and painstaking reassembly.

“Acknowledged,” Data said, opening his aperture into the Romulan network ever wider. Now, forced to use a great deal more of his cognitive resources than before, Data put aside still more of his background activities, concentrating on the swiftly churning labyrinth of visual icons that crowded his subjective “sight.” Still, it wasn’t a severe challenge; all he had to do was repeat particular Romulan algorithms and follow specific electronic pathways he and Geordi had discovered during their lengthy analysis of the scout vessel’s computer core. Still, the work took more and more of his attention, and Data felt an increasing sensation of something akin to kinesthesia. It was as though the torrent of information in which he now swam had palpable form, becoming an extension of his artificial body.