Smartly, Vale said nothing. Geordi was starting to understand exactly why Lieutenant Vale had gone so far so quickly. She was smart and knew when to speak and when not to, a valuable skill in Starfleet.
“Let me introduce you to my bridge crew,” Gold said, “then Commander Gomez can get you introduced to her S.C.E. team.”
The captain did a quick once-around-thebridge. The young ensign at the conn was a human named Songmin Wong. He seemed very shy, and just nodded when introduced.
The Bajoran at operations was Lieutenant Ina Mar. She had to be even younger than Wong, but nowhere near as shy. She had bright red hair and the longest, slimmest fingers Geordi had ever seen. When he shook her hand, he didn’t want to let go, or look away from her eyes.
The chief engineer was an Atrean male named Lieutenant Jil Barnak. He was middle-aged, heavyset, and very strong.
Geordi had a sense they were all very good at their jobs. And, being under Captain Gold as the bridge crew of the flagship of the S.C.E., they would see their share of action.
As the introductions were finishing, Gomez turned to Captain Gold. “My first insertion team will be ready to go in twenty minutes. You have any sense of where we should start first?”
Geordi was impressed. Gomez was in charge of the S.C.E., but she respected Gold enough to ask his opinion. Clearly, they had worked this way a number of times in the past. It was the way Captain Picard and Commander Riker worked together at times. Picard was in charge, but he valued Riker’s opinion. He didn’t always take it, but he valued it.
Gold shook his head. “From everything Lieutenant Commander La Forge and the Enterprise have given us, plus our initial scans, I’d say slow-but-sure is best.”
“My thinking exactly,” she said. “We’ll focus on building a map of that thing, identifying important areas, seeing if we can tap into its computers, and then decide what we need to take out.”
“What are you thinking of doing with it?” Lieutenant Vale asked.
“Way too early to know,” Gomez said. “Towing something that big to a starbase would be impossible on our own, and I doubt we’re going to get it up and running again, from the looks of that damage. Often, we just take the information and hardware we think is salvageable and useful and drop the ships into the nearest sun. We’ll see.”
Gold nodded. “Be careful in there. I think Captain Scott’s description of this thing as a monster is right on the money.”
Gomez laughed. “I’ve been getting the same feeling.”
Geordi didn’t laugh. He had had the exact same reaction to the alien ship since the moment he first saw it. It was an unknown beast, and taming it and pulling out its secrets was going to be something the best team of engineers in Starfleet might just have trouble doing.
CHAPTER
4
Gomez felt the transporter beam release them on an open ledge just inside the hole the Enterprise had blasted in the skin of the ship. The boots of her environmental suit snapped her onto the deck, holding her in place in what should have been zero gravity. Only she could tell it wasn’t. The alien ship’s artificial gravity system was still working. Amazing. As per regulations, Gomez had her phaser drawn. But with just a glance around, she put it away. The force of the phaser blasts had pretty much cleared this area of everything.
“Standard check of suits,” Corsi said, reminding everyone of that regulation. They were all in full environmental suits, and after any beam-in they were required to run a quick diagnostic of their suits and report any problems.
Lieutenant Commander Corsi was their security chief, and a stickler for following rules. She got on the nerves of the others on the team at times, but Gomez liked what she brought to the table. Corsi made their missions safer. And Gomez agreed with this annoying regulation, mostly because it was better to discover something wrong with a suit right away than when a situation got rough.
Gomez did the quick diagnostic of her suit, getting full green across the small display over her eyebrows. “Clear,” she said.
Geordi, who was beside her, said, “Clear.”
She had picked only four of her team for this first mapping session, and, one at a time, as per regulations, they reported in to Corsi.
“Clear,” Stevens said.
Fabian Stevens had been an engineer with Starfleet for a number of years, including a long stint on the Defiant. He was their expert in tactical systems, which was why she had picked him for this first jump into the alien ship.
“Clear,” Duffy said.
Lieutenant Commander Kieran Duffy was her second in command, and as good an engineer as there was. He had served as second in command under her predecessor, Salek. This mission on the da Vinci was the first time they had served together since their days on the Enterprise , and since they had had an on-again, off-again long-distance relationship, they were both still taking it slow so far.
“Clear,” Pattie said.
Pattie’s real designation was P8 Blue. She was a Nasat—a member of a large, insectoid race that looked something like a terran pill-bug grown to almost human size—and didn’t require an environmental suit thanks to her shell and eight arms and legs. Gomez had picked her for this first jump into the big ship because of the chance of running into any unforeseen circumstances. Pattie was the best they had in getting around in low gravity.
The rest of her S.C.E. crew was still onboard, watching and monitoring everything closely. She could see the da Vinci holding over the hole, its presence reassuring her.
“Clear,” Corsi said, finishing the drill.
Gomez glanced around at her team and Geordi, all of whom were now holding tricorders, scanning the area around them.
“Seems someone left the lights on,” Stevens said. “I’ve got constant point-nine-three gravity.”
“Power’s still on in what looks like energy conduits.”
“Looks like the Enterprise didn’t hit the power source,” Geordi said, “only the control area and crew.”
“Copy,” Gomez said, glancing down into the massive hole the Enterprise had smashed through the decks. That hole had now become a dangerous fall instead of an easy access path.
Around her the walls of the ship were blackened and twisted, but it was clear that they had been light gray, and the hallways that led away from the destruction were wide and still lit. Gravity inside this big ship and power still on would make it easier to explore, by and large. Just more dangerous.
“It also seems,” Stevens said, “that airtight doors sealed in all exposed corridors. We still might have atmosphere in some sections of this baby.”
“This changes nothing, people,” Gomez said. “We stay with the plan to map this place slow-but-sure. Pattie, you and Stevens go to the right down that passageway; Duffy and Corsi, go left. Geordi and I will go down. No one gets out of contact. Understood?”
She glanced around at everyone nodding.
“Move out.”
“Deck at a time?” Geordi asked her after flipping his comm link so that only she could hear him. “Or all the way to the bottom of the blast hole?”
She glanced down. From the readings they had been able to get, the blast had blown a hole through at least seven of the alien ship’s decks. The two decks below the control room deck seemed similar to this one. “Down four,” she said. “I’ll lead.”
Geordi nodded.
She engaged the antigrav controls on her suit and stepped out into the air. The suit held her, and she let herself drop slowly, using her tricorder to record what she could see of each deck. Above her, Geordi was doing the same. All the readings from all the tricorders were being fed back to the da Vinci, where the computer was working on building a three-dimensional holo-image of this ship, deck by deck, as well as analyzing all the materials and equipment they saw.
The farther down she floated, the smaller the blast hole became, and the shorter distance the damage extended back into the exposed corridors and rooms. She picked a corridor leading off to her right on the fourth
deck, eased herself over into position, and landed, stepping away from the edge to give Geordi time to follow her.
The corridor seemed to curve slightly away from her. It was wide and almost warm-feeling, with decorations covering one area just a few steps away. She waited for Geordi to join her, then pointed to one half-closed door nearby. “Want to give it a try?”
“I’m betting on personal quarters,” he said.
“No bet.” She had been thinking the same thing. This corridor looked like many personal areas of ships she had been on in the past. Only, if they were right, where were all the inhabitants?
It took both of them to budge the door enough to slip inside the room. It was a very large, very colorful room, with a type of bed against one wall, tables and other furniture in the center, and a private bathroom area to one side. There were no pictures of any of the inhabitants, but clearly, from the size and shape of the furniture, they had been humanoid.
“Wow, this is a lot nicer than my room on the da Vinci. ”
“Same with mine on the Enterprise ,” Geordi said. “But I’ll bet, for this ship, this is small.”
“Again no bet,” she said.
Geordi moved toward a small room off the main one while she headed to where her tricorder showed her a clear space behind a bulkhead. As she approached, a door in the wall slid silently open, revealing odd, metallic cloth in various shapes and sizes hanging there, with other pieces on the floor, as if tossed there just recently. The metallic fibers scanned to be a variation on whatever metal it was that made up the hull of the ship. Alien clothing, Gomez thought, belonging to whoever built this ship.
She glanced back at Geordi as he came out of the bathroom and saw what she had found. “Okay. The Enterprise detected twelve life-forms on this whole ship. But there’s room for thousands— maybe hundreds of thousands—of passengers, passengers that were using these compartments. What happened to them?”
“I have no idea,” Geordi said, “but from the looks of everything, they haven’t been gone long. That room was a bathroom, I think, for someone with anatomy I think we’d recognize. It could use a good cleaning, unless that smell is some kind of air freshener. Looks like whoever left here intended to come back soon.”
She had to agree. This place looked as if it had been left only this morning. There was something else—there was a sense of alien luxury to the room. Gomez wished she’d brought Carol Abramowitz along—the alien culture expert. She’d be able to tell exactly what the room was used for. “Let’s keep moving.”
Geordi nodded.
“Commander?” Stevens’ voice called to her over the group channel.
“Go ahead,” she said as she and Geordi moved back out into the corridor and she pointed to their right to move farther down the wide corridor.
“We’ve run into three sealed emergency doors,” Stevens said. “In three different corridors. Looks like all the corridors were sealed off when the Enterprise ruptured the hull.”
Ahead of her, Gomez could see that she and Geordi were facing the same thing in this corridor. Chances were the sealed doors meant the rest of this ship was still pressurized and full of atmosphere. They were going to have to set up a way to get through those pressure doors without causing more decompression. Or get the transporter adjusted enough to beam to the other side. That would be the easiest, if they could figure out a way to get through this metal.
“Commander,” Corsi said, breaking in, “if we missed both the gravity and the atmosphere in our initial scans through this ship’s hull, we might have missed more crew as well.”
“I’m starting to realize that,” Gomez said. She knew exactly what she had to do. “Everyone move back to the edge of the blast hole. Gomez to da Vinci. Bring us home when you have clear signals.”
She and Geordi moved back toward the end of the hallway. Ten steps from the ragged edge, the transporter beam took them. In their first short foray into the belly of the beast, they had learned enough to know they needed to be better prepared before they came back.
And as far as she was concerned, that knowledge was very much worth the trip.
CHAPTER
5
Geordi glanced up as Lieutenant Vale poked her head into the panel he was inside; he was lying on his back, working on a sensor relay over his head. “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked.
He laughed. “Not lately,” he said, dropping the calibration tool on his chest and cracking his fingers.
In fact, now that she mentioned it, he couldn’t remember exactly how long it had been since he’d slept. He’d been on duty since before the distress call and the fight with the alien ship everyone was calling the Beast. Then, almost twelve hours of emergency repair work after the fight; then, ten hours of scanning the Beast while waiting for the da Vinci. Now they had been back onboard the da Vinci, after the first short mission, for almost six hours, working on the sensors and transporter, trying to find a way to get them to work through that alien metal. None of the engineers had slept, and it hadn’t occurred to him either.
“Well,” Vale said, “you are going to need to take a break pretty soon.”
“Friendship talking?” Geordi asked, smiling at her. “Or duty?”
“Both,” she said, her blue eyes showing him warmth and caring. “Captain Picard sent me along to watch your back and try to keep you out of trouble, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
Geordi laughed. “Noted. But, as you can tell, my back is safe at the moment.”
She laughed and scooted back out of the panel entrance as two people came up behind her.
“Thank—”
“—you,” the voices said to Vale. “We—”
“—won’t be long.”
“No problem,” Vale said. “I was finished.”
The two faces of 110 and 111 appeared in the entrance to the panel where Vale had been a moment before. 110 and 111 were the names of a linked pair of the computer-dependent race called Bynars. Geordi had heard of these two before meeting them. They were supposed to be two of the best computer experts anywhere, and somehow the pair had been assigned to the da Vinci as civilian consultants to the S.C.E.
How, Geordi had no idea, but it was very lucky they were here. Corrections and adjustments to the sensors that would have taken Geordi a day to figure out had taken the Bynars, with his and Stevens’ help, a little over two hours.
The only thing that annoyed Geordi about them was that they talked together, never completing an entire sentence alone. After the last number of hours working with and around the Bynars, Geordi could understand that maybe there would be a time when he would become accustomed to their manner of speaking. But that was a long way off.
“Are you—”
“—almost finished—”
“—with the—”
“—relay adjustments?”
“One moment,” Geordi said. He did two small final adjustments and checked over his work. The alien ship’s metal alloys had been blocking the sensors in much the same way as a shield’s harmonics did. But, by running computer models, the Bynars had found an exact band that should penetrate the blockage. Geordi figured it was going to work, but the question was how well. With luck, good enough to focus a transporter beam.
“Done. Coming out.” He scooted feet-first out of the panel as the two Bynars backed out of his way.
“We are—”
“—ready as well.”
Geordi nodded and tapped his combadge. “Commander, give it a try.”
“Affirmative,” Gomez’s voice came back. “Stand by.”
Geordi smiled at the two Bynars, who simply stood like robots and waited. Even Data had more personality than these two at times, and Data was an android.
“Bingo,” Gomez said. “Good work, you three. Get back up here, and we’ll see what we can see.”
Both Bynars smiled right along with Geordi, then waited for him to lead the way, even though it was their ship. Thankfully, as far as Geordi was con
cerned, they didn’t try to make small talk as they walked.
The S.C.E. team had a staging room near the da Vinci ’s bridge. Usually the room had only a large table and eleven chairs for the captain and the ten senior S.C.E. team members. But for this mission, the chairs had been pulled back against the wall and the center of the table had been rigged up to project a hologram of the alien ship. As they gathered details about the Beast, the computer would fill in the three-dimensional map floating above the table’s surface.
As Geordi and the Bynars entered the staging room, the hologram was slowly filling in. Not with great detail, but at least with deck shapings and sizes, like a thin sketch. Clearly, the sensors could get through the skin better than before. Not anywhere near as well as he would have liked, but enough for the moment.
Gomez and Stevens were watching, along with Carol Abramowitz, a short, black-haired woman who was the team’s specialist in intercultural relations, and P8 Blue, who was a structural specialist.
“We’re getting clear images of the top deck area,” Stevens said. “And the rings. But the deeper we go into the center of the ship, the worse it gets.”
“We will—”
“—continue to—”
“—make adjustments.”
“Please,” Gomez said.
As one, the Bynars nodded, turned, and left.
Carol stared at the image of the alien ship filling in slowly. “We’re going to need to find their central computer. Can you have the sensors locate and pinpoint it?”
“Sure,” Stevens said, his fingers going to work on the computer controls.
Geordi watched as detail after tiny detail appeared, thick near the surface, very light and sketchy toward the center. Geordi could tell it was one amazing ship. There had to be far over a hundred decks, with large open areas scattered throughout. And the rings looked more like observation decks than anything else. There were a number of very large, multiroom private quarters scattered in the rings, and a lot of large gathering areas. Clearly the ship had been designed by a race as advanced as the Federation, to carry thousands and thousands of beings.
Have Tech, Will Travel Page 3