Have Tech, Will Travel (SCE Books 1-4) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [10]
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