Have Tech, Will Travel (SCE Books 1-4) - Keith R. A. DeCandido_. [et al.] [16]
Geordi shook his head and glanced at her. “No matter what we find in this thing, I’m putting in a vote right now that this Beast be towed to a nearby starbase and repaired. It would be a shame to toss this into a sun.”
“I’ll second that,” Corsi said.
Gomez glanced at her hard-edged security chief. It wasn’t often Corsi was awed by anything, but clearly this was one of those times.
Gomez had to admit, she was just as awed. And now even more determined to discover where the passengers of this ship had gone. And why the twelve remaining crew had attacked a colony.
Once she found out the answers to those questions, she would make the decision as to what would happen to this fantastically beautiful and powerful alien cruise ship.
CHAPTER
7
For some reason, even though he was now one hundred percent convinced that the Beast was an alien cruise ship, designed for tourists, that information didn’t calm Geordi’s uneasy feeling about it.
After exploring the spectacular observation decks on the rings, which was like walking in open space under the incredible windows, Gomez had recalled all the teams to wait for the results of the computer download.
Twenty minutes later, after the download had been completed, Stevens and the Bynars had meshed the information from the da Vinci scans with the downloaded information from the Beast and fed it all to the holo-image of the ship in the staging room.
They now had a mostly clear deck plan of the Beast, one they could focus in on in very decent detail in certain areas. In other areas, it still showed nothing. It was those black spaces Geordi was the most worried about. Still, the detail of the holomap was going to make their job a lot easier, and let them get to working on the real questions much faster. And Geordi had a sneaking hunch a lot of those questions would be answered in the engineering section of the ship, and by accessing the main computer, not in the passenger sections.
But the problem was that the download from the directional computers on the Beast only showed public areas, calling the support areas private. Most of the lower decks were labeled support areas. And since the da Vinci scans were still having problems getting all the way to the center of the Beast, there were still big empty areas in the center of the hologram image.
“Okay, people,” Gomez said, getting the attention of the entire S.C.E. team and Captain Gold, who were all standing around the table, talking and discussing the alien ship.
For Geordi, this was the first time he had seen the entire team together. It was an impressive group of talent and skills Gomez had put together. Top-ranked engineers, two of the leading computer experts in the Federation, respected specialists in intercultural relations and languages, a great flagship with an experienced captain, and some top security people. Geordi was glad he had gotten this chance to work with them.
The only member he hadn’t met was the sternfaced Dr. Elizabeth Lense, but he knew her by reputation. She had served on the Lexington and graduated from her medical class as valedictorian, the same class that had contained Dr. Julian Bashir. Dr. Crusher had been raving about a couple of Lense’s recent medical papers.
Lieutenant Vale moved over and stood silently beside him as Gomez went on.
“Since the Beast ’s main control room was destroyed, we’re going to have to get to the secondary control room, and the engineering section. From what we’ve learned from our scans, combined with the computer download, the secondary control room should be on deck ninety, and the engineering sections might fill the five decks below that.”
“Are those decks still outside of transporter range?” Carol asked.
Gomez glanced at the Bynars.
“We have—”
“—made adjustments—”
“—but cannot—”
“—penetrate past—”
“—deck sixty.”
“So we go the rest of the way without a safety net,” Gomez said, glancing