The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [57]
“They’ve got nothing but time, Will, hundreds of years between planetfalls,” Troi said. “You can do a lot of finicky maintenance when you’ve got that kind of time, even on a huge ship such as this one.”
“I suppose,” Riker said. “Well, shall we? The exit should be over this way. Our survey showed this portal leads to a short passage—here we are—that opens up onto a large gangway that eventually takes us into the gray zone. There’s the hatch.” He grinned. “I’m actually looking forward to this.”
“Don’t expect too much, Will,” Troi cautioned him. “Every passageway we saw on our way to the conference with the Presider was stark, confining, and utterly functional. Everything was bare metal. We didn’t see a lick of ornamentation between the landing bay and the meeting room.”
“This may be more of the same,” Riker said. “Despite what we saw back there in the storage room, I wouldn’t expect the Krann to spend much of their time on cosmetics. From what you and the captain said at the mission briefing, they seem to be an austere people—all business, no time for frills.”
They now stood in front of the hatch. There was a small, tapered red handle set into the middle of the door. “See that?” Riker asked. “I think it should open for us if I do this—”
“Will?” Troi suddenly said. “Be careful—”
The door smoothly slid aside, and there was a sudden blast of light and a roar of noise.
“Eh?” Riker grunted, poking his head through the hatchway. He was looking at a high, wide, brightly lighted and colorful corridor filled with hundreds upon hundreds of gaily dressed people of all ages bound on unknown errands or no errands at all. A broad, grassy strip dotted with benches divided one side of the corridor from the other. There seemed to be a convention that everyone heading in the same direction walked on the left. Open areas of various sizes were set into the walls and ran up and down the sides of the corridor. The people inside the stalls were conducting some sort of business—retail sales, mostly, from the look of things.
“Deanna?” Riker’s tone was puzzled. “I was expecting something a little bit different from this. It looks like Mardi Gras out here.”
“I don’t understand it,” Troi said, shaking her head. She looked up and down the corridor. The ceiling was at least twenty meters over their heads, and there was no knowing how long the corridor was, as both ends curved gently up and away into the distance. “We saw nothing even remotely like this on our way in or out. We must have been prevented from seeing it.”
“I think this corridor must circle the entire flagship, just under the hull,” Riker said. “Notice the curvature? It seems just about right for this section of the ship. You could walk around the whole thing, if you wanted to.”
A casually dressed older man strolling by the open hatchway caught sight of Riker and Troi standing there. “Hey, you two!” he called to them happily. “Aren’t you just a little overdressed?”
Not knowing what else to do, Riker smiled and waved at him, and Troi followed suit. The man waved back and walked on. “We’re going to have to get out of these clothes,” Riker told Troi in low tones. “None of these people is wearing an outfit anything like these. Everyone’s dressed very casually. We’re way too conspicuous. Perhaps we’ve broken some cultural rule without knowing it—like wearing a tuxedo to the beach, maybe.” He sighed. “We could have beamed over wearing our off-duty clothes, and we’d have been all right. They’d have been close enough.”
“Do you want to transport back?” Troi asked him.
“No,” came Riker’s quick reply. “You don’t learn anything that way. Let’s find out what we can do about our situation first.” He pointed. “I think I may see something helpful about sixty, seventy meters down that