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.