Nico led the ship into the intact cargo bay, then closed the bay doors behind them and sealed the room with the shields of the Cutter. Now, nothing would be coming in or out, and they wouldn't accidentally contaminate the rest of the ship with their presence.
They might have come from space, but the Cutter was just on the surface of a planet, and having any sort of spores, dirt or other biomatter in the samples would give them completely useless research data as they searched through the World Ship Creeping Night.
"Alright, first things first. We need to get a cleansing station set up so that we can start sending drones through the hallways without contamination. Then we can start on the power link to see how much damage has been done to the vessel's power grid.
I'm sure that Nico and the Innu will love that part of the job, so the rest of you will be with me on the mapping project.
We will be making a full hallway grid of the immediate area before we attempt to enter any rooms. Even if the doors are open, keep the drones in the hallway and passively record the interior of the spaces.
Once we have a basic layout of the area, then we can send a second wave to explore in more depth.
With a little luck, the interior will be navigable and mostly intact, without piles of bodies everywhere to hinder our cleanup and renovation efforts. Just stick to the plan and everything will be completed eventually." Max instructed.
The team laughed at the "eventually". The renovation of a world ship was a lifelong endeavour. By the time that you finished, it was usually time to start again on the most outdated sections, and you just kept working.
That didn't make them hesitate, they started on the cleansing station right away, preparing the bay to send out the smaller crab drones for the exploration phase.
If the hallways weren't locked down, then they should be able to explore fairly rapidly with so many drones at their disposal, even with the size of the ship.
The best that they could hope for was that the ship had managed to seal some areas, and that they had held all this time, so they could get a sample of the atmosphere that the species who created it had preferred. But that was a dangerous dream, as the retained atmosphere would inevitably mean retained moisture, corrosion, oxidation, and massive damage to the interior of the ship until a breach had occurred, and the atmosphere was vented into space.
It was possible that the ship was impervious to corrosion, but that was extremely unlikely, and would put it on the level of the monomolecular armour that they had recently developed. If there was an alien species with that sort of technology in the past, they would rather not find out what sort of enemy could have brought their entire civilization to ruin.
Max already knew the answer to that, but he wasn't going to tell the others until it was actually necessary. They would be happier not knowing.
"Commander, the cleansing station is ready. Should we start to deploy the drones now?"
Max double-checked the barrier they had set up and gave the team a thumbs up to begin the work, releasing a steady stream of crab drones out of the Cutter and into the airless cargo bay to begin their exploration.
The first few made their way through the open door to the main hallway, illuminating their way with their laser emitters turned all the way down to wide pattern floodlights for better visible spectrum footage. The first hallway was immaculate, preserved as an airless void, and just as spotless as the day that it left service.
The flat blue floors and walls, which Max recalled as being the local equivalent to Kepler military's drab green building interiors, were completely undamaged. Even the paint wasn't peeling, though there were some spots of frost on it, where the lingering moisture had frozen before the atmosphere had completely evacuated.
Then Max saw the location markers. The first drone had just turned down the hallways for the 1337 Mechanized Infantry Barracks, very close to where Max had been assigned when he was on this vessel before the battle of Canton.
That meant that this whole area should have been clear, assuming that this was the same ship, from the same timeline, and that it ended as his memories said that it did. With all that he knew about the Eternal War, his memories might have been from before the time reset, in which case, everything about this ship could be entirely different.
It was a strange sense of disassociation, the familiarity mixed with the uncertainty that everything was as he remembered.
The drones spread in a grid pattern around the cargo bay, inspecting the other bays, many of which were open, and travelling down the halls in a completely predictable pattern.
"You know, whoever designed this place would get along well with the Giants. The perfect grid pattern, the completely logical numbering systems, the rigid structure, it fits them to a tee." One of the human team members laughed.
But she had a point. The doorways were all well over human standard size, and Max was certain that there were no Mecha allowed in this area of the ship. If they had been, the floor wouldn't have been painted. Mecha feet ruined paint in seconds, even with rubber guards on them.
But then, Max was fairly sure that he wasn't human as he knew them during his past life either, so maybe he could learn something that would fill in the missing pieces while he was here. That would be wonderful. It was one of the last missing details in his mind, like Nico's sense of self.
He had started with nothing but his morality and language skills, where she had started with everything but her morality and personal memories. But now he had most of his memory back, and Nico had filled in most of the blanks, other than exactly who and what she was.
Once she recalled that, things might change, but hopefully, she had been her new self long enough that the last personal memories wouldn't change much.
