Max watched the drones progress down the halls for the next few hours, revealing that this wing of the ship appeared to be completely undamaged. That was the best news that they could have hoped for, and Nico thought that they would be ready to attempt a wireless power transfer within the next few minutes.
There was a power transfer capacitor in this cargo bay, where a piece of machinery used to be. Marks on the floor suggested that it was removed from the bay after the ship had been disabled, either by looters or a partial salvage operation to recover valuables from within the ship.
The hallways didn't show any signs of looting, everything that should be there was still in place, but the cargo bay had obviously been cleaned out, and then the door was shut behind them. Perhaps it was an emergency loading effort by the crew as they evacuated. That would explain the unrepaired damage and crude removal, as well as the lack of looting.
Max had been in dire circumstances on the surface when the ship was destroyed in his past life, so he had no idea what all had happened up there, only that the ship was reported lost in combat.
"Commander, we have done a circuit test, and it appears that we should be able to charge just this sector around the cargo bay. The breakers are tripped, or the power is manually disconnected only a few hundred metres away, in an orderly grid pattern that suggests the sectors were intended to be isolated when damaged to prevent a cascade failure of the power systems." The crew informed Max.
"Got it. See what you can get online, and then we can work from there once the investigations are finished." He agreed.
The team sent drones out with a power relay that they plugged into the connectors of the capacitor, and then wirelessly connected to the Cutter so that there was no risk of feedback or power surge should there be stored energy in the system.
From their research, the capacitor should charge to a specified voltage, and when it started passing power through the system, they could regulate their input to provide a constant supply for the portion of the World ship closest to them.
Everyone was on edge as the power supply worked to find the set voltage of the capacitor, then settled in and began to charge the system. They hoped that the capacitor would back feed into the rest of the ship, but they wouldn't know for sure if there was a protective measure against it in place.
Human ships allowed it, so that vessels or Mecha in the bay could power a damaged mothership, but there was nothing to suggest that this vessel would be the same way. There weren't any labels or warnings in place, or rather there were, but someone had painted over them the last time the bay was refreshed.
They might clean them off later to see if they were legible, but that could wait.
With the power flow stabilized, the capacitor began to quietly hum as it charged, and then after a few minutes the lights in the bay flickered on. Well, some of them flickered on. But it was enough to light up the bay.
Once they were on, the lights outside began to slowly come online as their ballasts recharged. Not many of them still worked properly after all this time, but the drones didn't need their lights to navigate most of the hallways anymore.
"Good news, Commander. We found a working control panel. It's not connected to anything, since the ship's mainframe is offline, and the link is disconnected outside this zone, but we can start working to decipher the programming and find out a bit more about this World Ship."
Max smiled at the crew member. If he were right, this would be a very familiar programming language to Nico, and to most of the others, as they had learned it to work on the Dyson Sphere. That would be an immense time savings for them, and they might actually manage to get more of the ship online in the next few days.
More of the drones were headed out into the ship to expand the exploration range as the number of hallways increased in the larger diameter search area, but so far, they hadn't reached anything that would stop them.
Which seemed quite strange to Max. There should have been automatic bulkheads activated to seal the halls in the case of a power outage or atmospheric breach, and he could see them in the camera feeds, but none of them had activated.
It was unnatural, but perhaps whoever had been here last had opened them up again to transport goods.
Still, it struck Max as odd that none of the security measures seemed to have activated when the ship was destroyed in combat.
Nothing in his memory should have caused a catastrophic failure like this. Even if the power was cut, the doors should still have sealed when the atmosphere was lost out of the massive breach on the far side of the ship.
[Drones, check the open rooms you pass on your way to the outer perimeter. Report back any that you find with cargo or undisturbed living quarters in them.] Max ordered.
That would slow down the deployment a little, but he wanted answers to the nagging feeling that something had gone very wrong here.
Nico gave Max a curious look as he changed the orders, but they had all wanted to see what was in the rooms, so nobody was going to actually complain that the next wave of drones to the front was going to be a bit slow to arrive. If they did find something good inside even one of the rooms, they would have days and days worth of data to analyze.
Max had one particular room in mind, and he made sure to route a drone past it to see if it was open. If he remembered right, the dorm that he had been in didn't have a door on it, it was open to the common area at all times. If the drone looked inside, it should find a few seemingly worthless items that would give valuable historical references to them here and now.
