Nico worked to reinforce the shielding on the Cutter, just in case the ship wasn't as dead as their scanners said it was, while Max guided the team toward the core of the ship, avoiding the routes which were most likely to be blocked by defenders or saboteurs trying to keep others out of the core engineering areas.
The blockades that they did see were entirely too predictable to have been set by actual trained professionals. Whoever had sabotaged the ship had only gone for the most obvious of blockades, and anyone who knew the layout of the vessel would have known better than to leave all the crew access routes open.
That suggested that whoever it was, they were either very new, or had sneaked onto the ship at some point before the battle.
Max didn't recall any warnings about intruders in his past life, but the more he thought about it, the more certain he became that this sort of world ship had conscripts on it to do menial tasks. They served a term of hard labour, and then they were dropped back off at their home world, or another port of their choosing.
That must have been the source of the infiltration. They were limited in their access, but if they were loyal to the Great Enemy, they would have waited until the most vulnerable moment, when the ship was under attack, and fought to the death to try to take out the ship.
Once the team opened the doors to the engineering airlocks, they found the first signs of the fight for control of the ship. Dozens of bodies lay scattered around the airless room, all mangled, and strange runes and circles were drawn on every surface in blood.
Nico looked over his shoulder at the video feed from the Mecha.
"Wow, didn't expect to see that here. We've definitely seen those before, in the tunnels where the bloody warriors were trying to summon energy beings into our layer. If that's what happened on this ship, no wonder things turned bad so quickly that the crew couldn't stop them.
Even purging the atmosphere from Engineering wouldn't stop an incursion by Energy Beings, and there's no telling how many of them made it on board before the ritual was stopped or ran out of sacrifices." She noted.
"Yeah, I had thought it was some renegade conscripts, but it looks like a death cult. What a mess. I don't want to mess it up so that we can record it for our records. If it is what it looks like, it might be the first successful Energy Being summoning that we've found and managed to record." Max replied.
"So you're going to look for another way in?" She asked.
Max shook his head. "I will send the small drones with gravity control ahead to look for a clear path and map the region. They can move freely without disturbing anything. If they find a way to get the Mecha in, that would be perfect, if not, they can move them through to a clear area. The Corvette Class units are decent in fractional gravity, but their fine position control uses thrusters, which could damage the evidence."
The drones skittered forward, extending their limbs to climb up the walls and across the ceiling, giving themselves a solid perch in case there were remnants of functional gravity plating, or a gravitational anomaly caused by the power core still present here.
The entire engineering area was covered in bloody drawings, and Max counted nearly a thousand bodies in the area, with the self drawn blood warpaint on some marking them as the attackers.
From the pattern, it looked like most of them died in battle, but the attackers had won this fight, and the last few had sacrificed themselves at the very end, in orderly rows around the power core.
"Do we have data on the core yet?" One of the cats asked nervously.
They didn't quite understand what a fusion core was, but it sounded dangerous, and after their experience at home, they weren't big fans of dangerous things.
"I'm examining it now. There is no external damage to the core that I can see. Just a lot of blood on the outside, but that's not a real problem, and wouldn't affect the function.
Oh, there we are, the main control screen is intact." Max narrated.
He led the drone over, and trickled power into the control panel.
The readings came up, and Max narrated them to the crew.
"We have an intact containment structure, with a Dyson Sphere type sustained fusion reactor in place. The total contents of the reactor are... zero.
The Fusion core was purged before the self-destruct sequence was set.
It looks like they used the power from the reactor to do their summoning and open the portal, then they purged it into space. There is no lingering danger from this reactor core, so I will send the drone over to the Warp Core."
The drone floated through the room, up to the Warp Core, which was still encased in a faintly glowing energy barrier.
"We have power. The Warp Core is still functional, but offline. Let's see what we have here. A matter antimatter reactor, similar to our own crystalline structure antimatter Warp Drives in construction. It has been taken offline, and is at minimum containment, waiting for the explosion of the Fusion Core to breach its barriers and set off a chain reaction.
The programming language is the same as for the Dyson Sphere, so I will start working to bring it back online and route power through it to the explored regions, but around the Fusion Core and the rest of the engineering district.
We don't need any incidents with those runes summoning an energy being to us, or giving away our position." He informed them.
The Warp Core glowed more brightly for a second and then returned to its dim stasis state.
"Correction, I will not bring it online because it has been depleted to power saving mode, and no longer has the antimatter available to bring itself back online. But we can route power from the power pack that I sent to the bridge through these relays, and that will let us bring the basic functions of the ship online.
The power pack won't run much, but we should be able to get lights in the regions where we're working, and test all the doors in sections.
The drones that are on the bridge will start on that as soon as the relay is verified.
Congratulations, the ship is now under our control, such as it is."
For both Reavers and Innu salvagers, the standard was the same. If you held the bridge and engineering uncontested, then you had control of the ship. Even if it wasn't going anywhere under its own power in the near future.
Nico joined in the round of joyful hugs that passed through the team, and then brought up the full diagram of the ship, as determined by the map and the few functional sensors that the power pack had brought online.
"Alright. Now it's time to get down to business. Let's see about closing off that breach in the outer hull and expanding the search zone."
