With the power pack in place, as well as the link from the Cutter now that the bridge had connected their cargo bay back to the main power grid, the lights in the hallways of Creeping Darkness began to take on their first hints of life in millennia.
That was enough of a positive sign that Nico and the team started to send the Corvette Class units out into the world ship to increase the number of hands and tentacles they had working on repairing the doors.
Once they had lights and doors working, they could start on repairs to the computer systems and see if they could get any of the secondary systems online. The kitchens had come partially online in the first zone that they had explored, so there was hope that more of them would also come online in other parts of the ship.
The whole thing would need an overhaul before anyone actually lived in it, but the more of the ship that they got online, the better the chances that it would be stable and warp capable once they got primary power back online.
Nico had already sent a team to document and destroy the summoning ritual in the main engineering bays, with the intention to study the results later. Her theory was that they served like the power conduits in the relays of a Portal device, and if they recreated it without all the blood, they could likely make it work again.
But not in the middle of a world ship, on a nice exposed platform where they could instantly annihilate anything that came through that portal.
Though, if they ran into a friendly Energy Being like the one that was guarding the Golden Legion, they might be making a mistake with a shoot first and then shoot again strategy. But the odds of that seemed to be pretty low if they took even a few seconds to examine what came through first.
However, that was a much lower priority than getting the World Ship working and getting back to inhabited space.
They hadn't gotten confirmation yet, but the attacks in the Alliance should have already started, and that meant that the attacks on their home Galaxy should have started as well. Denying their people even a bit of help was a waste, and Max knew that even two specialized Titan Class Mecha could change the fate of a planet.
It was what they had done at their last stop by helping the Golden Legion's protector. As soon as they destroyed the one attacking her, it brought her power level up high enough that she could evict all the other attackers from the surface.
A surprising number of lights were still functional once they got inward of the first zone of the World Ship, giving the team a much higher quality view of the progress than they had expected, and with the extra practice, the Androids were making short work of the repairs to the doors.
Once they had encountered an issue once, they wouldn't forget, and after a combined hundred doors, they had most of the critical failures memorized, so they could fix them in a matter of seconds with a Tech Adept Harness, or the tools on a drone.
The team was sending out more harnesses, sized to fit the Corvette Class units so that they could do the more intricate repairs on their own, instead of waiting for a drone, and with every passageway cleared, their productivity was increasing.
"Should we make more Androids or drones?" One of the team members asked Nico.
"Probably more drones. They are material efficient, and we need as many new bodies as possible as the grid expands." Nico agreed.
The Cutter was almost empty now, with only the Super Heavy Mecha left on board, which left them plenty of room to create more drones, fifty at a time and sent to spread out through the ship and explore more distant zones.
They wouldn't be able to get them online as efficiently, but being able to see the whole ship with their own sensors would give them a much better idea of what they were working with, as well as revealing any other possible sites where the Great Enemy had sabotaged the ship or tried additional rituals.
This part of the ship didn't have any large cargo holds, as they would have expected, only a few dozen launch bays, like the one that they were in. Those would be the priority targets for surviving gear to study, as well as likely locations for further battles to secure the ship.
It must have been mostly empty at the time of the attack, as there wasn't enough interior damage for there to have been a ship wide battle, but there had to have been more to it than just the attack on engineering.
"I've got a great idea. Since we're short on drones, and we still haven't gotten any internal sensors online, how about we have them make mobile scout cameras to stick in the hallways? We can make a security net out of that, and while there isn't much to see, it will tell us right away if the reports of malfunctioning doors are correct.
I've found a few that were working properly, but the position sensor wasn't working, so it always read as either open or closed." One of the human team members suggested.
"That's not a bad idea. The more we know about the ship, the better. Even if it is just whether the lights flicker when we try to fix the doors." Nico joked.
They did.
The power that they could send through the limited relays they were using was already reaching its limit, and they were going to have to get more power points built, or get the main ship's power back online soon if they were going to continue expanding their system tests at the rate they were going.
"We've got the engineering bay cleaned out now. I've got a full report on the fusion core as well. It really is completely purged. They must have dumped the contents of the reactor with the emergency override designed to prevent it from going supercritical with breached containment. The reactor itself appears undamaged, but we don't have enough of the computer systems online to make it work.
On the other hand, I think that I can get enough antimatter into the Warp Core for it to come back online and get primary power systems working." Nico informed the crew.
"Good work Lead Researcher! When do we start?"
