With the fear of losing contact with more possible discoveries fresh in his mind, Max worked to integrate the sensors of the Cutter and the Shuttles with the newly awakened sensors of the World ship to search for any signs of additional hidden vessels or debris.
The World Ship didn't have much online of its own yet, but with the Cutter in the bay linked to all the shuttles which were encircling the larger vessel to make repairs, they had a fairly comprehensive suite to work with.
They could detect the distortion of the Optical Arrays, Max was fairly certain, but he was still holding hope that the World Ship might be able to do better than that and actually locate anything that might still be nearby.
With the sensors tuned to their maximum, the display was picking up everything from space dust to bits of floating debris from the World Ship. Then, it picked up a distortion, and the World Ship's computer cheerfully announced that it had contact with another of its fleet's vessels.
It was powered down and lacking any ability to respond, but the optical array was still operational, and linked to the unknown vessel's computer. That was enough that the World Ship managed to patch a link through to its communications sensors and send enough power to get an interior camera online.
What he found was carnage. The vessel was a Lander, similar to the ones that Kepler used to drop Mecha into combat, but a large explosion had gone off in the middle of the space, causing a minor hull breach and blasting the occupants against the walls in various states of disassembly.
The most likely scenario was that one of the infiltrators had managed to make it on board with a suicide vest, ending the vessel's journey before it had even begun.
But, Max tasked a shuttle to bring it to an airlock anyhow, and then put a single tack weld on to hold it in place so that it didn't float away before they could inspect it.
With one vessel found so easily, Max had hope that there would be more for him to find in the vicinity, vessels that either hadn't made it away from the World Ship before it went to warp, or ones that had been jettisoned by traitors after it was disabled. Without an external source of propulsion, such objects would naturally be drawn back by the miniscule gravitational pull of the larger vessel, and might still be somewhere nearby.
So, the scans continued, and as expected, they found more and more pieces of debris as they searched further out. After a solid hour of searching, they located another Optical Array hiding something fairly large. It was larger than the field around the lander, so it might be an attack craft, or other interceptor class vessel. It could be a Cutter Class ship, but that seemed unlikely, even though the field was large enough to hold one. Then, the scan found four more tiny fields, which couldn't be larger than an attack craft.
All of these intact and functional emitters were going to be a treasure trove for Nico and the others, who were hoping to produce some of their own, now that they knew the devices could hide vessels from most known scanners.
The smaller ones especially, as they could be fitted to almost any vessel that the Reavers had, making them all difficult to track, and allowing them to ambush the forces of the Great Enemy with much greater ease.
The World Ship linked to the larger field, establishing communications, but what it found was not a ship, or anything like it. Instead, it found the wreck of a Titan Class Mecha.
At the time, those were known as the Emperor Class, and they were the most feared combat equipment that you were likely to see on a battlefield. The God Class Mecha were nearly a myth to the common soldier, and were a myth to many of the worlds in the known universe, who believed that their very existence was propaganda.
But the Emperor Class Mecha were star killers, capable of efficiently wiping out all life in a solar system single-handedly if they weren't met with equivalent force.
Max immediately sent out one of the larger drones on a recovery mission.
"Nico, heads up, we've got an ancient Titan Class Mecha incoming to our position. I will have it dropped in the bay until we've had a chance to sanitize it and make sure it isn't carrying anything infectious or corrupted by the Energy Beings." Max informed his partner.
"A new Mecha design, all for me?" She cheered, while the other team members booed him for giving her explicit permission to be the first to study it.
"You all complain, but she knows where I sleep." Max joked, calming the team down and allowing them to focus on their work.
They all knew that Nico wouldn't keep it from them forever, and they still had work to do guiding the Shuttles to their repair targets, and scanning to make sure nothing was missed.
Even a pinhole would be a disaster when they tried to pressurize the ship, and a hidden structural flaw below the surface might as well be a time bomb, set to go off at random.
Max kept searching the area as Nico performed a thorough external examination of their new toy, but there wasn't anything more of interest to be found.
The other fields hadn't responded to the World Ship's attempts to establish communications. Either they were too damaged, or they had a safety mechanism in place to prevent outside activation of the unit. But, the drone was sent out over and over to recover the objects, which turned out to be a wing of four attack craft, with long deceased pilots inside.
The fifth of their wing had already been found, broken to scrap by an impact and without its optical barrier. Why they had followed along and remained so close to the World Ship was a mystery, but the four small craft were brought in next to the Titan Class Mecha, so that Nico and the others could examine them at their leisure and get more answers about the sequence of events that had led to their current situation.
