Max double-checked the seals on his Mobile Suit and the function of the attached Tech Adept Harness. Normally, he didn't equip the multi-armed toolkit, but there was a chance that he might have to fix doors, or even the bolts that should have blown out during the emergency decommissioning of the vessel.
The harness also contained various weapons, but even the most pessimistic of their team members didn't see any likelihood that they would be needing that during the walk to the bridge. There were no signs of energy beings on the ship, and nothing else could conceivably have survived all this time given the condition of the ship.
There were records of operational Colony Ships lasting from unknown times to the present among the Alliance species. Some species had splintered during their initial expansion, and a subsection of them had chosen to remain on board the vessels permanently, never choosing a planet and becoming a space faring culture.
The humans had similar groups, but they were all from known origins, and not quite so long aboard their homes in the void.
Max ignored their chatter as he walked out of the cargo bay, headed for the bridge of the World Ship. He was cheating a bit, since he didn't need so much time to analyze the structures he was passing to make sure that they were actually intact. The gravity control of the Tech Adept Harness was incredibly agile, so he was using it to turn his walk into a fractional gravity bouncing lope that covered a half dozen metres per step.
It was much more efficient than using a mild magnetic field to stick himself to the floor, and the bulk of the world ship wouldn't mess up his sense of direction this way.
The World Ship was in a gentle rotation, but given its size, that still created a slight but noticeable outward pull that tried to draw everything to the wall of the ship if you left it floating in the middle of the room.
Max passed through the first zone without incident, as all the doors were already fixed and verified, but in the second zone, some of the newly repaired doors didn't want to open again now that they had gotten them closed for the first time.
"We should have known that this would happen. Do you have all the tools that you need to fix the door?" Nico asked as Max got to work repairing another of the mechanisms.
"Yeah, that's not a problem. It's just a shorted out wire. It looks like there was some condensation and the heat of the loose wire caused it to arc and blow the fuse. I'll have it fixed in a second."
Sure enough, the door slid open only a few seconds later, and Max was back on his way.
Nico had the androids and drones along the path making sure that everything was working before he arrived, not wanting to wait even a few extra minutes for him to get to the bridge and find out what sort of shape the emergency failsafe was in.
The doors to the bridge had been opened, and the area had been carefully cleaned by the drones before Max arrived, hoping to prevent another incident where hidden moisture might fry an important circuit. If they couldn't find the answers to the failsafe situation here on the bridge, then they would have to manually search every single support pillar on the ship and find out if any of them had blown, then repair all the damage.
That was not anyone's idea of a fun day, or week, as the case would more likely be.
[I'm at the console in the Admiral's quarters now. The power is on and I'm waiting for the bootup sequence to finish. Wan Doze Vista it says the operating system is called.] Max reported back to the others.
The words weren't familiar to any of them, just a jumble of noises, so they must be some sort of brand name or corporate slogan that didn't translate to the common language.
[This system has a terrible boot up time, but it looks like it's coming online now. Oh, never mind, it's running a diagnostic and opening boot up services.] Max narrated as he watched the console slowly work its way through the procedure.
Presumably, this console was never intended to be turned off, so you would not have to go through this process in an emergency, but still, it was a horribly inefficient solution to security.
[Alright, we're in, and it's recognized me as the Admiral. It looks like the actual terminal is a separate system from the rest of the ship's computer. There is a whole separate system for this. It's not even in the same language, this might take a minute.] Max informed the others.
The language wasn't difficult to decipher, it seemed to be some sort of pidgin or creole based on the same root language, presumably a local dialect of some sort. Max didn't recall that from his past life, but then all communication aboard the ship had to be done in the official language, and the world he had come from used it as their own.
Others certainly existed, he just hadn't expected to see one as the operating language of an Admiral's personal workstation.
There were only a few options available, the self-destruct, a full system lockdown, which was currently active, and a link to the ship's AI, which was listed as offline.
First, Max brought up the status of the Self Destruct.
[Please repeat the password after the 5-second mark passes]
[Password input timed out: Operation Cancelled]
"Ladies? I think that the self-destruct cancelled because the Admiral had locked himself in the airlock too early. It wanted him to repeat the password when there were five seconds on the timer, but he never did." Max informed the team, while trying not to laugh.
"The Admiral isn't among the bodies that we brought back from the airlock. Unless there was someone else on the bridge, he wasn't there for the final moments. Whoever set the timer might not have known about the final verification." Nico suggested.
"Well, that's a bonus for us. I'll start checking on the other functions that we have available."
