With the new knowledge that the inhabitants of this ship were the ancestors of both of their species, the team redoubled their efforts to thoroughly inspect every bit of the world ship. Even if it meant slowing their progress in mapping the vessel, learning as much as they could about the former inhabitants took priority over everything else.

The only other project that was still getting any attention was their effort to bring more of the power system back online so that they could control the lights and doorways in more of the World Ship to expand their search.

So far, they had lights on in the immediate area, but there was a manual disconnect somewhere that was preventing the operation of the blast and airlock doors. It was a strange situation, and Nico couldn't understand why all the doors would have been manually disconnected and forced open.

It was completely contrary to any sort of standard procedure for evacuation or fire safety, it didn't even make sense from a decommissioning standpoint, as the uncontrolled evacuation of the atmosphere would cause additional damage to the ship that could have been prevented. If you wanted the ship in stasis with the expectation that you would try to get it back later, it wasn't the right choice, but it had been done anyhow.

"Maybe we just need to go and manually reset the doors in the main corridors?" Max suggested when they came to another dead end with their attempts to get the system back online.

"Why would they manually lock them all open, though? If they haven't been, it would just be a waste of time." One of the researchers pointed out.

Max nodded. "I've been thinking about it, and I believe I know what they were doing. They were scuttling the ship. They knew that it was doomed, and they didn't want the enemy to have it, so they made it as hard as possible to get it working again.

It's nearly impossible to get the atmospheric systems back online even if you have patched the holes in the hull unless you can properly section off the ship and pressurize it by sections.

Without that ability to block the corridors and open all the other doors, you will end up with pressure zones all over the ship which will cause huge structural strains. So, if you expected the enemy to be able to use your equipment, and you wanted to prevent that, you would have to scuttle the ship and make it as hard as possible to repair if you couldn't completely destroy it.

I think that the main power was already off, so they couldn't detonate any remaining weapons to blow the World Ship to pieces, so they did the next best thing. They just made it as annoying as possible for the enemy to determine what they had done to sabotage the efforts to bring it back online."

The realization that after all the millennia that had passed, they would be the ones who would have to deal with the countermeasures intended to keep the Great Enemy from using the ship against its former masters slowly sank in, and the team began to consider just how much manpower it was going to take to get everything working so they could take this ship home with them.

Patching the hull was the least of their problems, but it was still a problem, and to accomplish that, they would have to seal off a whole section of the ship which was over forty kilometres long. Even if they sent the Androids, that was going to be a nightmare if they didn't find a way to get the doors working remotely.

"Maybe we need to start deploying the androids? There aren't enough of us to reset all the doors." Nico sighed. lights

She had been certain that she could find a way to get them back online remotely, but it just wasn't happening, no matter what she did. They were definitely separated by a mechanical switch.

"Alright, we can deploy them. I will have the androids in the Corvette Class units head out to check the doors in the main hallways. They're all large enough for a five-metre tall Mecha. Once the main hallways are working, we can move onto the other areas.

Only inside the Mecha for now, though. I don't know if we're going to have high radiation areas inside the ship, and we don't even know where it has been, so there might be trapped nebula gas in some regions still. Anything is possible for a vessel that has travelled so far unoccupied." Max agreed.

The team members all cheered at the possibility that they would finally make some headway. There was some hope that once they had a whole hallway of blast doors online, they would regain control of one of the subcomputers that operated them. They didn't have access to any computer systems on the vessel so far, and especially for the Innu and Nico, that was the part they were most excited about.

The Mecha started to move out of the cargo bay and into the airless hallways of the World ship, and within minutes the first of the doors came online.

[Commanders. There are some issues with the activation sequence for various doors. It appears that the decommissioning was performed with a large blunt object.] One of the Mecha Squad leaders reported with typical Android bluntness.

[What is the estimated time to repair the manual disarming switch?] Max replied.historical

[Estimated time to repair is seven minutes per door after the repair process is verified.]

[You have permission to repair the door mechanisms. Keep us updated on the progress.]

Slowly, the other doors began to come online as the androids got the mechanisms repaired, and they could finally control at least the first few sections of the ship's airlock system from the cargo bay, but there was still no sign of a computer system that might control them, leading Nico to speculate that the ship might have been running on an AI, and didn't have separate processors for different subsystems.

That was going to make getting all the essential functions online a much longer process.