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.
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.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter