He walked into a hallway of this ship, looking for Max. The hallway was illuminated by uncovered glowing tubes on the ceiling, the floors appeared to just be grate coverings. and the walls were a plain dull gray metal. Clearly no luxury ship, but a utilitarian one. His footsteps made a clanking sound as he walked upon the grating, which revealed wires and pipes and other devices lying below the floor. It seemed to him that this was for easy access to repair damaged wiring.
He found Max in the room at the end of the corridor, who was sitting at an information station, and looked to be pondering something. He spoke and stood as Mark approached. “Do you want to take a look at this thing? I’ve been trying to get it to tell me what’s wrong with the engines, and have had no luck at all.”
“Sure,” Mark said and sat down, absorbed by the terminal. After searching through menus for a few moments, he figured out the problem with the engines.
“A common feeder valve is broken. However, it can be replaced. The engine is the same model as the engines on our ship are. I remember at least that, I was always inspecting and performing any needed maintenance on them. If we don’t have any in the stores on this ship, the we might be able to just pull the valve from one of the engines itself on ours. That would require going back outside though.” Mark reported.
“Excellent,” Max exclaimed. “Let’s get those parts.”
“Before we do that, I want to take a look at this ship first,” Mark wanted to know what its primary purpose was.
Turning back the screen, he quickly brought up the ships manifest, and looked for any logs. Unfortunately, no one had left any logs in the ships databanks.
“Looks like this was an escape vessel. This is showing quite a few cryopods in the ship, and only a few living quarters.”
“Cryopods?”
“Yes, escape ships like this one freeze their refugees, since you can pack a lot more of frozen bodies in a close space that you can animated living ones. Not to mention the extra life support functions that would be needed to support more than a skeleton crew of animated people.”
“Ah. Right. We should get those spare parts,” Max said. He looked around, and noticed that the room they were in had a very large number of doors. All of them identical. “Do you remember which way we came in?”
“I think it was through the door over there,” Mark put the terminal to standby and stood up. He opened the door to a nondescript hallway, which looked exactly like the one he remembered walking down to get to the computer room. “This way.”