After a lot of crawling around conduits and splicing cables together, I was able to patch into surveillance feeds to get a topside view.
The experience wasn't like watching archival records, but it was definitely educational.
For one thing, I confirmed that some of the crew were still alive up there-I called out when I saw Perri working on a terminal junction before I remembered that she couldn't hear me.
Closer to the junction with the core, it's obvious that progress stalled out on the engineering project to detach our ring.
It looks like the crew had to abandon their work sites, though I'm hoping that's not for good-that sort of thing is way beyond my abilities, and these biomes can only stay uncontaminated for so long if we can't put some space between us and whatever's taking over our sister ring.