Today Tom Woods showed me the maintainer outpost we had visited months ago and what work they have done while I was away. They´ve managed to get most of the systems working again. Two heavy suits, around a dozen medium suits and over 30 light suits are ready to use.
The expedition has made three visits to ages of unknown security status (read: ages without a maintainer stamp), and so far everything went fine.
They followed security protocols set up by the original maintainers (which were quite cautious) and managed to define the status of the three ages they visited to “relatively safe”.
One of the ages is especially interesting: the linking book seems to link to the bottom of a sea, so visiting it without the most hardy suits would be suicide. These are able to resist the immense pressure of that environment.
We aren´t sure if these bulky, heavy suits are made of Nara, Deretheni or some other durable kind of D’ni stone, personally, I suspect it to be Deretheni (Nara would be too heavy, I suppose.)
If you have no idea what I´m talking about: You can find more information about the different D’ni stones at the guild of archivists website: http://www.dpwr.net.
Of course, there is a lot more information at this site, I recommend to everyone to read the excellent articles there!