The two arcanists of the group move onto the tender to investigate it while Fork scouts ahead. It's a weird mix of the organic, the arcane, and the unfamiliar technology the illithid have created or stolen from other worlds. The main cabin is a huge nautilus shell, and tentacles depend from the other end, but the deck is solid underfoot and the shell has a door. There are furled gossamer wings to either side, which you are able to recognize as astral sails; this thing can move on invisible arcane winds.
The door is unlocked, but strange and tricky to open; Ttharg, of all people, points out where the switch is. The cabin looks big enough to accommodate one person comfortably or four in a slightly cramped fashion; if you piled people onto the deck it could maybe take eight total at a pinch. At a table with greasy boot prints you see the remains of some kind of card game the orc was playing; there are five other hands. Was he playing with his plasmoids?
You find a maintenance log that is incomprehensible to Nibum and perfectly clear to Servius; perfectly clear and fairly dull. Leafing through it and counting names, you can see that the orcs use a rotational schedule. From the doodles you can tell that tender maintenance is one of the more boring jobs on the rig. All in all, it looks like about 24 technicians and 6 supervisors rotate through, night and day, which means some of that thirty are likely asleep right now. Weekly, the log is countersigned by an overseer, and you see three different names. 33 orcs? Plus maybe more who aren't part of the maintenance rotation?
Mounted in the center of the cabin is a simple chair, bolted to the ground. When you gingerly sit in it, illusions spring to life in front of you. You are able to intuit fairly easily that these are controls for the tender. In addition to the astral sails, there is a water jet that can propel it through the water. The boat moves shell first, which is opposite what you might have imagined. You find controls for large tools that can operated by the tentacles; welders, saws, scrapers, buffers. It does not look like the tender is designed to leave the rig; you find a display for the battery level, which shows it is fully charged and indeed still charging while docked.
It looks like the tender
can levitate above the surface of the water, but not far; no higher perhaps than the rings of the docks. There are definitively, no weapons.
Moving beyond the displays to look at the technology, it seems like power is stored in the spiral of the shell. You think between the two of you you could figure out how to charge it if you took it away from the refuelling station. You also find a bad-smelling hopper that seems to be composting organic material, perhaps for the living parts of the ship.
Tucked into a narrow gap you find a few vials of the drug ink; orcs are dependent on it, and it is dealt out to them in very limited quantities by their masters. Some orc has squirreled away a few vials here. Two of them are empty but two are full of murky evil fluid.