>>5254744EV should be 2. Fuck.
>>5253528>>5253626>>5253794>>5253800 You pull the salvage unit back to your base-station and order a recon drone to take its place. The video feed improves dramatically. Even from kilometers away, the multi-spectral surveillance suite carried by into the hovering drone is powerful enough to track individual villagers by identifying facial features and stride patterns. As one side of the display panel streams annotated video, the opposite side pulses with the saturated glow of a false-color thermal readout.
Over the next few hours, the drone follows the group as they navigate back through the clearing, move past the front gate, and hurry into the town church. They stay there overnight.
The next morning, the drone observes fifty well-dressed worshipers exit the church, chatting casually as they make their way back to the humble housing district. Its surveillance system helpfully informs you that - of those fifty churchgoers - none of them match the stride patterns or facial features of group you were originally tracking.
This observation strikes your attention. You consult your two human companions, both whom are still bleary from sleep. Alberico respond bluntly, stating that a "run down church in the rural ass-end of the kingdom" probably wasn't big enough to hold 50 people, let alone 80. You check this yourself by measuring the dimensions of the structure and making a quick calculation. He was right. Fitting fifty worshipers in the church would be a stretch. Packing fifty worshipers in a church already occupied by a thirty-strong salvage patrol was nearly impossible.
Impossible unless the church was much larger than it appeared.
You exploit the cool, dew-soaked morning earth to perform a earth-penetrating thermal scan of the area surrounding the town. The drone flies high into the atmosphere and flits from side to side, splitting the town into a grid of discrete tiles. The resulting data is relayed back to your base station, which renders it over the region's topographical profile.
The heat signature beneath the church is shocking highly - comparable to the waste heat rejected by a network of subterranean generators or a buried hydroponics facility rather than a small human town.
What could be generating this heat? And most importantly, what should you do next?
《Arm up the mercenaries, advance on the town, and demand some answers. 》
《Keep observing and preparing your forces]》
《Write-In》
You also consider the material support you could provide to the human irregulars. While they had been helpful enough, you had some reservations about equipping them with weapons millennia more advanced than their current technology level.
《Full Arm Up. Refit Liscia's mech with ATGMs, distribute las-carbines/camo-cloaks/spotters to Alberico's men》
《No material support》
《Partial - Write In》
[NOTE: I saw some discussion on this during the last voting cycle, but no consensus]
