>>5269697>>5269701>>5269705>>5269711>>5269733>>5269734Over the next few days, you and your human companions settle into something resembling a routine. As you order your recon drone to methodically survey the forested region to your north, Alberico rotates his men between the town and an impromptu training camp. It was a good system. Every day at noon, two squads of mercenaries - fresh from weapons training and mock-combat drills - would spend their afternoon eagerly poking around the cooling ruins, slowly picking the area clean of both riches and information. While former would appear into their company coffers, the latter is funneled exclusively into Liscia's increasingly-cluttered workspace back at the base-station. Fortunately, her ability to summarize this jumbled material has not slackened. Every night, she gives you a concise verbal summary of her most recent findings via vox.
Combined with your own analysis, you were now confident that the cultists were not being supplied locally. The las-rifle you examined may have been constructed using federation templates, but it certainly wasn't federation-made. Spectroscopy of the weapon's polymer components indicated an age of merely few hundred years - not the thousands you would have expected from a recovered cache-weapon. More to the point, the manufacturing quality was dreadful. Fracture lines, crystalline defects, extra seams...the list went on. Not even the most corrupted nanoforge would let mistakes like that slip through quality control. It was almost as if the original, forge-optimized design had been broken down into component parts and bolted back together in some primitive manual assembly line. You find it hard to imagine the type of scenario that would warrant such a grossly inefficient process.
Eventually though, you switch away from this perplexing problem after noticing a a ping from your recon drone. It had finished its survey. On the tactical overlay, you watch three friendly icons wink into existence to the north of your base-station. One of them was little more than a vague depression in the ground. Even through the surface-level scan provided by your recon drone, you could immediately tell that the core infrastructure had suffered a reactor-scramble event in the distant past. The transmitter may have survived, but the reflective chunks of cladding scattered around the base-station made clear that anything valuable would have either been vaporized by plasma leakage or rusted into nothingness in the wake of the ensuing power failure.
