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“Lieutenant Helena, have another look around those craters. Let’s see if they were firing at anything specific.” You ordered after looking at the craters for a bit longer. The tight grouping could easily make sense as gunnery training, but the fact that there were no obvious missed shots made you doubt that conclusion.
Thankfully, now that you had a point of reference to work with it wasn’t too long before you had another success. “Got something. A large concentration of high entropy materials, approximately south-east of the main cluster of craters. Diana, can you give me a hand here?”
“Already on it. I’ve also detected emissions from decaying radioactive materials, and a handful of smaller clusters of HEM’s, consistent with small plates of Titanium-A battle plate. I’m already collating the readings with known vessel classes.” Diana explained as she pulled up the scan results on the main screen. It didn’t take long before she found a rough match, and the profile of a very familiar small and blocky vessel appeared on the main screen. “Given the size and shape of the section, there’s a high probability of it being the remains of a Mako class corvette.”
You were making record speed on solving this mystery. Makos were one of the most common vessels to fall into less than friendly hands, owing to the fact that the few left in service were in less-than-second line roles, while the rest had been retired due to their notorious maintenance issues. It wasn’t that unlikely that a Mako in either innie or private security service had fled Arcadia and been destroyed here.
But that still left one question, how did it get there? Might they have been forced down? “Sensors, is there any indication that the ship came down hard? Impact markers, disturbed regolith, stuff like that?”
“Already checked that sir. The only surface disturbances that I can see is from the bombardment. That ship was landed <span class="mu-i">intentionally</span>, though it’s impossible to determine the reasons behind it.” Lieutenant Helena replied, bringing up a long-range camera picture of the site. And sure enough, you couldn’t see an obvious crater or disgorged material from where a ship may have come down hard.
“Drive discharging? Discharging their static buildup here could be safer for older vessels, or if they wanted to avoid being obvious.” Dyad suggested, and you had to agree with her assessment. With the known maintenance issues of the class, taking it anywhere close to a gas giant would be risky. And with their small slipspace drives, you didn’t need a large gravity well to discharge into anyways. Put those two together, and any sane captain would probably choose the moon.
