I IE Part 4
Imperator Pax
Talon Master
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I Interstellar Expeditions
Part 4
He couldn't be sure when the final decision to make for the Alexandrian Covenant. Whenever it had been had had probably been made before the planet with the whales and mormons on it. The announcement had been made after that as the flotilla of JumpShips had converged on schedule at the following rally point.Part 4
They were now two hundred and seventy light years beyond the canopian border... though admittedly at the end of the Star League it would have been more like two hundred light years, maybe less. In the late 26th century well the borders had looked even pretty different.
The good thing with meeting up with the Azami had been the ability to restore his salvaged mechs... never mind the awkwardness of them being salvaged from the Azami in battle... back to Star League era functionality.
They'd arrived at the JumpPoint for Sophos and surveyed it from a distance, and it had been a good thing they had. Gene touched the computer. He had no idea why there was no one on this planet, but primitive not the surface to orbit missile battery here would have been hazardous to a DropShip coming in unaware. They probably would have needed several dozen to cover the entire planet, and that wasn't in evidence, but there were enough to cover the major population centers.
Or what was left of them. "I've got something." One of Hassan's infantry commanders called.
"What is it Rashid? Where are you?"
"About thirty klicks from the capital missile battery, the magnemeter we use for prospecting had found a buried DropShip we think. Or rather the remains of it. I suspect it was blown out of the sky Colonel."
Gene raised an eyebrow. It was the first time he had heard Hassan be given a rank. The Azami had been fastidious about that sort of thing. Hassan shook his head at the oversight, "What do you make of it Rashid?"
"Pirates I would think, at least on any other world, we are trying to dig it up now. Give us a few hours."
A few hours later they were poking through what they were pretty sure was a Rim Worlds Republic DropShip, and it was like walking through a tomb. "This is the only one we've found."
"We are lucky that we managed to find this one." Rashid remarked sweeping his compact assault rifle out in front as if expecting to be attacked by Zombie Amaris supporters at every junction. "They're trying to get the computer on line now, but one of the dates within the missile facility suggests this was lost some time after 2750." Before the New Vandenburg Uprising. "As to where everyone went... I don't know... something is very wrong."
But not so wrong as that there had been some kind of planet wide war. There were no radiological signatures. The Capital Missiles were pure fusion drive KKVs. Point accelerate slam into target in orbit bang sort of affairs by all appearances. They weren't even particularly smart missiles with their seekers being downright primitive and probably requiring ground control telemetry to hit a DropShip not standing still relatively speaking.
The problem was that while the network wasn't large enough to cover the entire planet it was numerous enough that the planet's major indicators of infrastructure definitely suggested the locals had been able to build them. As if they'd been expecting an invasion... it would have been easy to just assume that perceived threat could have been from the Rim Worlds Republic, but he had his doubts.
"I'm surprised its this intact," He muttered swinging a light over the fancy shark embossed emblem, "I don't recognize this model of DropShip, but this armor is ferro-aluminum." Which was probably why it had survived the heat of reentry with such a big chunk of it gone from amidships. "Did they manage to crashland?"
"I can't be sure." Rashid replied opening a bulkhead. "I want to say no, but I think they were riding the nav beacon from the city in before they were shot down."
It still went no where to explain where Sophos's population went. A single Rim World's republic dropship being chanced upon didn't come close to explaining that. Abner and Ford were equally perturbed by the lack of signs of what had happened. "I suspect that they packed up and left," Ford announced.
"There are no signs of JumpShips, but we have found platinum mines, Germanium mining and industrial systems. All the sort of things needed to make primitive or even early modern JumpShip designs... but it looks like it was dissambled, and taken off. There are huge chunks of machine missing."
"Which could be scavengers." Rashid pointed out.
Hassan glanced at the surroundings. "I admit Rashid might have a point, but I don't think any of this was done in a hurry."
"No this would have been months at least. We have remains buried in graveyards that we're sure are from the 2700s, but no exposed remains, and nothing after 2800s. We're not sure where the cut off is, there is detritus, human artifacts, but there aren't any signs of war."
Everyone had basically independently verified that, over and over again. They'd found weapons over the following couple of weeks, but all of them were Rifles. Either the infantry small arms sort or the predecessors to modern Mech scale auto cannons. The natives living on Sophos had industry to build combat vehicles.
"What if they chose to move off world because they were running out of fossil fuels?" Ford suggested next, "The DropShip could be a red herring. Their vehicles, the ones left behind are all ICE powered, and that might explain their armament too. If they thought they were going use up all of the petroleum they might have left."
"I doubt it, there is corn growing rampant on the continent. That would have been able to be refined into gasoline even with just 20th century chemistry." Gene put in, "Its not impossible but I don't think it fits."
"Combination of factors?" Another IE grad student put in looking up from his noteputer, "They still had technology to build vehicles, and reach orbit at least with weapons. And if ICE wasn't an option, they could build fusion drives even primitive fusion engines should have been possible if those are primitive DropShip yards. If they were capable of building early JumpShips the same."
Sophos was one more world with more questions to it than it answered. Naturally of course as they wandered through the deserted city Abner took as a challenge rather than something to be discouraged by. The general conclusions though were not internal or external strife. It took significant effort to unearth the library cache, and star maps from the building they assumed was the planetary capital. Part of the structure had simply given way due to an earthquake probably forty fifty years ago. The computer itself though was even older. "This is Taurian Concordant."
"So its really weird then that we haven't found signs of nukes." Ford muttered, and Gene laughed, "Can we pull dates from it?"
"The reader says that this was," The tech adjusted, "2581 is when it was encoded. Its a library core from New Vandenburg. As for how long its been here, it seems like was installed in 2642. It has all the earmarks of the Alexandrian Covenant government, and has a Magisters seal on it,"
Ford explained that one "the male half of the government, as we understand it," The other issue was Sophos being depopulated wasn't the only 'lost' covenant world, apparently Cyrene had suffered an extinction level event as well... at least in Cyrene's case though it made sense where there wasn't anyone living there any more... not the mass disappearance of Sophos. It had brought up two more theories. The first was the easier one to investigate... go to the largest of the surviving, known, Alexandrian Covenant systems. Pharos. It was possible of course they had gone to another system, but that was where the second theory came in, with one of the IE researchers suggesting that they had fled to a system inside the Perseus Cepherus Cloud Complex.
Since they had the coordinates for 'Pharos' the system it made more sense to make the jump there... if that turned out to be a bust the Azami elders were content to try and colonize Sophos and make a living there. They were however going to have to start the long trek back towards civilization soon. The expedition could in theory back track the way it came and not explore any new worlds in return for spending more time in Pharos, but they needed to settle on a course home and there were very few direct routes back even with the maps they had. Either way that trip would potentially take them the rest of the year to get back.
At the end of that discussion things turned back to the Azami situation. There were a lot of questions including whether or not the Combine knew about the dependents. The general thinking was know. The Combine hadn't molested the Azami merchant travel thus far, but there was no telling whether that would hold... of course the main issue was officially they were only hunting a small renegade unit of the Arkab legions who had turned traitor. The official byline would really start running into a problem if the Combine started attacking merchants, and JumpShips outside the Combine borders.
Of course if ComStar substantiated that JumpShips with merchant credentials were 'casing' ahead of the pirate raids the Azami had committed there was probably going to be hell to pay. Of course if the azami were serious about settling down that was less of a concern about coming back.