"Analyses: The Next Steps"

[Guest Sar'vek t'Jhiin]

Sar'vek pulled up a chair to the Engineering console, staring at the etrehh report that had finally coalesced into a coherent form. This was... astounding. The extent and scope of the site was something that the scientist had suspected, hoped for, but confirmation was... glorious. For a short time, at least, Sar'vek planned to revel in the moment.

 

There was enough information that she also had a moment of "Oh Elements, where do I even begin?" The systems had finally finished most of their analyses, and the results were better than she could have hoped for. Their shipboard sensors were good enough for tracking particle anomalies out in space, but coordinating with ground-imagers, and for that matter, picking up on discrepancies from orbit, could be a bit iffy.

 

The "temple-political complex" and the city itself had been, as originally theorized, on the same physical and cultural level when the volcanic flows had engulfed them. They were, ostensibly, interrelated; their proximity alone suggested it, and the dating that had come through so far corroborated the theory.

 

Even better, if that wasn't too much of an understatement, were the results that had come in through the geological sciences division. Apparently, the volcano they were dealing with had managed to develop a latinum tube leading out through the city, which was still full of liquid, flowing latinum. Judging by the infinitesimal quantities of latinum they'd found in the soil, as well, the mountain had likely been a conduit for the metal to rise to the surface for millennia upon millennia, something that the natives had taken full advantage of. Sar'vek also suspected that the eruption itself had dislodged a fair quantity of latinum, and that some further searching could reveal even more among the ancient lava flows.

 

Beyond the latinum, though, there also seemed to be a strange mass of metalloid masses at the foothills of the mountain, something that didn't seem to be showing up as the unrefined bronze that they had been handling from the ruins. Sar'vek was hesitant to put the suspicion into words, but she was tempted to send a team over -- ripe with Laehval's people -- to see if that was a crash site from the non-native alien visitors. Due to the potential crash's proximity to the volcano, too, she almost wondered if they hadn't done something to trigger it... but that was a large assumption with little or na data to back it up. Dating on the alien bones hadn't even begun, and until that was finalized and until they knew whether the planet's "guests" dated to the same period as the volcanic eruption, there was no use in baseless guesses.

 

The scientist sighed, heading out of engineering and into her lab, to begin a few more queries on the metal fragments at the base of the volcano. Then, the next thing to do would be to head down there personally and investigate...