Humanity's Greatest Mecha Warrior System

While it certainly wasn't as fast as having the Innu do it, the Hunter team took less than half an hour to have the full contents of the electronic devices in the lab collected and downloaded.

There wasn't much more that they could do with it, but they had also collected the footage from the camera in the room. It had stopped recording centuries ago when its storage had filled without any additional commands, but that was perfect for the team back at the Anomaly.

The footage that they recovered was unencrypted, so the file format only took the computers a few seconds to decode with Nico's help, and they had the last moments of the planet in front of their eyes.

"Let's start with the oldest recording on the track so that we can watch what happened in chronological order," Khan ordered, and Nico brought it up on the screen, as the image was not a three-dimensional hologram.

That was a bit disappointing. The more advanced the technology, the more they could learn from it, but if the species had developed enough to create that satellite array, then at the very least, they should have been able to generate better data sets in the actual computer files.

The scene started with an empty room, and then a group of three small aliens, gray-skinned, with oversized heads and huge black eyes, entered. They took no time getting to work, putting aside the jackets that they were wearing and clothing themselves in lab coats and white gloves.

The audio for the next section was gibberish, but Huntress Khan looked excited and tapped something into the computer.

"Nico, back it up and play it again. I think we have a translation that will work for that language. They look like one of the Alliance species, and the Hunters have their traditional language from nearly a million years ago recorded." Khan informed the room.

They switched the translation from the human program to the Hunters, and Nico restarted the video feed.

"Honorable Lord, are you sure that it is wise to do this? After the disaster on Rigel Seven, all outside travel and communications were prohibited for a reason." One of the gangly aliens asked.

"It is necessary. The array around the quarantine zone is still sending signals to us from every single satellite. Don't you think that they are bound to notice that level of data traffic? If we don't send out the signal to tell them to move to autonomous mode, we might as well be shining a spotlight on ourselves." The first to enter the room answered.

"But how? We don't have the authorization. We are just a frontier colony." The alien asked.

The one referred to as the Lord turned to his subordinate with what Max assumed was an annoyed look that made his bulbous black eyes somewhat oval.

"You let me worry about that. You know the stakes, and if they find us, we won't escape again."

The group all nodded at each other and then left the room.

"So, they were using this as a meeting room since it is isolated and soundproofed, as well as not being connected to the rest of their data network. That is convenient for us. Now, we just need to know what they are hiding from.

It can't be the Myceloids in the region around the Array. They seemed much more worried about something tracking the signal than destroying the array and getting out. That says to me that the threat is outside the array." Khan mused.

Max nodded. "I would tend to agree. While lack of evidence isn't proof, the fact that they didn't refer to a threat in the quarantine zone but to the threat of the signal from the quarantine zone being tracked, as well as a disaster somewhere, suggests that their species is at war and losing."

The feed was just an idle room for a while, then the audio showed a blip, and Nico rewound it a bit so they didn't miss anything.

There was nothing in the room. But there was a booming noise, and then some of the objects on the counters shuddered a little.

"Either an explosion or an earthquake. I guess they didn't get time to shut down the signals." Max noted.

"Not entirely, anyhow. Though the array was only sending them one consolidated message when we arrived, so perhaps it was sending them more information before." Nico agreed.]

Over the course of two days in local planetary time, the sporadic explosions continued. There was no large-scale destruction of the city when the Hunters' search team arrived, though. Most of the buildings were still largely intact and only collapsed due to age, not violence.

The next time that there was activity occurred a few days after the explosions had occurred, and the only one who entered was the Lord, looking quite haggard, with his face sunken and hollow, as if he had neither eaten nor slept since the last time they saw him.

"Computer, display all of the active protest sites." He spoke, then waited for the response.

Fortunately for the viewers, it was visible on the tabletop in front of him. Unfortunately, it was not in a language that any of them or the computer they were using could read.

But the follow-up was enough to help clarify the situation.

"Computer, make a note. The anti-government riots have been fully quelled. Complete control of the planet has been regained, and the quarantine zone satellite array has been put into hibernation mode, with an extremely minimal data flow to ensure that travellers do not breach the danger zone.

The planet's sensors have detected no signs that the Harvesters detected our microburst signal. With luck, they still believe our species to be extinct."

The Lord then began tapping something into a handheld data tablet, and the lights in the room dimmed before he fell asleep in the chair with his head on the desk.

"Well, we now know what the explosions were. This is clearly the capital building, so they must have been the protests." Lilith noted.

"Or the response to them. But either way, I think that the most important part is that we now know what they're hiding from. The Harvesters."