Nico didn't look up from her data tablet as she answered Max's concerns about what was going on with this region of space.
"Right? I saw something while we waited that totally didn't make sense. The planet is roughly two billion years old. But the star it circles appears to be under two million years old, and the particles around the system support that. If the star was older, its gravitational force would have pulled the smaller particles and lumps of rock into more planetoids, but they're still mostly floating freely all over the place."
How had that not occurred to Max? This might be another region of the universe, but the rules of Galactic Formation should still be the same here. The Arisen said that the star systems were destroyed, but that didn't mean nothing survived. The planets could have floated in the remains of their former homes until the stars began to reform or were forcibly reformed by one of the species involved.
It most likely wasn't a natural event unless it was a side effect of the battle which had shattered the region, to begin with. The stars had reformed too fast for this gigantic nebula to have been undergoing a natural evolution at the start.
There were still a lot of things humans didn't know about how stars formed naturally, but they did know that it wasn't a sudden event, not to the point that the star was fully formed with inhabitable planets orbiting it.
Before he got to the full analysis of the star system, he really did have to go over the Mecha. It was an essential part of the post-mission process to make sure that they were ready for the next deployment, especially when you didn't know where that would be.
He wasn't expecting to find anything, but as he searched the Mecha for signs of damage or degradation, he found a rather strange energy pattern. Lingering magnetism or other energy signatures were normal, especially after a warp field had been formed, but this one didn't look like any signature that he had seen before.
Because it was unfamiliar, Max checked it against the ship's records, both Santa Maria's and the Destroyer's. But he came up empty-handed. This wasn't an energy pattern that they were familiar with.
It might have come from the Warp Drive-based power system of the experimental Mecha, though, so Max made a note and finished his tests to determine that the Mecha was ready to go.
Then he went to Shattered Pride and searched it for the same energy pattern.
It wasn't there, but there was an unidentified energy pattern there as well. It was similar to the one on his Mecha, but not the same, so Max started to compare the two and work on an analysis of the Mecha based on where the energy pattern was strongest.
That might tell him where it had come from, or at least what direction it had come from, and he could guess how long ago it had been formed and left undetected. It wasn't the most common thing to search for. He had just gone a bit deeper into his inspection today to make very sure that everything was alright after the strange interaction they had with the Arisen fleet today.
Once he had some data from both of the larger Mecha, he ran the same scan on the prototype and found that there was nothing out of the ordinary. Max had expected there to be something to give him a clue, maybe a base variant of the energy signature if it had come from the Mecha's power source, but the signature from the prototype was a very familiar Reaver Warp Drive signature that Max recognized as soon as the data tablet displayed the list of energy signatures found on the Line Mecha.
That made no sense at all unless it came from an earlier point in time when they weren't all together. So, Max pulled out the old analysis data. The energy signature should be in the logs, though it was such a pile of excess data that it rarely got inspected, like the composition data of the armour, which presumably didn't change after creation unless it was damaged.
It was still there in the previous battle, so Max went back to the battle logs from the fight before that. In that log, both Mecha showed a different unknown energy signature.
Now Max was well and truly confused. There was no indication of where these energy signatures were coming from, and they had changed at least once since first being applied.
So, Max checked his weapons logs. That would show him the shield and weapon signatures of the enemy War Walkers and ships. Perhaps there was something in there that he could use to help him understand what he was seeing.
Max searched for over an hour before he found what he was looking for. There was a similar energy signature detected on one other occasion. When they watched the Darklings' ship leave after the second time they fought with the Arisen in this star system, an energy signature with the same energy pattern had been detected. It wasn't coming from any recorded vessel or object, but it seemed to come out of the portal that the ship had opened to chase the Arisen.
"You look like you just found more questions." Nico laughed as she looked over and saw the look on Max's face.
"I did. There are two different energy signatures on our Mecha, and they have changed at least once since first being applied. The closest I have found is an energy signature from the portal that the Darklings opened to chase the Arisen, but it doesn't quite match any of the four energy signatures that I have identified so far as not being from any weapon or shield on the battlefield." Max explained.
"Ooh, a mystery. That's a nice change. Note the sarcasm. Why can't anything have a simple explanation here?" Nico asked.
"Likely because we are about sixty million years late to the battle, and we have no idea what happened before we got here." Max sighed.
He would find out, though.
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