The team circles the startown's remains. After two hundred plus years of unimpeded growth, the local flora has taken over the area.

Joxe overlays the planetary map on the air raft's main display. The largest population center was the startown, with half a dozen smaller communities scattered across the planet. The closest is 400km to the east, with a reported population of 2,150 sophonts.

Brent sets course to the small population center to the east.

"Veronica, we're going east," Joxe reports while ensuring that the ship is receiving their telemetry.

"You kids be careful," Veronica replies. "I'll be in the hot tub I fabricated in the cargo hold."

Naimh rolled her eyes. "You'd better not," she teased.

"I'm just testing it," Veronica deadpanned back.

An expanse of low, rolling hills extends inland from the coast where the starport is located. The forest below is unbroken except for a few clearings where fires had broken out, and where rivers cut through on their way from the distant mountains to the sea.

Gareth, who is in the right middle seat behind Brent, watches the air raft's sensors output on his tablet display. He spots numerous animals, mostly herbivores, with a large predator that Naimh, sitting beside him and behind Joxe's seat, identifies as a bear.

Malcolm uses his binoculars to search to the sides, moving from one rear seat to the other as he works. The device uses both visual, infrared, and near ultraviolet filters; Malcolm had labored for the entire week in jump to fabricate it.

The air raft's groundspeed is nearly 200kph, even with a left-to-right crossing headwind of 40kph. An hour into the flight, no one has seen any evidence of human activity.

Brent stays high enough to allow a good view of the surroundings as well as staying out of easy small arms fire from the ground just in case. "It looks grim.  I would think that a habitable world like this would keep a pretty sizeable population even if they were bombed back to the stone age."

Joxe nods. "It depends on how many people were left here. If there were too few, they could have died out."

"If there are people still here," Malcolm muses, "they may not have advanced tech that would help us find them."

Brent frowns and shakes his head.  From the tension in his shoulders those who knew him could tell that he was deeply affected by the devastation. "Even if they've been bombed back to hunter gatherers we should see signs of life along the rivers and river mouths."

"How do we go about searching for them," Joxe asks.

"Let's fly to the population center and then work our way along the river toward the ocean."

Joxe looks up from her panel. "We will have about an hour to loiter, unless you want Veronica to meet us somewhere closer."

The air raft is loaded with the last planetary map in Wanderer's memory, which means it's 250 years out of date. The air raft is on a direct course to the town depicted on the map.

Brent set the bingo fuel level in the air raft control system. "Let's see what we can find here.  If it's apparent that even the good places to live are vacant I'm not sure it's worth lingering here unless there might be some caches of equipment we might find valuable."

An hour later, they arrive at the town's location. The vegetation is less fecund here than at the coast, so the ruins of the town are more visible. A small, tree-lined river runs roughly north to south, parallel to a 1000-meter ridgeline three kilometers east of the town.

There are two obvious craters in the center of town, and what buildings there were are marked by ceramacrete foundations sprinkled with debris. Several wrecked vehicles, including a couple of heavy ground trucks and some earth moving equipment, lie scattered around what looked to be a processing plant of some sort.

"According to the planet's database," Joxe says, "they used to mine here..." she stops and reads, "They mined lanthanum, Brent!"

Brent looks somber as they approach the ruined settlement.  The level of destruction is sobering and doesn't bode well for any level of organized survivors.  He circles once and then comes down to land near the ruins of what looks like a processing plant.  "What would motivate someone to so thoroughly destroy a place like this.  I can see taking out a factory but the whole town?"  He shakes his head.

When Joxe speaks up Brent's dark mood partially cleared.  "Lanthanum?  That is the key ingredient for Jump drives, right?"  He looked around.  "We didn't have any useful deposits of Lanthanum which is a good part of the reason we never built Jump capable ships after the war."

"It takes about 1600 kilos of it to build a ship like Wanderer," Joxe says. She looks around the area. "That's odd." She points at a ruined building at the center of the processing plant. "That wasn't a bomb or missile."

Brent sees that the building burned from the inside, but there is a two-meter hole burned through the ceramacrete wall.

"We should look closer at the way this building was destroyed. Perhaps someone has been attempting stop populations from being or becoming capable of producing jump drives. You could keep populations isolated and compliant if you were the only power with such capabilities."

Brent locked the controls and climbed out of the air raft. "Let's go investigate.  I'd guess that they didn't bomb the central building because they wanted to loot the ore or finished metal."  He headed toward the damaged building. "Stay wary.  Even if there are no people around there might be denizens of the jungle hiding in the ruins."

Veronica comes up on the comm. "Brent, should I relocate closer to you? I'm not much good at four hundred kilometers away."

"I think Gareth is right," Malcolm says as he looks around. "I mean, a single kinetic strike would turn this place into a crater. That's not what we've been seeing, though."

Brent listened for a moment to the communication from the ship.  "Go ahead and get within about 50 klicks Veronica," he comm'd.

Turning back to the others Brent shrugged.  "Certainly the lack of lanthanum kept us on Egg confined to our system.  I can see how cutting off the supply of this material could choke things down around the entire subsector or further."

"Lifting off," Veronica reported back.

Joxe took a few steps toward the processing plant. "That looks a lot like a hit from a ship's laser," she says as she highlights the hole on everyone's helmet displays.

"Roger that," Brent replied to Veronica.  He stepped closer to the ruined building.  "A laser hit would make sense.  It is precise and will limit collateral damage."

"That, or that's all the weaponry they had," Malcolm muses. "Shall we take a closer look?"

Brent nodded as he moved up to the building.  "Or the laser doesn't use up scarce ammunition."

"There is that," Malcolm agrees with a chuckle.

The building is three stories tall, and Brent can see through the broken windows that the interior is burnt out. A faded sign above the main doors reads "Plant Operations".

Brent goes up to the entrance and looks inside.  "It's pretty burnt out.  I'm not sure if it's even safe to enter."

Joxe stands next to Brent and looks inside. "It's pretty trashed."

Malcolm moves to the corner, while Naimh steps up behind the others.

"Brent, you will want to see this," Malcolm calls over the comm.

Brent nodded to Joxe and moved slowly through the debris toward the rear of the building.  When Malcom called Brent headed over to see what had been found.