(stage grumble) "Clearance? Don't ♥♥♥♥ talk to me about clearance..."

Attempt to locate spare ammunition and weapons while waiting for orders.

Saber Squad - Tunnel Level B - Worst Contact

There are no spare supplies or useful bits here, and both Georgii and CD get more than a couple of glares from the militiamen for being so presumptuous.

Most of the militia seem to be first-gen colonists, there being no significant settlements on-planet besides this one.

Snipes elaborates on the situation. The 'bugs' you encountered at the outpost showed up first, without any warning at all. Either they were some awful sneaky native life, or they managed to totally evade detection. There are no biolab facilities on-planet that could cook up anything like that, and definitely not in the numbers they've seen. Back when he was in the Army he'd heard stories that might have involved these things, but that was a long time ago, and most of those took place on the far side of the TA territories.

As for the 'bots, they showed up soon after. They deployed those assault 'bots via heavily armoured spherical insertion pods. A half-dozen of the things came down - four had the siegebots, and two were packed to the gills with the black-carapaced trooper-bots. He seems relieved when you mention that one siegebot was downed already; they managed to lure one to a construction site on the northern outskirts and collapsed a half-built tower-block on it using democharges. That leaves two unaccounted for though. The soldierbots seemed to be able to subvert any robots that got close, but were unable to subvert androids. Interestingly, they also seemed to be incapable of sensing androids. He doesn't know of any factions that use either of these kinds of hardware, much less one that could deploy at such short notice, or one that could loiter a troop-drop like that in-system without being spotted.

Long story short is Snipes doesn't know if either of these guys are major factions in this region of space, and if TA Command are being tight-lipped then you can get there's some serious ♥♥♥♥ going down. Possibly more serious than he anticipated. This place was supposed to be a nice little out of the way mining outpost. The militia haven't seen any TA forces until you guys showed up, so they can't be of much help finding the missing squads.

Reception is flakey, but Intel and Command sound relieved (though not entirely pleased about one of the rail tunnels being partially collapsed) that some of the colonists survived, and disappointed that they're of no help with the missing teams. No major updates from Sword, Fang and Spartan yet, as they're still skirmishing their way through the city to the DCMT.

Snipes stays at the barricade, and assigns one of the slightly more wounded men to lead the squad to the hub of the surviving operations, a cleared out old hub of some kind, with huge bulkhead doors sealing off all but one route. The chamber itself is quite large, and now filled with prefab and hastily-assembled survival structures... the survivor camp is surprisingly neat in terms of layout, all things considered.

"It ain't much to look at but it's home for about three-fifty people," the militiaman sounds strangely proud of the fact they managed to save that many civilians, "But supplies are limited. We need to start moving people out of here, preferably out of the entire damn system. Come on, I'll do you a favour and tell you what Snipes is trying to keep a lid on..." he leads the group to a small, unused building, a dingy single-room thing with a large round table and several old chairs.

"...word from one of the colony engineer crews is one of the other crews was borin' down to see if they could beef up the geos -- y'know this place has geothermal power? Anyways, they found some xee-tech... don't look at me like that, it's short for 'xenotechnology', okay? They supposedly found some stupid 'alien artifact' under the city. We're talkin' seriously old ♥♥♥♥, like the wreck they dug out of Titan and scavved for FTL travel/comms."

Pausing, he snags a bottle of something from a crate, stopping to take a drink before continuing.

"'s better. So, we're not sure what it actually is, what it does, or if the dumbasses touched it or not, but we do know that... within a couple of days of when we think they found it, the bugs and 'bots started crawlin' out the damn woodwork. Whatever this thing is, I'd bet you good money (not that I have any) that they're here for it. Maybe to steal it from us, maybe to destroy it. Either way, if they did find something then it's bad news as far as we're concerned, and if it is as old as the Titan wreck, or if it shows so much as a hint of being related to it, then the TA are gonna wanna dig in and fight for it, even if they have to punch out everyone else who wants a piece of it. Of course, good thing for us is they'll all be scrabbling over each other to get at it, rather than working together."

"That's all assuming this ain't a load of rubbish and they're not just here to kill us all and stripmine the place. Icing on the cake is we don't know which of the two-'n'-half dozen geo-bore shafts it's in, assuming it hasn't been moved already. No way the militia could cover that kind of ground."