With so much early luck finding useful artifacts, there was an intense pressure on the staff of Terminus to accept more funding and send more teams down to the surface, either to help the ones that were already there or to search for more possible sites, in an effort to maximize their chances of finding something useful out of the planet's ancient cities.

Every research company that had an interest in their work was freaking out about the news, and they hadn't even gotten the close up tour yet to get more details on what sort of technology level they were looking at.historical

The relics appeared to be security cameras, but that could be from anything starting at the early analog age and onward, hundreds of thousands of years worth of most species' advancements. For all they knew, the species might have been a failed one that couldn't adapt to changing atmospheric conditions and never made it past the most rudimentary of electronics.

If they hadn't made it to advanced computing, there was little chance that anything they left behind would be useful to anyone in the Alliance as more than a curiosity or ornamental relic.

But that didn't matter to them.

Terminus had such a great track record of making something out of nothing that they were willing to wager that whatever they found here could be turned into something good, and they wanted in on the earliest possible opportunity, even if it was a risky bet that might cost them money.

Fortunately, today both Max and Nico were on board, so the ship had the Commanders present to shuffle off all the demands to. None of those who were trying to pressure and bribe their way into a partnership had the leverage to push against the entire Terminus Trading Company, they were relying on deals that had been made with the research department of Terminus, the Colony Ship.

Max looked over the details of the requests that they were getting, and sighed, before passing them to Nico.

"You do most of the work with the research and design departments, so I will let you decide which of those, if any, you want to accept. I really don't want to have to catch up and do a background check on everyone if you already know who most of them are." He informed the annoyed Cyborg.

"Fine, let's find somewhere good to sit so we can people watch and still get some work done. I will likely send more teams down right away anyhow, just to get better coverage on the probable sites that we have identified. Just searching the two regions is going to take tens of thousands of worker hours, and the more the low altitude drones search, the more that they identify.

These might be the most obvious ruins, but from the early scans, it's unlikely that they will be the most productive or best preserved ones that we can find, unless the inside of those pyramids is sealed off from the elements." She agreed.

"That is a possibility. They are pretty well-built, and it looks like our ancient civilization had a thing for building with solid stone. It wouldn't be surprising if the secure areas of their cities or monuments, or whatever those pyramids are, were sealed with a stone slab, which would have done a pretty decent job of preservation." Max suggested.lightsnovel

They walked a few more shops down until they reached a pub with a private room, where Max booked the area for the next four hours so that they could finish their work and a round of interviews before they left.

Nico got to work on the business proposals as soon as they sat down, and Max got to work on the plans to have more teams sent to the surface. There was only so much room that each group could cover, and only so many people were useful in a given area, but they had room to spread out in the Prairie City for a methodical grid search, while there were multiple pyramids in the complex around the first one.

It might have been a city that was created in a distinct style from the other ones, perhaps by a different tribe or culture of the inhabitants. Or it might have come from different eras in their history. But either way, the result would be various relics for them to collect, as long as something had survived until now other than the stone buildings.

He wasn't really concerned that the teams would damage or miss any relics, they were very well-trained professionals from a dozen different worlds, but they couldn't know that there was likely to be a time constraint on Max's presence here.

Going back into battle with the same gear they had for the last round was not Max's preferred course of action, but he hadn't received any word from Uncle Lu in a while about the progress of the next-generation weapons and power sources.

They were going to need that soon, or they wouldn't have time to create a Custom Command Mecha pair before they left to assist in the Koleska Region.

The ones that they had were no match for the Greater Energy Beings that they were likely going to face this time, and the Great Enemy had plenty of time to plan strategies to deal with their tactics before returning.

They could change tactics, but without changing their capabilities, they wouldn't be able to take the enemy off-guard and easily score lopsided victories, so every battle would come at an increasingly high cost.

Max knew that many would say that he was overreacting, as it was only a handful of battles against one species so far, but he couldn't get rid of the feeling that things were going terribly wrong, and he just didn't know how wrong they had gone yet.

Maybe he would feel better once he had a better grasp of what was happening on the other side of the Anomaly, Max decided. It was easy enough to pull up reports to his data tablet, and he could scroll through them while he took care of the crew logistics for the mission expansion.