It was better than they could have ever hoped to find on the very first planet that they visited.
Even one simple word was enough to prove that someone had been here before, and that someone had been here long enough to leave traces. It was an archaic script, but the computer still recognized it well enough to translate it, though if they found more writing, they might find that it was only a similar ancient script and their initial translation was wrong.
For now, the guests on the ship were unaware of the development, and the fact that something had been found so easily would be kept from them for a while so that they didn't start rumours that the whole trip was staged.
The level of coincidence was too high. Finding a sign in the first seconds of the search of an alien planet was trillions to one odd favouring good luck.
The search of the other site was the one being features on the screens aboard the ship right now, as they had started right away by moving large amounts of sand out of the way to expose more bare rock and check for the source of the rare mineral readings.
That was the sort of large-scale activity that the crowd could get into, and the sand was sifted as it was moved so that they didn't miss out on anything that might be hiding in it, like small metal relics, or even bits of a destroyed starship.
That was one of the possibilities that the ship's announcer had mentioned to the guests, the chance that a malfunctioning Portal or Warp Drive might have left a crippled ship stranded all the way out here, where it could have crash-landed on the planet.
It wasn't a frequent event, but with millions of inhabited worlds in the Alliance, it happened a few times a year that ships would crash somewhere obscure and a search for them would have to be instituted.
That was even how the humans had ended up on such good terms with the Alliance. They had found a group of adventurous students who had gone to explore the Klem planets, under the very mistaken assumption that an insect species would be friendly.
They had ended up with a damaged Warp Drive and had been rescued by Max and his crew, which slowly snowballed into full-blown cooperation between the two factions.
But not everywhere that a stranded ship ended up would be inhabited, much less inhabited by a friendly species.
The talk of a crashed ship was getting the crowd worked up aboard Terminus. In every restaurant, pub and coffee shop, the talk was that the rare minerals and strange sightings might be the signs of a ship that had broken up in orbit over the planet and crashed here.
If it were from the Alliance, this would be a huge find, the end to the mystery of a lost ship, but if it was an unknown species from outside the Alliance, that would be even better.
Not many of them stopped to think that just because the planet wasn't suitable for habitation now didn't mean it never was. Desertification was a known natural phenomenon, especially when planets were raided for liquid water before the advent of Replicators.
The humans remembered because they knew the process very well, and Replicators had come into their possession during this generation.
While the crowd was focused on the dig site in the sand, the team at the cliff face was busy excavating the sand and using ground penetrating radar to search for buried and hidden caverns. If someone had carved a word into the stone, they might have found shelter here, and a cave seemed like the most probable form of longer-term shelter.
But after five hours of searching, digging and scanning, there was nothing to be found except the single word carved into the weathered stone.
The stone face was solid all the way down to bedrock, so the marking wasn't above a doorway or a cavern. Perhaps whoever had carved it had only been passing by, or there was some other landmark hidden under the sand that they hadn't found yet.
The teams would be analyzing the radar scans for the next few days to see if there was something promising there, like a former oasis or the remains of a building.
It might have even been the location of a crashed drop pod, but they would have to scan a larger area in high definition to locate the remains of an ancient drop pod that had been filled with sand.
The other site was much more entertaining to watch, and they had found a few curious objects in the sand that had the interest levels of the guests raised.
None of them were actual relics, but there was a blob of Duratanium alloy, which was commonly used in ship building, found among the soft sand, and the way that the announcer had played up the small ball of rare alloyed metal was enough to get everyone eagerly waiting for news of a shipwreck on the planet.
The workers couldn't go all night though, and slowly the scene turned to the most beautiful crimson sunset, with the light of the large red star filtered through the blowing sand of this empty world, before fading to dark and returning the enthralled occupants of Terminus to their regularly scheduled evening entertainment.
Max could tell that this was the best call they could have made in their journey to find lost worlds. The people loved it, and the social media feeds were going insane from finding just a single blob of melted metal that didn't belong there.
It could have come from anywhere, even floated there from a space battle a hundred thousand years earlier, but the hopeful posts were getting hundreds of thousands of responses, and attracting even more positive attention for Terminus.
In two days, they would be sending down some of the senior students from the Academy to help out, and that was what many of the guests were waiting for. A real opportunity to see their precious children studying among an ancient relic dig site on an unmapped planet.
You couldn't get better bragging rights than that. At least, not easily.
