Breakthrough:

The third hot spot was a wealth of information that has busted this case wide open. Initially what appeared to be an empty building used for general government functions became a labyrinth of underground tunnels, typical of the Darvic people to use tunnels, which led to some hidden rooms housing a multitude of documents from both the project lead and some ancient documents from some Darvish shipwrights. This project was clearly intended to be an R&D lab for the production of new ships, at least until the spores were released. I’m still unsure as to how the spores were released into the atmosphere on such a scale but I found a broken jar in one of the rooms connected to the tunnels that had a rather large buildup of spores on the inside of the jar, suggesting that the Darvic leadership was holding on to at least some samples of the stuff, maybe for use in weapons development before the collapse of their empire. Regardless, the discovery I’ve made today explains why all the shipyards in orbit were operational, at least partially. High command clearly wants some new and improved designs for their ships, makes sense considering our current vessels are practically ancient themselves, but as for why they wanted this project to be secret I can only speculate, perhaps our position in the galaxy isn’t as secure as they make it out to be.

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I’ve got one more hot spot to investigate, and with the dots beginning to connect like they are I suspect all my questions will be answered there. Someone had to turn on the shipyards manually and since none of the DNA results taken from the bodies found a few days ago came back as the project lead I suspect he’s the one I’ve been looking for. He must still be alive but whether or not he’ll be capable of answering my questions is another matter entirely. Exposure to the spores have likely driven him mad if the condition of that poor young man in the medi-pod is anything to go off of. Perhaps medical will find a way to get rid of this “spore-madness” that many of Hipper’s crew have taken to calling it, in which case I’ll definitely be able to get the answers I’m looking for, but first things first I need to find this guy before he does something even more insane than killing his entire research team.