Recent days were so busy I completely neglected creating the journal entries for a long time now.
Many things happening one after the another, lots of work to be done, but also many problems to handle were keeping me away from this routine.
During our stay on the planet so far, we have established total of three different camps that we are aware of within the groups I managed to get in touch with. Having said that, the split in numbers is not helping us out with making it closer to reaching the goals established for the expedition.
While aforementioned is the case, we cannot really help it after all, mainly due to having several sub-groups within the crew, each oriented for reaching individual targets - colonists wanted soil sufficient for establishing settlements and creating self-sufficient communities, scientists were looking to learn about the planet itself and the alien technology, studying leftover installations, and military personnel wanted to have all the populated areas under proper control, ensuring safety of everyone in the crew.
However, even though there were those working on reaching goals of their respective teams, I am now aware of different factions being on the move all the time, not paying attention to the success of the whole expedition - rather than that, those people are representing the interest of their employers, who seek to secure business and earn money from establishing influence on this new planet.
Such history keeps happening whenever a new frontier is opened. Back on Earth, there were numerous wars for gaining control over land, whether it was recently discovered or in the hands of other nations. Then, over the course of time, humanity managed to reach outer space and similar conflicts sprouted over moons, planets or asteroids, all because of resources. To sum it up, it was expected, but I still hoped we can be more civilized and smarter - after all, we are talking about humanity being on the verge of losing our home planet to overpopulation and pollution, and there are still people putting their own profits above the well-being of all humans.
We are still expected to reach the alien megacity at some point, yet we are slow on moving on due to the findings we made on the way towards the target. The Industrial Caves, which is now the main site where we established a temporary camp, was originally supposed to be only a short stop for gathering various separated groups before we continue moving further.
This has changed the moment we made important discoveries in Industrial Caves' undeground - combined with other works done across different, smaller devices and installations left by aliens, it allowed us to notice interesting connections that could shed more light on how this lost civilization was thinking and ultimately resulting in our own technological knowledge being expanded. In the end, we could even figure out one of the key topics this expedition was to look into - what kind of energy source was powering the megacity to make it operational for years without any visible maintanance.
Still, it brings us back to the resources problem - since we have people spread across a number of camps, not knowing the location of majority of the people we had on Future, we have limitations when it comes to personnel available for doing the onsite work in Industrial Caves. This issue ended up with the plan colonel Ryan McRae decided on, which meant significant impact on the First Haven - taking most of the science team members from there away.
Unfortunately, a lof of stuff was happening back there and numerous people from First Haven were forced to take on multiple tasks at the same. Not only that, they were facing something no one from the planning team of Future project was taking into account - involvement of third parties.
Just to be clear here, they were aware of the possibilily of numerous corporations and different factions having their own people mixed within the crew, so this kind of thing was considered. However, no one could have thought that anyone else aside from the Earth Council, supported by numerous governments, was capable to send their own ship on such a mission - and that was apparently the case.
Of course, I'm yet to confirm if all the information I managed to gather so far is enough to conclude the third party involvement of such an extent is indeed the case, but what I saw with my own eyes until now points me toward already believing these are not the actions of mere individuals who could have managed to get onboard Future.
Recent incident that happened in First Haven required a large force of people to be involved in order to cause abruption and damage of such a level - weeks of work so many people put into making this place their home were destroyed in a matter of only few hours. Even the presence of additional military personnel on site was not sufficient enough to prevent this from happening - obviously, they managed to limit some damage, especially in terms of casualties, but gathered non-human resources, devices, buildings and different kinds of equipment ended up stolen or destroyed, which was a big hit to everyone around.
Many people were angered and felt hopeless after this event. Then again, at the same time, all the work that ended up being for naught made them less bound to the piece of land they put their hopes on. While I hate seeing people's plans being destroyed, this was something that positively affected plans related to work in the Industrial Caves - for a number of crewmates, staying in First Haven was no longer a must.