With night fallen, there wasn't enough light to begin our salvaging, and the wildlife would soon be at their most active. I certainly didn't want to attract too much attention.

  It was all I could do to go get the speeder and bring it to the town's center. I had Pal escort me while Red stayed and began cleaning one of the smaller buildings facing the pza. I'd rest there tonight. Between the speeder's defenses and my portable turret, we should be able to make it safe enough.

  It wasn't long before we heard the cries of various creatures, performing their roles in the cycle of life.

  It was a wonder that Izzy had survived, perhaps the sheer volume of noise the little mechanic made kept most beasts away. If I was being honest, I was already missing the little guy. He had a certain vicious humor that I enjoyed, as long as he pointed it elsewhere.

  He'd given me a little information about his people, Goblins. And the impression I'd been left with was that they were a lot like the Hutts, with their love of money and control. But Goblins also loved machinery and experimentation. You'd never catch a Hutt getting their own hands filthy with work, but most Goblins had a little grease under their cws.

  As I finally fell asleep, I worried that there was more to Izzy's presence here. Why were the Goblins pying with something are dangerous as teleportation?

  The next morning, we began our hunt for materials. It was a very profitable search, though not in the way I'd expected.

  While the majority of whatever the people living here owned had been taken with them, we did find a little bit of mining equipment. A drill ser, a sonic hammer, a few detonators, and some odds and ends. I was starting to think I might have to strip the buildings of their electronics, when I found the storehouse.

  It was packed full of ore. Floor to rafters full. Stuffed even.

  As I understand it most mining was done in asteroid belts, often with specialized mining droids, centered around rge stations that processed the ores. Even, after the Colpse that was still often true.

  Which meant I had some questions about why there was a mining town here. The only thing I could think of was that there was something special in this area. Something you're not going to find float around in an asteroid field.

  Now, I knew next to nothing about ores. All the metal I'd ever worked with was salvage. As far as I knew that's how most people get their metals, these days. I couldn't even tell you what this ore would smelt into, or if I'd have to alloy it after to make it useful. With this particur situation it was better and worse than that, there were at least four different types of ore. Tons and tons of the stuff. I wouldn't be able to haul even a fraction of this stuff back to the homestead.

  I decided it would be best to start smelting a bunch of it down and see what I got out of it all. But with my little smelter it would take ages to get a useful amount of material from ore. That was considered, by most, to be an industrial scale process.

  While the townsfolk had taken their industrial smelters, they had left a few parts behind. Between those bits and bobs and a few uses of Summon Parts I'd managed to craft a workable rge scale autosmelter.

  Wasting no time Pal and I loaded the hopper with almost a ton of the ore. We didn't worry about mixing types. The density sifting of an autosmelter should be able to sort it all out.

  While that was cooking, I decided to try and find some answers. I'd seen that one of the buildings at the central pza stood out. It was both rger and seemed to had more decorative accents. Perhaps the home of whoever ran the town. A good pce to start.

  Pal and I checked to make sure it was clear. Nothing.

  Then I tried to slice into the building's data storage. While I was by no means a security expert, I'd learned quite a few techniques while working with droids over the years.

  Sometimes droids didn't need conventional repairs, they needed reprogramming. Sometimes the seemingly physical problems were manifestations of a glitch in their codes.

  Almost all droid processors were encrypted. I'd figured out a number of common bypasses, overrides, and even some basic brute force slicing. I only screwed up a little at first... but I learned and refined what I learned.

  These were very useful skills when you are trying to get access to a ghost town's secure data.

  Hmm. Exerite, Neffirite, Lethrite, and Vesirite. Those were the main ores found here. I recognized none of those names. Maybe they were code names? Why would they bother?

  Izzy hadn't mentioned the ores, but I doubted that as long as he said he was here, he hadn't found them. Which meant Izzy didn't know what these ores were for either. Whether it was because he didn't know which ores smelting into the metals he needed, or the metals extracted from these ores weren't right, I couldn't say.

  But all of these ores were just the stuff that was in the way. An extra bonus, while they searched for their real target. What they were really hunting for was a type of crystal.

  While there wasn't much on why they wanted the crystals, I knew the description. Small clusters of green glowing crystals. Mana sources. They were hunting mana sources. I'd never even considered that mana sources might be found in natural pces.

  They were worth vast sums of credits. For one the size of the one I'd absorbed back to unlock my Technomancy, 10000 credits.

  I didn't know if the ones that I'd taken from Izzy's ruined Golems were as valuable, or if the fact that they were blue even mattered. But I needed them anyway. As much as it hurt my wallet to think about, I should absorb them tonight. Improving my Technomancy was worth it.

  Digging through the records of the town, it was established a century or so post Colpse, hunting for these new materials. If people have know about these new materials that long, why was I just now finding out about them? Why weren't droids or speeders being built with these new metals?

  Reading on, the town itself was only inhabited for a few hundred years. A lot of details were glossed over, but I got the picture. The town hadn't been sanctioned. The Hutts either refused them the permits to mine here, or the people here never applied in the first pce.

  Well, that was one way to increase your profit margins. If you survived the backsh. If the Hutt found out... they would have made examples of everyone.

  The st entries, weren't as I expected about them being discovered.

  They were about a disease the people were starting to suffer from. They couldn't match it to any known contagion. The profits were high, pay was good, so everyone kept going. Until they couldn't. Then the first death occurred.

  Then they finally figured out that it was exposure to the crystals themselves. Something about the energy the crystals produced was toxic to about 99.2% of the people exposed. Hmm.

  Finally, unable to continue, the leader of the town called in a few favors and used the st batch of crystal mined to purchase medical care for the townsfolk.

  I could see the results for myself.

  I was a bit worried myself now. Though I suspected that I wouldn't suffer from exposure the same way the townsfolk had.

  Maybe I should check out those mines?