Under the Ice

Our … have set their camps around the edges of a glassy, frozen lake. Under sufficient light, one may catch glimpses of spectral towers underneath. They grasp upwards from the lake bed like steadfast tendrils.

Our less experienced crews are still adjusting to work in such biting, sterile cold. Despite this, our excavations have proceeded swiftly. We have exposed numerous airlocks, all designed for primitive submarine vessels. There is, as yet, no sign of the vessels themselves. Whether the tower's inhabitants stayed or fled, every one of its docks was left empty.

As we continue to remove large sections of ice from around the various icebound habitats, our … at the docking tower have discovered a primitive computer terminal. Its brittle metal casing appears to have been... chewed upon.

The terminal booted up correctly after some minor repairs. Large parts of the habitat's data network remain offline, but we can infer a great deal from local caches of stock manifests, personnel files, and what appears to be a stash of mission logs.

Our knowledge of the ancient settlement on … deepens, but so too does our concern. What we have uncovered is the remains of a frontier colony - a remnant of a civilization so long forgotten, we cannot even discern their name.

When seas were a more dominant feature on this world, disparate groups of settlers were brought from their homeworld and conscripted into pioneer submarine crews. Their goal: to establish colonies and exploit the planet's natural resources. Their reality, however, was one of unchecked biological experiments, radical political change, and significant peril fending off hostile flora and fauna.

The sensor logs from a navigation buoy appear to have tracked one such crew en route to a nearby outpost. We believe their vessel may still be there, trapped in ice along with a cache of useful materials.

Having surveyed all we can from the wrecked submarine and abandoned habitats, our teams on … are preparing to regroup near the planet's surface. There is much we still do not know about this colony. Most of what we found simply amounts to an eclectic legacy, of life on a particularly lonely frontier.

Although they lacked faster-than-light travel, these ancient submariners have steered us towards remarkable breakthroughs in other fields. They made these discoveries in hardship, the likes of which we can strive not to experience ourselves.