Lee shrugged. “Between the time they sent the distress call and we got here? Couldn’t be less than a week.”

“Since when do wildcat colonies report back?” Wilson asked.

“I just go where they tell me, Lieutenant,” Lee said. She motioned to Jefferson and pointed at one of the bodies. “Check that body for an ID chip. Colonists sometimes put them in so they can keep track of each other.”

“You want me to go through the body?” Jefferson asked, clearly horrified.

“Ping it,” Lee said, impatiently. “Use your BrainPal. If there’s a chip, it’ll respond.”

Wilson turned away from Lee and Jefferson’s truly compelling discussion and headed farther into the hut. The bodies had been in an open area that he suspected, true to Lee’s hunch, was used for colony gatherings. Farther in were a set of what used to be cubicles and a small enclosed room.

The cubicles were a shattered mess; the room, from the outside, at least, looked intact. Wilson was hoping the colony’s computing and communications hardware were in there.

The room door was locked. Wilson jiggled the door handle a couple of times to be sure, then looked at the other side of the door. He pulled out his multipurpose tool, formed it into a crowbar and pulled the pins out of the door hinges. He set the door aside and looked into the room.

Every piece of equipment had been hammered into oblivion.

“Crap,” Wilson said to himself. He went into the room anyway to see if anything was salvageable.

“Find anything?” Lee asked a few minutes later, appearing by the door.

“If someone likes puzzles, they could have fun with this,” Wilson said. He stood up and gestured to the remains of the equipment.

“So nothing you can use,” Lee said.

“No,” Wilson said. He bent down and grabbed a piece of debris and held it out for Lee to take. “That’s supposed to be the memory core. It’s been hammered out of usability. I’ll take it back and try to get something out of it anyway, but I wouldn’t be holding out hope.”

“Maybe some of the colonists’ computers and handhelds will have something,” Lee said. “I’ll have my people collect them.”

“That would be nice,” Wilson said. “Although if everything tied through this central server, it’s possible everything got wiped before this got broken up.”

“It wasn’t just destroyed in the fighting,” Lee said.

Wilson shook his head and motioned to the wreckage. “Locked room. No other damage to this part of the hut. And it looked to me like the damage here was methodical. Whoever did it didn’t want what was stored on it to get captured.”

“But you said the door was locked,” Lee said. “Whoever ran over this place didn’t stop to check the computer.”

“Yeah,” Wilson said, and then looked over at Lee. “What about you? Get anything off the bodies?”