As two men sat in a darkened office full of cigar smoke and the muffled din of outside commotion, a holo-recording played on a tabletop projector they sat around. There was a pall of silence over them and the sound of ragged, hoarse breaths filled the room, emanating from the recording. Digits in red flickered over the top of the hologram, noting a date a slight bit older than three years at this point. The recording itself showed little; Mostly blurry footage of a dense, noisy, wet jungle, the sounds of heavy footsteps and that eerie ragged breathing. As the recorder's point of view moved, a single thin light beam could be seen sweeping across the landscape; Likely a helmet-mounted flashlight. By the end of the thirty-seven second recording, the beam swept across a giant, unseemly chunk of metal, definitely out of place in such a landscape. As soon as it came into focus, one of the men hit a button, freezing the recording before it ended.
As the unsteady image flickered, frozen in time, the man in question pointed straight at the hologram. "Ya see it? Right there. It's the ship. I'd know that bow anywhere, an'- An' ya see these two letters there? Yah, that's a capital "I" and a capital "N", my man. How many goddamn Pilgrims you know whose name ends in 'IN'? And -there-, outta all places? Ya remember it like I do, crew was paintin' in green for three weeks in the vac-docks." A moment of silence drifted between the two figures, broken by the sound of a service buggy rolling over some loose grating in the hallway outside. "Look, I'm all for finding it all. Wreck like that, with the stories- If there's even an inkling of truth in there, that is- can be worth hundreds of millions." The first figure slapped the tabletop with a polymer glove. "Yeah, that's what I'm sayin! We jus'-", he began but stopped when the other figure continued speaking. "...But. Say we go down. We find it, we salvage it. Right? Sounds simple. Now say -he-'s still down there. What about another crew? That's not even touching the issues of logistics, landing spots, navigation, potentially hostile natives... I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem like a good call. Maybe, just maybe, if we get our hands on more info. That'll be all for now, Swires." The first man, now identified as Swires, stood from the table and in lieu of a counter-argument simply gave the other man a nod, a curt "Yessir." and paced out of the room restlessly.
Afterwards, the remaining figure in the room touched his PDA, and a massive viewport screen slid down with a faint grinding of metal and the clicking of cogs' teeth on a runner. Violet mists swirled and billowed through the expanding gap to crawl against the thick glass. As faint pink light washed into the room, the bald man dragged the frozen holo-recording onto his PDA's surface and begun staring at the flickering, familiar Pilgrim liner bow painted in Underloch green. The outline of Gaia was faintly visible, the gift of an ebb in the Islay Cloud's densities. Quietly, to himself, after taking a drag from his cigarette, the man muttered: "You really went, huh? Crazy old asshole. Don't worry, the dumb kid's coming to get you." A grin flashed.
Sucks to be a weight on the wrong side of the brilliance-insanity scale.