Threats from within.

[Boss]

I watched them go down the hallway towards the first laser. I sized up the other men in the room with me and nodded to the less scruffy one. "If you'd be so kind as to show me to the other, I'd be happy to take a look and repair it as quickly as I can. That way you can get back to business." He smiled and gestured towards a separate corridor. The would-be soldiers remained in the main area. Why they did I don't know. I don't really care, either.

"...and over in this room we have the storage bins and canisters for the artifacts we've uncovered. Most of them don't work though. The ones that do we put in the canisters." He pointed out a number of containers that were far neater, newer, and cleaner than anything else I'd seen yet. Intriguing. The bins were a horror show. Artifacts, from mundane power cells to memory units for computational devices to components to much larger devices, all thrown in a heap. Many were shattered, others blinked weakly in nearly undetectable spectrums. I made a mental note to come back to this room later.

We came to another cavern, smaller and rougher than the first, at the end of which rested the squat and imposing form of a small fusion core and beside it, a pan-and-tilt mounted mining laser. Possibilities...

"I'm sorry, I don't think I got your name. Miss Hartwell never did specify who was down here to meet us." The man nodded. "I'm Norman McCullough. The laser's down there."

"Any information you could give me on the problem?"

"Well, when we last tried to use it, the output beam oscillated along the electromagnetic spectrum. I have absolutely no idea why."

"If you had an idea, I wouldn't be down here to fix it." We crossed the chamber and I opened my toolkit. I considered killing him then and there but the plan relied on them using this laser again, not avoiding it like the plague. I reached under the tray and pulled out a few tools, then placed them on the console. None of them were tools to fix the laser.

Curiosity got the better of him. "What does that one do?" He pointed to a grooved cylinder with a small forest of protrusions at one end, a ring on the other, and a single button placed about two thirds of the way towards the forest. I picked it up, spun it around so the prongs faced him, and smashed it into his chest. Ten thousand volts of electric energy surged from pole to pole, its high frequency interfering with muscle control. A shocked look crossed his face a second before that too was consumed by spasms. I pulled it back and let his twitching body collapse on the floor.

"That."

---

Just go play the game and have fun dammit.

all in all the conclusion is that disco doesn't need antagonist factions, it doesn't need phantoms, it doesn't need nomads, it doesn't need coalition and it doesn't need many other things, no AIs, the game is hijacked by morons to confuse the game with their dickwaving generic competition games mixed up with troll-of-the-day.