Let's go back a few hours before he decided to return to Larkspur Haven.
The deeper Aurelian went into Helion Bastion Twelve's preserved records, the more obvious it became that this trip had paid off far beyond what he had expected when he first followed the clue here.
The bastion had lost things over the centuries, of course. Some stores had been stripped during older internal conflicts, some sectors had decayed, and some data clusters were damaged badly enough that even the restored command system marked them as incomplete.
But the true core of the place had never been opened to the awakened population, and because of that, the most important things were still there.
There were resources stacked in sealed vaults, rare items packed in old military containers, layered technical archives, and more blueprints than he had time to read in one sitting.
The stargate blueprint alone would have made the whole journey worthwhile.
But it did not stop there.
