'So not just personnel created there...?'

She doesn't seem very impressed by the story outwardly. On the other hand, it's unclear if it's even possible to impress her. That's a very good stony expression she's got going. 

'Doesn't rule out - organic construction. That'd be basically useless for combat so we might not have seen it, even if it's advanced...'

'Tell that to the giant fucking boars.' 

'The machine lifeforms are interested in mimicking humans, though. We need to be on our guard.'

'I still think they're mimicking us... But even that special unit was pretty clearly a machine lifeform to my senses...'

'It evolved fast. It could have evolved more.'

The conversation takes place incredibly quickly, in compressed mode - it's over in the time it takes her to deliberately blink unimpressedly. "Let us see your escape pod. Maybe we can help." 

Between the two of them, Steam and Doll can tell that the androids have some kind of back-channel communication is going on, but without access to their enclosed noetic spaces and the encryption keys held therein, it's just noise. Steam and Doll have been back-channeling plenty, too, so it's hardly unfair.

Doll gives them a genuine and warm smile as she picks herself and Steam up. "Thank you, we can really use any help we can get." Then, Steam lets Braid and House know that they're returning to base with company (prompting another, if gentler, wave of annoyance) and Doll starts flying them back to base, making sure to not outpace the androids (which is easy, given just how quick they are).

They indeed keep up. 

"You work quickly," she comments, surveying what they have so far. (Though she'll leave most of the actual analysis to 5S.)

The base has definitely grown a bit since Steam and Doll left, as expected from a psychokinetic and technologist of Braid and House's calibers respectively. The terrain around the landing site has been remodeled to make somewhat difficult to notice from a distance and to provide vantage points for defenders around the perimeter, before delving into the earth, a checkerboard of storage piles and fabrication areas all operated by Braid's psychokinesis rather than by any sort of tangible machinery, interspersed with occasional mining pits from which narrow streams of material rise out before dividing neatly between the storage piles in accordance with the chemical make-up of the excavated matter.

"We think that some amount of rebuilding was part of the plan, given our abilities and the surviving records," Doll explains.

'They're not human,' she sends to 5S, confidently.

'Don't rule out possibilities... But organic constructions might be better at restoring the world than we are...'

"You're planning to stay here?" she asks. "It's not very defensible..."

'Or that's what they want us to think.'

"If you can mount the guns you'll see the enemy coming. But they can swarm better in this environment." 

"Well..." Doll and Steam exchange a look. "It mostly depends on what our number 1 thinks. Right now we're just trying to get a proper generator built so that we can stop burning through our reserves. But if this isn't a good place to stay, she'll pick it up and move us somewhere else."

At this moment, Braid and House exit the vessel at the center of the camp and hover over towards the guests.

"There's number 1 and 2 right now, actually."

"What would a 'proper generator' look like, and what do you need to replenish your 'reserves?'" 

"Uh, hm. I don't really have a good verbal description. It's a sort of blocky metal container that we fill with a special foam to capture and channel the high-energy particles coming out of a stabilized rift? I could transmit some visuals and structural data if you want to know more. Number 2-"

"Welcome to our humble abode, androids," Braid interrupts rather brusquely. "As number 4 was explaining, number 2 is our technology expert, who can give you all the details we have regarding the generator."

If 5S happens to switch to a scanner modality that can observe maso activity, it will be nigh-blindingly obvious that all of the activity going around the camp is all tied directly to Braid, who herself is brilliant with exotic energies.

She does; it's her standard way to detect active goliaths and special units, and it's how she knew that special unit wasn't an android. 

Prior model androids use water fuel cells for all their energy. YoRHa use it for some, especially for everyday activities, but the vast majority of their energy especially in combat comes from their black box. The black box does use maso, as do the oldest models of maintenance androids (especially Devola and Popola models) -

But not like this. 

'Definitely not androids,' she sends, extensively masking how high an alert this puts her on. '13B - '

'Don't attack yet. We need to know what's going on. And there's no sense wasting the energy.' She's maybe still slightly annoyed at 5S for starting the fight with the special unit; 13B had been content to glare suspiciously at it.

Her unimpressed nature makes it very easy for her to mask. She feels the same range of emotions either way. 

"I'd like that information!" 5S chirps, like she wasn't just contemplating stabbing them. "But 13B would be very annoyed if I broke regulations by accepting a direct unverified transmission. Can you transmit to an intermediary, or print the information onto paper?" That last is something the Resistance makes heavy use of - paper can't be hacked or spread logic viruses. 

House will definitely not mention that the empire has, in fact, created statically embeddable basilisks, and instead nod to 5S before working in concert with Braid to direct some of her psychokinesis through the fabrication process. A few seconds later, a stack of...not exactly paper, but sheets of a flexible pseudo-ceramic, with detailed descriptions of the construction of the smallest rift generator and exmatter collector (with all information that could potentially point in the direction of actual transuniversal displacement carefully removed) printed on them floats over to the smaller android.

Braid smiles, significantly less warmly than Doll's, before asking, "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

She has questions about the 'creche' they woke in, and about their ability to defend themselves from machine lifeforms - couched in terms of if they need help of course. And about their abilities.

5S, meanwhile, speed reads the papers. She's impressively fast at that, too.

The papers do indeed contain information on what materials are necessary (or just useful) for constructing the containment cell, capture foam, and stabilized rift, as well as what sort of geological processes tend to leave ores or deposits of these materials near the surface and in turn what sort of surface features can be used to identify where the materials might be found. There's also details on the chemical processes necessary to separate the relevant materials from their various substrates, processes to combine the materials into the desired compounds, and the macroscopic construction process for the generator and collector are also present. The only thing that might be confounding is the description of how the rift itself is created and stabilized, which delves into manipulations of 'exmatter' (seemingly an alternative name for maso) that may not map to anything 5S has records of, though at least on a surface level analysis it does seem to correspond with whatever it is that this 'number 1' is doing.

Meanwhile, Braid nods to House, who begins explaining the status of (entirely fictitious, but based on a real understanding of imperial cloning and psionic induction facilities) creche where they (supposedly) awoke few hours ago. Once that's done, Braid will in turn state that she is confident in her ability to defend against essentially any number of the bumbling toy-like robots which Steam and Doll encountered earlier, but that information on more dangerous machines (or wildlife, for that matter) would be greatly appreciated.

'...Don't think machine lifeforms have access to this.' She'll have to transmit it to Command to be sure, though. 'We'd have noticed them developing it.' 

She's also memorizing their explanation to transmit to Command, or course - while multitasking with relaying some of their information about more dangerous machine lifeforms (without revealing anything she isn't sure the machine lifeforms already know they know, or anything about her and 13B's own capabilities).

'...Different group of aliens?'

'Unlikely? But the possibility is alarming.' She'll mention it in her report, at least. 

Anyways! Here's a description of a goliath tank. And also of the Fucking Boars - seriously, don't tango with the giant white ones, you will lose. 

Neither of the maybe-aliens visibly takes notes, but House is certainly paying attention, even if Braid seems a bit skeptical about giant albino boars being particularly dangerous. Still, if these androids are spooked about them, despite their displayed capabilities, then maybe they have some sort of residual psionic abilities.

"What exactly are the machine lifeforms?" House asks, genuinely curious "The records we had didn't give us any indication of them. Where do they come from? Why are they hostile?"