Sorry to hear about your employment woes, Heathy. Hopefully your upcoming hunt will yield results very quickly.
As for where to go next, I don't think we can afford to ignore the red shirt angle. It looks to be a time-consuming endeavor, which I find worrisome, however if memory serves, our illustrious and excellent DM seemed to indicate that time easily abused in this game/setting (setting being PBP, not the campaign setting, of course). Therefore, I think we should chase it down. Heck, we may not have to go trucking after the dude. Red shirt might have info that we could pursue here. We won't know until we get our hooks in.