Tales From Tewanta

Ludwig's Deposit, HIP 75862 3 C - 3308-08-04 08:21 GST Maria drove the settlement's Scorpion light assault vehicle north away from Ludwig's Deposit towards an area of badlands. Thomas was in the gunner's seat behind her studying something on his data terminal, probably custom software he was working on for his little e-breach side project. Maria was a little grumpy. Thompson had interrupted breakfast to get the two of them to checkout some flaky perimeter sensors. Their employers, HIP 74286 Stakeholders, often didn't send the highest quality supplies: short term economies that lead to more work for them in the long term. Without Thomas repairing, patching, and developing clever hacks, the settlement would have had a catastrophic infrastructure failure ages ago. It was going to be his job to figure out what was wrong. It was her job, as scout, to look after him. This was an anarchy system controlled by a c...

Ludwig's Deposit, HIP 75862 3 C - 3308-08-03 19:44 GST Yuri Burke sat back from the neutron imager view finder and took a deep breath. His hunch was correct. This wasn't an ordinary fossil. Others would consider it extraordinary anyways, given that it was a fossil of an ancient, alien, and previous unknown insect or arachnid species. But in a galaxy of wonders, where an alien species menaced human space regularly, the fossil would have just been a curiosity, something for a rich family's private collection or an exhibit in a museum in some backwater system in the Empire with pretensions of being cultured. Yuri suspected that this fossil was special due to its unusual asymmetry. He would have loved to study the true form fossils, of course, as biochemistry was his original field of study, but this fossil was slightly deformed compared to the others. The asymmetry looked like an impact trauma, perhaps even a punctu...