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 puncture wound. His early investigations proved that to be the case. He had found, almost two weeks ago, a tiny needle like enclosure embedded in the fossil, about four centimeters below the surface, and about a centimeter and a half long. It was conical in shape, and barely two millimeters across at the base. The needle like space, pointed inwards. What Yuri saw proved that the space wasn't empty at all.
He wished he had someone to discuss this with. He had not had many friends at university, but he had a few, Francine, Edward, and Laurent, back when he was known as Philippe deBurgh, the second son of a minor house in the Empire, and a dedicated and impatient student of the sciences. Now he was a researcher for a crass little faction on the frontier, and a fugitive from the Empire. He would report write a report of the discovery to his new patrons, of course, a group calling themselves The Data Brokers, but it wasn't the same as a face to face scientific debate with learned peers. However, those debates were in the past. Thanks to the stupidity of his father and the villainy of his grandmother, his family had been ruined, and forced into slavery. His uncle Pierre, in an effort to curry favour, had thrown a lavish private party for the son of a senator, including exotic entertainments and curiosities. Amongst these, were some exotic alien pets, one of which, while very cute looking, was very dangerous when it felt threatened. Needless to say, at the party the creature felt threatened, fled for safety, attacking anyone that tried to grab it, and triggered electrical failures and started fires as it made its escape through service ducts. Dozens were injured, including the senator's son. To protect the family name, and her favourite son, Pierre, his grandmother, Lily deBurgh, convinced her father to say it his idea to throw the party and to include all the exotic alien creatures. She assured him, that as second son, the scandal would blow over quickly, that sanctions would be light, and that everything would be back to normal in a year or two. The senator thought otherwise, and put substantial pressure on the authorities to make his family scapegoats. Thus it came to pass that warrants were issued for their arrest and two generations of his family were sentenced to imperial slavery for twenty five years. Yuri was away from home at the time and, when he heard about the warrants, made a quick calculation and decided to flee. That was seven years ago. He had told himself that he would work to free his family, and had saved enough to buy his sister and mother. However, he could not figure out a way of doing so that didn't leave a trail back to himself, and he feared capture. He needed more money, and more power, to free his family safely. He needed money and power enough to get revenge on his grandmother and uncle. This discovery might be the key.
Yuri weighed the options. He could turn this over to HIP 74286 Stakeholders, his current employers. He rejected that out off hand. They would not know what to do with this. He'd get a bonus, perhaps, of a few thousand credits and perhaps a bit of recognition, but that would not be enough. This was big enough to finally finish things if he could just find a way of getting it to the right people. Appreciative people. Perhaps, his new patrons, the Data Brokers. They had contacted him unexpectedly a day or two after he sent out the abstract for a paper he was considering writing, to a few academic publishers. They were very interested in the fossil, and his theories about it in particular. In exchange for sending them the data he had, they paid him a quarter of a million credits. They called it a sign on bonus. They also offered assistance with his research. Calibration advice for the settlement's neutron imager, software upgrades, analytics and visualization tools. The software delivered by Thomas's smuggler, the day before provided the exact scanning pattern he needed to find the needle. It was almost as if they were looking for what he had found. All they wanted in return is his continued reports on his discovery.
His discovery. Yuri leaned in and looked through the view finder again. The stereoscopic image it displayed showed a crystalline needle shimmering as it worked to reconfigure itself to allow the neutrons to pass through it. The neutron imager hummed as it followed a scanning pattern to counteract these adjustments, the scanning pattern provided by the Data Brokers. He was looking at alien nanotechnology. He panned the image toward the needle's tip. From there a fine thread of the same crystalline material emerged. He traced its path through the fossil up to where he imagined the creature's central nervous system would be. From there, it split into multiple threads, impossibly fine, heading all the way to where he imagined the brain could be. They spread into a fine branching structure there. He was looking at not just alien nanotechnology, but a smart weapon, that directly attacked the target's nervous system. To the right people this would be worth billions.
He sat back and thought for a few minutes and made a decision. He made precise measurements of the crystalline structure. He would record his findings and write a report for the Data Brokers, but he would take a small sample from the brain area, for himself. Something about the Data Brokers made him uneasy. The fact that they knew what to look for and how to find it spooked him. They were too secretive. He had searched all public databases looking for anything that matched the alien nanotech properties and found nothing. If anything like this had been found before there should have been some sort of paper or article about it, surely. A small cube from the brain area containing the crystal, a single centimeter per side, would be his insurance. He set to work. Tomorrow he'd take a Scarab SRV away from the settlement, call an Apex shuttle, and disappear.