This story is not what I started to write, but in the end, I'm pretty happy about where it ended up: not so much a story, as a deeper scientific look into a completely pointless area. There's no excitement, nothing really happens, but I think it's in line with the lore of freelancer - and it offers a lot of technical background for planetform, and any player that dabbles in alien organisms or owns a Researcher ID.
The inspiration for the story came from a program I once saw on Discovery (I think.) It was a program about alien life, and the theories, that life could have been carried to Earth from for example Mars, buried inside solid rock. The program took a filmcrew to Antartica where, in the world's coldest environment, they showed how algae and bacteria lived even there. When they split rocks down the middle, about one inch under the surface, there was a brown-green band in the rock - life. Life carries on in this hostile environment, shielded by the stone from the cold and the wind, and just enough sunlight filters through the stone that phonosynthesis is possible.
I guess you need to be a real nerd to get something out of reading this but... I just felt like writing it.
