The Shadows of the Damned

[Sprolf]

761 A.S.


Sublevel 4,
New Berlin Museum of Rheinland


Dr. Lucas Baumann pushed the last box all the way onto the sparse shelf with a grunt. There were many other boxes of burnished steel, all labelled the same way.

"8/6/732,
Asteroid 43.61.357, Omega 11
Catalogued by Herr Schneider and Dr. Baumann
New Berlin Museum of Rheinland"

He smiled as he looked at the relatively small cluster of boxes that took up this corner of the otherwise massive archive room. The rough shelves of this empty sublevel of the museum archives were mostly bare, letting him see across what must have been hundreds of square yards of mostly bare shelves. A few clusters of boxes or crates were here or there, but there was nothing substantial to the pileup.

He stood up, brushing his labcoat off with a smile. "Vell, now, my boxes, I vill be getting to you in just a veek, once mine work mit Mr. Tekagi is finished. Zen ve vill find your secrets, mine little xenoartifacts." He smiled a little, ignoring the three jumpsuit-clad archaeologists or technicians around him. He was quite thrilled at the find that he'd been tasked with cataloguing these new artifacts that had been unearthed quite by accident by diamond miners. This was his big chance...

Well, he needed funding. A very generous Kusarian governer was funding Baumann at the moment, and would be awarding him a very handsome if he assisted in the reactivation of a peculiar matter cascade device that had been adapted from artifacts that gave off relatively harmless emissions - a very pretty looking device with little use, like all artifacts. Still, as pointless as that was, there was the money to be considered. Baumann knew these artifacts could wait; they had already been waiting for longer than he could imagine, and his acquiring money to further his research certainly wouldn't be getting much in the way of this.


He started back toward the elevator, chuckling.
His spirits were as high as his fortunes at the moment, and his future looked brighter than ever.
He would be the most distinguished xenoarchaeologist by the end of this year if all things worked out.

His future was bright indeed.

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