Suspicion -- SD 10307.21

[LoAmi 0]

Simultaneously with the commotion in the bar, the science department pressed on in search of the source of the illness in the small, run-down laboratory known as the Lodi colony's Directorate of Science.  The Director of Science, Dr. Seymour Aurum, seemed more interested in obstruction than in finding the cause.  More than once, he had told an inquisitive Ensign Toran that nothing that could be done to find the infectious agent.  He had clearly been affected by the illness and was suffering of a severe cough, and an unknown number of other less obvious symptoms.  Despite his condition, he had refused an offer of an examination by medical personnel from Arcadia, choosing instead to retreat into an office behind the main laboratory.  It was difficult to discern whether - in his old age - he had simply given up on life, or he was trying to hide something sinister.  Aurum seemed strangely unsurprised, if not unconcerned, that the only two reported fatalities from the illness had been his assistant scientists.

 

If there was one thing that Dr. Aurum clung to and protected, it was his single, small tablet of gold-plated Lodinite.  Lodinite, an exotic form of matter, cannot be replicated and is known to be native only to the Granger Asteroid Belt.  Ever since its relatively recent discovery, it has enriched the Traders Guild even more than the meager dilithium deposits for which the Lodi mining colony was originally constructed.  Scanned by Ensign Roberts' tricorder, the tablet registered simply as a hollow shell of gold, and therein lay the value of Lodinite.  Its structure interacts with matter and radiation in such a way that it becomes invisible to scanners.  Its scarceness prevented it from supplanting the cloaking device as the means of choice for hiding from prying eyes; but, for the smuggler who could afford the initial outlay, Lodinite presented unique money-making opportunities.  And thus, Lodi colony turned from an out-of-the-way, small-time mining operation into a center for the unsavory characters who sought its one product.

 

The majority of Aurum's main lab consisted of equipment that one might expect in a metallurgical analysis operation.  Surprisingly, Ensign Toran had detected biological materials in an adjacent room.  The room was quite a mess, with broken equipment scattered all over the floor.  Footprints had been detected, consistent with those of a limping individual.  Ensign Roberts was in the process of piecing together what biologicals, precisely, were present.  Most surprisingly, one wall of the back lab could not be scanned by sensors, and no power source or dampening field could be detected.  An entire wall covered in Lodinite would have cost the scientists many times more than their annual budget.  Now, it was time to find out what was worth hiding that much.

 

It was becoming abundantly clear that there was more to this operation than simple materials analysis.