White Gold
Nesseritas frieda contained fifteen different bones in its right hand. Far over the norm for Lockhart fauna. I jotted a note down in my notebook as I looked back at the Craggy Cliffs digsite. This sample of Nesseritas proved further the value of this find. And I found it before that detestable Doniel Jacobs. I felt giddy as an undergrad.
“Alright, let’s wrap it up,” I yelled to the half-dozen brutish laborers scuttling about the slopes. My excavation drones sat silent in the back of the hoversled, two of which held massive scorch marks, having burned out earlier today. An acceptable loss. My choices were work them overtime, or delay.
Almost five-thousand kilos of fossils sat in the hoversled behind me. The proceedings of my investigations should yield enough information to bury Doniel Jacobs, turning him into a footnote in Lockhart’s history.
And the Craggy Cliff find would serve as his epitaph. Many species undiscovered still lay beneath the shales surrounding me. Maybe I should hold off the demolition.
“Ready?” I asked my foreman, a big oaf named Turner or Turnsky or something like that.
“Charges laid, Professor,” Turnsky said. Maybe it was Turner. I had no gift for names and hadn’t bothered to upload any to my neural drive. Besides, every muscle-for-hire on Lockhart was cast from identical molds, and I needed the drive space for images.
“Well, there’s no sense sitting around. Let’s get to it,” I said, pulling out the trigger linked to the R37 explosives above the find. Anything I didn’t take my former colleague, Doniel, would. I needed another grad to deal with these problems. Demolition wasn’t my style. My last grad, Meri Blacburne, separated from me months ago to pursue her own career. Said I was an “intolerable imbecile”. I’d noted the lack of anything pertinent from her since.
“Whoa, hold up, professor,” Turnover said, reaching over and sheltering the trigger with his hand.
“Pardon?” I said. “I told you, I’m not paying you per specimen. Grabbing more samples won’t garner you anything further.” These laborers were a bunch of uncultured troglodytes, like old miners panning fanatically for gold. I wouldn’t be surprised if their pockets are lined with fossil fragments.
Perhaps comparing fossils to gold was accurate. Lockhart fossil cost more per cubic centimeter than gold. It had become my chief source of financial backing following a funding decline from the America Museum of Natural History. If this find panned out, I could return and excavate the ruins. The explosives should destroy just the top meter and leave the subsurface intact.
“No, it’s a good haul, and we’re stretching the weight limit,” Turnovsky said. “It’s just one last thing.”
I turned to rebuke the oaf, just as the brute slammed into me. I stumbled backwards and my foot caught on a rock, spilling me hard into the dirt.
Even with my head clouded and my spine feeling like the patient of a Brachiosaurus chiropractor, I was still lucid enough to see Turnover reach down and seize the detonator.
“Sorry, Professor. Ain’t nothing personal. Professor Jacobs made us a bigger offer. Far better than yours. He said he’d pay our full indenture if we got him these fossils.”
“Doniel?” I sputtered. “That honorless dog! I thought you a principled man but you’re nothing more but a greedy miser, you turncoat!” That was his name. Turncoat.
“Sorry, Professor,” he said as he walked to the hoversled. I stumbled onto my feet, and hobbled after him.
“You’d just leave me out here, you beast?” I said. “One of Doniel’s orders?”
“No, Jacobs wanted us to ditch you outside Dubois. But between your constant belittling and your calling my wife a harlot…”
Oh, so he heard that conversation. Damn. I followed him until one Neanderthal on the cart aimed an old sidearm at me. I decided not to press the sociopath’s chaotic anger.
Turncoat jumped into the hoversled, which then roared away with my fossils inside. As they faded into the distance, I heard Turncoat yell out, “If you’re still here when Professor Jacobs arrives, maybe he’ll give you a ride!”
That hoodlum. That treacherous, arrogant… bastard! Leaving me to rot was cowardly, but selling out to Doniel? He was a treacherous snake, and an affront to all xenopaleontologists.
Soon the hoversled was a mere speck on the horizon. No matter how much I cursed the louts, they never turned back and within ten minutes, they’d vanished.
