Yuri hasn't seen many rocks in gravity before. She's more familiar with spinning asteroid clusters, clouds of debris fragments--everything she encounters while hauling ships back to station for salvage. This planet's crags of limestone, or even the shining pebbles on the river bank, are completely new to her.

Flux's ahead of Yuri on the trail. She's shed some of her humanoid form for convenience, and she's hauling most of their camping gear with her tentacles as she sets the pace.

They've both fantasised about this trip for a year, planning it during their brief moments of downtime. It's the best they can do within their budget--a cheap camping trip on a secluded planet, somewhere they can sit and watch the sun move across the sky, see some stars from planetside for once. Even the leg cramps from the rough terrain seem worthwhile--a bit of physical pain is a small price to pay just to be away from work.

"Hey," Flux calls out to her from ahead. "There's a weird rock around here, it's got stuff on it."

"What kind of stuff?"

"It's got a pattern on it, maybe it's a landmark or a warning or something?" Flux motions impatiently with a free tentacle. "Just look at it and save me the trouble."

"Yeah, sure." Yuri's boots crunch through gravel as she picks up her pace.

The rock is a boulder overgrown with moss, with a carving on one of its flatter surfaces--two concentric circles intersected by gridlines, with an upside-down triangle symbol aligned in the centre of the grid. Yuri traces the triangle with her finger. It's machine-etched, and the moss growing within its deep grooves means it's been there for quite a while.

"Graffiti? It almost seems like it's pointing to something below..."

Flux locks her tentacles around the boulder, lifting it up with a mighty heave. "See anything there?"

"Flux, what the hell--"

"Don't worry, I'll put it back, just check under there--god, this is heavy--"

Yuri decides to save her criticism for later and looks beneath the boulder. A basic scan shows there's a non-reactive cylindrical thing buried in the soil. She pushes the soil out of the way and grabs it.

Flux sets the boulder down, then extends a few tendrils and begins prodding the object. "Metal-ish, I think, mostly hollow...there's something clunky and solid inside. No obvious hazards. Wanna crack this baby open?"

"Go for it," Yuri says. "If we explode, at least we won't have to go back to work."

"Here's hoping." Flux twists off the top of the cylinder and reaches in. "Oh, look, I still have no idea what this is. Some kind of stone carving?"

"Hmm." Yuri gently weighs the carving in her hand. It's obviously meant to depict a mountain range--there are little dips and valleys engraved onto its sides, and there's even a human figure near one of the peaks for scale. "Looks like a souvenir, maybe? They're usually not made from real rocks, though. And this place doesn't look like any landmark I've heard of."

"Maybe it says where it's from on the bottom?"

Yuri flips it over. There's a series of symbols carved into the bottom, divided into chunks that look a bit like the standard format for coordinates. The language isn't familiar. "Know what this says?"

"No, but Rittenhouse would, he's got like ten zillion language databases--if this is some kind of souvenir he'd probably know where it's from too, he gets all kinds of junk in that shop. Wanna bring it back with us? If it isn't worth anything we can just junk it stationside.

"Sure," Yuri says, placing it back into the container. "I'll keep it in the meantime."

The rest of the day goes as planned--they wash up, have dinner, and set up their tent, flicking its domed top to low opacity so they can see the stars.

As Flux drifts off beside her, her body gently rippling and morphing as she settles into sleep, Yuri opens the cylinder again and tips the carving into her palm, running her thumb over its surface.

It's probably a piece of space junk, something worthless, something that isn't even worth the trouble of bringing back to the station. It's probably nothing.

But she hopes it isn't.