Known as Lyca // Novara Universe

Lyca stared nervously at the screen.
 She didn’t know it yet, but she was about to make the biggest discovery in human history.

She was aboard the FS Callisnaut, a research vessel named after some deep-sea creature from Earth’s past by Thalassa Orbital. Normally a two-person crew, she was alone for this. Right now, she was watching the camera feed from the third drone she’d sent down through Titan’s thick, ancient ice crust. The first two had vanished after making contact with a strange, white, sparkling rock on the pitch-black ocean floor, kilometers beneath the ice. The second one had only managed to send back a single corrupted error code after bumping into the first.

At this point, Lyca wasn’t trying to discover anything. She was just trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

She had no idea that, decades from now, humanity would carve kilometer-wide shafts through Titan’s ice and send entire fleets of submersible mining rigs into its abyss. Right now, it was just her, ten drones - well, seven left now - and a hard-to-justify budget that would be even harder to explain if she lost another machine before the end of the first day.

Fortunately, the old drones weren’t physically lost. They were still tethered, long cables trailing like umbilical cords up to the surface. Even with modern tech, nothing beats physical tethering for deep-water data transfer.

“Concentrate, concentrate...” she muttered.

The screen began to shimmer faintly - light bouncing off something beneath the drone. Sparkling. That was what had caught her interest in the first place.

Layer by layer, the drone’s lights carved away the darkness, revealing a massive crystalline structure jutting from the seabed. The two ruined drones were still stuck to its side like flies on glass.

“Not so fast this time,” Lyca whispered.

She armed the harpoon-like sensor probe. One button. Then go.

The drone held position, aimed, and fired. Data streamed back up the cable to the tech container on the ice above.

Energy. Lots of it. Enough to fry any electronics that got too close. That explained the previous shutdowns.

She scanned the readouts. Metallic. Porous. Low density.
 “Interesting... very interesting,” she murmured.

More numbers came in. One by one, everything checked out—until she hit the line labeled resistance.

Negative zero.
 A sharp, clean zero, and a flickering minus sign taunting her just above it.
“Hmm. Busted sensor,” she said, frowning.

Faulty readings usually meant throwing out the rest. But nothing else looked wrong. It looked like a metal. Everything else fit.

She didn’t move for a long time. And didn’t sleep much that night.

She triple-checked the numbers. She swapped in the backup diagnostic software. She even had the tech container run a self-test on its own systems and data lines, just to rule out a glitch. But the numbers held.

The material didn’t just conduct electricity.
 It invited it.

She kept the drone hovering near the structure, careful not to let it touch anything again. Then she spotted a fragment—a small piece half-buried in the sediment, maybe cracked off during the earlier impacts. Just a little shard. It wasn’t pulsing or glowing like the main formation. No visible discharge. Maybe...

She positioned the collection arm and gently scooped it up. Expecting to lose another drone.
 But nothing happened.

The piece was small. Just big enough for a containment pod. She ran a low-voltage scan - no electrical surges, no magnetic anomalies. Stable, for now.

She sent it up.

The containment pod ascended slowly, reeling back along the cable, through kilometers of water and ice. Then, attached to a misused weather balloon, it rose toward the Callisnaut. She waited at the intake chamber, her breath fogging in the chill.

The pod arrived without incident. No sparks. No system failures. Just silence - and a cold, metallic glint inside the transparent housing.
It looked unremarkable. Dull gray. Slight shimmer. If she didn’t know better, she’d think it was slag.

“Time for testing.”

Heat conduction. Magnetism. Structural stability. Energy retention.
Each result felt wrong—but consistently wrong, in the same direction. The sample didn’t just conduct electricity with no resistance—it stabilized it. Preserved it. Encouraged it. It was as if energy preferred being in this material.

On the third day, she ran a field test with a simple power loop and a cooling sleeve.
The current flowed once—and never stopped.
No degradation. No heat loss. No noise.
Lyca stared at the oscilloscope for five solid minutes before finally muttering,
 “Okay... that’s not busted.”

She labeled the sample Juno-3, after the current day, and quietly moved the rest of her drones into survey mode, building a 3D map of the under-ice structure.
Titan had lots of it. Veins running deep into the crust. Huge clusters.
She started organizing the data. Categorizing. Preparing reports. Not for her financiers—yet—but for herself. Because she knew what this was now.

Lyca spent the next several days in a focused rhythm—scanning, logging, testing. She barely left the lab bay, except to eat or sleep in short, dreamless cycles. The small containment pod stayed sealed, but it never misbehaved. The readings held steady. The loop current kept running.

She filed her first full report to Thalassa Orbital late in the second week.

It was long. Methodical. Boring, probably, to anyone not deep into material science. She didn’t oversell it - just presented the data, added a few conservative remarks about conductivity and energy retention, and uploaded her logs.

The response came twelve hours later. An acknowledgment. Then silence.
Three days passed. Then another message—tagged priority. And another. Then a direct ping from the Thalassa orbital relay, patching her into a call with the Head of Research.
Lyca sat up straight for that one.
They didn’t demand. They didn’t send a new team or redirect her mission. They did offer help, though.
They simply asked her to keep collecting data. Send more. Run new tests if possible. Try to override the standard parameters of the equipment she had on board. And - gently - could she prepare a second sample, if there was a stable one nearby?

She could. Several.

The crystalline metallic structure on the ocean floor had no shortage of fragments. With slow, careful work, she retrieved a second shard, slightly larger than the first. It, too, behaved.
Soon, Lyca had a solid foundation of material for testing.
That marked the end of her solitude. With her findings, her data, and of course her samples, she returned to Earth.

Within two weeks, her results were confirmed by independent labs. Then the news broke.
The press called it a “perfect conductor.” A “solid-state miracle.” “New physics.” They ran headlines with her name, called her the woman who unlocked the stars. At first, she tried not to read them. She just kept working with the team. But everyone knew—this was the biggest scientific breakthrough in human history. And everyone who worked on it would be etched into the books that recorded it.

She wasn’t the most brilliant mind at Thalassa Orbital. But she was solid—and she’d been in the right place at the right time.

The name Juno-3 stuck. And so did hers.

Months later, orbiters were already being planned as permanent survey stations. Mining consortia were drafting proposals. Engineers were sketching new ship designs built around the properties of the material. Lyca gave interviews. Appeared on talk shows.

In the centuries that followed, every major advance in deep space travel would trace back to Juno-3.

And every schoolchild would know the name Lyca.

2065:
FS Callisnaut mission to Titan. Lyca discovers "Juno-3"—a natural negative-resistance superconductor.