So here's the deal:

The players recovered an ancient artifact from some planet out in the middle of nowhere. It was just a disk with some strange properties; the specifics don't matter too much.

They trucked it on over to this space station that's sort of the trade hub for the subsector and sold it off to a shady looking fellow for a handsome sum.

We ended last session with a bit of a cliffhanger. Suddenly, the PCs were seeing their faces on the holoscreens with something akin to "WANTED" underneath them.

And that's where we are. Trouble is, I'm having trouble figuring on what's gunna happen next. I do know that the "authorities" will try to hire the PCs to steal the artifact back. Some kind of sketchy deal's going down on a nearby planet (with a pop in the billions and a super high tech level; the capital of the subsector), so I thought that maybe they'd get involved with that somehow.

I'm not sure about any of the details, however.

Got anything?

Ok heres an idea: Turns out when they touched the device it scanned there faces and has been leaving a burned image of them everywhere its been used since then, the kicker is the device is a kind of mobile DNA rewriter that alters a beings genetic make-up into whatever the user inputs. so depending on who the shady guy was you could have anything from zhodani to hivers turning up where there have never been any and there all paniced coz it happened over night and against their will.  the only evidence the authorities have to go on is the images of the group burned into a few surfaces like a calling card, and camera evidence that places them in the system on the local station.

plus isnt selling alien tech illegal cept to officially sanctioned groups? so either way there in trouble.

The ancient artifact is sentient being. It is creating wanted posters of the PCs on the infonet because it feels a connection with them and wants to be rescued, but does not understand the culture enough yet to not make "mistakes" in its communication.