The blackness of space was suddenly interrupted by a flash of light. Slowly, a spot formed on the surface of the frozen metal hull, rapidly progressing from dull red to bright white. Then, as the tech blade pierced the alien steel, it began to move, slowly cutting a circular opening. Metal burst forth as droplets without a sound, the droplets drifting into the derelict ship and cooling quickly in the icy vacuum.

Then the cutting stopped. The last part of the metal cooled, and the hull shook as the metal plug was removed, filling the inside of the ship with a combination of dim starlight and the harsh white spotlight of the ship tethered above.

The first though the hole was Si’y. His motions were as swift and agile as ever. Zero-gravity environments were of little consequence to a being from an aquatic race, and Si’y moved as easily as he did over land, his metal-clad tentacles gently swaying before finally reaching up and removing an assault rifle and pistol from their mounts on the rear of his armored suit.

Sjdath followed immediately behind him, first gripping the edge of the hole she had cut with her long claws and then propelling herself into the dark void within. As she did, she checked her omnitool- -which, in her case, was actually six or seven formerly broken omnitools kludged together and configured to her personal specifications.

She clicked away at the holographic interface with one claw, and paused, somewhat concerned. Her vertical slit-pupils dilated, and she compulsively adjusted the valves on her respirator, increasing the concentration of sulfur dioxide.

“Has a problem been encountered?” asked Si’y, his monotone voice transmitted through their comlink. As a hanar, his inflection was always the same, but Sjdath could have sworn that he was being sarcastic.

“No,” she rasped. “The spectrometry function on this omnitool may need to be recalibrated.”

“Why?”

“The isotope analysis indicates that this ship is made of an alloy that I do not recognize.”

“Would such a thing be unusual?”

Sjdaht’s eyes narrowed. “I know many alloys.”

“Indeed, this one would expect that Captain Sjdath does, but it doubts that you can know them all.”

Sjdath just grunted. Of course Si’y was right, but there was no way she was going to admit it. So, instead, she activated the light function on her omnitool. Si’y responded by activating his own lights. They revealed long, shadowy corridors that curved outward from their location. They were slightly shorter than standard turian design. Had the gravity system been intact, Sjdath would have needed to hunch over to walk through.

“Two narrow, perhaps?” asked Si’y, turning back toward his boss.

Sjdath shook her head. “I once salvaged a volus patrol cruiser trapped in the well of a gas giant. This is nothing. Unless it is too tight for you?”

“It is never too tight for this one.” Si’y folded his tentacles slightly to drift through the corridor.

The pair moved slowly through the vessel, checking the area carefully. Most of the time, the crews of abandoned vessels were long gone, but in a few cases, there were still remnants of the crew- -or competitors trying to claim the salvage for themselves. That was what Sjdath had hired Si’y for, of course. She herself was not effective with firearms, but Si’y was so loaded down with weapons that he needed an extra-powerful mass effect driver just to keep him floating in artificial gravity.

Something about this ship still made Sjdath nervous, though. She was not sure exactly what. Abandoned ships always had a certain quality about them. They were just so still, so quiet. Sometimes, there were signs of horrible struggle: scars from pirate rifles, or remnants from horrible systematic failures. Other times, the life seemed to have simply stopped. Food still floating where it had been left, contents of desks undisturbed, letters half-written. The second situation was always the more unnerving of the two.

This ship was different, though. Sjdath had seen a great many vessels in her seven years of life, but never anything like this. The architecture was unlike anything she had ever seen. The design featured far more curves and swoops than she was accustomed to, but they all seemed unusually efficient for such a florid design- -and it was that strangeness that made it terrifying.

“I don’t like this,” she said.

“To this one, it just resembles- -”

Si’y’s transmission was suddenly overwhelmed with a warbling distorted sound that resulted from his photoprocessor failing to translate the visual equivalent of hanar screaming. A shadowy figure had suddenly jumped from a partially open door, instantly blocking their path and lurching forward toward them.

Despite their appearance, hanar were deceptively quick. One of Si’ys tentacles switched forward, its mechanical manipulator drawing a pistol. A flash of light went out, illuminating the darkness of the hallway, and the figure was struck. It lurched, and drifted backward through space as Si’y fired again.

“Dyrak! Hold your fire!” Sjdath slammed her fist into Si’y, pushing him against the wall of the corridor. Before he could protest, she shined her own light on the figure and indicated that it had been quite dead long before they had reached it.

The two looked up at the floating corpse for a moment, watching it bump against the wall and float backward slightly. It resembled many of the bodies that Sjdath had become all-too familiar with in her line of work: skin taught and bleached from low-pressure desiccation, empty eye sockets staring blankly forward, mouth frozen in fear and anguish, still gasping for that one last breath and wracked with the terror of the realization that it would never come.

This corpse, though, was far different than any that Sjdath had ever found before. It resembled no space-faring species she had ever seen. As far as she could tell, it was small, standing barely a meter high, and apparently a quadruped, with feet tipped in hooves. In life, it had likely been brightly colored, with a coat of body fur beneath a form-fitting uniform as well as a fluffy tail and head-hair like the humans had.

“Sweet Cthulu,” said Si’y, reaching out and poking it with one of his tentacles. “What is it?”

“Dead.”

“This one notes that such a description is obvious. Perhaps…a small elcor?”

“On a ship this small? Impossible.” Sjdath checked her omnitool. “That, and we would see a gravity system.”

“The power here is failed. The gravity system is not currently active.”

“No. Not inactive. There isn’t one.”

“Such an assertion is illogical, and even nonsensical.”

“These readings don’t lie,” said Sjdath, pointing to her hologram interface. “There is no gravity system here, at least not any kind I can detect. And…” She reached out and grabbed Si’y’s tentacle before he could return his pistol to its holster. “What is THAT?”

“This?” said Si’y, pulling his tentacle away from her and turning the weapon over. “It acquired this one from an dealer of antiquities at the last waystation. The weapon is of human design and called a ‘revolver’?”

“A what?”

“A revolver. It uses a mechanical cylinder to position cartridges containing self-contained explosive to fire heavy lead projectiles.”

“Lead? But the mass effect field- -”

“It uses no such field. It is hideous in appearance, but brutal in effectiveness- -truly, a fine example of the very pathos of human engineering, a representation of the beauty of action, a- -”

Sdjath grabbed him by his body and slammed him into the hull of the ship once again with enough force to make his tentacles twitch.

“It is a RELIC,” she snarled. “How dare you bring such a thing on a mission without my approval? I should sever your limbs and consume them with vinegar for this!” Sdjath released Si’y and allowed him to right himself. She growled and shoved the floating quadruped out of her way harshly. Of course she was not going to actually eat Si’y; hanar contained a toxin so powerful that it could sicken even her. “Use a proper weapon,” she growled.

“This one apologizes,” said Si’y, switching to a shotgun. “Also, the use of antique human firearms is greatly detracted from by the lack of report in an airless environment.”

“Hey!” said Sdjath, forcing open a door. “In here!”

Si’y drifted back toward her, directing his shotgun light as she forced the door. He then shined his light into what appeared to have once been the ship’s bridge.

The design was a kind of modified amphitheater design intended to seat several individuals. Those individuals had never had a chance to leave their seats. They were still in them, their bodies dried and eyeless, staring blankly at a large clear window that made up most of the front of the room.

Si’y flipped on his body light and looked around the room, his optics widening to focus on the dead creatures before them.

“Armchair, are you getting this?” he said in disbelief.

“Affirmative,” said the perpetually amused voice on the other line. “We have cross referenced this ship’s architecture as well as the anatomy of its occupants against all known styles of vessel and all known spacefaring races, respectively.”

There was a long pause.

“And?”

“Oh. And they match nothing that we are aware of.”

“I think I found what took them out,” said Sjdath, running her claw over a large hole in one of the walls.

“A meteor strike, perhaps?” suggested Si’y.

“Maybe…but this looks more like a mass-projectile strike.”

“Implying that they were attacked?”

“I have detected no other vessels or eezio drive signatures in this region,” suggested Armchair.

“There doesn’t have to be,” said Sjdath. “Back in the War, not every mass shell managed to hit a Reaper.”

“Could one really have gotten out to this distance?”

“They don’t stop, turn, or slow down until they hit something. After seventeen years, who knows how long they could have gone.” She turned back to the creatures. “These fools must have had no idea of what hit them. Explosive decompression. Nearly instant death. Weaklings.”

“Not all individuals can persist in space with merely a respirator mask and no pressure suit.”

Sjdath shrugged. “Being vorcha has its advantages.”

“That is correct. Being attractive is not one of them, however.”

“Oh! Burn!” cried Armchair.

“You think if I was some bikini asari that I would be doing this? Like the ones you spend all your wages on, perhaps?”

“That- -that is an unfair and unfounded accusation!” cried Si’y, suddenly. He shook slightly. “Also, please refrain from implying that you would ever wear a bikini. It makes this one’s food-containment bladder quiver, and not in a pleasant way.”

“You know you would want to see it.”

“This one would prefer to see Doctor Fenhock in such a garment before it saw Captain Sjdath in one. With all due respect, of course.”

Sjdath released a hissing sound that was her species’ equivalent of laugher and adjusted her valves again. She opened her omnitool and began to scan one of the panels that a space-frozen body with puffy, feathery wings was slumped over.

“Is it possible to restore operation to the computer system?” asked Si’y, getting back to business.

“It’s…it’s not a computer,” said Sjdath in disbelief.

“Is perhaps the omnitool functioning poorly?”

“No. No…I just have no idea what this place even is.”

“This one fails to understand…”

Sjdath turned herself around in space, facing the optics system of the heavily armed and armored hanar. “Noe of this makes sense. These controls, they are not controls. No computer, no interface. No gravity system, nothing. This vessel would never have flown. Armchair, can you confirm?”

“Yes,” said Armchair. Outside, his lights shifted, and the thick glass window was illuminated with brilliant white light that cast harsh shadows over the quadruped bodies. “No known technology is detected, either by our own sensory array or from either of your feeds.”

“Then may Dagon have mercy on this crew’s souls,” said Si’y, turning to Sjdath. “If we cannot get fuel, we might not- -”

“No,” said Sjdath harshly. “This vessel is lightyears from anything, there is no way it got out this far on its own! It has to have a mass drive!”

“We am not detecting any known kind of mass device,” said Armchair. “However…”

“What however?”

“A mass effect field is apparent in the rear-central section of the vessel. The readings indicate a high concentration of active element zero, and a possible engine.”

“I’m getting it to,” said Sjdath, recalibrating her omnitool. “Hanar! Do your job and take point!”

The derelict was not especially large, but it was also not especially small either. It took several minutes for Si’y and Sjdath to reach the engine room, and longer for Sjdath to cut her way through the reinforced doors that protected the core.

The doors, apparently, had done little to preserve the beings inside. Several engineers now floated throughout the large engine room, all deceased. One still clung to the controls, his arms wrapped around his post as if he somehow expected to be able to do anything useful as a freeze-dried corpse.

The engine room itself was roughly what Sjdath had come to expect. In almost all cases, engine rooms involved a large, open space with some sort of machine in the center. That machine was usually the mass engine, the element zero core that allowed a ship to function.
` In this case, though, the room was strange. The “machine” did not vibrate and hum as it should have, and there was no large, black core in the center. Instead, there was a large cylinder linked to numerous cables and conduits that seemed to feed the rest of the ship. Based on the readings that Sjdath had been accumulating and processing with Armchair’s assistance, those conduits seemed to somehow operate a distributed system within the ship. Everything that it held lead back to the core, leading Sjdath to believe that it was far more than an ordinary engine.

“These are tanks,” said Si’y, still holding several weapons but gesturing with a free tentacle toward a large system connected to the central cylinder. “Perhaps this is a coolant system.”

“No, no,” muttered Sjdath. “That…that just doesn’t make sense. These readings, they just don’t make any SENSE.” She pushed off from the ground and floated to the controls that the engineer was still clinging to and kicked him away. Unlike the controls on the bridge, these seemed to be mechanical in nature. “I am detecting element zero, but not nearly enough to make a core. That and…”

“And what?”

Sjdath did not answer, knowing that she would thoroughly discredit herself if she were to say what she were thinking.

“This looks like a shroud control,” she said instead. “I am going to open it. It should expose the central nexus of the core, so that we can know what we are dealing with.”

Before Si’y could protest, Sjdath pulled the mechanical system, feeling the gears and cogs clicking. Around her, system suddenly hummed to life, projecting flat images of pale blue light.

The central cylinder reacted, and its metal housing began to twist, unscrewing its halves as it started to separate. Then it pulled apart. A pale yellow light flooded the room, and Sjdath felt reached up for her valves.

“By the Enkindlers,” whispered Si’y.

Inside, there was no core. Instead, there was a large transparent inner cylinder filled with fluid, and floating in that fluid, its body attached to hundreds of cables and machines that grafted it into the systems of the ship itself, was a suspended, living version of the quadrupeds that populated the ship: the only survivor.