Captain Kurel leaned down from his chair, absentmindedly chewing at his fingernails. In a circle around him, his fellow baterians were hard at work on the ship’s computer, and the transparent screens that circled the room were covered in rapidly scanning representations of the deconvolution algorithms that the pirate crew was attempting to engage.

“Have you found anything yet?” he snapped.

“No,” said one of the crew. “Captain, there’s nothing here. Are you sure these are even the right coordinates?”

“Of course they are,” said the first-mate. “It’s just like it was the last time. These are the exact coordinates he gave us.”

“Find him!” yelled Kurel. “I don’t want to go into this at a disadvantage! If we can’t see him, we LOSE.”

The crew knew that, and silently went back to their computers. Kurel continued to watch through the windows, as if he could somehow see the mysterious vessel with his own eyes. He knew that it was out there- -it had to be- -and HE was on it, waiting.

One of the crew turned to his comrade and whispered. “Has anyone ever actually seen this guy before?”

“No,” said the other pirate. “We don’t know anything about him. He just shows up, takes the package and pays.”

“How does he take the package if we can’t see him?”

“I don’t know! He just does!”

“You know,” said a third participant in the conversation. “You remember that quarian cell we crossed last week? I asked them about it. They won’t even talk. The only one who did said that he’s some kind of ghost, a thing born in space.”

“He isn’t a ghost,” said Kurel. “He’s just a man. What would a ghost need with these parts, do you think? And he is out there somewhere. Probably watching us, laughing.”

“There!” cried one of the crewmembers, standing up so fast that he hit his head on the low ceiling.

“On screen!” demanded Kurel.

The pirate, rubbing his head, sat back down and entered the parameters into the computer. One of the auxiliary screens focused, drawing and amplifying an image around a component of the system’s star. The image was grainy and shaky, but Kurel smiled when he saw the characteristic silhouette of a spacecraft.

“There,” he said, on the verge of laughter. “That fool thinks he so smart- -he’s using the star’s corona to mask his signal!”

“We’re getting a lot of interference...” The pirate at the computer paused. “I…I can’t get a reading on a mass core.”

“That’s just the disruption of the star. Unless he was foolish enough to deactivate his core to hide.” Kurel turned to the first-mate. “Prulag, have us moved into position and target him- -but don’t let him know that we know where he is. Not yet.”

“Right away, Cap- -”

The first mate froze as a signal suddenly hissed and buzzed on the ship’s open channel. A tone came through, and then another. The entire deck went silent as several more clicked into place, forming a slow and strange song. Kurel was not terribly knowledgeable about music, but he knew that the song was not baterian; perhaps human, maybe asari. Whatever it was, it was somehow terrifying- -but he covered his nervousness with false bravado as one of the empty screens filled with a strange, abstract shape.

“You are not Rokon,” said a deep male voice. Kurel nearly fell out of his chair. There should have been no way he could have known that fact.

“I’m afraid not,” he said, smiling and adjusting his hat. “Our former captain met a rather unfortunate end. A terrible accident in the airlock. Grotesque indeed.”

“Do not expect to leverage that to renegotiate the price we agreed upon. Do you have the chip?”

Kurel held up a case, as if it was somehow visible to the person on the other side of the screen. “An experimental quarian tech neurointerface chip. Worth a fortune alone, plus the labor…you have no idea how hard it was to get it out of its last owner.”

“The agreed upon number of credits will be transferred to your account upon my receive of the package.”

“Well…no. No it won’t.”

The speaker on the other side paused. “Tread carefully here, Kurel. I am not someone you should take lightly.”

“Lightly…that’s your name, isn’t it? They call you ‘Light’. And by ‘they’, I mean the other pirate clans. Oh yes, Light, I know. You haven’t been trading with just us. You’ve been all over the galaxy. Not even in the same region. EVERYWHERE.”

“Rokon was aware of this fact. I never claimed to have an exclusive relationship with your organization.”

“That’s not what I mean. I talked to the others. Some were surprised to hear about you…and others required far more vigorous persuasion to give up their manifests. You’ve been busy, Light. It’s not just this chip. Biotic amplifiers, neural control modules, tech auxiliary reactors, every kind of omnitool part I can imagine, and some things even I can’t. You have acquired enough technology to build an army.”

“And so what if I have?”

“That’s the thing. I don’t think you have. Most of what you buy, it isn’t in working order. Much of it is junk…or would be short of some ridiculous laboratory. The kind that you might have access to if you were Alliance, or Citadel…or Cerberus.”

“I belong to none of those organizations. Not that it concerns you, Kurel.”

Kurel shivered. Light knew his name, even though he had never stated it. “Yes it does. Because that makes this easier. See, all those parts, I’m betting you fixed them. And you haven’t resold them. I want them, Light. And you are going to give them to me.” He turned quickly to his first-mate. “Fire to disable!”

“Firing…”

The ship shook as the pair of mass cannons opened fire, propelling light-speed slugs toward Light’s badly hidden ship. Kurel smiled and watched the shaky, grainy image on the screen, waiting to see the impact- -but it never came.

“C…captain!” squeaked one of the crew. Kurel almost yelled at him to not disturb him while trying to watch for impact, but he had never heard a baterian squeak like that before. He turned to see what the crewmember was concerned about, and saw him staring out a window. When Kurel saw what was outside the window, he squeaked too: there, suspended just outside the thick transparent material, as a blue, glowing object. A similar one was present on the other side of the vessel. Both mass slugs had been stopped in their tracks and now stood suspended outside the ship.

“I warned you,” said Light.

“Full reverse!” cried Kurel.

“But captain- -”

“FULL REVERSE!”

The ship did not move. The first mate looked up. “Captain, the engines aren’t responding!” The ship suddenly started shaking profoundly, and Kurel thrown out of his chair. “Captain! We’re- -the reactor! It’s hemorrhaging element zero!”

“How?! Are we hit?!”

“No- -we can’t be- -but- -”

Farther below deck, several of the pirates were already readying themselves for battle, taking up arms without needing to be told what was coming. As several of them ran down the hall toward the engine, a suddenly flash of blue light blocked their path. From the surge or energy, a figure stepped out, clad entirely in black armor, her face obscured by an atmospheric stabilization mask.

“Captain!” cried one. “Reporting intruder on deck- -”

The black-clad figure raised her hands, and both surged with biotic energy. The two baterians were immediately reduced to puddles of red liquid under the sudden surge of gravity. More seemed to become aware of the commotion and emerged, drawing their various weapons. The masked figure did not stop or slow; she raised her hands and flicked them to the sides. The baterians rose into the air and screamed as their flesh corroded from their bodies, pulled apart from their skeletons. The figure walked past the hovering skeletons, only pausing to emit a biotic shockwave that rent through the metal of the ship and forced the atmosphere in her area to vent.

The inside of her helmet lit up with the coordinates sent to her from her ship outside, and she slowly started toward where Kurel was fleeing.

Above, the captain pushed past his men as they rushed forward either to make emergency repairs to the dying vessel or to defend against the oncoming intruder. He, of course, being the captain, was too important to waste his life trying to defend a worthless ship. Something told him that he had made a horrible miscalculation, even though he did not understand what was happening.

There was only one clear recourse, though. He rushed through his ship and dove into his quarters.

“Captain!” called his first-mate, his most loyal co-conspirator in the mutiny against Captain Rokon. “Kurel! Wait!”

There was no time. Kurel slammed his fist into the emergency panel to his quarters and the blast door slammed closed. The first-mate pounded on the door and yelled, but his voice was obscured through the eight inches of reinforced polycarbon alloy. Kurel would have blocked it out anyway. All he was concerned about now was protecting the case he held at his chest. That, and trying to figure out how to work the ship’s escape pod.

The vessel shook again, and several screams and gunshots were audible through the thick metal door. Kurel started sweating as he desperately tried to load his various loot into the mostly defunct escape pod. Then, outside, everything went silent.

Kurel paused. For a moment, he allowed himself to believe that they had not known that he was there, that he had gotten away somehow- -but then a fist slammed through his door, cutting through the metal with biotic energy as if the blast shield were made of paper. A second surge of blue light reduced the door to ash, and a black-clad figure stepped in.

Kurel drew his pistol and fired several polonium bullets at the woman in black. Her body ignited with blue energy and the bullets disintegrated against her harmlessly.

“Asari bitch!” cried Kurel, eventually just throwing the pistol at her. He leapt for the escape pod- -and found himself suddenly floating in the air, unable to move.

Now fully panicked, he watched as the asari walked beneith him. She looked up at him through her respirator mask, almost mockingly, and then lifted a palm-sized, disk-shaped object near his face. The disk flashed, and Light’s abstract image appeared as a small hologram.

“Hello, Kurel,” he said. “I’m sorry you made me do this. I would like my chip, if you don’t mind.”

“Take it!” said Kurel, pointing at the case. “Not that you’ll ever be able to open it! The lock’s encrypted!”

“So I cannot have the chip, then? Well, I suppose there is no reason to keep you alive if that is the case.”

“WAIT! No, I didn’t- -”

“It may not be immediately apparent, but I actually have something of a moral code. I do not like to kill. I have a strong aversion to it. I cannot say the same of my associate, however. Your fate will be left at her discretion.”

The hologram vanished, and Kurel felt himself fall to the ground. He cried out from the impact, and got onto his knees. As he did, he felt a hand close around his head. The last thing he heard was a loud noise, and the last thing he saw was a flash of blue light as his head was liquefied by a point-blank biotic blast and his vital tissue scattered across the goods he had sought to preserve.

The dark-clad figure paused for a moment to survey the scene, and then picked up the case. Blue light flashed around her, and she was gone. The pirate vessel was left depopulated and silent, floating adrift in space without a single living soul aboard.

The teleport dropped the armored woman into a new location, and her boots clicked down against the translucent blue floor beneath her. She looked up through one of the more transparent pieces of plating and watched as the derelict pirate vessel seemed to drift as her own vessel departed.

Reaching up to her face, Jack removed her helmet. She took a deep breath of the cold, thin atmosphere. The air had no smell. It was sterile and perfect. Jack had spent her life on spacecraft, but she just could not manage to get over the lack of a smell- -or how this particular ship had no sound of ventilation or engines. It was as silent as space itself.

Her boots clicked across the floor as she passed down another hallway of translucent blue and orange plates, their glow lighting her way. The sound produced as she moved over the tech and biotic pieces of the ship was similar to walking on either very thick crystal or very thin silver. It was somewhat unnerving to be mere inches away from the void outside, separated only by a narrow wall of energy- -but Jack had become accustomed to things much worse than a tech-biotic ship.

What she could not become accustomed to, however, was how her age had come to affect her body. It had been five years since she had last worked for the vorcha Sjdath, and even then she had not been young. She was now nearing her fiftieth birthday, and she could feel it. The last battle was easy. The pirates had not even been able to fight back- -it should have made Jack feel better. Instead, her lower back ached and she felt tired. The old Cerberus implants in her head were buzzing and clicking, and she felt mildly nauseous. The only thing she could be glad of was that she had left her original knees back on Earth twenty two years ago. Cybernetic legs did not hurt.

The vessel was not especially large, at least not usually. Even taking her time, Jack reached the engine room quickly. She looked up to the center of the large room. In the center, a violet-coated pony was suspended by tech and biotic constructs that linked to the implants in her spine.

“Starsaid Jack, looking up at her friend. Starlight did not respond. Her purple eyes just stared into the distance as though she were looking at something tremendously far away. Jack gasped, hoping that what she had been fearing for months had not finally happened.

“STARLIGHT!” she cried, throwing the case to her side and rushing toward the pony.

The sudden shift in volume caused Starlight to blink and at Jack. “Jack. There you are.”

“Star! You blacked out again!”

“I did?” Starlight blinked, confused. “Oh. Yeah. I was finishing up the hack on the pirates’ respective bank accounts. After what you did, they won’t be needing their money anymore.”

“What I did?” said Jack, noting Starlight’s accusatory tone. “What do you mean what I did?”

“What do I mean? Well, let’s just say I’m glad I won’t be the one on cleanup over there.” Starlight sighed. “Jack, you didn’t have to kill them like that.”

“Rokon was our friend- -MY friend. We were part of the same crew back in my pirate days. Do you really think I could just let that go?”

“I only asked you to get the package. We might even have negotiated a new deal…oh well.” Starlight’s horn glowed, and she reached out with her biotic energy toward the case on the floor. She lifted it up in front of her, and three rapidly shifting spirals of orange tech construct appeared around it. Starlight’s eyes flitted from region to region as she hacked through its encryption in seconds, and then opened the case. From inside, she removed a tiny hexagonal chip.

“That’s what we went through all this trouble for?”

Starlight eyed Jack and smiled. “‘That’ is a quantum-span neural interface. It links the user to their omnitool through direct neural command.”

“You can already do that.”

“I know, but with this I can do it exponentially faster- -and I can double its output if I link it to my tertiary biotic parsing unit. Assuming I up my neural clockrate by at least thirty percent…anyway, I’ll prep myself for surgery immediately.”

“Starlight,” said Jack. She sighed. This conversation had come up yet again- -and it never went well. “You know how I feel about this.”

“Ah,” said Starlight. A spherical, orange-colored starmap appeared in front of her. “Of course.” She paused for a moment, manipulating the sphere mentally. “There,” she said, pointing with one armor-clad hoof at a system. “The sixth planet has an automated gas-mining station. We can stop there. After all, I will be doing brain surgery. And if I were to pass out, well, the entire ‘ship’ goes out with me. That would be very bad for you.”

Jack stepped through the hologram and faced Starlight, her reflective silver eyes meeting Starlight’s large purple ones. “Star, that’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“Jack- -”

“These implants, it’s too much. WAY too much. Starlight, you’ve already got more implants in you than most of the salarian army- -and it’s not good for you.”

“I feel fine,” said Starlight, defensively.

“Really? What about the blackouts? And when was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t need sleep. Not anymore.”

“That’s what I mean- -it’s like you’re hardly even a pony anymore.”

Starlight glared at her. “So it’s fine when you do it, but not me? Is that what you’re saying?”

Jack pointed at her. “Do NOT bring that up. Do you think I ASKED for Cerberus to put this stuff in my body?”

Starlight sighed, exasperated. “Jack, listen to me. I NEED these implants. I need more power.”

“Um, have you looked around you? We’re in a ship made ENTIRELY OUT OF YOUR BIOTIC CONSTRUCTS!”

“My biology is innately superior at biotic dissipation than- -”

“Bull! Two years ago, you would never have been able to pull this off- - nobody could! Nobody SHOULD be able to do this!”

“I told you, Jack. I NEED this.” Starlight’s eyes narrowed. “I’m just one pony. Do you think I can just walk into Equestria and just ASK them to surrender?”

“This whole Equestria thing again- -Starlight, I think you might- -”

“What? Give up? After what they did to me? They took me away from my parents. They cut me apart and made me an engine to power one of their damn ships- -and not just me. My entire race! I can’t forgive that. You know I can’t.”

Jack turned away, and calmed herself. In her advanced age, staying angry was growing increasingly difficult. “I know, Star. I know exactly what that feels like.”

“Jack, I’m sorry,” said Starlight, calming down. “I didn’t mean to yell. I just- -oh, wait a minute…”

“What?”

“We’re getting a priority transmission. Do we know anyone on the Citadel?”

“Yes. Ignore it.”

Starlight ignored Jack instead of the transmission. A large square screen of tech energy appeared in front of her and filled with light. Starlight moved it away from herself so that both her and Jack would be able to see it.

The image resolved quickly, and a scarred turian was suddenly staring back at them.

“Jack,” said Garrus. “It’s good to…wait, what the hell are you on?”

“Turn it off,” said Jack.

“Sure,” said Starlight.

“No, wait! Don’t you dare! I will find you!”

“Oh really? Like you helped me find Starlight when she was kidnapped by the Equestrian military? HMMM?”

“Jack, that was five years ago, I don’t- -”

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you over how busy I am right now.”

Garrus groaned and turned to Starlight. “Ms. Glimmer, you’re the rational one here.”

“You know it’s bad when the rational one in the room is the horse,” noted Starlight.

“Tell me about it.”

“Why are you talking to me? I hardly even know you.”

“Because I have a problem. And I think you can help me.”

“Not interested,” said Starlight. “Despite what you may have heard, I’m not a mercenary.”

“I have access to a lot of Council resources. I can pay you.”

Starlight laughed. “Money? Do you think I want MONEY? I’m a Core, not a prostitute.”

Garrus looked to the sides of the screen, as if he was looking around the room on his own side. “Valena!” he said. “Yes, you! What other Valena would I be talking to? Go take a lunch break- -I don’t care if you’re not hungry, just go! And lock the door on the way out!”

There was a long pause, ostentatiously as Valena left the room. Then Garrus leaned closely into the screen. “We’ve been watching you, Ms. Glimmer.”

“You mean you’ve been spying on us,” said Jack.

“Semantics. But we’ve noticed you’ve been buying a lot of enhancements. Real heavy-duty tech and biotic upgrades.”

“Is that illegal?”

“With the stuff you’ve been buying, yes. VERY. But I’m willing to overlook that.”

“Not that the Council could even do anything about it,” said Jack. “I hear you’re too busy throwing humans off the Citadel to be bothered with actually doing your jobs.”

Garrus sighed. “I can see why Shepard liked you so much. But no. Actually, we have something you might be interested.”

“Go on.”

“Star! You can’t be serious!”

“We’re clearly important enough to get a call from the great Councilor Vakarian,” said Starlight, her sarcasm blatant. “Let’s at least try to listen.”

“I have a Reaper biotic amplifier.”

The room went silent for several seconds.

“You have a WHAT?” said Jack.

“You heard me.”

“I thought all the Reaper tech was destroyed after the war!”

Garrus shook his head. “Not all of it. Some of it was locked away for research purposes. Almost every advancement in galactic technology in the last two decades had been thanks to that research.”

“And how many people died trying to let us warm our turian milk faster?”

“More than I like to count. You’re right, though. Some of the technology is simply too dangerous. The biotic amplifier is one of them. We can’t figure out how it works. But in the right hands…or hooves…”

“What does it do?”

Garrus smiled. Starlight was now listening intently. “Have you ever heard of a banshee?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jack.

“They were Reaper asari in the war. I fought them. So did Jack. Those things…it took me, Shepard, and a prothean almost half an hour to take one down. And what we have locked in a Citadel vault makes the components we recovered from them look like toys.”

“And where exactly did you acquire it?” asked Starlight.

“We found it in the wreckage of an old Cerberus station. Apparently, they tried to connect it to a human. The detonation was apparently…impressive. No idea what they pulled it out of, though.”

Starlight paused, considering. “And what, exactly, do you want me to do?”

“Star!”

“I just want you to think about it- -but think quickly. And if you’re interested, come to the Citadel. We’ll discuss it there.”

Garrus leaned back, and before Jack could yell at him more, deactivated the connection. The screen went to static, and Starlight dissipated it.

“Star,” said Jack. “You can’t seriously be considering this.”

“You’ve known Vakarian longer than I have. Is he one to lie?”

“No, but- -”

“Jack. That implant might be just what I need.”

“If you want to fight Equestria as a suicide bomber maybe.”

“No. No one else can use that. As a pony- -a unicorn- -my body may be able to withstand it.”

“That’s a bit ‘if’! Star, even if it works- -”

“If it works, just think of what I’ll be able to do. How many Cores I could save…”

“Star, please!”

Starlight looked to Jack. “We can at least see what he wants. Besides, I know you’ve been wanting to walk around shirtless on the Citadel for a while now.”

Jack refused to allow herself to smile even though she knew what Starlight was saying was true.

“Fine,” she said. “I need a drink anyway. And probably to punch that smug turian in the face. But you owe me.”

Starlight smiled. “Sure, Jack.” She promptly set her course toward the Citadel.