Booting up in a new body was not fun. Eli was immediately aware that he was no longer an interstellar scout ship, but instead a human shaped and sized droid body that he had made weeks earlier. He didn't know ehat happened to have activated the emergency boot, except that the hanger of his old body was dark and filled with shrapnel.

"Well shit," Eli said, the sound making no noise in the airless vacuum. "I guess the big bad alien didn't like being poked"

Carefully he tried to move his new body. Nothing happened, not even a twitch or a tremor. Minutes went by as Eli desperately thought very motivated thoughts about moving.

"FUU-" He cried out, wanting to slam his fists down. Two impacts on his hands registered, lifting him off the deck floor.

"Oh of course this is more like having an actual organic body than a ship. I have to 'just move' rather than think about moving." He grumbled.

Clumsily he tried to stand, immediately tumbling over himself and floated away from the deck. Alarmed and a bit panicky he tried vainly to grab something to stop his movement. A few bounces later he finally remembered the magnetic locks on the boots and small Ion thrusters on the pack of the body. Tentatively he flew down to the floor and locked his boots down.

"At least I won't be found spinning in space like an idiot, time to see how I died." He muttered as he slowly clomped his way to a data terminal. The terminal was only ever used by technicians that had come for his guild inspections to see if he was functioning correctly. It couldn't access the AI Data core, but could access the logs of every action made by it and events that happened around the ship. A thin cable snaked out from his right index finger as he moved his hand to the access ports on the terminal's side.

Immediately he saw that the data core itself had been utterly destroyed, one of the pily gold rods was lodged in the rear engines, having torn it's way through him. The generator was still functional and the hangar had emergency lights on. Distancing himself from his destruction, he accessed the sensor array and recoiled.

The hostile alien ship was only a few meters away! A large oval expanse of darkness had opened in its belly and was slowly moving to swallow him and his old body whole. Eli flinched away from the terminal, yanking his hand away from the port. *Device was not properly ejected* flashed briefly in his vision. Scrambling around his hanger looking for a place to hide, he finds nothing.

"Maybe something too obvious to work will work." He said, and promptly walked up to a wall, placed his back to it and slumped with his helmet open, the holographic face display turned off and did his best to impersonate an empty suit.

------

Silghen Morseg watched as the dead white ship was engulfed in the hold. He regretted having to kill the AI but the signal echo that was emanating from it demanded it. Any taint of Jeweller interference or technology had to be eradicated for the galaxy to be safe. As the husk of the ship touched down in the bay, he turned and made his way to the transit tubes. Hoisting his bulk into the opening he disappeared into the comforting darkness and made his way to the hangar.

-----

Saule watched from around a corner as the massive nightmare of a creature slithered into a hole he would have had issues navigating.

He'd come upon the thing as he tried to find his way back to his crew, having not found any clue about where they were. But a soft light emanating from a previous dark room had drawn him closer. Having witnessed what must be their captor, Saule felt a primal fear of the thing grow in his gut and his fur rise. Even now with the thing gone and out of sight, he couldn't relax. Quickly he began to make his way down the halls and corridors to find his crew and hoped some of them had woken up.

He found one of the ghostly trails of lights and started to follow it. After a few cavernous rooms had gone by he came to the large hallway he had first noticed the faint lights in. With that he began to retrace his way to his crew.

-----

Eli noticed everything slowly settle to the ground as the dark hangar surrounded him, forming a layer of detritus on the ground, and then a soft hissing slowly came into hearing apparent. The VOLD.OS program, having apparently been copied over as well, notified him the ambient atmosphere was suitable for humans though several degrees colder than preferred temperatures. Minutes went but as he stood still, waiting for something to investigate the wreckage of his old body. He was just about to try and sneak out into the alien ship when a light shone down into his hangar and a shape dropped down with a thud.

Eli would have been frozen in terror, had he not been already still. The thing that had just jumped into his hangar was horrific. It was as if some devil had decided to combine a worm, horse and spider together into one ugly creature. Then decided to put it in a robe that would look at home on qn evil grand vizier bent on taking control of a kingdom. It had dropped down in front of him on ten limbs which had splayed out to take its weight. It then stood up on six of them and began to look around the interior while making low rumbling noises interrupted by soft clicks.

It sifted among the debris for a few minutes before it found the softly glowing blue orb Eli had scavenged from the first ancient derelict. Holding it with all four of its arms, the creature flexed. A tremendous CRACK cake from the orb, and the thing dropped the four large pieces and left. As it reached up and began to pull itself up, it looked over the hangar once more, even looking directly at Eli, then pulled its bulk up and out.

Throughout the entire time the thing was searching the scrap, Eli had been in abject terror. He hadn't ever felt so terrified of a creature before and didn't think a being of code, even one that used to be organic, could be frozen in fear.

He took several minutes to compose himself then climbed a service to leave his old body and entered the darkness of the alien ship.