The actinic blue light of a plasma arc cutter lit the inside of a pitch dark hallway, as it carved a rough rectangle into a wall. Any sound as the chunk of metal moved and shifted into the hall was lost in the hard vacuum of space.

"We're in." Said Eletta, as the two-meter thick chunk of metal twisted in microgravity. She passed through the gap she had created, maneuvering in her thick gray hardsuit with the ease borne of long hours of experience. The weight of explosive ordinance across her chest barely fazed her movement.

Following behind her, just as fast but with less alacrity, was her small salvage team. Her 2IC, Matthew Garcia, was garbed in a much larger hard suit, with small thrusters lining his back, perfect for moving anything heavy they wanted out into open space where Rain could get at it with his loader.

"Copy, Eletta. Home-base is holding steady 100 klicks out. I'm going to check out the bow section, stay in contact." Rain warbled over the comm, his voice heavily distorted by the dense particle field they were operating in.

Eletta nodded at her last two team members, entered the ship just as she responded. "Copy that Rain, we'll let you know if we need anything picked up."

Kenneth, her 'weasel', came up to the side of her. He was wearing something more akin to a pilot suit, just the minimum protection needed to survive hard vacuum. It made the small wiry man look even smaller compared to the rest of them.

Darlene stayed back, fiddling with several scanners mounted to the front of her hard suit, her harsh frustrated movements giving her a slight chaotic spin.

"Feels off, yeah?" Kenneth muttered over their local comms.

Off was putting it lightly, Eletta thought. The only light was coming from flashlights mounted on their chests, making everything feel off.

"Can't get anything through this interference, ma'am," said Darlene, a growl low in her throat. She punctuated this by slamming the read-outs shut against her chest.

"Alright," responded Eletta, "Then we do this the old-fashioned way. Without those scanners to tell us what's what, we'll have to eyeball it. Move out, follow my lead, stay safe." She said as she kicked off the massive chunk of metal floating behind her.

"No idea what could still have power. Could be automated defenses still kicking." Said Matthew as he followed behind her, Kenneth and Darlene behind him. The muted sounds of her movement and breathing, audible only to her thanks to vibrations through her suit, only served to add a morbid ambiance to her mission.

Whatever had happened, no emergency blast doors stymied their progress. Whatever had broken this ship had done it fast and hard, Eletta thought.

Judging by the staterooms they passed they had made their entrance in the low-ranking officers' quarters.

"No bodies? Maybe they scuttled her?" muttered Kenneth, as they passed yet another empty room. She privately agreed. A ship this size would have needed a massive crew, just to have enough people for every shift.

Eletta narrowed her eyes. That room would have been empty, except for the glint of metal floating in the middle of the room in her flashlight.

"Stop, I see something." She said to her team. They came to a rest behind her slowly but said nothing over the comm. Darlene fiddled with her equipment, and if Eletta judged her muted grumbles and the slaps she delivered to the machinery’s side, they still weren’t cooperating with her.

She passed into the room silently and snagged the object. She ignored the dark stain that was most likely blood and turned it over in her hands.

It was a small datapad, about as large as both of her hands end to end. It looked relatively intact, she noted, with no major dents or damages.

"Intact datapad, looks like a dead battery." She said before she tucked it into one of the pouches at her belt.

"Great," muttered Kenneth, "Can we find something we can actually sell, next?"

"Let's just keep going." Said Garcia and the rest of the crew nodded with him.

Eletta pushed forward, though this time Garcia was in the lead. The hall they were in was coming to an end soon. The door at the end, she noted, seemed to be slightly cracked open. A dark shape seemed to slide past that small opening, illuminated for a moment in the hectic glare of her team's flashlights.

She blinked and it was gone. Nerves, maybe?

Garcia braced against the door, and slowly pushed it open.

"Shit!" exclaimed Darlene, as their lights brought what was beyond into a view.

A massive hole into space was visible on the other side, a massive chunk of armor ripped out of the hall beyond, carbon scoring evident across the edges of the metal.

Visible in that space, barely three meters from where she stood, were several bodies. More than ten, at a glance. She narrowed her eyes. No obvious wounding.

These people died of vacuum exposure.

"God damn..." Muttered Kenneth.

Eletta agreed with the sentiment.

---

Rain felt very small, compared to the broken vessel his salvage loader drifted over. The aft section alone was massive, and the mechanical innards strewn about the nearby space dwarfed his comparatively tiny loader frame. Ananke loomed in the distance, the reddish surface cast Rain’s surroundings in an odd pallor.

The bow section of the ship drifted in the distance, a dark knife against the pale red surface of Ananke, and Rain gave the tiny shuttle that had carried his companions into the ship one last glance before he pushed the throttle, and shot forward.

The distance that he had to cover gave him time to muse, despite the debris that was in his way. Instinct guided his hand as he deftly maneuvered through space, his frame scraping past the most dangerous chunks of wreckage.

---

T -30 Minutes till Mission Launch

After the debrief, Rain went immediately to his loader frame. This time, he had his helmet secure in his grasp. Obsessively, he went over the loader, even though he knew had already done this several times. Fuel, monoprop levels, every dial, and lever checked.

He felt someone come to a stop behind him, and a deep voice resonated from them. "What’s on your mind, Rain?" Eletta, then. She had distinctive hoarseness to her voice, something from her military days he guessed.

He turned to face her. She was clad in her hardsuit, a dark, heavy thing designed to protect from both the vacuum of space and other hostile things, like enemy gunfire maybe. The salvage crew was liberal with stories of times they'd had to fight off pirates or military deserters in pursuit of whatever payday they were after.

Her helmet, however, was still off. There was a hard look in her eyes, something searching. Rain didn't know if they were searching for something in him or something in herself.

"I have a bad feeling about this, ma'am," he said, honestly. His gut hadn't stopped twisting in knots since the debrief had ended. It hadn't twisted like this...well, not since he had run away.

"I do too, believe me." She responded, "I just need to make sure everyone can give it their all."

Rain knew then the hard look was searching his own soul, making sure he was up for whatever would come.

He nodded at her. "Ma'am, you don't want anyone else at the controls."

She nodded back, and a smile ghosted across her face. "That said," she started, "What's your take on this situation?"

Rain frowned. "That ship looked like a carrier-class, but I think it's bigger than any profile either side fielded during the war. So, we have exactly no idea what we could be headed into."

She nodded and clapped his shoulder. "I agree. Make sure you're ready for anything, then."

---

"This is the away-team, we have confirmed the crew of the vessel is dead. Continuing our search." The crackle of his comm broke him from his reverie, the voice cold and distorted thanks to the excess f-particles in the surrounding space.

That meant they had found corpses. Rain checked his mission clock. T+45 minutes?

He shivered, despite the warm climate of his cockpit. Too little was happening. He really hadn’t found anything yet?

He ignored the feeling of dread as he approached the lost bow of this massive vessel. A simple flick of a switch brought his floodlights on, four massive things mounted to the chest of his machine. He ignored any dark specks floating through space, now acutely aware of what the small things must be.

As the huge shape of torn armor, metal framing visible in the gaps came into focus, he narrowed his eyes. There was a symbol emblazoned across it, one that he had never seen. Across the 'top' of the bow, was a stylized depiction of a massive tree, its boughs wrapped around a spherical object clearly meant to depict Jupiter, emblazoned in stark white against the dark metal of the wreck.

The symbol took up a huge portion of the bow, which would make it longer than the Speak Softly, bow to stern, and that was a 650 meter long frigate.

He keyed his comm. "I have a symbol here. A tree cradling Jupiter in its branches. Transmitting visual now."

*"Roger that Rain, download accepted. See what else you can find. Bridge out."* Came the choppy, staticky voice of the bridge comms officer.

What else he can find indeed. He narrowed his eyes as something drifted through his peripheral vision. A dark, humanoid silhouette, too massive to be a human. A Frame?

"Let's see what you are..." He muttered to himself as he turned, thrusting gently towards the drifting Frame.

As it came into view in his lights, he realized it was no Frame he had ever seen in his life. It was far too smooth, with far fewer hard angles than a typical modern machine would have.

As he got close enough to see it in more detail, he sucked in a breath, deep enough that his O2 sensors gave him a warning beep.

This Frame was incredible, and once upon a time Rain imagined it was beautiful as well. It had more in common with a human woman wearing ornate, dark blue armor than a mechanical engine of warfare, though mechanical joints and cables could be seen. The head unit looked like an ornate helmet, with a thin visor that clearly housed the main camera, and what appeared to be wings swooping back off the sides of the helm.

Whatever beauty it once had was lost, marred by massive rents and scorch marks. Its entire left arm was missing, with the section of the chest, it would have connected to torn apart. Where one would expect the cockpit, just below the chest but just above the 'stomach', there was instead a hole, maybe two meters across, burned cleanly through the machine.

"Holy shit, holy shit..." He muttered. He hurriedly took as many visuals of it as he dared before he keyed his comm again. Whatever this was, it was incredible!

For a moment, he forgot his worries as he busied himself investigating this Frame, taking pictures and close-ups.

---

*"Rain here. Found a wrecked Frame, not a model I recognize. Sending visuals now. I see an open hangar, checking that out next."* cracked over Eletta's comm, bringing her to stop. Her team was currently examining an elevator door, one that stoically remained shut.

Eletta brought her arm up, watching a download bar on the wrist-mounted computer incorporated into her hardsuit. It had quite a bit to go before the download was complete, so she ignored it for now.

She pulled a coil of thick wire out of one of her many pouches just as Garcia spoke, "This should take us all the way to the bridge. Could be something worthwhile there."

They moved out of her way almost unconsciously, letting her get to the door.

"We're looking for information as much as anything physical, Garcia. Just as valuable to the right people." She said as she started placing the wire against the door, placing it in a large rectangle. When she completed the rectangle, there was a small beep in her helmet, the onboard computer telling her it was connected to the plastic explosive.

The wire, really the bastard lovechild of thermite and plastics, would burn through the thick metal in no time. Of course, it could also burn through them in no time flat, so they all drifted back by a few meters, stopping their movement using the walls.

Eletta keyed a command on her wrist, the download bar in the upper right nearly half done, and the visors of their helmets darkened automatically as the explosive burned a bright white so bright they would have gone blind otherwise.

Almost as fast as it had started, it was done. Eletta imagined the smell of ozone as they approached the badly scorched door. Garcia easily pushed this section of metal in, and it drifted into an empty elevator shaft, gently coming to rest against the wall opposite it.

"Why the hell didn't we do that to get in in the first place? The arc cutter *sucks*." complained Kenneth as they slowly filed into the shaft. They were on a middle deck, as the floor suddenly dropped out from below them, leaving a dark shaft extended away from them in both directions.

"You know why, dumbass. You're just lazy." Said Darlene, as they looked up.

"Alright team, use your EVA packs, but be conservative with the monoprop." A chorus of agreements came as small thrusters unfolded from their backs, and small joysticks snapped up under their arms from where they had rested against their thighs.

They drifted up the shaft, puffs of hydrazine propelling them 'up'. It was a silent assent, and Eletta took the chance to check her computer. She didn't think she imagined the shake in Rain's voice when he sent the package, which only drove her curiosity more. He was a quiet young man, but he didn't strike her as someone easily shaken.

It was almost complete as they made it to the top of the elevator shaft. This door was stuck half-open, the internal mechanism likely jammed, Eletta noted to herself as they passed through. The EVA packs folded back into the mounting on their backs as they went back to pushing off of surfaces to move.

Their flashlights illuminated a largely empty bridge. Empty, Eletta thought, due to the massive hole that had replaced the front of the bridge, which had likely taken the entire bridge crew out in one stroke.

"Fan out and search team, as usual." She said, and to their credit, they didn't falter a bit as they began a thorough search of the room. Eletta noted the technology on display as she slowly drifted forward herself, in search of the captain's chair.

Her search was interrupted by a different chime in her helmet. She looked down at her wrist. The visual packet Rain had sent was finally done downloading.

She pressed a button to open it and was greeted with the grisly sight of a destroyed Frame. She swiped through them, revealing more images, some annotated with Rain's thoughts.

Her perusal of this was interrupted by her comm crackling to life, and the genuine panic in Ramey's voice sent her fight or flight response into overdrive.

"An unidentified ship just entered the operational area, frigate class! It isn't responding to our hail!"

"Shit." Summed up, Garcia.