'Take over from her on triage. Not exactly in my skillset. I'm good for laying and taking fire.' King indicated drily as he hoisted Alice closer to Echo and their provided supplies before letting go. In the moment, their face literally flickered over - snapping to an expression of apparent contempt, wrought in high-fidelity and seeming almost like it was from a picture book of emotional expression. In the next moment it snapped away, King's visage settling into something resembling apathetic indifference.

'Securing the perimeter.' King indicated as he drifted away - was that a creeping hint of tiredness in his voice? Could the machine feel that way, or was it just a virtual affectation? It was not like physical exertion had any meaning to them. Circling around the group, King began to emit a screen of light across the walls, photo-voltaic shocks starting to flash-ablate the remaining etheric particulate still hanging dense in the air, clearing a wide bubble of relatively clean air around the group, smelling strongly of ozone.

As King carried on, he drifted closer to Salvator, leaning in and pressing a thumb to their elbow to communicate discretely off-comms once more.

_{'That gunship support is for us in more than one way, chief. We'll be sitting dead in the open. Might be preferable to look for alternative routes and exit strategies along the way.'}

King released his thumb and carried on until the group was ready to depart.

---

Back out on the station exterior, King seemed unimpressed by their route. He then vocalized something off-comms, his hardlight lips making motions without sound - there was a sort of mechanical deliberation to the motions, seeming more mimetic than not. The gist of whatever he said was largely lost, though those who could read Human lips might have been able to parse the gist of it.

The fuck was going through the station even necessary just to go back outside?

After completing his almost ritualistic muttered dialogue, King switched back to comms. 'Area seems a little peculiar. Minimal signs of infestation. I don't really have the senses to pick up on etheric activity, but from how active the station was and from all this damage there should definitely be more going on out here. Hey, team two, does that gunship have any remote sensor arrays for that? And I don't suppose it can operate independently of Echo down here?' King's inquiry was innocuously posed, if still failing to hide his paranoid vigilance by dint of merely shifting the bulk of it from their primary concern over to another.

Kleo cleaned up the thugs or puppets as they were called that came her way, easy meat to be cut down by her super-powerful badass little SMG that was upgraded. Helllll yeahhhh, she was locked and loaded not evening hearing what that fat moss head asshole had said to her to try and bait her in a freaking attack. Yeah she did goto the Academy, the academy for alien head squishers and badass human heros, she was valedictorian this fart nebula would find that out when the assholes that kidnapped her gave her a medal, or whatever. Steak dinner treat something like that.

Kleo stuck to the back with her squid friend as the group mossied their way through the wreckage, they had just got out of a massive ass fight that felt like it took a year to complete. Yet they weren't even done the mission, hell they didn't even complete their objective yet but that was coming to a head, likely.

"What's the plan now, boss?"

"Alice! Damn it!" Salvator cursed as the other voidhanger in the squad took a nasty hit, King reporting a suit breach. Even if the station had breathable atmosphere, he didn't trust any prolonged exposure with all of the etheric interference in the area. Probably the third worst possible situation to have a suit breach, outside of zero-G and anywhere with a confirmed toxic atmosphere.

The firefight ended soon enough, and Salvator turned to run diagnostics on Alice. Fortunately, Echo was already handling triage, so he simply let the matter be, turning his attention back to the situation at hand. King's mouthed, lip-read comment was met with a nod of understanding and battle-cant handsign in the affirmative before they resumed vocal communications.

"Harvest, Rasch. Requesting ETA on our end and yours based on projected paths. How much further do we have left to go? Over." He queryed up across the combined comms before switching back to the team's private channel. Or as private as it could be considering their support team.

"Squad, Rasch. Double check your suits and seals, report any further breaches and patch them up ASAP. In any case, agreed with Alice. I'm sensing some faint ethereal traces as well, but nothing concrete. All units, advance slowly. Scan anything out of place, and keep the rest of the squad in the loop. King, I want you on point. Echo, endoform on rear support."

Salvator caught King's gaze, signing the battle-cant for caution. Even without the construct's near-immunity to ethereal phenomena, it had proved to have a level enough head on its shoulders to not go guns blazing at the first twitch of movement. Unlike quite possibly half the squad.

With the shredded remains of the last corpse-puppet fallen to the ground, everything was suddenly much quieter. Embedded lattices of synth-osseous matter - emergency scaffolding that was forming around damaged areas - gave a barely audible creak as Ilshar pushed himself back to his feet. The internal autocasts were going to be a pain to extract once back at a base of operations, but they would keep him walking through the rest of the mission despite the knots of crumpled muscle where he had been struck. At least the rest of the squad seemed to be doing all right besides one of the ‘hangers, and even she was clearly not critical.

“We’d best be wary of engaging going ahead,” still stepping rigidly at first, he carefully kept his distance from Echo’s disinfestation fumes, jaws involuntarily contracting at the antiseptic smell within King’s bubble, “Another one of those could send us to the final coil.”

He gestured at the sealed door behind which the ether-mind was hopefully still preoccupied with the scavenger worms. Truthfully the gunship worried him almost as much as the threat of more hostile nests. Even beyond his own squad, the comms chatter was a reminder of what sort of eccentrics the Intransigence tended to employ, and an incautious missile hit on a motley carcass like Sargasso could be disastrous for someone close to the impact. If the Nexus was generous, there would be no need for its support, but the station was full enough of ill omens.

---

The way over the hull turned out to be as foreboding as Ilshar had suspected. The silence around the Envenomed was more than that of footsteps in the vacuum - it was the absence of the subtle work of decomposition. Sargasso was a graveyard, and it had maggots to its measure, but not here. The only signs of scrambling life had gone cold long ago.

“A corpse is not truly dead,” the tarrhaidim commented over the squad comms as he half-jumped over a nasty-looking spar of gouged metal protruding in his way. The weakness of the almost makeshift mag-clamps in his boots was a boon here. “It’s always crawling with renewed life, even when you can’t see it.”

He looked over the edge of the trench the group was passing by, noting how starlight glimmered across the more prominent pieces of debris. Almost like a mollusk’s residue. His etheric senses pulsed quietly.

“There’s ether-trails all over there,” he pointed at a particularly cluttered pit in the scratched fissure, “It’s like something marking its territory. I say we avoid these pits.”

Alice's assigned microfrom assisted her in first aid, mainly by procuring and providing necessary medical supplies from its harness as Echo had little to no knowledge on her specific biological needs- though it made sure the vac suit patch was properly sealed before returning to guard duty. The Endoform glanced over to face King's direction.

Informative. This unit is capable of independent operations among all forms. The Endoform paused, in a manner that could be described as somewhat reluctant or sheepishly. Clarification. Warform's movement capabilities are currently limited. Elaboration. Warform currently confined to support ship. Elaboration. 60% of high level cognitive function currently embedded in Endoform. Warform currently contains less than 10%.

Given the nature of this mission, the vast majority of Echo's 'attention' was focused on their current position, the Endoform and mocroforms, with the Warform given just enough resources to remain part of the 'platform' that was Echo.

Informative. Warform remains on standby for fire mission tasking.

As Rasch gathered the squad back up to move out, the Endoform stomped to the back of the squad's formation. Acknowledged. Endoform maintaining rear security. in the back, the Endoform could block off potential rear attacks, and due to its height could fire over the heads of the team if they ran into more threats from the front. The rest of the Mocroforms formed a loose perimeter around the squad, glancing in all directions and ready to block incoming threats with their bodies if the need arose.

"Accurate. Scanners can and will be linked to HUD's and overlays. Preliminary observation uneventful, beyond biodebris readings."

The vrexul's voice somehow managed to sound more pleasant as it spoke to King, almost as if it was human. Whatever software it used to communicate had been calibrated perhaps a little too closely towards something moderately presentable and less gravelly. It still had enough of the gravelly grit and scraping, almost metallic tone but now it sounded like it came out of a throat rather than brokn cement chunks grinding about inside of a rusty vent.

An uplink request popped up on the visual displays of the entire Envenomed Team; accepting it would cause a momentary superimposition a green line horizontally arranged across eyes, ocular bacteria, biolinked cameras and other such methods of sight. Objects it crossed over would faintly flash in a highlighted emerald green for physical objects of note - the hovering chunks of station, a few clusters of debris, but in a pinkish hue, a series of speckled patches representing something living or biological.

Some of them overlapped the emerald colour, specifically on the floating chunks.

That meant they were on the underside of them, as if they were hidden from sight.

Thin lines of pink stretched between a bunch of the floating plates as well - something was holding them together.

"Fire support vessel is independent, but within reason, they can be directed. Currently, they are attmpting to scan the base of tower at far end. There is a field of some sort enveloping the base of the structure and it is slowing down accurate scanning."

Not stopping - a small camera feed invitation opened and when opened, showed dual-screen footage. One of the on-board cameras of the disguised gunship viewing the base of the tower and another of a camera designed for scanning targets - from one of the vrexul infantry.

The former was practically identical to the Envenomed's own sight. The latter however resulted in heavy blurring and crackling, static-ridden footage. A progress bar on the bottom slowly filled however, ambling towards a full scan but most of the data coming back was not of the structure but of the field.

It wasn't ethereal; some sort of anti-electronic warfare shroud perhaps, or some techno-disruptive veil. Not enough to entirely prevent the vrexul's examination in its tracks however.



After having exited the slimy and foggy interior of the Sargasso, its outside would be refreshing for the voidhangers if only because it wasn't anywhere near as filthy and laden with obscure, perverse energies. It would typically take a few minutes even for voidhangers to acclimate their senses to a less clutterd, ether-concentrated environment but for the duo in the Envemomed squad, half a minute was more than enough.

A vague ethereal presence began to define itself with more specificity. It wasn't nebulous ether but something... living, or it had been living. A faded aura, soft and diminished, something vulgar and almost malleable, inviting their grasp and their curiosity. A peer down into the first of the trenches and they notice rather than immediately perceive.

Down there, what looked like a still pile of debris was illuminated with the same familiar pinkish hue from their visual overlays - it wasn't actually pink but with their own actual eyes, drab and greying like the rest of the exterior.

If they peered closer, whether with magnification, scopes, or otherwise, they would notice that the debris was packed together tightly. Very tightly; moreso than artificial gravity would allow, and that there were thin threads of a mucus-like substance trailing out of it like ghostly stems, drifting in vacuum.

Rooted to the pile, out of little gaps, in which they could intuit the source of the ghostly, faded sensation. Something had made these piles for the purposes of storage.

From the corners of Kleo's sight, she would notice something about the trailer-like structures sitting on the surface of the Sargasso just a short zero-gravity leap or two away. There was little about them that immediately caught the eye; it wasn't uncommon for large stations or vessels to have temporary structures placed upon them for prolonged maintenance periods.

These weren't fully sealed however and her scans didn't suggest any oxygen-tank storage. They were old, older than the actual current station they were on and didn't have the brutalist bulk of Yrrkradian construction. She could recognize that faded yellow, once white, from her days in the League.

See the blocky outline of a helmet drifting behind one of the windows - post-Veiled War era, long since phased out, a black square visor attached to a white suit lined with primitive anti-kinetic and chasm-resistant gel padding. Staring at her almost, waiting, drifting.

No life signs detected. Yet it was clear these external structures had been placed there well after the station's construction and its dissappearance into the unknown.



"Half-click ahead - we will rendezvous at a maintenance tunnel near the base of the tower. Original suggested travel route was through a larger series of corridors, but you had rerouted to the bowel-region of your immediate deployment. Progress hass been accelerated. You avoided an area of concerning activity."

The arthropod's voice paused for a moment as it spoke to Rasch.

"Pirate comms intercepted suggest your original path would have experienced a considerably higher degree of conflict; I detect multiple platoon-level depoyments of infantry. Weaponry and equipment detected not typically available to freelancer and raider elements within this sector."

They had seen gunships scouring the station, scourging with cannon fire, and the creatures that fled in their wake - not out of fear, but knowing that their quarry would come to thm in the labyrinth of crevices where they waited with hunger or hatred.

As Ilshar's body leapt over the debris, the pinkish threads illuminated in their visual display flashed. A visual indicator pointed downwards as the shared scanning detected something else in the trench. A trail of near-transparent slime, unsurprising except for what it lead to.

The corpses they had seen previously were of creatures, sapient alien species, of the material world. The way they had been festered, mutilated, and infested was foul, if logical in their perverse transformations.

In this second trench, a lightly pulsing mess of organs, dried-out membranous structure, and lighly pulsing colours lay impaled into a corner. A jagged metal spike held the horizontally bisected body of some enormous cylinder-shaped creature, life long since snuffed out but the cells comprising its body shifted from an electric blue transparency to a mottled spinach-green and mud-brown. A star-like arrangements of limbs circled the eye-like end of its presumed face, each one twitching from a residual electric pulse.

A quick look at the spike and it was not random debris. Multiple lights ran along its length as did deep scratch marks. The end of it sticking upwards pulsed with a faint, reddish light.

For Echo, it was not a weaponized lamp-post.

A preliminary scan showed that it was meant to receive signals.

In fact, it was actively doing so, pulsing them to and from itself to the base of the tower.
It was amplifying signals and if anything, seemed to be a scanning device of some sort that had been weaponized, yet not randomly.

Far over at the end of the trail, Echo would notice something. Movement, not of a living creature, but a mechanical swivelling. Enhancing the feed, they would see a bulb-like camera of sorts sitting at the top of the sloping structure's roof. Four wheels, anti-grav locked to the station, and slowly moving back and forth in a straight line.

It wasn't looking at the squad, not directly, but it was actively receiving whatever information the spike was sending it. Somehow, the field interfering with the vrexul's scanners didn't seem to affect it at all.

Oddly enough, it didn't seem to have the makings of something void-hardened - the material was likely for in-atmosphere use, perhaps why it was behind the distorting field.

The area was being observed and it had been used by at least two different groups over a very long stretch of time. What was it being observed for and what were they intending to get out of a corpse that had been sitting there for likely at least a month now?

Salvator processed the information given to him over comlink with a grim lack of enthusiasm, his lips pursing beneath his mask. Great. Wonderful. Entire platoons of heavily-armed boarders on the station. That explained the gunship support. At least there was the ethereal equivalent of a crisp breeze on the exterior of the Sargasso. So perhaps he and Alice would die refreshed, at least.

Of course, he didn't let his doubts show in even his body language, staying alert and ready as they trudged through. That would be an idiotic waste of squad morale if he couldn't contain his opinions to his own inner monologue. At least Kleo wasn't taking the opportunity to start a fight again. A few more of those, and it would have likely put Salvator into conniptions. The only saving grace on that front was that their support squad had someone equally as volatile, evidently.

"Harvest, Rasch. We copy, appreciate the support in dodging those pirate elements. Continuing advance, over." He keyed into comms before looking around, nodding to Ilshar.

"I hear you. Agreed." Salvator murmured as they proceeded forward, his carbine sweeping over anything that gave a hint of movement. "Squad, Rasch. Anything to report so far? Sounds like we got lucky evading entire platoons of upjumped pirates."

When Kleo didn't react, her eyes remained fixed on the drifting structure, and then the figure behind the glass helmeted, motionless, staring back. The connection came gradually, like an object rising from a muddy lake that was full of farts and stupid ass shit. “...League-made," she said softly over comms. "After the war. Those module units were never meant for a station - duh."

Her visor dimmed lightly as she filtered her feed, just scanning the suit inside the glass. Thermal cold, no motion. She looked some more, though, and tightened the scan parameters, hunting for anything that was out of place. "No life signs dewd." she said flatly. "Running diagnostic checks on signals."

There was a moment's pause.

"If it's sending a signal it's not obvious."

Kleo's focus changed, and she pulled in their shared link—the trench, the spike, the dead body with the faint pulsing energy running through it. The connections between them. It wasn't chaotic. It wasn't decaying. "That isn't a disease or magic shit," she said. "That is organized like the mass is contained. That spike doesn't look like debris either it looks like it's transmitting some sort of fucking data." She points a paw out to the tower.

"I would bet that is where." She changed her footing slightly, and subtly angled herself to get a better view of the roaming camera unit that Echo had identified. Her movements became deliberate, measured. "One more thing," Kleo added. "We're getting interference from our scans, but that drone isn't. Either the field is selective, or it is keyed to something we do not possess."

Although the sterile openness of exposed space might have seemed more welcoming to the voidhangers, it was not so for Ilshar, accustomed to humid and overgrown environments more than bare expanses. Though long since surpassed by augmentations, the naturally limited senses of a tarrhaidim were put on edge by open spaces, and his close skirting of the trenches was as much of a psychological reassurance from closely available cover as it was reconnaissance. Harvest’s mention of large pirate forces on the move did not help ease his mood - in the warrens and corridors, the enemy’s numerical advantage would have been much reduced, but if any forayed out here, the Envenomed would be an inviting target.

Finding the terminus point of the etheric trail he had picked up was a welcome distraction from those thoughts. He stopped next to Kleo at the trench’s lip, hunching forward slightly for a better look at the anomalous carcass below.

“Confirmed, there’s what looks like an emitter struck through a dead Chasm-spawn.” It certainly felt dead enough to his every sense. “And it doesn’t read like oneiric-attuned technology. It’s suspicious. Chasmborn matter doesn’t usually stay coherent for long after death, certainly not on an unstable place like this.”

Inorganic technology that interfaced with the ether was uncommon and often of scielto make, which this spike clearly was not. If it was stabilizing the corpse, it was in some way Ilshar had never seen before.

Tentatively, he reached out with his senses, not towards the spike, which eluded his firmly biologically-rooted understanding, but to the remains of the oneiric beast. If the device was channeling any sort of energy through its unearthly nerves, it could perhaps be traced, at the very least enough to determine if it was being drawn from the mass into the metal or the other way around - a difference crucial for understanding the transmitter’s less obvious purposes.

'I agree with Wispy. Almost seems like something we should just not poke and prod at. Not our objective and if we mess with it - or get pinged by it - might set off alarms or send trouble our way.' King threw in. 'I could maybe approach with optic camo and if it's rigged to pick up Oneiric signatures I'd be basically invisible to it if we have to mess with the thing, but I don't see any reason why we should.'

King, as Rasch had instructed, had taken point and was situated ahead of the group on the hull - having directly interposed themselves between the core of the group and where the spike was situated.

'I also would not be suited for doing much other than blowing the thing to pieces. The rest of you, well...Place looks like a kill-box. Going down would just be a bad idea. Echo seems like they might be the best bet? If we have to send somebody in at all, but they're not exactly subtle. Unless you have any surprises you want to share with us?' King threw a stiff, mimetic look over their shoulder while thumbing at the larger construct.

The steady crunch of Echo's multiple forms on ship plating stopped in unison as they reached the second trench. The mass of organs was noted, along with the spike- and camera, a drone of some sort attached to the ceiling.

"Correction. Spike appears to be transmitting data." Echo's voice reported monotonously in the earpieces of the Envenomed squad. "Elaboration. Camera drone appears to be receiving transmission. " One of the nearest microforms cocked its head at the drone. "Alert. We are being watched. Interested parties: 2 or greater. Clarification. Area is being watched, not necessarily for us."

Taking a closer look at the drone and spike- visually, not physically. Echo's voice intoned again. "Addendum. Nature of material appears to not be rated for void use. Hypothesis. Jury rigged, makeshift equipment. Congruent with pirate presence."

The endoform looked down towards the base of the tower, their decided rendezvous point, and, as King had pointed out, a veritable kill box. King prompted Echo, though correctly assumed that subtlety was not its strong suit. "Report. Providing options:"

"Squad Energy Shield. Functional.
Smoke munitions. Functional. Addendum. Limited.
Active suppression fire. Possible.
Microform scouting. Clarification. Microforms are not capable of active camouflage, but are small in size and do not fit silhouette of typical combatants."

Echo paused. "End of options."

As the voidhangers spoke, their bodies would feel something akin to a tingling warmth wash over them - subtle enough that it could have been mistaken as heat adjustment from their armor but a little too pronounced to have been entirely a byproduct of regulative systems. It wasn't ethereal in nature. In fact, Echo detected it as well when it pulsed out from the impaling spike, sweeping over the area. HUD's and visual overlays blurred, fizzled, then continued as if nothing had happened.

It came as a wave, washing over the area and temporarily interrupting comms channels - shutting, opening, shutting, opened again. King would feel his body seemingly shudder... or was it some figment of the imagination? Almost like an itch that vanished just when one was about to scratch it.

The pod-head camera was holding still, its sight locked onto an empty space over the trench where the impaled creature lay.

Kleo and Ilshar's observations were proven correct - scans of the lance demonstrated a few seconds after the interference that it was sending information back the way it came, right towards the camera-drone and likely the shielded facility built into the Sargasso.

The tarrhaidim reached out beyond the bounds of the corporeal, into the gelatinous mass of the bisected sea cucumber-worm like entity, and felt a suction-like flow of ether. It came in sudden stops and starts, like someone drinking, pausing, then sucking through a straw. The corpse itself was of chasmborn origin, yet the bisection wasn't bleeding out much in the way of qillatu or ether. The wound has been closed shut by the same slime they had seen in the area.

It was a savage cut but there was only the echoes of intnse physical trauma present. Ilshar wouldn't be able to detect any energies of a foreign body present. Whatever did this hadn't relied on ether.

The ground shuddered and rumbled. Stray fragments of the exterior flaked upwards in floor-tile sized pieces from the exposed surface and within the trenches.

"Seismic activity picked up on station warning systems and scanners. Multiple maintenance tunnels collapsing from kinetic impacts within. Unlikely to be pirates. Toggling controls to-"

This time, they all felt what was like the aftershocks of a massive crash, sending more fragments shooting upwards. It was tempting to say it was like a localized quake but this was like a drilling pulse vibrating beneath them, traveling outwards and away from them before abruptly stopping.

Just as the macabre javelin pulsed again, stronger this time and causing most of their HUD and scanning tech to blur then stop - a reboot would be needed.

This time, King's body felt something like partial, stinging cramps. Not enough to be crippling but enough to be unpleasant. A warning almost.
Visual zoom-in fine was fine on all visual/camera/ocular systems.

The camera drone's head had turned away, towards where the trailers where Kleo had seen the floating helmet. It turned and slowly looked towards them, settling on the middle of the group.

A flicker of motion behind one of the trailers - a flash of something twisting and vanishing as a cloud of particles kicked up from behind them.

The comms would take a minute and a half to re-establish. Whatever had appeared re-appeared, this time in a flicker of something vaguely purple out from the side of one of the trailers. Too fast to see exactly what it was but fast enough that it would easily be able to make it to the edge of the abandoned League structures attached to the base within the next 30 seconds or so.

Fuck. EMP?! Salvator swore vociferously under his breath as his HUD and comms crashed, immediately switching to his mask's redundant analog sight and reacquiring visual. They were made by...something. He couldn't even assume it was an etheric horror, if the lack of ether was any indication. Either way, this bode poorly.

By the time comms reestablished, Salvator nodded in response to Alice, considering their options. A flicker of purple out of the corner of his eye cemented it, and he raised his carbine, his rebooted HUD trying to lock in on the signal. Fuck's sake. A brief glance towards the drone just floating there reinforced how much the squad needed an actual tech expert, rather than relying on a secondary team. Something to bring up with leadership if and when they made it out of this mess alive.

"Right. Ilshar, back Alice up. Echo, Kleo, eye on the drone. Try to radio our support, see if they can backtrace it if you can get a direct uplink. King, with me. We've got a runner." He grunted, getting a running start before blinking away in a warp jump. The voidhanger reappeared atop the trailer the purple unknown had emerged from, trying to acquire it visually for King to secure.

"Marking it on your HUD now. Nonlethal capture if you can, but not at the cost of your own safety. Want to see what we're dealing with."