[ WP ] Your ship comes across the aftermath of an utterly devastating space battle . You are tasked with finding out what happened .

`` Lieutenant, get up here!'' the Admiral's voice rang across the bridge. I scrambled to my feet, snapping to a salute. 
 
 `` Sir!'' I called. The Admiral beckoned me closer, pointing to the sensor readout. The holographic space filled the center of the bridge, our ship floating in the middle of the room. All around it, murky wrecks tumbled and spun in the endless black. Bits of the holographic representation flickered and changed as our sensors struggled to cut through the interference. I raised a hand, gesturing to a cluster of twisted metal. 
 
 `` Definitely battle damage,'' I murmured, feeling a slight tingle as my fingers touched the holographic'surface'. 
 
 `` Lieutenant, what's your opinion? Who did this?'' The Admiral asked. His face was heavily lined, criss-crossed with a hundred scars from his time on the front lines. To tell the truth, he intimidated me. All among the Fleet, Admiral Dalken was legend. They say he saved the human race from extinction. Some say he fought off a Xindar royal guard with only a knife. 
 
 `` Not a Xindar ship, certainly,'' I replied, making a tapping motion in the air to bring up more detailed information. `` The wrecks show damage consistent with plasma burns, but the spread pattern is all wrong. The Xindar and Tellari both use beam-based weaponry, and this looks to be individual strikes scattered along the surface. Either an energy cannon or actual physical projectiles, with a plasma charge as warhead.'' 
 
 `` Take a team and find out. Six marines and whoever else you need.'' The Admiral's voice was clipped short. Without waiting for a response, he turned to address his security officer. `` Specialist, set condition two. Get a flight of Sabers in the air.'' 
 
 I pulled a squad of marines and a scanning kit, and within thirty minutes we were in a shuttle, suited up and ready to board one of the wrecked ships. The marines kept asking what I was expecting to find, until I was almost ready to claw their eyes out. After a few minutes in the shuttle I moved up front to sit next to the pilot. I wanted a look at these wrecks myself. 
 
 `` We're still ten minutes out,'' the pilot said, not taking her eyes off the scattered wreckage ahead of us. It was even thicker than I thought. The ships must have been almost point-blank when they started breaking up. There were two distinct metals out there, but they both looked like heavy, military-grade armor plating. 
 
 `` I just needed to get away from the troops for a bit,'' I replied, sitting down in the co-pilot's chair. The pilot nodded 
 
 `` It's Lieutenant Stalthyn, right?'' she asked after a long silence. 
 
 `` Just Karen is fine, specialist,'' I replied absently. Sometimes I hated always being a title to everyone. 
 
 `` Well, that one looks like it's in pretty good shape,'' she pointed to a massive hull drifting below us. The sides had been ripped open by weapons fire, but most of the structure looked intact. 
 
 `` That'll do. Let's see if we can find a hatch.'' I swept a hand along the co-pilot's console, a gesture like brushing dust off a surface, and the console hummed to life. I tapped in the scan parameters with practiced efficiency, setting the power fairly high to cut down on interference from the sheer amount of metal floating around us. 
 
 `` Perfect,'' I whispered, sliding the match across to the pilot. I glanced to make sure the image appeared on her helmet glass, an overlay showing the hatch I had marked. She nodded again, bringing the shuttle between two drifting hull plates and settling over the hatch. 
 
 `` Breach in ten,'' the pilot announced, and I felt the ship jerk as we made a seal with the wreck. I stepped back to where the marine squad was waiting. As we stepped towards the hatch, I heard six rifles activating around me, the high-pitched hum sounding comforting for once. As the shuttle's airlock closed behind us, I felt my heart rate quicken. We had no idea what was waiting for us on this ship. There could even be survivors. 
 
 The hatch opened soundlessly, letting us know the atmosphere in the dead ship was long gone. As we moved into the wreck, we found that gravity was a no-go as well. I drifted along the short hallway we found ourselves in, keeping my light trained on the far door. Some kind of bright blue liquid had been smeared across the door, trailing onto the walls and floor as well. I hoped very much it was n't blood. 
 
 The door opened easily enough to our tools, and we floated into a large room. Wreckage was everywhere, panels burnt out of the walls, even cracks clean through the bulkheads. I squinted through one of the cracks, and caught a glimpse of the *Constellation*, far above us. Two of the ship's crew were dead at their stations. One was floating a short distance from their terminal, the other still clung to the computer panel, hands stiff and frozen. They were n't so different from us. Two legs, two arms, mouth, nose, two ears. The four eyes were a bit disconcerting, but all in all they looking surprisingly... normal. 
 
 `` Lieutenant,'' one of the marines called. I spun, holding onto the back of a chair to steady myself. Something was smashed into the corner. It looked like an armored jellyfish, a dome-shaped head with trailing tentacles. The armor had been burnt through in several places, and the marines were still struggling to turn it over and look at the underside. But I knew what we would find. A ring of small engines, the keep the thing afloat. The remains of a reactor that we could never study, as they seemed to self-destruct on the creature's'death'. 
 
 `` Back to the shuttle,'' I said brusquely. `` Now.'' I slammed my communicator unit, set into the wrist of my suit, hard enough to feel the shock running up my arm. 
 
 `` Admiral, prep for evac. It's Harvesters.''
