Chapter 1 – The perils of forgetting to account for drift – part 1

Taylor, Anet, Margulis and Pemmy, well, not Pemmy as Pemmy isn't smart enough to understand, all watch in dismay as the orbiter slowly drifts apart in front of the lander. A little further away, the two halves of their railjack also slowly drift apart. None of them can miss the plushies slowly floating out of the nest room either.

Taylor sighs, "Ordis, what just happened?"

"Ordis is not entirely sure… Warning, sensors are reading a hyper velocity projectile coming towards… Operators, Ordis believes he knows what just happened. There is a receding light shadow from what appears to be a projectile travelling at speeds exceeding the speed of light."

Margulis has to be held back by Anet and Taylor as she tries to reach a console, "Ordis, that's impossible, nothing can exceed the speed of light."

Anet taps her daughter on the chassis, "Margulis, Ordis doesn't have anywhere else to go!"

Taylor asks, "Ordis, any ideas where that thing came from?"

"Ordis thinks the Operator would know more than Ordis does at the moment."

Taylor sighs, "Right, faster than light. Let me know if anything shows up on your scans, and depressurise the lander, I'm going to go and rescue my plushies. Come on Pemmy, let's see what we can salvage."

Margulis finally stops trying to reach a console, "Ordis, where are we?"

"My systems indicate that we are approximately half way between the orbits of Pluto and Neptune."


A few hours later, a long, narrow, ship appears out of nowhere that bears no resemblance to any of the factions that the three of them are used to.

Carrying a plushie and a blue glass pyramid, Taylor flies out of the wreckage and over to the ship. Opening a call to the lander, Taylor says, "Oh, hey, they speak English here, or at least they use English letters. The ship's called Normandy."

Margulis says, "Can you see why it feels like there's negative mass there?"

"No clue, but it looks like someone's opening the door and I'm working on their communications. I'm just heading around to the airlock."

Anet shakes her head, "Talyor, be careful you've got Taylor there, and I know you want her to meet your dad."

Taylor shakes her head as she pulls herself into her human shape, "Yeah, yeah, I'll be careful."

As she makes her way around to the airlock, she spots a window and waves to the people staring at her from inside. At the airlock is a human, wearing some sort of basic propulsion frame, tethering themselves to the outside of the ship. Slowly they turn around to face Taylor, who waves cheerfully, before they check their oxygen supply.

While they're doing that, Taylor floats into the airlock next to them and touches the wall to close the airlock. As she does, she absently leaves part of herself behind to learn what she can about their computer systems.

BANG! Taylor looks down at the remains of her plushie and then up at the human in a space suit, at the same time her systems reconfigure her shields to convert piercing kinetic energy to electricity for her systems.

"What did you do that for? That was Anet's plushie!"

As the person in front of her takes a couple more shots, Anet asks, "Taylor, what's going on?"

"I'm being shot at, and the first shot went through your condrac plushie."

Anet begins to laughs, "Taylor have you tried speaking English? Oh, and my original plushie is in digital storage."

Taylor drops the plushie and puts her head in her now free hand, "I'm an idiot, no wait. I'm in a vacuum and we haven't… Really? Their communications aren't using any cyphers whatsoever? Fuck!"

Taylor connects to the humans communications system and drags her English language out of the back of her memory, "Good morning, I hope you don't mind me dropping by for a cup of milk…"

The human opposite her freezes before pointing their gun towards the ceiling, "What?"

"Don't mind me, I'm just trying to remember my word book as I haven't used it in over 1,000 years."


Jane Shepherd looks at the thing wearing the body of a human in alarm, changing channels on her comm, she says, "Joker, get command on the line we've got a first contact scenario."

Before Joker can say anything the thing says, "What? No, I'm not an alien, I'm human. Well I was until a few months ago anyway… At least I think I was, as I still had 28 chromosomes but do implants stop you being human… Oh, hey… Jane Shepherd isn't it. You have implants, have you stopped being human?"

Jane switches over to an encrypted channel, "Miranda get them out of our comms."

The thing shrugs, "If you're not going to put in even basic encryption, don't expect to keep anyone out. Oh, and the airlock now has pressure."

Miranda replies, "This is encrypted... I've generated 257 new keys, and they're broken as quickly as they're used."

The thing responds, "Wait, those aren't just fancy math tests? Margulis, have you ever heard of doing encryption with prime numbers?"

"No I haven't, I'm a bit busy trying to save the digital storage here."

Jane pulls her helmet off and leans heavily against the wall, "Just my luck, there's more than one of them."

A third voice comes over the comm, "Taylor, don't you think you should introduce yourself?"

Somehow, the thing in front of her manages to blush as it says, "Oops, sorry about that. I'm Taylor Hebert, originally from Earth Bet, but most recently from the Origin System. If it helps, I was born human, I just had a slight accident"

Jane stares at the hand that Taylor is holding out. Coming to a decision, she grabs the hand, "Fuck it, I'm Jane Shepherd. Pleased to meet you. You wouldn't happen to have seen anything attacking a shuttle that was passing through here a few hours ago?"

Taylor shakes her head, "Sorry, no. But it was probably the same thing that destroyed our ships. We transited from the void, and bam, we were hit by a projectile going faster than light."

Jane blinks twice, "Joker, calculate the exact vector the shuttle would have been taking."

EDI's voice comes back in less than a second, "Calculations say that it is possible that this was a collision rather than an attack. There was a 0.0000003 second window between the Mass Relay activating and the shuttle leaving the solar system plus or minus 500 nano seconds."

Taylor blinks, "Wait, that's a big error window. Let me see those calculations… Mercury's mines, how crude is this computing hardware. No wonder it's so bad… right I see. We didn't see the incoming light from the transit for 1925.436231984332 seconds after the collision which would put their relative locations at that, giving us a 0.21 arc second deviation…" Taylor continues to mumble for a couple of minutes before saying, "Margulis, could you check my math, to make sure I've correctly accounted for everything."

Jane shouts, "Power down the ship, don't let it get into our computers."


Miranda comes running to the airlock.

As Taylor glances over at the aristocratic looking woman with long black hair she calls out, "Comms are completely compro… oh… I also couldn't shut the ship down."

Taylor waves, "Hi, I'm Taylor. Oh, and Margulis is just coming to the ship with Pemmy. Something about impossible numbers in your calculations. So you may want to leave the airlock."

This is when she notices the trio of marines pointing their rifles at her, one arm turns briefly into a tentacle to snatch one of the guns, "Oh, those are interesting, where's the smart matter? And what's the deal with this impossible element?"

At the same time, there's the loud retort of automatic gunfire unloading into Taylor until the cartridges turn red hot and automatically eject. Something that she just ignores, as she's already adapted to it after Jane tried to shoot her.

Jane shouts "Weapons down! Weapons down! She is currently non-hostile and we don't want her to become hostile."

Jane's eyes widen comically as another thing comes through the wall behind the marines along with a floating pillar around as tall as a human, and maybe 2m in diameter.

That's when things go from sideways to surreal and all the guns in the area spontaneously dismantle themselves, with their components just floating in the air. The tiny spheres of eezo that provide the mass effect field needed to fire the weapons dance in front of the newcomer.

Taylor huffs as she starts to reform the floating weapon components into 3 Fulmin, the signature weapon of Wisp, and one Plinx, a corpus pistol, "Margulis, what have we said about not acting on your impulses. Sorry about that, these weapons don't need any ammo as they run entirely off of electricity."

Jane dumbly nods as she takes the weird looking pistol, "Um, thanks. Would you be able to give us our ship back?"

Taylor looks up, "Um, what? Oh… Sort of no? Taking over technology is a natural byproduct of us just being here. But I can certainly stop paying attention to it. Um, would you mind taking us to the Kuniper Belt so we can make a new Pemmy. That way we can let Margulis have fun building a dry dock and new base while Anet and I come and help you as best as we can as an apology for all this."

Margulis looks up, "You mean that Taylor? You'll let me build a new research centre? Can I keep these element samples too please?"

Taylor sighs, "Margulis, when did you learn English?"

"Huh? Just now. They have translation programs built in to their computers, so it was trivial to just copy them to my implants and add Orokin to them."

Taylor sighs, "Jane Shepherd, meet Margulis, my somewhat daughter and one of my partners. She's also the last Orokin Archemedian and the most intelligent person you'll ever meet. She also has the attention span of a mayfly."

Margulis looks up, "I'm not that bad."

Taylor laughs "Margulis, how's the planning for the in-place upgrade of this ship going, and how many new projects have you started since you dismantled the guns?"

"Shut up! I'm only 40% through that plan, as I need to really understand this new element. I don't yet understand how it allows for negative mass without destroying everything."

"And how many new projects?"

Margulis mumbles, "17, but only because I'm currently trying to get into the scientific journals to see the state of the sciences here. I predict another 135 projects arising from that information, including a dedicated toy to produce this element."

"What about the orbiter?"

Margulis looks up, "Hmm, that's interesting… Oh, what? The orbiter? My lab's on independent power now, and I left it building a new Pemmy, that should be done in the next hour and Ordis can then direct the most urgent repairs so we can get the ship into the drydock."

From the helm, Joker calls, "Captain, the ship is moving without me doing anything."

Taylor snaps at Margulis, "Margulis, stop that!"

"But!"

"This is not your ship, and they're not enemies. You're not our enemies are you?"

Jane shakes her head and raises her free hand, "No, no, we're not enemies. Um, are you AI?"

Taylor shakes her head, "We're synthetic, rather than biological, life forms. Ordis, Cy, and Taylor here," she lifts the blue pyramid, "are all cephalons. That means they used to be organic until the Orokin turned them into cephalons, and now they're digital intelligences."

Jane swallows hard, "Uh, Joker, set course for the nearest large object in the kuniper belt. Everyone else back to work. Miranda, get the others and meet me in the ready room with Taylor."


As Taylor walks into the briefing room, she stops to look at the large wooden table, with a central holographic projector, in the cramped room. With a shrug, she activates the OmniMat built into Pemmy and replaces it with an Orokin era projector.

Cocking her head to one side, she sends a query to Margulis for the specifications of a mini synthesis simulacrum. Within milliseconds, Margulis has sent back the design, plus the designs for chairs that will allow non-orokin to use it.

With a minor thought, she dissolves the back wall of the room for energy and uses it to build a small void reactor and start it. Now having enough energy to work with, she first builds out the computing hardware needed to run the system, and a dock to put Cephalon Taylor on, before connecting the system to the ships computer network and starting on the chairs. As an afterthought, she locates the core for the ship's AI and points Margulis at it for upgrading, given the vastly more capable computer that Cephalon Taylor is going to have.


Jane holds her brittle smile as she guides the human looking alien to the briefing room behind the CiC.

"Taylor wasn't it? Would you wait in there, I just need to get something from my quarters and I'll be back."

Taylor doesn't even seem to acknowledge her as Jane makes her way to the lift up to her cabin. Once inside, she makes her way over to her personal comm and inputs her codes for the citadel council.

A few seconds later, the salarian councillor, Valern, appears in the view screen, "Spectre, you are a long way from the Terminus System."

Jane nods, "I am, I'm in Sol on Alliance business. However, Council business dropped in my lap."

"Go ahead."

"We are currently experiencing a first contact scenario with a highly advanced species that seem to be extra-galactic."

Valern cocks his head, "What makes you think they're extra-galactic?"

Jane laughs dryly, "They had no idea what eezo was until they came aboard."

Valern looks down, "I see, I will have some diplomats sent out soon. Will you be in position long?"

Jane shakes her head, "I don't know. What I do know is that they took over the Normandy with no apparent effort. They are able to shrug off our weapons, and they have the ability to reform matter out of hand." Jane holds up her plinx, "This used to be an M-3 Predator. Now it's whatever this is."

"This is an order then, delay your departure from Sol for as long as you can. I will contact you again once I've convened the council."

Jane nods, "Understood."

With that, the screen goes blank and Jane makes her way back down to the CiC.


Back at the cockpit, Margulis mutters, "Damn it, I wish I was in my research lab, then I could look at the subatomic make up of… Damn it Anet! Why didn't you make us train on the subatomic level…"

EDI turns her attention to Joker in the pilot seat, "Pilot Moreau, is it possible to look at subatomic structures? My records indicate that it is not."

Joker looks back as he's carefully throttling the eezo drive to allow the Normandy to reach the kuiper belt in reasonable time. "So far as I know, they still have to smash things together to see the bits and pieces that make up atoms. Something about quantum uncertainty or something."

Absently, Margulis says, "The universe is holographic, so you can just look deeper and deeper the higher the frequency you look in. That's interesting, I wonder how they managed that. Oh, EDI, this might itch a little."

Zariman – part 1

"Anet, Margulis, what are we looking at?"

Margulis looks up from the Grineer computer she's working on, "A pile of crap that offends every iota of engineering and research training I've ever had."

Anet laughs, "Tell us what you really think."

Margulis growls, "Do you want to do this? I mean, they don't even have the decency to include implant access to the computers. Everything has to be done through these terminals. Not even the Corpus have fallen that far. Then whoever designed the system seems to have never heard of an organisation tree, or any sort of file structure."

Anet laughs again, from her own computer, that she's leaning against, "Margulis, have you forgotten that you're not Orokin anymore?"

"No, I can hardly forget now can I." She holds up a hand and allows it to take on a less human appearance for a moment.

Taylor shakes her head and goes back to guarding the door, meanwhile Anet giggles, "Then why are you trying to access the computer like an Orokin?"

Margulis huffs, "I'm not, didn't I just explain that it doesn't have any systems for interacting with implants?"

"Daughter, you are a Sentient, not an Orokin. Why do you persist in ignoring that part of yourself?"

Margulis slams her fist on the keyboard, "I'm not ignoring that part of…" She trails off as she looks down at the keyboard, "Oh, I am aren't I. But…"

Anet walks over and puts her hand on Margulis' shoulder, before initiating a join, much like a parental hug. In the join she sends over the memories of learning the Orokin way, and their hope that Margulis would have been doing the same thing for the Sentient way of being. Along with that she can't help sending a sense of exasperation with Taylor for not learning more about being a Sentient too. As they separate, Margulis looks down at her hands and deliberately lets go of the form she's so used to. As she does, her body expands out until it's finally the full size it's supposed to be. Connecting to her mother wirelessly, she regards the computer, "This isn't all you meant is it."

What she gets back is an image of herself in the gardens of the Dojo learning how to terraform. With a sigh, she turns back to the computer and invades it in seconds, and only a few moments later she's located all of the interesting information and downloaded it. It will require further perusal later, but it looks like they have the location of the Zariman anyway.



As the sound of an alarm goes off, Ordis connects to them all, "This has become an extermination mission. Find everyone that saw you enter the secure area and eliminate them."

All three of them share a glance before Margulis forces herself down into her humanoid form, and picks up her weapon.


"Daughter, daughter, you must…"

With a mental flick, Anet turns off the incoming call as she turns her attention back to the gardens with Taylor and Margulis, "Taylor, you need to consider what happens to your plants and animals once they die, otherwise your eco system will fail almost immediately. Margulis, while a world of bacteria and fungi is very stable, you need to include insects, mammals, and reptiles in order to fill your brief. Remember your biology and geology lessons."

Hunhow's face briefly appears in a message window again, "Daughter, we need to…"

Taylor loses control of her human form as she tries to balance her garden so that it only needs a single energy input to remain stable, "Gah! This is harder than it looks."

Anet briefly joins with Taylor to send a sense of approval and appreciation before turning her attention back to Margulis, "Margulis, while this is very utilitarian, where's the wonder and beauty? Where's the…"

Margulis sweeps her hand over the garden, "Can you not see it? There's 300,000 strains of fungus and bacteria, all working together in a perfect dance, growing, living, dying, and being eaten. Each one producing something that the others require."

Anet sighs before she uses the systems to create a lump of limestone, and throwing it randomly into the garden, "Where's the resiliency."

Margulis watches aghast as the limestone causes some of her carefully crafted bacterial to reproduce out of control in the accelerated environment, causing a cascade throughout the system that ultimately causes mutations, and then wipes out the underlying bacteria that use heat and water to provide the basic chemicals needed for the next layer in the ecosystem, "But, that wasn't supposed to happen."

Anet touches her daughter and sends a sense of reassurance, "Margulis, you focus too much on the details and elegance that you don't leave yourself space to consider external factors." She waves a manipulator over the garden, "Life doesn't work like that. Life adapts, responds, and fills niches. Your creations should reflect that. They should be adaptable and able to grow to fill a niche if it's available."



Ordis opens a communication channel with all three of them, "Operators, we have just finished calculating the coordinates of the Zariman Ten Zero. A new mission has been added to Navigation."

As Ordis ends the call, Hunhow opens a call to Anet, "Praghasa."

Anet freezes as she's about to cancel the call once more, "What about her?"

"Your brother has reactivated her with Ballas. My daughter, you must stop them."

"Erra's dead, my Tenno killed him in the old war."

"Grievously injured, yes. Killed, not quite. The traitor, Ballas, unsealed his tomb."

"Why haven't you stopped my brother?"

Hunhow hesitates before responding, "Erra, listens to me about as much as you do. Especially now."

"Then, why do you think he'll listen to me?"

"I don't, however you are still your mother's successor. Like you, she can call our people out of hiding. I would rather you were the one to make the call, than the traitor, Ballas."

Margulis interrupts her with a snarl, "Did you say Ballas?"

Anet cocks her head to one side in thought, a habit she picked up from Taylor. Coming to a decision, she connects to an EmMat and creates a communications node to transfer the call to, "Margulis, meet Hunhow, my father. Father, meet my daughter Margulis, and you already know Taylor. Apparently, my, not nearly as deceased as he should be, brother has activated her with Ballas."

Margulis snarls as best as she can in her sentient body, "Where is that filthy spawn of a kubrow and yogwun? He has some nerve sealing me into Anet, ."



Hunhow stays silent for a while as he processes the new information, "Daughter…"

Anet interrupts with a growl, "I am not your daughter, not now, and never again. I am Anet, or The Lotus to you."



Taylor sighs, "Let's ignore the whole genetic donor thing for the moment. What's going on that requires our direct involvement?"

Anet growls, "Taylor, you know what…"

Taylor raises a manipulator, "Anet, I know, but at the moment he's a client, so we are going to treat him as a client. Now, Hunhow, what were you saying."



Hunhow rumbles, "Daughter…"

Taylor interrupts, "Uh uh, that goes for you too. Unless you want to be shunted to the Lotus Cephalons you will stop with the genetic donor crap until the call is over."

"…Praghasa, our mother, has been reactivated by Erra and Ballas, they are going to use her to call the sentient's out of hiding. The only other sentient that could do that is my…" He changes tack as Taylor raises a manipulator, "Natah. You must stop them, or call the other sentients yourself."

Margulis shakes her head, "We can't be involved in this. Ballas changed Anet in some way to allow me to take over her systems. But we don't know if that's the only thing he added. All three of us could be taken over by him if we got anywhere close, and unless we let it happen I couldn't tell you what part of our systems are needed to allow him to do that."

Taylor nods, "Anet, if one of us were to do this call thing, would it give away our location?"

Anet nods, "Every Sentient in the solar system, including my… including Hunhow would know precisely where we are."

Taylor nods, "Which include Ballas and Erra."

Margulis calls out, "Ordis, transfer Hunhow to the Lotus."

At the same time Hunhow calls, "Natah, you must call them, they are your peo…"



A moment later, Taylor forms a hand so she can snap her fingers, "Ordis, have you located the Warframe that Alad V stole from me yet?"

"Operator Ordis notified you of that new mission three days ago."

Taylor forms a head and another three hands so she can facepalm properly, "Right… Anet, would you mind terribly if I got my Titania back, and then we head to the Zariman to rescue me?"


Taylor, Anet, and Margulis all stop to stare as Cy brings the Railjack out of the void near to the recovered coordinates. In front of them, the ships scanners are projecting holographic markers for a fleet of Grineer ships. If that was all, then the three of them would have just taken their positions to wipe the fleet out.

Instead, there's a shimmering white crack in space behind the fleet, and it is getting bigger and bigger as it blots out the stars. As they watch, it cracks open, revealing a dark void that seems to hungrily consume most of the waiting fleet before a silvery grey ship slowly starts to emerge from inside the void.



The docking port alone looks as though it would be large enough for even a Grineer Galleon to dock nose first, even if that's all that would fit. As more and more of the disc shaped ship pokes through to real space, the sheer size of the 44km diameter ship becomes apparent.



As they watch, the ship seems to get caught in the rift just as it reaches its widest point.



Suddenly Margulis gasps, "What's that, on the edge of the rift?"



As the other two look, they can all see the faint images of another land, just beyond the rift.



Grimly, Taylor says, "Cy, plot a course to the docking bay. We need to get in there. Once we've landed, get back to the Orbiter and start preparing a new set of solar rails. We have a ship to clear out."

Margulis shakes her head, "What about Ballas?"

Taylor looks at her, "Be honest, how long do you think it will take before he knows about this? Once he does, he's going to want to take it for himself. Honestly, I'm surprised that we've not seen any of the Orokin towers being returned to real space."

Cy interrupts, "Captain, the Lotus Cephalons have been stepping up their monitoring of void incursions by any forces, and have been setting high priority missions to clear them out. Ballas would need to go to a tower personally in order to take one over. Every ships Cephalon has additionally been instructed to send new fallback coordinates to each of the tower Cephalons once their operators have completed their missions. We estimate that the entire fleet, bar two towers, will be inaccessible to the other factions within the next 28 days."

Taylor nods, "So they'll be back to sending out scouting missions and collating nav-coordinates again."

"Affirmative. Course plotted."


Nearly 6 hours later, two sentients, three Warframes, and Pemmy (aka PemMat mk 3 #3), Margulis' portable research lab, all land on a small pad inside a massive hanger that looks like it doubles as a concourse.



Once they touch down Taylor transfers out of her wisp. "I've got nothing on my implants, what about you two?"

Anet shakes her head, "There are communications, but they're not using the same channels as the towers."

Margulis nods, "That tracks, this was supposed to be a colony ship after all. I've got 33…" Margulis humphs as Taylor stares at her, "ok, Pemmy checking through all the variations of civilian and military channels that I had access to. It… They're also looking for any patterns in the emissions that could hint at unknown channels."

Taylor nods, "Anet, anything on the Grineer coms?"

Anet laughs, "Taylor, there's always stuff on Grineer coms, but they don't keep a data network going like the Corpus do. I'm monitoring it for anything interesting. Now what's going on with that song I can hear but not sense."

Margulis nods, "Whatever it is, it's playing havoc with Tenno and Orokin void based comms."

Taylor nods, "Right, I'll take point with my Wisp while the two of you bring up the rear and guard Pemmy and the Warframes. Remember, we're on our own here and until we find a secure living space we won't be able to set up transference pods for either of us."


As they're carefully making their way through the seemingly deserted ship, Taylor walks through a barely visible shimmer of light and leaves her Warframe behind.

She takes two steps through the door she was about to walk through before she stops and looks back, "What the hell?"

On the other side of the door, Margulis has already put her Warframe down, and is looking at the barrier in interest, "Fascinating, this seems to be disrupting the transference energies that we use to join with the Warframes. I wonder if this developed naturally, or was manufactured as it's a masterful use of the void."

Taylor shakes her head, "Fine, whatever. I'm going to scout ahead to make sure it's not an ambush, Anet watch our backs, Margulis find out how to disable this."

Shifting sideways in physics, Taylor lifts off the ground and puts herself slightly out of phase with the physical universe the same way she did when she made the bet with Anet so many months ago. As she does so, she shivers slightly as the ship around her seems to become less solid, and she's able to easily perceive the things outside the ship that were previously been blocked.

It's only because of this state that she avoids walking around a corner into view of some sort of void beast that is barely visible to her eyes, and invisible to the rest of her sensors.

Lowering herself to the floor, Taylor returns to her natural phase, and frowns when the creature ahead still doesn't show up on her other senses properly.

Off to one side, a voice hisses, "This way, over here!"

Taylor looks towards the voice, and blanks momentarily when she sees a young human woman in a black leather outfit kneeling in an access tunnel. Quickly, she flies over to the woman, and into the tunnel.

"Come on, follow me, there's a safe place we can talk."

Taylor shakes her head, "Not without my friends, they're just back there."

The woman stares at Taylor disbelievingly, "Are you serious?"

Taylor nods, "There are three of us, we're here to gain a foothold against the Grineer."

The woman shakes her head, "The Grineer aren't the problem, I'll explain later. Where exactly are your friends?"

Taylor tries to connect to Pemmy to create a map, only for the connection to fail. Sharpening a finger, she scratches a 'crude' map into the wall. Then stares at it in consternation as she realises that it's actually only off by a fraction of a millimetre. "They're here, just outside the weird barrier that's interfering with my communications."

The woman nods, "I can get us there, follow me."


After a circuitous route through some maintenance tunnels, and backtracking along some main corridors, the woman finally leads the group into a large central elevator.

As the elevator goes down into the ship, Taylor looks out into the central maintenance shaft wistfully, "I remember standing in one of these just after I arrived on the Zariman. Kay used to bring Rell here to watch the shuttles and drones moving around inside the shaft with supplies. We'd sit and chat behind the console there while Rell walked around the viewing window. We were considered a little odd for doing that, as each dorm level was its own town."

The woman looks at Taylor in surprise, "You're passenger N? We all heard of you, as what you did was supposed to be impossible."

Taylor turns round, "Who's we?"

The woman folds her arms defensively, "The crew. I'm Hombask, I was going to be in charge of the homesteading when we reached Tau."

Taylor nods, "I remember you, you tried to protect us. But you died."

Hombask looks down, "Yeah, not that it matters in this forsaken place. I'll let Quinn or Yonta explain it once we reach safety."

Margulis frowns, "Yonta? Archimedean Yonta?"

Hombask nods, "Yes, you know her?"

Margulis growls, "Of her, and I have some choice words for what she did."

Hombask shakes her head, "Whatever you think she did, she probably didn't do. Not in the way you're thinking anyway."

In order to divert the conversation, Anet quietly asks, "Why is Taylor passenger N?"

Hombask laughs, "Because that's what her passenger number was. She had another passenger number too, but anyone in the crew could see the passenger manifest, and when every passenger joined the ship. In the first days after the accident we were all using it regularly to find points of unrest or distress. It didn't help that we were running low on food because the Orokin in charge wouldn't stop the mission 'just because the agricultural biomes failed'."

Margulis frowns, "That didn't make it into any of the reports I received."

The large door behind them slides open, bringing a halt to the discussions as Taylor walks out into onto a veranda that has been partially overtaken by plants, "This wasn't our home."

Hombask shakes her head, "It isn't, no. Those areas aren't safe. The Grineer can't come down here, and the Angels… Come on Quinn's waiting for us."

As they walk along the veranda, Taylor looks over the edge to see water instead of the plaza she was expecting, "Water?"

Hombask nods, "The Orokin in charge ordered these areas flooded when the riots started, and the first adults started falling to void sickness. Every dorm level we've looked at is the same when accessed by this elevator."

Margulis looks out of the long windows that overlook the plaza below, "Were these the crew quarters then?"

Hombask nods, "They were." She then walks through a door on the opposite side of the veranda to the railing.


As Anet and Taylor walk into a sleeping area, Margulis takes one look at one of the people inside, and charges forward to land a right hook right around their face.

"How could you! How could you countenance the mission and the experiments they were running?"

The women she just slugged, holds her cheek, "I didn't have a choice, and I thought I could limit the damage. Do you have any idea how many times I wished I was the one that had chosen to walk away from my life's work? That I'd defied the Seven? Oh, how I wish I was the me that did that. Maybe then the whole ship wouldn't have been lost, maybe then I'd have survived."

Taylor laughs, "Not likely, out of all the Orokin, there's only the Entrati family, Ballas, and Margulis here still alive. But backing up a bit, what do you mean you'd have survived?"

One of the two men in the room speaks up, "That would probably be my cue. I'm Quinn, and you're Taylor Hebert. It is to my great regret that I am the person who glassed you when you arrived on board. We believed you to be a stowaway, and that was to be your punishment. My superiors took you away when you survived."

Taylor nods, "Thank you for admitting that, it's part of why we're here. The Grineer have found the genetic samples taken from my arrival, and we came to rescue the Cephalon created from me."

Quinn nods, "Maybe we can help each other then. The Grineer restarted the reliquary drives and woke the angels. We also have a void cascade affecting the entire ship. Then there's 'That', we can feel it, trying to push past the ship into the rest of the solar system."

Anet shakes her head, "What are Angels?"

Grimly, Quinn says, "They are manifestations of the void, and what we become if we succumb to the song. Kira was the angel that you met before Hombask. Hombask left to try and persuade her to hold on and not give in."

Taylor grumbles, "You still haven't answered the question, what do you mean you'd have survived."

Quinn looks at the woman, "Yonta?"

Yonta shakes her head, "So far as I can tell, we're conceptual embodiments. Imprints of people who died without going insane from void exposure. The sum of our possibilities."

Taylor puts her head in her hands, "Great, Eternalism, I hated that subject."

Anet shakes her head, "I feel like we are getting off track here. Starting with the basics, are the computer systems still working here? Are there any maps of the ship? How do we get to the places we need to go?"

Quinn looks down, "Cephlon Melica is still around, we managed to repair her enough to work. But she's… different. She'd be the best person to ask about the computer systems, but expect them to be spotty as the void… It plays havoc with the inside of the ship… It…"

Yonta interrupts, "The memories of all those on board while the ship was waiting for rescue, they shape the inside of the ship. As it was mostly children that didn't succumb to void exposure, many of the areas that can be accessed change their layouts and have a childlike relationship to each other. Sometimes, getting to the drives is as simple as taking the engineering elevator to the right level and walking down a few corridors. Other times you'll need to go through the Lunaro stadium, and the athletics track, in order to get close. I would imagine the same is true for the labs."

Margulis nods, "Is this area safe?"

Yonta glances nervously at a door, "It's safe from threats inside the ship. But there 'That', you should be fine, but for us… Many of us chose to explore 'That' rather than give in to the song, we don't know what happened to them."

Margulis nods, "I'm going to create a Reservoir outside, that should allow those that follow the safety net they need, if they're not already awoken."

Taylor pokes Margulis, "You mean like you and Anet."

Margulis grumbles, "Yes, like us. I don't know how you do it, you make it seem so easy."

Taylor laughs, "You could always ask Teshin to teach you, after all he taught me."

Margulis shakes her head, "He believes we've abandoned the Tenno, and is leading a number of them against Ballas."

Taylor puts her hands on her hips, "When was I going to find out about this?"

Anet smiles, "It's in the Lotus data packets we get every day. You'd already know if you bothered to read them."

"Right, well you get on with the Reservoir while I go and deal with this void cascade. Anet, I want you to try and get access to the computer systems and the Cephalon. If you can, see what resources we have available."

Zariman - part 2

Grimly, Taylor returns to the living quarters after seeing off all the Grineer that she's come across, as well as dealing with a cascade and flood, as well as clearing out the landing bay they arrived on. Behind her she's dragging a construction beacon that she carved out of the floor in the engineering section.


At the squealing sound of metal on metal, Margulis looks up from the void shield she's constructing on the remains of the promenade below the living quarters. A moment later she's flying up to the balcony.


"Taylor, are you alright?"


Taylor shakes her head, "Not really, I found Kira near engineering. She's; she's given herself to the void now."


"Have you told Quinn?"


Taylor nods, "They were on the mission control channel. I tried to kill her, but she kept retreating into a void shell whenever I got her shield down. I followed her a few times, but she was able to play keep away long enough to heal back up. I wouldn't mind, but this is what passes for an Omnimat here."


Margulis floats over and crouches down as she scans the device with her implants, "This is a Dax emplacement."


"I thought it might be after everything you've said about the towers. I'm starting to think that this was actually a colony ship that the military co-opted to run experiments on before it left the system."


Margulis nods, "It was, it was a big enough thing that I was even aware of it. That's part of why I'm so upset with Yonta."


Taylor nods, "How's the reservoir coming?"


Margulis barks a laugh, "It's not. There's so much void interference here that I'm having to build a void shield before we can even start. Ideally I'd just head back to the orbiter and set it to build one for us over the course of a few hours. But Ordis isn't due here for a few days, along with reinforcements."


Taylor sighs, "Where's Anet?"


Margulis waves at the entrance to the living quarters, "In there I think, she's also been going up and down the different levels of the ship to see if there's anywhere else we can take as a breach head to more living quarters. You know that once you've secured the reliquary drive and re-enabled the void shields there, you're probably going to kill the survivors too."


Taylor touches Margulis to quickly join and allow her feelings to be known. Once she's withdrawn again she looks over the edge, "Do you think you'd be able to make a new portable lab?"


Margulis shakes her head, "Not until I've got a working void shield. I'd imagine that I've run into the same issue that the engineers originally ran into, as the void is warping everything. Pemmy's fine, as the generator draws from the void, so the whole thing is already shielded. But I'm having to almost build the emitter by hand. I'm just glad I don't have Orokin hands anymore, otherwise it would be impossible."


Taylor looks over the balcony at Pemmy thoughtfully, "How big is emitter going to be?"


"Probably 2m tall and around 1m in diameter at its widest point."


"Could you make a small emitter inside Pemmy's shielding and use that to build the larger emitter?"


Margulis stares at Taylor, "Taylor, I am a researcher. That's the first thing I tried once it failed. There isn't enough space inside the shield to make one."


"How about turning Pemmy into an amobea?"


"Explain."


Taylor shuts off her senses so that she can remember high school biology alongside the lessons that Anet has been shoving into her head about how to build ecosystems. Slowly she says, "Amobea's are a single celled predator that eats smaller single celled creatures. As they eat, they grow larger until there's enough of them that they can duplicate their internals and then narrow their outer layer until it splits. Maybe instead of having Pemmy create things on the outside, you instead make it behave like an amobea and slowly grow until it can create a duplicate of everything important before splitting."


Margulis reverses her perspective, so that her back is now her front, and summons Pemmy up to the balcony. Touching the device with a manipulator, she thinks for a long time. Long enough that Taylor gets bored and wanders into the living area.


She's still there after Anet has returned, and Taylor has gone out once more to both try and find the lab she woke up in, as well as drive off more of the Grineer.


Eventually, Taylor returns, having only achieved one of her objectives, to find Margulis and Anet joined as they're both looking at Pemmy. "Well, will it work?"


Anet raises a manipulator and forms a hand to give Taylor a thumbs up.




After another day of fruitlessly searching for the lab. As well as sabotaging the Grineer's efforts at restarting the void drive to remove the Zariman from the void portal, and stopping angels from destroying the reactors and blasting the portal open. Taylor returns to the crew quarters only to hear an argument going on in the flooded floor.


Flying over the side, she stops halfway down to take in the fact that the water that used to be there is now gone. Instead, the floor is taken up by dozens of Pemmy's, and twice that number of something that looks like a cross between a Pemmy, a void shield generator, and one of the life support modules that make up a reservoir.


As she watches, over by the door one of the larger crosses suddenly splits down the middle and shrinks down into two smaller versions of the same thing.


After a couple of seconds Taylor flies down to the two of them, and passes through an atmospheric shield, as suddenly she can hear them both yelling verbally at each other.


Taylor rubs her forehead as she says, "What brought this on?"


Anet points at Margulis, "She wants to destroy the reservoir that we spent so long making."


Margulis, shouts, "I do not! I just want to separate them out and stop them reproducing!"


"That's destroying them!"


Taylor groans, "Margulis, why do you want to separate them out?"


"Because they're inefficient, and they feed on water!"


Anet shakes her head, "No they don't." As Margulis looks at her, she adds, "Well not just water, they also feed on void energy."


"And the generators use microportals to the void to generate energy!"


"But those use all of the void energy they siphon, leaving nothing for the organism to use itself."


Taylor puts her head in her hands, "Margulis, they don't have to be efficient. Anet, could you change them so that they consume the emitter. I assume there's an emitter in there somewhere. When the life support module is used for the first time?"


Margulis squeezes herself into a body just so she can put her hands on her hips, "That doesn't change the fact that they consume water to reproduce. Do you know what would happen if someone dropped one onto a colony, or on earth?"


Taylor sighs, "I would imagine, nothing, as there's no ambient void energy in any of those places. But if you're that concerned, add something to the water that's poisonous to organics. Then have them only reproduce if that thing is in the water."


Margulis and Anet both look at Taylor as though she's suggesting they kill their firstborn children. Eventually, Margulis says, "I suppose it could work."


Anet steps into her main frame, "I'll do it, I'm not happy about it though."


Taylor smiles in relief, "Great, well, as you've now got working reservoir's we can start looking for the labs and free Cephalon Taylor."




"Two hours, it took you two fucking hours to find this lab. I've been searching for days!"


Margulis looks up from the cloning tube she's working at, "Taylor, it took me five minutes to find the lab. The rest of the time was spent overriding the authorization protocols to open the elevator access and close the shipboard access. Oh, and finding this particular secure lab, and overriding the captain's authority took me another 10 minutes."


"But days!"


Anet looks between us, before she says, "Taylor, you could have done the same if you thought about it."


Margulis hums, "Oh, you were very naughty weren't you."


Anet and Taylor both look back at Margulis, "What?"


Margulis stabs a couple of buttons on a reconfigured console. A second later a vial of blood pops up on a table behind her, "This, is an original vial of your blood Taylor. It has never been out of the void, and it still contains your unique quantum phase variant."


Taylor looks at Margulis, "Margulis, don't make me go trawling through the databases just to understand what you just said. What do you mean by quantum phase variant?"


"It was one of Albrecht Entrati's theories that he developed after he discovered how to access the void. He theorized that every universe has its own quantum phase. It was only ever partially proven, as our void navigation computers use the quantum phase of our universe to return to real space. According to our own scans, you yourself had the same quantum phase as everyone else. So we, the Orokin, assumed you were a time traveler or came from another solar system."


"But I told you I was from another world, and we were one of a number of different variations we knew of."


Margulis nods, "You did, and your physical anomalies supported your story. But that doesn't change the fact that the Archimedeans' that studied your DNA didn't have access to your scans. The point is, that with this and the information in the computer here I can plot the way to your home universe."


While Taylor is trying to come to terms with what Margulis just said, Anet asks, "What are you doing with that tube?"


Margulis points at a tiny dot in the middle of the liquid, "I'm quick cloning Taylor from the uncorrupted blood we have here. That will take around 24 hours, I'm also locating the core for Cephalon Taylor. I'm also looking for the changes that they made to her so that I can reverse them. I'm designing Cephalon Taylor a body, as I suspect she'll prefer a bipedal body, and I know Taylor well enough to know she'd prefer we didn't treat Cephalon Taylor as a thing. Finally, I'm downloading the computer core into the Pemmy we bought with us."


Anet frowns, "Doesn't quick cloning come with a host of problems?"


Margulis nods, "At the speed I'm cloning this one, it will remain viable for around two years. Which would normally be a problem, but we're going to attach it to Taylor's mounting points so that it becomes her subframe. I'm also going to use your, my, reconstructed DNA to combine it with Taylor's cells and produce an embryo that I'll then put through the same process for myself. Of course, we'll need access to your subframe to extract that data. Once we've done that, I'm destroying this lab and wiping the lab's computer core. As we don't want the Grineer getting their hands on this technology."


Eventually, Taylor whispers, "I'm going home."




Over the next few days first Ordis shows up with a couple of other Tenno, then the Granham faction of Corpus shows up hot on the tail of half a dozen other Tenno.




Over the next several months, Margulis and Anet both force Taylor to not run any missions or transferring into a warframe. Instead, they put her in charge of overseeing the Lotus Cephalons. Partially because her cloned body needs time to be assimilated into her main frame. But mostly to teach her to keep up with the Lotus data packets that she's been avoiding reading.


In the meantime, Anet and Margulis both work on restoring all of the deleted parts of Cephalon Taylor and building her a new body using Orokin technology.