"Relay Wash" is a rare, often fatal consequence of Faster than Light travel. Since the Epostile created their first prototypes of the dark matter manipulating space-compression methodology, it's been well understoid that frequent travel generates a well-ploughed "lane". Visible roughly for 1 to 8 seconds after a Relay's Impulse closes, this subtle ripple in spacetime bends light at the scale of gravitational influence normal mass behaves within. Undocumented for many centuries of theoretical physics research was the physical displacement of the "weave" of Dark Matter dotted gingerly through reality, so accidents in early Faster than Light travel experiments were numerous.
These are things Relay Officer Ilix knew as a matter of surface considerations when decrypting black box or SOS data, but closer inspection of the crew metrics of the derelict vessel drifting 180km from his Relay satellite called into question just what happened to a crew in a sustained Wash Cycle.
"RO Ilix, we're within visual range and ready to deploy inspection crew, ICO Raffe will handle data arrays."
The old Epostile managing today's salvage chirped their communique quickly, his face wriggling on the Holo broadcast display to the left of Ilix's terminals. Today's Commanding Officer, an old bastard named Felix, had been ordered light duty after participating in the terrestrial campaign on Sulgen. He's in command of a small ship to ship craft known as a Sparrow, his team of engineers are going to space walk about .5km to the hull of the sizable Yacht adrift illegally in the middle of the Relay Lane. Felix is a typical example of his species, Red-black plumage with a fiery orange highlight cresting his head with a mane of vibrant feathers, wrapping down the flanks of his jaw and melding seamlessly with a patch of similarly bright orange feathers on his throat. His eyes are a greenish-blue, and his scaled muzzle features a distinctive and atypical (for the Navy) nose ring. It's quite striking to see piercings snuck past senior safety crewmen on a flight, so he's got enough clout in the pecking order to avoid a fuss.
Felix's crew of Accipiter engineers are a mismatched band of ranking FNG's pulled out of the nearby naval base into this ad hoc inspection mission. Had the yacht not rolled in and decelerated right in the middle of the lane, it'd be next week's problem when a dedicated crew could rotate in for review. Most of the time this happens, ships are powered down and everyone is dead, often from starvation, radiation, or self-inflicted weapons discharges. Rarely a fatal cabin failure will leave a thin crust of viscera smeared around the point of the breach, in virtually all known cases it's people illegally moving goods, jumping when they shouldn't, and approaching a lane in an extreme angle of attack maneuver meant to take advantage of the lane and terminate at a time marker to keep off of flight logs.
As for Ilix's guesses, the little gecko contemplated why the derelict, but powered, vessel would have a single, ambling, inconsistent vital read broadcasting. Distance scans revealed evidence of a hull breach near the aft port side plating, and the model of Yacht (a Gyrasian Company class vessel meant to ferry their ultra wealthy, politicians, corporate types and sometimes government officials) should have never been able to initiate a jump with the clearly unstable state the life support was in. Virtually all of the software exports from the ship's logs fed errors, config test values, or dangerously out of spec atmosphere concentrations. In particular, the interior had inexplicably been flooded with an excessive Nitrogen concentration. That suggested something much more dangerous than simply being adrift full of dead bodies. Ilix hit the broadcast on his communicator.
"Away Team, Raffe, confirm visual for me: is the vessel under power? What is the state of the propulsion? I'm getting scrambled readouts and am operating under an educated guess its data exports are faulty or tampered. Are you equipped with X-ray drones for a cargo inspection? High Nitrogen levels reported, might be HSO."
After a delay, the Information Communication Officer, Raffe, honked a response.
"Uh, the vessel is looking pretty normal save for a little rippling from the lane. Wait uh. Whattya mean might? RO Ilix, you can't just put 'might' and HSO in the same sentence. Hang on", Raffe, a young looking, white feathered hawk with a nervous disposition was now in the display.
CO Felix was faintly visible in the upper deck of the Cabin over Raffe's shoulder, reviewing diagrams with one of his boarding crew. The two space birds had a mostly inaudible exchange, excepting a famous Firefletch saying about setting ones genitals on burning cinders. Ilix rubbed the large scales between his heat pits, following his muzzle back towards the front corners of his eyes. He sat up, straightened out his neck a little, and cocked his head back at the black box data, spotting an anomaly as he idly cycled through read outs. A small thing jumped at him, a recently saved export dated for 2 years ago, then he noticed the ship clock was 2 years out of date.
"Raffe here, Felix says we gotta decide on an action now, because there's visible wash, he's gonna exo with the team now. We can scoot it with some external booster drones, but if any crew is onboard still kicking we need to do an entry. The vitals picture here looks normal on my read-outs, are you sure there's not signal decay on your end?"
Ilix scoffed. Signal decay. They're the ones hallucinating a wash, nothing is on sensors. Besides it's not like being 180km away from the target on the Buoy station was going to produce anything meaningful in decay. He gandered at the data exports again, they were now reading nominal, almost a carbon copy of the nearby Sparrow's. Worse, the Sparrow and yacht had closed to under .2km, knife-point range, telemetry was starting to get choppy, read outs were showing artifacting and deletions, like something was trying to scrub the export clean and cover its tracks while under examination with a microscope. Ilix bit their knuckle. If he was wrong it'd cause a fightful panic aboard the Buoy.
"It's mimicking your vessel.", Ilix gently muttered, "Assume safe distance I'm advising regional to order a termination with drones, you need to break off."
Raffe shot a confused look, but it swiftly turned to one of complete terror, Ilix's feed became choppy, holding on a stuttering loop of just a few frames of frozen mortal realization.
Then, the signal cut out.
Ilix's head shot back to his terminals, he checked telemetry on the nearby Sparrow, which was now gone, even emergency redundant broadcasting. Standing abruptly from his station, Ilix shouted at the Buoy Commander who had been overseeing traffic re-routes and other lane delays.
"Commander! HSO, the derelict is HSO! We just lost telemetry on our engineering Sparrow!"
From across the information center, the tired looking Gyrasian cocked an eyebrow. Their second in command, a young Epostile with a jagged scar over his left eye, responded before the Commander.
"What metrics? Did you get real scrambled vitals or what?", the young Epostile was just doing his job, annoyingly.
"Spoofed data exports, abnormal nitrogen concentration in the cabin, an external breach to the hull in a critical zone and 2 year backdating on the ship computer. I just lost comms with the Sparrow!"
Ilix and the Epostile had a back and forth that lasted five minutes too long, bickering over the precision of the Gecko's scanning configurations and other routine red tape bullshit. The dead signal finally got the second commanding to back off, but it was too little too late. Next to them, one of the civilian frilled mesmian lizards in a separate spot of the information center spun around in their chair and stood up, his face as ashen as Ilix felt. By now the normally noisy room full of radio calls and flight management became dead silent, transfixed at first by the barking Navy officers, now staring expectantly at the nervous little mesmian who looked like he was about to puke.
"U-u-uh Commander, the r-radar is showing a mass accelerating towards us, m-matching case profile of that Yacht and the Sparrow having collided and become... i-intertwined."
For a few heartbeats, Ilix reveled in the calm before the storm as faces fell and other terminals relayed second and third confirmations from nearby traffic. More than half of the information center was staffed by civilians contracted by the Coalition Navy, and their blank vaguely alarmed facial expressions must've been because of the stunned, frightfully pale Naval officers who were checking their sidearms. The young 2nd commanding Epostile turned to the commander, muttered something quickly, and took off in a sprint towards the Buoy's hangars. The Gyrasian station commander, a round bodied and otherwise unserious looking plated mammalian resembling an oversized pangolin, looked like he'd been jumpscared by a cave cricket. The man flicked on the station wide broadcast and quickly shouted out a universally dreaded order as his demeanour wavered:
"All hands! Prepare for boarders! Civilians make for the designated Evac bays! Navy staff, Coalition enlistees of all domains, and any paramilitaries with combat experience, muster at the nearest Security Station to receive arms!"
The commander sat down in their chair, hands shaking with adrenaline. Ilix was third on the pecking order. He strode over and grabbed the transceiver for the station, the Gyrasian had often differed to Ilix because Ilix was way more confident in commanding a crisis.
"Sir if I may?"
The commander nodded.
"Attention all crew and civilians, this is not a drill. Hadentria Super Organism nodule on approach, if you're not off vessel before it arrives you're as good as dead. Prioritize civilians, anyone with craft that can take extras or help tow lifeboats needs to organize in their sector now. Estimated impact..."
Ilix snapped at the Mesmian who was nervously monitoring the mass on radar. He mouthed a "seventeen minutes".
"Impact in 10 minutes, all flight proximity restrictions are cleared, use visual and instrumentation, flight crews pull straws now on who deports first in your sectors. There are 17 vessels docked in three sections, I expect there to be zero in 10 minutes. Buoy Command out."
With that, Ilix yanked the commander out of his chair, and the Information Center's crew followed him out. If he was lucky, that hotshot in second command could still fly a strike craft, one was warming up for emergency launch from the forth section reserved for Navy vessels.