Elfangor got the feeling that there was something missing, as he explored the wrecked craft further. It took his confused mind a while to track on what exactly that was, but then he realized that the two Skrit cocoons that had been secured to the right-hand wall were gone.
Elfangor noticed that the door leading in to the cargo hold had been ripped off its moorings. Elfangor stepped through the hole and into the main area of the cargo hold. Looking around at the haphazard piles and stacks of open, closed, or broken crates on the floor, Elfangor saw that most of them had been filled with objects from other planets.
That wasn't unexpected, since Elfangor knew that the Skrit Na collected all kinds of objects from the planets they came across. Coming closer, Elfangor was able to make out the contents of one of the shattered crates. It was a jumbled collection of things that seemed to have only the loosest connection to one another.
There were animals that had been frozen, to better preserve them for their journey to the Skrit Na world, Elfangor supposed. There were also bundles of the artificial skin that Chapman had called clothing, hollow-seeming glass objects that had been filled with liquids of varying colors, a collection of archaic electronics, and things that looked like hundreds of sheets of paper all glued together on one side. There was also a long crate of some other kind of objects, Elfangor could almost swear that he was looking at a collection of ancient projectile weapons.
Ancient by Andalite standards, anyway.
What Elfangor saw next, though, pushed thoughts of the primitive weapons right out of his mind. There, right in front of him, was the most powerful object in the history of the universe. The Time Matrix, sitting in the cargo hold of an old, battered wreck of a Skrit Na freighter. Right next to it was something that had been painted bright yellow and had four black wheels.
Elfangor didn't know what it was, so he stepped closer, wanting to know what this new machine was. There were silver letters in some alien alphabet, as well as a silver design in the shape of a quadruped. The letters spelled out the word "Mustang", and so Elfangor supposed that that was what this machine was called.