Author's Note: Alright! Another chapter to continue the story. I've also included the URL to the fitting for the Anaconda that Marcus has. It's a sort of quick switch out from passenger missions to exploration. It's actually the fit I'd used when doing exactly what Marcus was in this story. Running passengers and then just saying screw it and going exploring. Some of it's different now because of engineering I've done since then but it's basically my ship so WHOO!

H-tee-tee-pee-ess-/-/ : s. orbis .zone/YEwr8WWX PM me if you want to see it and can't figure out the link.

The readout for the Fugly-ship was still processing, his scanners doing their work trying as hard as 34th century tech could work to figure out just what the crap was going on with the….alien ship he had disabled and was now floating by. Some of the subsystems were staying in the list, shields, hull, sensors, laser turrets, railgun(?), and engines. The power core kept popping in and out though as if the computer couldn't actually get a read on it. He squinted at it as the whole page went blank for a moment. Suddenly he jumped when the words "Surge Detected" popped up on his screen and the ship's damaged engines flared for a moment and the ship suddenly disappeared.

"What the crap?" He hit the controls and Lucy angled around with a disgruntled look on his face, searching for the wake he could follow before he remembered he had stacked shield boosters in his utility slots.

'Guess we'll do this the hard way' Keying the command to engage his FSD, his ship thrummed as the power built and with a flash he was in super cruise. Flipping open the contacts tab he saw two contacts, selecting the top one showed the damaged ship the transmission had come from, the second one showed the ship he had been scanning and it was rapidly pulling away.

Swinging around like the whale of a ship she was, Lucy finally lined up, his mind started to catch up with what was happening.

'How in the hell did that ship already get up that fast?'

"Oh yeah, it's a friggin ALIEN ship!" As his ship sped up an odd feeling began to creep up on him.

'Great Marcus, you have no idea what was actually going on or why you were shot at. What the situation was, that disabled ship could have been a fugitive with some hostages!'

He thought back to the voices he heard, the child-like crying and screaming, the reassuring sounds, the desperation in the voice speaking that musical sounding language. After a moment of mulling it over it occurred to him as to why he reacted so quickly. He had heard those same voices before in pirate attacks on ships and stations.

'No, different words but they sounded the same. Someone was attacking someone who was begging for someone else's life. And that's exactly the shit I don't put up with.'

Suddenly he laughed out loud as the strangest part of the encounter popped into his head, "Even if this is first contact."

He flipped over to his Fire Groups and paired up his FSD interdictor to one firing trigger and grouped his large and huge laser turrets to the other firing trigger and then watched as the distance between the ships slowed and then stopped expanding, his fist tightening around the throttle.

"Get those fucking fires out!" Captain Gano was having a shitty day. A simple intercept of some Council-space border merchant shouldn't have been such a colossal screw up. Everything had gone great, by the book in fact. Well, if there was a book on that sort of thing. In the back of his head he found it amusing that the Hegemony may very well have a book on that exact thing. Ambushing Traders on Their Entrance to Lawless Space for Enterprising Pirates.

The sound of a short in his helmsman's console pulled him back to his situation and he stood, walking over to his subordinate's console just in time to see it flickering, the data readouts broken and incoherent. With a quick motion he slammed his fist into the side of the middle-caste batarian's head.

"Why didn't you tell me your console was broken?! Do you have any idea which damn direction we're even going?" The offending crewman had the two eyes on his left side squinted closed in pain and the other two open in fear as he grimaced away from his Captain and tried to come up with an answer that wouldn't get him beaten.

"Gano, he got us the hell out of there as soon as he could like you were yelling for him to do. You didn't say anything about where to get to."

Gano turned and glared at his XO who met his glare with a level stare for a moment before he grunted and went back to his chair, "Carry on helm, plot a course to the gas giant we discharged at earlier. Put us in polar orbit, we need to take stock and perform repairs."

He sat down in his captain's chair and pulled up his haptic display to go over the reports, at the same time his XO took that moment to begin summarizing the worse damage.

"Engines are down to 12% sublight capacity. Barriers are back up at full, the hull-"

"What the hell was that ship using that our barriers were still up and they still broke my ship?" He read over the engineering report, specifically the section detailing the melted metal that had ran down one of the walls on the exterior where a shot had depressurized a room.

"Lasers, have to be, that or some sort of plasma...a modified guardian array maybe? Those damn things hit a lot harder than any guardian array I know of though. Definitely better than anything that we'd see out here and that ship sure a hell wasn't Salarian. Too many hard lines." His XO paused at this to review the same report his Captain was looking over.

He flinched and looked at his Captain when Gano smashed his fist on the chair, "Dammit! We'll be running supplies for Aria for a fucking year just to pay off this damage! The entire guardian array is slag along with most of the engines!"

The XO could see that yes, that entire very expensive set of equipment was indeed very, very broken. "Well, I know the Hierarchy didn't have anything anywhere near that sort of laser array when I was serving Captain. Or any ship that could move that way that's not a fighter."

Captain Gano was about to reply that the ship that attacked them after destroying their shuttle had moved more like a Turian fighter than a frigate that it's size seemed to suggest it was. He would have voiced that to his long-time XO and fellow pirate if his ship hadn't taken that exact moment to do it's best impression of folding in on itself under him.

The lights flashed and almost died as a screeching and twisting sound could be heard as the crew were thrown around the ship, the superstructure of the ship strained horrendously. The constant, and while recently damaged but still consistent droning of the Mass Effect core keeping the ship at superluminal speeds suddenly fluctuated wildly to the point that the sound seemed to match up with the shuttering impacts in a discordant cacophony of noise that seemed to be hammering the ship. With a sudden final lurch after what felt like an hour in a rock tumbler, the ship stopped and after a moment the main power dropped and emergency lighting and systems came up.

There was moaning across the bridge as Captain Gano pulled himself up and looked around, seeing that he had been flung across the bridge and was now against the panel that opened the door to the starboard side of the ship. He attempted to stand up only to find that he just drifted away from the floor and flailed his arms.

"Dammit! Zero-G, what happened to the Mass Effect core?" He brought up his Omni-tool and selected the channel for his lead engineer.

"Rask! What the hell happened?" He paused, only silence coming across for a minute and was about to move down the roster before the channel keyed.

"Captain, the core is dead. Our FTL envelope collapsed and it looks like the hard shutdown kicked in and killed it. Kicked a surge through the ship and fried most things directly attached. I might be able to get communication and life support back up but anything eezo related will have to wait until I can get the core back online."

With a snarl the Captain nudged against the ceiling, cut the connection, and pushed off the wall towards his chair. That at least had straps so he wasn't just floating around while he lost his temper.

As he was finishing strapping himself into his chair he glanced around to see the bridge crew doing the same. His weapons officer was cradling his arm, it seeming to be broken when the sensor officer looked up with a panicked look on his face.

"Captain! That ship is circling us again!" Gano's face flashed with anger, "Then flush the damn buffer and check again!"

"It showed up after the system reboot sir, the sensors were already flushed!" A dull, shaking thud ran through the ship and the crew looked around for a moment to try to see where it came from.

The second thud was louder and broke the spell on the bridge as they all felt the ship shift slightly below.

"What was that?" The XO looked down to his station to try to get an answer, seeing only warnings and errors.

With a quick motion, the XO engaged his armor's emergency seals, a small mass effect field popping around his head to seal his suit against vacuum.

"Sir, it may have been sections of the ship depressu-" another thud that was much louder and longer, the faint sound of the hissing of metal being cut accompanied this thud before it stopped abruptly.

A scowl formed on Captain Gano's face, "Someone get us back to the relay and away from this damned ship!"

The sudden movement was punctuated by a new sound, the thudding was in fact depressurizing sections and the hissing sound was very close to the sound of a plasma cutter going through metal. None of the bridge crew had any reason to go slower than if their life depended on it. It was apparent that it did.

Marcus ignored the flashing heat warning for a moment as his huge fixed beam laser flash boiled it's way through the ship he had just interdicted. Years spent in resource sites and combat zones honed his sense when his weapons were reaching the heat-shut off point and he let off just under that. Sending the signal for another heat sink to cool everything down, he moved his ship carefully in place to cut the last third of the way to the center point of the ship. Where the bridge of the ugly ship sat. Or as close as he could guess was the bridge, few designs called for that much connectivity and centralized equipment without it being important for the ship.

He was finally rewarded with a gout of atmosphere that briefly flashed on fire as it travelled through the crevice that he had lasered out of the offending ship. Indicative of an atmosphere with oxygen in it he absentmindedly noticed as he moved his ship into position.

The last cut he had made was wider that the others just so he could do what he was planning. He wasn't sure if he would have a chance if he just blew the ship up and with the desperate sounds of the transmission playing in his head from the other ship he had decided he would see what sort of cruel being would do that.

He thumbed the button for the boost and his ship shot forward from 0m/s relative to the ugly ship up to 240m/s in the short distance before the bow of Lucy plowed into the weakened gash he had made, embedding the first three meters of his ship in the other. Then he wrenced the control to one side and down, creating the most expensive crowbar that arm of the galaxy had ever seen.

The screaming, tearing noise lasted a moment before Marcus shook his head and hit the command for flight assist and his Lucy stabilized in time for him to see the chunk of alien ship spin awkwardly off into nothing. He feathered the controls again to bring the bow of his ship, now twisted and gouged, to see into the hole he had made.

After a moment of staring down 70 meters of his ship he angled the top of his ship to the hole so he could look 'up' and look into the hole he had made. In it he saw what was left of the bridge of that ship. A dark, vaguely human-shaped mess floated up from the center, apparently having been smashed when he dug his ship's bow into theirs. He saw another body float by, apparently not belted in when he had struck and with no helmet, they had not been prepared.

'Guess combat operations discipline is lacking on this ship then. Too bad for them….' The thought trailed off as he realized that there was blue blood pooling up around the body's neck.

'Huh, blue, definitely alien still.' With a squint, Marcus focused on the next body. Only this one wasn't just a body, it was moving. Apparently with no helmet but that could mean anything. This one seemed to have been vaguely competent with the way it moved up to the hole and looked through. For a moment they both just stopped, Marcus couldn't make much of it's face out that made sense. Spikey protrusions on the side of it's face and back of head, double pointed 'chins', and then he noticed the eyes. Small, deep set, and doing their best to bore into his.

'Oh, I see you. I don't know why you decided to shoot those poor bastards down or why your people shot at me but I'll be damned if you get to do it again.' With a small nod to himself he briefly noticed the alien seemed to understand what that meant as Marcus maneuvered Lucy back and put the reticle of his huge beam laser directly on the shape he could make out in the hole.

There was a brief pause before he held down the trigger until the overheating errors popped up on his HUD and he sneered at the cooling glob of molten metal in the heart of the ship before letting off the controls and slumping back, just staring at what he had done.

It was ten minutes later as the destroyed ship was slowly spinning in front of him that he finally stopped just staring at the dead ship.

'You may have started a war Marcus, good job. High-five!'

'...'

'Heh, at least it'll be a hell of a story! Now, that looks like that smaller ship that started shooting first…'

Marcus' eyes followed a shape that was spinning end over end slowly after having banged against what looked like a hangar door on the side of the ship. With a shrug and a spurt of good-old opportunistic thinking, he moved slowly forward and let it bang into his cargo hatch. Briefly he was worried it would get wedged into it before the notice popped up that it had been scooped. The inventory tab noting "Unknown" in the list and two tons. A quick command and the cargo bay's auto system lashed it down securely.

'No reason to let two tons of alien ship bang around like seeds in a marca.'

With that he slumped back for a moment again, nudging the ship around back the way he came before he sat up suddenly.

"The other ship!" With renewed vigor he keyed the command for the FSD and hit the boost, if only to move that tiny bit faster.

"Shit, I could have been back ten friggin minutes ago! There could be survivors! I might be able to figure out just what the hell was happening too…"

As his ship hit supercruise, he smirked, 'My luck they'll be some Thargoid cousin species and how in the hell am I even going to talk to them?"

More of his experienced wisdom he had gained in his travels in the Bubble and Galaxy as a whole came to the forefront at that moment to crystallize his feelings for that moment in his life.

"Shit"

Also, reviews would be appreciated if only to let me know what you all think of it. I've got the outline and an overall plan for the story but I'm open to criticism.