A/N: Tormound raises a good point about exotics. Some, like SUROS, do have more than one copy, but they are incredibly rare, so the point still stands. In other words, Gjallarhorn is the most common exotic, since it's an entire line of weapons, but you're going to find it even less commonly than you would in the game.

Emulating Komarov

Grissom-18 studied the sensors on his ship. Laughing Behind Your Back hadn't failed him yet, but the data he was getting was weird. With a crackle, his comm flared to life. "Are you guys reading this?" Kaylee asked. "'Cause I'm getting a changing mass for this gateway thing." After both Grissom-18 and Jynarri confirmed Kaylee's readings, she said, "So, Jynarri, as our resident space magic expert, would you kindly explain what the hell is going on?"

Jynarri's sigh sounded like a burst of really ugly static over the comm. "If I've told you once, I've told you two point six thousand times. It is not space magic. It's the quantized manipulation of waveform packets of Light to modify spacetime and bend reality to my will."

"But saying 'As our resident quantized manipulation of waveform packets of Light to modify spacetime and bend reality expert' is too long to say," Kayee whined.

"Oh, in the same way that saying 'gliding' takes longer than saying 'floofing about'?" Jynarri retorted.

"Exactly!" Kaylee's mood immediately brightened. "I knew you'd get it, you smart Warlock you."

Why did being the adult have to fall to me? Grissom-18 wondered. "Alright, children. Calm down. Kaylee, your question is valid, but that does not mean that you can antagonize Jynarri."

"Even if he's so easy to antagonize?"

Grissom-18 groaned, sounding like a rusty hinge. "Yes, even if he is easy to antagonize. Especially if he's easy to antagonize. We do not want a repeat of the Reef incident."

Jynarri took the opportunity to cut in. "Well, Kaylee might, but that's only because she enjoys spending time in prison."

"Hey! Awoken prison is fun." Kaylee's mood shifted abruptly when she grumbled, "It's human prison that I don't like."

Jynarri said, "That's because you already know human anatomy. You learned more about Awoken biology in there than you'd ever learn on your own."

Grissom-18 really hoped that Kaylee would take that particular comment well; Kaylee's wrath was rarely rational, meaning that she tended to take things out on him. And, as the Darkness no doubt knew, an angry Kaylee was a scary Kaylee.

Luck seemed to be with Grissom-18, since all that Kaylee said in reply was, "Well, you were never going to teach me, you old fogey." Her words were sharp and spiteful, but at least she wasn't screaming.

"Hey. We have a job. Calm down or I'll calm you down." Grissom-18 rarely changed his vocal processes, preferring to sound like a calm, older man. In this instance, he had swapped his normal voice for something deeper and louder that screamed (figuratively, not literally) command. Once the radio had cleared up aside from little bursts of background noise, Grissom-18 reset his voice and said, "Jynarri, do you know why the gateway's mass is fluctuating?"

Grissom-18 knew that Jynarri was delving deep into his brain for answers before saying, "It's like nothing I've ever seen before, and the best theory I do have about it involves transmat systems, shock rifles, an absurd amount of glimmer, and Vex cells recovered from the Vault of Glass." He paused. "It's not a very good theory," Jynarri added almost as an afterthought.

Kaylee was about to say something, Grissom-18 knew. His Ghost spoke up first, though. "Guardian, I am picking up a handshake protocol from the artifact, but I cannot identify an origin source. The signal emanates from the gateway, but does not originate there."

"So it facilitates some sort of hyperluminal communications?" Grissom-18 asked.

Ghost bobbed up and down as he emulated a shrug. "It would indeed seem as though this gateway is an FTL communications relay of some kind, but I'd need to investigate closer."

"All right," Grissom-18 announced over the radio. "Guys, back up behind Pluto. Ghost, once they're away, accept the handshake." Grissom-18's next sentence was general enough to be an address to the people back in the Tower. "If I'm not back in twenty-four hours or the ineffable armies of Darkness start to pour through, destroy the gateway."

"Good luck, sir."

"I believe that the quote is 'nothing ventured . . .' Here's to you not dying out among the stars, left to drift and collect stardust."

"Wow. Kaylee, that's the opposite of inspiring."

"Okay, Jynarri McBossyPants. How's this? If you make it out of there alive, I'll bake you a cake and we'll have a bottle of champagne."

"Cake. Your best reason for Grissom-18 to come back is cake."

"And champagne!"

Grissom-18 tuned out his fireteam's bickering and said, "Whenever you're ready, Ghost."

Ghost's outer shell spun as he counted down. "Three . . . Two . . . One. Connection establi - whhoaa!" Grissom-18 couldn't blame Ghost; the sudden acceleration had shocked him too. There was a blue-out outside the window and his servos were shaking. Critical systems failures were scrolling across every display, even Grissom-18's internal ones. The radio had gone completely silent. Not even white noise. Ghost was pressed against the back wall of the cockpit the same way that Grissom-18 was shoved into his seat.

And abruptly, it stopped. Grissom-18 shook himself off, searching for fractures in his frame. Finding none, he turned to Ghost. "What was that?"

"I don't know. But based on star map triangulation, I'd estimate that we've traveled thirty-six light years."

Grissom-18's voice was low as he breathed, "If my calculations are correct, then that means we were going at least insanely fast, if not faster." He looked out at the stars, trying to find a constellation he recognized. Alas, 'twas in vain. Grissom-18 could not see a single star-picture; there was no bear (great or small), no swan, no dragon, bull, or hunter.

There was, however, another gateway behind Laughing Behind Your Back.

"What just happened?" Kaylee asked.

"The lightning. It just reached out and grabbed him," replied Jynarri.

"Yeah. I saw that part. I mean, what happened to Grissom-18? That's like no gateway I've ever seen. More like a circuit board. And we're ants that wandered too close." Kaylee maneuvered Quite Content Damsel out from behind Pluto and started to drift lazily closer to the object.

"What are you doing?" Jynarri hissed. "Grissom-18 was very clear. We wait for him to come back before we do anything."

"I'm trying to bait it, convince the thing to snap at me before I'm really in range. After all, if Grissom-18 doesn't make it back, I want to know what it is before the armies of Darkness and death swarm out of it and we have to stuff the gateway with trinitrotoluene." Kaylee was floating her ship around now, trying to mimic a fly's random flight patterns.

Jynarri was incredulous. "Trinitro-what? And don't talk that way. Grissom-18 will be back. He's a Defender. He can take whatever's beyond that gateway."

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Kaylee sniffed. Grissom-18 was the only reason that she was on the team. Heck, Grissom-18 was the only reason there was a team. If he didn't come back, she'd be alone. Again. Sure, everyone died alone. But aside from that first time, Kaylee had had a team to bring her back. Kaylee didn't want to come back alone ever again. That had been terrifying.

Suddenly, lighting arced off of the gateway's spinning ebony core, racing away from the machine. Kaylee acted on instinct, flinging the controls into full reverse. But the lightning wasn't hunting her. Rather, it curled around nothingness like a lover before disgorging a ship from its embrace. Kaylee reoriented Quite Content Damsel until its weapons suite was directed at the invader.

After a moment, though, the ship's IFF was patched in, revealing that it was Grissom-18 piloting Laughing Behind Your Back. Kaylee breathed a sigh of relief before pelting Grissom-18 with questions. "What happened? Where did you go? Did you meet anything?"

It was a relief to both Kaylee and Jynarri to hear Grissom-18's voice as he said, "I went through the gateway. To another star system, thirty-six light years away. No, thank goodness."

Jynarri's ship, Rope to Heaven, swept around Pluto and assumed a loose formation with Laughing Behind Your Back and Quite Content Damsel. "So," Jynarri asked, "How do we go through this gateway?"

Jynarri could almost hear the whirring servos and motors of Grissom-18's robotic shrug. "I dunno." Jynarri snorted. Typical Titan outlook. Never looking into the why or how of things. "Ghost just interfaced with the structure and all of a sudden, we were hurtling through space faster than I could blink," Grissom-18 elaborated.

Kaylee chimed in for a pair of cents, informing everyone that, "You're both a Titan and an Exo. You can't blink in any sense of the word."

"It was a figure of speech, Kaylee," Jynarri said. "Now, Grissom-18, what did you do when you 'interfaced with the gateway?'"

"The gateway sent a standard handshake protocol, which I responded to. As soon as that happened, it sent a secondary request for the mass of Laughing Behind Your Back. It was merely a courtesy, though. Whatever was sending a signal through the gateway got the mass anyway. And then we were gone," Grissom-18's Ghost elaborated.

There was silence for several moments as the three Guardians aligned their ships with the gateway. Three radios crackled to life as Kaylee said, "T minus three. T minus two. T minus one. Ghosts, prepare to fly."Simultaneously, each Ghost sent mass information to the gateway, prompting lightning to respond. Kaylee was the furthest away from the gateway, giving her just enough time to watch as a pair of lightning bolts sung away from the dark mass and licked Laughing Behind Your Back and Rope to Heaven. Half a heartbeat later, Quite Content Damsel was bathed in light as a third bolt flung Kaylee into a massless tunnel woven through spacetime.

Rope to Heaven was threatening to break up if such ludicrous speeds kept up. Jynarri cursed himself for not splurging on additional inertial dampeners to keep the ship stable. It hadn't seemed important when Holloway had suggested it, and Lord Saladin had been in the tower, offering Perun's Fire for eleven thousand glimmer.

Jynarri's vision started to darken on the edges, sending his mind spiraling to the stories he'd heard about the Vault of Glass. Was this Vex? Did Oracles live here? Jynarri hoped not, but it would explain their ability to warp across star systems in an instant. Jynarri wasn't good enough to have fought Atheon. He wasn't prepared to do this. Had there been other members of his fireteam? Did he not remember them becuase they had never existed in the first place?

Jynarri was close to hyperventilating, and Ghost's quiet mumbling wasn't helping matters. "Grab a hold of yourself. Warlocks do not panic. I see the patterns now. But it's not Vex. There are other reasons for my vision to black out. There are other reasons." Jynarri didn't feel any better after his little pep talk, but at least he was calm.

Fainting was near when Rope to Heaven came out the other end of the gateway, so Jynarri couldn't feel the smooth transition that didn't match the change in acceleration. He was just starting to regain his mental faculties when Kaylee's cheerful voice broke into his thoughts. "Woo hoo! If you didn't have aerospace combat design theory integrated into your armor, those gees would have sucked, but that was fun. Can we do it again?"

Jynarri was still too out of it to respond, but Grissom-18 played the knight in shining chassis for him. "I'm a robot, but Jynarri isn't. Let's spare his bodily fluids."

"Thank you," Jynarri wheezed as he fought to get oxygen to his brain. Just a black out, not Vex. Thank goodness. As Jynarri regained his bearings and studied his surroundings, he realized something. "My god. It's filled with Light!"

"What? But the Darkness was emanating from the gateway. This place should be full of it."

"Look. But not with your eyes. Stretch your mind and feel the Universe. Touch the photons searing through the void, smell the neutrinos shooting through your soul, hear the vibrations of quantum string, and taste the Higgs field," Jynarri guided Kaylee and Sandril-18. "You are not you. You are a conduit for Light. Find the Light welling up from inside you and follow it outside yourself. Is it alone against the Darkness? Or is it merely background noise compared to the natural Light of the system?"

Everything was silent as Grissom-18 and Kaylee tried to follow Jynarri's instructions. The quiet was peaceful for a nice long time. Eventually, though, Kaylee broke into Jynarri's thoughts and said, "I see it, if only faintly, like a veil hung over the Universe. But I see Darkness emanating from the gateway. Am I doing it wrong?"

"Not that I can tell. I'd noticed it too. And the only reason I can think of is that the gateway itself is the source of Darkness, or that there's another, hidden path that the gateway can take you down. Neither option bodes well. We'll need to study the gateways much more in depth later."

"Our job is scouting," Kaylee cautioned. "Worry about the gateway's properties after we get back and inform Dead Orbit." As an afterthought, Kaylee asked, "Is this how everything looks to you all the time?"

Jynarri shrugged, even though Kaylee couldn't see the motion. He said, "My helmet filters the noise so that I can concentrate on my own Light. But normally? Yes."

"You filter it out? But how can you concentrate if you don't see everything?" Kaylee paused long enough for Jynarri to start responding. But before he could get out more than a phoneme, Kaylee interrupted him. "Oh, I get it. That's why you're so terrible at sniping. You try to focus only on the target and yourself and you forget to see everything else. But that stuff matters. My helmet lets me see more: wind speed, movement of the target, planetary gravity, bullet velocity, predicted recoil. You need to know everything to place a bullet."

Grissom-18 came onto the speakers and said, "Debate your inferior combat styles later. Just because we're on the other side doesn't mean that we're done with our job. And besides, everyone knows that a helmet is just an invincible brain-case there to protect your head."

Jynarri flipped a switch and toggled his thrusters. "Then I recommend we investigate the third planet in the system. According to my scanner, it's in the Goldilocks zone, and it's the only planet I can find with the taint of Darkness." Jynarri waited only long enough to hear confirmations before spinning up the warp drive. His hands danced over the controls. Once all the lights that should be glowing were and all the lights that shouldn't weren't, Jynarri gripped the throttle and slammed it forward. All at once, he entered a tunnel fabricated out of Light. It was rushing, pulling him along toward its nexus, where the Light was pooled into a brilliance.

As soon as Rope to Heaven waded into the Light, Jynarri was thrown back into real space, right above the planet. It was a green planet, filled with lush forests. Right behind Rope to Heaven, Laughing Behind Your Back and Quite Content Damsel emerged and began landing procedures. Jynarri followed suit, bringing his ship into the atmosphere. As Ghost piloted it down, Jynarri checked over his weapons and armor. The Devil You Know was operating smoothly, as was Perun's Fire. And Exodus Plan RS/1 was in its berth, ready to be transmatted right to Jynarri's hands.

The trio of ships swept down over the trees, wind rushing past them and rustling the leaves in the treetops. At a gap in the tree line, the bronze spaceships slowed and allowed a team of Guardians to teleport onto the surface.

Grissom-18 landed first, Up For Anything at the ready. Jynarri followed, holding The Devil You Know. And Kaylee dropped in last, B-Line Trauma already pointed. Once everyone was down, Grissom-18 spoke. "All right, Guardians. Scanners show that the highest concentration of non-natural structure is just a little ways ahead. There's no Sparrow Link, though, so we'll have to progress on foot. Kaylee, I want you up front, a couple hundred meters out. I do not, however, want you to engage. You see anything alive, you withdraw and wait. I don't want you engaging something that takes a full fireteam to kill."

Kaylee nodded and saluted with two fingers. "Got it. Badass Bladedancer, moving out." Kaylee bounded forward with impossible speed, and pretty soon, all Grissom-18 could see was the memory of her cape fluttering in the wind.

"All right. Let's follow," Grissom-18 said as he took several steps forward. Jynarri stayed with him as they slunk into the trees, foggy air and dense vines parting way for the pair. The jungle was dark, punctuated only rarely by shafts of sunlight barreling through the treetops.

After several minutes of walking, Kaylee whispered, "I've found the city. Darkness clings to the doorways and drips from the rooftops, but the entire place feels abandoned. It reminds me of Asylum on Venus, but worse, somehow. I haven't seen anything, but I'm not about to walk into that city alone."

Grissom-18 said, "Sit tight. We'll be there soon. Find someplace high up and hole up. We may need sniper support." As Kaylee gave her affirmative, Grissom-18 could hear the familiar sounds of Efrideet's Spear being readied. Grissom-18 and Jynarri slung their weapons back and started out at a dead sprint.

Jynarri slid to a halt at the edge of the trees. He was standing on a cliff overlooking groups of squat, round buildings with wide doorways. It took only a glance to see why Kaylee had refused to enter, despite her normally chipper and annoying personality. There was Darkness crawling through the entire city. It wasn't a ghost town; the things that existed here simply weren't alive.

A few meters to Grissom-18's left, Kaylee stood up and shook off her invisibility. "I'm glad you're here," she whispered, glancing worriedly at the buildings peeking over the lip of the cliff. "I think the architecture is Cabal, and I think it was watching me. I've been turning invisible and finding new hiding spots, but that's only a temporary fix."

"Sorry for sending you off on your own."

"It's okay. You didn't know. I suppose we'll need to explore this place, huh?" Though the air was dead, Grissom-18 could swear that his tactile sensors detected a chilly gust blowing along his back.

"Unfortunately, yes." Kaylee nodded, whispering something to herself. She turned sharply and walked off the cliff. Grissom-18 swore and started to slide down, starting a miniature rock slide. Jynarri, meanwhile, glided down, lazily circling the two figures below him until he was touching the ground.

The team advanced slowly, making sure that all angles were covered by a gun. Kaylee felt the Light inside her glowing with enough force that she could channel it into her knives and begin a wild dance, should she feel threatened. But there were no enemies to fight, and her Light seemed very small compared to the intensity of the all-encompassing Darkness trying to snuff it. For the first time in a very long time, Kaylee's hands shook. Not enough to throw off her shot, but enough that she knew she was terrified. The Darkness back on Earth and the Moon and Venus and Mars was dangerous, but it was no where near as old as this Darkness. Kaylee had never been in the Dark Below, trying to end Crota, but she'd heard stories of the Darkness there preventing revives (aside from Fireborn Warlocks, of course) until it had been dispelled. Maybe the Darkness here was something like that. And Kaylee didn't want to die. Certainly not permanently, because then she'd be alone again.

But nothing attacked. The silence of the empty city was palpable as Grissom-18, Jynarri, and Kaylee went from door to door, investigating the buildings. Each one was spartan, having only the barest necessities of odd shaped furniture. There were no bowls of fake fruit, or electronics plugged into outlets, or tins of beef, or posters on the walls, or any of the things that made a house into a home. The city looked like it had been built and then forgotten. The only clue that somebody had ever lived here was a bulky, Legionary-shaped skeleton sitting slumped against the curved wall inside one of the houses.

"All right. This is the last building in this city. If we don't find anything, we'll head back to Earth and let someone else deal with this ontological conundrum," Grissom-18 proclaimed.

"Um, I don't think that this counts as ontological." Jynarri shuffled nervously. Whether from trying to argue with Grissom-18 or because of the atmosphere, Kaylee wasn't sure.

"We don't know why it was built or why it was abandoned without being destroyed. The Cabal are nothing if not thorough, and they wouldn't remove everything except the buildings from this planet. So, maybe it isn't Cabal, and maybe it is. Thus, ontological mystery."

Jynarri threw his hands up and said, "You know what? Fine. I'm not going to argue with you, Kaylee. Let's sweep this last building and get back home. The Darkness here is eating away at my soul, and I want to leave."

Kaylee made a kissy face and bent at the knees a little. "Aw. Is da big stwong Warwock scayred?" Even as Jynarri's face contorted underneath his helmet, Kaylee was laughing and skipping away into the building. Jynarri groaned and followed her in, Grissom-18 trudging along silently behind him.

The building was just as empty as all the rest. There were four rooms, arranged at the corners of an invisible square etched in the sky above the fat building. The first room was entirely empty, save a pair of doorways. "I'll go left. Kaylee, you check the right door. And Jynarri, stay here. I don't want us to be caught with our pants down this close to the end of the job," Grissom-18 said.

"Come on Grissom-18. We've been investigating this place for hours, and nothing's attacked us. Why do you keep putting up a sentry every time?" Kaylee whined.

The complaint was calculated, designed to get a rise out of Jynarri. It succeeded. "You're not the sentry this time around. Don't complain." Jynarri paused for effect before continuing, "And think of the long game for once. Just because you wouldn't wait doesn't mean that a more patient enemy might not. Because if you led this fireteam, god forbid, we wouldn't be ready if an enemy attacked at this very instant."

Grissom-18 made a sound like that of clearing his throat (if he'd had one) and said, "I lead this fireteam, but that doesn't mean that we'd be ready for an attack this very instant, thanks to your bickering." Kaylee could swear that his eyes were glowing brighter than normal through his hemet, as though he was trying to spontaneously combust Jynarri and Kaylee where they stood. He glared for a few seconds longer before turning and stalking across the threshold.

Kaylee turned silently and waltzed through through her doorway. The room was nearly as bare as everywhere else. It had a raised stone slab in the center, and another one jutting out of the wall, low to the ground. A bedroom, maybe? Kaylee circled the room, running one hand around the table. Her eyes were everywhere, praying for a clue. The room was a dome; there were no corners to hide in. The table was a single block; nothing could be hid underneath it. Kaylee spiraled outward, slipping her hand off of the table and sliding her other one onto the wall. It danced, tracing patterns on the wall as Kaylee followed the wall around the room. Once, twice. It was on the third go-round that something finally caught Kaylee's eye. It was tucked away, far under the hard bed. If she'd been even a centimeter taller, Kaylee would have missed it.

Kaylee bent down and peered to the tiny gap beneath the rock. Shoved far back, there was just a glowing speck to show that Kaylee wasn't hallucinating. She flapped her hand around some, trying to find the object. After several attempts, the shiftwire layering Kaylee's hands finally felt something other than cold, hard stone. Her fingers wrapped around the thing and withdrew it from beneath the bed. It was a piece of Cabal electronic paper, mostly blank. Only a few pixels still flickered, glinting in the sunlight. It must have been tossed under the bed at some point, forgotten at some point in the distant past before whatever exodus had happened.

Kaylee almost bumped into Grissom-18 on the way through the door. "Hello. What took you so long? I swept both rooms already," Grissom-18 said.

Kaylee took a deep breath to steady herself. "Because I found something." She held up the mostly blank sheet. Gingerly, Grissom-18 took it and turned it over in his hands, as though he was looking for a keyhole to unlock its secrets.

Purposefully, the pair rejoined Jynarri and Grissom-18 said, "Look what Kaylee found. Do you know what it is?"

"Let me see that." Grissom-18 passed the artifact to Jynarri, who also turned it over in his hands. After a few moments of intense study, Jynarri's hands glowed purple and he covered the sheet in his own glow. "I recognize it as a Cabal e-sheet, but other than that, I'm not sure what's on it. In fact, it's almost dead. Those last few glowing pixels are sucking up all the remaining battery life."

"Can you fix it?"

Jynarri chuckled to himself. "Fix it? No. It's not broken. But if it doesn't get a power supply very soon, any information that might have been on it will be lost. I'm sure Kaylee could jury-rig a connection out of shiftwire, but she'd need a supply of electricity to connect it to."

Grissom-18's tone was playful as he said, "I'm a supply of electricity. Kaylee, can you do anything?"

Kaylee shrugged. "You'll need to show me where your power supply is, and I'll need to play with it a little, but I'm sure I can get you hooked up. Sapphire wire is good like that." Kaylee sat down and started scooting closer to Grissom-18 even as she summoned Ghost and told it, "Get me my reserves of sapphire wire, some glimmer, helium filaments, shiftwire from an old suit of armor, and a little bit of spinmetal and relic iron, just in case." Kaylee set down B-Line Trauma and cracked her knuckles through her armor. Kaylee always cracked her knuckles, since it made Jynarri and Grissom-18 jealous. Jynarri's armor wasn't flexible enough to let him pop his knuckles with his gloves on, and Grissom-18's joints were regulated by pistons rather than a fluid, meaning that he physically couldn't crack his knuckles.

It took twenty-three minutes and fifty-six seconds for Kaylee to fabricate a connection. An additional minute and fourteen seconds were wasted snapping the cord onto Grissom-18 and then onto the Cabal paper. After twenty-one seconds of waiting with bated breath, the screen glowed with an orange light, displaying holographic pictures labeled with floating glyphs. Clearly, the sheet's residual charge was enough to last for twenty-five minutes and thirty-one seconds.

"Huh." Kaylee scratched her helmet before elaborating. "I don't recognize any of this. Anyone else understand?"

Grissom-18 shook his head silently, but Jynarri spoke up. "I majored in exolinguistics back before I died. Ikora Rey put my skills to use investigating Cabal structures back before I joined the team." Kaylee shrugged and passed the e-paper to Jynarri.

Jynarri balanced the e-paper in one hand and used his other to start prodding the holograms. Each time his finger broke the projected light, the screen fuzzed up and flashed red. At last, Jynarri shook his head and said, "It's locked onto this page, and I can't change it. However, it seems like this is a navigational chart. Most of it is incomprehensible, but I recognize this symbol." Jynarri pointed to a pair of lines connected by a squiggle that appeared several times on the map. "It only appears in abandoned buildings that the Cabal have voluntarily left. As I understand it, the hieroglyph translates to approximately 'cursed' or 'forbidden', which makes me wonder why so much of this is labeled as such. I haven't noticed any Cabal religion prevalent enough to declare these things, so I don't know why they're there."

"Wait. Wait. Wait." Kaylee noticed something and had to interrupt. "If the symbol means that the Cabal don't go there, then why is the gateway we went through forbidden? I mean, there were Cabal on both sides." Kaylee made a vague motion with her hands, pointing at one of the symbols.

Jynarri fumbled a little as he flipped the paper, reorienting the map. "Huh. You're right," said Jynarri. Kaylee smirked inwardly, knowing how hard that must have been for Jynarri to admit. He studied the map for several more seconds before scratching his head. "Well, maybe the translation isn't accurate. Still, if we assume that even half of these things are gateways, we're bound to be able to find another few planets away from the Darkness. Dead Orbit will be happy." Jynarri unplugged the cable from the e-sheet and poked Grissom-18. "We're done here, Grissom-18."

Grissom-18, who had gone into sleep mode, abruptly turned back on. He clapped his hands and said, "All right, everybody. Let's get to orbit. No sense staying in this place any longer than we need to. It gives me the creeps." He flipped out his Ghost and stared intently at it for several moments. Kaylee felt the familiar tingling of the transmat before her atoms disassembled and she found herself in Quite Content Damsel.

As one, Quite Content Damsel, Rope to Heaven, and Laughing Behind Your Back turned and jumped toward the gateway. Kaylee breathed a sigh of relief and started working on the mission brief to give to Dead Orbit. It was her turn, after all.

Halfway back to Earth, Kaylee groaned and said, "Aw darnit."

"What's wrong, Kaylee?"

"Report's too big, so I can't send it. I hate giving briefings in person."

"Eh. Gateway is a long word. Just replace it with something smaller, like relay. It'll cut down on file size, since it was used so often."

Kaylee nodded and said, "Thanks, Grissom-18. But really, the character limit on the reports is really restrictive."

Grissom-18 chortled and replied, "So it is. So it is."

A/N: Wow. That one chapter netted me more favorites and follows than any other story in its entirety. Here's hoping the second chapter is even better. Also, these characters are not going to be a part of Shepard's team. If you guys liked them enough, they might cameo, but they won't be on Shepard's team.