At first, they simply watched. Letting the alien lay on the rough iron surface, submersed in the glowing blue liquid, for hours as they ran imaging scans over it. Soon, a pair of marine drones, and the customized drone of Dr. Kent, were surrounding the unconscious... or dead.. alien.

"No pulse, no heartbeat. Granted, we don't know for sure these things have a heart, and if they do, the heartbeat might be closer to once a year... or hour."

"Doc, we stapled this thing to a wall, bound it up in a net, dragged it out of its home and locked it up without food for months, then dropped it in what, to it, is some riodiculous gravity. I'm sure a robot could make it, but the number of earthly life-forms that could survive this sort of mishandling is... well. Close to zero. Tardigrades?"

"Thats true, but we can't... Get it out of the water! Cut that piece off!"

Suddenly, heat started to blossom. The protective layer of slime around the alien had worn away; and the blue liquid came into contact with one of its limbs. Before the thing could be lifted up above the liquid, the body was practically on fire; and only a quick slash with a monomolecular blade allowed most of it to survive; the marine carefully lifting it over his head.

"Well. I guess that answers that. It survived all the way here and probably died when we dropped it. Once it stopped making its protective barrier...."

"Damn. Alright. Lets drain this crap and setup a surgical table. Might as well see what we can learn from the body."

***

"While it might have a vaguely organic appearance, the hull is clearly metallic. Black tungsten and carbon form layers across the skin, and the blue glow comes from the liquid running beneath it; notably the ships themselves simply look flat black until they get ready to fire. It looks like the goo doesn't dissolve carbon that's been alloyed into the other materials; and I'm guessing especially dense carbon, like diamond, would drastically slow things down."

Commander Peterson and Captain Amari were sitting in her quarters as she went over the research data, both looking a touch messy, partially buttoned uniforms, wild hair, and even smeared makeup. Despite the fact that a simple button-press could restore them both to perfect condition in an instant thanks to the overlay, they left it this way; seemingly enjoying these signs in their time alone' thankfully plentiful, thanks to their ability to drastically accelerate time.

"I can make you a reasonable fake type-5 shell by mounting a squid's limbs to the front of a gunship... or I can purpose-build you a fake version of any of them that will look like the real thing."

He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. "Ichika.....Do we seriously need to be talking work right now? We can take a few real hours off while everyone works on their own things, and spend a week subjective together."

"Talk work with me long enough for me to send out the fabrication orders, and I'm yours til we're ready to do something."

He gave a low chuckle. "Fine. We might as well build them from scratch; we need each one to have at least two hypercannons on it, and none of our ships are built for that."

Amari managed to actually get a full-fledged design sent off to the Anvil before turning off outside comms, leaving the ship in Thompson's hands, and focusing on just the moment.

***

Sitting in the captain's chair still felt strange to Derek; he'd done it hundreds of times on an almost identical bridge in Earthforge, but even with the overlay, it was different here on a real ship. Granted, it shouldn't be.

The current scenario wasn't really so strange. Dozens of times Earthforge had presented him with native wildlife; or small encampments of the Enemy; that needed to be dealt with during the terraforming process.

Sometimes, just completing the process solved everything; a hostile alien race might be wiped out when their desert world was struck by enough ice-filled meteors to eventually form oceans. Sometimes, the aliens weren't hostile; and creating preserves to maintain any non-hostile species was one of the secondary objectives those games would have. Only rarely did some sort of actual space combat have to happen to resolve the situation.

Unfortunately, it was necesary this time. And it seemed he was at least reasonably good at it. He'd finally passed the various trials to ensure he could handle it, whatever he ended up having to do... but now, he was writing his own trial. His primary job at the moment was just keeping the ship running while the captain was taking some time off; frankly, an easy task while the ship was sitting out in space eighty lightyears from any possible threat, surrounded by enemies.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So he decided to create more work for himself. Using the sensor data from the various sources; the Alecto and Tisiphone sensor logs primarily; he started piecing together simulations; a long series of test encounters between terran ships and the Mags, assuming that the dangerous type-4s had both the point defense seen on the civilian ships as well as their laser/plasma hybrid weapon. He made the point defenses somewhat more effective than they'd been shown to be in reality, added in the 'sprint' capability that a single type-5 had been witnessed using in the deep space encounter; and then gave the weapons officer the bridge for half an hour as he ran the trial himself at max timerate.

The trial was fairly simple; a dozen type 4s and hundreds of the civilian types scattered around a star system. One crippled terran ship, slowly fleeing the system the type 4s pursuing. The longer the trial went on, the closer together the type-4s would be; with, typically, the 'player' able to hunt down seven of the type 4s before the last group got into fire support range; where their mutual point-defenses meant that missiles needed to be used at close range, in unpredictable sprint modes, to get reasonable kill chances.

The remaining civilian ships, of course, had already clustered into such groups. The first stage of the trial would be taking out the type 4s to save the crippled ship. The second stage, working with other, simulated, destroyers to take out the clusters of civilian vessels. A perfect score if every enemy was killed and no allied ships were damaged; a task that could be achieved by careful and judicious use of hypercannon rounds and long-range missiles.

Calling everything 'type 1s' and 'type 5s' seemed a touch absurd. These alien craft were larger than the destroyers; only the type-5s were close to the size of any human military ship. Peterson and Smith had hesitated to put clear names on the ship types without more information; but hell. They could change them later if they wanted.

The type-1 became the Carrier; holding a swarm of 24 type-5 Gunships; as the type-5s, while clearly not made for combat, had their own point defense weapons.

The type-2; bigger than a destroyer but smaller than the type-1; became the Tug; most of the ones they'd seen had been attached to and moving rocks of various descriptors, usually towards existing solar panel clusters; but in at least one case on a collision course with a dwarf planet.

The type-3; smaller than the type-1 but bigger than the type-2; the Constructor; breaking apart rocks and building these nexuses of solar panels wherever they went.

And finally, the type-4; the Defender. Smaller than the other types, aside from the Gunship, but substantially faster and deadlier, equipped with a sort of 'plasma lance' that had traits of both laser and plasma weapons.. and still bigger than a Destroyer, at roughly a kilometer long. They believed it had four point defense weapons, based on their more distant analysis, but he programmed it with six, just in case.

He played through the trial at max speed several times; and every time the conclusion was fairly similar. Getting damaged, or getting the cripple damaged, happened fairly often while fighting off the Defenders; as, theoretically, that plasma lance might be able to get lucky hits out at hypercannon range; and the hypercannon has a limited firing rate. Once only the 'Civilian' ships were in play, careful manuevering and hypercannon rounds made ultimate victory inevitable; even if every single civilian ship charged, the terran ships were simply too fast and too long-ranged to lose.

After a few test-runs, he forwarded the trial to the rest of the crew on the 13; and after some hesitation, to the other, complete, ships, and those under construction as well. Hopefully not stepping on any toes.

***

On a clean steel table, Doctor Kent carefully began to slice into the unique alien specimen using a smaller-scale version of the marine mono-blade to pierce the soft, thick, outside mass; a digital readout overhead showing the internal structure of the subsections he was slicing into.

The Mag was somewhat disgusting; as could only be expected. Each of its numerous limbs contained a gland for producing the slimy protective coating, and its soft white back did as well. The foreclaws; mounted above and to either side of its long, prehensile tongue, were predominantly high-density, roughly diamond-equivalent, carbon; and the force with which they could push against one another was truly horrific.

Its blood; which at first seemed somewhat clear, though it had a yellowish tinge while inside the body; was mostly cobalt-based. Once exposed to the air it acquired a strange, greyish-pink sheen.

As Doctor Kent carefully lay the creature's parts aside, it seemed that it operated in some ways like terran life, and other ways completely alien. Numerous organs which simple couldn't be identified while deceased and nonfunctioning were observed, scanned, and catalogued. The circulatory system was obvious; a heart, blood vessels. The rest... unknown. No stomach analogue at all; the slime seemed to somehow process nutrients from the blue liquid it lived submerged in.

He preserved several of the slime-oozing glands for the other experts to examine; perhaps they'd be able to duplicate them, eventually. While the autopsy had told him all sorts of things about the alien, its chemical composition, and how they lived, it hadn't told him a single thing about how to communicate with them, or live in peace. There were no apparent means of communication at all; the things apparently saw in sonar, much like the marine combat units, and if they spoke to each other, the means were unknown.

Conflict, it seemed, was inevitable.