The local star was a bright, blue flare in the distance, flickering ominously as a multitude of specks began to cross in front of it; split second silhouettes. The derelict vessel had been drawing closer and closer to the asteroid belt that looped around the blue sun, gradually pulled into the depths of the field of rock as the weeks passed by. For another week there was silence, but after this, there was activity!
A small, spherical probe coated with fine, metal antennae, nestled on one of the larger asteroids, detected the drifting vessel and alerted its masters. It then began transmitting a barrage of commands at the ship, in every language its data banks held.
The general message was as follows:
STOP
STOP
GO AWAY
LEAVE
WE KILL YOU
After a few hours of broadcasting the simplistic, threatening warning, to no avail, the probe sent a final message, back to the mining fleet it belonged to. In the depths of the asteroid fleet was a gargantuan ship: The Thoot Processing Mothership. Roughly shaped like a rectangular prism, it was lined with jagged, ridged beams that protected its hull from impacts. A large docking bay yawned on the bottom face of the ship, aglow with lights and abuzz with activity as smaller mining vessels dragged hunks of rock into its maw.
Surrounding the Processor was a modest fleet of defensive vessels, each roughly 1/20th of the size of their parent vessel, along with an array of defence platforms: Spiked, cuboid structures equipped with tractor beams. The message reached the Mothership about a minute after it was sent, and after another minute of silent, unseen activity, one of the large escort vessels broke away from the formation, the prongs along its aft side crackling as its exotic particle engine flared into life, with a flight of tiny mining tugs following it.
Sally Ee'ith was pressed up against the cold, transparent cockpit shield that stood between her and the void of space, her antennae twitching nervously as their three hundredth attempt to contact the derelict went unanswered. "Maybe dead?", she asked in a synthesised, human voice to her sister Yui, trying to practice her alien speech. Yui, Sally's sister, was spread out over the control console on her 'stomach', her clawed limbs carefully manipulating lever, button and switch, maneuvering their small craft closer to the alien vessel. "Maybe.", Yui conceded, begrudgingly speaking back to her sister in the alien language.
The Ee'ith ambassadors were piloting a tiny, spherical craft, with its only outcroppings being the communications antennae protruding from the front, between the two cockpit windows, and the drive prongs at the rear. With a dull thud, their ship bumped up against the derelict, almost knocking Sally off her feet, as if to wake the inhabitants that way.
"We can't get in, anyway. The ship is not designed to board others.", Sally lamented to herself with a sad whine leaking from her abdomen, sounding almost like a deflating balloon. A splash of beautiful light appeared from the nearby asteroids; arcing currents of red, green and yellow that vapourised the asteroids before it.
"Thoot are here.", Yui remarked in a monotone as the large, escort vessel loomed out from the dissipating flash of particles, cruising smoothly into position above the two smaller ships while a small group of mining tugs streamed from its docking bays. Swarming around ambassador and derelict alike, they clamped their clawed arms onto whatever they could grasp, even burrowing in using their jack-hammers to get better grip, and dragged both up into the gleaming light of the Thoot warship.
Sally stood in the hanger bay beneath the derelict alien vessel, engaged in a heated conversation with one of her Thoot relatives. To an outsider, it was a rapid exchange of squeaks, throaty huffing and puffing, stridulating and hissing. Her sister, Yui, ever pessimistic but ever faithful, stood guard in front of the derelict's main airlock (already half pried open by its captors), the chain-fed gun held in her upper arms levelled at an angry crowd of Thoot miners. The stand-off had gone on for almost an hour now, with little progress made on either side. The Thoot family in its entirety was intent on breaking into the intruding alien craft and killing everything inside, and only a pair of Ee'ith ambassadors stood between the two. If it weren't for the innate kinship the two families shared, Sally and Yui would already be dead.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity trying to explain her motives and plan to the Thoot, Sally was allowed to explore the interior of the craft. Dressed in her EVA suit, she waited until Yui had finished cutting the way inside, then entered the small craft to see what was inside.