Marsa-umel looked out of the glass eyes of kes mask at the strange ship before ker. The detoxified air in kes suit's air sacks kept ker from smelling anything, but the interior of the ship was covered in some kind of gray fungus.
"Guess we know what killed the crew," ke said to kes cousin Va'lït over a small trinket attached to kes ear and cheek.
"I'm not quite so sure." Va'lït had been trying to check the computers but had little luck, as if the fungus was tampering with the electronics as well. Still he fiddled with his own scroll and the cords he'd brought. "I think the fungus might be a symptom, not the cause. But I won't be able to tell without samples and either the records on the ship or a good look at the water and waste systems."
Marsa volunteered to get some samples and take a look on kes own. "If the fungus turns out deadly, we can always throw the samples out the airlock."
"Don't," Va'lït said with a laugh in his voice, "We'll need to know exactly how dead we'll all be."
Marsa's cousin always had a bit of a morbid sense of humor. But it suited him well considering he'd gone off to school to learn about various diseases that could infect ships. Marsa had hoped to go to the colonies for school or even just to make connections for trade, but scrap had been poor lately.
Maybe if they could get something good out of this ship without everyone falling ill, ke could go soon after all.
Marsa arrived at a series of cylindrical tanks near the center of the ship. Green grow lights shown through each vat but instead of the purple of healthy algae, ke only saw more gray blobs. Ke reported this to kes cousin and continued to look and take samples.
"Hey," ke said suddenly over kes trinket, "I haven't even seen a single tsew onboard so far, have you?"
Va'lït took a moment before he replied, "I haven't. But I also haven't gone looking for them. I suppose if they aren't eating the fungus, then it could be a risk after all. At least, ingested. That still doesn't mean it killed the inhabitants itself."
"I'm just... worried," ke said, then added, "Plus, aren't fungal infections pretty hardy once they take hold? I just want to be careful."
"I'll tell the others back home to get an alchemic wash ready for our clothes if you're really worried. Goddess's Bones, we could burn the suits with alchemic fire if you plan to replace them with your part of the haul."
Marsa did laugh at this. "Oh, the aether suits aren't what I'd worry about replacing in that case... Maybe the whole ship." Ke continued kes search until ke got to the ship's waste room, where food scraps and the waste of an entire mini-ecosystem went to get composted. Ke were surprised to see that the outer part of the room, where a Helssi could walk through and retrieve compost or just check on the system, was mostly clean of the mystery fungus all over the rest of the ship.
Then Marsa registered the tsews, rat-sized and beetle-like creatures that ate almost anything smaller or less active than themselves, and were in turn eaten by other members of a ship's ecosystem. In this case, they were all crammed into the composter.
Adult and grub tsews crawled over each other, eating what little refuse still existed, sometimes eating the bodies of tsew that had already perished. But at the center of the compost and the scrambling tsews were the bones of various species, some Marsa knew and some ke didn't have experience with on kes own ship.
The largest ke could recognize were several Helssi bones, stripped of flesh.