The crew introduces themselves as a regular insurance-hired salvage team: Ray Elwood the armored marine, Glenn the construction-worker “scientist,” and Dr. Nicola Dills, a no nonsense geologist/zoologist.
Flysafe Insurance hires them to board the derelict research vessel Iron Scarab, retrieve its black box to deny a 20 billion credit claim, and grants them salvage rights—with a 500 million credit penalty if they fail.
Approaching the Iron Scarab, they see an additional junky shuttle already docked that clearly does not belong to the ship, and hails to that vessel go unanswered as it drifts cold and seemingly derelict.
They choose to dock at the rear engineering-side airlock to secure their exit, cycle through the umbilical into a dim, red lit corridor with low, dwindling oxygen and near freezing temperatures.
Elwood takes point and posts up watching the main corridor while Dr. Dills sweeps the Med Bay, finding extra first aid kits plus unnerving crystalline/metallic growth samples and a sealed petri dish of weird dark red-and-black fluid, with the emergency respirator conspicuously missing.
Glenn forces open the jammed Engine Room door with a crowbar, stressing himself and partially breaking the tool, while a distant heavy metallic thudding and intermittent light flicker begins to echo down the hallway toward Elwood’s position.
Inside the Engine Room Glenn confirms the engines are intact and fueled; the real issue is the Generator in another compartment, which is shut down and required to power life support, doors, and lighting.
Glenn squeezes into the Generator Room and discovers a crewman’s body riddled with bullets and impaled by a harpoon over the controls; the damaged system forces a choice between four partial power modes: cryo/freezer (currently on), remote doors, life support, or lighting.
As Glenn investigates the generator, the heavy footsteps and twin “headlight” eyes of a hulking metal construct finally round the far corner toward Elwood, revealing a patchwork power-loader like mech with a withered human rider and blinding lamps where its eyes should be.
The group’s first combat erupts: Elwood yells “contact,” hurls his one size fits all grenade, and dives for cover while the others scramble; the explosion tears chunks off the creature, but its metal body pulls the debris back into itself as it reformulates.
The creature retaliates with harpoon and shrapnel blasts; Elwood’s armor is shredded and he suffers a sucking chest wound, while Glenn later takes his own embedded harpoon with a blinking tracker light, both of them accruing mounting stress.
Recognizing their small arms are largely ineffective and the mech is magnetic or self reconstituting, they decide not to stand and fight, instead adopting a running plan: fall back, grab the cryo keycard, and use the ship’s layout and systems to outmaneuver the monster.
Glenn dashes into the nearby Cryo Room, locates Captain Carvington frozen in a pod, snatches the lanyarded keycard in a risky quick open and reseal maneuver, and triggers only a mild alert while keeping the captain technically in stasis.
While Elwood covers with suppressive fire and Dr. Dills patches his chest wound, the team retreats toward their shuttle; the monster’s harpoons tag Glenn as well, but they manage to board and undock, leaving Elwood behind as an intentional decoy carrier for the tracking beacons.
Both Glenn and Dills momentarily grapple with the stress and guilt of abandoning Elwood, but Dr. Dills’ panic manifests as an “adrenaline rush,” giving her advantage on rolls and renewed determination to come back for him.
Elwood grabs both removed harpoons, keeps their blinking trackers on his person, and ducks into Cryo; when the mech approaches, he ambushes it with a found flamethrower, igniting its hydraulic lines and revealing an Egyptian pharaonic headdress integrated into its burning silhouette.
With the flamethrower proving effective, Elwood rigs it to fire continuously as a burning trap in Cryo, then squeezes into the vents carrying at least one tracker, leading the creature to waste time pounding at the wrong door while he crawls away toward the Freezer.
Meanwhile the shuttle pilots around to the forward docking collar; using the captain’s keycard, Glenn and Dr. Dills force their way into the Helm, only to encounter a rival scavenger crew holed up there: an injured man with a nail gun, a half destroyed but talkative android, and two armed salvagers (a shotgun wielder and an axe wielding “Jolly Roger”).
Negotiations instantly collapse; Dr. Dills tranq pistols the shotgun leader unconscious, Glenn misses with his nail gun, and Jolly Roger moves to shut the door and control the room, escalating to a close quarters firefight.
While Glenn frantically tries to jury rig the bisected android’s universal power core into the dead helm consoles, Dr. Dills wrests away the shotgun and blasts Jolly Roger, ultimately inflicting a devastating neck wound that leaves him dying, tied up later with her paracord.
Glenn successfully powers the helm with the android’s battery, bringing the ship’s command systems online; he seals their helm door and remotely opens the station airlocks, explosively venting the corridors where the burning mech still hunts Elwood’s discarded trackers.
Elwood, now in the Freezer, finds a frozen crewman harpooned and blinking with yet another tracker, yanks it out to toss into the vent system, and uses his camera to quickly document the strange cargo relics and notes he passes, then rejoins the others via the Supply and Common Rooms.
Back in the powered helm, Glenn traces wiring to locate the black box’s mounting location, realizing it’s actually embedded in the wall between Helm and the Captain’s Quarters; using the keycard, he enters the captain’s cabin.
In the Captain’s Quarters, Glenn recovers the ship’s black box cleanly, while also spotting Egyptian style artifacts such as a golden death mask; these are noted and bagged as high value salvage.
Dr. Dills, determined to understand what happened, opens the locked Lab with the captain’s keycard and finds an open Egyptian-style sarcophagus, a pale, tumor ridden corpse oozing magnetic black fluid, a whiteboard of translated hieroglyphics, and a console full of research logs.
She calls Elwood in to record the whiteboard with his helmet cam, rips out or downloads the lab’s data (hard drive or similar), and notes a makeshift bed that suggests someone had been living in the lab with the corpse, before they both retreat, leaving the oozing body behind.
The team secures all hostile scavengers—those who survived the shotgun blasts are tied with paracord in the helm—and confirms that the vented, burning mech is now effectively neutralized behind a wrecked Cryo door, its presence still implied but no longer an immediate threat.
With the helm powered, airlocks controlled, and opposition contained, they prep the scavengers’ shuttle and their own as extra prizes, then fully power the Iron Scarab’s systems via the repaired generator to claim the ship as their own.
They later thaw Captain Carvington’s cryo pod only to discover he had already bled out from his prior harpoon wound; combined with the other dead crew in Generator and Freezer, this confirms the original crew is entirely lost.
Reviewing what they know, the team connects the dots: the Egyptian malachite artifacts and sarcophagus, the black magnetic fluid, the magnetic/mechanical monster, and the harpoon tracked, scavenger ravaged ship all point to some alien Egyptian horror the original researchers unearthed and disastrously weaponized or awakened.
They decide to honor the contract first: return the black box and lab data to Flysafe Insurance, secure payment, and then come back with legal salvage rights to strip the Iron Scarab—cargo, Egyptian relics, and even the derelict scavenger shuttle—for sale.
Acting on Elwood’s deep suspicion of the artifacts, they plan to jettison any items clearly linked to the creature’s corruption if future analysis proves them dangerous, while still liquidating as much mundane salvage as possible for profit.
In the end, they sell the cargo and contacts for roughly 150,000 credits, keep the Iron Scarab and two shuttles as their own, and, after sanity checks, walk away shaken but alive—with a haunted treasure ship and the knowledge that something Egyptian and alien is still quietly smoldering in the black.