Tracing one of the ends of the light vein deeper into the corpse, sticking her hand between slimy sacks of viscera. The gentle pressure of the squelching organs is the only protest the body offers to her intrusion.

There is a complexity to the texture, there seems to be little to no connective tissue to get in the way of Ellen's intrusion. Presumably everything she feels through the suit had some biological function in life, but the labyrinth of intestines and cartilage do not immediately yield any of their secrets.

Ellen has to bend over slightly to push her elbow into the incision, but at last she feels something: the vein leads to a small lump, hard but with a little give. Several other veins connect to it.

Intriguing!

If she wants a better look she's going to have to get all those other bits out of the way. She feels around to get a better sense of the layout and then pulls back to start planning an efficient set of cuts.

The lump is attached to one of the surrounding organs, it's also conveniently close to the skin facing upwards, so it could be accessed without having to roll the corpse over or too much digging.

Maria takes hold of the other end of the light-vein, freeing Ellen's other hand to make the extraction less awkward. Her arm slips out coated in vaguely iridescent blood.

"Did you find anything?" She asks.

"Well, I found this. I'm not sure if it's anything yet." She cuts delicately down to the lump, freeing it a bit at a time, ready to stop and reevaluate if it turns out to glow.

Maria looks over Ellen's shoulder as she carves a careful and deliberate path to the lump. Maria holds the skin apart as Ellen digs through proto-intestine, parting them to reveal the smooth, light grey nodule. It is attached to the organ underneath; something bean-shaped, like a kidney, only wrong. The lump almost looks like a tumor, like it doesn't belong.

"Ah, I see, lucky." María says. "This is probably where it stores its light. These are good for capturing and releasing light when needed, they're quite valuable. They keep as long as you keep them full with some light. What do you want to do with it?"

"I was looking for where the vein went to see how it released its light, since it probably doesn't cut holes in its own veins in the ordinary course of things. Probably." This seems like the right degree of doubt to have about any theory of how these creatures work. "I guess I found it." She studies its position and attachment. "How fragile is it? If it's valuable then I should cut it out, but not carelessly."

"Organs like these tend to be fairly resilient." She squeezes it gently. "You'd have to take a hammer to this one to break it, though cutting the skin might damage the reflective membrane some use to keep the light in. If you want to cut it out then the prudent thing to do would be to clamp down the branches first, to keep errant light from escaping."

She gives it a tug. "I expect it might have tiny openings to feed this organ it is attached to, so you'll want to be generous with the cut, give yourself a wide margin of error." She traces a circle about half an inch wider than the lump itself. "That's the cut that I advise, if you want to extract this one. I expect that this is not the only one, to maintain a creature this large."

She nods slowly. "Right then. Let's see if I can get it, and then see how many more I can find."

Clamp down the branches, give it a good margin of error, and cut. Simple. She hasn't consciously noticed until now how right this feels. Has she held a knife like this before? To what end? If only she could remember...

But she shouldn't get distracted. She focuses, prepares, and makes the appropriate incisions.

Maria presents the tools and a shallow metal bowl almost before Ellen has a chance to want them. The specimen is cut out with expert precision and deposited in the metal bowl. The gunnery officer gently sets it down on the metal cart beside them.

The incision has left a hole in the organ it rested on. Muscular, with chambers, perhaps a heart?

And Ellen smiles in quiet triumph, and then turns back to the creature. Interesting that it would have a heart here, or heart-like organ—but then, the light did seem associated with a fluid... She can't resist peeking into the organ, trying to figure out what it was meant to pump.

The inside is smooth, slick with the same iridescent fluid that coats the rest of the beast's insides. Probably blood, but given the colors involved there's at least a little bit of doubt cast on that theory. Three chambers, two on the sides and one central one, where the blood would intermingle. Several wide blood vessels branch out and disappear into a sea of iridescent gore.

Well that's fascinating but ultimately a distraction. She follows the light-veins instead, cutting where necessary to expose them. She never so much as nicks one. Why do her hands feel so confident at this grisly task? No matter; she has work to do.

These light veins are disimilar to blood vessels, in that they are far less prone to branching. Each vein seems to cleanly lead to another nodule. At some point the captain leaves the room to tend to some errand, and Ellen continues her work. Maria remains, silently and unobtrusively making the tools she needs available in her peripheral vision, and taking any that she's down with. Nodule after nodule find themselves piling in the bowl, and the two of them need to dig deeper to find more.

Hours pass as incisions criss-cross their way up the beast. Ellen counts five "hearts" of various sizes, and what appear to be intestines snake their way through the whole creature. These intestines lead straight to the mouth, several times. It's almost like the mouth is several mouths side by side. Either there is more than one digestive track or there are several forks in it that Ellen hasn't found yet.

The hearts though, unless they pumped in perfect harmony, it would have severe blood pressure problems. And given the number of burst capillaries she finds, that's probably the case. So much of the blood seems to be outside where it's supposed to be.

As she approaches the head, she finds something strange. Threaded through a strand of what might be a nerve. Copper wire.

"Curious..."

She investigates. Studies how the wire is integrated with the nerve, and what structure it has, whether it's a single strand or many separate threads, how smooth or lumpy it is, how thin or thick. She can cut deeper if she has to, to follow it and find more.

A single strand, jacketed by the wire like a rubber coating and its length is smooth and even. Tracing it to its origin requires more cutting, leading up to the end of the creature. 

The beast's "head", for lack of a better thing to call it, is saturated with eyeballs, and here the beast has a skull rather than some assortment of cartilage. The wired nerve enters the skull through a small hole, making further progress difficult.

"Hmmm..."

Her attention is thoroughly caught. She examines the rest of the skull, looking for more navigable openings.

The skull has a number of holes, spaced around its surface, resembling eye sockets. Each one has an optic nerve coming out of it and connecting to an eyeball. There's a bit of distance between each hole and the eye it leads to, that, along with the fact that the hole is obviously too wide for the nerve itself makes it seem like the eyes have popped out of their orbits. The eye sockets are wide enough that Ellen might be able to shove her hand in if the path were cleared, but it would be a tight fit. 

More cutting will have to be done, to reveal more of the skull, or it's contents.

She picks the nearest eye socket to the wire, and starts excavating. She doesn't know if the eyes are valuable or interesting, so she tries not to destroy them while she cuts them away.

As soon as Ellen tries to carefully cut the first stretched out optic nerve that she sees the glint of something metallic, and sure enough, there are copper wires embedded here too. 

Testing another eye will yield the same result.

"...do we know why the optic nerves have copper wire in them?"

Up until this point the gunner had remained silent and out of the way, providing assistance when needed without interrupting or getting in the way. Over the last few hours it could almost be easy to forget she was even there.

A few seconds of silence makes it seem like she's not going to break it, until she says: "It's not unheard of for these creatures to have metal in them. The light can bring life to anything, but if it did so here, I would expect the shape of the metal to be erratic and distorted, instead it appears to be machined, artificial. I've never seen anything like it."

"And it's integrated, like it grew there, or was placed by really alarmingly impressive surgery..."

She follows the wire that started all this, in the opposite direction, away from the skull. Can she trace it far enough to find out if there's an eye at the other end?

"Impressive, yes, but perhaps not as impressive as you might expect. Light can and usually does erase scars, perhaps they devised some technique of growing or sealing the nerve around the wire."

It takes more digging, but yes, the original wire leads to another eye.

"Is wire like this useful, should we be salvaging it?"

"In poor and neglected areas telephone lines can be difficult to keep operational due to copper thieves stealing the wires. The metal has value, but I'm more interested in divining their purpose in this corpse."