The infantry rifle barked again and put more rounds at it's target, this time Arik was rewarded with a splattering spray of dark red blood over the deck and one of the flickering consoles.

There was a few moments of silence as you lost track of your target, unsure whether or not you landed a killing blow.

A shape flashed in a corner of your vision and you leapt back at the last moment, a stroke from his skana sword that would have opened your throat instead gouging a scar into your pauldron and bouncing off harmlessly. You see him more clearly now as you struggle to get out of range of his deadly blade and turn your weapon against him.

Having discarded the robes he wears only a smooth undersuit with wrist mounted pistols. Though visibly wounded, he recovers quickly and darts erratically closer towards you.
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:42, Tue 05 Feb 2013.

Gritting his teeth, Arik fell back a few steps, raising his rifle and firing again. Fear coursed through his veins; he was alone, against an assassin who seemed to have shrugged off a full burst, and was still moving as quickly as a snake. But this was no time to let fear take hold.

Moving back a bit and firing again.
15:00, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 4 using 1d12+3. Damage (With Burst Fire).
15:00, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 12 using 1d20+4. Combat Rifle Burst Fire.
Not sure if that last round triggered the Warrior's Luck: if not, still keep it in reserve to use when hit.

The next burst missed him entirely, the snake-like assassin taunts him, licking his lips and swaying swiftly as he moves, an almost hypnotic dance with his sword as he get in close again and strikes, this time with a thrust aimed at Arik's groin.

The tip of the blade rebounds off the thigh plating, scarring it but not penetrating and Janus, spins, recovering yet again from a failed stroke. Gleeful malice in his eyes as he sets up another strike, almost serenely given the intensity of the combat.

Arik vaulted over another console, putting some more distance between him and the insanely-calm assassin. His mind didn't race with questions as to the man's identity or purpose: the assassin was simply a target. Another step back, and another burst, just like the training holograms he'd seen, to instruct soldiers on how to face melee opponents or vicious beasts.

15:16, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 12 using 1d12+3. Damage (With Burst Fire).
15:16, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 22 using 1d20+4. Combat Rifle Burst Fire.
Again: Warrior's Luck on standby if needed.

The shot should have hit, you had him dead-to-rights. Just as you lined up your shot he dodged, tumbling through a half somersault and landing ready to strike, he looks up at you, sword arm outstretched and there is hatred in his eyes now and he seems to be breathing harder than before, chest hammering quickly as he makes his next strike lunging foward like a striking cobra and bringing his skana around for your head.

The cut should have cleft your head in twain, but in a flash of instinct your rifle came up and the blade struck the stock instead of your head, the assassin wrenching it clear of the weapon and circling around you rapidly to put you off balance. You feel the burning exhaustion of the fight beginning to fatigue you.

OOC: Both your warrior's luck abilities were used up that past round.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:26, Tue 05 Feb 2013.

Arik breathed in deeply, staggering back a step and firing again. He needed it end this, quickly; he doubted his luck would continue to hold.

Where is the rest of the damn crew? he thought, his fear mounting.

15:36, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 9 using 1d12+3. Damage (With Burst Fire).
15:35, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 10 using 1d20+4. Combat Rifle Burst Fire.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:38, Tue 05 Feb 2013.

Another wide miss, panic was setting in and you're having trouble controlling your shots. No matter how much you tell yourself that this is just like training it's a lot more real.

You count off your shots.. how many more bursts left until reload? Three? Four? How long has it been? You sent the deck crewman to the bridge. What if he didn't make it? What if the bridge crew is already dead? What if it's just you and this slimy bastard left and- SLLIITT -how did he get so close? You were just about ready to fire again and now he's less than half a meter away and... his skana blade is buried to the hilt in your abdomen. The point stabbed through the weaker abdominal plating and went all the way through you.

There's a burning agony in your stomach as he pulls the blade back out and pushes you down to the deck. Everything is getting dark and hazy. Your thoughts are clouded... but... you remember you're still holding your rifle in one hand, clutching it to your body as you bleed and your strength ebbs away.

He's still standing over you, wiping off his blade...

He sounds very far away...
Sleep, son of Aesgar. Sleep."

12:47, Today: The Void, on behalf of Janus Meyrink, rolled 4 using 1d8+1. Skana damage.
 12:45, Today: The Void, on behalf of Janus Meyrink, rolled 27 using 1d20+8. monoskana attack.
OOC: You can make one more attack against him at minus 2 your normal bonus.
This message was last edited by the GM at 20:59, Tue 05 Feb 2013.

Vaguely and dimly Arik saw a shape above him. As the pain faded away to numbness, his weak arm repositioned the rifle, his trembling fingers squeezing the trigger one last time.

This is it. Over. Were Arik's last thoughts before darkness overtook him.

16:01, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 5 using 1d12+3. Damage (With Burst Fire).
16:00, Today: Arik Aesgar rolled 8 using 1d20+2. Combat Rifle Burst Fire.

You arrive in the Engineering section of the ship, noticing that the alarms are still blaring throughout the ship. The saboteur would have been able to disable those if he or she wanted to, meaning that either the saboteur was out of action... or they wanted the unsettling sound drowning out all other noises.

You find your first signs of the attacker. Chief Medical Officer Venn's voidborn daughter lies with her left carotid artery opened by a very precise incision. Her mother pales as she sees the blood and chokes up as she attempts to revive her for a few moments until Junior Medical Officer Hael reaches down and stops her.

The body is already cooling.

Ten meters later, the body of Chief Engineering Officer Shubai with the same laceration across his windpipe and left carotid, slumped against the bulkhead in a pool of drying blood.

A set of bloody bootprints leads into the main engineering section.

Master Farhenra singles everyone to be quiet and keep their weapons ready as they move into the crowded chamber.

OOC: perception check

--> From The Bridge-->

The sound of the klaxon was obnoxiously overbearing, but Justor was used to focusing under stress, so he managed to drown out the background noise with his own thoughts.  Unfortunately, his thoughts turned towards the disturbing as they entered engineering and found the two dead crew members.  He watched as Medical Officer Venn tried to resuscitate her daughter, his face passive as he inspected the wound from afar.  When they reached the Chief Engineer's corpse, Justor was already forming hypotheses about what had been used to make the wounds.  Whatever it was, it wasn't a standard firearm, or even a laser or microwave weapon.

Spying the footprints alongside Farhenra, Justor falls in and begins advancing on the Main Engineering section...

OOC
18:03, Today: Justor Reson rolled 13 using 2d6+2. Perception.
This message was last edited by the player at 02:13, Thu 07 Feb 2013.

Your methodical nature and analytical mind serve you well in this situation. Around a corner you find the main engineering center with all the consoles and control stations. You immediate recognize a fight happened here. Indari made rifle rounds had been sprayed into nearly everything. Someone had been firing and missing their target repeatedly. No evidence of any return fire though.

There was some blood spattered on one of the consoles and... over to your left you notice a body wearing Aesgarian Gold, a standard suit of Astral Trooper armor from the Aesgar House forces. Still twitching but bleeding out, maybe 10 meters away.

Which meant that...
Just in time you saw a shape crawl out around a bundle of cables to your right and stalk swiftly towards you.

OOC: Roll initaitive!

The moment Justor saw the body on his left, he turned slightly to call out to the medical officer, but before he could complete his turn, a sudden movement caught his eye.  He swung back and lifted his pistol, his eyes fixed on whatever it was rushing at him from the darkness.
"Halt!"
He called out at the form to stop, both to give it a chance to cease what may not be an act of aggression, and to alert the others.

OOC:
18:23, Today: Justor Reson rolled 1 using 1d8-1. Initiative.
Ugh. =w=

The white haired civilan Observer was fast, too fast for Justor to track with his pistol and the scientist froze up as Janus leapt towards him, his own skana blade lifted up over head ready to bring it down on the hapless non-combatant.

Justor Reson didn't have a fire's chance in the void.

There was a metalic ringing and a visceral tearing noise followed by the sound of something heavy collapsing to the ground.

Zenner Farhenra stood between Justor and Janus, his own skana sword held out, tip down and dripping with fresh blood. The white-haired observer lay on the ground, convulsing and clutching the neatly ruined stump of his right arm, the severed part of it lay a meter or two away, still clutching tightly the hilt of the blade that had ended several lives aboard the ship today.

Justor was vaguely aware that the medical crew had gathered around the body of the Astral Trooper but he found it hard to keep his eyes off of the Executive Officer as he stood from his crouch and straighted, flicking blood off the end of the curved sword as he walked in a slow circle around the maimed saboteur.

Farhenra placed a boot on Janus, rolling him onto his back and holding him there as he raised his blade up high again with two hands. Before he had even seemed to finish his flourish he had already completed his stroke, opening the cartoid artery on the left side of Janus Meyrink's neck and releasing a spray of blood, the life leaving his crimson eyes after only two breaths.

Justor could have sworn that Janus had been smiling as he died.

"Are you alright, Mr. Reson?"

For a moment, Justor felt as though his life had passed before his eyes.  The red light of the engineering section flashed off of Meyrink's blade as it descended towards Justor, only to be flung away by the timely reaction of Farhenra.  He watched, as if he were frozen, as Farhenra coldly laid open the assassin's neck, leaving more blood to pool on the deck.  At the sound of his name, Justor blinked hard and looked down at the pistol in his hands, finding his mouth dry as he tried to swallow.
"It...it's Doctor, actually..."
His hand was shaking almost as much as his voice.  He looked back at Farhenra, even if the man wasn't facing him.
"Thank you."

Almost like a sheet had been pulled off of his eyes, the blaring of the sirens brought back Justor's senses, and he shook his head.  Nerves might have been warranted in such  a close call, but there was no telling what damage the sabateur might have done, and with the Chief Engineer dead and his junior on the shuttle...Justor took a deep breathe, and he was all business again.
"We need to find whatever damage Meyrink caused and restore power.  Where is the rest of Engineering?"
He hadn't noticed before, but the main engineering section was oddly vacant considering the persist alarms going off in the ship.

He calmly slid his Skana back into the sheath and stooped the pry the saboteur's weapon from his lifeless fingers before responding.

"The chief engineer is dead. We need our junior engineering officer back here immediately. She is currently down on the planet. The Deck crew can handle some of it... but we'll need Voidmaster Grey." he looked around gravely. "I will sweep the ship for additional saboteurs, but I doubt we'll find any... take the comms officer back to the bridge and tell them to return to the ship immediately. The door code is ZW8291."

Justor listened to Farhenra's orders with gravity.  This betrayal had been costly indeed.  So many crew members dead.  Justor nodded to Farhenra.
"Understood."
He turned back to find the Comms Officer, disregarding the medical personnel attending to Meyrink's last victim.  He was a lucky man; a few more minutes and he would most certainly have been dead.  When he got to Comms Officer Donnel, he tapped his shoulder and motioned towards the entrance to Engineering.
"Come, Mr. Donnel, let us guide our comrades home."

Not waiting overly long for the Comm Officer's response, Justor made his way towards the exit of Engineering to return to the bridge.

--> Exit to The Bridge-->

-- Bridge -->

Annie was somewhat out of breath as she appeared in Engineering, still clad in her void suit for the most part, although her helmet was under her arm.

"Sta-" Her request for a report was cut off by the sight of her old boss and Sami Venn laying dead. She stared for long moments, then her eyes flicked to Janus' body, hardening slightly. "Do we know where he was working from?" She asked the attending people.

Master Farhenra approached from the shadowy corners of the engine room, his harsh features illuminated strangely by the crimson emergency lighting.

He carried a curved sword in a relaxed reverse grip, a ceremonial skana blade and another one sheathed on his back. He wore a Commander's cap now, which you realized used to be on Commander Valna.

He stepped over Janus and came to a stop in front of Voidmaster Grey.

"Killed three. Wounded two. Critical condition. They're being frozen right now..." His voice trails off, distant. He's covered in blood.

There is no sign of anyone else in the chamber, but Janus and the other two bodies have been mostly sealed up in cadaver sleeves.

"Three..?" Annie whispered, then her eyes flicked to his cap. She saluted. "Then, Commander Valna is also..?" She asked, worried.

"She is badly injured. Officer Venn has her now, she will live only because of that. I found her stuffed into a ventilation shaft with her throat slit. If I had been a few minutes later..." The normally stoic Master seems shaken by the events of the day.

Grey nodded, grimly.

"You did well, then. Now, what did that waste of air do to my ship?" Annie went over to one of the consoles and started calling up diagnostics, coaxing the ship to tell her its woes.

00:40, Today: Annabel Grey rolled 8 using 2d6. Status.

If the bridge was a mess, engineering was a garbage dump.

There were bullet holes everywhere, several consoles were blown through completely. Pipes had been punctured and had been sealed down the line to prevent deadly gasses from building up. Cables were cut by stray rounds and in several cases might have been severed deliberately by a cutting tool of some kind.

There was a great deal of blood, roughly four bodies worth spread all over the place.


The computer system wasn't much better.

He'd tried to shut down systems and when he couldn't figure out how to alter the system settings he'd cracked the security barrier in seconds and uploaded some kind of intrusion worm which had given him access to functions one by one as it did all the heavy lifting and seemed to have been designed to attack and disable star ship functions.

Pretty much everything but life support and comms were off, but he had been part way to working that too. The worm had been erased as soon as he'd been discovered but before he'd died.

He didn't want anyone to know where he was coming from or what his goals had ultimately been.

--From Moonwing Shuttle-->

"Meyrink was a saboteur!?" Dizzy's voice picked up a few decibels as Maire intimated that particular detail to her.  She made a slight hissing sound through her teeth at the thought, "Gorum strike me for a blind fool!  I should've known! non-military personnel with full access to the ship?  Even if I we couldn't restrict his movements, I should've had one of the Astrals with him at all times, ostensibly for his protection." Dizzy slammed her fist against a wall, gritting her teeth.

Politics weren't exactly Dizzy's strong point.  Where she came from, disagreements tended to be handled blade to blade in the circle of honor, or in the chaos and fire of the field of valor.  Subterfuge, assassins, saboteurs?  Few Garesh employed such tactics, because those who were caught tended to be turned over to the Church to be made a proper example of.  But she'd been in space for months now, she knew that things were different in other parts of the Hegemony, she just hadn't been smart enough to anticipate that the vaunted Indarian house would want to sabotage their own project.

"You know what this means, don't you?  Someone wants Rangers' mission to fail, to make the Indarian nobles lose face.  With the expense that's gone into this initiative, if it flops the political fallout might be enough to rattle Indarian supremacy in Hegemony space."

She took a breath and shook her head, ordering her thoughts and trying to get her mind back on task.

"Do you think you're going to be able to sense the Commander and the Pilot?  Or are we down to the ol' Mark I eyeball?" she asked, pulling the shoulder strap of her rifle over her head as she got a look at the damage the fighting had done down here.  She whistled softly, "Grenth's smile . . .", she sounded almost impressed.

Maire jumped and barely strangled her scream when Dizzy's fist hit the wall, and almost slumped back to the ground when she was able to stop herself from  dashing in the opposite direction. "Sorry... you startled me..." She said with a gasp, but she continued to move down the hall with Dizzy at a slightly increased pace. WHen they got to Engineering, she groaned inwardly at the sight of everything in wrecks. And the blood... gods, all that blood made her want to barf right now... She quickly took in Master Fahrhenra, and remarked to Dizzy as she set a course for him, "I think he found commander Valna." She then turned to him. "Dead or severely injured?" She asked, expertly hiding her previous loss of composure behind a facade of actually knowing what to do. Even though that was fake too.