He chuckles.

"Yeah i know how that feels. Not much to do about that i fear. But if you got something you know there is some room left.

So you like the paint job?"

He asks as he points at the Snake skin paint job and the viper emblem on the back and chest of his power armor.

"My old operative call sign. Herd to let go of but now i can at least make it flashy."

Abe made a non-commital noise regarding the presence of space in their cargo container. He would need to take a peek at potential cargos before they left, but it wasn't a pressing matter.

He smiled though when 'Viper' pulled his attention to the paint job, peering more closely at it. When he spoke, his tone was neutral, with a hint of amusement or camaraderie, "Call sign? You were in the service?"

Charles nods.

"Yeah acquisitions. But the officers doing the thinking for you wasn't my thing."

"Oorah", offered Abe softly with a smile, confirming what he suspected the other had deduced, "Marines, CO for the Third Battalion of the 401st. None of my call signs were ever so ... memorable"

They begin a flight to St Brendan.

Lilana and Minka begin to teach Charles the art of Cinematography.  There's a technical side.  Charles knows how to use the equipment that takes the pictures and records sound.  That is the easy part.  The software that edits and produces, turning recordings into a finished product, is the real heart of the skill.

"The trick to selling any media is the market," Minka explains.  "People want to see strange, exotic things from far away.  Anyone can call up information about Deseret, sure, so we turn information into a... a show, of a kind.  We're selling people not just the fact that Pire-e-Vela has a zoo but how interesting and amazing it is.  So what we show and how, moment by moment, is built around that.  Show and tell in little bite sized pieces, make it an exciting story."

Lots of commands and options, cutting, expanding, filling in, taking out, changing sounds and lighting and style, all for the story.  A lot to learn.

He has just begun.

But meanwhile, the ship journeys to St. Brendan.  It will be a week in space.

During the journey Jackson will thank Abe for taking up the Pilot spot so he concentrate on engineering. He is still willing to help with piloting during the trips and is still willing to teach Minka to improve her pilot skill if she wants. "you never know if might prove useful on a resume."

OCC It sounded that Minka was at Pilot zero skill. Jackson is willing to help her improve if she so wishes
This message was last edited by the player at 04:18, Wed 20 May 2020.

Abe splits his time between duties, standing stints in the pilots chair and in the workshop - making the repairs and performing the maintenance he identified before they departed. He tries to tease out of the crew a little more about the issue that Miss Minka hinted at during his interview, keen to understand the trouble they’re in. If the crew is up for it, he takes them through some basic measures they might take to improve their security

Charles spends his free time learning the tricks of the trade and when Abe seems to want to teach them security he makes it a duo action. Using whatever Abe wants to teach about security as the source of a mini docu about the ships security mostly for learning purposes.

Minka is an barely adequate pilot.  She's very good at following procedures and steps and does it all exactly as the on screen instructions advise her to, but that's about it.  Fortunately, she has not had to do this often, and is much more comfortable letting someone else do it.  She'd rather be editing documentaries and reading about possible next points of interest.

Which she has to do, of course, but Lilana also wants her to learn what she can from the more experienced pilots.  It never hurts to have redundant skills aboard.

Describing the current mission to Abe is something Minka leaves to Lilana, who is in charge and ought to be doing the important stuff like that.

Lilana has already sized up Abe as appropriately fearless, and once they are clearly "past the point of no return" she tells him what she can.

It's somewhat thin, at the moment.  Lilana learned a few weeks ago that a scout- now possibly, it seems, a non-human scout of the "Crosser" species- located a cache of lost hibernation pods.  Cold sleep capsules.  Lilana even has pictures of them now.  But they are definitely not lost.  They were placed, on the surface of what looks like an inhospitable planet, very deliberately.  This didn't create an enemy, per se.  But this is not the sort of thing someone doing would make public.  There's no record of anything like this.  And the sort of person that would be involved in the theft, diversion, whatever, of hundreds of hibernation capsules... Lilana could be stepping on some very big toes.  But this could be the story of a lifetime, her ticket to stardom, fame and fortune, she wasn't about to let it go.  The rest of her crew, apparently, was.

By now Charles had an intimate knowledge of the ships parts he worked on and even had made one trip outside to make a zero G weld.

They have arrived at St. Brendan.

St Brendan is a young colony world.  Like many of the second and third generation colonies, its remoteness is a feature, not a bug.  These worlds do not have strategic locations along the Main Line, nor do they have any great resource of note.  What it is a good environment for a specific social system to operate- the Roman Catholic Church.

It's slightly lighter than Earth, and drier and cooler, with all of the land in the Northern Hemisphere, much of which is the great Perdos Desert, a broad, dry stretch bigger than all of Earth's desert's put together.  It has native life, but this is at a very simple level.  It's visible from space as splatterings of blue-green in the wetter environments, but those aren't forests, just a microbial sludge.  Not a single plant or animal rises above the lumps and rolls of slime.

The native life of St Brendan is doomed, of course.  The arrival of Earth life, and Earth crops, means all the rest that goes with it:  Earth microbes and even some Earth insects.  There will be trillions of microscopic battles but inch by inch St. Brendan is being conquered by Earth life.  Right now, it's just a few spots around key colony areas, in an equatorial belt, where crops are being raised.

Like virtually every world St. Brendan has an orbital station.  St Brendan Highport is oversized for the planet's small population- perhaps they are optimistic.  But despite the room it has, at the moment it is pretty busy.  Ships on their way to LDMLT-01 have stopped here, including a few of the small traders.

LDMLT-01?  Yes, the star system with the world otherwise known as Kozaana.  This is the nearest colony world, and St. Brendan has become the jumping off point for people wishing to interact with the alien Crossers.  It's making things fairly busy, locally.

Lilana is a little bit worried over this.  "I had hoped we'd find someone with some Crosser experience here.  Aliens are... alien.  Sometimes it's hard to understand them even with the best of translators.  I mean, you can understand them, but not.. understand them.  What they really mean.  I've heard Crossers are the easiest, but still... I hope traders haven't snapped up everyone who knows about them."

************************
Any character who has spent time in space travelling the frontier knows that the various alien races all have very different ways of thinking.  The Crossers are at the "familiar" end.  Conceptually, their thinking is closest to humanity.

Pleased to behind the helm of a starship once more, Abe drank in the wealth of information the ship's scans provided. He considered Lilana's worry carefully, the enigma of the sleep pods and their tie to the Crosser's playing on his mind

"We will want to tread softly", he observed, pulling up what information he had on those starship's insystem - such as the lagged light would tell him anayway.

"We will want to tread softly", he repeated, "But perhaps there are crewfolk aboard those vessels that have plied those routes before, mediated with the Crossers, traded?"

"We might pull something from the nets, but even there we will need to be cautious with our searches"

Charles had his snake skin leather jacket on the drone was up and humming in the air and he was checking if they crossed the payment threshold for the next month already. After all he wanted another drone or two to increase the angles of his shots and try more things to learn faster. It was obvious the ex operative was going 100% for his role as cameraman.

"What if we make a small docu about the jump point? Even those tied up by traders might spit up information for their 2 minutes of fame. Hell we might have traders willingly share information if you bring the right questions to the table."

Raising an eyebrow at their captain, Abe nodded thoughtfully, "At the least, it would help us sift the skittish and the belligerent from the rest"

Once they are on/near St. Brendan, Jackson has a job to do, so we take a moment or two to digress into:

Google-fu in the 24th Century

Finding obscure information in a Commonwealth Archive can be a challenge, even when it isn’t secret information.  Partly, this is because there is just so much of it out there, and partly, this is because the data is prioritized by What Do They Want to Show You rather than What Do You Really Need.   But through skill, it is possible to dig information out of any Commonwealth Archive.  You don’t even have to be there.   As long as you have access from on or near the planet on which the Archive is located, and have a computer, you can access it.

It is a skill check, with higher rolls being needed for more obscure or secret information.  Relevant skills are Computer, Admin/Bureaucracy, and Investigation.  If you have more than one skill, you can use the secondary skill as a bonus at one half of its level.   You can also claim a bonus from a specially relevant career background, for example, if you have a military character, you have a bonus searching for military related information because you know the vocabulary.  Two people can team up only if one can provide a bonus the other can’t.  Three will just get in each others’ way.

********************

But meanwhile,

They line up for the usual refuel and restock stop.  The St. Brendan

She also sends out her Job Offer message, looking for someone with Crosser experience.

They refuel at the space station, which handles passenger and freight transfers for those not actually landing on the planet.  Like most stations, it has a name- this is the Our Lady of Loreto Orbital Terminal.*  Like most stations, its name is often ignored and it is simply called by the name of the planet it serves:  St. Brendan Highport.

Or sometimes, "Port Loretta".

Our Lady of Loreto is in geostationary orbit above the principal settlement area, an equatorial peninsula where St Brendan's unruly climate is somewhat tempered by ocean.  This arm of space, from Deseret to St. Brendan, was largely settled by religious sects looking to have places where they could be socially dominant. As a result, it's known to be socially conservative.  People don't like having their standards challenged here.  Generally, space crews tend to find St. Brendan "boring", to them it is only a place to do business.  Today, the business is actually elsewhere, with the Crosser ship still a few systems away.  It has turned St. Brendan into an unusually active jumping off point.

Lilana approves of the idea of talking to some of them- if nothing else, it gives a good cover to keep people from prying about the real story.  The Nellie Bly finds its place at a dock.


*The Patron Saint of Aviation since, unofficially and altogether unexpectedly, the 13th century.  It was finally made official in the 20th, when aviation actually existed.

OCC: I assume you need Jackson to do the Google-Fu then:

As soon as he is able he will try to get the information needed by Lilana. He smiles as his search seems to be bearing some fruit.

17:07, Today: Jackson Taylor rolled 13 using 2d6+1.  Googlefu  Computer / Admin backup roll.

<Orange>17:07, Today: Jackson Taylor rolled 12 using 2d6+2.  Googlefu  Computer / Admin.

If it matters He has Scout and Port Authority backgrounds.
This message was last edited by the player at 00:26, Wed 03 June 2020.

Charles eyes Abe as he gets ready to go information hunting.

"You joining us? Better work a field dynamic out on safe ground then find out what we want to do doesn't work in a real situation?"

Then as the drone goes up he turns to Lilana and gestures her to lead the way.

"Lead the way boss."

ooc: Would my Streetwise or Broker 3 come in handy here to find some people to interview?

If needed then Abe can team up? He brings his military and scouting background together with Computer-1

Once the Nellie Bly is secured, Abe breathes a sigh of relief, though his fingers continue to work the starship's systems to ensure their security is online and they're receiving the necessary data feeds from the Highport.

Standing as Charles extends his offer, he smiles and his own drone hums into life. One hand scratches at a scar on his cheek as the other briefly checked the pistol he carries. He nods, once, "Absolutely, Mister Viper. Want to see if anyone remembered the training I've put them through"

"Work a field dynamic, you have a way with words Charles."Jackson mused.
"I don't know how long the research is going to take but I definitely want figure out how to work with the team for the long term."

Jackson smiled at at Abe's comment. "It been a little time since my days with the scouts and with customs and security , but I am more than willing to put those skills to use for the cause."

When he noticed Abe's pistol he asked. "Do you think I should get up my pistol out as well?"

"We can wait", suggested Abe, a question in his tone and a glance to Charles, "And I might be able to help with some of the poking in corners you need to do..."

At Jackson's further comments, he shrugged, "Borders can be rough; I carry mine unless station regs forbid it"

"I got a computer on me thats powerfull enough for you to do the research on the go if you like to hook up to it i can send you a link request. That way you can see how well you can do research in the field. And if we get close to anything i did in the past that will not be a skill that we like to lack. It also has some routines that might help you."

He suggests.

ooc: My computer also comes with +1 engineering and +1 computer as a bonus

Jackson clicked his tongue twice and then said"Charles, you seem to have all the fun toys. we could do it while in the field or we can do it the usual way, whichever is the best way to get the darn job done in the time required"
This message was last edited by the player at 06:20, Thu 04 June 2020.

Charles chuckles.

"Sometimes yo just have to stand behind the right cargo shuttle when it looses its load."

At this last wry remark, Abe chuckled, "If we need to be more intrusive in our research, my own machine has some of the tools... But there's no need to bring out the artillery for work like this"

Lilana is amazed by one of the responses to her request.

"An actual Crosser," she says to her crew.  "A Crosser apparently needs a ride home, and wants to go with us... and has a human partner, a young woman, who is part of the deal, so it seems.  Well that was unexpected.  If you want to take a break from all this..."

She glances over at Jackson's computer screen.  He has done exceptionally well at recovering information.  He's got piles of it.  So much so that it will take some effort just to go through it and identify what's really important, what's just trivia, and what is really important even though it looks like just trivia.

"So these... this whole batch of pods... they were delivered to a ghost ship?  Well that's closing a circle, considering I started off on the trail of ghost ships."

(For the sake of Abe, who wasn't there:  Ghost Ship is a term for any ship that does not engage in commerce, and keeps its actual purpose a secret, though it is not overtly a government ship.  They don't take on cargo or passengers, they don't have any known government connection, they pay for things with accounts that are quickly erased, or with cash. They leave no records.  And they break no laws, at least, they have never been known to, so they aren't officially investigated.

There are numerous theories- they are smuggling, they are moving extremely rich people who want to travel in secret, they are shifting wealth around for corporations that want to evade taxes, they are engaged in espionage.  Or maybe it's a mix.  But people are curious.

Spacers see it differently.  Whatever the Ghost Ships are up to, they have must have rich powerful connections who want to keep things secret.

Yes, that is one of the many things Jackson has managed to uncover- a large number of pods that look like the ones in the pictures were inspected, certified, and delivered to the ship  Baltican.

But anyone looking to meet the Nellie Bly's New Hires should go to the Nellie Bly Job Interview Thread.