Ledo and the others consider the message and Ledo puts up his hand.

”We don’t have enough information but if this involved a stripper maybe we should check out the brothel first. Now I am pretty sure if we rip that grate off something is going to rush out so Silver and I will cover the entrance while Rig uses his attachment to hook a rod onto it and pull. You know what...”

Ledo and the others will take a quick look around, maybe going as far back as the hangar, to find a nice piece of metal that they can set up like a barricade (or potential blast shield).

In reply to Ledo Typhin (msg # 77):

Another section of the derelict's hull makes a dandy blast shield.

With it in place, the barrier is set to come off.  The pole snakes out as Ledo, Rig, and Silver stand behind the blast shield.  The pole grabs the barrier...

...it almost falls off.  It seems it was only hanging on by a couple of rusty staples.  Nothing blows up.  The only boom is from the barrier hitting the ground.

With the barrier gone, the inside of FAT PUSSY'S is visible.

It's set up like almost every strip club any of them have ever been in.  A large common room with a stage right across from the front door.  A bar runs the length of the wall to the left.  A set of doors lines the wall to the right.

The common room is mostly full of what was left of it's original furniture.  It looks like someone took an axe to almost every single chair and table.  Old stains of dried blood and other bodily fluids are sluiced across everywhere and everything.

Whoever took that axe to the tables took a few swings at the bar as well.  The old counter has few spots that aren't marked or cut into.  Broken bottles line the shelves, their contents long since evaporated.

There does seem to be a few bottles that escaped.  But hard to tell what they are from the entrance.

The doors along the right wall are labeled as Bathrooms, Good Time Room, and Private in that order.  They are all shut and seem to have escaped damage.

On the stage, a hologram is performing.  A pretty woman is dancing.  Not the refined ballet seen up to now.  But not a striptease either.  More like a burlesque.  Rig recognizes the woman in the holo as the same one who was on the screen saver.

In front of the stage is a couch and a cryo tube.  On the couch are two men, or what remains of them.  They've both had beer bottles inserted neck first into their eye sockets.  Their skin has dried until they are mummified.  It looks like they died badly.

On the chest of one of them is painted

3

On the chest of the other one is painted

21

The cryo tube also has a man inside.  Unlike everyone else encountered thus far, he is flesh and blood and does not seem to have been tortured or murdered.  The tube is powered, and from what is discernable from here, still active.  The guy inside the tube is frozen storage.  Possibly still alive, but that would depend on how long he's been in there and how good the tube is.

Ledo considers the situation and decides to leave the cryo tube for now. Another thing the Navy can mess around with.

"Floor 3, Room 21. Sounds like we have our key code but there are more questions that need to be answered..."

After scanning the room for traps they move Rig's rig into the strip club and proceed to open up the three doors and take a peak inside, starting with the bathrooms.

In reply to Ledo Typhin (msg # 79):

The bathroom is suprisingly clean.  There is one dead body in it.  But the room smells fresher than any other room thus far.  Even the thick layer of dust is missing.

The answer is pretty evident:  the room's cleaning bot is still functioning.  It wakes up once the door opens, a small robot about a meter in length and half a meter in height.  Four robotic arms protrude from each corner.

The bot comes off it's charging pad, raises one of the arms, and squirts a fine mist in your direction.  It's floral scented sanitizer.  Your suit sensors don't think anything of it.

The body on the floor has been cleaned.  What you can tell is it was a man.  He was shot in the chest.  And that's about it.

The toilets work just fine.

---

The Good Time Room must have been for private dances and those who wanted to screw but didn't want to spring for a private room across the plaza.

No one who is in here now had a good time during their last moments.

It's hard to tell how many died in this room.  They've been hacked apart, literally into pieces.  It looks like someone was using the bondage chains installed on the walls for more BD and S than M.  They must have chained up their prisoners and then taken their time.  The walls behind the chains are gouged and chipped.  Like someone swung the axe a little too violently.

Other than piles and piles of long since rotted corpses, there's nothing here.

---

Private turns out to have been an office.  A small room with a business desk, a nice chair, a computer, and a headless body sitting in the chair behind the desk.

It was a woman.  Her arms are bound to the chair.  From the way the body is dressed...flamboyantly with a lot of gaudy, cheap jewelry...Ledo and Silver can guess she was the madam.  From the stains on the wall and chars around the neck stump, Ledo guesses someone tied her to the chair, stuck a low power concussion grenade in her mouth, and pulled the pin.

The blast shot away from the computer, which still seems viable.  The security is a joke.  Rig can get through it in twenty seconds.  Her password was actually FATPUSS

Apparently she was typing a message right before she died.

FROM                     Sylv
TO                       Arden Fiest


Ard,

They just told me Cles walked in.  What the hell?
I thought you and Dino weren't gonna bust him out?
Does he know about Lottie?  I swear, you fucked us all,
not just her.  I'm going to

That's all the message there is.

Silver knows the name Arden Fiest though.  Dino is familiar as well.

Arden Fiest.  Dino Sedgewick.  The two of them ran a crew back in her Grandpa's day.  The BurnOuts.  Stupid crew name aside, they were the shit.  Tough.  Rude.  Had a kill record the length of a solar system. Silver knows them because her brother is like a huge fan.  Really.  He's got a boy crush on certain crews and they're one of them.

From what she could recall, the stories were The Burnouts just kind of disappeared one day.  Arden apparently left the quad for Jewell and no one knows what happened to the rest of them.

Well.  Until now.

Rig stepped back, shaking his head.

"No. No! No way. This isn't a smuggler's den this is a fucking house of horros. This Cles guy is like out of a horror movie. What the fuck are we even doing here? No way. Let's just turn around and head back. There isn't anything but more death this way."

Rig started to walk out but Ledo grabbed the shoulders of his vacc suit.

"Rig, hold it together. We're in this too deep. Remember what we saw when we got here? We need access to the station to get out. We need to see if there is any fuel left. We need to figure out what is going on. Focus man. We have the numbers for a room. Let's punch it in and see where it gets us. But first I think we should check on this cryo guy."

He points to one of the Fritz Jrs and points him at the cryopod.

"Can you see if this guy is even still alive? He was left here for a reason, maybe he's a clue for how to fill in those questions on the kiosk."

OOC:
19:37, Today: Ledo Typhin rolled 14 using 2d6+3.  leadership!

This message was last edited by the player at 00:43, Mon 25 May 2020.

Under Ledo's advice Rig goes to check out the software inside the hotel terminal. He'll hook up his computer to any available port and see if he can't gain control of it and figure out if there is more running than meets the eye.



19:37, Today: Gary 'Rig' Rigan rolled 12 using 3d6+4, keeping the 2 highest rolls with rolls of 5,3,1.  +2 computers +2 edu, + leadership boon.

In reply to Gary 'Rig' Rigan (msg # 83):

Rig locks the cryo's board to Fritz and uses him to do a scan.

The cryo tube is still viable.  The guy inside is alive.  Kind of.

When someone has been too long in cryo, the term is 'freezer burn'. This guy is freezer burn.

His core autonomic systems will probably work. For a while.  But his muscles have atrophied to the point that they are probably beyond repair.  If there was access to a major hospital, it might be possible to stabilize him enough to replace enough of his systems for survival.  As it is now, if he comes to he'll be around for a few hours at most.  It will then just be a case of what gives out first: his heart or his diaphragm.

This guy's ident information is in the system.  I ran it.  He's on the ICUC boards with warrants.  They've been outstanding for seventy four years.  But they're still in force.

This is Buck Coppers.  Real name.  His parents must have hated him.

Anyway...even if he gets thawed, he's looking at a life in prison.

There's a message embedded in the system too.

Fritz plays the message.  It's audio only.  Silver recognizes it as the voice of the guy who played on that video Tepha watched on landing.

Arden.  I won't waste our time here.  Buck's the only one who didn't. So I told him I'd give him a chance.  Up to you.  Thaw him or don't.  He's like everyone else.  Their blood is on your an' Dino's head.

You shoulda never a' touched her. I'll hate you into the next life you utter fuck.

Come see me in Control.  I'll be waitin'.

Ledo considers things and gives the nod to Rig.

”Hook him up to a battery and lets get Tepha to help move him to the Tia. Waking him up for a life in prison seems unusually cruel but maybe we can get a few credits out of him in exchange for a quick death.”

Silver sucked on her teeth at that.


.’I didn’t think you to be that cruel, Captain. Squeezing a guy on his deathbed...didn’t think you had it in you.”
This message was lightly edited by the player at 14:34, Mon 25 May 2020.

Ledo’s voice is stern as he responds to a subordinate questioning is order. Still he takes the time to explain his reasoning. Silver wasn’t from a military background and some allowances had to be made.

”What other choice do we have? Leave him to die here? Wake him up for a painful couple of days where he struggles to breath? We wake him up and we can ask him if he wants a quick death or to be turned over to the authorities. If possible he should be able to beat the 3500 credit bounty on his head for us to let him go. It’s not about cruelty, it’s pragmatism. We need credits to replace the fuel and patch the hull. So far this excursion has been a complete disaster, we need to salvage what we can.”

Rig heads back to the Tia, informs Tepha that they are bringing on a passenger and grabs an emergency power unit from the low berths and rigs up a portable power system on a grav sled. Together with Tepha they load the tube up and get it integrated into the ship’s power supply

”Worst case scenario, we have an extra cryogenic tube....”

Silver, always pragmatic, starts searching pockets for credits. Maybe someone had a few credits (or drugs or smokes) on them. Couldn’t hurt, right?

While Silver is looting the dead Ledo goes back to repositioning Rig’s rig back to the motel kiosk. He also sets up the blast shield again angling it as best as possible to protect against both the remote mine and anything coming out from the motel.

He was starting to get a bit more confident that Cles had wanted this Arden to get to the end of the line at control however there was a good chance this whole thing was one giant trap. Still it seemed like the only path was forward at the moment. All they needed was to get Fritz into the mainframe and maybe they could disable the rest of these little booby traps and find something of value on this godforsaken rock.

Once the rig was in position Ledo considered the questions and tapped out his responses with one of the rods with a finger pointer on the end:


Thank You for Using KeyCom!  Your First Choice in Accommodations!

Do You Have Reservations? Y
How Many In Your Party? Y
Will You Require Companionship? N
How Long Will You Need the Room? 1
What Floor?   3
What Room? 21


When I Slit Your Lying Throat
And Piss Inside The Hole I'll
Leave After I Dig Out Your Rotten
Heart While You're Still Breathing
Do You Think You'll Scream As Much
As She Did? Y

In reply to Ledo Typhin (msg # 90):

Ledo presses the last 'Y'.  The kiosk goes blank a moment.  Then...

Please wait.  Processing your transaction...

Then there's a ding! sound.

A slot in the kiosk opens.  A key card juts out. It is for room 21 on floor 3.

Enjoy your stay!

---

Cles didn't seem to be too concerned about looting.  Then again, as Silver is finding out, these guys didn't have too much loot on them.

She manages to wrangle up 427 credits total.  One of the guys has some interesting looking targeting goggles on him.  Silver will need to patch them, but they should still be servicable.

And then...wait a minute.  Hold the blast off.  One of the guys has a necklace around what's left of his neck.  It's sort of fruity looking for a guy.  He must have taken it off some noble lady he'd banged and killed.

It's a little silver figure on a chain.  The figure is one of those...what are they called?  Silver saw one in a book once...ostrich?  No.  Ostriches have two legs.  This has four.  It could be a llama then.  Or a horse.  She's never seen an actually one of either of those.

Whatever it is, it's a mammal.  Probably.  It's got a long, solid body with four legs that end on what look like smooth lumps of metal.  There's a tail made of mop like clumps of hair, and down it's regal, thick looking neck are more lines of hair like the same.

The weird thing is that there's a horn sticking out of it's forehead.  It looks like a spike.  Not like someone drove a spike into it's forehead.  No.  The pointy end is sticking out.

It's a llama with a spike someone welded on it's forehead.  Or maybe it's a horse someone welded a spike on it's forehead.  Aren't those things called something?  Aren't those things called something?  Like unicycles or something?

On the back of the pendant is an engraved message.

To my Clemintine.

05-224-82-82

---

Tepha and Rig wheel Mr. Freezer Burn back to the Tia with no major issues.

Sorry.  COuldn't resist fun with Silver's narrative.

Let me know if there are any questions.  Thanks.

Silver pockets the credits and the charm. If nobody asked about it, she wasn't going to tell what she had found. It was literally pocket change, right?

Ledo struggled to get the blast shield up to the third floor. The plan was to lean it against the wall to the side of the door so he could swipe in from the side. If something blew through the door, that's fine, he wasn't there. If something blew through the wall well hopefully a piece of iron would stop it.

As he was swiping in he realized if it was strong enough he would be blasted to the ground and the iron would land right on top of him. He really hoped Cles wanted to Arden to get to the end of this little freak show.

In reply to Ledo Typhin (msg # 93):

Ledo enters the key card...

The door swings open.  That's about it.

The room beyond is the normal kind of bedroom for a fuck 'n luck dump like this.  An uncomfortable looking bed.  A nightstand with a clock display that's not right. A vid system on the wall where porn could be bought.  A seperate closet with a toilet and a shower one could use to try to scrub away the shame.

As Ledo looks from the doorway, something goes click.  After Ledo jumps away and comes back, he can see it's another holo projector.  A rather complicated projection this time.  And just...

There's a woman on the bed.  Five men stand around the room.  One of them...Ledo recognizes the guy in the cryotube...is on the floor.  Looks like he's been beaten up.  The other four guys are taking turns.

It's brutal.  It's like watching every woman's nightmare in real time.

The only grace provided is the fact the woman's face has been wiped.  Instead, where her face should be, is a sort of field where random letters, numbers, and symbols are popping up.

It's the code.  For the bomb, Fritz 4 says from his perch on Ledo's shoulder.  It's displaying one character every thirty nine seconds.  I think...whoever set this up wanted to make sure it would be viewed to the end.  That's why they're only flashing one character at a time and in short bursts.

We missed the first few characters.  So we'll have to wait for it to rest and watch it again.

If you want Captain Ledo, I can watch it to get the code.  You don't have to sit through it if you'd prefer not to.

---

Rig finishes the last connection.  The mystery cryo tube is now hooked up to Tia's cryo system.

Tepha studies the read outs.  Tia confirms what they already knew.  This guy is freezer burn.

As she goes to flip to the next screen, Tia suddenly rumbles and lurches.  Not violently.  But something is definitely going on.

Hold Auto-Management has initiated re-berthing procedures Mainframe dutifully informs everyone.

Unlike Tepha, Rig knows exactly what that means.  In port like this one, where ships descend downwards and there is a limited number of lifts available, a ship 'on lift' or sitting on the lift just under the entry, will be moved to one side by the dock's auto-management system if the lift needs to be used again.

Confirmed, Fritz says almost on top of Rig's inner monologue.  We are being set to the side of the derelict.  Lift is being recalled for use.

Someone landed top side.  And they've triggered the lift.  We've got company coming.

Ledo curses and then pulls his PD laser pistol and hands it to Fritz 4.

"Record the code and then shoot the holo-projector when its done. You're our ace in the hole on this one, Fritz. If whoever comes down decides to get hostile, we hold the only way past the proximity mine. After that hide somewhere. Hide all your juniors. We might need a distraction."

After arming Fritz 4 he unslings his sniper rifle and double times it back to the hangar.

"Silver, get back to the ship. Someone's coming down. I want you in the gunnery chair. Rig, I need you to patch my comms through the ship. I'm going to head up top with my sniper rifle but I don't want our guests to know I'm up here."

Ledo heads to the elevator shaft and begins the long climb up the service ladder to get to the gangway up above and set himself up a nice little sniper's perch.

Tepha considers the request and pipes in.

"Fritz 2, go with Ledo. Hide at the bottom of the elevator shaft and you can be the relay point. We already have the network hooked up for it, it's a simple patch job to make your comms go through the ship..."

She tippity tapped on the console and basically just turned the existing communication relay into a duplex system. Send and receive.

Rig was hustling down the gang plank with a special package in his hand.

"So boss. I guess now's a good time to mention I salvaged that block of thermite we found on the dead guy, right? Right."

Rig scanned around the hangar and started running calculations in his head:

1. Given that he knew exactly where the incoming ship would be located
   
   
2. Given that he knew approximately how long it would take for the Tia to move out of the way, the lift to go back up to the surface and bring the new ship down.
   
   
3. Given that the Tia would need to be able to use the lift to get back to the surface
   
   
4. Given that he didn't want to bring the whole hangar down on them.
   
   
5. Where was the best logical place to put a block of explosives cripple a hostile ship.

OOC: This might be an engineering task? This might be a tactics task? Some kind of combination of both?

Rig: EDU+Mechanics:  Dear god man!
23:12, Today: Gary 'Rig' Rigan rolled 15 using 2d6+3.  mechanics + edu

Ledo: INT+Tactics:
23:13, Today: Ledo Typhin rolled 8 using 2d6+2.  +1 INT, +1 equipment tactics roll.

Hmmm.

Whether if it's by laser cannon or bomb, I can't see anyway to not do some damage to the lift in a fight like this.  So I'm thinking that Rig's main objective would be to do the least amount of damage and/or inflict damage that is easiest to repair.

From Ledo's perspective, I am thinking he wants the attack to go off at the most advantageous point.

So what I need to know is:  when would Ledo want the bomb to go off?  When the ship is in the shaft coming down?  Or after it's landed?

Also, what effect is most desirable (to Ledo) in setting off the bomb.

Let's do it this way:  below are a list of objectives in setting off Rig's bomb.

A) Inflict maximum damage to the incoming ship
B) Strike the incoming ship as soon as possible
C) Limit the incoming ship's firepower
D) Reduce the ability of the incoming crew to leave their ship/deter boarding

Rank A, B, C, D from most to least important for me.  That will give me an idea of how to judge Rig's 15.

Thanks

OOC: Good point!

Ledo isn't planning on striking without warning, but he's going to have aces up his sleeve if the other guys turn hostile.

He wants the bomb to be remote activated and I would say:

C, D, A, B in order

Also they have the Ion Barbette but it has to be front arc. Don't know if they can control which way the ship is facing before the other ship arrives.

In reply to Ledo Typhin (msg # 99):

They can't control how the ship will be placed unfortunately.  But that is an important consideration as well.

So I'm going to leave it up to luck about the barbette.  Roll me 1d10.  Multiply the result by 10.  That's the percentage of the new ship that will be within the arc.

Since that placement could affect any plans, I'll wait until I get your results before proceeding.

Also:  just to make sure we're on the same page.

Ledo has the sniper scope and is placed in best position according to his tactics roll

Where is Rig going to be after setting the bomb?  He will have time to take another position once he's placed it.

Silver is on board Tia in the gunner's nest.

Tepha is on board Tia, manning communications and sensors.

Fritz is just looking sexy

Rigs in the Tia. Rolled a 30%