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There was a fairly long debate as to the next move. Dliiavrnt was all for teleporting aboard the Akhashuua's bridge and trying to take control of the computer. Lasnus and Nose favoured a direct assault through one of the hatches. While this conversation was happening, Gvn noticed two more people approaching the Akhashuua from the direction of the starport buildings. Close examination revealed these to be Kirk Majors and Graine Poulter. |
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Lasnus tried to make a data connection with the Akhashuua, but the standard security procedures had been observed and, not greatly to his surprise, the data channels were blocked. |
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Dliiavrnt then turned his attention to the idea of a diversion. Focussing his clairvoyant vision on the ship, he scanned the locker - finding a case of grenades, which wasn't quite what he had in mind - and then moved on to the cargo bay. Examining the cargoes, he found five 40-gallon drums of olive oil and a stacker truck. Exerting his telekinesis to the extreme, he managed to unscrew the cap of one of the drums, and then to tip it over. Using telekinetic agitation to raise the temperature of the spilled oil, he managed to start a fire, and then topped this off by managing to start the stacker truck - in full reverse - and jam the wheel on full lock. There was an immediate reaction amongst the crew. Two of the three currently in the lower deck set off towards the locker, leaving the commom room clear. Instantly, Nose and Lasnus raced across the landing field and under the ship. Nose tapped in the code he'd secured earlier, and the hatch unlocked. A quick twist of the mechanism and they were in. |
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Quickly checking the scene, they confirmed that the common room and bridge were clear, and while Nose set up in a good position with reasonable cover and a good view of the entrances to the common room, Lasnus ducked into the tiny computer room and set to work.
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Again, he was unsurprised to find the standard top-level access passwords had been changed. Any half-way competent ship crew would have done the same. However, the "back-door" password installed by Bilstein shipyards was unchanged, and with almost no effort, he was in. His actions after that were quick and effective; wiping all other crew records from the system, he set the antihijack down to Observation Only mode. Once it had tracked and identified all the sentients aboard, he marked everyone not a part of Team 7 as a Hostile. Then he disabled every hatch and lift on the vessel.
At this point, Majors and Egan Doyle - the latter in full combat armour - raced back up the starboard corridor, round the corner, through the aft end of the common room, and back down into the cargo bay. Such was their haste that they didn't even notice Nose crouched in the computer room door. |
The Zho Bros joined the party just after that, via the same hatch the others had arrived through. The strain of watching where he was going and watching a seperate viewpoint became too much for Dliiavrnt, and his clairvoyance dropped. Thus reinforced, Nose moved down the corridor and into the cargo bay. There he found Doyle and Poulter desperately fighting the fire, while at the same time trying to dodge the madly orbiting stacker truck on an oil-coated floor.
While Nose positioned himself carefully for a clear shot at them from cover, Dliiavrnt applied his telekinesis again, and managed to push a crate down on top of Poulter. Just to make his day worse, Poulter was then promptly run over by the stacker truck. Stunned, he lay on the deck as Doyle finished extinguishing the fire.
As Doyle dropped his extinguisher and moved to help his crewmate, Nose called out to him and suggested they surrender. Poulter had no fight left in him, and simply lay still, but Doyle leapt up, clawing at his weapon, and scanning wildly for a target. Nose dropped him with a single well-aimed burst, and the armoured corpse dropped heavily onto Graine Poulter, underlining once more that worthy's non combatant status. Nose crossed to him, tied him up, and left him right where he was.
Lasnus had tracked the last two crewers; Kirk Majors was in the personnel lift on the upper deck, jumping up and down in futile efforts to get it to descend, while Holly Hyde had secured a toolkit from somewhere and was trying to cut her way out through the portside personnel airlock. Nose crossed the cargo bay, went through into the port longitudinal corridor and levelled his rifle at Hyde. "Drop the tools and weapons," he barked. Holly froze, but retained her grip on the laser welder she was using. "Can I turn it off first?" she asked in a shaky voice, "it'll cut my legs off if I don't." Nose conceded the point, relieving her of her pistol at the same time. She came without a struggle.Meanwhile, Stpierb' positioned himself with a clear shot at the lift, and asked Lasnus to allow it to descend. Lined up and ready, he nonetheless managed to make a complete mess of it, and instead of sawing off his target at the knees as the lower half of the lift came into view, fired early, and was promptly showered in ricochets as his gauss fire hit the lift shaft and bounced back - sustaining a light but incredibly painful wound in the groin among others.
As Majors came into view he readied his rifle to return fire, but, using the last of his psionic strength, Dliiavrnt grabbed him and smashed him upwards into the ceiling of the lift. Being contructed of bulkhead material, this gave not at all, and Kirk Majors expired instantly of a crushed skull, massive brain trauma and a 40% telescoped spine. The lift came to a halt with a very nasty red mess oozing out into the common room. Peace descended again, and the team realized that a great moment had arrived - they had successfully repossessed their first starship.
The moment was interrupted by a crash and a cry from the cargo bay, as the stacker truck ran over Graine Poulter again, finally managing to tip itself over to lie with its' wheels spinning in a pool of oil. Ignoring Poulter's needs, Stpierb' fetched a medical kit, and applied anaesthetic to his own wound, with evident relief.
The bodies were cleared away, and the prisoners duly incarcerated in the Baranduin's brig. Discussing the question of returning the ships to New Rome to turn the Akhashuua in, Nose suggested innocently that he, Gvn, Blackwood, Mackenzie and Eagle take the Baranduin, and Lasnus, Dliiavrnt and Stpierb' take the prize. He used his extensive piloting experience to set up a linked jump, a military technique used to synchronize the jumps of vessels going the exact same way. Cheerfully, the crews of the two ships went into jump.
During the week that followed, Lasnus and the Zho Bros merrily looted the Akhashuua for personal possessions, money, weapons and ammuntion. Their mood was light as they emerged from jumpspace... until they realized that the Akhashuua was alone in space; the Baranduin was nowhere to be seen...
Epilogue One(216/1105 -and on-, New Rome/Glisten)Unsure as to whether the disapearance of the Baranduin was due to theft, treachery, or disasterous misjump, the Akhashuua's crew landed at New Rome, and notified the local ClawBack LIC office - and the system police - of their return. The office promptly provided them with a mountain of official forms to fill in, and the police confirmed that the raid on Sod had been successful, and that shares in the appropriate "information leading to" rewards would be forwarded in due course. |
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Early in the investigation, CB-LIC's diagnostics of the Akhashuua's computer logs revealed that the jump linkage had been severed from the Baranduin just moments before the ships should have jumped. This seemed to indicate that the disapearance of Nose and the others had been intentional, and raised suspicions with the others - especially Lasnus who suddenly realized that his share of Big Ron's Cr750,000 had gone with Nose. Incensed, he shot off a message to Big Ron, requesting any information on Fred Nose's whereabouts, and reported the Baranduin's disapearance to the company as a definite theft. Once his pay was through, he was going to take passage back to Aki, and see what Big Ron's organization could do about hunting the Baranduin. Lasnus was going into business as an independent...
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The Zho Bros left quietly about this point. They were well aware that their cover was looking pretty tattered by now, and it was only a matter of time before the hounds closed in. As ever, they talked a lot about "going home"; but inside they both knew they could never give up the freedom they had now. No, somewhere quieter; less touchy about the ...skilled... Maybe the Beyond, or Foreven; perhaps Solomani space... |
Epilogue Two(210/1105 -and on-, Trane/Glisten)Watching the shape of the Akhashuua light up with the glowing grid of its' jump field, and then fade to nothing, Captain Nose grinned quietly to himself. Lighting the fusion engines, he turned the Baranduin around and headed back from jump point to Trane. On the way, he worked his way through the ticklish process of explaining to the rest of the crew why they were breaking away from the others. On landing back at Trane, he went on a brief and intensely satisfying shopping spree with the Cr750,000, unloading a significant proportion of it in return for several items of an extremely military nature. He prepared a careful deposition, revealing Lasnus, Dliiavrnt and Stpierb' as illegal Zhodani psionic imposters, and transmitted it to the Imperial authorities and CB-LIC office at New Rome by X-Mail. Then he launched again, heading "out there" for somewhere, somewhere with a nice exciting little war, his sort of thing.... |
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And so the various fuses lit by the characters began to burn down. What would happen next? Maybe we'll find out one day.....
