12/09/2011 Session

We decided to rest on the office platform because Boomeron and I were rather in need of some first aid.  I made another meal and everyone actually ate it this time, though the office platform objected to my campfire half way through cooking so it was a bit underdone.  After he and Chaz had done what they could to heal Boomeron and me, STD-01 examined the portent based weapon and said we’d probably be OK to use it, though it was designed to be used by something a bit bigger and more vital than us.  Quold tried to tell us not to use it under any circumstances which rather pissed me off after all the pain I went through to get the thing.  STD-01 started trying to explain to him that it would probably be safe to use, as did Boomeron, but he wouldn’t shut up.  In the end I just pointed it at him and told him to fuck off.

After we’d rested we decided to investigate the landing platform at the top of the dome and see if there were any fliers left.  We got the office platform to manoeuvre as close as it was willing and we could see that there was one flier that looked like it was probably the Captain’s.  Quold got a bit excited and said it had a mini bar and a bureaucratic terminal with a direct link to the main database.  We were a bit worried it might have been infected by the Sanctus Sanguine virus so STD-01 scanned it.  Fortunately he didn’t find any anomalous signals, only the standard ready signal.  We jumped over to the landing platform using the AG harnesses.  I tried using the controls to fly more than just jump but it was a bit trickier than I’d expected so it took me quite a while to get there.  We all landed OK and there didn’t seem to be any automated defences so far.  There were a few other landing bays marked on the platform, all empty aside from the Captain’s, and a few utility podules that presumably served repair and maintenance functions for the fliers.

Quold started shouting at the limo and it actually responded so he tried to requisition it, explaining that the Captain had become compromised and introduced the Sanctus Sanguine virus.  He also claimed to have a medical expert who could back him up, but it didn’t seem too impressed by Chaz or STD-01’s explanations.  I tried to explain about the tablets I’d read in the Captain’s quarters but I don’t think the AI was smart enough to comprehend.  STD-01 did something weird that made his eyes glow but he couldn’t do anything to help.  Quold started saying that we were a super-secret task force sent by the captain to investigate the infection.  It eventually believed him but still wouldn’t give us access.  He then started telling it that we were here to save the Captain.  This went on for a while so I had a look around the landing platform.  There were a few faint seams on the utility podules but nothing I could figure out how to open.

Eventually Quold convinced the flier to let us in and it opened up its doors.  He then told it about the mimetic virus in an attempt to get manual control but it said its systems were intact and uncompromised.  He asked it about its weapons but all it would say was that all its weapons systems were online.  STD-01 plugged into it and after a moment or two all the control surfaces seemed to activate.  He said the flier had two weapons podules containing Gatling lasers, one on top and one beneath.  STD-01 instructed the flier to give fire controls to Gav.  It didn’t have any location data for the captain and said that active scanning in situations like this isn’t usually a good idea. 

We decided to try and make a bomb out of some of the spare hyperdrive fuel, hoping dropping it might lure the Captain out of his villa.  STD-01 set to work and these weird little robot arms popped out all over him to help him work on the bomb.  I’ve never seen him do that before!  The radiation from the fuel seemed to have affected STD-01 and he was looking a bit pale, but other than that we got the bomb stowed outside the flier.  We decided we should drop the bomb through the French doors where we’d seen the captain before.  STD-01 managed to get the right angle and drop the bomb right through the doors, and we withdrew to a safe distance to set it off by shooting it with the railgun.  Gav braced the railgun out of the window and set the weapons podules to fire at the same target.  He fired and the bomb went off.  The roof blew off the villa and a brilliant wave of light enveloped everything.  I figured the HEV suit would protect my eyes but it didn’t kick in in time and I couldn’t see much and my eyes really hurt.  Apparently the nano-forest started looking pretty agitated and a glowing humanoid form emerged from the ruins.  I’m not sure exactly what happened as Chaz was sticking some weird probes into my eyes.  She managed to rewire my optic nerve, which had been burnt by the flash, but it bloody hurt!

We were all taking aim at the Captain when he fired some kind of energy beam at the flier.  STD-01 got it to do some evasive manoeuvres but he still hit us.  The flier was still in the air but the lower weapon podule was unresponsive and the control surfaces were somewhat damaged.  Chaz sprayed flaming erotic lube at him and managed to line up a good spray, though it took a while to get there since we were quite far away.  Gav lined up the active slug hypersonic railgun and took a shot at him.  The shot seemed to go through him somehow instead of exploding inside him like it had before, and he kinda jumped out of the way.  I fired the portent weapon at him with Quold mumbling away in the background.  I felt a bit weaker after firing it, but it looked like a chunk of the Captain’s soul leaked out of his back.  Boomeron fired a grenade at him but it was detonated by small point defence weapons that sprouted out of his torso.  STD-01 got the flier to fire at him with its lasers but they didn’t seem to do much damage.

The Captain fired at the car again, but he must have been a bit disoriented as he only winged us and didn’t penetrate the flier’s armour.  I fired the portent cannon again but it didn’t seem to do as much damage this time.  Gav hit him again with the railgun and this time it seemed to go off inside him.  His torso sort of exploded out, though his nano-tech cyberware just about kept him together.  Boomeron popped a grenade into the expanded torso which seemed to slow him a little bit.  STD-01 hit him again with the flier’s weapons which again didn’t seem to do too much damage.

I hit him again with the portent gun but again it didn’t seem to do much.  Gav’s next shot exploded a bit past the captain but did seem to stop the pieces knitting back together.  Boomeron put another grenade in front of him which dispersed him a bit further and STD-01 fired the flier lasers again.  Quold was still blinded so wasn’t shooting, but started shouting something about the Captain having broken the rules so he had to be stopped.  I guess he was trying to be encouraging or something.

Boomeron fired another grenade right into the middle of the Captain’s dispersed torso and managed to spread it out more, though a certain section clumped together, giving a good target for the railgun, which Gav hastily exploited, unfortunately not to much effect.  I shot the portent gun again and it seemed as effective as the first time I used it.  ST-01 fired the flier’s lasers again, but as before they didn’t seem to do much.

Suddenly we sensed something powerful and malicious moving towards the flier.  Boomeron leapt for the controls and I guess STD-01 let him have control as he banked the craft sharply away from the presence but managed to get us back into a good firing position.  Gav hit the Captain’s body again and it seemed pretty much shredded.  I was starting to feel a bit weak from using the portent gun repeatedly but I guessed it was the only thing that would hurt the weird thing that flew out of the Captain.  I decided to get Quold to fire it after I’d aimed but it didn’t seem to do much good even though we hit him.  It was around this time I realised this was some kind of warped, tainted thing that was not of our celestial so I hit it one last time with the portent gun myself, having not had much luck using Quold as a battery.  This seemed to disperse the energy being, whatever it was.  As soon as it died the Captain’s table radioed us and told us to leave the area straight away.  We shot a hole in the some and flew out.  As soon as we left the dome there was some kind of weird implosion as the tip of the tower and the Captain’s Table disappeared into a hyperspatial fold in space-time.

We decided to go see what had happened to our truckn and eventually managed to get them on the radio.  The truck was pretty damaged after a few major zombie attacks and they’d had to retreat to a side street near the tower, but were surrounded and wouldn’t hold out much longer.  We located their coordinates and Gav cleared out the zombies with the Gatlin lasers, then Chaz set the corpses on fire with her flammable spray.  The truck was still salvageable but pretty badly damaged but everyone was still alive and the security bot was still functioning.

05/09/2011 Session

The C&C platform was listing pretty severely now and we were preparing to jump back to the office platform.  Quold started signalling wildly with the signal lamp on his sewer suit but I couldn’t figure out what he was saying.  Gav couldn’t either so he called him on his walky-talkie.  Turned out he was telling us the platform was about to crash and we should jump off it.  As we finished figuring this out the platform started to drop.  We all jumped off but Gav and STD-01 seemed to get stuck, presumably in some kind of gravity field from the platform itself.  Quold tried to get the office platform to help the get free but it said gravity field generators were a restricted technology so it wouldn’t be able to access them, besides which it didn’t want to get near the C&C platform even in its current state.

Quold started saying something about using a fire extinguisher as propellant.  I still had one in my pack after that time when me and Skrood got set on fire.  I hate getting set on fire!  I was progressing away from the platform alright, but Gav was still stuck so I threw it over to him to use to increase his velocity.  I managed to angle it right so the momentum made me move faster towards the office platform.  STD-01 had been a lot further out from the platform when he got stuck in the field and he started to break free as well. 

Suddenly the platform dropped down about 3 metres, dragging Gav and STD-01 down with it.  Boomeron and I were quite far out from the island now and everyone else seemed to be at a safe distance, apart from Gav and STD-01 of course.  The C&C platform dropped another metre just as I landed on the office platform, and STD-01 got his shotgun out to try and push himself away from the gravity field.  This seemed to work and both he and Gav managed to get free of the platform’s AG fields just as the platform finally failed and started to slowly crashed into the nanotech forest below.

After we’d all landed safely on the platform Quold asked it if it had any healing capabilities as many of us were quite beaten up.  It didn’t really seem to know anything about it and suggested maybe the bathroom or the orgy platform.  Quold asked it what its primary function was, and it said it had been configured for administrative duties.  After hearing this he decided he should try and see if there was any way he could indict the captain using bureaucratic evidence from his terminals.  He tried to use the terminals but a load of errors came up, followed by a message the security had been called.  Gav started looking a bit interested at this point as he was legally obliged to arrest Quold, but, he eventually decided the pleasure of beating him wouldn’t be worth all the paperwork he’d have to fill out afterwards.  We decided we should rest before going to confront the captain but there was some debate about where we should go to do that.  Boomeron was very keen on going to the orgy platform but everyone else was a bit more reluctant after what he’d been like lately. 

We eventually decided to stay on the office platform since we knew it was safe, so I made some dinner.  Nobody else wanted to eat it.  They said I’d taken some really fine ingredients, made them into a bland gruel and made it taste slightly of sulphur.  Ungrateful bastards, don’t know why I even bother sometimes.  We all went to sleep, and when we woke up I made breakfast, despite their reactions last time.  Quold put on some weird music that was apparently supposed to be rousing and inspirational, but it was mostly just quite annoying.  We had planned to go straight for the captain but felt we might be a bit under-armed with just the two xeno-weapons, so we headed back to the captain’s quarters to get the other one from his museum.

We decided we should go in through the central courtyard again since the nursery robot seemed to have been pretty harmless last time.  The platform agreed to take us to back to the captain’s villa but it didn’t want to get down low near the nano-tech forest which might be infected with the Sanctus Sanguine virus.  It was a lot easier to get into the mansion this time since we had the AG-belts and Gav had blown the doors off.  As we started drifting down on the AG we saw that the security swarm was still there but had spread out all around the place, making everything around us all glittery.  The nano-tech defences were more concentrated around the area where Gav had fired the xeno-railgun but there were less around the side of the building where the xeno-weapon we hadn’t already commandeered was.  Gav and I could both remember a reasonably empty corridor on the other side of the villa that we could hopefully blow a hole into without triggering any nano-tech defences.  The only things in there were some drapes, which it didn’t seem too likely the captain would want to protect with loads of nano-tech.

Skrood set a charge and we withdrew to a safe distance using the AG-harnesses.  The charge went off and seemed to crack the wall and make a few small holes, but nothing big enough for us to get through.  The foliage around the house below where we were hovering started getting rather agitated when the charge went off and started forming weapons podules to defend the captain’s villa.  Gav and Boomeron fired some grenades into the foliage and seemed to do a bit of damage.  I decided I should probably go make a proper hole in the wall so we could get that weapon.  As I started heading down toward the weakened section the nano-tech bushes fired on us and hit Boomeron and me.  They were firing some kind of flechette rounds and a load of them got embedded in the front of my armour as I was landing.  Boomeron got hit a lot worse than me since he doesn’t have as heavy armour.  I activated my strength cyberware and smashed a door in the wall with my shoulder.  I stepped inside to get out of the hedges’ line of fire, and everyone else got their asses in there pretty quickly as well.

Boomeron disappeared somewhere after saying he’d take point, like he seems to do a lot of the time.  The rest of us tried to be stealthy so as not to provoke the nano-tech security and headed towards the xeno-weapon.  When we got there Boomeron was stood staring at the display case.  He said we should just blow a hole in it and I was pretty much inclined to agree.  Gav seemed to think we should have an exit strategy before smashing the case and alerting the defences and started talking about blowing a hole through the ceiling to lift everyone out with the platform, or blowing the whole display case outside through the wall.  Skrood dug out some spray-on explosive he though should blast through the case and everyone decided that I should be the one to reach in and grab the xeno portent weapon since I had the heaviest armour and was one of the fastest runners.

Skrood sprayed on the explosive and rigged up a detonator.  We all withdrew to a safe distance and took cover.  He detonated the explosive which put a pretty big hole in the cabinet.  As I ran up to it the bottom of it had started turning into nano-bot defences like we’d seen elsewhere.  I smashed my hand in and grabbed the portent-weapon.  It was a long cannon with a hole to insert your hand and a firing mechanism inside.  Bits of the case tried to wrap around my hand as I grabbed the gun but I tore free and started to run away.  The swarm bit down on me hard as I was running and that really hurt, but I managed to get free enough to continue running, with the swarm of nano-bots nipping at my heals.  Gav and Boomeron started firing back to thin the swarm and I just made it to the doorway around the same time as Quold, jumping up into the air back up towards the office platform and avoiding the locust-like nano-bots below.

When we were safely back on the office platform Gav had a look at the weapon we’d retrieved and compared it to some of the entries in the xeno-weapons manual.  Eventually he found a similar sounding entry that said it wasn’t a physical weapon so would go straight through armour, but it drew power from the user so only people with strong portents should use it.  Quold said none of us should ever use it under any circumstances because it would destroy us all, but he says stuff like that a lot.

29/08/2011 Session

After we made it back to the office platform and got what nano-tech protection we could it said we should investigate the C&C platform to find out what more it knew about the Captain's condition and what had happened to the ship.  It gave us some anti-grav belts to get to the C&C platform, but it didn't want to take us there itself in case it got infected by the Sanctus Sanguine virus.  Quold spent about an hour trying to convince it to tell us about the security protocols for C&C and I think by the end of it he was getting pretty anxious.  Eventually it showed us a full schematic it had acquired when acting as a routing station during some kind of network upgrade.  It seemed surprisingly smug for a machine and it made damn sure we knew it outranked us.

It said the C&C, whilst it had many intrusion countermeasures, would use most of its nano-tech mass to maintain command and control functions throughout the ship at all times.  It was also the most likely node in the Captain's quarters to have access to outside communication.  It also turned out that the office node still had all the wireless capabilities to communicate with C&C, so Quold and STD-01 tried to convince it to make a cyber attack on the C&C platform at the same time we made a physical one.  They argued with it for quite some time but ultimately it refused, saying it couldn't afford to lose any more nano-mass if it was going to maintain its own security.  Boomeron found a gauss pistol he'd forgotten about in one of his pockets, and said something about making it into an EMP grenade of some kind.  I don't think you can really do that, but he spent a while fiddling with it and seemed convinced he'd done it.

The office platform maneuvered us into position above the C&C platform to jump across on the AG harnesses.  We could see one large central display with four slightly smaller displays arrayed around it.  We were preparing to start shooting the C&C platform when Quold started pleading with the office platform to help us.  It eventually gave in and released some more drones to act as a botnet, distracting the C&C platform while we attacked it.  Chaz sprayed a whole half tank of flamer fluid onto the island and Skrood threw a couple of flares, which set most of the surface alight.  I braced the alien sniper weapon against the forward edge of the office platform.  I targeted the C&C platform and pulled what Gav had said was the trigger.  A 12 foot green flash fired out of the end of the barrel and a green flash crashed into the C&C platform.  A shockwave spread out from the impact point, putting out most of the flames, and cracked some of the more rigid sections and the display screens.  Our platform was rocked by the shockwave.  We were all knocked around a bit and Gav, STD-01 and Quold fell down.  The C&C platform was rather blackened and smoking, still floating but listing to one side.

We gathered everyone together to go and try to interface with the C&C platform in its weakened state.  Chaz decided Quold should stay on the office platform to make sure it stayed secure, and he seemed quite keen on the idea.  We all leapt across OK, with Boomeron displaying particular finesse in the air, apart from Gav who mistimed his jump and landed on his face.  As soon as we landed we could tell that the C&C platform’s defences were trying to use nanotech to attack us.  The suits the office platform gave us were holding for now but Gav’s was somewhat damaged from the prolonged contact during and after his impact, though it was still holding. 

STD-01 got out the nano-lockpick, saying he could use it create a data port to access the node.  He stuck the lockpick into the floor in front of him and then reeled back, screaming and bleeding from the ears and eyes.  Obviously we hadn’t distracted enough of the platform’s processing mass for STD-01’s attack to work so we set about trashing it some more.  Chaz sprayed bleach into every access port and memory slot she could find, which seemed to make the platform smoke some more.  Gav opened up on the remaining consoles and screens with his advanced riot shotgun and smashed the hell out of everything in his line of fire.  Weird tentacles started sprouting up from the damaged areas so I set about hacking them down with my scraper.  Boomeron started scouting around the platform and found an undefended section where the xeno sniper weapon had hit.  STD-01 went back to his hacking attempts, but found the nano-lockpick was stuck into the ground in the same place he’d attempted to interface with the platform before so he had to stay where he was.

We felt another wave of nanobot attacks hitting our shields.  Another wave of tentacles came at me at the same time and they seemed much more scraper resistant.  They seemed to be more resistant to Gav’s shotgun too.  Skrood threw a grenade, I thought aiming for a particularly large clump of tentacles, but missed them and blew up some of the remaining consoles instead.  Boomeron had a go at some of them with his assault rifle but it didn’t seem to do much.  We carried on fending off tentacles, and Gav seemed to get the shot just right with his shotgun this time.  Boomeron shot some more tentacles next to the ones Gav had shot but his shotguns shells didn’t seem to have any effect, I guess the tentacles had reconfigured against that particular type of attack.  I decided to switch to my laser rifle to try and keep the tentacles at a distance.  Then I remembered this setting I discovered before where you could fire a sustained beam.  I cut down a large swathe of tentacles with the sustained beam but it used a lot of the charge in the power pack.

Some weapons pods had formed on the other side of the platform and they fired on all of us.  My armour took most of the shot and Gav dived out of the way.  The others mostly seemed fine apart from Skrood, who was knocked to one side by a spray of fire.  I fired back at the weapons pods but the laser beams just seemed to bounce off, kind of like a laser light show at a rock concert.  STD-01 said he’d made some progress hacking the platform and could control some of the systems if he knew how to program them.  Boomeron did something weird and his eyes started glowing, then he started telling STD-01 what commands to input.  Whatever they did must have worked because the platform started forming a defensive wall around the impact site where we had regrouped.

We held out in the dead area of the platform and managed to keep the tentacles off STD-01 long enough for him to access the sensor logs.  The ship had apparently been hit by an asteroid sized munition.  Defensive fire did a lot of damage to the projectile but didn’t stop payload from reaching the ship, which was a phasing bioweapon composed of the crystals we’d all seen during the attack.  The ship was off course from our attack target, supposedly an ‘easy soft target’ who had allied with our most recently vanquished enemy. He also found out that the anti-nelotic shielding which sustains the celestial’s light within the ship is failing, so we definitely do have to leave.  He also found that the C&C station had been used to insert the Sanctus Sanguine virus into the computer system and that the Captain had inserted the programming himself, though all traces of the virus had been thoroughly cleansed from this node.  The package was distributed amongst most of the computer’s nodes because it had all the correct security certificates to avoid the firewalls and spread to enough nodes quickly enough that it couldn’t be stopped by any of the intrusion countermeasures.

Boomeron managed to find some information on forming the nano-tech patterns in the platform’s database, and also determined that the platform was in the middle of a catastrophic shutdown so we shouldn’t stay on it much longer.  Gav tried to check out the ship’s targeting data but couldn’t find anything more than a list of expended munitions, which was rather long!  After a while he found that most of the main weapons systems were offline or severely damaged so would have trouble targeting us once we were out in voidspace in the shuttle, though some of the secondary surface defences were still active.