Part 1: Rude Awakening

[Asta]

After floating into the room, Estella halted her momentum by hooking her foot on a nearby object that was affixed to the bulkhead. "What is it?" she said, pointing at the screen with her chin in a short upward nod.

[pringerbeam]

     "Have a look for yourself."  Replied Jetz as he blew up the AR screen for the two of you to see before taking wing to the vending machine and having it dispense a bag of what appears to be gelatin cubes.  As he works on opening the bag and eating its contents you get a chance to read the mesh article.

     Yesterday, station security forces conducted a raid on a B Block residential apartment based on reports of suspicious activity from neighbors and concerned citizens.  In the apartment, security forces discovered a number of restricted items including military grade explosives and an illegally operated nanoforge.  The terrorists were identified as an anarchocommunist cell based off a manifesto found among the files on a seized hard drive.  The terrorists, found to be using illegal mesh anonymizing programs and falsified identities were not in the apartmentat the time of the raid and remain at large. Please be on the lookout for a human male, a human female, and a neo-avian male possibly traveling together.  They are considered armed and extremely dangerous.

[Asta]

"Well shit." Estella cursed flatly and scowled. "I don't remember becoming a communist. So what the hell is this?"

[pringerbeam]

     "My personal cover."  Said Jetz through a beak full of gelatin cubes. "I make sure to fill my drives with communist propaganda and write up a crazy manifesto for  the authorities to find in case shit goes ass up.  Great for making sure that the local security forces don't look too hard at the why's and keeps Firewall on the down low.  It works more than you would think.  Probably would make me some enemies in the outer system if any of the real collectives found out but hey, I never have to go out there." 

     He finished the bag of cubes and pulled a bag of liquid out of the dispenser and squirted some of its contents into his open beak.  "Oh yeah help yourselves.  I'm always hungry after I sleeve."  He said, pointing to the dispenser.  "Anyways, whatever happened, we hopefully are dead, blew our stacks before we bit the dust, and my dead man's switch triggered our backup forks sleeving.  Which leads us to the here and now...  plan B so to speak."

[Asta]

"Evidently the goal of plan A wasn't included in my backup, so let's start there before we go over plan B." Estella replied, arms still folded. She wasn't sure if she was hungry, at the very least it would probably be another hour before the smell of sick faded from her memory.

[Oath]

"Well, what's the move from here? Do we need to lay low for a while?" Donovan floated his way over and dispensed himself some of the cubes as well and popped a few into his mouth while trying to process the situation.

[pringerbeam]

     "Maybe if we had the luxury of time we could lay low but we probably don't.  We're already more than a week behind schedule from this start point....  which I guess brings us to why we were out here in the fist place."  Replied Jetz as he began to call up more AR screens.  In just a few short moments there middle of the room was a cloud of displays.

     "So we'll start where Firewall got its first whiff of something going on."  At this Jetz brought a screen to the middle of the cloud and enlarged it.  The image was of a debris field with a backdrop of Earth.  A magnifying window centered on a section of the image showing a grainy image of an all- terrain vehicle affixed with rocket boosters making contact with a large spaceship.  "A little more than two months ago... sorry, closer to three months ago now I guess...  a gatecrasher team entered the Martian gate with the backing of a hypercorp trillionare.  Three days later their all terrain vehicle was spotted by one of our Scanner cells that was monitoring known routes off old Earth where it made contact with a vessel belonging to the same trillionare's personnel security firm."  He nodded to the image.  "I'm hoping we're all able to somewhat grasp the million problems this could present to the future of civilization as we're know it."

     

[Asta]

"An x-risk." Estella stated flatly, though there was a hint of a smile on her lips. She had been recruited by Firewall as a specialist in xenobiology, presumably because her knowledge would be useful combating alien terrors beyond transhuman comprehension, but that was secondary to her goal. Collection and study of biological samples from the same xenos she should be wiping out for the safety of the Sol system.

Natural curiosity, and a desire to push the limits of transhumanity's knowledge of the universe would ensure that she got her hands on samples. Then it was a "short" hop back to her labs in an Extropian territory to experiment. Sometimes on other transhumans. She would get the proper paperwork of course, no shortage of people to be "convinced" to volunteer.

Behind her, just on her periphery invisible to Jetz and Donovan, the shadow lurked and agreed with her. Always prodding, always directing her to continue her work. She couldn't say she minded its "enthusiasm", but had that always been the case? It had been too long at this point to know any differently.

"Where do we go from here?" she asked Jetz.

[pringerbeam]

     "Ah that's the best part!  Cote d'Infini!  Monte Carlo of the stars, playground of the system's wealthiest, and one of the many residences of a one Dorian Holbach: the trillionare backer of our gatecrashers."  With this Jetz brought up two windows, one showing various advertisements for Cote d'Infini that were all glitz and palm trees.  The other window showed the dossier for Holbach.  "As you can see...  Our information on Holbach is limited to the few mesh articles our preliminary scans were able to pick out.  He seems to have been up to this point an otherwise unremarkable hypercorp trillionare. He primarily makes his money through military contracting, hardware, spaceships, heavy weapons, standard stuff but he keeps s finger in every pie he can reach.  As with most men of his means, he of course has his own private army: Barracuda Tactical Solutions.  They're the ones that picked up the gatecrashers in orbit."

     Jetz pulled up a brief couple of images of the security company's equipment and notable operations before pulling up an image of a palatial estate with a notable BTS presence.  "This is Holbach's Cote d'Infini estate which has recently become his primary residence and which he had more than doubled his security forces on. Whatever it is he's up to, we're guessing it's there... and that's where we're came in more than a week ago.  Whatever we found out, it probably got our asses wrecked so we need to figure out what Holbach is up to and stop it."

[Oath]

"Well, that's what we need to do but we should try to find out exactly what got us wiped out before. If we don't figure it out before we go in again we will have the same thing happen again. Maybe we can get some boots on the ground and catch wind of what's going on?

[pringerbeam]

     Jetz put a talon on his beak and let himself float freely as he looked to ponder, slowly rotating in space.  "Hmm...  Good point...  Whatever we did before must have got us killed...  Reinforcements could be helpful but...  Well it might take some time.  We could always call in some Erasers but those dudes don't fuck around and their use is considered a last resort.  I'm not sure how much help we could expect from them without more information or proof of an imminent X-risk going nuclear."

     "Maybe..."  Wondered Jetz before being interrupted by an AR screen projecting across most of the open surfaces of the walls.  Huge red letters on a black and yellow hazard stripe field and accompanied by blaring klaxon made itself known.

[error]WARNING: PROXIMITY ALERT
UNKNOWN VESSEL APPROACHING
[/error]

     Jetz's eyes widened as he looked at the two of you.  "Uh...  That can't be good!"  He exclaimed before pulling up a screen that appears to be showing a debris field with a shuttle floating along.  "Fuck, who the shit is out in a debris field in the middle of nowhere?"

[info]Make a Perceive test[/info]

[Asta]

[info]Percieve, 60-10 (50)
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 72, total 72[/blockquote][/info]

[Oath]

[info] Perceive  60-10 (50)
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 37, total 37[/blockquote]
[/info]

[pringerbeam]

Donovan
      As the shuttle navigated the field of debris you catch a glimpse of an insignia: a red wolf's head howling at the moon.

[info] Make a crime related Know check or a G-rep test[/info]

[Oath]

Donovan strained his eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of the approaching vessel.

[info] Black market 80-10 (70)
[blockquote]Rolled 1d100 : 38, total 38[/blockquote]
[/info]