Session 2 Log

Song Cai Flower Tier

• With Piv's warning several things happened at once. Nikolas opened up with his pistol, Terry jetted back out into the docking bay mini-gun blazing, Bert gathered up random objects to throw and John 117 took up a firing position at the terminal end of the docking umbilical. In the same moment Kru pulled open the hatch to the Lakota and realized the airlock beyond contained another of the TITAIN-tech headhunters. The fight was brief on all fronts with only Kru taking damage as he slammed the hatch closed like a guillotine on the advancing death machine.

• With Terry standing guard in the bay against further attack, most of the rest of the party searched the courier.

Nikolas discovered a small cache of weapons, a large supply of ammunition of various types and a remaining case of military grade explosives.

Piv’s case-morphed forks found an inactive TITAIN-tech remote clinging to the med bay’s emergency egocaster and clutching a number of bloody cortical stacks, with an additional stack loaded in the machine. He downloaded the device logs and discovered that approximately 83 hours ago the machine had been used to cast an unknown number of unidentified egos to an undetermined number of unspecified destinations. The logs were then apparently nested and encrypted with some unbreakable, alien-seeming cypher, post transmission.

Kru first pulled the memory core from the headhunter that had attacked him and then hacked into the Lakota’s systems. He determined the ship was fully operational but critically low on fuel. He also determined the ship had been docked for just over 98 hours and since disembarking the crew had not returned or had any communications with the ship. He also recovered and shared an updated shipyard deckplan of the Flower. During this tech work Kru also realized that strands of the same wiry fungus that had been growing all over the Flower’s bridge were now growing and enmeshed in his morph’s right arm. With Bert’s cooperation he quickly transferred into one of the case morphs previously occupied by one of Bert’s forks.

• It was at this point that John 117’s muse informed him that a decade had passed. With no show of emotion he both accepted this and realized that his target was certainly long gone. After claiming the sole heavy weapon - a plasma rifle - from the stash aboard the Lakota he teamed up with Bert and they turned the five spare morphs into remotely operated demolitions mules and John took off towards the stern of the Flower, bombs in tow and Bert riding virtual shotgun. John 117 would infiltrate the mules and Bert would tell him where to plant the explosives.

• Rentlov re-confirmed the deal with Darwin. Primary objective: destroy the Flower. Secondary opjective, recover as much intel about what had happened on the ship as could be safely recovered without jeopardizing the primary objective. At that point, Kru, Rentlov and Nikolas returned to the bridge of the Flower where Kru hacked in and downloaded all the uncorrupted data he could find - five large packets worth.

• Sneaking back through the ship, planting explosives at Bert’s instructions as he went, John 117 found much of the middle sections of the ship - the gutted reactor to the lab modules - had been heavily cannibalized. The programming workshop however was entirely intact and as he looked it over for valuables he found a high-end, state-of-the-art (for 10 years ago) server that promised a wealth of data. He turned it on and tried to access it but missed some essential security protocol and the device burned itself out - but not before he saw the word R.E.N.T.L.O.V. in bright AR (augmented reality) graphics initially light up and then quickly fade as the machine died.

• At this point, the rest of the party started aft and John 117 headed into the next module astern - the nanotechnologies workshop. With no power at all the space was pitch black, but the glow of his flashlight revealed hundreds of bodies randomly piled up against the back wall of the lab by the gentle microgravity of course changes.

Most were desiccated and freeze-dried - naked or wearing jumpsuits, old vac suits and a few even nightgowns. But some were still fresh, wearing combat armor and covered in flash-frozen blood. Traumatized by the sight, John 117 was struck mute as three horribly misshapen forms lifted from the pile like hand puppets at the ends of a trio of undulating, tentacle-like cables and moved to attack.