Mercury Tier
The characteristic glare of clinic lights. The familiar smell of morph storage gel. That disoriented feeling - not sure when or where you are. Reinstantiated. Again.
Mercury. You cling to that thought. Mercury. The tiny, scorched, innermost planet. You were farcasting to Mercury. That’s it. You were on another mission. Oz-3. You got a report from a Crow stationed there that a Song Cai Flower ego had violated the exclusion zone around Caloris 18. You were sent to find out what it wants with a quarantined solar energy station and to terminate it - not necessarily in that order.
So why is this haggard old woman in the company coveralls checking your vitals and giving you stinkeye? And is that a whiskey in her hand? It’s certainly on her breath. Wait a minute. She’s saying something that sounds important…
“so...given it’s your third time around I don’t got much in the way of selection - you pretty much cleaned me out. You’ll just have to make do.
I don’t know what went wrong...either time really. I mean I have telemetry but it cuts off when the shit hits the air recycler - you know, when the screaming started. The first time you went in soft - all super-spy. Tried infiltrating. Lost your signal 13.5 minutes after you entered the complex. The second time you went in all tactical, in a full frontal assault. Lost you 2.7 minutes after you breached the vehicle bay airlock.
That place is scary as shit and there’s no way I’d ever go back. Fuck no. I mean it’s been under interdiction since the Fall for a reason. What I’m saying is I ain’t got any more advice to offer you than I did the first time and you ain’t learned anything worth a shit since then. But, they say the third time’s the charm so you should be golden, right?
The runabout should be back in an a couple hours. You’ve got that long to fab up some toys and get the fuck out of my med bay. After that, you’re on your own…”
• To the rest of the party it looked like Kru was instantly booted out the system and he collapsed to the ground unconscious. To Kru however, there was a long, terrifying interlude in which his consciousness melded with an insane chorus of minds that were being pulled and stretched through some kind of multidimensional bottleneck - like light disappearing across the event horizon of a black hole. Then everything went painfully white.
***
• Realizing that they had apparently died twice already in attempts to infiltrate Caloris 18, the sentinels questioned Doc Sternhagen and reviewed the limited telemetry. Randomly sleeved in neo-gorrilla, scurrier, dragonfly, arachnoid, exhalt and olympian morphs, the party fabbed a collection of weapons, a few select pieces of gear and boarded the runabout that had just returned on autopilot from it’s second trip to the Caloris Planitia in 72 hours.
• During the 19-hour overland journey the party reviewed the telemetry and participated in a series of simulspace training sessions generated from the pre-Fall floor plans of Caloris 18 provided by Doc Sternhagen. A plan was made to find some kind of external computer access so that Captain Kru could hack the station from the outside and facilitate the team’s entrance.
• Just outside the vast field of solar collectors, Nickolas parked the truck under a broken rock overhang, hiding it from orbital observation. The party then crossed 10 kilometers of black, sun-blasted terrain on foot, marching through an endless forest of solar receiver pylons as Mercury’s long dawn spread slowly in the East.
• Captain Kru accessed a substation on the main trunk to the facility and used it to cut off the limited power the station was collecting from the predawn light. He found a grenade set to remote detonation in the workings and a note scratched on the station housing that read “just in case - Capt. K.”
• Observing from the crater rim the party scouted the complex. Nothing moved - no signs of activity of any kind. Old rover tracks from the lanes between the countless solar panels converged into a single road that followed switchback turns down to the crater floor and across to a large vehicle bay with a blasted, crumpled door.
• The team decided to sneak down the talus slope above where the structure penetrated the crater wall, thereby accessing the roof. As they did so they attracted the attention of a pod-morph horror clearly cobbled together from either the original station personnel, or more disturbingly, the remnants of their own team - some kind of humanoid centaur formed of parts from multiple biomorphs. It climbed deftly and attacked with a long, cybernetic, lizard-like tongue that ended in fractal tendrils that would have shredded through armor with little resistance. Luckily the team was able to instantly bring overwhelming firepower to bear and brought the monster down before it could hurt anyone.
• In the midst of the strangely silent gunfire, Kru was able to access a maintenance hatch and plug into the facility’s mainframe. Expecting to have to hack his way in he was surprised to discover that there was no digital security, that the contents of the system were not only wide open but seemed to almost encourage access to anyone willing to physically connect. Kru plugged in.
• To the rest of the party it looked like Kru was instantly booted out the system and he collapsed to the ground unconscious. To Kru however, there was a long, terrifying interlude in which his consciousness melded with an insane chorus of minds that were being pulled and stretched through some kind of multidimensional bottleneck - like light disappearing across the event horizon of a black hole. Then everything went painfully white.
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