Do we have no rope at all on the ship?
Just give it a big jump I guess, you'll land on the surface so the ship can pick you up.

You can definitely walk across the umbilical cable but it might be hard getting to it.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/03(Fri)17:21 No. 776987 ID: b073ca
File 148617126808.png - (139.06KB , 600x600 , 1-139.png )

You squat down, deactivate your electrostatic boots and push off of the Starlette, jumping straight "up" at your target. Your EVA suit actually has maneuvering thrusters, but considering the size of your target, you opt to save them for getting back to the ship.

The giant stone looms silently in your visor as you close the couple hundred feet to its surface and as you touch down, you goose your thrusters a little to soften the landing. You hit the asteroid with a silent crunch, squished slightly by the inertia of your EVA gear, but still managing to grab hold of the rock and cling there.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/03(Fri)17:21 No. 776988 ID: b073ca
File 148617128624.png - (74.37KB , 600x419 , 1-140.png )

While the asteroid is a fairly solid chunk of ferrous iron and nickel, there seems to be a thin layer of dust covering it which plays hell with your boots' ability to grip. You're forced to clamber across the surface like a deep sea crustacean until you reach the nearest hatch and examine it. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to open it: there is an access panel, but it's far too small to admit a person.

Can you hack it? The panel on the bottom right looks like a basic emergency hatch, maybe you can re-route the system alert to an alarm clock or something.

>>776988
Maybe the access panel has a manual override in it. Open it up!

>>776988
>but it's far too small to admit a person.
Well, if you lost a few pound you might be able to fit in there, fatty!

>>776988

The front door might be best. Last thing we want to do is expose the place to hard vacuum if we don't know whether or not anyone's inside. We want to help, not commit murder, after all.

>>777025
I thought we were here to retrieve the EVA suits they stole from us.
Murder may be necessary.

>>777043
Those are on the Sunfish. We're here to get the spare EVA suits the miners keep in the asteroid mining station.

You've tried opening the access panel, right?
I'm assuming it's locked, and shooting it might damage any electronics.

Step 1: Put 1 foot on the panel, the other on the hatch surface.
Step 2: Turn on the electrostatic boots.
Step 3: Press the gun against the boot on the panel, point it downwards and sideways towards the asteroid.
Step 4: Fire the gun and use the recoil and pulling power to force open the access panel.
Step 5: Hack the hatch.

>>777064

Depending on how hard the EVA suit is, we could risk hurting ourself. That, and the force of the shot probably isn't much more than our thrusters. Both sound like a waste, and firing a small mass off into hard vacuum at a high velocity is a great way to cause problems later.

I say we try to either open that little side panel there in the hopes it's a set of recessed controls or make for the main airlock to the asteroid.

Looking at the hinge geometry... assuming the access panel doesn't have anything more useful, maybe slip something thin yet sturdy into whatever seam you can find at the opposite end from the triangular bracket, then pry?

>>777075
Sure, this. See if it's a control panel.

Open it to see if it's some kind of control panel. If it is a makeshift thruster, you probably don't want to release the pressure behind that door anyway.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/04(Sat)09:14 No. 777085 ID: b073ca
File 148622844297.png - (116.27KB , 600x600 , 1-141.png )

You crack open the access panel and check it out. Inside is a blank console, and several buttons labelled: Charge Capacitor, Discharge Capacitor, Load, Test Fire, Fire, Shutdown. The buttons look as though they are supposed to light up, and next to them is a slot that you imagine might take a keycard. There also looks like there's a large switch for manually opening the hatch cover.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/04(Sat)09:14 No. 777086 ID: b073ca
File 148622845460.png - (74.94KB , 600x493 , 1-142.png )

You give the panel a spritz of Smartfog brand nanites and wait for a moment while they worm themselves into the system. A few moments later and extremely primitive looking HUD shows up on your visor.

VECTOR LTD
++++++++++++++
Firmware driver 1.8.112 (c) 2235
Model 034 THUNDERBOLT industrial grade railgun
serial# 48153
>_

>>777086
That sort of makes sense. They need to move chunks of material back to the ship, right? If you're careful, railguns are a cargo mover.

Also very obviously a weapon and a potential danger to your ship.

...so the security on these must be badly outdated, right? Can your collar hack these?

A battle fortress built into a giant rock? Now dat's Orky!

Where is this one pointed? Also consider maneuvering the Starlette away from any railguns.

Nothing else to do here that's quiet, head for the entrance.

>>777086

Well, I mean ... if you needed to get something down to the surface of whatever colony you made REAL QUICK and didn't care how big of a crater you left, this'd work, right?

Definitely not the way in, though. Let's try that terran-sized access hatch down by the main doors.

First, check out the help function or man page or whatever to make sure you understand the syntax. This thing can easily blow stuff up, and primitive firmware interfaces are, necessarily, going to assume a pretty high level of minimum user competence, so make sure you don't blow anything up accidentally.

Then, figure out how to shut it down and open the hatch. Should be a standard procedure for maintenance or repair work, only difference being you've got hardware access instead of legit security credentials.

>>777133
This

>>777086
Fire yourself out of the railgun toward the larger ship.

It's probably intended for use as a mass driver rather than as a weapon emplacement (pretty terrible weapon if you can only aim it by RE-ORIENTING AN STEROID). Bucky mentioned the asteroid would need stationkeeping thrusters to stabilise it relative to the ship, and for a few megatons (or gigatons) of rock and iron a 'stationkeeping thruster' is still a fairly hefty device. Mass drivers are an ideal choice: as long as you can power one, the only reaction mass you need is the asteroid itself. Any gas-based thruster would need a refinery to break down the rock then chemically crack molecules until you can get your propellant(s).

Try and find some user help page in this and learn how to open up the hatch. Maybe try and shut down the rail gun as well. It'd suck if they fired that thing at your ship.

Disable the firing mechanism, open the hatch, recall the nanites, go inside.

Suggestion 2017/02/05(Sun)00:37 No. 777308 ID: 9f3729

>>777157
Oh my god we HAVE TO

>>777308
Finish your actual job first, then do some due diligence to confirm that the acceleration involved would actually be survivable.

If so, do the orbital-mechanics math and position the Starlette, in advance, to catch you with minimal relative velocity. Set the pink hearts in your collar to go off on arrival. Spread out your cargo bay doors and be an industrial railgun creampie reunion.

>>777203

Thrusters would help re-orient its position after being tugged, since you're basically creating the equivalent of a ball on a string, and would only need to compensate for angular momentum imparted. I doubt they would use a payload-style mass drive for this, as that would mean rocketing out materials they would both wish to be harvesting and to retain (for future shots or recycling).


>>776691
Based on this initial schematic, each port -- if indeed each one is a rail-gun and not a covered thruster to prevent debris / dust getting inside -- is positioned approximately on a major axis, which would be fine for basic maneuvers but would prevent dealing with any sort of rotational forces that could snap the umbilical as a railgun would be a linear force toward the center of the asteroid. If they're instead at an angle to the axis, then to we have a scenario where you would need to fire payloads of differing masses and/or at differing speeds to re-orient the asteroid. And considering the controls are on the outside, that seems terribly inconvenient for anything that would need to be done in a hurry.

The hatch diagram also doesn't entirely match what we see now, but that could just be an art error or lack of foresight, so it's hard to say.

Let's do a little digging as to what we can do with this terminal. Try commands like 'help', 'ls', and so forth. Maybe we can access more than firing controls.

>>777339

Oh, idea! Maybe it has a built-in schematic of itself? That'd give us a good picture of at least some level beneath the surface that the LIDAR wouldn't be able to penetrate.

No sense of going in blind before we get a good picture of things, right?

Toxoglossa 2017/02/05(Sun)10:13 No. 777346 ID: b073ca
File 148631840538.png - (68.46KB , 600x600 , 1-143.png )

You seem to remember hearing something about these. Back before pinch-drives, there were a number of options for building the escape velocity you'd need to leave the solar system. Mass drivers were an effective, if mindbogglingly slow, way to creep closer to the relatavistic speeds you'd need for the trip. With the right amount of mass you could fine tune the course so that the Sunfish had a constant companion. They're also absurdly dangerous and you count yourself lucky that the Starlette wasn't fired upon in its approach. You reach out via your collar and spend a few minutes piloting it into a course that'll take it out of the way of the gun.
You pull up the firmware UI and get a list of commands; one of them being "shutdown". You don't see any immediate effect, but receive a message informing you "Shutdown initiated: entering maintenance mode". Another command gives you a network listing and you're able to ping several other railguns around the asteroid, as well as a central control system, but are unable to access them from here.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/05(Sun)10:14 No. 777347 ID: b073ca
File 148631844238.png - (120.66KB , 532x600 , 1-144.png )

You then pull the large switch and watch as the blast shield covering the barrel is silently pulled aside. You cautiously peer into the chamber and see that its about 10 feet deep and fairly narrow, and lit by a number of dim work lights which take a moment to kick on. At the bottom you see a mechanism for loading the railgun and it looks like you could possibly fold yourself up into it, but you're reaaaally wondering if that's such a good idea.

>>777347
Screw that, let's check the asteroid's front door.

>>777347
Float down into it to get a better look, maybe hack the panel into cycling the mechanism?
See what test fire does, if you can make the breech open you could climb through.

>>777348
This.

Heck no. Front door it is.

>>777347
No way! You're too wide to fit in there without getting stuck! Let's look for a different entrance.

Your sense of machismo demands you do the stupid thing and attempt to enter through the loading chamber of the railgun.

Absolute best case is shooting yourself out of a rial gun lets you meet up with the girls. ...which helps nothing, because then there's no one on your ship, and you didn't accomplish what you snuck onto this asteroid to actually do.

>>777347

Yeah, we're a flake, not suicidal.

The door it is.

Go long as we maintain control of the gun we'll be fine. Go in.

No gun. Gun bad! Front Door.

>>777542
THE GUN IS GOOD. THE SIM-COLLAR IS BAD.

>>777550
[[spoiler:Damn, now I want to see Bucky in zardozini...]]

The gun is shutdown, and anything designed to accelerate solid objects to hypervelocities is going to have a sensor interlock to prevent it firing when the cover is closed or a foreign body is in the acceleration chamber, because if it did it would be prone to destroying itself.

Bucky has repeatedly mentioned how small the opening is and has mentioned that he's worried about getting stuck in there. Sure, it would be funny, but if he gets stuck, the only way to get out would be to get captured by whoever eventually comes out here to find out why the railgun is turned off.

Let's go look for a door.

>>777714

Thank you, voice of reason.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/06(Mon)17:00 No. 777729 ID: b073ca
File 148642920413.png - (158.61KB , 600x600 , 1-145.png )

You eye the mechanism warily and back off. No sense getting stuck in there when you haven't even tried the front door yet.

You climb your way over to the far side of the asteroid, mindful of just how exposed you are. You approach the hangar door and get a look at it. Above the door, the foot thick umbilical cable is sunk into the structure and coils off into space. Below it, a pair of extendable tracks sit waiting and empty, designed to grasp some kind of cargo container and draw it into the hangar. You brighten up: if there's no cargo vehicle here, the facility might be unoccupied. Next to the hangar is a smaller maintenance door, similar to the one you last saw Sam and Annie disappear into. Next to the door is a glowing green panel and above it is a nub containing a security camera.

>>777729
Get up above the security camera and spray it with some fog so you can loop its feed and enter unnoticed.

>>777730
Yup

Oh phew, they're adjacent entry points. Fog the camera and head inside the airlock.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/07(Tue)17:22 No. 777959 ID: b073ca
File 148651694870.png - (86.64KB , 600x529 , 1-146.png )

You creep around the entrance, avoiding the vision of the camera, until you reach the wall. In the low gravity, you're able to plant your boots and stroll up the side of the building and sneak up on the camera. A quick spray of fog and some deft splicing leaves it stuck looping the same empty footage until you say otherwise.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/07(Tue)17:22 No. 777960 ID: b073ca
File 148651696157.png - (117.46KB , 700x444 , 1-147.png )

You climb down and cycle the airlock, letting yourself into the hangar. Sensing your presence, a number of lights flicker on and illuminate the room. If the facility has grav plating, it seems to be turned off, causing loose items to drift through the chamber and letting your gun float up and hit you in the elbow. A ladder leads up into what you assume is a control room of some sort and below you is a vertical chamber into the asteroid itself, sealed with an airlock door. Along the far wall you see a trio of lockers and a set of controls line the wall next to you.

>>777960
Check the lockers for the spare suits we're after.

Also take a brief look at the controls to see what exactly they do.

make sure you didn't accidentally turn off oxygen cycling when you entered the area and killed people.

>>777960

Lockers first, then see what we can dig up via the controls. No sense in turning anything on that isn't, but if we can figure out what they were REALLY up to out here, then maybe we can also figure out where they took Sam and Annie's suits.

Our priority though should remain to secure a pair of suits so we can get them back to the Starlette.

actually, we only need one more suit. two people leave one takes their suit off and the other brings it back, they put it on and they leave. will make it take way longer but it will work.

>>777973
Still if would be good if the two crews parted with the same number of suits they had when they met.

>>777973
That'll work only if we have plenty of time. If we're actually trying to run away, we won't have time to do that because whoever gets left behind to wait is more likely to get caught!

Toxoglossa 2017/02/08(Wed)17:37 No. 778223 ID: b073ca
File 148660422260.png - (99.68KB , 445x600 , 1-148.png )

You march over to the lockers and inspect them. None of them are locked, which indicates that no one expected to have visitors snooping through them. Two of them are empty, but you open the third and your jaw drops In amazement: floating inside like a deflated marionette is a complete space suit.

Not quite believing your luck, you take it out and inspect each piece; it's worn but mostly intact. The design is bulky and antiquated but the pressure on the O2 mix looks good, and the seals all look intact. There's a worrying tear in the front and back of the torso which has been carefully repaired and layered over with sealant, forming a silicone scar on both sides. A stain around it looks as though it was partially cleaned, but remains ghosted onto the surface. You hope it holds up under pressure and make a note to test it later.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/08(Wed)17:37 No. 778225 ID: b073ca
File 148660423691.png - (110.75KB , 590x600 , 1-149.png )

As you're finishing your inspection, the bark of a klaxon nearly unsticks you from the floor as you almost jump out of your skin.

A polite voice comes over an intercom: Shuttle incoming. Please clear the hangar for arrival. Shuttle incoming.

A gruffer, less polite sounding voice follows: "This is the Fugu registering for docking. Please stand by.... is... is there someone over there? Please respond."

>>778225
Well you heard the warning. Clear the hangar. Get up into the control room, even. Help your fellow spacer out. You've got a gun to force your way out if they don't just let you go with the suit.

Hell, it's a more than fair trade. One well-used suit for two fully functional ones.

Quick, cut open the suit and wear the rags and visor over your suit! It won't fool anyone for long, but you just need to finish the conversation as quickly as possible!

Put the suit back, then hide in one of the empty lockers.

Okay. There's not supposed to be anyone over here. That means one of two things- they're asking blind and you still have a chance to bail. Or they somehow noticed you over here and sent someone to investigate.

How quick could someone get a shuttle over here?

>>778233
Do not destroy the scare resource we came here to collect.

>>778225

Sounds like a standard security procedure, and someone who would VERY MUCH like to get away from the sunfish for a bit.

However, we are DEFINITELY not here. Let's bail up that ladder -- with the suit! -- and hide for a bit to see what's going on.

>>778246
>Let's bail up that ladder -- with the suit! -- and hide for a bit to see what's going on.
Except there's one big problem with that: There's external windows on the control room up that ladder. When Bucky goes up there, the motion-sensitive automatic lights will turn on, announcing to the approaching craft that somebody is indeed here and removing any possibility of hiding. The control room is also very likely a dead-end as well, meaning Bucky would either have to threaten his way back out, or possibly seal the ladder hatch and shoot out a window to escape. And that latter idea probably wouldn't work since external windows almost certainly have emergency fast-acting automatic depressurization shutters that'd slam shut as soon as the window is breached.

Hide in a locker, robust him when he opens it!

Alright, don't freak and think. If you were spotted by the Sunfish and they had sent a security team, the team would have come in quiet and not have attempted to hail you. They'd probably have either remotely disabled the announcement and then popped the hanger door as late as they could on their approach to get the drop on you. So the odds are good there aren't guards on that shuttle, but instead a mining team or possibly a engineering one here for maintenance. But then, why are they requesting clearance to dock when they'd normally be opening it via remote control because nobody is here? ...Best guess, the automatic lights in the control room were set up to activate along with the ones down here. They saw the light spilling out through the windows up there and so the guy thinks there's somebody in the bunker.

Even though the team on the shuttle is not likely guards, you should still try to avoid them. While they probably aren't going to be hostile, encounters with members of the Sunfish raise all kinds of opportunities for complications and trouble. The most obvious one is they radio back that you're here and ask for orders or help. And you can't even try to fake that you're a member of the Sunfish even if you ditch and hide your own spacesuit 'cause of your obviously future-tech neural uplink collar. Best to try and avoid contact with them.

Bring up your link to the external camera, check the real feed from it and take it off loop if the Fugu hasn't entered its visual range. That way there won't be obvious intelligent tampering. If the Fugu is in camera view, then wipe the video record back a couple weeks and a few random hours and days from before then; They won't be able to tell if it was somebody else discreetly erasing it or a glitch. Then keep the camera feed up in your peripheral vision to monitor for anybody approaching the airlock.

While doing that, close the locker door and chuck the space suit into the airlock or at least close to it. Quickly find the nearest motion sensor for the lighting, give it a nanite spritz and lock it its sensor to max like it glitched out; Hopefully anybody investigating will think the sensor chip just flaked and got stuck on. Then move to the airlock, spritzing the hanger console as you go so you can remote access it later if need be. Spray the airlock controls, close the inner door and silently lock both inner and outer doors. The plan is to lay low in here until the team on the Fugu disembarks and hopefully all descend into the mine and out of earshot of the airlock cycling, then leave. (Making sure to put the airlock security camera on a loop as you do, taking it off loop once you're out of view, and walking over the surface in a direction the control room doesn't have windows.)

Alternate plan idea is to nano-spray the hangar door controls and glitch them out so they can't be remotely opened, then glitch the airlock controls so it can't be opened and also glitch the motion detector, then descend into the mine, make your way to the mass driver you sprayed earlier and exit that way. Unfortunately, this plan has the added risk of getting stuck in the mass driver loading hatch, and all the "glitches" will probably be considered intentional so they'll know somebody was here.

>>778291
We want to avoid accosting anybody if possible. Besides, there is very likely at least two, and probably three or even more, people coming over on that shuttle since going out mining alone is unacceptably risky. Having more than one means if something bad happens to one, another can possibly save them.

>tear in the front and back of the torso
>stain around it looks as though it was partially cleaned
Uhm was somebody fucking killed while in this suit

Uh... Guys? Hello? Offset with the shuttle and personnel doors?

Hug the personnel door. As the shuttle enters, open it, slip through, and close.

Then wait before going back in.

Hell, then we can just waltz in, steal the whole damn shuttle, and no longer need to worry about stealth because we'll have something near irreplaceable of theirs held for ransom.

>>778267

Wait, how do we know that's not where we are now and the reason they think someone's here is because the lights came on in here?

Right now we're cornered as it is, but also the only person with a suit. Both suits if we "borrow" this one. So … I really see no negatives here.

>>778362
Um. Anybody coming over here would almost certainly have put on a space suit before departing the Sunfish. I say this 'cause Baxter said that the mining and processing department was pretty much the only ones with space suits, and he also said that the ones stored in the mining bunker would be spares.

And we know Bucky isn't in the control room right now because he said the ladder leads up to the control room. If you think those consoles with the screens lit up with exclamation point warning signs are in the control room, take another look at the image of Bucky entering the bunker. You'll see that there are two consoles with screens that match the ones in this update's image.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/09(Thu)16:56 No. 778410 ID: b073ca
File 148668816177.png - (92.89KB , 600x524 , 1-150.png )

You grab the spare suit and duck into the airlock, giving the controls a spray of fog and locking the door behind you.
You switch to the active feed of the camera you accessed earlier, rotating it to give you a view of the umbilical cable. You watch as a boxy looking craft slowly follows the winding cable towards the asteroid. It passes out of view and you feel it clunk into place on the rails outside. Moments later the facility thrums with noise as the air is pumped out of the hangar and the door is opened into space. More clunks reverberate through the station as the Fugu[i/] is pulled inside and locked into place.

You sit quietly, listening to the hangar pressurize itself again. An eternity later, you hear a pair of professional voices disembark from the shuttle.

?: "[i]Fugu here, Sunfish do you read? docking complete."

You hear a garbled radio answer and the voice responds with an affirmative.

?: "Sounds like it's still stuck open. They can't get it to respond."

??: "I'll check upstairs, maybe it's something wrong with the network."

?: "Good call, I'll head down and check the mechanism... Hey, Arthur... were the lights on when we came in?"

Arthur: "What...? I don't know, maybe? You gotta stop with this ghost story bullshit Fisher, there's nothing up here."

Fisher: "I know, it's just... man this place creeps me out."
You hear the sound of the the inner bulkhead opening as the two crewmen set about inspecting the mine.

>>778410
You didn't leave that mass driver open did you? Sneak out and put everything back the way it was before.

>>778411
Don't risk contact with the Sunfish crew, let them find it in maintenance mode and stick with the bullshit ghost theory.
Exit once you hear the bulkhead close and rendezvous with your gigantic space-peen- I mean, the Starlette - ASAP(nis).

Make spooky ghost noises and bang on the bulkhead doors to scare them.

>>778421
That'll only scare 1 of them. The other guy is going to come investigate the sound and have a weapon ready to use on whoever or whatever he finds.

Or they report it back to the Sunfish and then more guys with weapons will come and look for what's going on.

Quick see if you can set the automatic lights to fuck around, it will scare them at first but then they will be preoccupied trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Are they in the hangar?
If you wanna play it risky you could try and quickly hide yourself in a spacesuit locker before they come in.

>>778546
No! If they're here to do maintenance, they're going to be looking in the lockers for a spacesuit to use!

>>778546
>>778559
You're already halfway out the door, why would you go back in?

From those two's conversation it sounds like your nano-hack of the mass driver was noticed by the Sunfish because you left its external door open. Whoops. Thankfully it also sounds like they chalked it up as some random fault and not meddling. Though, could they possibly detect it was tampering by you and not some glitch? ...Aw, dammit. They're gonna have to walk out on the surface to access the mass driver's external control panel and blast door to check and shut it, which means they're gonna take the airlock you're hiding in. You can't stay here.

Can you still remotely access the mass driver's controls and close it, then take it out of shutdown so the Sunfish has network access to it again? ...Aw, crap. Did you remember to close the access panel on the mass driver too? 'Cause if you left it open, that's a dead giveaway somebody was out here. You should swing by there and close it if you did leave it open, if possible. ...Except, did you leave bootprints as well? Ones obviously not made by a Sunfish space suit? Because those would give you away as well, and you don't have the time to brush away the tacks you left getting here. If and when someone goes out on the surface, they'll be noticed, including the ones outside this bunker. So much for this mission going unnoticed. At least on the way back you'll know to use your suit's maneuvering thrusters to not leave easily followed prints away from the bunker.

Do a count and comparison of the voices you heard. Was the gruff voice on the intercom earlier either Arthur or Fisher? 'Cause if he wasn't either of them, then there's another guy out there you don't know where. He's possibly waiting in the Fugu's pilot seat or elsewhere on the shuttle, but he could also have disembarked and just didn't say anything.

>You hear the sound of the the inner bulkhead opening as the two crewmen set about inspecting the mine.
You sure they both went down the mine? Because it sounded like one of the guys was going up into the control room to check the network while the other went down into the mine.

Before you consider cycling this airlock to exit, remember how much noise it made cycling when you entered. 'Cause it sounded like one guy was sticking around in the control room to check the network, and if the airlock is noticeably noisy he will hear and investigate. He'll probably check the camera feed and record as well, so any obvious error or mismatch in the record will stand out like a sore thumb, so check and scrub it again. But if it's not that noisy he could still notice if it pops on the control board up there, so use your remote link to see if you can spoof a fake status back up there when you exit.

However, if the airlock will make a noisy racket... Then you may have to bite the bullet and just cycle it and go, but only if you can take a path that isn't visible from the bunker's windows. And also jam the airlock's controls after so it'll delay them getting out; They'll blame it on ghosts or glitches, at least for a bit. Otherwise you'll have to go back in and risk an encounter with a crewman to hide in a locker or something, then gamble that one way or another they'll be out of earshot of the airlock so you can slip out. Not the kind of odds you'd like.

>>778559
They undoubtedly are wearing their own space suits brought over from the Sunfish. Baxter did say that any space suits stored in the lockers in the mining bunker are emergency spares, and all the rest of them are kept on the Sunfish itself.

Cycle the airlock and hide somewhere. Remotely have your nanobots cycle it repeatedly. They'll take it as another glitch. Or a haunting.

>>778691
Program it on a loop connected to somewhere else, eg. the airlock cycles every 30 seconds as long as the light switch is on.
Also lock the inner airlock door, give nobody permission but add a backdoor so you can edit it again later. The crew will think it's related to the cycling problem. If they fix it they wont find any weird permissions profile anywhere.

Also be careful, the network guy Arthur isn't superstitious. If you wanna have some fun maybe trigger the mechanisms remotely and get the Felix's attention, useful if you need them both to look away for a second eg. If Arthur can spot you from the network room.

For even more fun, does your neural uplink collar have Adobe-VoCo-like tech? Analyse the Arthur's voice and speak using it exclusively to Felix. I'm thinking telling him to go back to the ship for a second, or telling him to do something inconvenient like going and checking a random maintenence area again and again.
Even better, mute them both and use both their voices on eachother to cause really spooky mayhem.

Tell Felix, using Arthur's voice that he needs to turn the lights off in the mine for a second, make it sound reasonable. All they have is an audio feed, Arthur will have no way of knowing how spooky is is for Felix, also play Felix spooky noises directly to him.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/11(Sat)10:46 No. 778718 ID: b073ca
File 148683876665.png - (77.27KB , 600x425 , 1-151.png )

You bring up the railgun's firmware app, take the device out of maintenance mode and close the hatch.

After a minute or two you hear Arthur's voice come over the intercom: "Ummmm... hey Fisher? Yeah, the hatch just closed... no, yeah it came out of maintenance mode and its all green... no idea, I didn't do anything... well, just do a once over and meet me back here. Dachel can bring someone over for a full analysis... yeah, let me know when we're done and we can do a test fire."

Not really having any way to interact with them, you decide that there's no reason to bother these crewmen and resolve to wait them out in the airlock. You tick away the seconds occasionally hearing Arthur over the intercom directing his partner through the tedious process. Silently you consider using your permission, but would rather not have to clean out your space suit.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/11(Sat)10:46 No. 778719 ID: b073ca
File 148683878176.png - (86.91KB , 429x600 , 1-152.png )

Eventually you see the lights dim for a second and hear Arthur call out: "Railgun four test fire in 3,2,1..."

You don't feel anything, but moments later a burst of ionized energy cascades through the station, knocking out your collar's connection with the Starlette.

While waiting for it to reconnect, you hear the two crewmen board the Fugu and, still arguing about ghosts, leave the hangar. You breathe out a sigh of relief.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/11(Sat)10:46 No. 778720 ID: b073ca
File 148683879238.png - (96.80KB , 486x600 , 1-153.png )

You're suddenly and inexplicably struck with a feeling of vertigo. The walls squeeze and pinch around you and you feel as though your body is stretched upwards like taffy. A second later everything snaps back into place and you stand there for a moment listening to your own breath as you get your bearings. The feeling leaves you nauseous and disoriented and as you recognize it, your blood runs cold: someone just used a pinch-drive very close by...

>knocking out your collar's connection with the Starlette.
>pinch drive use
DID SOMEONE JUST FUCKING STEAL YOUR SHIP!?

Get out there and look.

>>778720
>Starlette left unattended
>connection down
>pinch drive used
Uh, dude? I think someone may have just jacked your ride.

>>778723
Either that or you've got company.

>>778720
You either just had your ship hijacked, or someone new just arrived in the system.

I would bet the later. It would take time to crack whatever protections you have on your system, the ship didn't warn you of anything on approach, or a hack attempt, and there was a tiny window of opportunity where you were offline just now.

Someone following you is very bad news, though, especially as your ship is currently defenseless and without a pilot- it can't respond.

Get those connections back online ASAP and find out what your ship sees.

>>778721
>>778723
>>778724
>>778727

Wait, so we just experienced an electromagnetic pulse capable of disrupting our connection to our ship ...

... have we ever encountered this before and is there a chance that the interference could actually have sent a command? Could the Starlette have thought you wished for it to use the Pinch Drive and just warped itself elsewhere?

I think our first order of business is now re-establishing contact with both our shore party of Annie and Sam, and the Starlette.

>>778720
Radio the girls and tell them to start murdering people inside as retaliation 'gainst who just stole your motherfucking ship.

1) Find Starlette.
2) If the Starlette is gone, space the two gonzos in that hangar. I see now why you brought a gun.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/11(Sat)18:11 No. 778840 ID: b073ca
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You struggle to contain the panic rising in your gut and scramble out of the airlock. As you do, your collar blips that it's re-established contact with the Starlette. You breathe a sigh of relief. You crawl over the tiny horizon and see the crimson ship winking at you like a jewel on black velvet.

Toxoglossa 2017/02/11(Sat)18:11 No. 778841 ID: b073ca
File 148686548680.png - (129.24KB , 600x511 , 1-155.png )

You turn around and scan the sky, looking for the source of the pinch drive effect. As you do, something black and hideous slithers out from behind the Sunfish. Your breath catches in your throat as you recognize the shape.

Bucky: "...Repo men..."

END OF CHAPTER 1

>>778841
...have they seen your ship yet? I don't suppose it was conveniently on the other side of the asteroid?

Welp.
That's a problem.

Next chapter: http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/779392.html