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
File 148686547665.png - (80.97KB , 600x463 , 1-154.png )

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