Bumping with images

Captcha: Space elicilyi

What could it mean?

How about a good bluff?

"We aren't going to land on the planet, we were just testing a repair to our drive."

Then we hang out until they're occupied with something else.

>>14102871
Roll for it, 1d100, high is good.

rolled 90 = 90

>>14102917

Here goes.

Well that went better than expected.

>>14102927
The fighters swoop by once, to get visual confirmation and then peel off.

"Don't cause any trouble." They say before they're out of range.

" Nice job Mr. Renard. Couldn't have told a better lie myself." Mr. Max says and brings up a display of the planet. "We're meeting these revolutionaries here" He highlights a dense taiga far to the north. The nearest settlement is almost a hundred miles away.

You guide the ship into orbit and then break through the planets atmosphere, the hull glowing red as you do so. The ship rockets over the trees, only slightly harder to control then a plummeting rock. Pulling on the controls, you follow Mr. Maxs instructions, landing in a wide valley, melting layers of snow as you land.

"Now we wait." Scot says. " I'm gonna go get some sleep."

You open up one of the outer hatches and step out onto the grass, soaked with melted snow and partially burnt. The whole place smells like Ozone.

"You're from here, aren't you?" It's Olivia. Her and Tracie have joined you outside.

You nod.

"Not a bad place to live. Almost peaceful." She scans the trees, looking for movement. Flitbirds dart amongst the trees and far in the distance a few Snowboars are plowing through the snow, they're thick tusks throwing snow in both directions.

"Listen fur th' signal" Tracie says " Three whistles."

"Kindof simple, don't you think?" Olivia says.


Several crew members start bringing out the crates filled with weapons as you stand there, breath billowing in the cold. The crew quickly finishes and retreats to the warmth of the ship.

It's almost two hours before you hear it. Three whistles in quick succesion.

>>14103068

Send them the counter-signal (another three whistles?)

Several forms dissolve through the snow. They look rough and hardened; thick and unkept facial hair, thick skin and a quiet demeanor. They're wearing a mismatch of camoflague and stolen body armor, cradling hunting rifles, pistols and even a crossbow.

More of them dissolve out of the trees around you. Overall there's two dozen. They stop at a safe distance and a few of them nod their heads or otherwise acknowledge you. Something about them unnerves you.

One of them steps forward, a thick bear of a man, covered in armor and camo netting, a Sniper Rifle on his shoulder.

"You are, Mr. Donowitz?" His tongue struggles to speak English.

Bumping

"I am Mr. Renard. Mr. Donowitz died from wounds sustained in a fight at Dark Side of the Moon station. Our ship barely escaped. We gave the attackers, a Council frigate run by an idiot who didn't want to take bribes, a bloody nose on the way out, but the station was destroyed.

"I don't know what Mr. Max's condition is. If he was lucky he was on one of the other ships we saw make it away; we kept the frigate busy as long as we could. Hopefully we bought enough time for them."

>>14103292
(Mr. Max is with you)
The man nods.

"These things happen. I am Bursch, the leader of this band. I trust you were able to bring our weapons? The agreed upon price was 1 million credits, exactly. However, I have a favor to ask of you." He nods towards your ship. "May we discuss this within your ship? I constantly worry about prying eyes and ears."

>>14103352

Oh great, he doesn't trust his own men.

His men can wait outside then, we and all our people outside are going back on the ship with him. Then we can talk.

>>14103400
He signals for everyone to stay outside and follows you, Olivia and Tracie into the ship. Once you are safely within the hold, he settles on a crate and begins to talk.

"As I said, the agreed upon price was exactly one million credits. However, I have brought along enough to double my offer. Two million credits." he pauses for a minute before continuing. "Two conditions though. One, and maybe most important is the three people we have in our care. Two are scientist, and one is a computer expert. We can not keep them here, they are far too valuable. I ask that you take them with you, until you can find a safer place for them."

Bursch stands now and begins pacing. "The second part I would ask of you is this. The closest settlement to us is called Weisshaus. It is the Farthest point that the Council has on this planet, with a railway leading out from it. Tommorow, we will begin our attack to liberate Weisshaus. We know that in the garrison there is three fighters and a single bomber. We need them dealt with, or at least distracted." He is standing by the hatch now. "What say you?"

>>14103496

"Perhaps our ship is safer for VIPs than being on the march. Yes, we will take them, but I will keep them busy if they do not have their own work. Letting educated men sit idle would be a waste of their talent.

"As to the second, what other intelligence do you have on the area? Radar stations, maps, patrol schedules, regular air traffic, that kind of thing? Only a day to prepare makes this tight but doable with enough intelligence."

>>14103689
We've been planning this attack for the past three months, but have had to hold off due to lack of arms. We now have those arms.

"The information we have is this: Tommorow, our saboteurs will detonate several bombs on government buildings in the area. We have stationed there several of our men to spread mayhem and to incite the locals there. Many of our band have family and friends amongst them. The population will not be hard to incite."

"Once the bombs detonate, we attack. Most of the attack will be focused on securing the garrison and the two rail stops. We detonate some charges on the rail line further down to prevent reinfocements from arriving to quickly."

"The only thing that would end this in seconds is their air support. A single well placed bombing run could wipe out entire swaths of forest and force us to flee. That is why we need your help. Two million credits."

>>14103768

"You have our help. This ship should be able to kill a bomber and two fighters."

>Gameplan
What I'm thinking is that since we don't have good intelligence about where their radar stations are, nor how quickly the enemy can get fighters from other bases into the area, nor the fighter patrol schedule, we'll want to make the initial approach as a civilian craft. When we get into striking range and we're sure about where the fighters and bomber are, we position ourselves to kill the flying fighter(s) and prepare dead-reckoning firing solutions for the ships still in the hangers (the bomber and probably one fighter). Then we start jamming. As soon as we start our jammers we drop the missiles on the pre-calculated firing solutions, and shoot down the fighter we put ourselves near.

Sound workable?

>>14103862
Workable with a few rolls yes.

Bursch extends his hand.

"I'm glad we can count you as an ally. Those crates outside are the weapons, correct? Then as promised, here is the two million I owe you." He hands over the small card. You swipe it on your own and the account jumps up to two million.

"I will send up the scientists and Jared. Thank you again for your assistance." Bursch steps out the hatch.

A few seconds later, three of the rebels step through. One is an old man, looking to be on the verge of death as is. The elements have not been kind to him. The second scientist is a lean women with ragged cheek bones and a pair of glasses caked in frost. The final person to step through is tall and lanky. The camoflague he has on barely fits, and you see that he is barely a man.

Tracie whistles. "Nice new frien's we got, aint they?"

The women introduces herself as Emily and the old man as Emanual. The younger one is Jared.

"I hope we have somewhere to sleep. I am absolutely sick of sleeping in the woods." Emily says, sealing the hatch.

Tracie chuckles. "She is all yor's, boss."

>>14104002

How many bunks do we have anyway? I know we lost two men, but we picked up Mr. Max so that's just one bunk freed up. If we don't have enough beds, it'll be time to start thinking up alternate solutions like hotbunking or hammocks.

For now we'll need to interview our new charges.

"We'll make sure you're comfortable and warm. Have any of you been crew on a ship before? We'll talk about safety basics and your duties over coffee, or whatever hot beverage you three want. Come on, I'll show you the mess."

>>14104002

We'll want to find out what the scientists' fields are too, they could be something cool like particle physicists.

Reporting in. Let's quest!

At the moment, only you, Tracie, Mr. Max and Scot have actual bunks. The rest of the crew has been sleeping in the cargo hold in sleeping bags.

The three are all eager and willing to help. Emily is a xenobiologist who was threatened to death when she refused to research how a certain fishes venom on a backwater world could be used for weapons.

Emanual is a theoretical physicist that worked on star ship drives. His whole family was killed when he threatened to quit, and for revenge, he sabotaged the drive of a brand new warship, causing it to distengrate. He's been on the run ever since.

Jared is the youngest one. He's an expert on computers. As soon as he finished his training, he was drafted by the Council to set up defense networks. Although he looks to be about 20 or so, he's really almost 40. He's only so young because of how much time he's spent in cyrosleep. He worked on the old Haven defense system, and intentionally left a few back doors for himself. When the Council found out, he shut the whole system down and made his escape.

Bumping.

Sorry for the long delay, internet suddenly stopped working.

>>14105964
It happens sometimes, no worries.

"I hope you don't mind the cargo hold, we aren't exactly a hotel."

Give our new crew a tour of the ship.

>>14105897
We need to get the computer guy on making a supervirus to infect council ships.

>>14105994
None of them seem to ind. At least it's warm in here.

As you're showing them around Mr. Max stops you, asking to speak with you. You nod and follow him a few steps away.

"Do we show the the probe or not? Stuff like this is valuable... Really valuable. If any of the were spies, then we would have a hell of a time ahead of us."

>>14106030
"One of them might have an idea as to how to turn it on." Bring it up to them, but don't show probe unless we're sure.

>>14105897

Great. The way the emergency over-drive capability of our ship works is a black box to us, but I bet it's not very good for the longevity of the engine. We can ask Emanual and our regular mechanic (Tom or Tracie?) to give the engines a look so that they don't fall out or something stupid next time we need to use emergency power. Does Emanual know how to fly a ship?

We should get a network uplink hooked up to the planetary network for Jared to do some intelligence gathering on our target. Seems right up his alley.

Xenobiologists are cool, but we don't have any aliens for Emily to look at right now do we? But a biologist WILL understand math and chemistry, and ought to have a good memory. We're down one pilot at the moment, so we should pick someone to train as a replacement (one of our permanent crew) and have her start training to cover the duties of the chosen crew member.

Everyone else know what he or she is supposed to be doing to get the ship ready for fighting. We ought to reload the missile tubes and all that, too, and make repairs to the damaged parts of the hull.

"Good point.. Don't show it to them just yet." Mr. Max scurries off, an you finish the tour of the ship, minus the hanger with the probe. At this point, Haven's sun is just going down, and on the exterior cameras, tiny rodents are crawling from their burrows. Tracie is standing behind you, looking through a camera feed with you.

"Ya know boss... We aint got's to blow them fighters up" He says.

"What do you mean?" You ask, turning to look at him.

"Well, say you an' me an' a few others go in an steal 'em?" Tracie is grinning wickedly.

>>14106120
The missile tubes are loaded with the last two, and all the important parts of the ship are welded shut with metal. The crew has done all they can to hold the ship together without a full dock.

Emily proves that she does know quite a bit about chemistry and math, though she is a bit rusty on both since she's been on the run and the "cold may have roughed up my mind a bit."

Once the tour is over, Jared requests three interface link-ups to the ships main-frame and sets up in a corner of the hold. Status bars and lines of code scroll across the screen as he works, furiously typing in commands on the keyboards.

Al takes care of Emanual, showing him the engine rooms and the ships schematics, both of them discussing the finer points of excess heat removal.

"I take i' back." Says Tracie "They fit righ' in."

>>14106030

If his story is true, there is no way Emanual is a spy. And a story like his shouldn't be hard to verify. No spy would use a tale like that. He's probably clean. He can look at the probe.

Emily's story isn't hard, we just need access to a research database that she's published papers in. She'll know which ones she's written, and if they're decent papers about xenovenoms that are referenced by other published papers then she's probably legit. Since manipulation of research like that would make most scientists scream bloody murder, we'll keep an eye open for clues in the papers that reference her work, things that would be a give away about the validity and usefulness of the work. Obvious errors like the chirality of molecules being wrong.

Jared's story is harder to verify, but the Haven defense system going down would have made the news, and he is probably on a dozen wanted lists.

>>14106230
This.

"They might fit in nice enough, but it never hurts to be sure."

You run a quick search through the ships database for the three names. Sure enough there names are listed.

Emanual C. Heunos- Referenced in no less then six speeches and over twenty news casts, all dating back six years ago. He's still widely considered one of the most dangerous terrorists around.

Jared A. Sydney- Wanted on the Haven, Council and Terrorist lists, with a substantial bounty on him. Although the Council tried to cover it up, he did crash Haven's entire security network for an entire day. Thinking back you can even remember it.

Emily P. Dister- Written over 100 papers on xenobiology, mostly relating to tropical and aquatic biomes. The papers stop abruptly about two years ago, and someone named 'Sigoury' took her place.

During your background checking, you also find an interesting newscast.

"Today a terrorist uprising was halted at Tauros, at the illegal space station 'Dark Side of the Moon'." The preppy, overly happy newscaster says. Footage of you jamming a buzzblade through the Council soldiers chest in zero-g. "Luckily, quick reaction from Nearby Council ships put down the uprising and the station was destroyed before terrorist leaders 'Mr.Max' and 'Mr. Donowitz could escape."

Footage cuts straight to footage of the station after the last salvo of missiles, bursting apart.

>>14106392
"Heh, they got my good side. Too bad they didn't show where we fucked up their frigate."

Show them the probe, they're good for it.

>>14106471
Emily's jaw drops when you show her the probe.

"This is real right? Not some Council tech we don't know about?" She's rubbing her hands on the hull of the probe. You nod your head. "Do you know what this means? We could be on the verge of something... Something amazing! Did you save the first contact?" Again you nod.

Emanual, silently is examining the engine on the tiny craft. "Faster then the speed of light you say?" He mumbles.

Jared only glances at it, and seems impatient to get back to work.

Tracie is watching the two scientists eamine the probe.

"So whatcha say Boss? We gonna go git us some free ships or wha'?"

>>14106536
JARED CONFIRMED FOR SPY

>>14106545

He's not a spy, he's a nerd. This is just some weird thing, he wants to get back to his network shit. This is probably the first time in weeks he's had an uplink.

>>14106555
>nerd
>doesn't acre that we've got an alien space probe

Nope. Spy.

>>14106536
"If we have space for them, let's get lootin'. They're better as guns than scrap."

>>14106536

"Tracie, if Jared comes through on getting us good intel I'm game for trying for them. If we have to go in blind I'm going to plan on just blowing them up though."

Tell Tracie and Max to keep an eye on Jordan, and monitor his traffic on the systems.

>>14106580
"Damn straight we got room for 'em!" Tracie grins "Here's ma plan"

Take the ship as close to the settlement as possible, flying low to try and stay off radar. Land and have You, him and two others sneak into the hangers where the fighters and bombers are being kept. Bust our way in, signal that we need out of here, and then fly the Council ships to meet up with our ship.

"Soun' good ta you?"

You think for a moment. Jared takes the oppurtunity to chime in.

"I can get you satellite maps and unlock any doors you guys get too.. Not remotely though. I'd need to be nearby to get that stuff done. I think I can break the acsess codes on the fighters too. Just don't ask me to fly one."

>>14106567

I'm sure when we figure out how to get that probe's computer system online and accessible, Jared will bust a nut over it. Until then it's just some piece of junk for the scientists to play with.

>>14106656

Could Jared scramble the codes on whichever ship we don't steal to keep them grounded? It'd be nice to be able to shoot a fish in a barrel.

>>14106656
Is there any way the council can track the fighters if we were to steal them?

Also, there's no telling how tight security is. If shit was to hit the fan, are there any alternatives?

>>14106763
If shit were to hit the fan, then You could always have the ship itself come in guns blazing.

The Council fighters might have ID's like Council guns do, but they can be removed or scrambled.

And Jared says he can easily change the acsess codes on whatever one you don't steal.

>>14106825
We've got some fighters to "liberate" from the council. Let's do this.

>>14106867

If they aren't running a patrol we'll get to pick between two fighters or a fighter and a bomber.

The bomber will fit right? It'd be cool to have a bomber.

>>14106867
You, Tracie, Tom, Scot and Jared all pack on layers of clothes and camoflague. Ammo, and weapons are passed around, with you taking one of the leftover sub machine guns with a silencer, two grenades, a pistol, and the Electrostick you created the other day.

The night is almost unbearably cold. Your breath billows out in front of you as Tracie leads the way through the snow, leaving wide foot prints. Haven's larger moon hangs in the air, massive and lighting your way, bouncing light off the snow.

Tracie sets a grueling pace. You've already gone two miles when you spot the Ship lift out of the clearing. It's almost another mile before Tracie waves you to the ground. You hit the snow and instantly you're buried. The rest of your group do likewise.

Up ahead is a Council patrol, probably sent to investigate the ship. At the lead is a Council light walker, the pilot on top surveying everything around him. Behind the walker is a ragged line of 6 Council Orderlies, all of them shivering and only lightly geared.

>>14106969

Is that walker unbuttoned? Could we land a grenade in the compartment?

>>14107038
The walker only has armor platings on the front and side. The platform on top has a gunner and a pilot. A few well placed shots could take them both out.

>>14106969
Would the walker topple from a grenade blast? We could use the explosion to distract the orderlies while we overcome them before they get the chance to recover.

>>14107082

If they aren't going to walk on top of us, and if they haven't seen us, then we should just let them walk on by. If they're likely to hit us, an ambush is our best bet.

>>14107116
If one of the legs could be taken out, the whole walker would topple over(It's bipedal). It's also open topped.

The main threat of this walker is that it's 10 feet off the ground. It'll most likely either spot where you guys are hiding or see your foot prints in the snow.

>>14107157

Nothing for it then, time to lob a grenade at their little squad, and kill the walker's crew as fast as possible.

>>14107197
You signal for everyone to ready grenades, trying to move as slow as possible to avoid attention.

Roll twice.

rolled 22, 67 = 89

>>14107230

Let's make sure we cook them off before we toss them. Nothing worse than getting blown up by your own grenade.

>>14107260
You hold your grenade in your hand, count to three and throw.

Six grenades fly through the air, landing all amongst the Council soldiers and the Walker. In the next second they explode. Snow and underbrush fly everywhere. Three of the Orderlies are cut down instantly from the hail of shrapnel. The walker took most of the blast on it's underside, and bits of jagged shrapnel are jammed into the metal now.

"Shit, get them!" Tracie shouts, opening fire with his rifle. Two of the Orderlies duck behind the Walkers legs while the third is thrown to the ground by Tracies bullets. The Chaingun on top of the Walker is being spun up and turning towards you.

rolled 54 = 54

>>14107313

Controlled bursts against the walker crew, they are the #1 priority targets now.

>>14107332
You rise to a crouch from the snow and squeeze the trigger three times, aiming for the Walker crew's exposed head. Your bullets slice through the air, bouncing off metal plating. One of the bullets catches the gunner in the shoulder, causing him to jerk to the left as the chaingun starts firing. Thousands of tiny bullets tear into a tree behind and to your left.

The two orderlies on the ground have begun to fight back, taking aim with their carbines.

Crack, Crack, Crack!

Bullets whistle by you and you roll to take cover. The walker starts moving now, pressing into your position while the Infantry beneath it keep your heads down.

rolled 40 = 40

>>14107313
>Internet derped, back in action.
Gun down walker crew, have the surviving orderlies subdued.

rolled 87 = 87

>>14107401

Keep up the pressure on the gunner, have everyone else suppress those two Orderlies.

>>14107446
You lean out from behind your cover and spray the rest of your clip into the walker. Your bullets find their target, an the gunner slides from his position and 10 feet to the ground, dead. The walker keeps advancing though, moving slow enough that the orderlies can use it's legs for cover.

Tracie lobs two more grenades from his cover and then rushes the walker. The grenades explode at the same time as Tracie is halfway there, wounding the two orderlies. Both of them fall to the ground bleeding.

Tracie gets to the walker and scrambles up it's side. The pilot doesn't even have time to pull out his pistol before Tracie has him by the neck and throws him off the walker into the ground with a roar.

You and your group move in on the three orderlies. One of them is likely going to die, his blood is everywhere, and he's barely breathing. All three of them are tied up anyways.

Tracie drops down from the walker and walks over to them.

"Eh... What do ya say we do with 'em boss?"

(I'm going to bed now though. To be continued)