Play date: May 21, 2017
In-game date: April 8, EY219
Location: Aiscapo system
Previous events: Meeting the Governor, planning on using atomic bombs
Theme song: Fly Me to the Moon
While the Iof and Steel Hummingbird are being tied together and calculations are being made for the jump to the inner side of Keun, which will take about two hours, Jillian talks to Vob, asking why the Grob are being so downbeat. Vob tells her about their experiences with genocide -- Jillian knows that the Grob and another sapient species in their system went to war long before the D'vor came and that the other species, the Kheldhi, were totally wiped out by the Grob. It's something that they acknowledge but aren't very happy discussing. Communications are curt while the attachments between the ships are finalized.
With everyone strapped in the Iof makes the short jump to the moon of Keun, bringing the Hummingbird along. One minute they're in space, and then after the briefest lurching feeling the moon is suddenly looming just outside the windows. The jump is good, with the ships appearing just over the surface. Padb and Volkova have the two disentangled in a few minutes and then the Hummingbird heads off to the first drop site while the Iof nestles itself into a crevice and waits, Padb frantically calculating the jump out. There won't be any radio contact during this mission: if they're discovered the entire weight of the Juche navy will fall on their heads. If that happens before all three bombs are set this civil war might be already lost.
The plan is to have the bombs go off six hours after the ships are separated. Volkova's modified the space drive to put out a reduced signature but if it comes to a fight she's not sure how well the drive will hold up under that sort of strain. Malcolm takes the Hummingbird slowly across the surface, flying nap-of-the-earth (NOE) and taking advantage of any topology that presents itself to prevent peering eyes from spotting a fast-moving object. There may well be some sensors on the planet itself looking up but the biggest fear here are the two military space stations orbiting below the moon. It's unlikely that they will be able to distinguish the ship but he still pulls her up to a halt whenever they whiz by below.
It takes ten minutes to get to the first site and another ten to get the first crew off the ship. There are ten marines and ten bomb technicians. At every stop three of each will leave, taking one bomb with the loader. It will take them about half an hour to get down to the right depth to plant the bomb, half an hour to set it up (atomic bombs are more complicated than alarm clocks), and a little less than half an hour to get back up. The team leaders for the marines and techs, Na Na Kim and Seo-Yun Jo, respectively, will stay on the Hummingbird and only join a team if it's necessary. Due to radio silence they can't really coordinate anything once the teams leave the ship and it's even more nailbiting for them than it is for the Hummingbird's crew -- it's their people, after all.
It will take twenty minutes to get to the second location and another thirty-five to the final one if all goes according to plan, then the ship will loop to the first location to get the troops there and so on until everyone's on board and they can jump out once they've tied up with the Iof. All in all it's going to be tight, timing-wise. As they slowly make their way along the moon's surface Captain Lieutenant Nana Kim reveals to Jillian that she knows the ship jumped and was likely tied up to another ship: she's been on a jump ship before and recognized the feeling. Besides, how else could the trip be explained? Her guess is that the Steel Hummingbird is part of the Black Rose -- who else other than the government would have the resources to field a ship that can jump? Nana Kim doesn't blame a courier ship for getting involved with the Black Rose; it's hard to make a living and she's not going to judge. Jillian prevaricates and refuses to admit to anything.
Trouble shows up after they leave the final drop point when Jillian detects active sensors from ships just over the moon's horizon. Active sensors means that someone's looking for something. Malcolm quickly drops the Hummingbird into a crack and they wait to see who's hunting. The signals come from four small ships, likely fighters or gunships, that are in combat formation and obviously looking for something. Malcolm listens in on their conversation and although he can't make out the details of the code they're using it's obvious that they're looking for something that should be here but don't have a good idea of where it is -- this can only be the Hummingbird. But how was it spotted? Any visual sighting would have the combat group coming right to their location but they're doing a standard search. No one should have been able detect the energy signature of their drives through the moon.
Making things worse, the telltale sensor readings of two ships jumping in are detected: the D'vor are here. These new arrivals also begin to use their active sensors, which are much more powerful. There's no way that Malcolm could take the ship over the surface, even flying NOE, and not get spotted. They're stuck here.
Bishop contacts Chig with the untraceable Egg and asks for an update on the jump. It's going much more slowly than the Grob would like; the moon might have minimal gravity but it's enough to make everything more difficult. They probably won't have enough time to finish before the bombs go off! Jillian can help and likely make the difference, but they'd have to get her on the Iof. As they fret about how to get to the Iof without being spotted Malcom has the insane idea of actually flying through the surface of the moon. It's barely holding together under its own gravity and there are all sorts of fissures like the ones that the atomic bombs are being placed in. If Jillian can find a way to the Iof he'll get them there! Jillian scrambles to get subsurface maps of the moon from Professor Pritchard and the two of them find a path. The good professor hasn't really been paying much attention and seems to think that Jillian just wanted to find a path as an academic exercise. Standing on the bridge and watching out the window as Malcolm takes the ship at speed through gaps she shouldn't be able to fit in gets Pritchard so worked up that he has to be physically removed from the bridge.
While Nana Kim appreciates Malcolm's skill she also recognizes that there's no way they can get to the bomb sites and pick up her people. Everyone else is oohing and aahing Malcolm's tour de force flying through the moon's cramped interior but she just watches impassively.
It takes a while but Malcolm eventually gets the Hummingbird to the Iof's position; the latter ship has nestled itself in a location far enough in that it's undetectable by anyone not inside the moon, including the D'vor ships outside. An umbilical is hastily set up and Jillian is soon on the Iof helping Padb with the jump calculations while the ships are physically attached. For everyone but the two navigators it's a matter of waiting as the bombs tick down, which is simultaneously boring and nailbiting.
Bishop drops into the Dreaming to try to feel the D'vor ships that are still blasting the moon's surface with their sensors. He reaches out for their presence in the Dreaming, but there's nothing there. No matter how hard he tries they have no detectable presence at all. They'd might as well be well-armed sofas.
Malcolm spends the time recording whatever data he can glean from the D'vor sensors, which might be useful later. He then gets the idea to lure the D'vor ships in by flaring up their space drive before the jump, hopefully luring the D'vor in close enough to the moon that they're caught in its destruction. Volkova messes around with the drive to make an unusual energy signature, something that would never work for flying around but that would prove irresistible to anyone looking for anything unusual. Not able to get a direct line of sight to the hidden ships this might cause the two ships above to come close to the surface...
As the calculations and atomic bomb timers tick down to roughly the same end point in time Malcolm starts up the drive that Volkova's modified and starts to -- hopefully -- bring some curious D'vor ships in to their doom. The calculations completed, the Iof waits until the last possible minute before jumping to give the D'vor ships the smallest chance to recognize a trap. In an instant, they jump and appear two AU above the orbital plane.
It looks like the plan didn't work, as the moon is still intact, but at this distance it will take over a quarter of an hour for the light from the explosion to reaching them. So they wait in silence, watching the sensors for an indicator of what happened: this far away they won't be able to see what happened with their bare eyes. When the reading come in indicating that the plan worked there's an odd silence on board, a knowledge that they've destroyed a vital D'vor resource in the system but one that had eight thousand people on it in addition the eighteen members of the Daebak military who were no doubt waiting until the last moment in hope that they'd be picked up. The silence is broken by Seo-Yun Jo's victorious shout -- she doesn't seem too concerned about her team as long as the bombs went off. If only they were closer! She'd love to have seen it directly.
The three atomic weapons were never going to be enough to blow up Keun in a spectacular fashion: at roughly 30km on a side it's just too big. What the explosions do is shatter the moon into component pieces as vaporized rock surges through the fissures at phenomenal pressures and speed. From this far out it looks like the pieces are pushed out of orbit, sparing the people on the surface of Juche a devastating series of impacts. It also looks like there's another atomic explosion on the far side of the moon as it comes apart. Commander Jo guesses that this is one of the bombs that Juche had on Keun cooking off, a sign that they were either very sloppy about keeping the bombs sitting around with no safety measures or that they were getting ready to use atomic weapons themselves. She hopes for the latter; it would be more professional.
As for the two D'vor ships, the Hummingbird can't make out what happened to them. It's too far out to see anything that small, especially with all the debris, smaller explosions as the base on Keun is torn asunder, and to no one's surprise every space drive in every ship in the area roars to life, making for a messy signal.
Nana Kim puts together a coded report and has Malcolm send it to the Eondeog military base through a tight beam, describing what happened and saying that they'll be maintaining radio silence for the next two days while they fly back to Daebak. She then asks for a bottle of liquor, supplied by Volkova, and also for a room to get drunk in. She's shown to the non-Murder Room single-person quarter on the passenger deck. Seo-Yun Jo gets a glass of liquor and sits in the galley, drinking with a slight smile on her face. Bishop likewise gets a bottle -- wine, in his case -- and retreats to his room with Whang. He's really not a drinker, but this is a good occasion for it. Malcolm offers to stay at the helm and Azar, Jillian, Sheema, and Volkova take a few bottles and go to the captain's room where they start on the path to drunkenness. Well, Jillian and Sheema do, at least. They drink, but Azar and Volkova are largely immune to getting truly drunk without a full bar available.
As Jillian gets drunker she gets more physical with Sheema and the two of them start heavily making out. Volkova takes this as her cue to leave, but Azar stays in the cabin, watching. Whatever was going to happen comes to a screeching halt when Jillian breaks the liplock, suddenly remembering that the jump gate is scheduled to open to Vishnu on the 11th. Since the D'vor have already brought in some additional ships from Vishnu on the usual schedule they're likely to do so again in three days' time. Right now Daebak has its opponent on the back foot with the removal of Juche's main base, but if more forces come through from Vishnu that might change.
Jillian disentangles herself from Sheema and tries to get her clothes back in order while shouting for everyone to report to the galley. When everyone's present and Malcolm's brewing up some sobering tea -- Bishop's had almost half a glass of wine and is wasted -- Jillian tells them what she's realized and with only two days until the gate opens it's unlikely that the Daebak forces will be able to fight their way to what will no doubt be a heavily guarded gate. Even if Daebak's ships get there they'll either only temporarily disable the gate by damaging it -- it's a bad idea to try to permanently hold such a location in enemy territory -- or destroy the gate, making travel extremely difficult until the slide points are better understood. The Iof, on the other hand, can jump in there and Volkova suggests she can sabotage the gate so that it looks like it's just malfunctioning, in a way that would be more difficult to diagnose and repair than just physical damage.
It's unlikely that two ships will be better than one in this case: the only way that this will work out is if Volkova's sabotage looks like a malfunction and having two ships means twice the danger of being spotted and having nosey parkers with guns show up.
April 9, EY219
If they're going to jump there's time to plan: flying the 2.2 or so AU to the gate would make things a race against time but calculating and jumping is just a matter of hours. Nana Kim has Malcolm send a coded tight-beam message to the military brass to ask their go-ahead for their plan. It takes almost an hour, but they get permission.
Volkova starts going through whatever books she has that might help her get a feel for jump gates. She's no specialist in the technology, which is mostly a jump drive with modifications. Padb knows this sort of thing, being the jump drive engineer for the Grob and an ideal person to help with sabotage, but is also the only one who can repair the drive or do the calculations. Do they want to risk bringing someone so important to the jump gate? Vob offers to go: speaking human and being generally useful with engineering might be useful.
Malcolm offers his souped-up EVA suit to Volkova, which has small jets to make maneuvering in micro-g easier. He also gives her a crash course in how to get the most out of the life support system. Nana Kim volunteers to go with Volkova as protection. She doesn't have any engineering knowledge but is very comfortable in space and can provide support of the shooty kind if it comes to that. Jillian gets the feeling that Nana wants to so something to atone for losing her squad but isn't the type to do something stupid and ensure that she dies with honour or something equally silly.
It seems to be a good idea to have at least one of the Grob coming along, but that means that Nana Kim would see them. The Grob are contacted and agree to let her see them. If things go badly with humans again they figure they can always jump away and start over again. It's decided that this is worth the risk and Jillian's given the task of breaking the news to Nana that there are aliens right next door, so to speak. When Jillian starts to explain to Nana that yes, they do have a jump drive, Nana starts making guesses of who would have such restricted tech. She keeps coming back to her original idea of the Black Rose being the only group that's likely to have this sort of thing, and Jillian eventually has to stop the line of guesses by telling her it's aliens.
Nana's not convinced that the Hummingbird has been palling around with aliens and, once Commander Jo and Professor Pritchard are safely out of the way, Vob comes through the umbilical and greets Nana in the human tongue. She stares at the Grob for several stunned seconds before shouting that they're adorable! Everyone's relieved that this has gone well and they can now plan more openly. She's got lots of questions and after agreeing that she'll lie to the military that it's the Black Rose that has the jump drive (there's no other way than a jump drive to explain the trips the Hummingbird has been taking) the crew and Vob answer her questions about the Grob. Mostly.
The rough plan will be for the Iof to jump close to the jump gate and have a small team make an EVA trip to the gate itself and sabotage it. Hopefully the ship won't be recognized if it jumps close enough. It will then either calculate and jump away or fly away if detected and draw any hostile craft away from the gate. Once Volkova and her team are done with their job they'll jet away with their EVA suits in a predetermined direction. They should be small enough to not be spotted by passive ship sensors and get picked up before their air runs out.
It seems like a good plan until Jillian finishes the long scan she's been doing of the gate. As expected, there are several human ships guarding the gate, though they're place to defend the gate and are far enough away that they shouldn't notice the Iof. This ships are two corvettes (the Nampo and Sariwon, who have their transponders on). There is also a strategically-dangerous large fuelling ship (the Manu 2 from Vishnu). There's one large but hard to get a read on ship right near the gate in a cloud of debris or something there even though they don't know of any combat having taken place there. The debris is too regular -- it looks like it might have been placed there. Is it a minefield?
--------
Bishop's Bedpost Notch Count: 1 drunk quickie (running total: 30, aka XXX)
Jillian's Bedpost Notch Count: 0.5 -- second base (running total: 5.5)
Malcolm's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 15)
Volkova's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 7)