Play date: May 3, 2015
In-game date: February 13, EY219
Location: Vishnu system
Previous events: Getting Nanda Reddy back, meeting Jillian's ex Rashid and scaring him. A good time.
Brahma is a week and a half away, so Nanda Reddy will have some time to heal as they head towards the secret base of the Leary's survivors. Bishop doesn't just use his various slugs and oozes to treat her physical ailments, he also uses his knowledge of the Dreamscape to help her with the psychological scars her torture has left. He's better with the physical side of doctoring but she's a survivor and her mind is clear by the time they make it to Brahma even though her fractured orbit isn't yet entirely healed by the time they enter Brahma's magnetic field.
The gas giant has the usual cluster of moons, moonlets, and smaller bodies around it, along with a faint and unimpressive ring system. Its strong magnetic field makes sensors and communications difficult to use, which is part of why the Leary survivors' secret base is here. It's also currently on the opposite end of its orbit compared to the other outer planets in the system. Ganga, the closest other body in Vishnu, is almost 10AUs away.
It takes a bit of work for Bishop to cut through the electromagnetic noise and communicate with the base. He passes the mic to Nanda, who talks to the base and convinces them that everything's ok as far as the ships appearing in orbit are concerned. The D'vor-looking Iof hangs back while the Resplendent Dragon and Steel Hummingbird fly close to the moon of Lotus. Nanda's not sure if both of the ships can fit into the hangar on the surface and while Malcolm's game to try it -- unlike Neet -- the decision is to have the Dragon stay up in the air to keep an eye on things while the Hummingbird lands.
When the Dragon lands and the doors close behind her everyone disembarks. Malcolm's got his sword and has the Blingmaster hidden up his sleeve, Volkova's got her trusty Khnuta at her side, and everyone else is unarmed. There are about a dozen survivors from the Leary to greet them, their proportions looking a little odd to Aiscopan eyes: they come from a different cluster and their nation of origin on Homeworld is different from what is found locally.
Nanda talks to someone whom she introduces as Fai Huang, the former captain of the Leary. He looks to be in his mid-50s and is still wearing his uniform from his ship, which he's kept in pretty good nick. Malcolm's feeling a little claustrophobic and bad-tempered after all the time they've spent in this dead system and mocks the now useless uniform more loudly than he probably should. Jillian winces at this but starts up a conversation with the captain anyway while Malcolm looks around the hangar. He's pretty sure that he could have fit both the Dragon and Hummingbird in here without any real issues. He notices that there are four odd organic conical ships that look like the Wyrm ship they saw on the von Däniken platform when they rescued Seo Yee and Tigd and there's a Vishnan naval gunship here as well that looks like it's ready to fly. The latter must be the ship that Nanda Reddy stole from the navy when she was captured and tortured the first time.
When Malcolm stops looking at the ships and starts paying attention to his captain again it looks like she's done with the introductions and the rundown of the situation in Vishnu. The Leary's survivors now know about the Iof and are waiting for it to land and for the Wyrm to be reunited. The Iof lands on the moon's surface not long after and several of the Grob walk to the hangar doors in EVA suits, along with Seo Yee and their bag of Wyrm. They in turn are introduced to the Leary's crew and taken to the room where the main Wyrm colony lives and writhes. The Wyrm here are connected to sensors that lead to a computer with nixie tubes for output. It's a crude way of communicating with the Wyrm but they communicate among themselves with weak electrical and chemical signals as well as by touch -- not the sort of language that humans can easily crack.
Bishop steps up to the communication device and with the help of a couple of the Leary's crew communicates with the colony. It turns out that he's a natural at it, as he is with communications in general. He tells the Wyrm that they're about to reunited and relates to the humans and Grob they're happy about this. When the Wyrm are all mixed together they quickly learn what they can from the small colony and their feelings towards the humans and the Grob are improved, as far as Bishop can tell.
With the Wyrm all back together in one big happy writhing pile Bishop starts to ask them about their experiences with the D'vor and their society and technology in general. Their technology is mostly secreted by their own bodies and they seem to have managed to create space drives themselves, or something very similar, they don't have weapons, never having needed them before the D'vor showed up. When the D'vor attacked they didn't have any of the problems with their own kind turning on them that the Grob and humans have had. Without weapons they resorted to ramming the D'vor ships directly and while the D'vor ships seemed to have some sort of field that largely stopped the human projectiles from hitting their ship the field wasn't able to stop the Wyrm ships. Of course, ramming ships that can shoot you from a distance isn't generally the best strategy...
They don't seem to have much in the way of personality or culture; they're like social insects that are "happy" while working. They've built the ships in the hangar over the last few years because, well, it's what they do. Even Bishop, who enjoys social intercourse and alien species, honestly finds them pretty boring.
Malcolm contacts the Resplendent Dragon using the base's comms array with some difficulty due to the magnetic field and tells Xao that they'll be staying the night; the Dragon edges down the gravity well closer but doesn't land, acting as a sentry. Hopefully the electromagnets will keep it from being spotted.
While they have a bit of time and some of the Leary's computer experts here, why not take a look at the Iof's "brain"? Bishop, Jillian, and Volkova convince the Grob to connect the brain to the power supply but they'll only do it if they disconnect everything else, so the brain can't do anything untoward. With the Leary's computer experts, Ana Hidalgo and Lia Perkasa as well as Arba, Difig, and Quiy from the Iof the three members of the Hummingbird suit up, walk across the moon's surface to the Iof, and spend hours working out what they can about the brain. It's a very advanced computer of some sort. While transistors are being used in the newer human computers the Iof's brain seems a step more advanced than that and too complex to really pick apart. It seems complex enough to run the entire ship on its own in real time. Whatever the D'vor look like, they're amazingly advanced. Based on the interior layout of the Iof as it was when the Grob found it there was likely never a crew in the ship and they wouldn't be necessary. It could have been entirely run by the "brain". The Grob were lucky to have come across a ship that had had its brain disconnected by a lucky shot. Are there any actual fleshy D'vor in the system at all?
Their investigation is interrupted by a frantic banging on the hatch. It's Malcolm, who has suited up and loped across the surface to tell them that the Dragon has spotted D'vor closing on the moon! Their communications were interrupted and Malcolm has no idea what's going on and had to head out to the Iof since they'd disconnected everything while conducting their research.
The humans suit up as quickly as they can and head back to the base while the Grob reconnect systems as necessary. Inside the base the Leary's crew has been grabbing what they can and boarding the Hummingbird while Cletus fires up her space drive. Malcolm can't bring himself to leave the beautiful gunship here and quickly drives the minibus out of the loading bay and somehow manages to get the gunship into the Hummingbird's hold in a way that looks like it violates the laws of physics. Malcolm's the one who put it there and he'll likely be the only one who can get it out. The Wyrm have been dumped onto their four ships and are ready to go.
The six ships take off and fly to where the Resplendent Dragon should be. Bishop is on cannon, Cletus is in the jumpseat, Jillian's on sensors, Malcolm is flying, and Volkova's on the engineering deck. The Wyrm are told to keep out of the fight: if all they can do is ram and this is all of their species left it's probably best for them to stay away. The Grob in the Iof are similarly the putative last of their species but they at least have beam weapons. As they approach the area they see that there are two D'vor ships of the same model as the Iof trying to hem in the Dragon. Neet's been doing a good job of staying away from the D'vor but now that reinforcements have arrived it's time to actually get down to fighting. The Hummingbird and Iof close the distance and engage.
It's a relatively short fight, with phenomenal piloting by Hrav, Malcolm, and Neet keeping their ships intact. There are some minor hits exchanged and the D'vor ships prove to be dangerous: nimble, precise with their beam weapons, and heavily armoured, including some sort of subtle defence that stops ordnance before it hits the ship's hull. Olivia manages to badly damage one and then finish it off with two long, devastating burst from her insanely large cannon. Right after the D'vor ship explodes its companion jumps away in a similar fashion to the smaller squidship the Hummingbird came across so long ago. This is disturbing. Not only should a ship not be able to make a jump without taking hours of not moving to make the necessary calculations but it means that reinforcements could be coming any time. Not only that, but the D'vor now know if the D'vor found them here by tracking them inside the system -- only showing up now because of the time to travel across such a long distance -- they may well know where the damaged Chempil Arayan is.
On the human side the Dragon's air engine has taken a hit by the beam weapons that the D'vor use and Olivia's gone through over half of her ammo to take out a single D'vor ship but otherwise everyone's ok. With an unknown number of D'vor ships potentially coming by at any time it's probably time to head to the slide point and leave this system. Not sure if the D'vor know about the slide points Jillian plots a course that obfuscates their real route and they fly off.
Thinking about it, Jillian realizes that the D'vor ships, having advanced computing devices in them, may be able to jump quickly because they're able to make the reams of calculations almost instantly. If so, some of them might pop up any time, long before they reach the slide ponts. It's going to be a long thirteen and a half AU to their exit...
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Bishop's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 20)
Jillian's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 1)
Malcolm's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 12)
Volkova's Bedpost Notch Count: 0 (running total: 4)